 Welcome to Free Thoughts, I'm Trevor Burris. And I'm Aaron Powell. Joining us today is Charles J. Sykes, the author of eight books on current affairs, including A Nation of Victims. He is the former longtime host of the number one conservative talk radio show in Wisconsin. In December 2016, he stepped down, writing in The New York Times, the conservative media is broken and the conservative movement deeply compromised. He is now a regular contributor to MSNBC. His new book is How the Right Lost Its Mind. Welcome to Free Thoughts, Charlie. Good to be with you. I just recorded this on November 7, 2017, which means it's 364 days since the election of Donald Trump to the presidency. Before we get too much into the details in a nutshell, what happened and how surprised were you? Well, that was one of the reasons why I wrote the book was to step back and ask myself, what did, what the hell just did happen to us? What happened to us as a conservative movement? What happened to the Republican Party? What happened to the country? And it's obviously a complicated story. I was quite surprised that he won that election. I actually was thinking, trying to think back to what I was thinking about two days before the election. And I'll be honest with you, I was imagining that conservatives would have the opportunity to go off into the wilderness and rethink our fundamental values and present a more or less unified critique of Clintonism. But I did not see, I didn't think that Donald Trump was going to win. And of course, the whole last year has been an extraordinary intellectual and political adventure, hasn't it? It almost feels like conservatives still manage to end up off in the wilderness. Well, okay, it did. And I do think that actual conservatives are really in the wilderness. And as it turns out, I think principled conservatives who took many of the ideas, you know, limited government constitutionalism seriously, we're not only in the wilderness, we're on a much smaller desert island than I was expecting. In your background, as you write about in the book, is a little different. You say that maybe one reason you weren't so bewitched by populism and the stuff that came up with Donald Trump is because you're a product of the left. Well, yes and no. I mean, you know, part of it was I described myself as a recovering liberal. My father was a longtime activist. So I didn't come by my conservatism by birth. I came by my conservatism by a long process of thinking and reading and going through the ideas. You know, it wasn't like being born into a church. It was something that I thought I understood. During the 1970s, liberalism became increasingly extreme, implausible to me. I thought reading the works of Milton Friedman and Frederick Hayek and George Will made a lot more sense to me than what we were seeing from mainstream leftism. So I guess in part it's because I always took conservatism seriously, not as a tribal identity, but as an idea, as a concept. And I think one of the shocks of 2016 was realizing how in fact that intellectual element of conservatism was perhaps a much thinner crust over the movement than I had expected. Of course, right wing cranks and crackpots are new to conservatism. No. And you point out things like John Birch society and anti-Semitism. And has it always had this undercurrent, I guess, would be the right way of putting it? Yes. It has. And two points to make about that. Number one, there was a time when the conservative movement had gatekeepers like William F. Buckley Jr. who were able to excommunicate those crackpots and those cranks. And I go back into the 1960s when he drew a red line about the extreme paranoia of the John Birch society when he expelled folks like the Ku Klux Klan, not because he was squishy or because he was a rhino or because he didn't take anti-communism seriously, but because he recognized that those kinds of movements would deface conservatism, would make it impossible for the movement to be taken seriously. Fast forward to 2016, we realize is there is no one with that moral authority, that intellectual authority, to act as a gatekeeper to exclude the cranks and the crackpots who made it a recovery. But I will also admit that's the first point. The second point, I will admit that we always knew they were there, but I always thought that they were on the fringes. And I think that along with a lot of other conservatives, perhaps we didn't take their presence seriously enough, we didn't push back on them enough. And as a result, folks on the fringes made their way into the mainstream of at least the conservative movement last year. Do you think that the people who pushed them into the mainstream, so the people who voted for Trump who hadn't, especially like a lot of them had been Obama voters before they were Trump voters, but do you think that the ideas and the movement that they represent is a relatively new occurrence or do you think that they've always been kind of a larger part of conservatism or the GOP than we suspected and that something just kind of catalyzed them in the 2016 moment? Well, that's an excellent question. And that's one of the things that I wrestled with here. And I think I would come down to the latter explanation that there was a lot there that we had ignored or missed, in part because the conservative movement was never quite as coherent and unified as we all thought it was, not that we all thought it was. But there were a lot of disparate elements that were held together under the big tent during the Reagan years. They were held together by anti-communism and a variety of other, you know, were anti-Obamism. But the reality was there were real tensions in the conservative movement between social conservatives, libertarian conservatives, populist conservatives versus chamber of commerce conservatives. And I think that for a long time, the establishment Republican Party had ignored the way in which its base had changed, including how blue collar its base had really become. I often say that in order to understand the modern conservative movement, you have to understand it as a persecution movement. As someone who came, I mean, my background and my parents were conservative, became more libertarian, not being religious. It kind of moved us into libertarians when I was growing up. But I did grow up saying, you know, the media is left, Hollywood is left, public schools are left, universities are left, and these little shining lights of sanity out there, and we're all being persecuted. And I think that a lot of conservatives over the, since I would say William F. Buckley kind of developed a persecution movement, but now that sensibility might have backfired, it seems. No, you're exactly right. And by the way, all those things that you said are true about everything you're describing is in fact accurate, and we see this on university campuses on a regular basis. But yeah, that persecution complex, that sense of being under siege is central to understanding the conservative movement. And as I write in the book, the conservative movement, yes, is reactionary, but it had something legitimate to react against. The overreach of the left, the brow beating of the left, all of those things. But you're right, at some point, the conservative movement seemed to have adopted the culture of victimization. And one of my early books that I wrote was called The Nation of Victims, which argued that everybody in America at some time or another can claim victim status. Well, somewhere along the line, conservatives decided that they would like to play that victim card. And that's a constant theme, that they are under siege, they're under attack, they're looked down upon, they're being insulted. And you see that playing out in conservative media and conservative politics all the time. I think one of the interesting things that seemed to happen with that in 2016, the direction that that took, Trump voters, when they were asked why you're voting for Trump, one of the common things was that he... It was essentially that everyone hates him, everyone I hate hates him, so he must be doing something right, that the victimization turned into, well, my politics now are whatever will most upset the people I see as victimizing me. That is exactly right. I think it's important to understand that my book does not beat up on everybody that voted for Donald Trump. I want to make that clear, that they are not the ones necessarily who lost their minds because many of them, I think, did think it was a binary choice. But what you're describing is exactly right. The conservatives really became very clear about what they were opposed to and who they hated, less so focused on what they were for, but that tribal identity cannot be overstated. And the way in which conservatism became basically not so much pro-liberty as anti-leftism is also part of this story. And anti-leftism is basically everything we do is about liberal tears. If the left is upset about it, then it must by definition be right. If somebody on the left hates someone, they must by definition be doing something right. Well, that's deeply satisfied for a long period of time, but as you point out, there comes a point where it goes, okay, maybe this got out of control. Maybe now suddenly our desire to annoy the left has led us into cul-de-sacs. They're going to be very, very hard for us to extricate ourselves from. You point out in the book that some people did seem to predict this. You particularly highlight Ross Duthat and Rayhan Salam, who predicted a populist element to the conservative movement, including kind of leaving behind the working class. But the one that really struck me was you quote Kevin Phillips writing in the 1970s. The quote is, then there are other conservatives, many I know, who have more in common with Andrew Jackson than Edmund Burke. Their hope is to build a cultural siege can and out of the populist steel of Idaho, Mississippi and working class Milwaukee, and then blast the Eastern liberal establishment to IDO institutional smithereens. That is a quote that could have been written yesterday by Trump supporters. So maybe we should have been listening to some of these people or picked up on the currents that they were pointing out at least. You know, of all the interviews I've given, you're the first person that picked that quote out. And I remember when I read that, I really sat back and went, wow, so this is these are the 1970s. We are talking about something that happened what 40, it was written 40 years ago. So many of the roots of this dissatisfaction, I mean, were much deeper. And I have to admit that, you know, particularly when I read some of the work of the reform icons, you know, Russ Duthat and others, I did ask myself, why didn't we pay attention? I mean, these things were out there, people going, hey, you know, understand that there's a real gap here between much of the grassroots and the quote unquote elites, a word that I, by the way, dislike more and more all the time. But, you know, what was it that caused us to brush that aside? And I think it's because we had gotten so caught up in our hyper partisanship. Everything was about winning the next election. And when you are just focused on winning that next election and causing liberal tears, then you're less willing to ask the tough questions about, you know, what does it mean to be a conservative? Why are conservatives supporting this particular program? Why are we not talking about something else? So we as conservatives did not, I think, engage in the kind of introspection over those years that probably would have helped us avoid the Trumpocalypse. How much of this declining influence on the part of the conservative elite is a result of shifts in the media landscape and the technology of media? That, you know, for decades up until very recently, your main source of news and opinion on political issues was outlets that were controlled by and populated by those elites, you know, the national review and its ilk. But then the internet and particularly social media switched. It allowed more fringe voices. So maybe Alex Jones is an extreme example to reach much larger audiences. And so, and I wonder, I wonder not just how much of an impact that had in kind of dragging people away from the elite opinion, but also whether that was a change that the elites almost didn't notice until it was too late. Like they just assumed, you know, for years we speak and everyone's listening and then suddenly people just weren't really listening anymore while they just went on speaking. You know, we could spend the whole show talking about this because that transformation really, I think, goes to the heart of what happened. One of the other most interesting things that I came across that surprised me as I was doing the book was the realization that back in the 1980s, you know, during the Reagan era, you know, the golden age of conservatism, conservative media pretty much did not exist. The conservative ecosystem that we now have was not there. There was no conservative talk radio to speak of. The Furnace Doctrine was not repealed until the end of really, you know, almost at the end of the Reagan administration. So all you had was if you were a conservative, you had national review. You know, perhaps you would read The American Spectator or you would read the Wall Street Journal editorial page, but that was pretty much it. What we think of as the conservative media didn't come until after, you know, Rush Limbaugh in 1987, 1988. Fox News did not go on the air until 1996. You didn't have Breitbart, I think, until 2006. So all of that is very, very recent. So going back to your question, yeah, I think that you did have a conservative intellectual infrastructure that thought that conservatism was defined by national review, weekly standard, commentary magazine, Wall Street Journal editorial pages. These were the things that I read. I'm going to make that clear. I was one of these people and we thought that that was what conservatism was about when in fact the center of gravity had changed dramatically and permanently perhaps. You know, clearly the influence of Fox News and talk radio can't be overstated. They became the gatekeepers for the conservative movement so that you had this very dramatic book ending where in the mid-1960s William F. Buckley Jr. and National Review had the power and the authority to expel the John Birch society. But in early 2016 when National Review magazine, again, Buckley's magazine, devoted an entire issue to stopping Donald Trump, it was like brushed off like a nap. It had no impact whatsoever. And I think that those bookends tell you how dramatically the center of gravity had changed in the conservative media. It's interesting that the conservative history, going back to Buckley and National Review, is this sort of escape from the mainstream. So start your own magazine and then when conservatives couldn't control media, when we had Walter Cronkite and the three networks, we're going to go to talk radio and then we're all going to start our own news channel and then we're also going to start think tanks like the Heritage Foundation and to a lesser extent Kato and so far as we have conservative leanings. And all this stuff where just if you're not going to listen to us, we're going to do our own thing and maybe we could look at the Alex Jones alt-right Breitbart as another example of that because the old counterculture becomes the establishment. So now the establishment is National Review. It's no longer the counterculture and Alex Jones is doing what National Review did back in the 60s. He's telling a different narrative than what the conservative establishment wants you to believe. Well, yes, but of course the original media was in fact reality-based, in fact-based as opposed to Alex Jones. Well, there are those facts things. That's true. That's an important distinction. But the story you tell is fascinating because it's basically the story of my career up until now. I was part of everything you have described and when I got into conservative talk radio in the early 1990s, I thought it was an incredibly exciting and important thing to create an alternative counter media to the mainstream media. And this was a remarkably important and I thought hopeful development. And of course then you had the blogs and the internet and all of these competing voices that broke the monopoly on information of the mainstream media and democratized it. All of this is good. This was something that I championed. At the same time, you had this explosion of think tanks, the development of an intellectual infrastructure that I was also very, very close to. I was very good friends with some of the people at the Bradley Foundation. I affiliated myself with local think tanks here in Wisconsin. And so this was an exciting period of time where the left no longer had a monopoly on ideas and it no longer had a monopoly on communication. So again, now we come up to where we're at. You did have this transition where you did have these new voices. I would argue less responsible, less serious voices. You did have what I described as the grifter class who became part of the business of talk radio, the business of cable television. And I think a lot of those people were less interested in ideas than they were in clicks and ratings and fundraising. And this new generation, I think, was much more open to the kind of demagoguery that we saw last year than the previous generation. I think the original generation was interested in ideas, had a real vision for the country, was really grounded in principles, but that they were eventually replaced by a media infrastructure with very different incentives and very different priorities. Well, there are some ideas, maybe not so much trumps, but I guess nationalism is an idea. Yes. It has a long pedigree of people defending it, some monstrous people, but maybe some fairly smart people, people who think that there has to be some homogeneity in a society and things like that. That's an idea. I don't think the nationalism we're seeing now is even idea-based. I mean, it's not like people are pointing back at Carl Schmidt. It's more just gut reactions and fear. I don't see even ideas in that. But even when it comes to ideas, like Charlie, you mentioned our friends down the street, the Heritage Foundation, you put some blame on too. Considerable blame. Well, let me just address that point because I do think that here's where guys like us, and I mean the three of us, are at a disadvantage in some times because we actually think of politics in terms of ideas and policies and the consequences of those policies. Now we're naive, I know. Whereas it turns out that for a lot of Americans, politics is now more about attitude than about those specific ideas. It's about the tribal loyalty. It is that gut visceral sense. So yes, you can, and there are quote-unquote intellectuals who will try to put a veneer of ideas over some of this. But I think that that's kind of, you know, ex post facto reasoning. You asked me about the Heritage Foundation, and I do have a chapter devoted to the switch that they made. You start off by understanding how crucial the Heritage Foundation was in the intellectual development of the conservative movement, particularly of Reaganism. So they played a very particular role, but somewhere along the line they decided that it wasn't enough for them to be intellectual leaders. They had to be activists. And I do think the moment when they decided that they were going to be players was one of those decisive moments in conservatism, where I think that rather than being this very serious substantive source of conservative ideas and information, not always right. I don't agree with everything they've ever done. But at least you, I mean, I certainly remember writing books where I relied very heavily on some very thoughtful research they did. Absolutely. Then they bring in Jim DeMint, who decides to make it a political, to weaponize it politically. And basically turn themselves into an arm of what I've called a perpetual outrage machine, where, you know, you're pushing for government shutdowns and you're beating up on politicians who don't embrace this tactic or that tactic. And that was a decisive move from the conservative movement being policy-based to being anger-based. And we've seen the consequences of that as well. How does the Tea Party fit into all of this? That's one of the, that's a heartbreaking story for me, because just like our discussion of the conservative media, I was a big fan of the Tea Party when it first came on, you know, grew up. I thought of it as an incredibly hopeful development, a grassroots development. But in very short order, I remember asking myself at the time, okay, who are these people who claim to be representing the Tea Party? All of these organizations that were out there who were raising money and calling themselves Tea Party This or Tea Party That, many of them in retrospect turned out to be scam packs. This was a movement that I think had, you know, legitimate concerns was actually, I think in many ways, a spontaneous uprising of conservatives. But it was hijacked by grifters and charlatans. And so I know that they're often blamed for other things that have happened. But if you listen to what the Tea Party folks were saying, you know, they really were pushing back against the government that was, you know, out of control, a debt that was a massive intergenerational transfer of wealth. And you kind of wonder where that original, you know, those original folks are today. And culture. I have to ask you about her because she's fascinated me for a long time. I met her briefly once and you talked about going on television, I think, with her at one point. But for her, she's always struck me as fascinating. I can't decide if she actually believes what she says. I sometimes call her an anti tinkerbell, which is, you know, you have to clap to keep tinkerbell alive. You have to hate her to keep her alive. That's like actually what gives her strength. But she was one of the first Trump supporters. And she actually had a line, which I had never seen you write in a book. She said that Trump could perform abortions at the White House as long as he kept the immigrants out. So I guess it's like, was she always this way? Would she always kind of in the Trump camp? And I guess the second question is, do you think we should take her or people like her seriously as actual thinkers or are they playing an act more than actually thinking deeply about problems? You know, one variation of my book would do is how the right lost its mind would have been just to take a series of biographies of certain people and trace how they changed. And she would be one of them. Because there was a time and I could be naive here where I actually thought she was a relatively serious thinker. I think she's incredibly bright. I think she's an incredibly effective writer. But somewhere along the line she did basically, she did become the prisoner of her own shtick. But more disturbing was the way that she kept escalating and raising the ante of really, and I don't want to sound like a liberal here, but it had been really offensive over the top rhetoric, including the column she wrote after 9-11 that got her fired from National Review about basically going into all the Muslim countries and bombing them and converting them to Christianity and things like that. And some of the other things that she seems to rebel in doing things that are specifically designed to make people hate and specifically designed to outrage folks. And at a certain point that's less thoughtful than it is kind of shtick. So I honestly can't get into her head, and I've been on many shows with her, or several, whether she believes all of this, she's certainly intense about everything she says. But I do wonder about a kind of conservative that is more a brand, branding themselves, selling a brand than it is engaging in anything that's going to enlighten us. I wonder how much that point plays out in the broader picture, because for a while there was on the internet, there were the click-baity headlines. There was that website like Upworthy that would always be There aren't click-baity headlines anymore? They don't seem to be as much a thing. I think Facebook killed Upworthy. So it was basically manipulating you. It was like, you know, you won't like 10 things that do X and you won't believe number five or whatever else. They figured out that certain things kept people engaged, kept people tuned in or clicking. And it seems like the conservative outrage machine and as represented by people like Ann Coulter, who might be just kind of playing a character because it works and gets ratings, that almost ratings became the thing you chased and that as a result it like broke a generation to some extent. I remember seeing someone on Twitter wrote, and I can't remember who it is so I can't give them credit, but they said Fox News did to our parents what our parents feared violent video games would do to us. I had not seen that. That's really good. I do think there is something to that. We became addicted to it so that getting the clicks, getting the ratings winning the elections became the end of itself. It's the self-justification and jump ahead here in terms of branding and being the ultimate clickbait politician. Is anybody more clickbaity than the current president of the United States? Who basically figured out that, okay I may not have a coherent philosophy of governing, but I have a brand to sell and I know how to use social media to hook people. That's very much part of the story of 2016 and 2017. We've been blaming the right a lot and of course they deserve a ton of blame. What about the left? There are things that they're not, many things that they're not particularly good at. They have their own problems, one that has been written about a lot and you highlight is the crying wolf problem, for example, that they spent the last whatever, 40 years labeling every Republican as a racist idiot basically or a racist basically a racist. Yeah, bigots. Yeah, oligarchical racist. Romney had the most insane things written about him. I can use site from the left who kind of had a mea culpa where they said okay, I called Romney an oligarchic racist and maybe that was a little bit over the top because then someone actually came along like that and we had a problem where suddenly we're crying wolf the entire time. That seems to be a problem. What other sort of things, that and other things that the left might have a blame for this? Well, I'm really glad you brought this up because first of all there is there's a huge amount of pushback from the left about that when I basically said you understand why there was so little reaction to the alt-right in 2016 it's because you guys have been making this allegation and I will tell you that I get a lot of criticism from left-wing media on particularly this point. They don't want to be told that because of course their narrative is that no conservatism has always been awful it's always been sexist, it's always been xenophobic it's always been dumb and Donald Trump is the perfect expression of conservatism and everyone's conservative is directly responsible for Donald Trump. This is the left-wing argument that you get right now but there's no question about it and I try to make this point whenever I possibly can when I appear on liberal media which is again I understand that if you have called John McCain a racist if you have called George W. Bush a racist if you have called every single person every conservative for the last 50 years if you have called them a racist don't be surprised when playing the race card is met with a shoulder shrug an eye roll and this again this became the left's way of telling conservatives your bad people shut up we're not taking you seriously and as a result as you point out when the real thing comes along and the alt-right is the real thing you know they didn't have it they were out of ammunition they didn't have any words really really racist yes these are the no no no really seriously guys these are the real racist but the flip side is that we conservatives and I put myself in this category I think we'd been numb to it that we had been so used to you know basically saying yeah yeah yeah we really kind of ignored the fact that there were some pretty scary folks over on our side and we didn't do anything about them and we didn't call them out because they were our allies let's be honest about it they voted with us in elections so what was the point of picking a fight with them I think if you were existing in the conservative intellectual class you may have believed that the party was a party of ideas as had been said before and national review and all these things were representative of it but that might not have been the case you write about a specific caller when you were talking about a candidate in Wisconsin I believe who said that maybe we should deport all Muslims and you had a call-in show about that and what happened after it when you had that call-in show well now this was yeah this was a guy that was actually running in a Republican primary against Paul Ryan and he was the Sarah Palin and Coulter Breitbart endorse candidate Donald Trump had actually said nice things about this guy his name was Paul Nealon and at one point he suggested that we should seriously consider deporting all Muslims including American citizens now I wanted to open up the phone lines because I thought okay now people will recognize you know what an un-American idea this is right this this is one where maybe the audience and I will be on the same page and we'll understand that conservatives can be concerned about illegal immigration and everything in the war on terror but we are not going to be rounding up our neighbors because of their religion one of the first callers out of the box and I still remember this vividly Audrey from Oshkosh who said no you know what we need to think about this and compare them basically to pit bulls you know that there may be good pit bulls but the breed itself is pretty dangerous and I will admit to you and I know that some folks will think I'm terribly naive I was really shocked I was shocked that there were the people out there who would not only agree with this idea but then would agree so strongly they would call into my show which was a 50,000 watt show in the state of Wisconsin and articulate why we ought to basically have a religious test to expel people of a certain faith and that's I won't say it was the first time I realized but I did have to sit back and go okay um who are these people I thought I understood who our allies were what have they been listening to me for the last 20 years did I say anything that led them to think that this would be an appropriate use of government power um where there are certain themes that I should have emphasized more should we have called these folks out and I still don't know the answers to those questions How much of that is demographic and geographical isolation so we know that those areas of the country where people have the most contact with immigrants whether those are Muslims or Hispanic immigrants tend to be the most positive about immigration and about immigrants how much of this is that these people it's not it's not necessarily that they they were influenced by these terrible ideas or that they themselves are bad people although I think in some cases it can rise to that but just that there's whole swaths of the country that really don't have much exposure to or don't know much about what it's actually like to live in a cosmopolitan place and so they simply assume that it must be catastrophically awful you know in the way that like Donald Trump talks about Chicago I think that's a major factor and there's no question about it that that is one that that you get out into rural Wisconsin where this woman was was from and I think it's unlikely that she actually knew any Muslims at all or had ever encountered them so that that's clear factor but considering how we are segregating ourselves out by culture and by ideology that's not going to get any better one of the things I touch on in the book is the great sorting out in American politics that that we are increasingly becoming this blue and red those maps the blue red maps actually do reflect something fundamental that's happening that that we are actually physically now separating ourselves based on ideology so that it's not just on social media and media that we live in different universes we increasingly live in physically different universes but I will say this though and maybe just getting back to the whole question of ideas one would have thought that even if you were isolated and living in places where you did not encounter people of different religions still there's obviously something missing in the American tradition if people would think that this was a good idea that I guess I had thought that the idea of you know the values of the declaration of independence the values of the institution ideas of religious tolerance and religious freedom all of those things had been inculcated to the point that you still wouldn't think that you would expel people your neighbors because of of their religion so the the whole idea of and I know this is something that you know that you focus on this idea of freedom and liberty was thinner on the ground a pickly among conservatives than I had imagined I'd always suspected that perhaps there was that that that there but you would have hoped that those ideas which had been very strongly articulated by people like Ronald Reagan I mean go back and read his shining city on a hill speech what would how he envisioned what America was all about I thought that's what people meant when they said you know I want to take my country back or when they talked about American exceptionalism and apparently my vision of that was very different from what a lot of folks in the grassroots had so we've we spent a while now talking about the the kind of how we got here and the the movements that and ideas or non ideas that let us here so now I want to turn to more of where we are and where we're going so with Trump in office and with the way that it's played out I mean do you see do you see these trends continuing do you see signs that the right can get itself back on track I mean I guess so we're as we're recording this the day we're recording this there's a gubernatorial election in Virginia that is supposed to be to some extent a referendum on Trump and Trump's movement so how that plays out what the returns look like tonight might you know change how we might answer this but do you do you think that the the way that Trump's presidency has played out the lack of success that he has had is going to sap the the vigor of this movement that the ideas can come back or do you think we're just getting started well it's very difficult to make predictions as you know given how all of us were wrong about a year ago at least I was wrong about a year ago and it's very hard to say you know what's going to happen in 2018 given how strong the base continues to support Donald Trump but let me ask the go to the sort of the mega question what does this mean for conservatives and I wish I could give you a more hopeful message here but in many ways the election of Donald Trump has been worse for the conservative movement than I thought it would be now there are people like Hugh Hewitt out there who completely disagree with me on all of this but what I've been struck by is the willingness of conservatives to basically roll over and to rationalize and to and to trim their sails on one issue after another do the their willingness to conform to Trumpism as opposed to say okay here's a distinctive kind of conservatism that is not populist not nationalist which is not authoritarian which in fact still respects the rule of law that actually understands the importance of the constitution those voices are muted rather dramatically so what I see happening is that you'll continue to see the kind of polarization that we've had but that polarization will be more tribal than it will be ideologically unfortunately the number of conservatives I would say libertarian conservatives who have been willing to really speak out loudly in opposition to some of the more disturbing trends in the era of Trump is vanishingly small and I would like to say that the more we'll speak out and maybe more will but right now all of the forces tend to be pushing toward conformity and I don't think that that's a good I don't think that's a good trend well then let me ask you about a possible counter narrative that gets offered to that and one that might be slightly more hopeful and that's right we know from I mean throughout the campaign and we know from people who know Trump that he's highly impressionable there is the longstanding many people said at the hill you know whoever the last person he spoke to whatever position they advanced is the one that he will advance and so everyone jockey to be the last person to speak to him and so maybe this what looks like conforming to Trump's agenda is perhaps a ultimately naive attempt to like yeah this guy is awful we don't want to support the things he's doing but we've got control of both houses we've got control of the presidency maybe we can finally get a handful of things done so if we just kind of you know flatter him a bit don't push back too hard we can talk him into doing the things that we've always wanted like reforming taxes and so as long as as long as we're holding out hope that we can ultimately you know there'll be lots of bad rhetoric but we'll we'll ultimately get some good things out of it and so we're just going to kind of go along and then maybe if that doesn't happen there'll be more pushback as they realize that this is a disaster and they're not going to push through a legislative agenda I think that what you describe is exactly what is in fact happening here which is the bargain that they've made okay we can get some conservative wins and by the way there's that's true on you know judges the federal judiciary supreme court these are good things the rollback of the administrative state the regulatory relief these are real genuine wins but on the other hand you have to also weigh the cost what are you willing to spend for all of this I mean the Bushers bill keeps going up all the time I also think that there's two other counter narratives number one that let's say that you're right and we do get all these conservative wins under Trump my concern is that by the Trump the Trumpification of conservatism also means that it'll be toxified and that yes you have these wins over the next four maybe even seven years but then because the conservative movement has been discredited by its association with Trump that it ushers in a decades of democratic dominance a la what's happening in California and I always have that image in my mind of you know when California used to be bipartisan and what it's become now is that the model for the rest of the country so that you have short term advantages long-term disadvantages if in fact the left snaps back to power in 2020 are they likely to be centrist or moderate or are they likely to push the country towards single payer in reaction to Donald Trump also considering the way that Republicans are governing by ramming through legislation on the narrowest of partisan margins with almost you know no due to liberation what is there any reason to think that Democrats once in power will not act exactly the same way and perhaps even more aggressively I mean is each country ramps it up so I guess I'm concerned about the backlash to that I am not seeing enough conservative wins to justify many of the compromises that are made but I certainly hope that those folks who say give it time we're going to get some wins I hope they're right but I also don't think that we snap back from this I think our politics has become coarsened I think the impact on our culture is dangerous I think the willingness of more and more voters and citizens to adjust their moral compass to accept things that were unacceptable to believe things that were untrue to cover up for corruption I think all of that is going to leave a stain that's going to last a lot longer than the Trump presidency at the end of your book you offer some modest advice to fellow conservatives and some things that conservatives you kind of alluded to some of those but for people who are like us very disgusted by Donald Trump and what's happening to this country but still have conservative or libertarian leanings what is your advice to those people well you know part of it is to step back and this is hard for a lot of us you know step back from the day to day and from the you know who wins the next election and really go back to first principles what is it we believe in what is really important why are we conservatives all of those things I mean and also this is a period to recognize that you know we can't keep replaying our greatest hits from the 1980s as much as I admire Ronald Reagan we we can't become part of a zombie conservatism that continually comes up with the same answers to every problem in every decade but I also think this is an opportunity for a distinctive kind of conservatism that you know is free of the crony capitalism the special interest crony capitalism that is free of the rejects the authoritarian appeal that you're often seeing but also you know is willing to address some of the legitimate concerns of the Trump supporters without embracing the toxic elements of all of that I also think that there's a moment where because the Trump presidency is kind of such a shock to the constitutional democratic system that we've had that I'm seeing an openness on the part of even people on the left bear with me here who suddenly have developed a strange new appreciation for things like limited government for the Bill of Rights for the concepts of checks and balances there might be a teachable moment here for why perhaps we ought not to invest our masters in government with as much power as the left once thought was a good idea I'm sensing more skepticism of that centralized power more skepticism of government across political lines that I ever have before so but I guess this is one of those moments where I would say don't sacrifice long-term principles for short-term means it's not going to be worth it thanks for listening this episode of free thoughts was produced by Test Terrible and Evan Banks to learn more visit us on the web at www.libertarianism.org