 Welcome to Free Thoughts from Libertarianism.org and the Cato Institute. I'm Trevor Burrus. And I'm Aaron Powell. Joining us today has been Dominic, founder and publisher of The Federalist, host of The Federalist Radio Hour, and writer of The Transom, a daily subscription newsletter for political insiders. He's also the co-founder of the Red State Group blog. Welcome to Free Thoughts, Ben. Good to be with you. Free Thoughts is usually a show. I think we try to be a show about deep ideas and eternal ideas, not as much politics. Our last episode. Without a large audience. Yes, exactly. That's our niche. And our last episode was about Confucius and Libertarianism. But today I think we should just talk about politics, if Aaron will oblige, you okay with that? I think so. Okay. So we are in the midst of everyone's craziest political year ever with all these things going on. And of course the big name is Trump. You wrote a piece a year ago, we're recording this in August of 2016 that did a pretty good job of predicting Trump. I'm not sure if that's changed much, but I guess I just want to ask, what is your theory of Trump? Because everyone has a theory of Trump, so what is your theory of Trump? Sure. And with apologies for the fact that just about everybody's theory involves vindicating their prior critiques of the Republican coalition or the party or ideas, what have you, everybody likes to blame the people they were already blaming for things. From my perspective, my theory of Trump and the one that I wrote about back in last August was essentially that the Republican Party has been a coalition that combined people who believed in conservative or limited government ideas from what you could generally describe as a classically liberal view of the rights of all people and the importance of limiting government's intervention in people's lives, that that ideological core was what really animated conservatives, and particularly, I would say, the Tea Party, things of that nature. At the same time, a significant portion of the Republican coalition was not particularly ideological and was much more open or thought of themselves as being on the right out of a vision that had more to do with what you might describe as white identity politics. Now, that isn't to say these people are racists any more than people who are looking out for their communities are racists, or if you're a Cuban voter and you care about how Cubans are treated, that you're a racist or something like that. What it means is that they cared about protecting the entitlements that benefited their communities, and they disliked the entitlements that went to other communities. So you saw this rise in previous cycles via the various candidates who sounded populist notions when it came to economic policy. You saw it with Pat Buchanan. You saw it to a certain extent with Ross Perot. You certainly saw it with Mike Huckabee in 2008, and you saw it with Rick Santorum in 2012, all of whom broke with conservative orthodoxy on economic issues to basically espouse, well, you know, I'm for tax cuts. I might be for smaller government in some senses, but I'm definitely going to protect all the old age entitlements. I don't want to get rid of any of these redistributive things that go to the middle or the working class. You know, I'm going to defend all of those things in opposition to what you might see as the Paul Ryan agenda, which basically says, actually, we're going to go to our own white, older voters and convince them that they should have less Medicare dollars flowing their way. And so those two things were always at odds within the coalition, but you never saw anyone stand up and give voice to them. I think that what Trump was able to do with this cycle was really play the identity politics card to the hilt. And what he did in this way was show that you could succeed in that vein. If you had something that a lot of these other candidates didn't have, what's in common between Buchanan, between Huckabee and between Santorum? They're all basically Bible thumpers when it comes to the culture of war. They all have these socially conservative, traditionalist, Catholic or Baptist views that made them a lot more prone to talking about those issues when it went on, when it came to doing media than the economic side. I actually ran into Mike Huckabee recently in New York and had a conversation with him about this. And he basically said, nobody cared about my economic agenda because they just wanted to ask me about what I thought about, about gays or abortion or all these other issues. Trump didn't have that going for him. He's a very secular, maybe the most secular candidate we've ever seen nominated. Uh, this is a guy who doesn't listen. He doesn't give any actual, he doesn't make the obligatory God references, even if you're an atheist, I think we've probably never had someone run for president who say that they don't ask God for forgiveness. Like that's, that's kind of a new thing. And so in the absence of that, he was able to play to this economic agenda and at the same time, he was able to play on the concerns that a lot of white Americans have about the changing nature of the culture and the global economy, um, concern that he allowed him to sound this nostalgic, uh, taking us back to when we were great again moment. Uh, and what that really did was show to us, I think that the American political reality is maybe a lot more European than we thought that one where the, you know, the parties of the right sound more, uh, less like conservative, principled people and more like a nationalist, sometimes even xenophobic, uh, people. And, uh, and I think that Trump really showed that there was an audience for that in, in the American electorate. Now, you know, his problem is that the audience for that is maybe a third of the voting population and not enough for him to really form some kind of grand coalition we've seen in recent weeks that he's been, uh, trying to, you know, reach out with an olive branch to all of those communities that he's pissed off for the course of the preceding, uh, months and years. Uh, but I think that that is really my thesis about Trump, that the breakdown of trust, uh, in, uh, in elite institutions in, uh, in the conservative ideology that had been at the core of what the Republican Party at least pretended to stand for, for a long time, the breakdown of faith in that led the, led a portion of the Republican base that had not particularly been active in primaries in the past to come out and support someone with this, this nationalist agenda, um, that really is not about limited government. It's more about, uh, I'm going to work for the people who look like you. Now, a year ago, would, would you have said, you wrote this and you still said you were, he's not going to get the nomination. Um, are you, are you really surprised or, or now that you kind of can figure it out retroactively and say, so yes, this was inevitable. So I, so I, the explanation that I wrote in August, um, since I write the trance on my right every day. And so, uh, virtually every day, I'm going to be giving you 800, you know, 700, 800 words in the morning about, uh, about what I think about something that's going on, unless there's some big story that, you know, I just think you need to read. And I started saying that Trump could be the nominee, um, or that I thought that he would be the nominee, uh, in, I want to say, uh, after Thanksgiving in December. Um, and part of the reason that I thought that or that what changed my mind was seeing the response to, um, activity, basically the, the terrorist activity and, and general sort of concern about the world, seeing those voters go to him as opposed to maybe a more stable, uh, or someone, someone who stood to benefit for, for the entire month of, of November, I felt like every single pundit was coming in every day and saying, well, this is why this news story is good for Marco Rubio and none of it was happening. You know, none of that was, was going on. And what I think that reflected was that when, when voters talk about wanting somebody new wanting, wanting a fresh face, what they really meant this time around was somebody who was completely outside of politics. Um, not just someone who was, you know, a fresh face governor or a young senator or something like that, they wanted somebody, uh, dramatically new. And then as soon as the Republican party became clear that the Republican party was unwilling to become the party of Ted Cruz, the party of, of a kind of, you know, strong conservative ideological ideas, uh, and it became clear that they just weren't interested in that, uh, that's the moment where I, I, you know, really changed my mind. And, and I think that that was happening basically in December. How much of a role did media coverage play in him winning? Because you have a field, at least earlier on in the primaries of, I mean, there's a lot of people, um, they can't, it's a lot of people to pay attention to, especially if you're someone outside of the Beltway who cares probably the right, vanishingly small amount about this stuff compared to us crazy people here. And Trump is a highly entertaining trainwreck. Um, and so the media is just talking about Trump all the time. And that's how most people hear about the candidates anyway. So do you think he would have had anywhere near the success he did if the other candidates had been more even coverage? So I'm going to blame it. I'm going to spread the blame a little bit. Um, the, the media coverage of Trump was pretty critical from day one. It's, it's actually a myth to say that they weren't critical. What was different about Trump is that he got direct access to the voter at a far higher rate than any other candidate. The ability, I mean, nobody was doing the equivalent of setting a camera down in front of a podium when Bobby Jindal is doing a rally in Iowa and just letting him talk on air for an hour. And that's something that just is, is separate. That's not media coverage. That's just giving him access. And so that was the part that I was critical of. I mean, I felt like they were asking critical questions of him in interviews pretty early on, you know, they, most places didn't only treated him as a sideshow until the point where he made the immigration proposal. And as soon as he did that, people had something to ask him about that was different. And I think that they did start asking those questions. Um, but I think that there, you have to split the media baby, basically that their, their access to him, I think was significantly beneficial and was not, was not given to any other candidate. But then there was also the role that right wing media played in this process. And I think that we need to understand that, you know, you don't want to paint with a broad brush. Not everybody dealt with, with Trump the same way. I did sign on to the against Trump cover that National Review ran along with a number of other people. And, and my real argument against him just came down to Donald Trump doesn't believe in the Constitution. I don't think we should have presidents who don't believe in the Constitution. We've had too many of them already. But, but the, the, the conservative media complex has a lot of different flavors. I mean, it has kind of the younger online places that have only been around for, you know, a decade or less. The federal list is obviously one of those we turn three next month. The, and then you have the kind of the intellectual journals, the places where the smart people kind of get together. But then you have the mass media side of, of conservative media. And I think that there's a distinction people need to, need to make mentally that I'm not sure everybody does, which is that there are very intelligent people who work within conservative media. I think that I think Rush Limbaugh is a very smart guy. I think he's very good at what he does when it comes to radio, whether you agree with him or not. But then there's also a, a form of media on the right that is as much about entertainment and as eyeballs as it is anything else. It's the same as ESPN's coverage of the NFL or something like that. They're not going to be all that critical of the NFL because they have Monday night football. The, the difference I think that you saw here was if you go down the, the, the, the Fox sort of hole and you look at who was critical of Trump and who wasn't. The people who were in DC, the Krauthamers, the George Wills, the Britt Humes, you know, they, they were critical of Trump almost from day one. You know, they were, they were criticizing him as people who know politics, who know someone who doesn't know politics. It was the New York contingent of commentators, many of whom have no political background, who were from day one backing Trump, defending him, saying a lot of things in, in support of him. Sean Hannity, Eric Bowling, you know, all of the kind of midday commentators and that kind of set. And it was actually very few of the people on Fox from New York, Dana Perino and Greg Gutfeld kind of being exceptions who, who were critical of Trump and, and sustained it in a way. I think that made a significant difference in this cycle. And I think that it had a lot to do with the fact that Fox people, people who watch it are voters, they are Republicans, they're very active. And I think that the most critical moment in this cycle was actually came after Ted Cruz won Wisconsin and had some momentum. He was actually in internal polling. He was ahead of Trump in California. He was, he looked like he had some momentum. And then there was a two week period there after, after that Wisconsin victory, where every single day on Fox and on a lot of these and a lot of these different venues, there were people pounding their hands on the table and basically saying this is over. He's going to win New York. He's going to win Pennsylvania. It's over. Ted Cruz has no hope. He's just, he's just, you know, you know, kind of a dog who's, who's biting at your heels. You know, he needs to drop out. And that drumbeat had a significant effect in internal polling. Ted Cruz saw his numbers turn around significantly. He really dropped. And I think that that speaks to the power that this media really has to frame what's happening in an election. It seems that your theory partially of Trump relates to this sort of idea of transactional politics. And it kind of reminds me of J. Costs spoiled rotten, which is a, we had Jay on to talk about Republic, Republic no more, but his book before that spoiled rotten discusses how transactional politics, meaning vote for me and I will give you things crept into the Democrat Party in the thirties and that's sort of where it remained. But if the Republican Party was trying to be classically liberal, which is sort of against transactional politics, at least in theory and principle, and that that's just not going to fly. And this brings up the question of what libertarianism, that part of republicanism has to offer an electorate anymore if we're going to say, we're not going to give you anything except for the possibility of a richer world that is not a check in your pocket. And so it's a repudiation. And so maybe the reality of politics just ends up being that if you got principles, you're going to lose. The libertarian position is the same as Michael Corleone's and Godfather too. I'm here. I'm offering you nothing, not even the fee for the life. So but but here's the thing about that. My argument has been and this goes back a couple of years now that that this this populist rejection of the elites was going to happen one way or the other. Like it was already you could see it rising and people like Tim Carney and myself, you know, have been writing, you know, for a while now, hey, guys, you kind of need to get behind this or find a way to to help it move in the right direction. Otherwise, it's just going to go. I mean, this is a this is a fire that was going to happen anyway. But when a force fire happens, you have to do controlled burns around it. You have to dig trenches. You have to do you can't just let it burn. Otherwise, it just consumes the whole forest. I think in this in this case, you had you had a number of politicians who are themselves transactional working in working in a way that ignored this this populist fervor, the rejection of the elites and this distrust of established institutions that was rising. And instead, the problem that they had is they were just interested in transacting with other people. So what what do you have? You have situations where the biggest priorities for for, you know, the Republican Senate when they were running for office was we're going to be a hedge against Obama's radicalism. We're going to push back against Obamacare. We're going to prevent him from doing his immigration plan. And then they get in and their priorities are, you know, the Keystone pipeline and getting rid of the medical device tax and all these other things that that K Street lobbyists and corporations want. And I think that the people really rejected that and not so much because of what they were doing, but that their priorities weren't lined up with what the people were. I don't think that they were rejecting it out of this principled argument that like this isn't something government should be doing. It was more about rejecting it from the perspective of you're not paying enough attention to us. And my real concern is that historically, that's not really been the animating factor for the majority of American politics. It's been a portion of coalitions and it's been something where, you know, we were talking before the show started about the prescription drug benefit. That's that's certainly an example of transactional. We want to reward our older voters with this entitlement benefit that's going to redistribute stuff toward them. So this is not new, but it hasn't been the driving animating force of a party. You know, the party has always been in or at least pretended to be more about ideas, ideas about what, you know, the life well lived looks like how government should facilitate or get out of the way of allowing people to live in that way. And that's a debate that has really been absent from this cycle entirely, because basically what Trump has done has become the same kind of candidate that the Democrats have fielded over the course of the past several years, which is basically saying, I'm just going to fight for you and I'm going to get you the benefits that you deserve and you look across this country and you see lots of people who you don't think are working hard and don't deserve the benefits they're getting, I'm going to change that. And that turns out to be, you know, a very powerful message in America, a message that speaks to a perhaps more sizable portion of what we thought might have been a group of people who voted the way they did because of ideas or because of policies instead, they're voting that way because they just think this person is an avatar for me and for my group. So on the one hand that seems distressing from where Trevor and I sit as working day to day to advance libertarianism because we're kind of constitutionally opposed to that sort of politics and think that, you know, that the very basis of government is in doing the opposite of that sort of politics. But on the other hand, I wonder how depressing the overall picture is because so the among the Democrats, the person who seemed to campaign the most on I will protect your interests was Bernie Sanders who lost and Trump, well, yes, he won in a crowded field, looks fingers crossed on his way to a loss and likely a fairly large one. And he certainly didn't represent the majority of primary voters. So is this populism? Is it a large threat in the sense that it could realign one or both of the two parties that we seem to have fixed in this country? Populism flares up in ways that can have a significant impact, but it usually does so temporarily. Historically, these movements can't sustain themselves. They die off. And one of the things that I think that should give people hope is that we've seen a couple of small imitators of Trump, but Trumpism is so attached to him and his brand that it's hard to see it taking on as something that as a phenomenon within the Republican coalition. It's transmittable to other people. It kind of reminds me of the story I saw that Hillary's having a really hard time finding a person to stand in for Trump in the debate prep because no one can just give the verbal vomit of just like ideas. Caleb Brown doesn't do a decent job. Caleb Brown actually should do a good job, yeah, but the inimitable, irreplaceable, that's not the right word, irreproducible Trump. Yes, I agree. The other thing is that I think that I think that actually the way that Trump moves the needle in a couple directions is interesting. And I'm wondering if he actually serves to discredit some of the ideas that he advocates for. For instance, you know, I think that let's let's take let's take two issues where where libertarians are clearly at at odds with Donald Trump. OK, the border clearly this is a this is a candidate who has gone through all sorts of different twists and turns when it comes to his immigration policy. Just the other day, Ann Coulter, one of his most dedicated supporters was was, you know, expressing a lot of concern that he's moving away from his hard line position. But I actually have heard a lot of concern among smart people who are more closely aligned with Trump Trump's position, that a loss at the ballot box and that the nature of the way that he's made the case for this actually discredits their ideas and and maybe hurts the case that they've made for much harsher approaches to immigration and keeping people out on the issue of trade. I think clearly we have an issue in America where where people don't have faith in their in their elites to cut good deals for them and nobody really understands TPP. They don't understand the trade policy unless they're in it. But I actually think that his his giving expression of the idea, well, you know, this is an unfair deal. This is this is something that we we can't trust because it's something that Obama and Clinton cut with with these other trading partners and that we can't have faith in it. I don't think that that's actually a policy critique. I think it's something that is just it's a distrust of the people. And so again, I don't think that endures after Trump in a way other than something that we probably would be OK with, which is skepticism of, you know, our elected officials to not just be corporatist, you know, not just have a corporatist approach to the way the trade policy works. On the other side, on foreign policy, I think that Trump actually reveals how much of the Republican electorate rejects the general foreign policy consensus that has been a part of their hawkish leadership over the course of the past two decades. One of the downsides to not having anyone from the Bush administration run in 2008 or 2012 or anybody closely aligned with Bush was that we never had a great working out of what we learned from Iraq and what we learned from Afghanistan, what we learned from his approach really to foreign policy generally. And so that conversation was really delayed and didn't really happen, I feel like, until this year. And when it did happen, you have a candidate who openly broke with the idea that the Iraq War was a good idea and used it repeatedly to, you know, against his opponents. Now you can go back in the records and find that he's not really accurately representing his position. But still, I think that that gave voice to a lot of people who had generally been ignored by the consensus foreign policy position of the Republican Party. And so it's not all bad in a way. Like, I think it's, I think this is, you know, it's a revelatory thing. It tells us more about what this coalition is and what it isn't, that it's more secular, that it's perhaps less hawkish, that it, you know, is more that it is less wedded to conservative economic ideas than perhaps we would like. But I think as a whole, what you can step away from it and say is now we know more and we know this thing now. What should we learn from it? And I think the biggest error that would be made by conservatives or by anybody who cares about the future of the Republican Party after this election would be to say, well, we just think the same things that we thought in 2012. Let's have the autopsy for the party again and just update all the dates in it and just think the same thing. I think what they need to do is look look long and hard at what this coalition told them about, you know, what they believe about government and what they don't believe. And then, you know, it's the responsibility of leaders to try to translate that populist rage into things that are actually good. How do we use skepticism for the elite, skepticism for these institutions, skepticism about the deals that are being cut to actually further the cause of liberty as opposed to just promising that I'll be a strong man for you. If this is a sort of like a Republican Party colon and cleanse, which I kind of see. And if and if if Trump is sort of unique in the way you've said, it might be therefore you kind of seem like you're saying that it's the the reports of the death of Republican Party have been greatly over exaggerated. What is that trend? Yeah, but yeah, that maybe the Republican Party will be better after this. That really depends on the people who are part of it. I mean, the Trump reveals things about the country that I think we have been ignoring for quite a while. The Republican Party establishment and leaders, the donor class was very good at keeping this tap down. You know, they nominated John McCain. They nominated Mitt Romney. And it was a situation where they really did kind of push push this populist rage to the side. Now they've nominated the guy who was one of the original burthers and is clearly someone who plays this very aggressive tabloid kind of game. But I think that the error would be to think that this was just about the media or that this was just about the black swan effect of a guy who can communicate one of these few rich people who who has the capacity to to connect to the working class and be kind of a trader to his own class. The lessons that I think they ought to take are ones that really tell them things about their coalition that they may not have wanted to pay attention to for a while. And parties do die. But what's more common is for parties to realign in ways that that make them be very different things. The the Democratic Party of JFK, you know, is not the Democratic Party today. OK, in fact, I would argue the Democratic Party of Bill Clinton is not the Democratic Party. Absolutely. You know, Clinton could run against I mean, Bill Clinton's more Mitt Romney. I always wanted Clinton of 1992 to run against Mitt Romney and basically the same candidate. Yeah, yeah, you're completely right about that. And the thing is and the thing is honestly that that's the problem. That's the kind of future that I think the Republican Party has. I think it's going to go through a period of realignment. It's going to become something different. The the concern I would have if if I were a member of that party or if I was in its leadership is that they're there's going to be there's going to need to be a lot of leadership from some young voices that that directs this fire. Otherwise, it will consume the party and it'll turn it into a rump nationalist party along the lines of what we've seen in Europe from the far right. So when I have looked at when I paid attention to the Trump campaign and when I have been critical of Trump, there's a the concern that I have is not just about the policies that he represents or the shift towards we're going to prop up entitlements and we're going to build walls and we're going to kick people out and we're going to harder even more people overseas and so on and so forth. But but there's like there's an ugliness to it. And that seems like the kind of thing that it's harder to realign around like the thing that seemed to rocket him to fame initially was his the Mexicans are sending rapists. And every time he turns around and says something that's not just stupid and he says a lot of very stupid things. In fact, he's often one of the most profoundly confusing things to me is how people can be excited as rallies because what he's saying literally doesn't make any sense. Like it's like a it's like a space ghost rant. Yes. But but that they there there seems to be this like just really repugnant ugliness to the rhetoric and the way that he talks about other people and the way that he talks about out groups from the perspective of his supporters. And that seems like so, yes, something that to say the Republican Party should embrace that like if that's a large portion of his impealed and they need to figure out to embrace that would seem to be a problem. And it seems like that might point even more to the death of the party because of how disfavorably he's seen by all of the growing demographics. So a couple of things about that. First off, what we are seeing to this point is that as much as the Democratic Party would like to paint all Republicans with the Donald Trump brush, they haven't really been successful with it this cycle, particularly you see that by looking at the Senate races where across the country, virtually every Republican senator is running 10 points ahead of Trump. In some cases, it's much as 13 or 15 in some states. In fact, at this stage, I was talking with CBS's head of polling on Sunday and he says that he sees three or four net losses for Republicans in the Senate, which would not turn it over to Democratic hands. So I think that tells you to a certain extent that they haven't they're not grouped in with him in the same way when it comes to the perspective that Hispanic and Black Americans have on Trump. Trump at his best sounds like a politically incorrect New York City cop who's sitting at the bar at the end of the day and ranting at the television. And that's basically the way that Trump lives his life. There's something that actually can be refreshing about that in the day and age of scripted politicians. And you think of how scripted Romney was in particular and particularly politicians who are just willing to take it when it comes to the media criticism and not fire back. And I think that given that our media entities are so unpopular, Trump's activity and doing that is something that really paid dividends for him this cycle. And I think that that's not necessarily a bad thing for Republicans to take on in their relationship with the media going forward simply because the media is let's face it in the tank for Hillary. It really is. And it's not so much. It's it's more true this cycle. I think that it's been true any other cycle. It's not just that they view Trump as like this extinction level event. They just from day one, they've been kind of shocked, I think that the people responded to him in the way that he did. That's not necessarily bad. But I agree with you on the ugliness side. At his worst, he's joffery from Game of Thrones. He is he is he is literally the guy who likes to go and pull the wings off of insects and and just, you know, do you know, just he'll just pick people to go after on certain days for no rhyme or reason, you know, and and do so in a very active and personal way. And that to me is is something that's that's very disgusting. And I think that most politicians will never do that. You know, the very few politicians will go will go down that road. But I do think that when when you just as a matter of the way that he approaches things, people people will say things about him like, oh, he tells it like it is or he or, you know, he doesn't play their game or he's not politically correct. I think there's actually some virtue that in this day and age in in in recognizing that the media no longer plays by the rules that it did 20 or 30 years ago in the way that it treats these candidates. And I think particularly that's true of of outlets that have really risen up to a degree where they they particularly will target and try to ask Republicans difficult and crazy questions in order to get them to stumble. And I think a perfect example of that is actually was from a Trump press conference a couple of months ago where he spent the entire press conference bashing the media and talking about how terrible it was and, you know, he's doing it right to them. And then the last question was from a Yahoo News journalist who asked him what he thought about Harambe and Trump actually gave like this five minute answer about what he thought about Harambe. And it was, you know, just sort of going, you know, well, you know, it's a very difficult thing. You know, you see, you have to make, you know, these split judgments. And, you know, I understand how the concern of like he had clearly thought through, you know, what he thought about Harambe. But the thought that I had was, you know what, ask that of any of the other 16 and they would probably have stumbled on that question. You know, they might not have known how to answer it. They might not have, you know, what do I say in this sort of scenario? They might have given some very typical politician answer like, well, that's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about, you know, subsidies today. I think that Trump's response actually in that point, that type of thing does work and it works because in this day and age, you have journalists who are asking not just got your questions, but got your questions about all kinds of pop culture things. I don't know if Trump's gotten asked yet, but I'm sure he's going to get a Ryan Lochte question. You know, and it's just like the one thing that I wish I could take away from Trump and give to more politicians generally is just be more engaged in the culture, be more aware of these things. And then when the journalist asks you the gotcha question, trying to get you to say something stupid that can go on TMZ and not just on CNN, be more prepared for that. Now we do have this third candidate in the mix. Yes. Jill Stein. You don't have any Wi-Fi around here, do you? Exactly. It's in the fryer brain. No Wi-Fi, no vaccines. But Gary Johnson is interesting to libertarians and possibly an opportunity of some sort to at least get more of the message out there. How do you sort of see that fitting into the rubric you've described? Is this an opportunity for libertarians to have a hand in reforming the Republican Party along a more principled aspect or the libertarian party may be going to be a significant element in the future? So I think this is an opportunity, obviously, for libertarians. Personally, I wish that they had a different candidate running the cycle. And it's not that I dislike Gary Johnson personally. I think he would be a better president than either Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton. I know plenty of people who are Republicans or who have been Republicans who are going to vote for him. And I think that that's and I think that that's a good thing. I hope that he I hope that the level of support that is indicated in polling actually comes through on Election Day, which is something that is always, you know, a problem with the third party people's kind of underperforming that number. And I hope that he gets on the debate stage. My only problem really is, is that when I look at Gary Johnson, what I actually see and even more so when I look at Bill Weld, I see kind of a 90s era liberal Republican, you know, which is which is not as much about, you know, eliminating eliminating departments, cutting back government, you know, limiting government in aggressive ways. It's more about, well, you know, socially liberal, fiscally conservative, that kind of thing. The difference is social liberalism in the 90s was, you know, the ACLU was still signing on to the Religious Freedom Protection Acts. You know, the they they were still fighting along the same lines when it came to civil liberties free speech and free speech liberals today have really dropped that from their menu of things. They they are aggressively anti free speech in a lot of different areas and not not just in the campus. And I'm very concerned that that's going to be an issue under a Clinton presidency that gets ramped up even more since she's never been a fan of free speech and has plenty of enemies out there that she'd like to see have to deal with all sorts of problems. I wish that the Libertarian Party had nominated someone who was who was more aggressively pushing libertarian ideas as opposed to kind of being a middle of the road moderate Republican candidate, which is basically what he is this cycle. I understand, though, that that I mean, this is a guy who who had a very good governorship, you know, I think is is someone who, you know, it certainly doesn't have the criminal problems of Hillary Clinton or the insanity problems with Donald Trump. The only thing is I wish that it had been maybe a younger voice who represents more of a 21st century approach to libertarianism. I would have really liked to see when it became clear that Clinton and Trump were going to be the nominees. I would have liked to see somebody like Justin Amash get in there just in the sense that I'd like to see some of these younger faces because you want someone who can not just be a face for libertarianism this cycle, but can be a leader going forward. And I think that that's that's going to emerge, I think. I think that there are going to be a lot of people after this cycle who kind of take a hard look at, you know, am I really a Republican? What do they really stand for? If the Libertarian Party really stands for things that I believe in, you know, that maybe that is something that I can build, you know, a more meaningful approach around, you know, for myself as a voter going forward. So I do think it's an opportunity. I just would have liked it to be a little bit more, shall we say, radical. I like to be having those good fights where Libertarians are really right and Republicans have been really wrong. And instead it's like, you know, it's more, hey, look, we're way more normal than these other people. I like your 90s comparison because he does, Gary Johnson sometimes reminds me of the guy who used to host Double Dare, Mark Summers, because he always used to wear sneakers with a suit. It was like, whoa, you're still crazy, Mark Summers. What are you doing? Yeah, and he's kind of awkward and stuff. Yeah, this is, I think it was the week before he was, Johnson got the nomination. I had a piece in the Washington Post about my fears about nominating him and Weld that it was when a lot of Republicans were saying, I mean not a lot, but there were prominent Republican pundits and other people saying, I'm gonna switch, I'm gonna vote for the Libertarians, I'm gonna switch my party affiliation and so on. And I had this fear that the Libertarian party, which I should say because we get lots of confusion about this, like Libertarianism.org that this podcast is a part of is not in any way affiliated with the Libertarian party. Kato is not affiliated with the Libertarian party. They're different things and not all small L Libertarians are big L Libertarians, but that if the Libertarian party became kind of the place where people who used to think of themselves as Republicans and then the Republican party went insane and so we want kind of moderate Republicans to have a new home. And if Johnson and Weld represented that kind of moderate Republicanism taking over the Libertarian party, that unless they were going to win because obviously they're better than the alternatives right now, that you risk that if the Libertarian party and Libertarianism kind of represents like America's founding conscience, like the principles of the American founding and the principles of real constitutionalism and giving that a voice, even if it's not going to win, it's still gonna be a voice out there saying like, hey, you guys are drifting from like what you have pretended to value at least, that that's going to hurt American politics over time. But at the same time, it's hard to say like because even the kind of moderate Republicanism that they've advanced looks so damn good compared to the other choices. Yeah, I mean, it does look, it does have that 90s moderate Republican flavor to it. The thing, I agree with you. I wish that this was more, I wish that they were more running about free speech about your right to self-defense about the fact that government shouldn't even be doing these things is something that I would like to be hearing more from them as opposed to as opposed to this kind of alternatives. But I do think that there's in the war of ideas that we've all been fighting in and dealing with over the course of our career, this is I think an opportunity, regardless of whether Johnson and Weld can be the people who actually expressed those ideas consistently. I think this is an opportunity to kind of say, what does the party stand for? What is it about? What should a coalition be about? What does this look like? And I think in this context, the clarity that Libertarians offer, that small L Libertarians can offer to voters in the wake of something this crazy is something that I think is gonna have more appeal to it and is going to get a response not just from those looking for someone who's not a criminal and not nuts. Do you think that there will still be the alignment with libertarianism in the right because some people say, oh, this is now the middle, which is a little bit different than people have said but it works in this context. But can the left ever really come over to the libertarian side at this point anymore or are we gonna have to look to the right? I think that the anti-war left can come to be in favor of some libertarian ideas but I think that the rise of the type of social justice speech crushing approach among younger liberals, it's one of the most depressing phenomenons I've seen in my lifetime but it's also something that I think really closes the door to having libertarians be kind of more at home on the left in the sense that that's just such a fundamental issue that you can't really cross that line and I think that there was actually more hope of that type of alignment. Again, back in the 90s when the ACLU and libertarians saw each other as being a lot more aligned and people who cared about those issues were a lot more aligned. I think now that you basically have a democratic party that is corporatist, that is more hawkish, that is entirely in favor of the surveillance state that doesn't particularly care about civil liberties for individuals and that having sort of achieved what they wanted to when it came to most of the culture wars is now moved from arguing about whether abortions should be legal to arguing that we need to get rid of the Hyde Amendment and everybody needs to pay for everybody else's abortions. Like they've moved so far away from where they were before that I think that has really kind of closed off and I think libertarians actually may end up in the middle just by default if we end up in a situation where you have one party that's basically corporatist, one that is kind of nationalist and protectionist, the middle position is going to be the one that's okay with advancing in the global economy and economic progress and technology and isn't just trying to engage in either Keynesian expenditures or in some kind of redistributive project that more favors people of a certain race or a certain background. So handicapping the future here, since you did a pretty good job a year ago, who's gonna win and then what's gonna happen a year from now? Could have you back a year from now and we could just continually do this, this sort of notion-domist thing. Bring Ben back everywhere. Oh gosh, so I will say that I'm not always good at predicting things and I certainly thought in this cycle, even though I outlined how I thought Trump could win and why he could, I still thought that it was unlikely when I wrote a year ago. So here's what I think is likeliest at this stage. I think Trump is going to lose, but I think he's gonna make it closer than people currently think. I think that he'll probably end up with a loss that looks nationally probably like a five or six point loss, but he might actually win a state or two that Mitt Romney didn't win simply because of the demographics involved. He might lose a state or two that Mitt Romney won. Ultimately, I think it's going to be kind of a wash, not the blowout that I think some people see in the national polling, but also I think not close. The thing that I think it should be concerning when it comes to this whole context of like what's moving forward and what we're looking at a year from now is let's just say for the sake of argument, Trump loses by six points. The Republicans retain the Senate by one or two seats and Hillary Clinton is elected. And a year from now, Mitch McConnell is on the Senate floor saying, well, you know what we really need to do to solidify the party and to wash the taste of Trump out of all of our mouths is we need to pass comprehensive immigration reform with Hillary Clinton. Something that would just be a giant finger raised to the base of Trump supporters and would probably animate them all, all the more within the Republican primaries. Now, I'm not saying that's going to happen. I'm just saying there's a possibility, something like that happens. Or name your deal, name your other sort of thing that they're going to do in terms of transactional politics with Hillary Clinton. There's a surprising number of Republican politicians, I think, who think of Hillary Clinton as the way she was when she was in the Senate in much earlier as opposed to the way she is now, which is, in my view, much more wedded to the progressive culture war and to all of these different promises that she's made along the way to get to where she could be right now. And I expect that her presidency is going to offer something that looks a lot more like Obama and a lot less like the triangulation that Bill Clinton did in the 90s. Thanks for listening. If you enjoy Free Thoughts, please take a moment to rate us on iTunes. Free Thoughts is produced by Mark McDaniel and Evan Banks. To learn more about libertarianism, visit us on the web at www.libertarianism.org.