That '70s Show - with John Podhoretz
The 1970s were a tragedy – inflation, rising crime and crumbling cities, American humiliation abroad from the Iranian hostage crisis and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, to Moscow’s geopolitical advances right in our backyard in Latin America. But here we are again, in the 2020s – with inflation surging to a four-decade high, a new crime wave and new decay in our cities, American humiliation in Afghanistan, ongoing Iran deal negotiations, and a new war launched by Russia.
Are we living through another version of the 1970s right now? What can we learn from that era? John Podhoretz returns guest to the podcast. John is a writer, public intellectual and culture critic, He is editor in chief of Commentary Magazine and host of Commentary’s critically acclaimed daily podcast, he’s a columnist for the New York Post, and author of several books. He is also a film critic – formerly for The Weekly Standard and now for The Washington Free Beacon.
Transcript
DISCLAIMER: THIS TRANSCRIPT HAS BEEN CREATED USING AI TECHNOLOGY AND MAY NOT REFLECT 100% ACCURACY.
[00:00:00] Where people don't have Attention Deficit Disorder is over feelings. Feelings require no attention. They're there. They sit there in your soul. So if what you're feeling is anxiety over inflation, you're not gonna get distracted from that. What solves that problem is the feeling going away, and the feeling goes away when the macro problem is getting resolved.
In a memorable observation, Karl Marx said that history repeats itself. The first time, he said, is tragedy. The second time as farce. Well, the 1970s were indeed a tragedy. Inflation, rising crime in crumbling cities. American humiliation abroad from the Iranian hostage crisis and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan to Moscow's [00:01:00] geopolitical advances right in our backyard in Latin America could go on.
But here we are again in the 2020s with inflation surging to a four decade high, a new crime wave and new decay in our cities, American humiliation in Afghanistan just last summer, and the ongoing Iran deal negotiations. What could be further humiliation and of course a new war launched by russia This is certainly not farce At least as marx would have us think as our friend neil ferguson said sometimes you just get two tragedies in succession Are we living through another version of the 1970s right now?
What can we learn from that era? It's a topic I've been kicking around with John Podhore. It's a return guest to this podcast. John is a writer, public intellectual, and culture critic. He's editor in chief of Commentary magazine and host of Commentary's critically acclaimed daily podcast. I highly recommend it.
He's a columnist for the New York Post and he's the author of several [00:02:00] books, including one of my favorite political books, Hell of a Ride, about his time in the first Bush administration. John is also a film critic, formerly from the Weekly Standard, and now for the Washington Free Beacon. This is Call Me Back.
And I am pleased to welcome my friend John Podhortz to the podcast. Hey, John. Hey, Dan. Great to be with you. As it is always great to have you on my podcast, it is equally great for you to have me on your podcast. Yeah, but I think when I was on your podcast, I got COVID. So I'm not, I, yeah. But I didn't get COVID, which is really the most important thing.
This is true, but I want you to know that after, the day after we recorded your podcast in Palm Beach, I, maybe two days after, I did a, I recorded a podcast with Ron Dermer in New York. And it was the first time, really, I can think of in the last year or so that we had done an, an in person podcast we did in a little studio.
And Ron and I sat two feet apart from each other, [00:03:00] face to face, and talked for an hour and a half or whatever it was. And I made the stupid mistake. Early in the podcast of saying, Ron, isn't this great? We're really are post corona now. We can do this in person We don't have to do all these things virtually And then that night I tested positive.
So here we are again. Oh the irony. Yes. All right, John. Okay. Yes I want to talk about the 1970s Which, um, you know, a lot of my guests have a lot of views on the 1970s and don't view this as an ageist comment, but not all of them live through the seventies and have a very vivid memories and strong views on what the lessons are of the seventies for these 2020s.
And that, and, and I, and you and I have talked about this outside of the context of podcast, and now I wanna bring the conversation onto our podcast. Right. In, just, in 1970s you were growing up in New York City? I was growing up in the Upper West Side of New York City, on 105th [00:04:00] between Broadway. and West End, um, which was, uh, the pluperfect combination of, uh, upper middle class professional largely Jewish people living in rent controlled apartment buildings, some of which, uh, went co op during this period, thus, uh, providing, um, pretty, uh, feckless and impecunious, uh, Jews, uh, for the first time with financial security in the form of, Extraordinarily cheap equity in apartment buildings that they would then, uh, like my parents, uh, find, uh, you know, a gift from God.
And then a lot of, um, working class and poor people living in tenements and projects, uh, just, you know, a stone's throw away. Uh, a lot of Dominicans, a lot of Cubans, a lot of Puerto Ricans. Um, so it was a very mixed, uh, uh, neighborhood, uh, both, [00:05:00] uh, culturally, uh, ethnically and in class terms. And in the 1970s, and I want to get in, we're going to get into inflation, we're going to get into some of the foreign policy issues of that decade, but just life in New York City at that time, you know, it, it, it, Did it feel like New York City was, was it like Escape from New York, the movie, or did it feel like a city on the move?
Or did it feel like almost schizophrenic, like it was both, like it was a city mired in, mired in urban decay, and yet a city that had tremendous promise. Okay, so, um, this is a great question, and it's, it's a, it's a great question, and it's an interesting one, because In fact, New York, not only in feeling, but in actual, uh, economic and social terms, was very stagnant.
Not only was it stagnant, but it was shrinking in size. It was receding in size. Uh, [00:06:00] we know this because in 1970, There were 8 million people registered in the census in New York City and in 1980 there were 7 million. Population of the city shrunk by a million people in the 1970s. The experience of living in New York in the 1970s as compared to every other period and particularly even now, uh, was of a, of a, of a city in stasis.
There was no construction. Building, there was no, there were no sheds. Uh, being built, uh, blocking buildings because buildings were being renovated. Uh, businesses weren't moving in. Nothing, there was, nothing was being built. Uh, there were a third as many cars on the streets of New York I once discovered in 1975 as there were in 2000.
So it's not like traffic was crazy and, you know, the city was bubbling and bouncing and booming. The city was in decline. It's, uh, unquestionably. Uh, in decline and running on fumes. It [00:07:00] was, it was kind of grubby. It was dirty. Uh, there was not a lot of upkeep. Famously, you know, Central Park, uh, there was no budget in the Parks Department for re seeding lawns and grass.
So Central Park became a kind of dust bowl, mud bowl. Uh, you know, it was not until the 1980s when a private conservancy took over management of the park that actually the park was reseeded with grass. Um, so it, it looked like any city that you go to in the world where, uh, where the infrastructure was basically being allowed to crumble because there were no resources.
To maintain it or keep it up. And, and unlike what happened once the 1980s hit in New York and Wall Street, shot up like a rocket and went from, you know, seven 70 or whatever the Dow Mm-hmm to 3000, you know, three years later. And it's of course now in the 30 thousands, um, wall Street wasn't throwing off all this money, you know, filling the city's coffers.
The city basically went bankrupt in [00:08:00] 1975 and 1976. Uh, because it had a lot of social obligations, and it did not have a lot of tax, uh, revenue and tax income, so it was in bad shape. Uh, the subways were covered in graffiti. So the subways, so where people, like right now, or up until the pandemic really, you have, you know, young and not young professionals who are making lots of money, people on, you know, making millions of dollars or hundreds of thousands of dollars a year.
Who ride the subway every day and don't even think twice about it. That wasn't, the subways weren't bustling with people at all. Steps on the income ladder. No, no, no. If you could afford it, you stayed out of the subway. If you could afford to take taxis everywhere, you stayed out of the subway. They were grubby, they were sordid, they were covered in graffiti.
Uh, there was a lot of begging. There was a lot, you know, and, but of course, yeah. But of course, the city And then, it was much more a city of the middle class, much more than it, than it, than it is, or certainly Manhattan was, was a, was a. So explain what that, I mean, how that felt. Okay, so the employment in New York City was, [00:09:00] was employment in middle class professions, you know, not, even professionals who worked at law firms or accounting firms or whatever, worked in Wall Street.
Most of them were middle, middle level. Managers and they were, they were affluent by American, you know, GDP standards or, you know, per capita income standards, but they weren't, they weren't living the high life. They weren't rich. The dominating sort of life was a middle class life, small shopkeeper, small businessmen, single family homes, you know, that were often multi generational or houses that have been in the family for a long time.
All of that. So it was a middle class city. It wasn't, you know, people came to come to New York to work in the arts or be, you know, live bohemian lives or stuff like that. But it was not a playground of the rich, uh, in the way that it, that it became. And so, of course, in those circumstances, people then are, are captive, uh, to the exigent circumstances of the world they live around.
Like, they can't [00:10:00] They can't pay enough to escape the streetscape, right? You can't pay enough to get out, you don't have enough money not to take the subway. So you walk or you take the bus. Or, uh, maybe you have to, you have to take the subway because you work in Manhattan and you live in Brooklyn and there's no way in otherwise.
And then you live a kind of life of menace and sordidness and all this and that's why a million people left. A million people fled the city, and we haven't even talked about crime yet, but a million people left the city because they could, because life had become untenable, or they decided that things would be better, and they didn't go to, you know, Texas.
They didn't, now people go to Arizona and Texas and Florida. They went to Westchester, they went to New Jersey, they went to Nassau and Suffolk counties, they went, they, they, they, they voted with their feet, they thought the city was dying, and they went to get themselves a nice house, you know, somewhere where they weren't going to feel like at any moment they could get mugged.
So, like, I do want to move to more national issues in a moment, but [00:11:00] before we do Let's talk about crime then. Uh, so this, this past week we had this awful, tragic shooting, uh, in Brooklyn on the, on the subway. You know, multiple people shot, hospitals, you know, the sense of the city kind of shut down. Mhm. And it, it felt that way, and when events, there have been other events throughout the last couple years that have been smaller versions of that, when it, when it happens, these, these events had, at some point, felt like outlier events, that they were like a shock to the system, because we view New York City historically, or at least in my adult lifetime, as the safest big city in the world, and, and then these events happen, and we're like, how, how are the wheels coming off in New York, when you see that?
Whereas, it sounds like in the 70s, these weren't outlier events. Okay, so, you There's a, there's a real, so, you know, the classic pop cultural portrait of New York City in the 70s is Death Wish, is the movie Death Wish, which is Bronson. Yeah, a guy, uh, [00:12:00] living in my neighborhood, uh, architect, upper middle class architect, liberal, very liberal, bleeding heart, he's called in the first scene.
His wife and daughter go To the supermarket to shop on Broadway supermarket is now fairway, which is like the iconic supermarket of Manhattan But then it was a D'Agostino's or something. They come home. They're walking back to their building, which is at 75th and Riverside Interestingly enough a building that George and Ira Gershwin lived in when they wrote their great songs Uh, walked out, uh, and, uh, crossed the street from the Manhattan Day School, for you, for you fans of Jewish trivia.
And, uh, they walk down the block, they go into their building, and they are pursued, they're followed from the supermarket by a multi ethnic gang of four guys, including Jeff Goldblum, uh, who, uh, there's a Puerto Rican, there's somebody white, there's somebody black, and there's somebody who's indeterminate.
Somehow, they get into the back elevator, they go up, where they announce they're delivering the [00:13:00] groceries. They break into the apartment, they, uh, rape the daughter, they kill the mother, and then Charles Bronson comes home to find his family ruined and destroyed, and in his grief and sorrow, he starts going out on the street and hunting down muggers.
First he does it with quarters, he puts on a sock, and he goes up to one of them and he smashes them in the head with the sock, and then he starts shooting them, right? Death Wish. Death Wish was like a documentary, and I'm not, I'm not joking when I say Death Wish is explicitly structured as a western, uh, it's like a western in New York.
He's being pursued by a marshal, like a, by a cop, who, who is, who, uh, who knows that something untoward, but he is like, An avenging gunfighter who has come into town and is hunting down the bad guys. Um, but it was one of the reasons it was such a sensation and it was a huge cultural sensation is that it had the feeling of [00:14:00] some kind of bubbling up of the collective unconscious about what was going on in America, not just in New York, but sort of everywhere, a sense of menace and things had jumped the rails.
And of course, it was after the 1960s, uh, when, you know, crime in America went crazy in general and there was all this crazy crime, right? So it was like, S crimes in San Fran. You know, the, the, I'm getting the time out of joint here. But, you know, bombings of Army, uh, recruiting stations, uh, uh, white people being hunted by Black Panthers on the streets of San Francisco.
Just shot for being white. Uh, Patty Hearst, I didn't, you know, like, uh, the, the, this, uh, the Manson, uh, the Manson family girls shooting at Gerald Ford, like everything seemed to have gone. Bananas and there was a just a general sense of menace. So that was Death Wish. That was New York City. It was obviously a melodrama and very extreme, but there was some deep sense of accuracy to the emotions that it was, that [00:15:00] it was engendering.
And the difference between Now and then, is that the sense of menace was, uh, that, uh, you could get mugged at any time. Walk down a block, somebody comes up to you and pulls a knife or pulls a gun and demands your wallet. Or if you're a kid, another kid could push you down and grab your bus pass, which was like a kind of free money thing, or something like that.
And everybody got mugged. I mean, you didn't know a person who wasn't mugged at some point or other, you didn't, kids, every kid was mugged by another kid. Like, it was, it was a common experience. Later in the 1980s, it would be that if you owned a car, somebody would smash the window and take your radio.
That happened to everybody. It was like that. So, um, that was, Menacing and, and, and horrible, right? But it was explicable. It was, it was both, it was, uh, it was economic crime. Somebody wants your money, they take your money. [00:16:00] What is different about today and what's going on in New York and why it's so unnerving is that the crimes that are consuming everybody and terrifying everybody are crimes of insanity, not Not economy, right?
It is someone standing on a subway platform, somebody comes up to them and hits them 125 times with a hammer, or pushes them on a subway track, or kids are going into the station in Brooklyn to go to school, a guy comes in in an MTA vest, he drops a, he drops a smoke bomb, and then he just starts openly firing on people.
I'm sure we're gonna find out his motives, his motives are hatred and, uh, you know, black and white racial hatred and all of that, but clearly, Insane, right? This is insane. There's a lot of off the chain insanity, and that And in terms of homelessness, and then the, and then the overlap between mental illness and homelessness, which City Hall and the health authorities in New York City are constantly telling us that our big problem of our, homeless problem is a mental health crisis, and [00:17:00] vice versa.
So, was that That was, sounds like that is now, that was not the 70s. Well, there was some of it, right? The deinstitutionalization of the mentally ill started in New York City in like 1972 1973. And so what you saw, if you lived where I lived, there was a block away from my apartment building on 104th and Broadway, there was a single room occupancy hotel that then got filled with people who were being discharged from mental institutions.
And, uh, you could tell when they stopped taking their meds. Uh, you know, they took their meds, they're wandering, if they didn't, they started walking up and down the street, screaming at the top of their lungs, and one day in front of the supermarket on my corner, There was a young hippie kid who got stabbed and he got stabbed and he was lying there, but we were all sort of standing around and waiting for the ambulance to come pick him up.
And he said, I don't know why anybody would do this to me. And the guy who had stabbed him was a schizophrenic. Like he wasn't, he didn't stab him for no, he stabbed them because he got [00:18:00] messages in his head telling him to do that. Right. So that was going on. But the overwhelming feeling in New York now is of, um, is of a city that has loosed the chains of civil society.
And so the streetscape and the subways and stuff are being dominated by, uh, the emotional domination of these places is by, uh, Uh, people who want to destroy civil society or are, or are elements of the destruction of society. It's not ordinary people, you know, jamming the subway cars. First of all, it's, the subway cars aren't that jammed, which is one reason that things are bad.
The platforms aren't that jammed, which is one of the reasons, uh, these, these experiences are so dominating. And, and it's scary in a different way. I mean, it's, it just is. Like, it's, it's like Well, you can't, you can't, you can't game it out. It's harder to game out because there truly is a randomness to it.
Right, so when I was a kid, [00:19:00] yeah. So when I was a kid, everybody learned how to walk around New York, okay? If you're on a long, dark street, if you had to walk down a long, dark street With a lot of doorways that didn't have doormen in them, you walked in the street. You figured out, you walked in the street, because there weren't that many cars driving, it was a lot safer, but if it was, you would walk in the street.
Or, you would go to a block that you knew had a lot of doormen on it. So that you weren't walking on a street that had a lot of doorways that were unoccupied that someone could jump out at you from. Or, you know, you, you learn techniques to make yourself safer. Right? There's no way to make yourself safer from somebody Um, who is in the middle of a schizophrenic break.
And, and, and there's no defense against it in some fundamental way. Like, I think we understand that, and this is what the crime drop of the 1990s involving all these theories about broken windows, you know, arresting people for minor offenses, because any people who committed minor offenses also commit major offenses, and you can get the major offenses to [00:20:00] stop even if you bust somebody for jumping a turnstile in the subway, because Chances are he's a violent criminal who's on probation for something else, and he's already, you know, not obeying the laws and the rules, and he should go away, right?
So he can go away. Then there's one less criminal on the street, and then if you multiply that by 5, 000, there are 5, 000 fewer criminals on the street, and that makes a real difference. Okay? In this case, you know, you sort of get the sense that, absent a gigantic change in policy toward the mentally ill, There's nothing to be done.
I mean, Eric Adams, the new mayor of New York, understands that he needs to do something about what is going on here or the city is finished and he is finished politically. So what was his first gesture? His first gesture was to say, we are going into the subway and we're going to clean the subway out of the mentally ill.
How he did it? He sent in social workers. I mean, he, he increased the number of, of, of cops from the NYPD into the transit police and, and did that. But basically, he has people going into subway stations, going [00:21:00] up to people and saying, Can we take you to a shelter? Can we get you some medication? Can we this, can we, like, and you're not, you know, it's not like you're going up to somebody, you know, who's, who's depressed and anxious and, you know, saying, can I give you, you know, a Xanax.
Like, you're talking to people who have already been in and out of these systems for 10, 000 years and they're not, whatever. It's not, so, you get a sense that they don't know how to get a handle on it. And the weird thing about what happened in the crime drop in the 90s, not that we're, we're talking about the 70s is, Suddenly, Rudy Giuliani and a bunch of other people said, We got this.
I think we know how to handle this. We're going to track, we're going to use computerized data to track where crimes are and flood the zone so that the criminals go somewhere else and make this place safe, and then when they move somewhere else, we're going to go there, and then we're going to stop them there.
And while we're stopping them, we're also gonna stop people, and fix them, and take the guns that they would use for crimes, and we're going to arrest people for [00:22:00] minor offenses, and we are going to see who they are, and then we're gonna, we're gonna, we're going to revoke their parole, or we are going to bring them back to a judge and say this is the second or third crime they've committed.
Send them away. They are a danger to society. And you know what? In the space of a year, a year and a half, the crime rate in New York City dropped by 30 percent and over the course of Giuliani's 8 year mayoralty, it dropped by 80%. So it turned out somebody had a solution. It took a long time. It took 30 years for that solution when the crime dropped, the crime surge began in 1964.
It took 30 years for somebody to actually say, I think we have a way that we can do, because nobody thought that crime was ever going to go away. Like, it was a kind of, it was like a, it was like having a low level chronic condition, an illness that you just lived with, and that was American life with crime.
Right. So the, living in New York in the 1970s was, uh, was about. Managing low expectations, right? It was sort [00:23:00] of like the streets are dirty, no one's picking up the garbage. Walking in the middle of the street as a kid is a perfect metaphor. I mean, that, that, that, that, that became normal for a kid. Yeah, and it was, it was just what you had to do.
So you lived, you lived with lower expectations. I remember. In the late 80s, early 90s, um, Richard Thornburg was the attorney general of the, of, of the United, and he, and he, he, uh, resigned to run for governor. Yeah, Senate. Senate, he lost. Yeah. So he started, this is like late 91, he started a new, like, uh, non profit group.
And it was called something like the First Freedom Foundation. And I knew the guy who was his deputy, and the question was, well, what is the first freedom? And he said, well, it's, you know, freedom from fear. We're, we're, our purpose here is to talk about, you know, crime, like we're gonna lower crime. Again, this is 91.
This is just a [00:24:00] couple of years away from the crime drop. And I was like, get out of town. What are you talking about lower crime? Like, there was a, there was a crack epidemic. You know, the, uh, crimes in, in major cities peaked in 1993. Like, if you look at the numbers, they got worse and worse and worse. And then, in the late 80s, when the crack, crack epidemic really broke open.
And not only were there gang wars, but this was a, crack, of course, was a, was a, a stimulant, and so it led people who were using it to act, act out violently. Um, it was terrible, like the number were just, were just, was gruesome, right? And so the idea that you would actually You know, like, and so, you know, decide you were gonna do something to try to lower the, lower the crime numbers.
Seems totally, right. It was like, where are you going? You're gonna like, like, con people out of their money to give you donations so that you guys can, you know, have a nice office and get a job? Like, that's how pessimistic one felt about the possibility [00:25:00] of doing something about this crime. Problem that had existed really from pretty much a couple of years after I was born until I was 30, you know, I was born in 1961.
The crime surge starts in 1964 and it basically ends in 1994. So the course of my entire life from the time I was 3 till the time I was 33, I lived in a world in which, in which violent crime and burglary and murder and all that was kind of like a given. So, so this was all against the backdrop of, at least from the mid seventies on, uh, a national economic mess, which was inflation.
So, Jimmy Carter's elected in 1976. At the time of his inauguration, inflation was at 5. 2%. By the time Reagan was elected in 1980, inflation had, had skyrocketed up to 14. 6%. Now, we talk about these numbers, and we hear stories about lines at gas stations, and, [00:26:00] I mean, you've told me, people don't fully appreciate how much the The challenge and the, and the incredible difficulty of living with constant, constant rising prices for gasoline, for food, for everything, just permeated life.
It permeated every conversation. It permeated every political debate. It permeated popular culture. So, talk about that. Okay, Johnny Carson, the host of the late night Talk show that was By the way, you're the first person on this podcast when I've ever raised a question about inflation The first two words to come out of their mouth was Johnny Carson, but so so here's why so I don't know 25 million people watch Johnny Carson every night And I think if you went back and you watched his monologues from 1974 to 1979, the monologues were probably seven or eight [00:27:00] minutes long.
And then there were little skits and things. Sure a minute and a half of it was dedicated to rising prices every night. In some fashion or other. In other words, we're talking about, we talked about inflation the way we talk about COVID. I mean in a funny way. It was really that? It was that? Well, it wasn't, it wasn't, again, it wasn't.
Because nobody thought there was anything you could do about it. So, so, you mentioned Carter getting, uh, elected, uh, at 5. 6 and then going up to 14. 5. 2 going up to 14. 6, yeah. But, you know, a year earlier, Gerald Ford, inflation was such an issue in the United States that Gerald Ford, the president, uh, in 1975, began an entire campaign that he called Whip Inflation Now.
W I N. Buttons. The White House produced a hundred million buttons to send out to [00:28:00] Americans so everyone could wear a button that said, whip inflation now. Now, how was he supposed to do that? I don't know. I have no idea what they actually, I mean, they had various gimmicky policies in hand. Um, you know, somebody said the point about the inflationary spiral, um, the economy was already in bad shape by 1973 when the Yom Kippur War started, right?
It was already in bad shape. Their wage and price controls had been, had been put on by, by Richard Nixon with very weird effect and all of that. And exogenous shock, right, which was the Yom Kippur War and then the Saudis and OPEC instituted an oil embargo. Which instantly raised gas prices five, if I, if I have this, these numbers right, five fold.
Mm hmm. So in my living memory, I remember driving with my grandparents, who lived in St. Paul, Minnesota. And my grandmother would bypass a station where the gas was 23. 9 cents a gallon to go to a [00:29:00] station four blocks away where the gas was 22. 9 cents a gallon in order to save the extra penny on the gas, right?
Just think about that for a minute. So what was she saving with a, with a tank of A tank of, uh, 15 cents. She was saving, uh, if she had to fill up for 15 gallons. Okay, so that was where gas prices were in 1972 when I was there. And then in 1973, they were a dollar, or something like that. They were five times what they had been.
And that's before the revolution in Iran, and when things also went up in the late 70s. Right, well that was the second oil embargo. Right, so there were two in the first oil embargo. And that was when this sense that everything had gone, I think, this general sense that, um, that everything was now out of the hands, that po that, that, uh, that the economic system and the political system was failing the ordinary person, because Prices were out of control, and there was nothing really to be done about it.
Some of it was exogenous, like I say. I mean, [00:30:00] the, this was, this was, uh, a, uh, power flexing by, by a newly, uh, potent block that, uh, no, was no longer afraid of the West, and Did not think that anybody would do anything to them if they, if they held the West hostage and, and price gouged this way, and they were right.
But was it, but was it, did people have an explanation for it? I mean, now it's interesting. I'm struck by like, the freewheeling nature with which people who spend no time thinking about economics, nor should they at an academic or policy level, use terms like supply chain. You know, oh yeah, pressure on our supply chains.
I hear this all the time from like, random people or you know, uh, the labor market's really tight. You know, you hear people talk, just, I mean, lay people who, who, who understand, actually to their credit, they really do understand something's wrong. Right. But because of their access to information, and I, I do think that the pandemic focused these debates so people actually do.
I think people can really visualize [00:31:00] how, how the pandemic and the shutdown of the economy, at least during the first year of the pandemic, really kind of broke a part of the economy, putting all these pressures on, on supply chains and whatnot in the labor market. So there's, people, people can articulate it.
Was it, was it like that then? Or was it just something people learned to live with? Absolutely not. I mean, and, and that's the reason that I mentioned sort of Johnny Carson or like sitcoms of the 1970s where Where there were jokes every five minutes about, oh my god, I went to the supermarket again today and it was twenty dollars more than it was last week.
Like, I don't know how I'm gonna make ends meet. It wasn't, the understanding wasn't present. No one was wonkily trying to explain it. I mean, people were furious with the, with the Arab oil states. And there was a real sense that, you know, we, that we were being mistreated by the Arab oil states. Um, and, and that, you know, a war was being declared on us by the, by the, by the Arab oil states.
But, it was just [00:32:00] more like, man, things are not going right in this country. Right, but when you think about that, because then you describe what the urban situation was like, and crime was like, and then prices are right. And people didn't have, you, you yourself said, yeah, good luck fixing crime. Yeah, and I said that, I said that.
15, 16, 17 years later. I know, but I'm sure that was the mindset even in the 70s. So what did people do? That's what I'm saying. In New York, so you had various So in New York, people went to Westchester, right? In America, there was nowhere to go to get away from inflation, you know? I mean, you know, a supermarket You know, if toilet paper goes up 20 cents a roll in California, it's going up 20 cents a roll in Texas.
It's not Um, you know, in that sense, so, so, there was no escape from inflation, but I think there was a real sense of powerlessness. And you got a sense of powerlessness from the political system, right? Which, again, throwed up these gimmicks or said, okay, so Nixon said, okay, I'm, [00:33:00] I'm, I'm instituting wage and price control.
Something that is so unthinkable to me now, I mean the idea that an American president would unilaterally control the wages and prices of, of, you know, of the entire American economy is now, you know, Bernie Sanders wouldn't even attempt to do it, like it's, it's bizarre and one, and one of the reasons that you wouldn't do it is that it didn't work, uh, among other things, I mean it, it, it had, or, you know, all it did was sort of freeze everything in place, which was really not helpful because as we now know, the only real solution to certain types of economic stagnation problems is growth, and the last thing you're going to get is top down government intervention is not going to cause growth in that way.
And so, I think there was just a sense of powerlessness and hopelessness, and, and America was in a very bad mood, and it was in a bad, it was losing in Vietnam, uh, it had, you know, it had these countries going to economic war with us. Uh, crime was bad, you know, uh, we had a, we had a crooked [00:34:00] president, you know, who, who was running a crooked scheme out of the White House.
Uh, then we had a sort of a, you know, a kind of stumble bum bumpkin, and then we had this, a stumble bum guy who no one even voted for, for it, and then, and then we had this kind of oleaginous, You know, uh, a guy who said I'll never lie to you, and then just, you know, didn't seem to know what he was doing either.
So that was America in the 1970s. Okay, so then let's go to July 15th, 1979, for Jimmy Carter's famous malaise speech. So he gives a speech, uh, from the Oval Office. He actually never used the word Malaise, right, if I'm correct in this case. Malaise was a word that had been used by Christopher Lash in his, in his book that was the, um, that was the, uh, the culture of, uh, camera with the name of it, but it's, I'm, I'm, I'm losing control of myself, but basically the idea that America was in Malaise.
Was the inspiration for the speech, the [00:35:00] sociologist Christopher Lash. So it was a, it was a speech that was supposed to be, it was going to be about national concerns, the energy crisis, reorganizing the government, our nation's economy, and issues of war and especially peace. And then he, he says in the speech, it's Jimmy Carter, 1979, It's clear that the true problems of our nation are much deeper than gasoline lines or energy shortages.
Deeper even than inflation or recession. And, and then he goes on to say, We are confronted with a moral and spiritual crisis. A crisis of confidence strikes at the very heart and soul and spirit of our national will. We can see this crisis in the growing doubt about the meaning of our own lives and in the loss of a unity of purpose for our nation.
The erosion of our confidence in the future is threatening to destroy the social and political fabric of America. Our people are losing faith. And he goes on and on and on. This, in history, has been regarded as like a, a political suicide note, uh, for Jimmy Carter, this speech. [00:36:00] But at the time, it was actually well received.
If you look at the news coverage, immediate a immediately after, immediately after, he got a little bit of a pop, didn't he? Okay, but the entire Destruction of the Carter presidency was writ small in that speech. Because what did Ronald Reagan do when he ran for president against Carter? The ultimate, the meta message of Reagan was, There's nothing wrong with you.
He's to blame. He's going to you and saying your problem is you're in a spiritual crisis. Because you've lost your confidence and you're, you're, you're bad. There's something bad wrong with you because you aren't, you've been, you're, you're, you're sick. You're sick in the soul. This country is sick in its soul.
And Reagan basically said, there's nothing wrong with this country that making me president can't fix. Yeah, his, his, his critique was, I quote here Reagan, I find no national malaise. I find nothing wrong with the American people. Right? The American people are [00:37:00] fine. It's the political class that failed them.
It is not that, uh, uh, this was Carter's the great horror of this speech in, in American political. It is that Carter was saying. You've failed me. I'm here, I'm working every day for you, and you just don't have enough confidence in me, and you really need to look deep in your heart and wonder why it is that you're so sick.
And he got 40 percent of the vote, uh, in, in November of 1980. Having, you know, having won the presidency. Like, this is no joke. Like, basically, the American people looked at him and said, screw, screw you, buddy. You know, he, he lost 40 states, he got 40 percent of the vote, and, uh, and, and it was a very, it, it, it's important because, like I said, I think the American people felt powerless, and they felt as though, um, all kinds of things had turned against them.
We'd lost the war. We, you know, are, uh, we were, and then [00:38:00] getting into 1980, like, you know, we had, uh, we had hostages taken in Iran by a regime that was actively sponsoring people, you know, shouting death to America, hundreds of thousands of people shouting death to America, and we do nothing. We sit there and do nothing.
The greatest national humiliation this country has ever known or ever experienced. And this guy is saying that they did it? That the guy, the person who, who suddenly is paying three times as much for gas and has to stand on ration lines to get their gas? Uh, because, um, this country's, uh, reputation had sunk so badly and our ability to affect world events had gotten so awful that people were not scared of us sufficiently to make sure that, uh, they weren't gonna keep the gas from flowing?
Like that, that, that was, that was the end result of the, that was the sort of the culmination of this. The disease [00:39:00] of the 1970s was an epic failure of American elites. It was not the failure of the, of, of the American people. The elites failed to run a justice system that protected people. They failed to, uh, you know, to sort of win a war that they had started.
They failed to protect the country abroad because then we got, we got We got our people who worked for the U. S. government in an embassy taken hostage with no consequences and all of that, and it was their failure that Reagan said, You're fine. You're just fine. You're just, you're, you're the victim. You are the victim of these people.
They are not the victim of you. So in major cities, you had the crime and urban decay, the urban decay crisis. And then at the national level You had inflation and you are talking now about these foreign policy national security crises that Really hit like a peak in 1979. So let's go through them. You mentioned the Iranian hostage.
So the [00:40:00] Iranian hostage taking of the US Embassy was in the end of 1979. So if you go to the beginning of 79, the Pahlavi regime, which had been in power, which the US had been supporting, was deposed. That was February 11th of 79. And then by April, I think the, the Iranian people had quote unquote voted for, quote unquote voted for an Islamic regime to come to power.
And then, um, by the end of the year, uh, Khomeini, Ayatollah Khomeini was made supreme leader. So that's, that's just Iran, and obviously Christmas, Christmas, or sorry, November of, uh, of 79, um, the hostage taking, you're talking about the 52 hostages. So that's Iran, okay? Right. And then, the end of the year, 1979, same year, Soviets invade Afghanistan, and the year before that they had, uh, the Soviets had, um, been backing a secular Pro [00:41:00] Soviet client, effectively client state government in Afghanistan, which was having a hard time secularizing this large Muslim population in Afghanistan, and there was obviously the Mujahideen, uh, repelling the Soviet presence in Afghanistan, and so, boom, they sent in, you know, the Brezhnev sends in, what, like a hundred thousand troops, and it's a full on invasion, uh, that went on for about ten years.
Now, we ultimately know that the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan was a total quagmire. for the Soviets and Brezhnev, you know, the Soviet leader is looked back on as having been like sort of semi senile when he made this decision and he was talked into it by, you know, hawkish advisors, uh, and, and, and comrades within the Politburo.
But at the time, it didn't feel like it was a mess, right? It looked like everyone else was on the move and the U. S. wasn't, right? So in 79 you have Uh, the Pahlavi out of Iran, Khomeini, and the Islamic, Islamist revolutionaries taking over. The hostage taking, the 52 hostages, the humiliation. The [00:42:00] Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, it, it got more, you got more, you've got, you've got the Sandinistas taking over in Nicaragua.
And then also at the end of the year, the discovery though, it turned out that it had been there for a lot longer than we knew of an actual Soviet brigade and Soviet missiles in Cuba on 90 miles off the shore of the United States. So the Soviet brigade and missiles in Cuba, not missiles, but like, not, not, not, not.
nuclear missiles or something, but sort of the, an actual Soviet standing brigade in Cuba, a Soviet client state on the American continent, a Soviet backed Um, uh, um, guerrilla force in El Salvador on the march. Um, and then a bunch of other things that weren't really about us or not about us. But, you know, in England you had, uh, the winter of discontent where, um, a leftist, so a leftist prime minister found himself, you know, the [00:43:00] country it was reported had the, uh, England dropped so far that its, uh, annual per capita income in, in, in Great Britain was lower than on the island of Puerto Rico.
Strikes, four day work weeks, the Prime Minister of Italy was assassinated by a terrorist gang, the Red Brigades, Aldo Moro was assassinated by the Red Brigades. Uh, and there was a lot of bad stuff going on domestically in the United States also. Three Mile Island, there was a meltdown at a nuclear reactor.
There was a terrible chemical spill on Love Island in upstate New York. Um, like, it just, it was like the wheels were coming off Western civilization, oh, the boat people, um, a million and a half, uh, people coming out of, uh, you know, fleeing, uh, re education camps in Vietnam. And even into 1980, and even into 1980, you had I mean, Reagan wasn't elected until the end of 1980, obviously, so you [00:44:00] had the, the Iran Iraq war start in 1980.
And, I'm not sure exactly when it was, but you also had the Mariel Boatlift. Uh, when 125, I believe, 125, 000 Cubans were allowed to depart Cuba on boats. Um, and hit, and hit the shores. Uh, of the, of the United States. So there was just a general, the world just seemed to have been spun off its axis. And that was the culmination of this decade of, of horror.
Okay, so now comparing that to now. Yeah. Okay. Right. So Carter's response to all of this was to, I mean if you look at his major policy response, was an operational response. Which was Operation Eagle Claw in, in April of 1980, which was the operation to rescue the hostages, which obviously, uh, failed because, uh, one of the helicopters that was intended to evacuate the hostages, um, [00:45:00] malfunctioned or Crashed.
Well, crashed in the desert. Yeah, crashed. Right, right. So, and, and eight Americans, I think, were killed, uh, in the, in the transport, uh, aircraft. But his main response to both the, the Afghan crisis and the Iran crisis was sanctions, right? I mean, that, that was it, right? I mean, if you go through Well, we didn't go to the Olympics.
Right, we did go to the Olympics in 1980 in Moscow. He placed an embargo on shipments of commodities such as grain to the Soviet Union. He, you know, the Carter administration suspended high tech exports, uh, to the Soviet Union. And yes, he, and he, and he also withdrew from the SALT II treaty, uh, or withdrew it from consideration by the Senate.
And with Iran as well, he imposed all sorts of sanctions. I think he froze something like eight billion dollars in Iranian assets. Uh, and he, and he imposed the trade embargo. So it was all economic squeeze, economic squeeze, economic squeeze. Now, you know, there are aspects of what the administration, the [00:46:00] Biden administration has done in response to the Ukraine crisis that are surprisingly positive.
And yet when you think about the lead up to the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The administration was saying that we're going to threaten Russia and Putin with sanctions. We're going to broadcast the intelligence we're learning to show them that we know what they're up to. And we will hope the subtotal of all of this will deter Putin.
And of course, you know, they didn't impose the sanctions, they threatened the sanctions, they imposed the sanctions after. Um, so how would you compare, I mean, I don't want to oversimplify it, but how would you compare How Biden is managing these global events and how Carter, to how Carter did. Well, I think the, the ultimate comparison here is, is Is, um, more, is, is less directly policy and more, um, sort of the after effects [00:47:00] of, of national disgrace.
By which I mean, the Soviets felt empowered after 1975 by our bug out from Saigon. By the, by the helicopters lifting off the roof of the U. S. Embassy, by the fact that the United States had, had, you know, had sacrificed, uh, 58, 000 people, uh, to this war that we then fled, uh, the communists then took over and imposed a Stalinist regime that involved sending millions of people, uh, to their, to re education camps and hundreds of thousands.
to their death. And again, not only did we not do anything, but we stood by mutely, including while, you know, many people who had been, who had worked with us, and worked for us, and been part of our effort were, you know, had their lives, um, destroyed, and we did nothing. And the Soviets, therefore, felt like they had a much freer hand than, than they had ever had before.
And that it's impossible to believe that a more active, a more self confident, a [00:48:00] more Uh, involved America in the world, uh, would, that the Soviets would have thought that, that they were in a position to invade Afghanistan with, with no consequences or to push. This, uh, effort to install friendly regimes way outside their near abroad, right?
Angola, Nicaragua, uh, you know, um, uh, South America, uh, El Salvador, like, you know, this was, this was a very serious Um, uh, set of, of aggressions that had they been more, more fearful of us and what we might have done to them, they did not take on. And I think that as, as things accelerate in our, in our much faster day.
Uh, you cannot understand the invasion of Ukraine without understanding the meaning of the pullout from Afghanistan that Biden executed in August of 2021. You just can't. Like, we bug out, there are these [00:49:00] incredibly similar images of the hysteria and the scenes at the airport. Hundreds of Americans are still left in Afghanistan, uh, you know, unable to get out.
Um, and Putin looked at this, and looked at this long standing ambition that he had. to swallow up Ukraine and said, now's the time. This is my moment. What are they gonna do? Biden says he wants everybody to come home. Biden said, I'm the president who ends wars. I don't start them. Well, I got a war to start.
You know? And, uh, and, uh, what's where everybody else looks like? Pretty much like a paper tiger. So this, this event that seems to maybe be a hinge moment where where the West kind of was slapped back into sanity, or kind of, um, braced by reality by what, what has happened on the European continent, um, is a direct result of Biden's own choices and Biden's own behavior.
Again, I don't think it's America's behavior. And then, of course, in terms of inflation, what's interesting about the [00:50:00] inflationary spiral in America is that it has a slightly different quality, because the inflationary spiral in the United States in the 1970s was really triggered by the, by the oil shocks, the two oil shocks in 73 and in 79.
I mean, there was a lot of other stuff and a lot of other stuff happened and we screwed up our currency in various ways. But the The inflation that is now gripping the United States seems so connected to the six trillion dollars in government printed money in 2020 and 2021 flooding the country after, you know, after a decade of printing money in order to protect us from the consequences of the financial meltdown.
Uh, 12, 13, 14 years ago that, um, you know, we did this to ourselves. Right. Way too much money chasing too few goods. And to your [00:51:00] earlier point, until those in power wrestle with that reality, right? We just flooded the system with too much money. It, it's almost like your, your wage and price controls compare, like it's like, it's like unless, like you, you can come, now, now they're talking about we're gonna tax, you know, corporations need to reduce their profits, so they're not, they're making less money because that's a way to deal with inflation.
It's, it, that is like the wage and price controls, actually, it's a total distraction. And, in comparison to Carter's Malay speech, which, you know, no, no one, no one is foolish enough to ever repeat, I mean, that, that specific kind of experience is, the Biden White House saying things like, Basically, effectively saying the American people don't know how good we gave it to them.
We, really, I mean, it's amazing. We created the child tax credit, gave the families all this money, they were lifted out of poverty, and, you know, where's our credit? Like, you know, our poll number's at 40%. We need to When they say things like, we need to tell our story [00:52:00] better so that people will understand how how, how they really should praise us instead of attacking us.
That is a, the flip side of the idea that they don't know what they're talking about. They're the ones who are at fault because they don't recognize how, you know, how wonderful we are. It's their crisis. Whereas, for the first time in 40 years, People get a check two weeks after they get, they have the same pay amount in their checking, in, you know, in their pay stub, right?
350 and three, you know, 787. 22. And, uh, that 787. 22 is worth just a little bit less than it was two weeks ago. And in a year, It's going to be worth 10 percent less, right? I mean, or, you know, uh, month to month, the inflation rate, according to, you know, in, from, from, uh, from February to March, [00:53:00] inflation rose 0.
5 percent by half a percent. So every single person, now half a percent is only, you know, okay, so it's point, it's half a penny, right? But then if you, out of 1, 000, half a penny is, I don't know what that is, 10 bucks, like, and it's not, Nothing. I mean, it's never nothing. And so, their experience is, I'm making less money, and my car costs more.
And, you know, and, you know, the big ticket items, and my car is costing more, and I see, I sort of want to buy another house, but I see the, now the mortgage interest rates are going up. No, no, it's this line that, um, I've heard several Democrats critiquing the administration's approach, whether it was Paul Begala or, or the pollster Mark Millman separately have said, it's, it's, the, the problem with the administration's approach is it's like going to a doctor when you're not feeling well.
You go to the doctor and say, like, my shoulder hurts, and I want to check it out, what can you, and the doctor says, no, your shoulder [00:54:00] doesn't hurt. And you're like, no, no, no, my shoulder actually hurts. I'm here to get you to, I'm here to find out, like, and the doctor just keeps telling you, no, no, no, your shoulder doesn't hurt, your shoulder's doing great.
Or you have the Larry Summers version of it, which is you go to the doctor and you say, my shoulder hurts, I think what I need is surgery. To fix my shoulder, because I have a rotator cuff problem, and if you fix it, then I'll be better. And the doctor says, no, I'm not going to do that. Here, take some fentanyl and get addicted to it.
Because what I'm going to do is I'm going to get you addicted to painkillers because then you won't feel it, but it's never going to get fixed, but congratulations, now you're addicted to painkillers. Right, so the country, 70 percent of the country thinks we're on the wrong track. You know, the president's approval rating is 40%, and they think they just have to tell their story better.
Approval rating I think at its worst in 79 was 28 percent and he finally marched back, right, to the high 30s, low 40s. Well, I think he, [00:55:00] I think as always his approval rating matched his election, his vote total on election day. Yeah. Right. Um, but you know, until the, until the, the, the, the only debate between Carter and Reagan, which I think was nine days before the election.
Mm hmm. People didn't really know that Reagan was going to win. That was the odd part. It sort of all became clear, like, you know, when Reagan said, there you go again, or whatever it was, that, uh, something big was happening here. But, um, if you, you know, as I recall, and again, I was, I was 19, so I wasn't, like, involved in deep political analysis, you know, in Washington.
I was out in Chicago, uh, going to, going to college. But, um, I, it was not a, it was not a gen, we didn't have the same kind of ridiculous amounts of polling then, either. We had, there were like two polls. Right. There was like Gallup and Harris, and that was it. Well, that, that's Yeah, go ahead. But I'm just saying, like, people didn't know that Carter was going to lose that big.
So I want to, I want [00:56:00] to, how much people were tuned in to these crises, whether it was the foreign policy crises, whether it was the inflation crisis, the crime crisis, um, now On the one hand, you're right, there's so much information. There's so much information. And yet, we have national, you know, attention deficit disorder.
So we zero in on something, and then, so, you know, it's usually about, if the crisis is really bad and really galvanizing, it's three, four weeks if it's something especially captivating. Um, so Ukraine, I thought, had that effect. Right? Zelensky, and, and it captured everyone's attention. And then I hate to say it, because it even happened on your podcast, Ukraine was quickly supplanted by Will Smith and Chris Rock.
And then we all became obsessed with Will Smith and Chris Rock. But was it? But was it? Because we're back. We're back to it. Last poll, CBS poll says 75 percent of the country wants us to do more, right? I mean that's what's interesting is, but this goes [00:57:00] to, so that's Ukraine, but I mean this goes to inflation, the National Attention Deficit Disorder, right?
That's a real thing and it's a real problem. But where people don't have attention deficit disorder is over feelings. Feelings require no attention. They're there. They sit there in your soul. So if what you're feeling is anxiety over inflation, you're not going to get distracted from that. Every single time you go to the gas station, and gas costs more.
That feeling floods back. Every time you go to the supermarket and you spend 6 more than you did last week on the same number of goods, or you start noticing that the box of cereal that you bought for the same price is 20 percent smaller because that's the other inflation game, right? Is that people sell the same, sell less of the same, less of the same product for the same amount of money.
Um, You feel it, and there's no getting away from, there's [00:58:00] no narrative, there's no distraction, there's no look a squirrel game that can prevent you from feeling the insecurity and the anxiety that comes with a reduced income or, or, or increased prices, or safety. Get back to the safety thing. There's nothing you can do.
You can say, you know what, aggregate, in aggregate, New York, the number of subway crimes is actually down relative to where it was in April of 2016, when there were three of them, blah, blah, blah. That doesn't mean anything to anybody. Because if you're standing on a subway platform in New York, and there's a homeless guy walking around, screaming at the top of his lungs, and he comes near you, and you're not, for a split second, sure whether or not he's gonna push you on the subway track, because that's now happened 40 times in the last three months.
That's not gonna go No. No amount of rationalization information, gameplay with statistics is going [00:59:00] to solve that problem. What solves that problem is the feeling going away and the feeling goes away when the macro problem is getting resolved, which is why inflation is the killer app of all policy killer apps.
Okay. I want to just close on what one, uh, I know you have to run. You have a very important, uh, errand. I do. Relating to it, relating to the family dog. Don't family dog, which trumps as, as, as the senor home is now the owner of two dogs. We, we, we got a second one, you know, amazing. Um, we, we, we, I totally get priorities.
Um, okay. So I just want to close. You wrote a very, uh, Provocative piece for Commentary Magazine that basically says this is, um, not that you want it, not that you wish for it, but this is vindication for neoconservatism, this, this, in many respects, the neoconservative policy movement was a response and political movement and moment was a response to the 70s and we are experiencing, and you're sensing [01:00:00] in the American public's mindset, according to all the public polling, about Ukraine Um, that this is a sort of the, the, the return of, of some kind of neocon moment, at least in global affairs.
Can you spend a minute on that? Well, I, I do both, uh, both, uh, foreign affairs and crime, really, uh, maybe inflation less, though. So, what I argue is that neoconservatism, which has a reputation, which has a bizarrely complex reputation, was actually a relatively simple, uh, intellectual tendency. Both in foreign policy terms and in domestic policy terms, foreign policy terms centering and circling in the 1970s around Commentary Magazine, which was then edited by my father, and the domestic concerns and And, and explored by the Public Interest, which was edited by, uh, Irving Kristol and, and, and Nathan Glazer.
And what they both had in common was that they were explorations of where America was going wrong, because, in my view, what brought these two tendencies [01:01:00] together In wildly different ways was the failure of deterrence that in that that the exploration in foreign policy terms was that America had lost its deterrent power to deter without having to act to have strength and reach and force such that, as I say, the Soviets wouldn't have gone into Afghanistan because American power and the projection of American power and the idea of American power was so potent.
That it would have, it would have retarded their ambitions and kept them from doing it in the first place. Similarly, in domestic affairs, you had moves in criminal justice reform. And, and moves and ideas about incarceration and policing that ended the idea that this was all being done to deter crime. Uh, 9 11 policing, uh, 9 1 1 policing, which was the idea that you kept cops in cars until they had a crime to bust or to solve and then they [01:02:00] went to it rather than Preventative.
Cops on the beat, cops on the street who were there to interdict criminals before they committed crimes. To be present. To make it so that they wouldn't happen in the first place and that brilliant thinking and brilliant liberal policy making and all kinds of progressive advances led people to believe that they could do without deterrence in pursuit of different aims and different policy goals and that But the neoconservative vision was, was a vision of a world in which deterrence was restored.
And when we think about where we are now, with the Russians, and in our foreign policy, and in our domestic policy on crime, that is exactly what we need, is the, is the return of the idea of deterrence, that we need to deter criminals from acting, and we need to deter bad actors abroad. From acting and that, that, that, that's projection of American power and a belief [01:03:00] in authority, a belief in America's authority, both at home and abroad, public authority.
This is why we gather in societies to protect ourselves from bad actors. That's why, that's why societies exist. Uh, to make sure that everybody can sort of go along to get along and get through their lives without being, without untoward hindrance by people who want to steal from them or, Or take their land, or take their property, or something like that.
And that we have, we, there's been a weird disjunction between that central social responsibility, both at home and abroad, uh, and, and, and the, and the governing class of the United States, and that that's, that's why this is a neoconservative moment, because that, I believe, is what Is the answer, the solution to these problems is the restoration of deterrence in criminal justice policy and the restoration of deterrence abroad.
Yeah, almost like we need a broken windows policy at home and we also need it globally. Right. I mean, [01:04:00] what are we going to have here? I mean, look, in this sense, Ukraine is nominally, it's not good news, it's a horrible thing that's happening. But the resistance and the fact that the Soviets, the Russians, excuse me, couldn't roll over Ukraine and do it, you know, and have been humiliated and all of that.
is a fantastic turn of events and should not be under, you know, should not be undersold or, or undervalued. But, you know, I mean, China is still sitting there. China is way more powerful, way stronger, way more, way more affluent, and way more determined than Russia in many ways, and they're still standing there looking over the sea at Taiwan.
And, and, and, you know, the question, the open question is, are we going to show the, have the metal and show them that we are not gonna, we as the only real preventative against them doing that, aside from the Taiwanese people and their resolute and stout resistance of the sort that I think they will have just as easily as the Ukrainians have it.
Um, How, are we going to be there to make them think twice, [01:05:00] three times, four times, five times, and say, you know what, it's not worth it. Right. It's not worth it. Alright, we will, uh, leave it there, John. I know you've got to, um You gotta take care of business. I do. Yes. Take care of dog business. Uh, alright, thank you for doing this.
Uh, we'll have you back, uh, hopefully to not talk about the depressing 70s and how they're echoing today. We'll find a happier topic. I think you wanted to talk about depressing topics. Well, you know, that's me, Crushing Morosity. That's the commentary brand. Here we are. Alright, take care. Thank you. Thanks, Dan.
That's our show for today. To follow Jon Pothoritz's work, you can go to commentary. org. Or on Twitter at commentary. Of course you can't find John himself on Twitter because he has taken himself off, but this is one of my public service announcements. One of many to encourage John to get back on Twitter.
Call Me Back is produced by Ilan [01:06:00] Benatar. Until next time, I'm your host, Dan Senor.