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Welcome back to Beyond the Polls. This week, I'll talk with former Ronald Reagan and George Herbert Walker Bush speechwriter and Hoover Institution fellow Peter Robinson about Reaganism, what it was, what it could have been, and why it's no longer the future of the GOP. Let's dive in.
Well, a lot has been said over the last few weeks about the change in the Republican Party that Donald Trump's ascendancy has brought. But I'd like to look back in time. I'd like to look back in time to the Republican Party of my youth, because so much of what has been discussed in the press is based on people who had that youth and had those expectations and look forward and say, what's changed and why?
And joining me in this path down reminiscence is a man who worked for Ronald Reagan and his successor, George Herbert Walker Bush, the Murdoch Distinguished Policy Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Peter Robinson. Peter? Henry, a pleasure. A pleasure. Well, thank you for joining me.
So a lot gets said about Reaganism and the words of the most vocal and often most youthful opponents of what they think it was, zombie Reaganism. Yes, that's right. You were present at the creation, or at least at the creation in the White House as opposed to present at the creation in the 1964 speech that made him famous. What was Reaganism about when Reaganism was young? Ah.
Well, Reaganism, to an extent that these days often gets overlooked, Reaganism was in the first place about ideas and underlying principles. And what happened when Ronald Reagan won in 1980 and then took office in January 1981 was that he put into practice and used the bully pulpit to give national voice to ideas
ideas, policies, principles, approaches that had been percolating, I think, in particular. To me, the three great figures of the American restoration of the 1980s are Ronald Reagan, of course, who was the practical politician who made it all happen. But you had Milton Friedman and the Chicago School of Economists,
who had been working since the 30s, particularly since the 50s. Milton publishes his great book on monetarism in the 50s. They had been working for three decades on the intellectual, well, what Milton really had been doing was combating Keynesianism. The prevalent idea, when he started, it was an absolutely dominant idea that a modern economy could only function properly if the government ran it.
And Milton Friedman, who was intellectually, you could disagree with him, and many did, but in those days, at least he could not be ignored because he was intellectually so powerful. He won a Nobel Prize, after all. Milton Friedman showed that that was all wrong, that property rights, fundamental liberty, get the government out of the way, peel back regulations, lower taxes, and the economy would take off. And then the other figure is Bill Buckley, who...
Well, there are all kinds of complicated things to be said about Bill Buckley, but what it comes down to is that he made conservatism cool. Bill Buckley was this fantastically interesting, elegant, playful figure. And when Bill Buckley articulated conservative principles, stood up to the Soviet Union, smaller government, lower taxes, all of this, he appealed to
not just to people's grandfathers, but to kids. So, all of this is coming along and it takes decades to percolate. And then comes Ronald Reagan and gets elected and starts acting. And the famous so-called triad, although it only gets called that in retrospect, at the time, everything felt as though it all fitted together. One, of course, is anti-communism standing up to the Soviets and
And the other is the economic program of lower tax for peeling back regulations, lower taxes, supporting Paul Volcker as he as he rang inflation out of the economy. And then the third is the social conservatism.
which gets described a lot of different ways, but it was clear Reagan gave a lot of pro-life speeches. He was trying to remake the federal judiciary. Now, he didn't succeed in that. He gets criticized these days for appointing Sandra Day O'Connor, Anthony Kennedy, who were, let's put it this way, they cast some disappointing votes as members of the Supreme Court. But the Federalist Society, the notion that judges had to be watched across their whole career, all that was still new. Okay, so you get a kind of
reassertion of the principles of the Constitution, you get unabashed self-confidence standing up to the Soviet Union, which includes defense spending, and you get
cuts in taxes and a kind of pressure against leaning into the headwind of spending to hold spending down. Reagan didn't achieve in discretionary domestic spending. He held it to about 1% for a couple of the eight years, but even Ronald Reagan couldn't contain spending that well. In any event, you put all of that together,
And then there was also, this is the bit that is very hard to convey, Henry, but you'll understand it. Maybe you can convey it better than I can. There was also a restoration of national pride, of morale. You could really feel it. I was in studying at Oxford in 1979 when the Iranians took Americans hostage.
And when Jimmy Carter's attempt to rescue the hostages failed, the helicopters crashed in the desert. And the humiliation that I felt as an American, the humiliation
The Englishmen who were... Some of them, the Englishmen on the left who were my friends were condescending, "Oh, you Americans thought you could pull it, you're getting what you deserve." And Englishmen on the right, Thatcher had already been taken office by the time I got to England, were really sort of sympathetic, "How could this have happened? So sorry for you." One way or the other, it was humiliating. And then Reagan comes along as he takes the oath of office, the Iranians back down, they release the hostages. And
All these things you can point to, the economy recovers, the Soviet Union begins to feel that the Soviet Union is now on the defensive. And it may sound corny to us now, but the Reagan campaign re-election campaign slogan of "Morning Again in America" captured something that felt real to tens of so many Americans that they re-elected him with 49 out of 50 states.
That's a long answer to your question. I'm not even sure it answers the question, but I'm trying to get at it. It's important to understand that Reagan was conservative in policy terms, but there was also a sense of excitement, almost of relief that the country had come back to its senses. That's important to grasp about those years.
Yeah, no, and I think it is something that became so natural that it became forgotten. Yes. That he had been so successful that it became the hubris of the unipolar moment that, of course, America, you know, when you and I were young and, you know, battled the mastodons on the way to school and, you know, avoided the pterodactyl swooping to pick us all up, you know,
It was a very depressing time. America felt ungovernable. America felt in decline. An economy that had produced millions of good-paying jobs produced stagflation, high unemployment and high inflation simultaneously. The Arab oil embargo, having to go to gas stations you queued on alternate days of the week, depending on whether your license plate ended at an odd or an even number. And that was considered...
normal. Yes. And that the only solution was more government regulation. And Ronald Reagan stands up and says, no, actually, it's exactly the opposite.
And by 1984, you know, I was in Los Angeles during the Olympics, and I thought it was going to be the worst time ever to be there because, of course, smog was much worse in 1984 than it is today. And instead, it was the best time to be there because so many people left, I could drive around on the freeways. I hadn't thought of that. The Olympics, the 84 Olympics were a wonderful, wonderful event.
Well, that's the thing. Americans won everything. It was just shit the movie. Americans won everything because the Russians boycotted. But in our home country, in Ronald Reagan's backyard, Americans win everything. And it's coming at a time when America isn't being pushed around in the world anymore. When inflation has gone down by two-thirds, unemployment is dropping. And it felt like the gloom had lifted off of them. A decade of gloom.
had lifted off of our shoulders, and we went from success to success to success to success to success. I mean, obviously not life is a series of hills, but each hill was a higher height. And I think that helps to explain why so many people of our generation and the immediate successors
we're so enraptured by Reagan because we remembered the gloom and we reworked. Yes. Yeah. Because it worked. And then his successors made it work in varying degrees. You know, even Bill Clinton, uh,
ends up learning that he has to be an interpreter, not an opponent of Ronald Reagan, that that's the lesson of the 1994 revolution, where he campaigned from the center, governed from the left. Democrats lost control of the House for the first time since I Love Lucy was the most popular show on television, 1952.
And then he says the era of big government is over, by which he didn't mean that big government was going away. But what he meant was the era of ever expanding government and the assumption that government is the only solution to our problems is over. And that was the culmination of the promise that Ronald Reagan launched in 1964. And it just looked like we've discovered the secret formula. So what happened?
Why did the secret formula not work after a certain point of time? Or is the real argument that, well, it did work until the dastardly people abandoned the secret formula, and we need only to recover the original coat to get back to, you know, peace, prosperity, and pride? You know, what happened in the years after Clinton leaves office?
Henry, I thought I was joining this podcast so you could tell me what happened. Well, I can do that when I'm a guest on your podcast, Peter. Exactly. That's true. Well, of course, the short answer is I don't quite know what happened. Ronald Reagan has been forgotten, which to a certain extent is perfectly normal. I can recall...
He's been dead for 20 years. He's been dead for a long, long time. I can recall in 2000, I helped out for a couple of weeks with the George W. Bush transition team. He'd won, but he hadn't become president yet. And there's a knock on my door one afternoon, and it's a kid. And he said, an intern who was helping out somewhere. And he said, Mr. Robinson, is it true that you served in the Reagan administration? I said, yes.
And he said, "Oh, well, could you come pose for a picture with all of us interns? We heard that and we wanted just to make sure it was true." And I thought, this is ridiculous. Then I thought to myself, wait a moment, the period between 1980 when Ronald Reagan was elected and the year 2000 was exactly the same interval between 1960 when John Kennedy was elected and 1980.
And when I went to work in the Reagan White House, John Kennedy was a figure from history. So, I think there is something to be said. It just happens this way, that everything that happens before your own memory kicks in, so let us say at the age of four or five, takes place in black and white. It's historical. It's sepia-tinted. It's just different from your own lived experience. So, what do we have?
Half the electorate now just cannot remember that.
those days. They can't remember. I mean, to me, the normal impulse, the correct impulse is, wait a minute, the last time things really worked well were the 1980s. Let's go back and figure out what they were doing then, and as best we can, apply them to the current moment. Well, you say that out loud, and half the electorate doesn't know what you're talking about because they have no memory that things were working well at all. And B, you get attacked by the
And then there's also the bit I can remember, again, going back to the 80s, there were Democrats who would bristle whenever FDR was mentioned. And of course, I realize now that they were bristling about FDR 40 years later after FDR.
Because this was their time. They were in different... So it's generally, of course, kids don't want to be stuck with Ronald Reagan. He's as far distant from the current president as FDR was from the 1980s. They want their own time. They want their own figures. They want their own... All that is understandable. But what I can't figure out... So this is the question. If you and I did what you and I have the impulse to do, which is go back to the 80s and say, what worked...
and what can we adapt to the present moment, what would we answer? Would we end up answering that? To this day, I still occasionally get asked, what would Ronald Reagan have made of this or that or the other? And for about a decade, that was a sensible, it was a coherent question. For about a decade after Reagan left office, you still had the feeling that the issues were about the same, the country was the same country over which he presided. But now, it's like saying,
What would Grover Cleveland have thought of this, that, or the other? Or what would James K. Polk? I mean, it's just, the world is so different. So, is nostalgia for Reagan purely nostalgia, or are there lessons that we could derive from him, and particularly from the policies of those days? And that I put to you, Henry, as a question.
Oh, you just want to turn it back on me. I do. I really do. So, you know, what I would say is, one, with respect to these people who bristle at FDR, it's certainly natural that any generation's ambitious wants to make statues to themselves. That's the nature of human ambition. But...
The fact is very few people erect new edifices. They may erect new statues in an edifice somebody else largely created. And I would argue that today's Democratic Party remains the party of FDR in a way that even most modern FDR Democrats don't quite grasp because the innovations he wrought were so transformative and so reaching they don't even know
that they are echoing his sentiments. So, I look at Joe Biden as being somebody who's following FDR's footsteps. LBJ was haunted by the idea he wasn't going to be greater than FDR. He couldn't stand the thought that he was simply going to be the next great figure in the pantheon that FDR created. And arguably, you know, he...
did more to advance FDR's vision than any Democratic president in between this day and the death of Franklin Roosevelt. Well, it wasn't good enough for him, but it doesn't mean that he wasn't FDR's heir. So my question is, I don't see, if you had asked me a decade ago, I started talking about the need to become a more working class focused party in 2010.
I was a populist before populism was cool. You were. I am an eyewitness to this fact. I thought at first you must have lost your mind. And then I looked at your book and talked to you and you haven't lost your mind at all. By the way, Reagan himself always distinguished between the New Deal, which he never attacked, and the Great Society, which is Lyndon Johnson's work.
And the Great Society was in his mind where things had just gone wrong. It was too much. Although some of that is political in the sense that Ronald Reagan gives his great speech against Democrats in 1964 before the Great Society has been enacted. Ronald Reagan's speeches that bring him to the point where he is asked to deliver a nationally televised address for Goldwater Miller take place in the late 50s and early 1960s. Right.
The Great Society is barely a conception in the fevered minds of the left of the day. You know, when they're bemoaning Eisenhower sterility and the conservative coalition of those awful Southerners and those awful Republicans who are holding back all of our wonderful ideas that will fulfill Franklin Roosevelt's vision. So when Reagan says that, I think, OK, whatever.
He's figured out something he didn't figure out in 1964, which is that he needed to openly kowtow to be an interpreter of Franklin Roosevelt in order to shift the direction, as opposed to implicitly be an interpreter of Franklin Roosevelt, which is my argument in my book where he was.
But if you had asked me in 2010, I would have said, look, if you understand Ronald Reagan's thought, you understand that what his path is for Reaganism has become an entrenchment of solutions rather than the man himself. That all I need to do is reacquaint people with Reagan's thought, his flexibility, his depth, his uniqueness.
that is different from what was being peddled as Reaganism, and Reaganism can renew itself, and consequently remain as guiding a light as Roosevelt's thought is today. And 14 years later, I look and I say, I failed! That Reaganites don't want to rethink, and people who want to change aren't
you know, a lot of the change agents like me quite a bit because they see where I am on that fight, but they also say, don't adopt the idea that it was Reagan's genius to marry new ideas into old cloth. And they want to overthrow something entirely. And consequently,
I think, lose track, you know, its most extreme forms lose connection with the American tradition. And I'm thinking about the extreme forms of nationalism that reject the idea of national rights and so forth. So the question I wonder about is, you know, I look at this period and I think the heirs of Reagan did not understand Reaganism. And so consequently, they made choices in Reagan's name that failed.
In part because they didn't understand the principles. They understood the policies, or they understood the dogmas. So you have to be talking about the Bushes, father and son. The Bushes and others. Some of the Bush critics were simply variants of that. When I think of a key moment, I think, where the Bush people actually got it right was on Medicare Part D.
which is, say, extending the promise of Medicare using market mechanisms to cover a modern technology, prescription drugs, that didn't really exist on a mass form when Medicare was created, and to do it in a way so that the subsidy was limited by market means, but that the promise of Medicare for all, regardless of...
Medicare for all people who are eligible for Medicare. I'm not parroting Bernie Sanders. You know, we're all 65 years and older.
that you wouldn't have a narrow, means-tested version. And, of course, the Heritage Foundation whips against it, and it almost loses in a Republican-controlled Congress. And probably if you had a secret ballot, it would have lost, because for Democrats it wasn't good enough, and for many Republicans they were basically browbeaten to support their president when they would have preferred not to do anything.
The other thing, but you know, I take a look and I think the Bushes didn't understand Reaganism, the Cheneys didn't understand Reaganism, and the people to their right didn't understand Reaganism, because to them it was, it's always focusing on the marginal tax rate, forgetting that people actually like government programs, and always, and in
And, of course, under the Bush years, you had the idea of a strong, confident America carried into a neo-Wilsonian. American power can never be misapplied wrongly, and American power can never be undermined through fabulous strategy. And we end up with, at the end of the Bush years, very frankly, defeat and depression. That's right. We're what Ronald Reagan ran against. And Ronald Reagan's heirs brought us defeat and depression.
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doesn't just invade Kuwait, he occupies Kuwait. He's going to annex it as a new province of Iraq. And George H.W. Bush does something that Ronald Reagan never did. He organizes a massive invasion and puts together a national coalition. But in large measure, because of the Reagan defense buildup, which included not simply expanding conventional forces, but enormous research budgets that brought us precision munitions,
Brought us an entirely new kind of military. The war proves very short and victorious. And George H.W. Bush stops where he said he would stop, which is with the liberation of Kuwait. And he does not go on to Baghdad to bring down Saddam Hussein. He stops where he said he would stop and brings the troops home. We have that, which makes me queasy, but ended well.
Would Reagan have done that? We could argue it both ways, but I think he'd have been happy with the way it ended. And then we have, what was the year, Henry? What year did we invade? Did George W. Bush go into Iraq? March 2003, as I recall. Okay, we go into Iraq. Again, it's a huge undertaking, and...
The war goes well for three weeks, Saddam Hussein is brought down, and then things begin to go sideways. And they go sideways for three or four, I beg your pardon, two and a half to three and a half years before David Petraeus goes over there, there's the so-called surge, and they achieve some stability. Yeah. But it's not victory. And it is not victory. And what I, I have, the one thing that I feel absolutely, well, I want to put the question, the one thing that I think we would agree on immediately is
is that Reagan would not have permitted that war to go sideways. He would have called it, I mean, I remember now, I remember Donald Rumsfeld, the sitting Secretary of Defense, while that war was going sideways, speaking to a Hoover Institution event in Washington and talking about the revolution in military affairs, a new ethos, a new procurement, a kind of reform of the Pentagon, and not talking about the war.
He was Secretary of Defense in a time of war. The war was going sideways, and he said, in effect, nah, that's the State Department's problem. It was a mess, and I just don't think Reagan would have permitted that to go on and on and on and on. I think we can agree on that. Would he have invaded the first time? Would he have invaded the second time? What do we think, Henry? What happened the first time? Let's remember, the Soviet Union still exists in the first. Soviet Union is tacitly an ally of...
In fact, during the first Gulf War, the Soviets did not resupply Baghdad, but their satellites did. And I've long believed that the fall of Saddam is the reason why Gorbachev collapsed, is that the fact that he could not prevent America from taking out a Soviet ally. You know who would agree with you? I heard Edward Teller say the same thing.
And while that war was still taking place, Ed Teller was here at the Hoover Institution. And for people who are younger than we, who is Edward Teller? And who haven't watched Oppenheimer, where he's presented much differently. Yes, he is. In fact, I think he's presented unfairly in Oppenheimer. Edward Teller was one of the great physicists who was a Hungarian who came to this country
in the 30s, as did a number of the great scientists. Zella and Fermi came from Italy. Oppenheimer was native-born, as I recall, but was it his pen name? And so Ed Teller was one of the great scientists at the middle of the Manhattan Project. And then what the movie gets to a little bit, although, as I say, in my judgment, it's unfair toward Teller. Teller and Oppenheimer, there was a break among the scientists there.
after the Second World War, and Teller was the leader of the faction that wanted to go ahead and develop a hydrogen bomb on the grounds that if we didn't, the Soviets certainly would. And we did do that. And Oppenheimer opposed. Oppenheimer wished it could all be put back in the bottle. As far as I can tell, the
That really is what it came down to. He regretted the whole horrible. He never said, I'm sorry we dropped the bomb. He understood the necessities of war, but he just wished it hadn't happened, and he certainly didn't want to go ahead and build a hydrogen bomb. Okay, that's Ed Teller. Right, so let's get back to 1991. The thing is that a Soviet proxy takes out a major oil-producing state and an American ally in an area of...
geopolitical importance when we are still a net oil importer. And the Kengan of Saudi Arabia pays for the war because they want, they supported Hussein as a bulwark against Iran, but now Hussein has become a threat to them. If you allow this to take place, then allies of the Soviet Union and de facto Iran, even though Iraq and Iran are opposed to one another, they are de facto allies against the West,
will dominate the crucial pipeline of energy on which the West applies. Would Ronald Reagan have gone along and supported an invasion, a limited invasion, to reconquer Kuwait? I think it's arguable yes, arguable no, but I think it's very arguable yes, under those discrete geopolitical circumstances. Certainly he was around and did not criticize George Herbert Walker Bush, nor did anyone close to Reagan.
That is all true. All that is true. The Reaganites, when this was happening, that, oh, and remember, there was no love lost between the Reaganites and the Bushies. This is all true. When George Herbert Walker Bush says in his inauguration speech that he's probably in a kinder and gentler country, Nancy Reagan turns to somebody next to her and says, kinder and gentler than who?
because she knows that she knows exactly what's going on right right so there's no love lost between these people and george schultz george schultz the late george schultz who was a colleague of mine here at the hoover institution was told that he would be permitted to drive to george hw bush's inauguration in a government limousine but that since there would be a new administration
The moment George H.W. Bush took the oath of office, he would have to make his own arrangements for returning from
the administration. And don't think he didn't feel that slight for the rest of his life. Right. Well, this is the thing. This is unspeakably petty. Yes. Yes. And there was a lot of that. I'm sorry to say. So my point is that we can't know what Reagan would have done, but neither Reagan nor anyone close to him engaged in undermining the president. So now let's take a look at 2003. What you have is
moderate evidence that Iraq has weapons of mass destruction, evasive behavior by Hussein that suggests he does, in fact, trying to develop a nuclear bomb,
And what we now know is falsified intelligence that was meant to back that up. And 23 years later, I still want to know who had the means and the motive to fake the Niger Yellow Cake documents. That's a very good question. By the way, I myself am persuaded by the Silberman-Robb report that
that looked into all this intelligence failure, and I'm persuaded probably partly because I had the findings of that report relayed to me by Larry Silberman himself, Judge Silberman, and I'm sure you knew Larry Silberman. There was a more persuasive man you could not find. But they came to the conclusion that, strictly speaking, it wasn't an intelligence failure, that Saddam Hussein wanted everyone, including those closest to him in his own regime,
to believe that he had weapons of mass destruction. And since even those closest to him believed he had weapons of mass destruction, it was impossible for any intelligence operation to prove that he didn't. You couldn't get down to the ground in Iraq and search the whole country. You could just engage in human intel. And the word kept coming back. Yes, he has them. Yes, he has them. Yes, he has them.
sometimes from very highly placed people, because they believed it. All right. Yeah. So I think this would have been an example where Reagan would have been very hesitant to go to war. Because let's remember, in this case, there's no direct aggression. There's no direct threat to American interests. There's an American risk. It's not unlike the situation of Muammar Gaddafi during the Reagan administration, when
Libya was supposedly engaging in its own secret nuclear program. For those who are fans of Back to the Future, there's a reason why the person who kills Doc Brown is a Libyan terrorist, because Libya was in 1985 what Iraq became in the Bush administration. But yet...
he tried to isolate them he uh sent um two strikes you know one in the early 80s after there was a libyan-sponsored terrorist bombing in germany and another after another terrorist bombing i was running for the assembly at that time and i'm walking door to door and somebody tells me that you know we bombed you know libya and it's kind of like well
I don't want to jump up for joy in front of this potential voter. But Ronald Reagan did not like putting boots on the ground unless it was necessary. And so I think it is highly unlikely that Ronald Reagan would have launched the 2003 invasion against the wishes of our close allies in Western Europe and against the wishes of the Saudi Arabians.
who did not want us to do this. They permitted it because they were a de facto client state, but they did not pay for it, they did not want it, and they did not want democracy. If we were going to do it, what they wanted was ideally somebody who was a firm Sunni dictator who could hold back Iran and govern this multinational country. And instead what you had was
The hubris of unipolarity that was not only expressed in the invasion, but it was expressed in the manner of the conduct. The reason that the occupation starts to go south is because Colin Powell was right. We needed hundreds of thousands of troops to suppress the
This area that had 20-something million people, massive amounts of people, massive amounts of territory, many of whom were not friends of the United States, even if they were opposed to Saddam Hussein. For me, the moment I knew that things were going south was when, two moments. One was when it was clear that both Syria and Iran were allowing, if not supporting, the transport of weapons from their countries to Syria.
people fighting us. The insurgents, right. The insurgents. And what would Ronald Reagan have done? Well, if Ronald Reagan had gone ahead with it, Ronald Reagan would have said, in for a dime, in for a dollar, if you don't stop, if you don't police your own borders, we're going to hold you responsible and we're going to
violate your borders in order to protect our troops. This was, you know, Reagan's view in the Vietnam War back in the 60s was maybe this wasn't a place to fight, but if it is a place to fight, we fight to win. Correct. Once Americans are committed, you win. And then the second moment was in the war.
When the siege of Fallujah happens in early 2004, what do you do? You fight to win. And the Bush people decided to fight to tie because they didn't want to have the casualties. And I just thought, you don't want to win this war. And that is, in fact, how they prosecuted the war and how they prosecuted Afghanistan. And that is not the way Ronald Reagan would have done it. That is for sure. But, of course, what happens is there's no one, because Reaganism has been misunderstood...
There is no one from the Reaganite wing of the party who was saying this is on Reaganite. So it allows the Bushites to co-opt the Reagan legacy and blow it to bits. We lost Afghanistan well before we withdrew Afghanistan. Although there's a curious, there's a curious, this gets us into details that you and I might appreciate, but I can't imagine many listeners would. But there was that curious tension. Jim Baker made it pretty clear that
He let it become known that he was queasy about George W. Bush's invasion of Iraq. And of course, Jim Baker, his best friend for years and years and years was George H.W. Bush. He'd watched George W. Bush grow up. He was a friend of the family, but he was Ronald Reagan's chief of staff for four years and then his secretary of the treasury. He was...
in all kinds of ways, a Reagan man. So there are two things we know Reagan did that I believe back you up. One, and they both take place in October of 1983, the Marines are killed, there's the horrible bombing in Lebanon, and there's an impulse, well, if they attack us, if they attack Marines in the barracks, we go after them with overwhelming force. And Reagan, I learned this later,
I was in the White House. I was on his staff. But Reagan keeps pressing people, if we go back in, what's the military mission? What do you want the troops to do? How will we know when we have won? And there was no military mission. Those Marines had been put there to show the flag or some vague notion of just a kind of demonstration of strength without any specific objective to attain. And once Reagan sensed
that there was no clearly defined military mission, he said, we're out. Now, he gets attacked for that today for encouraging, and maybe in an ideal world, you'd have had some kind of more, but he said, either we have a specific military mission, or we do not have American troops in the region. Bring them home. And then the second event, which took place just hours later, was our invasion of Grenada,
And Ed Meese told me that he was in the Situation Room with Reagan, being briefed by then Chief of Staff Jack Vesey, General Vesey, who went through this plan. The invasion plan was put together over the course of a weekend. It all happened very quickly. And the president asked one question, how many troops and sailors? And General Vesey answered with some number. And Ronald Reagan said just two words, double it.
double it. If we go in, we go in with overwhelming force, and we go in to win. Now, in the end, it wasn't exactly, but the impulse, the president, or I can, there's one other, you mentioned Lebanon a moment ago, this is another case that Ed Meese mentioned to me, that Jimmy Carter rode the military hard and could have been accused of micromanagement on some occasions. So, before
The military responds to Lebanon. Some generals ask for time with the commander-in-chief, and it's given to them, and Ed Meese is present again. And they take a map and put it over Reagan's desk in the Oval Office, and they say, now, Mr. President, depending on the terms of engagement, we may be fired upon by Libyan fighters. Do our fighters have your permission to cross over into Libyan, to follow Libyans back into Libyan airspace?
And Ronald Reagan said, you have my permission to follow Libyan fighters back to their goddamn hangars. Okay. The point is, if we engage, we win. But we don't engage unless we know exactly what we're doing. And both of those rules are violated in the second invasion of Iraq. Correct? We'd agree on that? Well, they end up being invaded, you know,
Betrayed because if you were to ask the people who were pro invasion and W. Bush's administration at the time, they would have said, what's the mission? The mission is to topple Saddam Hussein and to end the production of we accomplished that mission in three weeks and three weeks. And we were there for years.
But the problem was they didn't understand the country. They honestly believed that there was going to be a joyous uprising of Shia Muslims who were going to be thankful for American liberation and there would immediately be a seamless transition to a peaceful pro-American Shia-led government, which was stupid.
But they genuinely believed it. And then when it became clearer and clearer that that wasn't happening, there was no leadership in the White House to say, okay, we want our objective, but there's actually the war's not over because the war wasn't just with Saddam. It was with the forces who want America out of the Middle East. And they're now fighting a Subrosa war against us. And nobody wanted that war.
So I would say, in the initial, you met the Reagan test. I don't think Reagan would have gone in, for the reasons I mentioned. Well, also remember, precisely because of the agreement we reached, or that we imposed on Saddam Hussein after the first invasion, the phrase...
that Madeleine Albright used, a number of the Democrats who attacked George W. Bush said, we had him in a box. We had Saddam Hussein in a box. And I've asked about that ever since, every time I've had a chance to speak to somebody who is in a position of military significance. And you know what the answer is? They all say, we did have him in a box.
Saddam Hussein couldn't have deployed weapons of mass destruction, he couldn't make a move without our seeing it from the air and being able to respond extremely quickly and very aggressively if we needed to. So then the question that comes to mind is,
So you have a Bush administration that doesn't openly run as Reaganism, but is widely understood to be, you know, that Bush makes moves that his father did not to bring in supply-siders. When he pushes outside the Reagan consensus on judges with the appointment of Harriet Mears, he surrenders to the Federalist Society, which was established during the Reagan administration. By Ed Meese.
Well, by Ed Meese, among many others. Among many others, that's right. Yeah, I mean, Ed Meese was important in it, but he was in the White House. It was the student law student. Yeah, but it was clearly Reagan-era creation of, we're going to bring the principles of freedom in American democracy in a consistent, organized way to America's law schools in order to remake the judiciary. But he abandons Reaganism in...
foreign policy by being both overly expansive in his use of American power and underly expansive in its exercise so that we have new Vietnams in Iraq and Afghanistan, which Reagan would never have. And then you have the ersatz manipulation of the housing market
That helps to bring about the collapse of the housing market and the great financial crash of 2008, which is, again, not something that is widely talked about. But some of the reasons why these loans were being made was to satisfy dictates that were put down by Bush's
Housing and Urban Development Secretary to encourage loans in largely Hispanic areas to secure the Hispanic vote. This is a Karl Rove thing. But again, there's no Reaganite disapproval of this. No one is standing up while it's happening. And so you have a president who leaves with the lowest job approval ratings.
since Richard Nixon, parallel to Richard Nixon's roughly a quarter of Americans. We go through what comes out to be something just short of a depression and somebody who has engaged in the defeat of American prestige overseas. And there is still the Reaganite response is basically
not, it's basically not recovering Reagan's prudence and his adaptation of principle to the times, but to basically say, we need more tax cuts.
We need a further reaffirmation that Christianity is at the center of American identity. We need to have the ever-increasing exercise of American power in places like Afghanistan so that we don't lose without actually having a strategy of winning, which necessarily involved invasion of Pakistan.
and probably the invasion of Iran to cut off the supply routes of the safe houses that the Taliban would retreat to. And so you look at this and say, this is people bearing Ronald Reagan's name, but none of Ronald Reagan's soul. And so I look at this and I say, no wonder the young right want nothing to do with Reaganism. You know, what they've been told is Reaganism is not Reaganism. But yet, when I say that,
Anyone who is a Reaganite either ignores it or rejects it without actually engaging it. And so then you have, I think, where you have... So, Henry, you really basically have no friends but me. Is that what it comes down to? I have lots of friends. I'm just joking. I'm just joking. No, look, I'm a nice person.
Midwestern or, you know, come on, let's have apple pie and dumplings together, you know, for basic food groups, beer, meat, and fat. There we go. Which, however, brings us to a line, a new line of questioning, but it's my questions for you. Okay.
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Correct. We have this phenomenon that Reagan is elected governor of California in 1966 by a million votes. Mm-hmm. Re-elected. As I recall, the margin isn't that big, but he's re-elected. He's re-elected by 10 points. By 10 points. So he's a popular governor through all eight years. He carries the state of California...
Essentially, he carries it three times. He carries it in 1980 for himself and 84 for himself, and then he campaigns in Orange County for George H.W. Bush, and Orange County is where the margin is that carries the state for George H.W. Bush in 1988. Okay, so what we have is...
a Republican presidential candidate carrying California as recently as 1988, which will seem like ancient history to the kids outside my window here on the Stanford campus, but doesn't seem that long ago to you and me. We have Pete Wilson, in all kinds of ways, a Reagan-style Republican, California Republican, and he certainly still reveres Ronald Reagan. Reagan was governor when Pete got started in the California Assembly.
And Pete was elected. Pete is going to stop him from backing Gerald Ford in 1976. Yeah, that's true. It gets a little. Pete is really his. He loves Ronald Reagan, but his actual policies were always more moderate. And OK, OK. But still, he was he was a California Republican who wanted limited government. And he is governor. When did Pete step down as governor? Ninety eight. Ninety eight.
So, as recently... So, he serves two terms as governor. He's elected in 90. He's re-elected in 94. He serves all the way through 98. All right. It is inconceivable today that a Republican presidential candidate would spend a dime in California. They'll certainly come here to raise money, but to put money in in a camp, inconceivable, because that dime would be wasted. California is such a lock for the Democrats, it's gone. It is inconceivable. Well...
Arnold Schwarzenegger gets elected as a Republican. He doesn't quite know what he's doing. As far as I can tell, he's a very winsome figure, full of self-confidence. He hires some political hands. He goes to the state with four referenda. It's probably too much. And then he gets these referenda are all defeated and he immediately folds. Once he encounters California political reality, he hires a Democrat as his chief of staff.
And for the rest of his time, although he didn't change party affiliations, I would maintain that when he was reelected, it was essentially as a Democrat, a kind of centrist Democrat. One way or the other, the idea that a Republican could get a real Republican, a Pete Wilson Republican, could get elected governor of California today is, you'd be a fantasist to make any such argument. Okay, what happened? This notion...
That at the state level, we can get self-reinforcing political cultures so that a state, once it begins to move left, can move very far left. And of course, there are counterexamples. Jeb Bush runs for governor in a competitive two-party Florida state.
And by the time he steps down, Republicans outnumber Democrats in the legislature. And now under Ron, I think last year for the first time, registered Republicans outnumbered Democrats in Florida. In other words, Florida's moved to the right. Texas, you get the argument, Texas was always conservative. It was just conservative Democrats. That's not quite true. Ralph Yarborough was a liberal Democratic senator. Ann Richards was a liberal Democrat senator.
as governor. Or look at Ohio, which has been trending Republican to such an extent that Sherrod Brown, running for reelection as a senator, Republicans are counting on Ohio as a pickup state. It's not quite a gimme, but okay. So the point is, California, I'm asking about California because you and I both know the state and love the state. You're in Santa Barbara today. I'm talking to you from Palo Alto.
How does this happen? How do political cultures become ingrained and self-reinforcing?
Yeah, well, what happens in all of these places is an intersection between demographic change and the changing of the political coalitions. You know, the California of my youth, the California that may have been still what you settled in, I don't know when you came to the Hoover Institution. I've been here since the mid-90s.
a while a while yeah so the you know the california that i grew up in uh had very few latinos very few asians you know we did have you know i have asian friends or latinos in my high school um
in my neighborhood, but it was largely reflective of the American demographics of the time, which is, say, largely white with some blacks and just a couple more Asians. So California was basically Iowa that happened to be on the Pacific in those days? Well, literally, because there was Iowa Day in Long Beach. Was there really? Yes. Iowans moved to the Southern California, and there was Iowa Day in Long Beach.
that attracted tens of thousands of people up until the early 1960s. And that was when the sense, oh, I'm a descendant from Iowa, collapsed. And of course, now you've never heard of Iowa Day. But no, literally, it was Iowa on the Pacific. And Ronald Reagan's move from rural Illinois to come out here was not at all untypical or atypical. But what begins to happen is...
A corollary to what has been happening nationwide, which is that whites with college degree become less religious, become less conservative, and a particular subset of them flock to California.
because of its perceived cultural liberalism, and because it's the center of what is among the least traditional, populated by the least traditionally Christian group, which is software. You know, when I grew up in California, California is a defense industry hardware producing state.
If you've got a college degree, you're likely to be an engineer working in Lockheed or working in Hughes Martin down in El Segundo. You're making what I call, with my friends who are in the legacy of those industries, you're making death toys, you're welding steel, you're building automobiles, you're manufacturing things. What starts to happen after the invention of the personal computer is that California starts to invent ideas. It starts to invent the intangible thing.
And that attracts somebody who nationwide is not interested in a Republican Party that has its roots or has a strong root in social conservatism. So one way of tracking what took place is to say the business leaders go from Packards and Hewletts of the world. These are men who served in the Second World War for whom...
There was no difference between the way they lived their lives and the defense of the nation who understood the Cold War. Bill Packard served, Mr. Packard served. When I came to the Hoover, he was still alive. And everybody referred to him as Mr. Packard. So Mr. Packard served as Assistant Secretary of Defense in the Nixon administration. You go from Bill Packard to Steve Jobs, and you've gone from one California to another. All right. And that's part of it.
Um, and, uh, so, uh, the people who come in are from the left, the people who die or leave are from the right. And then you have the massive demographic change, which is that, um, you have massive Latino migration, uh,
First in Southern California, but now throughout, you have the massive Asian in-migration, such that my old neighborhood, which back in the 1970s was basically the descendants of the people at World War II. There was the Albanian across the street, the Dutchman across the street, there was the Swede. It was like white ethnicity on steroids. It's now 85% Asian. And this is Long Beach? Yes.
No, I lived in West San Jose. West San Jose. Oh, that's right. I'm sorry. Long Beach is a melange of things. But where I lived turned from in the late 1970s a melange of white ethnicity. You know, the children or the grandchildren of the immigrants from the 1880 to the 1920 period who are now in the middle class and about ready, all of us, to step up into the permanent middle class through college education. To...
the modern version of that, but it's all Asian descendants, Asian, Indian, Chinese, Hong Kong, um,
My old high school, I think, is 90% Asian. And why do Asians, as an ethnic group, tend to vote Democratic? Well, my theory is, first of all, Asians differ in their partisanship depending on their ethnicity. But this gets to the other thing. One of the things that drives partisan...
realignment in this country is social issues. That when Ronald Reagan comes to the fore, the religious right is just starting. The key element of the religious right calls itself the moral majority. And it's possible to think of that as being factual if you get outside of the theological basis and say, are most people, is a majority of people in this country largely Orthodox-believing Christians? That was arguably true in 1980.
It is clearly not true today. And so you take a look at who's coming to California. It is people who have no cultural roots in that tradition.
And the ethnicities of Asian population that have some roots in that tradition, you know, people who are practicing Catholics who are Vietnamese or Koreans who are Protestant tend to be more Republican. I see. It does not mean that they are Republican in the way that somebody with a similar, you know, one of the things I tell people is that the single biggest way to prior to the last few years to switch a Mexican immigrant from a Democrat to Republican is to convert him
Pentecostalism. But they still vote 30% less Republican than an identical person who is not Latino.
And so what you have is the whites who come are people who are for the cultural revolution, strongly disinclined to vote Republican. And the ethnicities that come for cultural roots are strongly disinclined to vote for republicanism and are also not coming from cultures that are as individualistic.
So, you know, there's nothing... Obviously, you look at lots of thriving small, medium, and large businesses. It's not that the immigrants lack any sense of desire to improve their situation or that they lack any entrepreneurship, but they don't have the mythos of English-derived individualism that remains at the center of orthodox Republican thinking. And so...
You take a look and say, who is it that they get attracted to? Well, they get attracted to somebody who's not that sort of person, and that's Donald Trump. They're much more interested in Trumpism than they ever were in the Republican Party. Henry, what is Trumpism? Oh, what is Trumpism? I think Trumpism is...
A phrase that doesn't have a strongly defined content but needs defining because what we've been seeing worldwide for the last 15 years is a rejection of the Washington consensus of the 1990s era. That free trade has not worked for everybody.
Free trade and people does not work for everybody. By that I mean the law of immigration. The idea of a unipolar global order clearly is inconsistent with that, because it is the free trade order that has created the largest threat to the unipolar American-led global rules-based order.
And then you have what in our youth was a minority is now maybe still a minority, but a culturally dominant element that pushes social change for the sake of social change. Correct, right. And so you have a group of people who say, this doesn't work for us. We're not respected, and we're getting poorer, and our children are likelier to die in wars that we have no direct interest in. What part of this works for us?
And so you see this worldwide. And I think in America it's exacerbated by the religiosity of the country, is that those who are still orthodoxly, you know, still 1970s-style moral majority Christians, feel that they are at threat.
And they have become a populist element that tends not to be replicated in many other places, but in places where you do still have strong religiosity, Orthodox religiosity, you see it like in Poland and some elements of Italy. And so Trumpism is some amalgam of old republicanism and new populism. But Peter...
I need to bring this to a close. Oh, but you were just about to tell me the answer. The answer. Well, maybe we should do this again sometime. But I really enjoy our conversation. And, you know, we've actually never met face-to-face. Because we do this over Zoom, I've seen your face. No, but...
But, Henry, I feel at this point, don't you think it could only be downhill? We could only disappoint each other if we met face to face. We have so much fun doing this. No, no, that's true. Yeah, we'll see what that means, though, is that I'm going to discover that underneath the Peter Robinson mask is really a shape changing lizard. And that's the secret you're trying. Ross Stout that understands. But to be repeated, to be continued. Thank you for joining me on Beyond the Pools. My pleasure, Henry. Take care.
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