As California Goes . . .? | GoodFellows: Conversations From The Hoover Institution

[Music] hello my name is neil ferguson the milbank family senior fellow at the hoover institution and this week we're doing a little table turning for a change i'm going to moderate our discussion in my capacity as the recently minted american citizen who moved to california from massachusetts just five years ago that means i get to ask the questions actually it's my penance for being late to last week's show answering but also asking if i know him some of the questions is my colleague john cochran rosemarie and jack anderson senior fellow at the hoover institution and best known these days for his widely read grumpy economist blog back from a week off as general h.r mcmaster former national security adviser to president donald trump and author of battlegrounds the fight to defend the free world and hoover's food and michelle ajami senior fellow and last but by no means least instead of moderating as he usually does bill whalen the virginia hobbs carpenter distinguished policy fellow in journalism is going to be in the nearest thing to a hot seat we have on this show and that's because he knows much much more than i do about one of the main topics of our show californian politics it's tuesday september the 14th and as we speak californians are casting ballots in a recall election essentially voting on whether or not to fire and replace governor gavin newsom he's hoping to avoid the fate of gray davis who was removed and replaced by arnold schwarzenegger back in 2003 but that's not all that's going on in the north american world of politics up in canada justin trudeau could be looking at defeat in his country's snap election in less than a week's time in some ways newsom and trudeau are cut from similar cloth sons of their countries elite generally considered good-looking and committed to progressive political stances which they don't always quite live up to in their own costed lives and this just a few weeks after president joe biden's net approval rating turned negative for the first time since his inauguration not to mention the growing confidence of republicans that even if they can't get rid of governor newsom they have a good shot at winning back not only the house but also the senate in next year's midterm elections so why all the pushback against the left-leaning leaders is political disgruntlement just a function of coverts obstinate refusal to go away thanks to the infectiousness of the delta variant or is the north american public tiring of virtue signaling left wingers who don't quite walk the walk think governor newsom's covert regulation busting french laundry feast but how about alexandria ocasio-cortez's appearance at the new york metropolitan museum of arts annual gala in a fancy white designer dress bearing the slogan tax the rich okay bill help me figure this out why is gavin newsom facing a recall well first great introduction neil i may be out of a job come next week if you want to keep doing this why is newsome facing a recall in a word covid neil in two words that you already gave away french laundry and then three words governor's bad decisions people tend to forget that this recall effort was underway well before kovitt in fact if you look at the actual petition to recall the governor it's how you do it in california you have to collect signatures from voters commensurate to 12 percent of the turnout in the previous election deal or about 1.5 million votes if you look at that petition the word covet the word pandemic is not to be found it's a rather familiar list of conservative gripes with regard to california immigration abortion lack of death penalty gun control too much spending by government but the process was moving along at a very slow pace uh as of about september only about 675 000 signatures kneel and they went to court and the recall campaign said look it we're trying to collect signatures at a time when the state is shut down we need more time the judge agreed and the judge granted a four-month extension to march the 17th to collect signatures neil that occurred on november the 6th of 2020 that same night gavin newsom hopped into a car and went to the french laundry and had dinner at the french laundry one week later the san francisco chronicle reports on that dinner and it's the worst possible story imaginable for newsom why well first of all he is being hypocritical he's telling everybody to stay home don't go out and he's going out secondly french laundry could we find a title that just speaks more to just just you know the extravagance and just smug self-titlement of a marin county person like newsom and then thirdly neil he wasn't honest and upfront he said no covet protocols were broken so of course a photograph promptly emerged of him sitting at a table with friends and lobbyists not wearing a mask and so he had a problem it then gets compounded worse this kind of missing nuance of california politics most californians neil cannot spot their governor in a police lineup arnold schwarzenegger being the exception to the rule the more californians saw of newsome over this period of time they unless they liked him why number one the french laundry dinner made them mad number two newsom started lamenting that he knew it was like to be a zoom parent when it turns out that his kids were actually going to a private school in sacramento so wrong and then thirdly he started doing daily news conferences neo where he tried to give you an update on kovid and newsom has kind of an odd speaking pattern he tends to speak in techno terms technobabble if you will and instead of being clear concise and reassuring it was just the opposite and so now california's got a close-up of the governor they didn't like it and the process took off and before he knew it they had two million signatures it ended up being 1.7 million verified and game on for the recall okay that all makes great sense to me and it reminds me of something our colleague victor davis hanson wrote uh which invoked h.g wells's wonderful book the time machine he talked about newsome personifying a quote new plutocracy of eloy whose wealth exempted them from all worries about the mundane problems of the distant and despised morlock others but for uh for all that it doesn't look as if he's going to be recalled it looks as if he's going to pull this off and survive so the really hard thing might be to explain why after all you've told us uh he's not being swept from power in an avalanche of popular indignation well neil it's math uh 1.7 million sisters senators might get you into a recall but you need far more than that to win an election in california let me put this in very hr mcmaster terms for you gavin newsom has one thing going for him in california far more democrats than republicans a difference of about five million california's a registration five million more democrats and republicans secondly neil he took advantage of a provision a loophole in the recall law because he is not considered a candidate he's the subject of the recall he does not have to live by campaign donation limits so he can raise unlimited amounts of money reid hastings the ceo of netflix gave him three million dollars the governor very quickly put together an 80 million dollar war chest kneel and he spent it doing what you do to win in california he advertised relentlessly on television 36 million dollars on advertising in august alone if you were sitting out here watching the olympics you cannot escape elizabeth warren who is around the clock doing commercials for the governor in h.r mcmaster terms gavin newsom controls the ground game because he has more voters and secondly he controls the airwaves so he controls the air as well and hr i think politics and the military are similar if you control the ground and control the air you tend to win campaigns i ask go ahead john as as it looks neil warren i might ask some questions as as the polls show nearly made it to ten minutes we need to remind ourselves that as we are talking we don't know the results right and listeners may pick up on this after the result is known so reminder uh you know you don't know history in advance so for all we know a huge upset is coming but it's just just not looking that likely well let me let me clarify one thing before john jumps in welcome to my world neil by the way um under the uh recall rules uh we're playing by the same rules as last year's presidential election the governor declared a state of emergency and he and the legislature agreed to mail ballots to every one of california's 22 million registered voters so every californian has a ballot to cast in this election if he or she chooses they don't have to worry about catching cover to go down to the polls or where to find a polling place given a september election so this adds to the advantage for the governors so that's that's why this is a bit of a crapshoot in guessing because we don't know the turnout but again if you give every californian a chance to vote because there are five million more democrats you tend to win elections sorry for butting in john but go ahead as the polls do look like news and will will survive the question being by how much now but i want to ask you um this one seemed to me like uh easy a pop-up fly and yet i'm surprised at how much difficulty the california republicans are having you mentioned a list of issues immigration abortion death penalty and guns a set of issues that is suicide politically to campaign on in california what would seem easy is that if the set of issues were fire water power schools crime and homelessness oh and and the housing which is a continuing disaster that knew some promise to fix and did uh nothing about right simple governance as opposed to a litany of right-wing issues which has allowed newsome to paint this as him versus trump a competent uh organized party uh puts together candidates with a message that has been tested and has some chance of winning and who have some experience now perhaps all of the electorate has gotten used to nobody with experience and knowledge of how to be a politician is competent so we might as well elect radio hosts and i have nothing against larry larry elder he seems like a interesting person a radio host but he has no political experience he's not the sort of person an organized party would have put up if it wanted a chance uh at winning a serious governorship against uh against gavin newsom so does this just does this signal the internal implosion of the california republican party as an organization as what a political party is supposed to be what the heck is going on you know john will rogers famously said i uh i'm a democrat i don't belong to an organized party i'm a democrat and a paul rogers were alive today and living in the palisades as he did back in the 1930s you might be saying i'm a republican in california because i don't belong to an organized party the california republican party did not endorse a candidate in this recall but more bothersome john is that it didn't seem to mobilize in any way to help their candidates in this regard if you look at the the financial numbers and i hate to dwell on money but money really is king in california in campaigns whereas the governor has 80 million dollars elder has about eight million dollars john cox who ran against newsome in 2018 and lost by 24 points he has about eight million dollars then there's kevin faulconer former mayor of san diego john who's running on good government his record uh has been for several years fashion himself as a moderate he's pro-choice he's open to a pathway for citizenship for illegal immigrants and so on and so forth a guy has been thinking long and hard about how to get 50 of the vote in california he has about 2.5 million dollars so the party is number one not managed to steer any money to faulkner i don't understand why maybe he just doesn't interview well we'll find out after the election secondly what you don't see out here john you don't see independent expenditures against the governor the california rules john cochran neil ferguson h.r mcmaster could spend tens of millions of dollars against gavin newsom if they wanted to as long as it's not coordinated with a campaign an i.e an independent expenditure but you've seen zero of those on the airwaves and i think that speaks to two things here john number one uh people who do invest in california making a very calculated choice that they think either a nucia will survive or if he doesn't a democratic legislature certainly will and they'll take notice of who gave money where but secondly john i think you know investor lack of confidence and i just know that notably talking to people out of here who give money uh to candidates they tend not to give in california because they just see it as a losing cause so if we're going to talk about a republican renaissance in california john part of it's going to be just kind of overcome overcoming what i'm afraid is a defeatist mentality i spent some time looking at stats from this century on statewide elections in california if you take arnold schwarzenegger out of the equation john republicans have lost 52 of 353 statewide races out here that includes the state constitutional races senate and presidency if you're a savvy investor why would you invest in a franchise that's lost 52 or 53 times so john i've got a question for you which is on on the economics maybe part of the problem is that despite all the things that california's democrats have done wrong which our colleague michael boskin listed the other day in an excellent webinar but despite all the kind of things you can grumble about here which you just mentioned from schools to wildfires to poverty you name it california's got it despite all this california still has a phenomenal economy i must admit i was slightly startled to realize that its gdp is greater than that of my original country the united kingdom not to mention france with two thirds of the population so i mean my question is is john is the is the kind of reckoning still to come and i want to i want to particularly reference a great piece kevin williamson did in the national review california across roads in which he compares california to detroit before the downfall quote detroit thought it could count on ford chrysler and general motors forever silicon valley thinks it can count on apple amazon and facebook forever the complacent leaders in michigan were dead wrong so are the ones in california question to you as an economist is california just on the brink of really going down economically the way michigan did after the automobile manufacturers lost their edge and will that be the moment republicans finally get their mojo back or not whether it's there's it's not just republicans have to either mojo back or their acts together there's still a party deciding whether it's the party of trump or the party of good governance there isn't california a third party efforts because they recognize this brand is just broken side uh and there is dissension within the democratic party uh that party is also uh combined of uh various coalitions which bill may want to talk more about will the the mod the moderate squad uh take over from the coastal uh elite progressives in in trying to bring some good governance back within the democratic party right but something's got to change and i think the danger you pointed to is exactly uh the one to worry about detroit was the silicon valley of the us in the 1920s beautifully high property values uh the place where innovation was happening uh companies were being started lots of money was being made and it uh it it got it it died from the sort of standard progressive policies that uh progressive in quotes that california is trying to impose what we certainly see already is uh and i hope i'm gonna encourage bill to come back in bill and leohanian are doing a wonderful series documenting exactly what's going on companies are moving away in droves already um what was happening is that silicon valley was the spot where you could needed to start a company you needed the venture capital you needed the engineers to come you needed to start you you want some guy who can program java html and put together something quick you can get him or a gal uh here quickly but the minute it's a company an operation you move the hr uh out to nevada as fast as you can you move the production out as fast as you can the big tank companies are already quickly diversifying into nevada texas colorado wherever they can uh the the part of running a big company not just starting a big company uh in part because housing is so incredibly expensive that you just can't afford to house people here uh the business climate is so awful that you you just cannot build office buildings around here so i see that pattern the aerospace industry left a generation ago so that pattern certainly seems to be the danger california will face now forever the weather's still pretty nice uh so uh it could be a it could end up you know carmel doesn't have a lot of businesses but still has a fair amount of money because retired people move there um so uh you know california has better weather than detroit but that's all you're trading on once you have immensely high taxes a regulatory environment that makes it nearly impossible to run a business or to expand a business to invest uh and now um the the problems of crime homelessness making it not even a pleasant place to live the 20-somethings don't want to live in san francisco anymore they want to move out as well so i want to bring hr in at this point by slightly pivoting to the geopolitics of of california which is not something that gets discussed nearly often enough but john as you talk about the big tech companies that are the equivalent of the big detroit uh automobile manufacturers i'm thinking you know what those tech companies are pretty strategically important these days whether it's artificial intelligence quantum computing you name it a lot of the cutting edge research is being done at the big tech companies notably google apple and and the others and so i wanted to to ask hr a question prompted by something that my friend janan ganesh wrote in the financial times this week about the states quote china facing geography and here i go with the quotation from the naval base san diego to the bay area's tech exports california is the conduit through which the us vies with its rival across the sea its sense of detachment for the national story will be ever harder to sustain hr you've been with us now for quite some time enough i think to get a feel for this part of the united states do you ever wonder if there's a kind of disconnect between california's strategic importance and the way californians think about it i think that i think that disconnect has been growing in in recent years you know based on the on the assumption right that the china having been welcomed into the international order would liberalize would you would play by the rules and then liberalize its economy and its form of government i i think we're coming back more into alignment remember you know i mean the way that that uh silicon valley really really became a center of economic activity was a large measure with defense investments right in the aerospace industry as john mentioned and and that innovation ecosystem developed around universities and cutting-edge technologies and and those who were applied to defense and often times in these closed research and development systems and efforts that would then spin out technologies into the commercial sector after they were developed that ecosystem has shifted now to to really innovation happening mainly in the private sector with much of this innovation having defense application but at the same time as that shift was happening california i think it really designed for itself more of an internationalist identity i mean just look on an iphone right it says designed in california let's say designed in the united states of america you know and so this this sort of trans-pacific experiment to use the title of a book on china's and in california's relationship with one another i think is under duress because now i think everybody's working waking up including tech companies to the grave danger of the chinese communist party not only in connection with its unfair trade and economic practices and sustained campaign of industrial espionage but the way that the chinese communist party is using technology to extend and tighten its exclusive grip on power to extinguish human extinguish and freedom and to gain a differential advantage over us not only militarily but also in the emerging data driven uh global economy to get to get on to to get an exclusive grip on critical supply chains involving you know rare earths and and battery manufacturing uh for for example and to do so in a way that will place future generations of americans uh at a position of disadvantage uh as as well as eliminate the competitive advantages of of california's tech companies so i think it's changing in a positive direction now but it was this sort of this moral equivalence of you know we're all just citizens of the world you know that that i think led to a degree of complacency that allowed china to really do a great job of infiltrating uh tech companies and infiltrating really research labs and research facilities that were funded even by the u.s departments of defense and energy so i have to push back just a little against a small part of what hr said because my job is to because it wouldn't be good fellows if you didn't first of all my job is to object to mercantilism in all its form remember that the point of trade is not for existing companies to make profits by selling uh trade is trade the ports remain clogged cost ten thousand bucks to get a container from china to uh the us online up from 2000 um you know that that's going on as much as it ever ever used to you know when you say exclusive grip grip on supply chain remember china has to import as much as it has to export a supply chain is a supply chain things bounce back and forth in fact you know the the u.s stopping china from importing things could slow down its economy uh very drastically you don't have control over things as much as you think uh in trade the tech companies um at last report google and apple many of their employees are refusing to work on any uh thing revolving defense so our defense and and security tech is strikes me as a quite separate question which i want to hear more about from the tech companies in general in fact in the larger scheme of things tech strikes me that it has made it it isn't the detroit of the 1920s uh with lots of companies innovating it is the detroit of the big three maybe the detroit of the 1950s tech has now turned into a regulated oligopoly uh was con is still a little bit innovative in its desire to harvest data but as far as the big new inventions that is not our current temp companies which might be therefore ripe for their own disruption from something else that comes from somewhere else but nobody these days would go out and say what's good for google is good for the united states in the way that what was good for general motors was good for the united states i think i mean williamson's point is i'm i'm sure that the detroit of the 1950s not the 20s when already was uh almost oligopolistic and as he as he observes as those dominant car manufacturers began to lose out to foreign competition it did not cause the political pendulum to swing back on the contrary a death spiral uh was what you got where uh where the democratic one-party state kind of dragged uh drac went down or dragged down the economy with it but but hr wait you just said something very important this is the political spiral we'll get back to hr and china and so forth the political spiral which we've seen uh many times is a a country an area is falling to pieces yet everybody wants their piece out of the carcass so you're unable the taxes go up the businesses move out the taxes go up even more uh the demand for pensions for government employees overwhelm the government state that the government finances so they start cutting money on police so crime so gets worse so that more companies move out and nobody's able to uh organize that grand bargain where we we stopped giving up our desire to take it from everybody else meanwhile sinking the whole ship and that is the political spiral that california through its massive failures of governance is is uh is open to and i know that elon musk may have left california but he certainly hasn't left china i want to use the moderator's privilege of of slightly pivoting uh to to another issue on our agenda and that is whether there are any good news stories anywhere in this country uh for republicans dealing with uh blue state politics and bill one of the things you were writing about just the other day was what california republicans can learn from their massachusetts counterparts and this i know a little bit about after 12 years of uh of living and working there i got quite used to divided government and having uh mitt romney as a governor and now we we have uh in in baker another republican governor what is it that in your view the the republicans have got right in massachusetts that they don't seem able to get right in california well neil i thought about this and i give you credit because you raised this on a previous show or an off-camera conversation we have where you asked how can republicans win in massachusetts but not california it's a very good question neil because if you look at the disparity in voter registration it's 22 points in california it's about 21 points in massachusetts with one important difference republicans are only 10 percent of the electorate massachusetts neil but democrats are only 30 percent so 54 of that electorate is up for grabs deals so-called unenrolled voters it sounds like health care but they call them unenrolled in massachusetts means independence you might have been one of them when you live there and i couldn't vote i wasn't a citizen then i just had to watch oh but neil state you could still vote in massachusetts trust me there are ways to do that but i wouldn't break the law like that i'm i'm i'm i was a law-abiding non-citizen yeah that sounds more like cochran but not the boy scout mcmaster but anyway in massachusetts um republicans have looked at the landscape and realized that we have 10 percent of the vote out here we're not going to win 10 percent of the vote even if we peel off democrat votes we have to appeal to the 54 percent and if you look at the last six or so elections in massachusetts kneel for governors republicans have won four at the same time california has seen democrats win five out of six here republicans won four out of six there it's pretty simple it's darwinism neil they've adapted to their environment look at mitt romney he was a one-term governor back in the early 2000s in massachusetts not the rip not the mitt romney you saw when he ran for president very much a social conservative mitt romney said he would not take away abortion in massachusetts mitt romney was very warm no pun intended toward climate change when he was a governor mitt romney enacted a health care reform a health law in massachusetts a kind of eerily paralleled obamacare and when he ran for president this was a big problem for him not the mit romney who went national you look at the current governor of massachusetts uh nailed charlie baker who at various times has been the most popular governor in america according to opinion polls i saw one survey that had him more popular than dunkin donuts which for some people is the unofficial state food in massachusetts charlie baker has managed to survive now he may be up for re-election next year for a third term which might be problematic but he has thrived in massachusetts neil again by adapting again he's embraced climate change he's been very aggressive on uh vaccine vaccination mandates neil and he has never shied away from picking fights and getting into scraps with donald trump in other words these are things that the majority of massachusetts would salute so you look at california as compared to what john was talking about you're going to have to pick up issues which have resonance with the majority of the voters not the dug in 35 percent of the electorate but the 50 plus one who can actually deliver a victory for you that's funny you should mention vaccines because a couple of republican governors are having a somewhat torrid time yes uh with covert right now and i wanted to swing our conversation to the situation in florida uh where governor desantis has seen his net approval full 14 points texas similar kind of story for governor abbott and the narrative that is certainly out there in uh in media land is that this is because they've mishandled uh covert by essentially putting themselves on the other side of all the debates uh from from face masks to vaccination and in particular resisting any compulsion for citizens there in their states to wear masks or get vaccinated and the argument uh is that that's why the delta wave has been so much more uh of a problem in states such as florida and texas to say nothing of other southern states i wanted to bring john in here because john uh like me you've been a close uh student of the covert pandemic and uh not only its economics but its wider ramifications do you buy this story that uh that there is a kind of fundamental difference between red state and blue state america when it comes to a vaccination in particular and that explains uh the divergence uh in hospitalization and death rates during the delta wave um to some extent masks are they work a little bit but much less than people give them credit for you cannot walk into a crowded bar and think you're safe because you wear your mask it's perhaps the most politic you know most potent symbol uh but not the secret to reducing a reproduction rate from six to one which masks do not do vaccines are very helpful and the step against vaccines i think is you know we had a chance come on guys let's all get vaccinated before the delta wave came out and the u.s blew that one um in many ways but it is a remarkable step back in fact the complaining about newsom uh you know our republican candidates are saying the first thing they're going to do is get rid of the masks and vaccine mandates rather than what one should be angry about nusamat is the way he handled things a year ago but i guess a year is too long for anyone to remember about how lockdowns and endless press conferences and just gross incompetence the first time around that incompetence is still around just that you know america our bureaucracy has given up on anything but the the the fantasy that slightly changing mass mandates is going to make any difference whatsoever to the spread of a disease and and the fact we just gotta you know people gotta get vaccinated and stop complaining about it uh so i you know i i don't think it's as potent and it's also not just uh a republican democrat makes for a lovely uh narrative in today's politicized media but there's income race and other categories where people are refusing vaccinations which is kind of a tragedy uh you know imagine imagine our ancestors in the middle of a wave of typhus or cholera telling and telling them that your descendants will be handed over a weekend the answer to a global pandemic and somehow they couldn't get the fda to certify it for nine months and then when it finally came out they couldn't get people to take it and it and it kept on going it's really kind of a tragedy that we can't get this next john data guys aren't we and i took a look at the data to see if there was this big difference between let us say california and florida and here are the percentages of the population of those states fully vaccinated against covert 19. california as of yesterday september 13th 57.2 percent florida 55.2 percent so two percentage points difference that doesn't seem to me too but neil i think you're missing something here in that uh vaccines have now become a wedge issue in american politics and you see this here in california what is what has been nuisance closing argument he's pushed three buttons to get democrats to turn out number one is abortion thanks to the ruling in texas the texas law uh secondly it's the long shadow of donald trump uh the ads against larry elder show elder with the thumbs up next trump of the thumbs up and then the third is now vaccines which he calls a matter of life and death and let me point your attention to the commonwealth of virginia my home state which used to be a very red state until obama flipped it oh biden carried it by 10 points in 2020 they have a governor's race this fall neal seven weeks from now and we always look at that as a bellwether because virginia new jersey vote the year after president comes in uh the democrat terry mcauliffe he used to be the governor of virginia he's running again to get back his office he is calling his opponent anti-science and that's the buzzword you're going to hear from democrats i think as we get into 2020 where are you on vaccines are you pro-science or anti-science so i wonder whether this is really something that is going to work uh into 2022. i i buy the story that it's helped a lot in the newsroom campaign and it may play some part in virginia though i should add that the percentage of the population fully vaccinated in virginia is only fractionally above california and 58 i mean these differences are actually trivial but i get the point about the wedge issue but is it a wedge issue in 2022 when the delta wave will be a distant memory and let's face it the delta wave is cresting now even in the least vaccinated parts it doesn't deal it does nail it butts up against what other reality in virginia in that if you look at the virginia it's not just a governor's race neil it's also legislative races and i took my glasses on because i want to read you quickly what the state legislature has done in virginia virginia had a republican governor for a long time republican legislature and then it flipped after the 2019 election and the virginia legislature neil is kind of nancy pelosi's every fantasy here's what they've done since they took office they passed voting rights laws they've abolished a death penalty they passed gun safety laws they increased the minimum wage they declared racism a public health emergency and made it illegal and discriminated against the lgbtqia community meal i think that vote in the first tuesday in november is going to be an interesting window into 2022 to see just how much residence and pushback there is against populism neil keep in mind loudoun count in virginia which is in the excerpts of washington dc has been one of the most hotly contested parts of the country when it comes to critical race theory so while yes democrats may be pushing science as the wedge issue i think you'll see republicans pushing back and using the aforementioned woke issues and aoc is the counter well if they can do that that will be effective i mean so i would just emphasize what neil said the the the uh narrative that vaccination rates explain the change in delta just doesn't make any sense right uh you know how much natural immunity is there out there uh how much do people see each other that's what it explains the fundamental way not to get coveted is not to hang around with people who have covet let's get back to back to back to your your question just there was an important point that that needed emphasizing there you know this is the big question is is the next political thing going to be about trump guns abortion vaccines and masks that would be a disaster for republicans if that's all they can come up with or will it be about governance crime uh the the woke revolution as you called it um uh and and all the crazy stuff coming out of washington uh so will there be a competent republican party emphasizing issues of simple governance and personal freedoms including that to speak that americans care about or how about national security hr it's kind of striking to me thank you joe biden's net approval rating turned negative more or less immediately after the absolutely shambolic evacuation of american troops uh civilians and a few others from afghanistan and i wonder if you sense sea change there or whether the the commentators are right who say that this is a kind of one-week wonder and will soon be forgotten i can't help feeling as i look back on the 20th anniversary of of 9 11 that one major terrorist attack is all it needs to transform our national conversation but even if that doesn't happen even if we continue to avoid another 911 do you sense that the biden administration committed a a lasting uh amount of damage to itself over afghanistan and is that something you expect to play into the midterms uh next year yes i do neil and and the reason is people americans don't want to lose wars and obviously what we've seen is is that when you lose a war especially when you lose war through self-defeat by signing a surrender agreement with the taliban and then adhering to an agreement that the enemy that the enemy doesn't that doesn't adhere to at all uh and then lied to the american people over and over again uh about the nature of the situation in afghanistan and the very nature of the enemy right what have we heard hey the taliban is separate from jihadist terrorists what have we seen suraj haqqani who is prominent in al-qaeda and the head of the haqqani network as head of security uh we've heard that well maybe the taliban will will implement a more benign form of sharia what do we see we see summary executions brutalization of women the extinguishment of human rights you know we we hear that you know that that the taliban will be maybe concerned about the aprobium you know of the international community uh and therefore will will help uh you know us our citizens and others who have helped us uh depart afghanistan what more do you need to know other than this that the supreme leader of the taliban habitually you know his son was a 17 year old suicide bomber and they're talking about interest being aligned without even discussing the ideology of this organization that is determined to thrust afghanistan back to the 7th century and and is waging at jihad against all civilized people and is interconnected with these jihadist terrorists so i think the american people will recognize that they've been lied to even though the media is not highlighting it remember with donald trump that kept score you know hey this is what the president administration has said here's what reality is who's keeping score now do you remember under donald trump everybody was upset about the president's mean tweets toward allies how about leaving the citizens of allied countries behind you know hostage situation no i think it's going to keep it starting to go on it's going to it's going to continue it's a long problem yeah john can i can i john before you have your question here as the moderator and both both john and bill have been very rudely interrupting hr and it's outrageous and i'm not even sure i'm going to let you back in i want to ask you more questions that's all but but you're so great i want to ask another question as long as you behave yourselves bill why don't you go first and then john okay i just want to point out one thing kevin mccarthy who's the house minority leader he aspires to be the speaker after next year's elections he's good at two things folks he's good at raising money and he's good at finding candidates and he has gone out hr and he's made a point of getting veterans right now he looks at the house and i think he sees a problem there are 91 veterans in all of congress right now hr about one in six that's the lowest it's been since world war ii you go back to 1973 three and four members of congress had military service so mccarthy has recruited no less than 144 veterans to run for congress this year that suggests to me that afghanistan very much is going to be in the conversation not just the debacle but also you just think of the image it's embarrassing it's a patriotic insult it just it's american retreat it's tailor made for for veterans and i think this is an interesting wrinkle to look at the congress moving forward it congress in 2022 moving beyond if you get a hundred of these veterans in let's say it could look very much like the congress in 1946 and 48 when you had very young men like jack kennedy and richard nixon and gerald ford coming to washington so i think that's where afghanistan and national security could play in next year's midterms interestingly one of the unintended consequences of the old volunteer force versus the draft is that you have a much smaller pool of people with military service to bring into the political process uh john you had a point so um i would ask more questions of hr because he's on a fascinating role here it's amazing to me that biden's only down 45 percent the amazing thing about this is he still has 45 approval despite this debacle but you said you said i think unintentionally we lost the war that would mean that the war is over and it is not uh as you keep reminding us the war is over when the enemy says it's over the enemy here is not the taliban in afghanistan the enemy is a global uh war against islamic fundamentalism which will play out across the middle east and across all sorts of places uh afghanistan is one little battle in that war which we chose to chose to lose but that that war goes on and then for that reason i want to ask you to prognosticate the biden administration has announced they want out of iraq too uh and there and uh brighton has been remarkably trump-like in in proclaiming every defeat to be a wonderful victory having had this wonderful victory in afghanistan are we really going to repeat the same thing in iraq as promised and uh if not you know kennedy famously had a a failure in the bay of pigs recognized that the process was to blame got things back together again and then successfully navigated the um the cuban missile crisis is anybody realizing that the process here is completely broken some heads need to roll and we better get ready before we do this again in iraq under exactly the same circumstances well just the scope of this this goes back to neil's initial question john is is that you know this is going to keep this is the gift that will keep giving right back to the divine administration and and the reason is this is a this is a humanitarian catastrophe which we're just now seeing the beginning of uh we'll have to confront it right because the last time the taliban was in power from 96 to 2001 there wasn't even one cell phone in the country and now everybody has a cell phone these images will be inescapable it's a political catastrophe as we were discussing in connection with our our credibility with allies and friends internationally but it's a security catastrophe in terms of the strengthening of jihadist terrorists what we're seeing play out already is a declaration of victory obviously by the taliban somehow and this gets this gets to bill's point i mean this was an affront i think to to many veterans that the president announced that he was going to adhere to the timeline would withdraw from area 60 of arlington cemetery area 60 is where is where heroes are laid to rest who gave made the ultimate sacrifice in the wars in iraq and in afghanistan and somehow he he thought that veterans would think that that was a that was an appropriate gesture rather than an insult because i think there's a misunderstanding this goes back to neal's point that very few served very few americans understand the warrior ethos i mean warriors don't want pity what warriors expect i think from their political leadership is their determination to achieve an outcome that's worthy of the sacrifice they see their fellow servants men and women make and and the risks that they take in in battle and so i think all of this is going to continue to play out in a way that is to the profound disadvantage of the of the administration unless they stop pretending stop pretending that a lost war doesn't have consequences stop pretending that the taliban is separate from other jihadist terrorists you'll stop pretending that leaving afghanistan doesn't put you at a profound disadvantage from counterterror from a counter-terrorist perspective because you have this great dream of over the horizon capabilities but i haven't seen any indication that any leader is willing to confront reality and so i don't think the facts will go away if if if the fourth estate does their job right if they expose the reality and draw the contrast between that reality on the ground and what the administration is saying and portraying to the american people i think the administration is going to have a hard time i mean you know i wrote a book about vietnam years ago and really why americans lost faith in lyndon johnson the johnson administration was because the reality of the war in vietnam was apparent and was in direct contravention to what the johnson administration had been telling the american people from from years prior but then once we left so neil i want to ask you the historian uh is not america even more effectless than this there are humanitarian catastrophes all over the world the state of women throughout the middle east is pretty atrocious uh people are dying and starving in all parts of africa and we don't seem to care uh really is that going to bother anyone a year from now uh and and still affect things politically i think it will hugely depend on whether there are consequences for the u.s homeland what's fascinating about the war on terror is that globally terror won we don't notice this but in fact deities activity has spread far beyond the places where american troops were deployed and is now causing uh mayhem in many parts of of africa nigeria is the best known example somalia is well known but places like mali are now being infected by this this virus and i think the american public will avert its gaze it has a good track record of doing that where africa is concerned unless there's spillover uh into into american life i want to end with a question for everybody uh lightning round uh big picture let's step back we've talked california we maybe sounded parochial to some listeners we talked america we try to get global with the help of hr but i want to ask is the world swinging left or right as we speak because my sense is if i look at europe where i have just been that there's quite a swing to the left discernible not least in germany where the social democrats are expected to win the upcoming uh election there was a labor victory in norway just the other day boris johnson is not quite riding as high as he did in the uk and uh i wonder if newsome survival is part of the surprising strength of the left globally because partly because covert has legitimized the left-wing view that big government is the answer so lightning round starting with hr then john and then bill can rapid is the world moving left or right or is this just a stupid question h.r well i'm standing from international perspective i hope it's swinging to the middle right and and rejects both that the self-loathing philosophy of the far left and which we're defined as the problem and therefore you know our disengagement from abroad is an unmitigated good i mean how do afghan women feel about that philosophy and and maybe when it when the uh you're the far left now is arguing for a reduction uh and and constraining um of the authorization of of military force that allows us to go after jihadist terrorists internationally and they're advocating for the terrorists who are interned um in in in guantanamo bay i mean they're more concerned about them than they are for for afghan women and the innocents are being victimized and brutalized by by the taliban i don't think that plays well you know with the vast majority of americans and i think it cuts against as well the the the uh the you know the i would say the swing to the second hope the the bigoted i would say the biggest neil isolation is far right uh that saw our disengagement from the world as well as an unmitigated good based on this idea right that you know that those people over there you know they've always been at war with each other there's nothing good that can come of u.s involvement and and and i think that that both are wrong and what we need is a reasoned and sustained approach to foreign policy national security that prioritizes our interests as we've been discussing here uh and understands both that we do have agency and that there are limits on our agency you're stressing out the producer by tr treating the word lightning too lightly uh john uh inside 60 seconds please uh is the world going left or right and and do you buy my thesis that covert is kind of on net benefit to the left um i don't buy your thesis and i'll try for once to be shorter than hr this is a wonderful opportunity i'm timing you uh no i'm not going to make you 60 seconds uh the left is ascendant among international institutions bureaucracies uh those parts of our government and corporate world that are insulated from voters uh the woke the woke religion revolution really is taking over there uh however the right is in complete disarray um doesn't know what it stands for uh and what it is there's a mass of people who simply want competent and good govern government and that's why they keep uh letting one side in because that side is not as bad as the previous one uh trump won because he wasn't hillary clinton buying one because he wasn't trump the next one will win because he or she is not buying and so there's this hunger for competent good governance in the middle and i can only hope we get that before one of the left or right manages in their obvious efforts to try and take over and not let those untrustworthy voters do what they like to do covet should be the lesson that our bureaucracies are completely incompetent not to be trusted however the usual uh process of writing down whatever we last did and celebrating it as a wonderful victory so we're ready to make the same mistakes all over again seems to be underway brilliantly done john a model of concision and this leaves only the last the last words on the subject uh from bill whelan i have no idea how to deal with getting the last word i'm so not used to it on this show uh our producer by the way says neil we have a lot of time left so i think i'll go on for about 10 or 15 minutes don't give the game away like that no uh it's a very smart question neil and i think the answer is it's a jump ball how's that for uh weaseling out of a definitive answer but it begins with canada which we haven't talked about but september 20th they have a spot election justin trudeau who runs a minority liberal party thought that he would stage his spawn election to pick up seats in parliament it appears that it's backfiring and if you look at what's going on in canada neil it's similar to california and that he's going after conservatives in canada mouth-breathing anti-science conservatives so let's see if that plays number one it backfires against him that speaks to uh reacting to the right i mentioned virginia let's also see if there's a push back to the right there but then i think neil you're looking toward the 2022 midterm election and if there's a revolt in congress or not but then the pivot out of that deal this is the question moving forward will joe biden run again for president but what happens on the republican side and again the long shadow of donald trump if donald trump decides to run for president i'm pretty i would be willing to bet you a dunkin donut that he will get the nomination because he just needs a plurality to get it and what do we know about donald trump it's going to be theater it's not going to be a serious conversation if you will so that would be a disadvantage to the right so i think let's look at canada let's look at virginia and then let's just see kind of which party really is kind of willing to take the adult step and then be a little more sensible since we went a couple minutes on you you only i was just about to wrap and you don't get to because we have a couple minutes you only ask a question i know you when you have a really smart answer so i want to hear your version of the answer to that last question yeah tell us how we all got it wrong well if you insist my sense is that this pendulum uh has swung to the left that covert has legitimized big fiscal expansions uh uh modern monetary theory uh by uh by other means in all but name and for the moment this is benefiting parties of the left right but uh there's gonna be pain uh and it's already visible in the inflation data and not only there so if this is a a left-wing swing i think it will be quite short-lived especially in the united states where i'd be willing to bet more than a dunking donut who by the way aren't sponsoring good fellows it just keeps coming up i blame you bill i'll bet you any amount of dunking donuts that uh another shellacking is uh in prospect for the democrats at uh at the midterms next year and i suspect also in europe that the pendulum will quickly swing back to the right because coming soon and you heard it here first is a great second migration crisis uh as the the numbers that can make their way from africa and the middle east uh and of course from afghanistan to europe will will quite potentially uh quite possibly dwarf the numbers of 19 of 2015 2016. so my guess is the world looks a little bit leftish at the moment uh uh the world has got its uh it's met gala dress on saying uh tax the rich but not worrying about when the taxes go up for not just the rich but a whole bunch of other people too i'll i would bet that pendulum swings right back to the right okay i'm now gonna uh revert to being moderator and stop opinionating and draw this discussion to a close we have uh another exciting episode of goodfellas in prospect uh one week from now we are still in the market for a topic suggestions always welcome uh we could uh conceivably go for one of our ask us anything sessions with that it only remains for me to wrap and i hope i'll be reverting to my normal situation and handing the moderator's chair back to a professional like bill whalen i would also like to thank john cochran h.r mcmaster for their always insightful comments and questions and thank all of you for listening to another edition of good fellows it's normally at this stage that bill tells you to stay safe or something like that i'm kind of sick of that stay safe stuff so i'm just going to say stay engaged keep listening and we will do our best to keep you uh informed uh with that it's uh it's goodbye from me neil ferguson and goodbye from the other good fellows if you enjoyed this show and are interested in watching more content featuring h.r mcmaster watch battlegrounds also available at hoover.org you

Channel: Hoover Institution

Views: 11,910

Rating: 4.8429751 out of 5

Keywords: California, recall, Gavin Newsom, Larry Elder, Democrats, Republicans, COVID, economy, Afghanistan, warrior class, woke revolution, Virginia, Trudeau, Canada

Id: roNvbT_X1O8

Length: 55min 9sec (3309 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 15 2021