What’s So Funny about Corona, Politics, the Media, and the Culture? Andrew Ferguson and P.J O'Rourke

[Music] pj o'rourke the legendary bad boy of gonzo journalism and andrew ferguson the finest pro stylist and wittiest observer in washington today or for several decades joining us to discuss their wasted youth and the present predicament a special plague time edition of uncommon knowledge with peter robinson pj and andy thank you for making the time pj you're at home peterborough new hampshire exactly right and andy you are in arlington virginia that's exactly right all right boys to the introduction patrick jake o'rourke grew up in toledo ohio he became one of the inventors of gonzo journalism during his decades of writing for national lampoon at rolling stone and at least a dozen other publications he's the author of again well over a dozen books including the best book ever written on the way washington works parliament of horrors everybody's entitled to an opinion that ladies and gentlemen is a fact it's the best and his book on the election of 2016 how the hell did this happen p.j o'rourke now serves as editor-in-chief of american consequences andrew ferguson grew up in illinois and has been writing about politics and culture in washington since the reagan years now at the atlantic andy has written a number of books including most recently crazy you one dad's crash course on getting his kid into college new york times columnist david brooks has called andy quote the greatest political writer of my generation and for once david brooks was correct um gentlemen my middle son just the other day hey dad do you know what we call the coronavirus we kids we call it the boomer remover on one side of us the greatest generation on the other side our kids millennials or gen xers or whatever they are you've got three pj andy you've got two but of course it's about us uh we consider ourselves at the very peak of our performance full of years and wisdom the kids think we're about to shuffle toward the exits but how do you grade our generation how has the baby boom generation of americans comported itself pj um i i hate to say worst ever um because because i've got kids and uh and and you know they're they've yet to prove themselves completely worthless but uh no i think the baby boom has just been um uh an absolute horror show uh we um uh we we grew up with uh way too much uh prosperity uh parents who are far too kindly and decent unlike their parents had been um we faced one major challenge in our youth uh the war in vietnam and um we ran from it as best we could um i i feel sorry for the guys who got caught uh weren't quite as quick on their feet as as i was uh we faced one great challenge uh we completely flunked that um we've elected uh a fair number of idiots uh and we've really just topped out recently and um yeah i would say we're awful andy i can't i can't argue with that i might i'm a self-loathing uh baby boomer myself um one thing you can say about baby boomers i think you can uh which is that there is a higher number of self loaders among baby boomers probably than any other generation so we may be uh venal and uh maritricious and stupid but at least we know it so is that is that self-loathing simply the current expression as we get older of a self-absorption that has always been oh i've had i've had it for years all right one really unpleasant thing about self-absorption as you get older is who and what you're absorbed in you know i mean when one was young and trim and fit and so on it was one thing to be self-absorbed but to be self-absorbed in an old and flabby not very well and somewhat forgetful person was really and i that that and and that's hence the pandemic you know every generation gets the uh this is this is our crisis here this is our depression this is our world war ii um every generation gets the crisis it deserves but the one thing crisis is supposed to do is bring people together we got a crisis that keeps people six feet apart um you know it's interesting though it says that usually people when they're facing crisis you know they say this is my own personal vietnam but baby boomers can't say this is the baby booms vietnam because vietnam vietnam oh gentlemen sco all right pj has raised the top at covet 19 and all but a few thinly populated states i think the number of states is seven out of the 50. so that means 43 other states we've all been told to walk away from our jobs and stay at home and wear face masks and wash our hands and for weeks now tens of millions of americans have done just that does the does the sheer willingness to obey of americans in this crisis surprise you concern you or does it strike you as entirely appropriate we should be scared out of our wits and obedience is a simple corollary of that andy what do you think well i remember the great uh scene in that um revisionist western with dustin hoffman little big man where he meets up with um uh wild bill uh hiccup and hiccup consists of sitting with his back to the wall so he can see the door and little big man says well why are you doing that bill why you always sit there he said because i'm afraid of getting shot and um that's kind of you know i'm not too surprised people are all indoors because they're afraid of catching this deadly illness that will especially if you're my age or over or even if you're peter's age he's much younger than i am um you're likely to you're likely to buy the farm yeah all right so the conservative andy ferguson pj just told us it's entirely appropriate for us to obey meekly you have gone through life as a libertarian which is a different stripe of creature do i get anything from you any urge to rebel any wish that we'd put up more of a kick over this um i'm absolutely opposed to all of this closing down society and the economy and i am obeying every injunction to do so to the letter because when it comes to weighing courage versus principle um uh the uh cowardice one out uh uh yeah i i i am and quite reasonably i think uh i'm frightened of getting this um i also i i don't i think there is something that's not i worry of course that the government will is having so much fun bossing everybody around and it won't want to quit having that fun after this is over in fact the government will be reluctant to declare that it's over or parts of the government will i mean who who could possibly imagine a scenario where andrew cuomo is likable i've never heard a single kind word about him and all the time that i have been covering politics which would be his entire political career um but just you know it is going to be tough for them to let go but i think there's something i think there's something else going on here so i really do think that um um people do want to help people are and they don't know how they can help uh you can sew a few face masks at home or one can i can't um and and so i really think that they're obeying not so much out of deference to government or like or even fear of the disease but out of the out of some sort of of desire for better social good which is is kind of sweet i think in a way i'm i'm i'm touched a lot of people are putting themselves to huge huge inconvenience and you know deprivation andy you wrote recently the new quarantine regime has relieved considerable pressure on the introvert community the world has caught up with us at last you're enjoying yourself i wrote that a few weeks ago yeah it kind of even the the the introvert in me has started to get a little extroverted um yeah this has gone on about as long as as i can take it i'll probably take it for a few more weeks but uh i like what pj said you know i've actually strangely seen this in in myself which is very unusual to see this kind of fellow feeling in myself but um i hate wearing this mask i have a little homemade mask that i keep in my cars for when i go out to the store or whatever um and i i would not wear the mask except it makes people feel better it doesn't make me feel better but it makes everybody else feel better uh and so when i go into you're never you're not surly about it you do it i i confess i only put on the mask when either it's required and there's certain stores here in northern california where you're not permitted in unless you're wearing a mask or i receive the evil eye from three people in a row that's my rule yeah i just want i hate it no yeah i hate it too but i want people to feel better and feel more comfortable it's bad enough for everybody as it is this interview ends right now that i've already established that two of you have gone soft we have sweethearts pj o'rourke and andy ferguson what's happened yeah yeah it's um um you know it started with the trump election and it just went down from hill downhill from there and the next thing you know i'm going to be uh feeling the burn i i don't know what's happening to me uh but i actually haven't tried the mask yet uh i have not you live in peterborough new hampshire that's i have not dropped this property really i have not been off the property for six weeks uh which i have discovered is just fine with me i am i mean i'm in a very lucky position i i'm in a beautiful place up on top of a hill we've got a bunch of land and i'm just uh um i've discovered i really didn't like to go out anyway uh uh you know other people are well was it wasn't it start that said their hell and uh yeah i really don't mind i've got i got two of my kids home and um they're going nuts of course but i am i'm enjoying having them around um i i've got a wife who's masking up and doing the shopping errands and like the lone ranger and um i yeah i honestly i mean it's it's weird but i don't really mind it okay back to the baby boomer boomers and what we have wrought products of our generation anyway this is mandatory uh for the three of us who got to know each other during the 1980s how did this happen how did the united states of america go from donald from ronald reagan to donald trump andy pj now what i'm after here is okay there's all kinds of contingency what i'm after here is is history just one damn thing after another and sometimes there are happy bounces and sometimes there are bad bounces or does it say something about the trajectory of the nation morals morale well-being that we go from ronald reagan to donald trump power of stupid um libertarianism and conservatism are actually extremely complex philosophies uh i mean i'll give you a couple of of examples for this try reading michael oakshott it's just nearly impossible to do and then there's i'm trying to remember who i think it was chesterfield that pointed out that that being a conservative is actually the hardest work in the world it's a it's an activist proposition if you have got a red white and green post and you want to conserve that post exactly as it was a a post out in the field a pillar or something and you want that to be red white and green and crisp and clean exactly the way it's always been you have to go out there and scrub it and paint it and and shoe the birds off the top and keep the uh you know keep people from ramming their car into it and so on it actually takes a lot of work to conserve things and another problem with with conservatism be besides it being hard to grasp and leftism is very easy to grasp you don't have anything because somebody took it away from you we're going to take it back and give it to you for free gotcha got it yeah got it no no problem uh but conservativeness is very i mean you know balancing individual liberty with individual uh um responsibility uh is is just is a terribly difficult thing to do and it is and and conservatism easily drifts off into things that are easier to understand like the sort of populist bigotry that donald trump represents and um you know the left can't drift off into stupidity because it's already there but we we made the mistake of winning we're a fabulous opposition party it's great to have bill buckley standing uh uh uh you know amidst the tide of history yelling stop you know but then his then that tide of history actually did stop and we were in charge and it quickly degenerated andy here's norman podhoretz norman podhoritz now 90 years old former editor of commentary father of neoconservatism maybe maybe the grandfather of conservative journalism here's norman podhoritz on donald trump the fact that trump was elected is a kind of miracle to save us from the evil on the left his virtues are the virtues of street kids you don't back away from a fight and you fight to win close quote andy can you find anything in there to agree with uh no no he's not a fighter he's he's just he's he's a name-caller and he's uh um yeah he's a spoiled kid who who uh you know generally speaking got his way um and always has and uh but he's from queens i guess so that makes him think that he's tough but he's you know he's if you push him he's like every other bully he just backs off and uh but doesn't really fight for things and people are saying that he's a fighter no he's not he's not really he's he hates the people that he hates and he's contemptuous of them just as they're contemptuous of him but that's quite different from being a fighter pj on joe biden joe biden is a zombie from the policy cemetery of the carter era with a stump performance like the living dead close quote all right we've talked about ronald reagan to donald trump how do we go from the democratic party of john kennedy and hubert humphrey and lbj and your old friend andy eugene mccarthy to joe biden pj yeah well the power of stupidity works uh works on in in both parties i mean the traditional democratic party had a pretty delicate balancing act to do itself i mean they they had the left they've always had that sort of left-wing thrust where we're going to take everything from the rich people and distribute it to the poor or we're a robin hood but up until a lot and up until i don't know up until hillary clinton maybe uh they always thought they had to balance that with with with some kind of pragmatism you know i mean like like like the head of the uaw had to balance his anger at the bosses at gm with keeping his members employed he couldn't destroy the corporation off of which he lived so democrats have always had to do the delicate uh any par they're a parasitical party and any parasite always has to be careful not to kill its host reminder coronavirus thank you um and but somewhere they just sort of lost sight of that and uh and decided that that they would go with the h.l menken uh definition of practical politics is the auction of goods about to be stolen andy what would your friend you you you befriended him in his final years what would your friend jean mccarthy have made of joe what would he have made of the democratic party today uh i it's hard to know what his politics were uh at the end of his life he was very um he was suey generous uh you know he he quite admired uh reagan loved jack kennedy hated bobby kennedy it was all a very complicated um set of opinions that he had but he was basically in economics he was basically a socialist so i don't think that he would be too alarmed by all this i think what he would one thing that he would really dislike is the balkanization is the word we used to use of the party and the um the obsession with different kinds of americans i remember he was amazingly uh kind of disgusted when in the 68 campaign he discovered that his rival robert kennedy had developed a um a campaign organization that had committees for uh 26 different kinds of americans and you know and that really was quite cuban democrats italian democrats yeah people didn't or you know rich italian democrats middle-class italian democrats you know and mccarthy said i know baskin robbins has 32 varieties of ice cream but i didn't know there are 32 varieties of americans and i think that would quite alarm him that this this business of identity politics is so essential to the party now back to the 1980s if i may back to the 1980s which is when the first the three of us first got to know each other well pj was already a famous journalist i was a white house speechwriter and he became a white house speechwriter i maybe the two of you had a more nuanced view of things than i did but i felt we were getting some place and it wasn't just youthful high spirits that the united states stands up to the soviet union and it demonstrates the power for good of democracy and we cut taxes and roll back regulations and demonstrate the power for good of capitalism that we were establishing permanently valuable lessons we were reaching conclusions and today china is on the rise communist china and young americans who were once the strongest supporters the most disproportionately ronald reagan was most popular among the youngest age cohort they're now the disproportionate supporters of bernie sanders young americans are socialists they're the supporters of bernie and elizabeth warren so did the 19 was i simply deluded was it really nothing other than youthful high spirits did the 1980s accomplish nothing how do we wha i i i i'm this is this is this you guys handle the humor i'll try to give a few i'll be i'll be abbot you'd be castalo if you wish but what i'm asking for here is does any of this mean anything did we get anything done with all those efforts of ours that we were pouring out in the 1980s andy well it sounds like you fell for the progressive fallacy which is that history has some kind of direction and you know reagan's rhetoric had a lot of that in it and i blame you for that actually um but also partly it's that um we were wrong about a lot of things i mean we all thought that okay you you know you bring china into the family of nations uh let them open up their markets free market and capitalism will will compel this kind of democratization and in you know 25 years we're going to have a liberalized us uh yeah china and of course we were wrong about that we thought that the collapse of the american family would yield all kinds of hellish social results and crime and so on it collapsed and actually things like abortion rates and pre-teenage pregnancy or down so we you know life was much more complicated than we thought when we were young i guess that's sort of an old man's lament isn't it well i would be if the old if that old man were making this old man feel better but you're not pj well i was i am older than you guys and i i was not a kid in the 1980s and i'd been through my 60s stage of youthful idealism i turned 40 in the 1980s and turned 40 during the reagan administration and um yeah i think andy's right that we were wrong about certain things wrong or we were oversimplifying them one one thing that caught us by surprise was that we assumed um given our belief in the self-organizing the hayaki and self-organizing abilities of human society we assumed that the newly freed countries behind the iron curtain would go out and self-organize himself in an organized way we did not realize how deeply damaged those societies had been by the by the not not so much by the oppression of communism although that too but by the corruption of communism we didn't realize what a corrupt structure had been left behind even when the people who built that structure were gone so we should have been a little smarter about that uh then um um we had this idea and it's an idea that's true i think in the long run but but it can be the very long run very long run is that free markets result in freedom and they do eventually we must remember that that europe had free markets of various forms for hundreds and hundreds of years before those those free markets resulted in the kind of freedoms that we were talking about but then we got blindsided by something that we so those two things we should have foreseen but there was something that we couldn't have foreseen no one could have foreseen which was an a a a sea change in the economy i mean equal to the industrial revolution the the electronic economy comes along and it's still so new that we don't even yet know what this actually means but we do know that any fundamental change in economic structure even if it's a change for the better is deeply disruptive and so one of the reasons millennials are such lefties is that the economy that they sort of expected to to to enter as adults has disappeared they're all making a living by driving each other around in uber and you know and who can blame them for being mad actually i my i took a trip to the airport about six months ago and found myself chatting with the uber driver who had graduated 18 months earlier from princeton university with a phd in philosophy yeah well it was it was he had taken his degree in hispanic studies it wasn't let's put it this way he was not a computer scientist journalism and speaking of disruption you've both made your entire careers as journalists and a conservative journalist pj libertarian journalist their cousins slightly different but cousins why does this profession overwhelmingly attract liberals pj you want to go oh i i've spent a lot of time thinking about that and um i think we spent years trying to figure it out yeah i really blame it entirely on the uh on the movie uh uh uh version of watergate not on watergate itself but on the uh the there were all these like uh uh well-meaning twerps out there who were going to join the peace corps and then they saw woodward and bernstein played by robert redford and dustin hoffman never mind that any journalist is going to end up being played by dustin hoffman not robert redford but you know they didn't quite get that through their heads all and all all these little world savers um pointless little world savers well-meaning jerks thought oh no not the peace corps i'm going to become a journalist i really think there was a because up until uh the woodward-bernstein era up until all the president's men uh journalist i mean i'm old enough to have still worked with these guys you know the newsroom was blue with lucky strike smoke you know everybody had a pint of booze in the in the in the drawer and started hitting at about 10 a.m you know and uh it was a maybe it tended a little bit to the left but that was just because that was a you know the the little guy you know it was all about like supporting the little girl if it was the left it was more of a new deal left more of a new deal left or an old union solidarity left or you know something something like that you know a little uh nelson algren type of thing but um but they they weren't idealists i mean these guys i mean lincoln go back to megan of course it wasn't like that but megan said the reason that you become a journalist is it's a ringside seed at the circus and of course now uh they've taken the elephants out of the circus i mean all we've got left at the circuses is the little clown car they put too many clowns in but never mind that's a that's a that's a side point but i really do think it's the world that has got a hold of it yeah do you remember this is coming back first time i remembered it for years the informal motto of the daily of the new york daily news used to be tell it to the mcsweeney's the stuyvesants already know did you ever hear that one oh yes it's a beautiful thing but that's that's that's that's the little guy we're sticking up for the little girl that's totally commendable and understandable and conservative in its own own way yeah yeah andy what well i think most journalists still think they're they're doing that uh the conditions around them think that they're standing up for the little guy and that they uh have contempt for the well-to-do and the rich the the thing is journalism the the conditions around journalism have changed so that it attracts a particular kind of busybody and um uh a reform-minded sort of person rather than the kind of you know just just the facts man ma'am and just tell it like it is and all that kind of stuff um it's it's much more uh a profession it's not a profession it's much more of a trade for people with reform minded who want to want to make the world look better for themselves take pursue that a little bit in the old days and by the old days i remember i'm talking about the days in which we were all young men that journalism i can remember thinking in college it would be the coolest thing actually it would be the coolest thing in the world to be pj o'rourke but there were magazines you wanted to write for remember when esquire was a written mag not men's style but there was writing okay so we all know that the business model for this has just collapsed all the advertising has moved to facebook and google and you can't afford to publish a magazine anymore and the weekly standard a great publication finally the billionaire who was supporting it gets tired off the weekly standard dies and the answer to that from my children i don't know if yours have the temerity to try it out on you the answer to that is no no don't worry about it all the good journalism is in the computer somewhere it's all migrated online there are just as many great writers you just have to look around for them a little bit by that or has something been permanently lost something has been permanently lost that simply isn't true that you know there's some good reporting that's somewhere around the internet if you if you sort through enough of it but but you know i mean uh takes me forever to sort through it so there's some reasonable reporting but there used to be a sort of a career arc to uh journalism that that that not everybody followed but that everybody knew about and it was kind of there as a model uh you the first impulse had to do with the writing usually uh nobody set out to be a reporter people sat set out to be writers uh if if your reporting chops were only where you know some of the people who were the best writers and kind of the worst reporters wound up as sports writers because you could sit in a chair and do your reporting right but but they were beautiful beautiful writers and the idea was to be a a great you know was to write well and then like you'd be noticed by the slicks by the magazines and your stuff would be picked up and plus you had a novel in your drawer along with that bottle of jack daniels was there was a novel you were working on and uh i know three or four old newspaper guys from the generation before me who did indeed write uh uh uh decent novels maybe they only wrote one maybe they never really broke into the big time but but they wrote but there was a career arc out there to be had and that that doesn't exist anymore uh uh journalism never paid really well it pays pitifully now right and so naturally it attracts the uh this people without enough to do the busybodies and nosy parkers of the world and and and um yeah no there there's been a real loss and the quality of the writing is just not good i mean even in even in the new york times uh you know i i even in new york times i i see reporters who cannot cannot tell the difference between um um whether they're there is you know between quantity and number you know whether there is less of something or whether there are fewer of those things um never you know i really just i really disagree with that i think you do yeah i really do i think there are some wonderful wonderful writers out there uh and people younger than we are of course everybody's younger than we are uh you know the the uh there's a great line from head of the fcc somebody said to him you know he was defending television and they said well you know 95 percent of television is crap he said 95 of everything is crap and i think we're romanticizing the uh the greatness of the of the those old newspaper writers i mean some of them really do stand the test of time others don't stand up all that well um uh but at the risk of sounding like a suck up i i work with several writers that i would put in in the category of uh at the atlantic now yeah yeah of a royco or um you know one of one of the legendary greats from the old days and a lot of the legendary greats as i say weren't all that great i mean pete hamill i'm sorry he's lionized is an embodiment of that old style that pj's talking about but he's terrible he's a terrible writer and always was does breslin stand up does jimmy breslin stand up no well not to me i went back and read a bunch of him for something i was writing about two or three years ago and it was hastily done factually suspect um very self-conscious hack-made stuff i thought okay let me tell you two stories and just see what you do with them and here's story number one which was told to me by tom wolf who followed that arc and tom wolf was at the herald tribune when walter when when john kennedy was shot and they turned on the television in the newsroom at the herald tribune and they watched walter cronkite and wolf said to himself this is the moment newspapers and i suppose in those days there was still at least half a dozen newspapers in new york newspapers are done people are getting their news from television this is the moment when there's a decisive shift and the next morning as he walked from his apartment back to the herald tribune offices of the herald tribune and of course nothing had been on it had been on television non-stop all night long he walks through manhattan and there are lines at every newsstand around the corner and he said what he drew from that is no it's not real until people read it the written word has a power that nothing else quite touches okay that's story number one story number two three or four thousand years ago when i was when i was an undergraduate at dartmouth college i got a great job working reunions i had to sit in a dorm and alums would leave the dorm where they were staying for their three or four day reunion they'd give me the key and at two in the morning when they came stumbling back in i'd give them the key back eight hour shift i was there all night and i read a book a night thirty years later i go back for a reunion of my own and it turns out the same job still exists but all the kids who are working reunions are not reading they're watching movies on their laptops all right andrew try to cheer us up about that boy i'm sorry peter you were right and i was wrong [Laughter] i think a lot of them are probably reading stuff on their laptops i mean you're just not worried about this what are you going to do what good is worrying going to do okay okay pj will you well you have recourse to tony soprano what are you going to do i was listening to andy talk about the wonderful writers that exist today and you know i i i andy's more deeply involved with the printed word and any more than than i am but i do still i am still editor of a of a web magazine and i do i've got some great writers there's no doubt about it but there's kind of no place for them to go with with what they do so i was sitting listening to annie and i was thinking gosh andy i hope you're right you know i hope you're right and i do know that some of those old legendary types were at the best very much of their moment and at their worst were were hacks you know um but that 95 of all things are shut this you know that does come but the reading thing there's absolutely no doubt about it i got three kids and um uh two of them really just don't read and and and one of those two is the is the best student of the three and the most serious academically most serious of the wants to be an archaeologist is studying all the tough stuff in college um taking the hard sciences where were her the the girl that does read her elder sister is the one who's an art history major and will soon be driving that uber to take you to the airport um no the kids really don't read and we've got a house full of books we must we we must have five thousand books in the house and i i i've worked for years to kind of build this library because i've looked around for decent hardback editions used decent heart back when used bookstores still exist use decent hardback editions of all the books that i've loved all my life and you know part of it was my own collecting thing but part of it was for the kids and can i get them to crack one even now you know when everybody's sock drawer is over organized when you know when we truly have run out of things to do no all right gentlemen a couple of years now i thought i was depressed when peter finished his thing now i'm really depressed um andy yes i'm going to paraphrase a an email of yours actually i'm not going to paraphrase it i'm going to i'm gonna quote this and if it offends you we'll cut it out but i think i can get away with it i care less and less about politics all i ask from any writer nowadays is some evidence that he recognizes that all of this matters the deep sense that we're all equally under some kind of care and judgment when i encounter a writer like that i'm astonished and very very grateful close quote is that so all the stuff that we cared about in the 1980s doesn't matter well explain yourself to working journalists here well that's not a comment on writing or journalism that's a comment on what people believe in now and what what intelligent people are expected to believe it wasn't that long ago when any intelligent person had some sort of sense of the transcendence or the weight of the past and and the accumulation of great tradition in the religious traditions particularly say the catholic church that's all i was commenting on there i think and the the the the culture is so deeply secularized and it's so absorbed into the way especially um intelligent well-educated so to speak young people think um that that that that is disturbing to me that's that's not good pj let me add some more disturbance um because not yeah yeah not only am i depressed on on the point that andy made and i i really do uh find it like harder and harder to see some system of belief let alone spiritual belief that some some some coherent moral system that underlies i mean people want to be nice they want to be good um but they don't seem to you know andy and i've had this discussion um uh a number of times is that you you can be a moral person while being an atheist but it is a lot of work it's really you have to go around robin hood's barn you know to do it i'm not saying it can't be none but but it but it's tough and i would prefer it if the kids believe in god which they don't seem to do but they also don't understand that it's meaningful that it's important what they're covering in politics because underneath politics under the layers and layers and layers of politics many of it frilly many much of its silly much of it frothy is the power of the gun ultimately politics is about one person's ability to force another person to do something it all lies under is it is is all the basement is violence the foundation is violence is violence if you get a parking ticket you don't pay that ticket you get a fine if you don't pay that fine you go to court and you get a bigger fine if you don't pay that fine they'll throw you in jail if you're trying to escape from jail they'll shoot you basically you can't park on a double yellow line because they'll shoot you and not enough kids remember that when they start talking about oh the government should do this for me the government should do that for other people the government should be bigger more involved with this we should have freed this that and the other thing is is that you are expanding that foundation of violence when you expand government it's not just because like i'm an old fuddy-duddy and want my taxes to be lower although i am and i do um andy on on abraham lincoln in a recent essay the ultimate concern for lincoln was the survival of the union to which he had an almost mystical attachment close quote an almost mystical attachment to the union if there is a theme that runs through all of your work pj and andy from beginning to end from young rambunctious boisterous bad boys to [Music] gentlemen full of wisdom pj now lord of the matter sitting on top of his hill surveying acres and acres if there's a theme that runs through all of your work it is a an abiding fondness for the united states of america even if it's a fondness for the circus aspects of this so imagine some socialist bernie supporter some one worlder kid your own children perhaps what do you what do you say what do you say to that kid let's say i'll start with you andy to persuade him that the united states of america is distinctive and in some way still worth it all uh you know i think chesterton said about patriotism um you love your country because it's your country and you know the way you love your mother because she's your mother she's not because she's the best mother or the kindest mother or the best cook or the best you know carpenter or whatever you love your mother because she's your mother and that that's the foundation of what patriotism is and i think that that's true but there's also something more with the united states which is the united states is a actually is uniquely um worth caring for and loving because it is the um the container of the great idea of the declaration of independence and um that's why people revere lincoln still is because he he preserved that idea and um it's sort of a distillation a grand culmination of a lot of wonderful things in the western tradition um so you can have patriotic and that idea is that idea is that all men are created equal that's the central idea that you're referring and that governments are instituted among them to preserve certain rights that are inalienable unalienable uh endowed by a creator uh so you can have you can love your country's the united states simply because you're an american and you just you love the country you were born in and raised in and are grateful to it and but you can also love it america as a intellectual proposition pj well uh yeah i mean what he said there is no doubt i mean we we didn't invent the idea of liberty but we invented the idea that liberty could be organized so that a government served a free people and at the time that lincoln was fighting the civil war we were the only country in the world that could be of which that could be remotely said although the british had a lot of liberties or i should say the english had a lot of liberties and some of their in some welsh maybe or something a few lowland scouts although they had a lot of liberty they were still subjects in america the government was subject to we the people and um we invented that idea we are the original experiment for that idea without our invention of that idea it would not exist anywhere else and so yes that gives us a a a a you know something that makes us a little more than just equal to any other country in the world it makes something that gives us a sort of first among equals and when things go wrong here and they sometimes do and they certainly did in lincoln's time and they're not doing so great right now um the whole world watches and says well china says well this doesn't work you know an interesting little 200 year experiment you know a mere wink of the eye and chinese sense of time but obviously you know this this this idea of a government serving of people and uh uh so okay then this will be the last question you've been generous with your time but pj raised the question of china they outnumber us they've got a government that seems to be able to handle handle a virus more efficiently than than ours there's some doubt about whether they're telling us the truth but they seem to have contained it they've gotten rich they've raised half a billion people out of poverty not just during our lifetimes but during the last quarter century alone half a billion people raised out of poverty and they've got a model that all the rest of the world is looking at now china seems to work the united states what's going over the long term not i'm not asking for a chestertonian answer i love the united states because i love the united states but as over the long term who'd you put your money on this 240 year old constitution that we have or the rising power of china p.j all my money on the united states as i've spent some time in china uh the most time that i spent there was back before things were before things got worse but xi jinping things have definitely gotten worse but the chinese although they have you know they've made tremendous strides but of course when you begin with zero all strides do look amazing so i mean you don't have to go that far outside china's wealthy cities to be back in another millennia you know there's one electric wire running into that village that makes it different from what it was in 1600 um and the chinese hate their system and the chinese when you get them you know really talking to you and you realize they realize you weren't going to report them for anything would say the government is sleeping don't wake it up don't wake it up you know the the mountains are high the emperor is far away that's when things were going well in china you know and and now um i don't think the trainees are very we may think they did a good job of controlling the uh uh the outbreak from their you know the wet market and wuhan um uh you know they they've banned undercooked bat meat and and and good for them but i don't think the chinese people are all that jacked about what a great job their government did on this andy who's your money on usa usa usa would you care to elaborate no i think i just i i just um in my experience and i think in his historically over the last couple of centuries that's where all the that's where all the safe bets are so we are still number one crotchety three crotchy old guys can still agree on that much cynical decision never bet against free people especially when they've got guns pj o'rourke man of long storied career now editor of american consequences andy ferguson of the atlantic thank you thank you my pleasure for uncommon knowledge the hoofer institution and fox nation i'm peter robinson [Music] you

Channel: Hoover Institution

Views: 121,465

Keywords: Uncommon Knowledge, Peter Robinson, P. J. O’Rourke, Andrew Ferguson, COVID-19, Donald Trump, Joe Biden, journalism, China

Id: GU8MqBA6csY

Length: 52min 39sec (3159 seconds)

Published: Fri May 01 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/kaffir54]

This is pretty much what is wrong with boomers, rinos and neo-cons and libertarians

They admit they were cowards during vietnam and they are still cowards.

They hate Trump because he shows them to be what they really are. Psuedo-intellectuals.

they are NOT warriors for justice or liberty.