GORKA: Let me drill down on that. How tectonic a change to our political culture was the election of 2016? Some have posited that the Deplorables’ election of Donald Trump has broken the stranglehold of the Brookings Institution types, the know-it-alls, the op-ed writers. Do you agree? Or will we snap back after a second term of Donald Trump to business as usual? How large is the impact, historically, of the 2016 election?
VDH: I think it’s pretty large, because there have been these force multipliers like the Internet, like blogging, like Twitter, that allow messaging to go out regardless of the elite. It doesn’t matter anymore. You can see it in the Democratic party. As popular leaders you’ve got a seventy-seven-year-old socialist in Bernie Sanders and a twenty-nine-year-old basically know-nothing in AOC. Most of the other party’s presidential candidates worry the Democratic establishment. The whole thing is in flux. On the Republican side, I don’t think people will care if Mitt Romney or Jeb Bush wades in, or the Koch brothers, or George Will or Bill Kristol—these were the voices of the sober and judicious Republican establishment. I don’t think anybody in Michigan or Pennsylvania or the Central Valley of California listens to them anymore.
People have tuned them out because they cried wolf one too many times. “Trump is a monster, Trump can’t be the nominee, Trump can’t be elected, Trump can’t succeed.” After a while, people think, “Just go away.” And I think that’s the attitude they have towards a lot of these people.
Maybe we could have a more meritocratic elite where the track record of your actual performance mattered more than where you went to school or the letters behind your name. That would be welcome, but there’s always going to be an elite. I just hope it’s not an East Coast, West Coast, corporate, media, university elite.
GORKA: Well, I think it’s clear that he’s broken the “Never-Trumpers,” that he has made them increasingly irrelevant; however, it seems there has been no change in the Left. If you look at the language of Democrats, they talk of concentration camps in America, ICE needing to be disbanded, and the president’s re-election campaign launch being analogous to a Nazi Nuremburg rally. Does this mean, Professor Hanson, that things will get worse on the Left before they get better?
VDH: Yes, because when we say “elite,” there are different types of roles that an elite can play. In the case of the Democratic party, because they were interested in political power, a Dianne Feinstein or a Joe Biden or a Chuck Schumer tried to mask or camouflage the insidious progressivism that was growing in their party. And now that elite is discredited, and you and I are talking about AOC or Representative Ilhan Omar, Elizabeth Warren, Kamala Harris, or Bernie Sanders. We’re not talking about Chuck Schumer or John Kerry, or all these supposed senior statesmen in the Democratic party; they’re completely irrelevant now. There’s been a Jacobin revolution on the Left, and you’ve got street fighters and brawlers and baristas. You’ve got everybody in there.
In one way, I like to see it. I’m not a fan of the progressive movement. But on the other hand, you can see what happens when their gatekeepers are overwhelmed by the mob, and the mob is in the street, and that’s what’s happening in the Democratic party.
GORKA: Given the grim, grim things we already know about how power was abused relentlessly and repeatedly during the Obama administration for political purposes, especially to spy on candidate Trump and President Trump, knowing all that, as an American, do you feel optimistic about our future as a Republic, or do you think that we are Rome on the edge of collapse?
VDH: Well, you know, Rome took four hundred years for a splintered decline. What I’m more worried about is the largest number of immigrants we’ve ever seen, not that I dislike immigration, but we’re not assimilating and integrating them. We’re substituting ideas of social justice for the rule of law: if your motives are deemed noble by progressives, then you can do anything. That said, I think that when Americans are given the information, the choice, they’re not going to vote for reparations or infanticide or the Green New Deal or the wealth tax or abolishing the Electoral College or student debt or ICE or free college for everyone. I don’t think they’re ready for that yet. And I think there’s going to be a pushback.
But at these critical points in American history, whether it’s instituting a draft on the heels of Pearl Harbor, it’s never been a sure thing. And, you know, the Confederate Army was on its way to southern Ohio until it fought Union forces at Shiloh, and on the first day it almost won. So, you’ve come very close to catastrophe in our history. And we’re dealing with it now, but we just have to hope that the common sense of the American public will prevail.
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Now to our second observer of the radical Left and the Trump Effect. Lord Black, or Conrad Moffat Black, Baron Black of Crossharbour, is one of a dying breed. Born in Canada, Conrad Black epitomizes a bygone era, one populated by truly larger-than-life characters, incredibly successful men who could make fortunes in business, whilst discoursing on the finer details of the history of Western Civilization and penning biographies of American presidents.
Lord Black is a legendary figure in the media world as well, having at one time or another owned the Chicago Sun-Times, the UK’s Daily Telegraph, the Spectator, the Jerusalem Post, and Canada’s National Post. At the same time, he has suffered at the hands of an overzealous American prosecutor, just as President Trump did during the Mueller investigation. In Lord Black’s case, however, he fell victim to said prosecutor, eventually serving time in jail for an alleged crime that President Trump pardoned him for shortly after I interviewed him. Now read what a businessman, media mogul, and historian has to say about the challenges that you, I, and the president face.
GORKA: Lord Black, you are a very successful businessman in the world of finance, but also a historian, a man of letters who’s written incredibly successful books on Roosevelt and Nixon. Not only that, you are uniquely positioned as a businessman and historian to write living history, because you have actually negotiated with Donald Trump the businessman.
BLACK: Oh indeed. That was twenty years ago. And that was how I first knew him, in a business context.
GORKA: So this gives you a unique perspective, a perspective that has led you in your most recent book, Donald J. Trump: A President Like No Other, to describe our president as a “popular tribune,” which doesn’t very much fit into modern Judeo-Christian Western politics. That phrase harkens back to maybe the age of the Founding Fathers or back to the original Roman Republic. What do you mean by popular tribune?
BLACK: By that I mean he represents the authentic voice of a widespread sentiment among average people—and that is, on its face, very surprising for a man who is, by a wide margin, the wealthiest man ever to be the president of the United States. But to a degree, you could say the same thing about Franklin D. Roosevelt, except that he made no pretense about being an average person anyway and was clearly quite satisfied to be a very patrician figure, with an elegant and educated accent. Donald Trump has an “outer borough” accent, though you can tell that he is an educated man, even if his detractors pretend that you cannot and that he isn’t.
But he does rather sound like a middle-class, or even working-class person much of the time. He is authentic, and as with Roosevelt, you can’t tell where he came from. As you’ve kindly said, I wrote a book about Franklin D. Roosevelt, and no one could ever figure out how he had the genius of knowing where public opinion was at all times, but he did. And so with Donald Trump. He got out among the people to an astonishing degree, in the commotion of wrestling matches and prize fights and as a television star. But even so, he’s an extremely wealthy man, proud of being a wealthy man, and yet he intuitively, and tactically, successfully appeals to the legitimate sentiments, not the prejudices, of a very, very large number of Americans—I would say now probably more than half of the population.
GORKA: As an individual who worked for him in the White House I’ve seen this man connect as a billionaire, as a president, with steel w
orkers in Steel Valley, Youngstown, Ohio. How does that happen? How does an individual of his wealth, an individual who lives in the rarified atmosphere of private jumbo jets, how does he resonate with steel workers, Lord Black?
BLACK: Every summer he worked for his father on building sites, his father being a developer also. And he managed some sites when he started, not the work crews, but he was intimately involved in the real nuts and bolts of that business, to the point where he could mix the pest control fluids to get rid of roaches and things like that. And he always knew the working man. That’s where it came from.
He always knew those people, he has a very gregarious personality, and that comes across quite clearly. I think his enemies can’t dispute that. They may claim that he is not the sort of person that they would wish to associate with, but you can see that he is very affable and so on. He has that very extensive background working shoulder-to-shoulder with working-class and middle-class people, and he knows what their concerns are.
And he never—even at the height of his activities as a successful businessman—he was never around very much the Park Avenue, 5th Avenue, traditional elite, the social elite. You would see him, yes (and I was slightly in that circuit for a time, and lived part of the time in New York, and he was a neighbor of ours in New York and Palm Beach, in a rather grander combination of places he had close by). You’d see him in these big evening events for many charities in New York sometimes, but you’d never see him in the halls of 5th Avenue or Park Avenue as a guest; he was always busy.
I got to know him through business, and then somewhat socially, but he was busy all the time, with his television or his business. And he was not interested in hob-knobbing with the rich, which is the normal ambition of people who make a lot of money in New York, you know, they want to fraternize with other wealthy and socially prominent people.
GORKA: There are theories of history that present what I think is a false dichotomy in terms of whether it’s circumstance that creates the leader, or leaders are born and then they change history. You, however, have written about the “elitist decay,” about the conditions of self-hatred and ideological determinism that America became hostage to prior to the last presidential election. Is Donald Trump’s presidency a reaction to the eight years of Obama and the political neo-Marxism of the last forty years? Or, knowing him as you do, was his election inevitable?
BLACK: First, on the argument that you opined, both happened at different times. Sometimes circumstances create the man or person, and sometimes it’s the other way around. And I’m not an apostle of the “Great Man Theory,” but it does have some validity. There is no question, between Winston Churchill and Franklin D. Roosevelt, that they really saved Western Civilization by providing the leadership they did. In the case of Donald Trump, I think he saw it coming, and he watched it grow—the frustration and the irritation of a very large number of what we might just call ordinary Americans, traditionally called the working class and middle class.
And he was always polling, because he was always interested in the idea of translating celebrity into high office. And you may recall that he was in the primaries as a candidate for the nomination of the Reform party in 2000. He won primaries in Michigan and California, but then he concluded, quite correctly, that historically third parties never win in the United States. Not even Theodore Roosevelt could do it in the famous election of the three presidents, against Taft and Wilson in 1912.
And so he was waiting for his moment, and he changed parties seven times in thirteen years; he’s not a party loyalist. He was waiting for this moment to develop and to perfect his technique. And at pulling twenty-five million viewers at least every week for fifteen years, an astounding record, and getting into these improbable places for normal politicians, like 90,000 people in the Silverdome to watch him shear the hair off Vince McMahon of the wrestling federation. He was always angling for it and watching the level of discontent grow.
So he was the beneficiary, not just of the failings of the Obama Administration, but of the preceding administrations. I put it to you, Sebastian, that the twenty years preceding Donald Trump were the worst twenty years in government in the history of this country. I would accept that the presidents immediately prior to the Civil War were less competent presidents than Obama and George W. Bush, but they didn’t go on as long.
But from the late Clinton era all the way through George W. Bush and Obama, we got the policies that produced the greatest economic crisis in the world since the Great Depression.
We got an endless war in the Middle East, the chief result of which was to hand effective control of most of Iraq to Iran, which is exactly the reverse of what was intended and an immense humanitarian crisis.
We got a flatlined economy. Gross domestic product per capita growth went from 4 percent and 4.5 percent under Reagan, to 3.9 percent under Clinton, to 2 percent under the second Bush, to 1 percent under Obama.
And the country was like a pressure-cooker, but the media didn’t notice it. The system worked for the rich friends of the regimes, and it worked for Hollywood, and it worked for Silicon Valley. But the average American, the backbone of the nation, felt they were being left out. And Trump saw that when nobody else did.
GORKA: There are those such as Steve Bannon, and others, who have said that politics, Left and Right, means nothing anymore. We are now in the age of dueling populisms, the leftist populism of Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez versus Donald Trump, Brexit, Italy’s Northern League, and the Brazilian populism of President Bolsorano. Is it that simple, number one, has politics so radically changed? And second, after his second term, will Donald Trump have effected some permanent change on the body politic or will power merely return to the establishment elite of the fetid swamp?
BLACK: Well, I think there will be a durable change, Sebastian. I wouldn’t put it exactly as you did, citing Steve Bannon, but I do think the Left-Right thing is getting quite blurred. And I think most serious conservatives would not concede that the Left has a monopoly, for example, on the concern for civil rights. And most moderate Leftists would object to being labeled as totally fiscally irresponsible, or pacifists, or the like.
I think what the country wants, and what all democratic countries want, is policies that work. People do become extremely resentful of complacent elites who set things up very nicely for themselves but leave the working class and the middle class living paycheck to paycheck or living off state benefits. And you know, that’s been a widespread phenomenon, and you see it in all the advanced Western countries now.
But I think on your second point, that yes, the Trump presidency will have a durable impact. I think Reagan left the country in good shape, and the problem was that George Bush Sr. allowed Ross Perot to split the Republicans, take twenty million mainly Republican votes, and bring on the Clintons. And then things started to go downwards, and they went down at a steeper and steeper angle for the succeeding years. Trump won because of what had preceded him. But I think he will redirect the country again to the virtues of low taxes, relative deregulation, and a serious definition of the American national interest that is enforceable and doesn’t over-extend the country.
Given the increasing rate of change, it would be hazardous to predict that his impact would be permanent, but I think it’ll be durable.
GORKA: But for it to be durable, to quote my friend Monica Crowley, we need more people like Donald Trump who truly aren’t ideological, at least in the taxonomy we’ve used in the past, but are “attitudinal” in terms of their practical behavior and their love of country. Is there a class of people who are prepared, who have the celebrity, who have the wherewithal, the spine, to create a new political class that is less ideological and more attitudinal, Conrad Black?
BLACK: I think so. I think so. You see, I’ve felt that was one of the greatest assets of America. When the northeastern establishment, the Ivy League and Wall Street, really dropped the ball in Vietnam, they pushed Lyndon Johnson into it w
hile they all fled thereafter into the long grass—the best and the brightest, the Kennedy leftovers. As that happened, a new group, mainly from California, led by Ronald Reagan, came in with the optimism of the American West, and took their place.
And what we have now, I think, is a kind of completely non-violent but militant common-sense, middle-class, fact-based movement here. It isn’t reactionary, it isn’t in any sense retrograde, although it’s presented as such. And this kind of movement says, “Let’s get rid of this phony regime where there’s this masquerade of caring about the little people while, in fact, everything is taken care of for Wall Street and Hollywood and Silicon Valley, but not for the country.”
Most Americans, despite the horrible problems in academia, are fiercely patriotic, they love the country, they’re proud of the country, and they want it to do well. And they’re right to be proud, but they’re also right to recognize that there are terrible problems that have to be dealt with.
GORKA: I, as a proud American, now of seven years, I’ve always said that of the many common characteristics of my fellow Americans, the central one is common sense. And thanks to you Lord Black we may have found a new label for what “Trumpism” is, “militant common sense.” A militant common sense alloyed to an unswerving love of country and belief in America.
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Thus, the insights of two great observers of the American scene: Victor Davis Hanson and Conrad Black. The question we now face is whether we can stop the leftists who are trying to sabotage President Trump’s Make America Great Again mission and whether President Trump can win reelection in 2020. I believe, as you’ll see, that, with your help, it can be done.
CHAPTER FIVEHOW YOU CAN WIN THE WAR FOR AMERICA’S SOUL
As you can see, they have a plan. The radical fringe of the Democrat party, the extremists of the 1960s and 1970s have become the “mainstream.” Bernie Sanders, an avowed Socialist who honeymooned in the Soviet Union,1 almost won the Democrat nomination for president in 2016 (only to have Hillary Clinton steal it with her “superdelegates.”), and the old radicals have now been reinforced by the product of fifty years of left-wing indoctrination in our schools and colleges, exemplified by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. And now, thanks to an acquiescent and obsequious media, their extremist views are parroted openly, including the need to abolish ICE and the Department of Homeland Security, as AOC and her subservient colleagues brazenly promote communism under the cover of Environmentalism with a “Green New Deal” that would ban gas-powered cars, air travel, and beef husbandry as we know it today, and require the destruction and reconstruction of all the homes and commercial buildings in America in order to make them “environmentally friendly.” This would require a Communist level of government control—and that is the level of control over your lives that the Democrat party wants to have. If we let them.
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