Pushkin from Pushkin Industries. This is Deep Background, the show where we explore the stories behind the stories in the news. I'm Noah Feldman. What has happened to the American Right? That's our topic today. How did a party that touted itself as the party of ideas turn into the Party of Donald Trump? And what are conservative intellectuals thinking about it? To discuss that on this week's show, we're joined by Peter Wayner. Peter is my favorite conservative intellectual of the moment. He's a senior failure with the Ethics and Public Policy Center, and he's a contributing opinion writer for The New York Times and a contributing editor to The Atlantic Magazine. He worked for the Reagan administration, the George H. W. Bush administration, and I first met him when he was working for George W. Bush, first as a speechwriter and then as the head of the Office of Strategic Initiatives. Boy, we haven't seen each other in along I literally think I last saw you in the basement conference room at in the West Wing during the Bush administration, right back in the good old days. Depending on how you think of it, yeah, well, compared to Trump, I'd say Pete. I want to start by registering a kind of frustration. Often when people ask me who are the leading evangelical Republican intellectuals in the United States, I start by saying, Pete Wayner. You got to read Pete Wayner, But in the last six months alone, you've written pieces talking about how the terminology of evangelical Christianity is no longer the right fit for you, and even that membership in the Republican Party may not be exactly the place where you belong. So you're robbing me of my lead intellectual and within those categories they'll still be in my leading intellectual but in other some other categories. So would you talk a little bit about your own transitions? And in both of these spaces with respect to terminology, I have the feeling more than content. Two are now happy to do it, because the first thing I'd say is I'm still conservative, though I don't consider myself a Republican, which we'll get into. And I still consider myself a Christian, though I've detached myself from the term evangelical. Let's take the last one first. I mean the evangelical Christian movements, the one that I've been most a part of For for most of my adult life, I didn't grow up a Christian and a high school began a pilgrimage that brought me to the Christian faith. I was evangelical churches that for the most part I have been a part of and identified more or less theologically. With the reason that I no longer consider myself evangelical is primarily because of what's happened in the political arena. I think that the term evangelical these days is identified by most people understandably so as a political term, not really as a theological term. Most white evangelicals overwhelmingly support Donald Trump. But not only that many of them, not all, because it's a large movements, about fifteen percent of the population, and there are a lot of people on that spectrum, but a lot of white evangelicals are not only supportive of Donald Trump, but enthusiastic, and they are essentially they've become his sword in his shield. The white evangelical leadership, whether you're talking about people like Franklin Graham, Robert Jeffries, Jerry Fallwell Junior, Mike Huckabee, and so forth, they are of enthusiastic Trump supporters, obsequious in many cases rhapsodic about him, unwilling to challenge him, unwilling to stand up to his ethical and moral transgressions, and unwilling to speak truth to power. And that really bothers me. I think that that those people are doing more to harm the Christian witness than the so called new atheists ever have. Notwithstanding the complete accuracy of everything you've said, why didn't you think it was worth it just to sort of stand your ground and say, look, let's treat evangelicalism as about the Gospel the way it traditionally was, and not move away from the term by virtue of its contemporary politics. I mean, for myself, I remember when I identified as a modern Orthodox Jew. I was always troubled by the concrete politics of many of the people who shared that position. But I thought, to myself, least at the time, I'm so committed to this way of life. I'm so committed to these religious traditions and values that I don't want to let them monopolize the term. Now. To be fair, I also myself moved away from that terminology. So I know where you're coming from. But I'm wondering, why not stand up for the evangelicalism yeah, dry, good question. It's very well phrased, and I must say that I've several friends of mine who have exactly that that point of view, I guess I I'd say several things about it. One is, if you find yourself saying I'm a Republican bot or I'm an evangelical bot, and most of your your statement is the qualification of the term or the allegiance, then that's worth thinking about. That's a very good insight, by the way, in almost any area of life. Yeah. The second thing is, I mean, I'm not wed to this, I guess personal divorce with the term evangelical. If things change, I'm more than happy to come back. So it's it's not as if this is something which is necessarily permanent by any because, as you say, it's not that your Christian witness has changed in any respect. No, it's not. And it's the same thing for the Republican Party. If the Republican Party comes back to what I think is it's it's best self and it's truest roots, you know, then I would of course be associated with it as well. The other thing is I just should say that because I didn't grow up in a Christian Church. I never identified all that much with denominations, and I'm a person who has had questions and kind of zigs and zags and his faith. It's it's not always been an easy path for me in the sense that that's just my my outlook and temperament on life. I'm often examining things and rethinking and so forth. That's a good description for an intellectual. It's a more difficult description for a faith journey. Yeah, you know it is. And I'm certainly within the four corners of the faith without without a question. In some ways, I'd say my faith is deeper now than it was even ten or fifteen years ago. I think I've just been less attached to Evangelical Christianity than maybe some other people have. But there's no question that the reason that I moved away from it was this Trump moment, and because of what I think is the discrediting of Evangelical Christianity by a lot of white Evangelicals. Again with a qualifier and caveat that a lot of my friends are evangelical, white Evangelical Christians, and some of them have have real concerns about Donald Trump. Let's talk about the Republican part because your path was not very wavering with respect to Republicanism. You worked for Reagan, you worked for George W. Bush, You've been the leading Republican thinker. Talk about how you could move away from that terminology. Yeah, you're exactly right. I mean, the Republican Party was the party that I've been a member of since I first cast my first vote for president, which was which was Ronald Reagan, and was a proud Republican. I never thought it was a perfect party by any means. There's no such thing as a perfect party. Otherwise it wouldn't be a party. No, there's not. There's not, And you know I would even in my writings when I was, for example, blogging for Commentary magazine, it was an unusual for me to take on Republicans. So it wasn't a party that I was. You know, I didn't feel like I was a blind follower, but I certainly was comfortable there. And as you said, I worked in three three republic administrations. I'd say several things have happened to the Republican Party which has troubled me. One is a dramatic evaluation of ideas. You know, Daniel Patrick moynihan in The New York Times in nineteen eighty nineteen eighty one wrote in an op ed in which he said that the Republican Party in an instant had become the party of ideas, and that was for somebody like me, who was really a child of the Reagan Revolution, that was really important. There was an intellectual vigor and excitement in that era. If you go back and think what were some of the key and central books of the nineteen eighties. Losing Ground by Charles Murray on welfare reform, the Closing of the American Mind by Alan Bloom, which was a warning against relativism or relativism and postmodernism, the Naked Public Square by Richard John Newhouse. And there was the Federal Society in antonin Scalia. And so that was the kind of intellectual milieu that that existed when I came to be part of the Republican Party and the conservative movement. And I think there's been a dramatic devaluation of ideas which is culminated in this Trumpian moment. Can I can I actually ask you a question just about about that deviation, because I've heard other people make a similar argument and I'm not sure I understand the contours of it in the following way. There's no question that Trump is not a conservative who comes out of that particular set of intellectual traditions that you describe. And it's also the case that very very few, if any, of the people whom he's appointed to important influential positions come out of those intellectual traditions. But that doesn't mean that the ideas have disappeared. There's those same ideas are still out there, and in one sphere, the sphere you mentioned the Federalist Society, there of conservative constitutional and legal thought. Actually, Trump has consistently appointed people who are full of ideas that our ideas, very much out of that intellectual tradition, which are creative and challenging, and they might be right and they might be wrong, but they're certainly interesting. I mean, I think of Justice Neil Gorsuch, for example, who's himself. You know, he's an intellectual. I mean, how else would you describe someone who, in the middle of his legal career goes back to Oxford to finish his PhD. And you know, on the Supreme Court he's pushing a very particular It's not Scalia's version, but it's a particular conservative federalist society version of critique of the administrative state and of its overreach. I mean, it's very it's an exciting fermenting time, even if you disagree deeply with what the ideas are that he's that he's offering. So in the ideas are still out there. It's just that this current president isn't super interested in them. Yeah, I let me untangle that a little bit and maybe give my own my own spin on what you said. I don't doubt and I would never argue that there aren't people who are intellectuals within the Republican Party or the Democratic Party. I mean, it's it's not as if all ideas have been shattered they don't exist, or there aren't people that care for them. What I mean about the devaluation of ideas is that if you took a step back and said, not just Trump and not just the people who Trump is hired, but the people who nominated Trump and what defines the Republican Party today, I would say that if you listen to conservative talk radio or the or Fox News, there aren't serious arguments for the most part on policy. It's the politics of theatrics that is that has happened. The way I've described it to people is I got the feeling that somewhere along the way, a lot of the let's say, the conservative media complex, of which I know, these people, I've been, you know, friends with them. These are people I've known for many decades. But somewhere along the way, I think that they just got tired of some of the arguments that were being made. For example, you know the issue of cutting taxes, right, and that's been a perennial debate here between liberals and conservatives. Liberals saying that it's tax cuts for the rich, it's oriented just to help the wealthy to get wealthier, that it exacerbates the deficit, and it's harmful to the economy, and the traditional conservative response was, no, these tax cuts are done to try and generate economic growth, which helps everybody, so overall they're better for the economy. I think that conservatives just got tired of doing that. And what happened is Donald Trump came in and there was a pretty impressive field in twenty sixteen that you could have chosen depending on what your flavor of ice cream was, and if you're a more libertarian, there was Rand Paul. If you are a certain kind of Christian conservative, there was Mike Huckabee or Rick Santorum. If you were a kind of let's say, reform conservative, there was Jeff Bush or Mark Ruby or John kay Sick, or there was Chris Christie. I mean, the one person that you would not have chosen out of that field if you were a traditional Republican would have been Donald Trump. And yet he won, and he went actually quite easily. So the question is what would have cost people who for years and years were the kind of purity patrol that said, if there was one deviation from ideology, whether it was Jeff Bullish or Mitch Daniels, they were attacked on conservative talk radio. Is no longer being conservative. And many of these people rallied behind Donald Trump, Who's who's done things a thousand times or worse than Mitch Daniels, or were Jeff Bullish And the answer was, in my estimation, large part of the answer was that they were excited by his style. They didn't care about ideas, it was the theatrics. It was entertaining to them. And the other thing that I think is part of this too is Trump tapped into these seething resentments and grievances on the American right, some of which were understandable. Certainly if you were an evangelical Christian you felt like you had been mocked and ridiculed by the elite culture. There was some basis for that, but there was the seething, these seething resentments that that grew, and Trump tapped into it. I mean, that's you're clearly right about that, Pepe, But I can I offer it a third hypothesis supplements the other two. It's not meant to replace it, and it's one that you know, cuts maybe a little close to the bone, but it's that Arguably, the George W. Bush administration had the effect within the Republican Party of discrediting the sort of project of ideas driven conservatism in the foreign policy side because of the Iraq War, and you know, as you know, because somewhere in the complexity of the chaine of government where you were close to the very top, and I was close to the very bottom. I was working for the officer reconstruction of humanitarian assistance and then the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq. So I was there too, and I think in some important ways when it came to foreign policy, the wing of the conservative thought world that came to be called neo conservative lost credit. And one thing Trump was very clear on was his repudiation of what he would be characterized as neo conservative ideas, ideas about spreading freedom in the world. And I think some of the blame there falls with the Bush administrations failures in Iraq, of which I consider myself to be a part, a small part, only because I was a small figure. And then on the domestic side, there was the fact that the Bush administration, partly because of the Wars, left the United States with a larger deficit than it had received and that helped drive the birth of the Tea Party. And you know, there too, the small government side of the ideas seemed not to have cashed itself out in a concrete way. And I think arguably it's just a hypothesis that opened the door for Trump to walk in and say, you don't need the ideas Conservatives, those are the people who gave you the Bush administration, and I'm going to give you something really different. Yeah. Look, I think it's it's completely valid to say that. By the end of his presidency that the Bush presidency it was. It was obviously low and there was a reaction against it, and it may well have opened the door. I think that a lot of things probably opened the door to Donald Trump. But if you would have thought that the Bush administration for the sake of the argument, if you felt like it was discredited by instead of ideas, then you would come up, presumably and hopefully with another set of coherent political ideas. That's not really what happened with Donald Trump. You got a person who has no interest, no acquaintance with ideas at all. And I wouldn't lay that at the foot of George W. Bush or anybody else. And I will say, even when George W. Bush was riding fairly high in the Republican Party, certainly in his first term, we had these conversations with him. I recall these actually where he was warning about the rise of the isms nativism, protectionism, and isolationism. And so those movements were already coming, not because I mean they predated the sense among Republicans that the Iraq War had been completely lost. In all of the rest I will say, just as a footnote here on the Iraq wars, it's more than a footnote, but in the context of the conversation. But I think it's important for the zake of history and the reality of things, which is what George W. Bush did in the Iraq War with a surge in two thousand and seven was one of the most impressive and bravest political decisions that I'd ever seen, and actually turned the war around when he named Dave Petreus and Ryan Crocker to essentially lead that effort. And by the time his presence he came to an end, Iraqis was hardly Switzerland or Swede in terms of how pacified the country was, but it was in considerably better shape than it was in two thousand and five two thousand and six, and the war had been turned around. And in my mind, when Barack Obama pulled out all of the troops in twenty eleven, that triggered the downward spiral that we're still seeing now. Having said that, there's no question that the war was deeply unpopular and it hurt the larger project of democratization in the Middle East. I think what you say makes me think that we, you know, we should have a serious conversation. I mean, the world needs a serious conversation about the Surgeon in retrospect. I was a strong supporter of the Surgeon the time, and I think it did accomplish some of the things you describe, But I think the history of it is, in fact, it is pretty complex, and you know, deserves its own thorough conversation. I wanted to say one more thing in defense of George W. Bush. You know, you tell this fascinating story about his pointing to the rise of nativism and protectionism and isolationism. Arguably, one of the things that saved the United States from entering into a period of public islamophobia in the immediate aftermath of September eleventh was George W. Bush. I mean, if you look at how Islamophobia rose during the Obama years and obviously culminated in Donald Trump's run for the presidency, I think, you know, historians will want to know, well, why didn't this happen sooner? I mean, it was so long after nine eleven had happened, And I think a major part of the answer is that the President of the United States, George W. Bush, actively and thoughtfully carved out a position that said we are not at war with Islam, and he refused to use any islamophobic rhetoric, and he allied the United States with Muslims, and I think that actually had a suppressing effect on what otherwise would have been somewhat natural islamophobic sentiments that would have followed from nine to eleven. And when he withdrew from the political scene after two thousand and eight, there was just nobody there with the capacity to rein them in. I'm not saying that Barack Obama, of course, was islamophobic, just that he didn't have the same kind of credibility on the issue with those people who would want to incline in that direction. And I think this is something that that w has not received sufficient credit for in retrospect, and I think it's something that's worth worth noting. Yeah, well, I agree with you on that, and I would just say it's on this larger point about the Republican Party in the American right and what's happened in terms of it's intellectual, you know, movements. I would say, now, to the degree that Donald Trump has any set of policies, and it's difficult sometimes to tell what they are, what what kind of ideology that he has, it is fascinating to me how much he's transformed the Republican Party. I mean, I'll give you one example that's relatively recent, but underscores I think all sorts of pathologies that have happened, and that has to do with the issue of debt, deficit, limited government. Now, people on the American right, you're exactly correct when you talked about the Tea Party right that that came out because there was a sense of tremendous frustration with Mitch McConnell and John Bayner. So if you listened to it to conservative talk radio around two thousand and nine, twenty ten, twenty eleven, you're almost as likely to hear criticisms of Bayner and McConnell as you were of Obama. So you got a sense back then, pre Trump, of this rising populism and anger. Like Rush Limbaugh, for example, shifted from years and years it was a binary conflict between liberalism conservatism, and more and more it went to establishment and the establishment. And if you look at where Rush Limbaugh is now versus where he was during the Reagan years, you see these profound changes. This the other day, Russia Limbaugh got a call from a listener who was concerned about the debt and the deficit, and Rush essentially laughed it off, said it doesn't matter, hasn't been a problem, hasn't come back to bid us. Have you listened to Russia Limbaugh for virtually his entire career, particularly when deafits were going up under Democratic presidents, he whacked them up side ahead again and again and again. And yet because of Donald Trump and Donald Trump has no interest in limited government, the deficit has increased by around fifty percent I think over the last three years. You see this illustration, which is the Republican Party, which for years made this an issue, if at least theoretically, if not in their execution and through policy, said that debt and deficit mattered, and limited government and a liberty mattered. Now you got a guy with like Donald Trump who doesn't care about those issues at all, and they've shifted with him. You see the same thing on protectionism versus free trade. The Republican Party as long as I've been alive, has been the party a free trade. Now, if you did a poll, Democrats are more likely to be free traders than Republicans. It's a fascinating flip. So we've talked a lot about what's gone wrong, but you're also looking forward and thinking about what to do next. And your new book is actually directly forward looking. It's called The Death of Politics, How to Heal Our fred Republic After Trump. So, first of all, you're assuming there isn't after Trump in our future, and I don't know whether that's actually true. But talk a little bit, if you would, about your vision of how we do go about healing a Republic that is very badly fraid by virtue of the temper and tone of public discourse, and very much by the revolution that Trump has wrought, not only in the Republican Party but in the way we talk about politics. Yeah, you know, in the short term, I'm not optimistic about where we're going to go. I think that the twenty twenty campaign is going to be the most vicious and brutal in our lifetime and one of the worst in American history. And maybe it'll it'll compete with the election of eighteen hundred between Jefferson and Adams, which was a pretty nasty, nasty affair almost for the young republic apart. So look, as long as Donald Trump is president, and as long as he's operating this way and he's always going to operate this way as long as he's president. Is just going to be very difficult to try and get American public discourse in American politics back to a better place and for decency and a sense of humanity to prevail. But in the medium to longer term, I'm not necessarily optimistic, but I'm hopeful for several reasons. One is I'm a congenital optimists, I suppose when it comes to America and its capacity for self renewal, I just think the American story is really one of the amazing stories in human history. And we've had a lot of difficult times, but it's been more or less a steady progress toward justice and more or less toward decency, expanding the rights and liberties of people. So that gives me give me with some recent setbacks. Yeah, yeah, but but of course that's that's the that's that's the story of individual lives, and I guess the lives of nations, which is that it's never a straight lined trajectory, and but I think the trajectory of America has has generally been good. Second is just I try and bear in mind historical context, which is we've had a lot worse periods in our history than this. Um, I can name a couple which are pretty obvious. I mean one I did, which was the election of eighteen hundred between Adams and Jefferson, which was a vicious affair and politics was difficult at that moment. The Civil War, it's obviously the worst time in American histories. Seven hundred thousand people dead in the country of roughly twenty nine million, so that would be the equivalent of seven million dead today. And the late sixties and seventies, I mean, I think some people may forget. I was a little young to have a lot of memory about about the late sixties. But um, you know, if you go through you take off some of the things to remind listeners. But you had the assassination of Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King Junior within several months. You had the riots in the streets, the race riots. You had the universities being taken over. You had the March on the Pentagon, you had the Vietnam War. You had Kent State in the early seventies when the National Guards shot some students at Kent State. In the research for the book, I discovered that in an eighteen month period in between seventy one and seventy two, there was an average of five domestic bombings a day in the United States. So there was a feeling for a lot of people in the late sixties early seventies that the country was kind of coming apart, and there was certainly much more violence in the streets than we're seeing now. So that I think is another thing to keep in mind, which is we've had harder times and we've overcome them. And the third thing, which I put some hope in is that sometimes I believe viruses create their own antibodies, and sometimes in the life of an individual and in the life of a country, if there's certain virtues that you forgot, you cease to pay attention to, you cease to cultivate, and they're stripped away from you, you're reminded why they matter to begin with, and then you begin to defend them and fight for them. And my sense, my instinct, some of its anecdotal, some of it's the survey data. I think that there is a big counter reaction to what Donald Trump stands for, for his style, for the dehumanization, for their cruelty, for the crudity, and I will see. We're going to find out in twenty twenty whether he's going to be repudiated or not. But I find the country exhausted and embarrassed and to some extent ashamed of what Donald Trump has come to represent and the intensity of his politics. Pete, you know, I share that insight that I think people are embarrassed, and I also think you use this keyword exhausted. People do seem to be exhausted, and so that makes me wonder where's the energy going to come from for a counter response? What I sense is this sort of fatigue and frustration without anybody really saying, Okay, here's the reason, and here's the source of the energy that will drive us to do something different. And I'm wondering, do you sense that? Do you sense a source of a place of energy? I mean, the one really energetic place in American politics other than trump Land today seems to be the Democratic Socialist left, which is highly energized. You know, it may be leading the Democratic Party into political disaster, but from the perspective of those who belong to the Democratic Socialist wing, this is their chance to take their youth, their energy, and their enthusiasm and to mainstream a bunch of their ideas and to get the party to listen. I mean, they're not wasting the crisis of Donald Trump. They're using it as an opportunity. But also, I don't think that that's the place from which we're going to get a kind of nationally unifying anti Trump moment. So I'm wondering, do you have a you know, is there someplace else in this great land of our where you see energy that could coalesce into a more energetic and powerful rather than an exhausted and enervated return to you return to civility and politics. Yeah, it's it's a great question. I do see it. I mean, I'll name one thing is specifically one movement and I'm familiar with, and I think it speaks to a broader movement. It's actually not a political movement, and I'm not sure that this needs to be or even should be driven primarily through politics. Maybe it's it's a cultural response which ends up manifesting itself in a political response. But David Brooks, who's is a close friend of mine, runs a project at the Aspen Institute called a Weave Project, and essentially what he's doing is he's getting together and using a power as the Asment Institute, as a convening form for groups all across the country who are essentially re weaving the social fabric, which is I think fraid in many places, and not just for political reasons, not just because of Donald tru but there's a sense, I think the research data backs this up that the country is alienated, lonely and isolated in ways that it hasn't been before. There's a lot of fear that I think characterizes life in America today. And you do see all across America groups that are rising up, all sorts of groups doing all sorts of wonderful work to heal the country. It's a very American thing, it's a very Tofilian thing, and that's to me as a source of hope. But I think as long as Donald Trump is the president, we're not going to begin the healing process in the way that it has to. He has to be removed from the equation, and I think that will happen in twenty twenty, but I don't know. I think it's just much too early, and obviously the Democratic Party can foul things up and Trump himself for all of his problems and for all of his ignorance and policy, has a certain malicious genius when it comes to his ability to tap into and energize his base. I've never seen anything quite like it. I think that Trump's hold on the base of his party is at least as strong as Ronald Reagan's was. There was an almost cult of personality that has happened with Donald Trump, which is an extraordinary thing to witness. It's not unsurprising when I wrote during the twenty sixteen campaign my criticism of Donald Trump, one of the things that was on my list of concerns. Wasn't my chief concern, but it was. One of my concerns is that he would he would utterly transform the Republican Party and that people would like a black hole. The gravitational pull of Trump as president would pull an awful lot of people in. And I think that's that's happened. And I must say just anecdotally, because I've been in touch, as you can imagine, with a lot of Republicans, a lot of Evangelicals who are supportive of Trump. That's the world that I came from. The obviously the Republican in Christian world. And I found a couple of years ago more qualified support support for Donald Trump, but qualified that is largely disappeared, and now it's actually changed. There's a real enthusiasm form. It's the sense that he's going to bring a pistol to a cultural knife fight, and that thrills them. Pete, I want to thank you very much for sharing your vision of reweaving social fabric sometime post Trump, and I want to thank you really for the body of your serious conservative intellectual thought. And let's hope that the return to the Republican Party as a party of ideas happens eventually and that you're you're a central part of it. Thanks for joining me. I was great to be on. I'm a great admirer of your work and it was fun to have the conversation with you. Listening to Pete Wayner, you can't help but walk away with the feeling that the decimation of the ideas wing of the Republican Party has been complete. Here's someone who was at the absolute epicenter of the world of conservative and Republican ideas, a committed evangelical Christian, a senior figure in the George W. Bush administration, and he can no longer bring himself to call himself a Republican, and perhaps even more shockingly, the political associations of evangelicalism have become so strong that he's not even going to use the term evangelical to describe his own religious fit. That's a devastating picture, and it raises the question of what is going to happen going forward? Will the Republican Party eventually seek to reinvent itself For the moment, the answer is pretty clearly that that reinvention has happened, and that reinvention has been a reinvention into Trumpism. Trumpism, though still awaits its own intellectual expression. There's a president. He has ideas of a certain structure, but what he does not have is the armature of thoughtful people to try to express those ideas in a coherent and in fashion. It's not clear where that's coming from, and it's not clear where it will happen at all, But if history is any judge, if Donald Trump is reelected, there will be an opportunity for Trump intellectuals to emerge, and some will eventually emerge to state their case. When that happens, it'll be all the more important for intellectuals from other perspectives, whether conservative, liberal or left of liberal, to offer responses and to engage in a conversation. And that conversation, if we're lucky enough for it to emerge, is actually going to be the beginning of the process of restoring some kind of political discourse in our country. Deep Background is brought to you by Pushkin Industries. Our producer is Lydia gene Coott, with engineering by Jason Gambrel and Jason Roskowski. Our showrunner is Sophie mckibbon. Our theme music is composed by Luis GERA special thanks to the Pushkin Brass, Malcolm Gladwell, Jacob Weisberg, Miah Lobel. I'm Noah Feldman. You can follow me on Twitter at Noah R. Feldman. This is Deep Background

Pushkin from Pushkin Industries. This is Deep Background, the show where we explore the stories behind the stories in the news. I'm Noah Feldman. What has happened to the American Right? That's our topic today. How did a party that touted itself as the party of ideas turn into the Party of Donald Trump? And what are conservative intellectuals thinking about it? To discuss that on this week's show, we're joined by Peter Wayner. Peter is my favorite conservative intellectual of the moment. He's a senior failure with the Ethics and Public Policy Center, and he's a contributing opinion writer for The New York Times and a contributing editor to The Atlantic Magazine. He worked for the Reagan administration, the George H. W. Bush administration, and I first met him when he was working for George W. Bush, first as a speechwriter and then as the head of the Office of Strategic Initiatives. Boy, we haven't seen each other in along I literally think I last saw you in the basement conference room at in the West Wing during the Bush administration, right back in the good old days. Depending on how you think of it, yeah, well, compared to Trump, I'd say Pete. I want to start by registering a kind of frustration. Often when people ask me who are the leading evangelical Republican intellectuals in the United States, I start by saying, Pete Wayner. You got to read Pete Wayner, But in the last six months alone, you've written pieces talking about how the terminology of evangelical Christianity is no longer the right fit for you, and even that membership in the Republican Party may not be exactly the place where you belong. So you're robbing me of my lead intellectual and within those categories they'll still be in my leading intellectual but in other some other categories. So would you talk a little bit about your own transitions? And in both of these spaces with respect to terminology, I have the feeling more than content. Two are now happy to do it, because the first thing I'd say is I'm still conservative, though I don't consider myself a Republican, which we'll get into. And I still consider myself a Christian, though I've detached myself from the term evangelical. Let's take the last one first. I mean the evangelical Christian movements, the one that I've been most a part of For for most of my adult life, I didn't grow up a Christian and a high school began a pilgrimage that brought me to the Christian faith. I was evangelical churches that for the most part I have been a part of and identified more or less theologically. With the reason that I no longer consider myself evangelical is primarily because of what's happened in the political arena. I think that the term evangelical these days is identified by most people understandably so as a political term, not really as a theological term. Most white evangelicals overwhelmingly support Donald Trump. But not only that many of them, not all, because it's a large movements, about fifteen percent of the population, and there are a lot of people on that spectrum, but a lot of white evangelicals are not only supportive of Donald Trump, but enthusiastic, and they are essentially they've become his sword in his shield. The white evangelical leadership, whether you're talking about people like Franklin Graham, Robert Jeffries, Jerry Fallwell Junior, Mike Huckabee, and so forth, they are of enthusiastic Trump supporters, obsequious in many cases rhapsodic about him, unwilling to challenge him, unwilling to stand up to his ethical and moral transgressions, and unwilling to speak truth to power. And that really bothers me. I think that that those people are doing more to harm the Christian witness than the so called new atheists ever have. Notwithstanding the complete accuracy of everything you've said, why didn't you think it was worth it just to sort of stand your ground and say, look, let's treat evangelicalism as about the Gospel the way it traditionally was, and not move away from the term by virtue of its contemporary politics. I mean, for myself, I remember when I identified as a modern Orthodox Jew. I was always troubled by the concrete politics of many of the people who shared that position. But I thought, to myself, least at the time, I'm so committed to this way of life. I'm so committed to these religious traditions and values that I don't want to let them monopolize the term. Now. To be fair, I also myself moved away from that terminology. So I know where you're coming from. But I'm wondering, why not stand up for the evangelicalism yeah, dry, good question. It's very well phrased, and I must say that I've several friends of mine who have exactly that that point of view, I guess I I'd say several things about it. One is, if you find yourself saying I'm a Republican bot or I'm an evangelical bot, and most of your your statement is the qualification of the term or the allegiance, then that's worth thinking about. That's a very good insight, by the way, in almost any area of life. Yeah. The second thing is, I mean, I'm not wed to this, I guess personal divorce with the term evangelical. If things change, I'm more than happy to come back. So it's it's not as if this is something which is necessarily permanent by any because, as you say, it's not that your Christian witness has changed in any respect. No, it's not. And it's the same thing for the Republican Party. If the Republican Party comes back to what I think is it's it's best self and it's truest roots, you know, then I would of course be associated with it as well. The other thing is I just should say that because I didn't grow up in a Christian Church. I never identified all that much with denominations, and I'm a person who has had questions and kind of zigs and zags and his faith. It's it's not always been an easy path for me in the sense that that's just my my outlook and temperament on life. I'm often examining things and rethinking and so forth. That's a good description for an intellectual. It's a more difficult description for a faith journey. Yeah, you know it is. And I'm certainly within the four corners of the faith without without a question. In some ways, I'd say my faith is deeper now than it was even ten or fifteen years ago. I think I've just been less attached to Evangelical Christianity than maybe some other people have. But there's no question that the reason that I moved away from it was this Trump moment, and because of what I think is the discrediting of Evangelical Christianity by a lot of white Evangelicals. Again with a qualifier and caveat that a lot of my friends are evangelical, white Evangelical Christians, and some of them have have real concerns about Donald Trump. Let's talk about the Republican part because your path was not very wavering with respect to Republicanism. You worked for Reagan, you worked for George W. Bush, You've been the leading Republican thinker. Talk about how you could move away from that terminology. Yeah, you're exactly right. I mean, the Republican Party was the party that I've been a member of since I first cast my first vote for president, which was which was Ronald Reagan, and was a proud Republican. I never thought it was a perfect party by any means. There's no such thing as a perfect party. Otherwise it wouldn't be a party. No, there's not. There's not, And you know I would even in my writings when I was, for example, blogging for Commentary magazine, it was an unusual for me to take on Republicans. So it wasn't a party that I was. You know, I didn't feel like I was a blind follower, but I certainly was comfortable there. And as you said, I worked in three three republic administrations. I'd say several things have happened to the Republican Party which has troubled me. One is a dramatic evaluation of ideas. You know, Daniel Patrick moynihan in The New York Times in nineteen eighty nineteen eighty one wrote in an op ed in which he said that the Republican Party in an instant had become the party of ideas, and that was for somebody like me, who was really a child of the Reagan Revolution, that was really important. There was an intellectual vigor and excitement in that era. If you go back and think what were some of the key and central books of the nineteen eighties. Losing Ground by Charles Murray on welfare reform, the Closing of the American Mind by Alan Bloom, which was a warning against relativism or relativism and postmodernism, the Naked Public Square by Richard John Newhouse. And there was the Federal Society in antonin Scalia. And so that was the kind of intellectual milieu that that existed when I came to be part of the Republican Party and the conservative movement. And I think there's been a dramatic devaluation of ideas which is culminated in this Trumpian moment. Can I can I actually ask you a question just about about that deviation, because I've heard other people make a similar argument and I'm not sure I understand the contours of it in the following way. There's no question that Trump is not a conservative who comes out of that particular set of intellectual traditions that you describe. And it's also the case that very very few, if any, of the people whom he's appointed to important influential positions come out of those intellectual traditions. But that doesn't mean that the ideas have disappeared. There's those same ideas are still out there, and in one sphere, the sphere you mentioned the Federalist Society, there of conservative constitutional and legal thought. Actually, Trump has consistently appointed people who are full of ideas that our ideas, very much out of that intellectual tradition, which are creative and challenging, and they might be right and they might be wrong, but they're certainly interesting. I mean, I think of Justice Neil Gorsuch, for example, who's himself. You know, he's an intellectual. I mean, how else would you describe someone who, in the middle of his legal career goes back to Oxford to finish his PhD. And you know, on the Supreme Court he's pushing a very particular It's not Scalia's version, but it's a particular conservative federalist society version of critique of the administrative state and of its overreach. I mean, it's very it's an exciting fermenting time, even if you disagree deeply with what the ideas are that he's that he's offering. So in the ideas are still out there. It's just that this current president isn't super interested in them. Yeah, I let me untangle that a little bit and maybe give my own my own spin on what you said. I don't doubt and I would never argue that there aren't people who are intellectuals within the Republican Party or the Democratic Party. I mean, it's it's not as if all ideas have been shattered they don't exist, or there aren't people that care for them. What I mean about the devaluation of ideas is that if you took a step back and said, not just Trump and not just the people who Trump is hired, but the people who nominated Trump and what defines the Republican Party today, I would say that if you listen to conservative talk radio or the or Fox News, there aren't serious arguments for the most part on policy. It's the politics of theatrics that is that has happened. The way I've described it to people is I got the feeling that somewhere along the way, a lot of the let's say, the conservative media complex, of which I know, these people, I've been, you know, friends with them. These are people I've known for many decades. But somewhere along the way, I think that they just got tired of some of the arguments that were being made. For example, you know the issue of cutting taxes, right, and that's been a perennial debate here between liberals and conservatives. Liberals saying that it's tax cuts for the rich, it's oriented just to help the wealthy to get wealthier, that it exacerbates the deficit, and it's harmful to the economy, and the traditional conservative response was, no, these tax cuts are done to try and generate economic growth, which helps everybody, so overall they're better for the economy. I think that conservatives just got tired of doing that. And what happened is Donald Trump came in and there was a pretty impressive field in twenty sixteen that you could have chosen depending on what your flavor of ice cream was, and if you're a more libertarian, there was Rand Paul. If you are a certain kind of Christian conservative, there was Mike Huckabee or Rick Santorum. If you were a kind of let's say, reform conservative, there was Jeff Bush or Mark Ruby or John kay Sick, or there was Chris Christie. I mean, the one person that you would not have chosen out of that field if you were a traditional Republican would have been Donald Trump. And yet he won, and he went actually quite easily. So the question is what would have cost people who for years and years were the kind of purity patrol that said, if there was one deviation from ideology, whether it was Jeff Bullish or Mitch Daniels, they were attacked on conservative talk radio. Is no longer being conservative. And many of these people rallied behind Donald Trump, Who's who's done things a thousand times or worse than Mitch Daniels, or were Jeff Bullish And the answer was, in my estimation, large part of the answer was that they were excited by his style. They didn't care about ideas, it was the theatrics. It was entertaining to them. And the other thing that I think is part of this too is Trump tapped into these seething resentments and grievances on the American right, some of which were understandable. Certainly if you were an evangelical Christian you felt like you had been mocked and ridiculed by the elite culture. There was some basis for that, but there was the seething, these seething resentments that that grew, and Trump tapped into it. I mean, that's you're clearly right about that, Pepe, But I can I offer it a third hypothesis supplements the other two. It's not meant to replace it, and it's one that you know, cuts maybe a little close to the bone, but it's that Arguably, the George W. Bush administration had the effect within the Republican Party of discrediting the sort of project of ideas driven conservatism in the foreign policy side because of the Iraq War, and you know, as you know, because somewhere in the complexity of the chaine of government where you were close to the very top, and I was close to the very bottom. I was working for the officer reconstruction of humanitarian assistance and then the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq. So I was there too, and I think in some important ways when it came to foreign policy, the wing of the conservative thought world that came to be called neo conservative lost credit. And one thing Trump was very clear on was his repudiation of what he would be characterized as neo conservative ideas, ideas about spreading freedom in the world. And I think some of the blame there falls with the Bush administrations failures in Iraq, of which I consider myself to be a part, a small part, only because I was a small figure. And then on the domestic side, there was the fact that the Bush administration, partly because of the Wars, left the United States with a larger deficit than it had received and that helped drive the birth of the Tea Party. And you know, there too, the small government side of the ideas seemed not to have cashed itself out in a concrete way. And I think arguably it's just a hypothesis that opened the door for Trump to walk in and say, you don't need the ideas Conservatives, those are the people who gave you the Bush administration, and I'm going to give you something really different. Yeah. Look, I think it's it's completely valid to say that. By the end of his presidency that the Bush presidency it was. It was obviously low and there was a reaction against it, and it may well have opened the door. I think that a lot of things probably opened the door to Donald Trump. But if you would have thought that the Bush administration for the sake of the argument, if you felt like it was discredited by instead of ideas, then you would come up, presumably and hopefully with another set of coherent political ideas. That's not really what happened with Donald Trump. You got a person who has no interest, no acquaintance with ideas at all. And I wouldn't lay that at the foot of George W. Bush or anybody else. And I will say, even when George W. Bush was riding fairly high in the Republican Party, certainly in his first term, we had these conversations with him. I recall these actually where he was warning about the rise of the isms nativism, protectionism, and isolationism. And so those movements were already coming, not because I mean they predated the sense among Republicans that the Iraq War had been completely lost. In all of the rest I will say, just as a footnote here on the Iraq wars, it's more than a footnote, but in the context of the conversation. But I think it's important for the zake of history and the reality of things, which is what George W. Bush did in the Iraq War with a surge in two thousand and seven was one of the most impressive and bravest political decisions that I'd ever seen, and actually turned the war around when he named Dave Petreus and Ryan Crocker to essentially lead that effort. And by the time his presence he came to an end, Iraqis was hardly Switzerland or Swede in terms of how pacified the country was, but it was in considerably better shape than it was in two thousand and five two thousand and six, and the war had been turned around. And in my mind, when Barack Obama pulled out all of the troops in twenty eleven, that triggered the downward spiral that we're still seeing now. Having said that, there's no question that the war was deeply unpopular and it hurt the larger project of democratization in the Middle East. I think what you say makes me think that we, you know, we should have a serious conversation. I mean, the world needs a serious conversation about the Surgeon in retrospect. I was a strong supporter of the Surgeon the time, and I think it did accomplish some of the things you describe, But I think the history of it is, in fact, it is pretty complex, and you know, deserves its own thorough conversation. I wanted to say one more thing in defense of George W. Bush. You know, you tell this fascinating story about his pointing to the rise of nativism and protectionism and isolationism. Arguably, one of the things that saved the United States from entering into a period of public islamophobia in the immediate aftermath of September eleventh was George W. Bush. I mean, if you look at how Islamophobia rose during the Obama years and obviously culminated in Donald Trump's run for the presidency, I think, you know, historians will want to know, well, why didn't this happen sooner? I mean, it was so long after nine eleven had happened, And I think a major part of the answer is that the President of the United States, George W. Bush, actively and thoughtfully carved out a position that said we are not at war with Islam, and he refused to use any islamophobic rhetoric, and he allied the United States with Muslims, and I think that actually had a suppressing effect on what otherwise would have been somewhat natural islamophobic sentiments that would have followed from nine to eleven. And when he withdrew from the political scene after two thousand and eight, there was just nobody there with the capacity to rein them in. I'm not saying that Barack Obama, of course, was islamophobic, just that he didn't have the same kind of credibility on the issue with those people who would want to incline in that direction. And I think this is something that that w has not received sufficient credit for in retrospect, and I think it's something that's worth worth noting. Yeah, well, I agree with you on that, and I would just say it's on this larger point about the Republican Party in the American right and what's happened in terms of it's intellectual, you know, movements. I would say, now, to the degree that Donald Trump has any set of policies, and it's difficult sometimes to tell what they are, what what kind of ideology that he has, it is fascinating to me how much he's transformed the Republican Party. I mean, I'll give you one example that's relatively recent, but underscores I think all sorts of pathologies that have happened, and that has to do with the issue of debt, deficit, limited government. Now, people on the American right, you're exactly correct when you talked about the Tea Party right that that came out because there was a sense of tremendous frustration with Mitch McConnell and John Bayner. So if you listened to it to conservative talk radio around two thousand and nine, twenty ten, twenty eleven, you're almost as likely to hear criticisms of Bayner and McConnell as you were of Obama. So you got a sense back then, pre Trump, of this rising populism and anger. Like Rush Limbaugh, for example, shifted from years and years it was a binary conflict between liberalism conservatism, and more and more it went to establishment and the establishment. And if you look at where Rush Limbaugh is now versus where he was during the Reagan years, you see these profound changes. This the other day, Russia Limbaugh got a call from a listener who was concerned about the debt and the deficit, and Rush essentially laughed it off, said it doesn't matter, hasn't been a problem, hasn't come back to bid us. Have you listened to Russia Limbaugh for virtually his entire career, particularly when deafits were going up under Democratic presidents, he whacked them up side ahead again and again and again. And yet because of Donald Trump and Donald Trump has no interest in limited government, the deficit has increased by around fifty percent I think over the last three years. You see this illustration, which is the Republican Party, which for years made this an issue, if at least theoretically, if not in their execution and through policy, said that debt and deficit mattered, and limited government and a liberty mattered. Now you got a guy with like Donald Trump who doesn't care about those issues at all, and they've shifted with him. You see the same thing on protectionism versus free trade. The Republican Party as long as I've been alive, has been the party a free trade. Now, if you did a poll, Democrats are more likely to be free traders than Republicans. It's a fascinating flip. So we've talked a lot about what's gone wrong, but you're also looking forward and thinking about what to do next. And your new book is actually directly forward looking. It's called The Death of Politics, How to Heal Our fred Republic After Trump. So, first of all, you're assuming there isn't after Trump in our future, and I don't know whether that's actually true. But talk a little bit, if you would, about your vision of how we do go about healing a Republic that is very badly fraid by virtue of the temper and tone of public discourse, and very much by the revolution that Trump has wrought, not only in the Republican Party but in the way we talk about politics. Yeah, you know, in the short term, I'm not optimistic about where we're going to go. I think that the twenty twenty campaign is going to be the most vicious and brutal in our lifetime and one of the worst in American history. And maybe it'll it'll compete with the election of eighteen hundred between Jefferson and Adams, which was a pretty nasty, nasty affair almost for the young republic apart. So look, as long as Donald Trump is president, and as long as he's operating this way and he's always going to operate this way as long as he's president. Is just going to be very difficult to try and get American public discourse in American politics back to a better place and for decency and a sense of humanity to prevail. But in the medium to longer term, I'm not necessarily optimistic, but I'm hopeful for several reasons. One is I'm a congenital optimists, I suppose when it comes to America and its capacity for self renewal, I just think the American story is really one of the amazing stories in human history. And we've had a lot of difficult times, but it's been more or less a steady progress toward justice and more or less toward decency, expanding the rights and liberties of people. So that gives me give me with some recent setbacks. Yeah, yeah, but but of course that's that's the that's that's the story of individual lives, and I guess the lives of nations, which is that it's never a straight lined trajectory, and but I think the trajectory of America has has generally been good. Second is just I try and bear in mind historical context, which is we've had a lot worse periods in our history than this. Um, I can name a couple which are pretty obvious. I mean one I did, which was the election of eighteen hundred between Adams and Jefferson, which was a vicious affair and politics was difficult at that moment. The Civil War, it's obviously the worst time in American histories. Seven hundred thousand people dead in the country of roughly twenty nine million, so that would be the equivalent of seven million dead today. And the late sixties and seventies, I mean, I think some people may forget. I was a little young to have a lot of memory about about the late sixties. But um, you know, if you go through you take off some of the things to remind listeners. But you had the assassination of Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King Junior within several months. You had the riots in the streets, the race riots. You had the universities being taken over. You had the March on the Pentagon, you had the Vietnam War. You had Kent State in the early seventies when the National Guards shot some students at Kent State. In the research for the book, I discovered that in an eighteen month period in between seventy one and seventy two, there was an average of five domestic bombings a day in the United States. So there was a feeling for a lot of people in the late sixties early seventies that the country was kind of coming apart, and there was certainly much more violence in the streets than we're seeing now. So that I think is another thing to keep in mind, which is we've had harder times and we've overcome them. And the third thing, which I put some hope in is that sometimes I believe viruses create their own antibodies, and sometimes in the life of an individual and in the life of a country, if there's certain virtues that you forgot, you cease to pay attention to, you cease to cultivate, and they're stripped away from you, you're reminded why they matter to begin with, and then you begin to defend them and fight for them. And my sense, my instinct, some of its anecdotal, some of it's the survey data. I think that there is a big counter reaction to what Donald Trump stands for, for his style, for the dehumanization, for their cruelty, for the crudity, and I will see. We're going to find out in twenty twenty whether he's going to be repudiated or not. But I find the country exhausted and embarrassed and to some extent ashamed of what Donald Trump has come to represent and the intensity of his politics. Pete, you know, I share that insight that I think people are embarrassed, and I also think you use this keyword exhausted. People do seem to be exhausted, and so that makes me wonder where's the energy going to come from for a counter response? What I sense is this sort of fatigue and frustration without anybody really saying, Okay, here's the reason, and here's the source of the energy that will drive us to do something different. And I'm wondering, do you sense that? Do you sense a source of a place of energy? I mean, the one really energetic place in American politics other than trump Land today seems to be the Democratic Socialist left, which is highly energized. You know, it may be leading the Democratic Party into political disaster, but from the perspective of those who belong to the Democratic Socialist wing, this is their chance to take their youth, their energy, and their enthusiasm and to mainstream a bunch of their ideas and to get the party to listen. I mean, they're not wasting the crisis of Donald Trump. They're using it as an opportunity. But also, I don't think that that's the place from which we're going to get a kind of nationally unifying anti Trump moment. So I'm wondering, do you have a you know, is there someplace else in this great land of our where you see energy that could coalesce into a more energetic and powerful rather than an exhausted and enervated return to you return to civility and politics. Yeah, it's it's a great question. I do see it. I mean, I'll name one thing is specifically one movement and I'm familiar with, and I think it speaks to a broader movement. It's actually not a political movement, and I'm not sure that this needs to be or even should be driven primarily through politics. Maybe it's it's a cultural response which ends up manifesting itself in a political response. But David Brooks, who's is a close friend of mine, runs a project at the Aspen Institute called a Weave Project, and essentially what he's doing is he's getting together and using a power as the Asment Institute, as a convening form for groups all across the country who are essentially re weaving the social fabric, which is I think fraid in many places, and not just for political reasons, not just because of Donald tru but there's a sense, I think the research data backs this up that the country is alienated, lonely and isolated in ways that it hasn't been before. There's a lot of fear that I think characterizes life in America today. And you do see all across America groups that are rising up, all sorts of groups doing all sorts of wonderful work to heal the country. It's a very American thing, it's a very Tofilian thing, and that's to me as a source of hope. But I think as long as Donald Trump is the president, we're not going to begin the healing process in the way that it has to. He has to be removed from the equation, and I think that will happen in twenty twenty, but I don't know. I think it's just much too early, and obviously the Democratic Party can foul things up and Trump himself for all of his problems and for all of his ignorance and policy, has a certain malicious genius when it comes to his ability to tap into and energize his base. I've never seen anything quite like it. I think that Trump's hold on the base of his party is at least as strong as Ronald Reagan's was. There was an almost cult of personality that has happened with Donald Trump, which is an extraordinary thing to witness. It's not unsurprising when I wrote during the twenty sixteen campaign my criticism of Donald Trump, one of the things that was on my list of concerns. Wasn't my chief concern, but it was. One of my concerns is that he would he would utterly transform the Republican Party and that people would like a black hole. The gravitational pull of Trump as president would pull an awful lot of people in. And I think that's that's happened. And I must say just anecdotally, because I've been in touch, as you can imagine, with a lot of Republicans, a lot of Evangelicals who are supportive of Trump. That's the world that I came from. The obviously the Republican in Christian world. And I found a couple of years ago more qualified support support for Donald Trump, but qualified that is largely disappeared, and now it's actually changed. There's a real enthusiasm form. It's the sense that he's going to bring a pistol to a cultural knife fight, and that thrills them. Pete, I want to thank you very much for sharing your vision of reweaving social fabric sometime post Trump, and I want to thank you really for the body of your serious conservative intellectual thought. And let's hope that the return to the Republican Party as a party of ideas happens eventually and that you're you're a central part of it. Thanks for joining me. I was great to be on. I'm a great admirer of your work and it was fun to have the conversation with you. Listening to Pete Wayner, you can't help but walk away with the feeling that the decimation of the ideas wing of the Republican Party has been complete. Here's someone who was at the absolute epicenter of the world of conservative and Republican ideas, a committed evangelical Christian, a senior figure in the George W. Bush administration, and he can no longer bring himself to call himself a Republican, and perhaps even more shockingly, the political associations of evangelicalism have become so strong that he's not even going to use the term evangelical to describe his own religious fit. That's a devastating picture, and it raises the question of what is going to happen going forward? Will the Republican Party eventually seek to reinvent itself For the moment, the answer is pretty clearly that that reinvention has happened, and that reinvention has been a reinvention into Trumpism. Trumpism, though still awaits its own intellectual expression. There's a president. He has ideas of a certain structure, but what he does not have is the armature of thoughtful people to try to express those ideas in a coherent and in fashion. It's not clear where that's coming from, and it's not clear where it will happen at all, But if history is any judge, if Donald Trump is reelected, there will be an opportunity for Trump intellectuals to emerge, and some will eventually emerge to state their case. When that happens, it'll be all the more important for intellectuals from other perspectives, whether conservative, liberal or left of liberal, to offer responses and to engage in a conversation. And that conversation, if we're lucky enough for it to emerge, is actually going to be the beginning of the process of restoring some kind of political discourse in our country. Deep Background is brought to you by Pushkin Industries. Our producer is Lydia gene Coott, with engineering by Jason Gambrel and Jason Roskowski. Our showrunner is Sophie mckibbon. Our theme music is composed by Luis GERA special thanks to the Pushkin Brass, Malcolm Gladwell, Jacob Weisberg, Miah Lobel. I'm Noah Feldman. You can follow me on Twitter at Noah R. Feldman. This is Deep Background