John O'Sullivan On Conservatism And Trump

(The full Dish is on vacation until Friday, September 4. This week’s episode was recorded on July 21.)

John is a journalist and political commentator. He’s the founder and president of the Danube Institute, the international editor of Quadrant Magazine, associate editor of the Hungarian Review, former editor of National Review, a fellow of the National Review Institute, and editor-at-large of National Review. He’s the author of several books, including Sleepwalking Into Wokeness.

An auto-transcript is available above for paid subscribers (just click “Transcript” while logged into Substack). For two clips of the episode — on falling birth rates and immigration, and comparing Thatcher and Reagan — head to our YouTube page.

Other topics: growing up Catholic in Liverpool; his working-class parents; his dad
on a hospital ship for D-Day; stories of John working closely with Thatcher; both of us British editors of US magazines in the early ‘90s; covering The Bell Curve; the Cold War and defeating the Soviets; muscular liberalism; Tony Blair and his tensions with Bush; what it means to be a conservative liberal; cosmopolitanism; the meaning of Englishness; oikophobia; multiculturalism; the World Cup; Trump and the Greenland threat; the Dem threat to democracy via institutions; the post-liberal left; Deneen and the post-liberal right; Trump getting Europe to bolster its own security; Ukraine; the Iran War and the nuclear threat; Trump’s character; the future of the GOP; AI and automation; Brits on the dole; the grooming gangs; Andy Burnham; premarital sex; how women civilize men; and the divorce rates among gays, lesbians, and straights.

Browse the Dishcast archive for an episode you might enjoy. Coming up: Azam Ahmed on terrifying new drugs, Emily Eakin on postmodernism, and Arianna Huffington on anything but politics. Please send any guest recs, dissents, and other comments to dish@andrewsullivan.com.

We got a ton of listener emails over last week’s pod with Ross Barkan on the DSA, but we’ll air them when we return from the August break. On another recent pod:

I enjoyed your discussion with Megan McArdle. I love hearing about guests’ upbringings (more of that please!), and I enjoyed learning about Megan’s knowledge of DC “elites” and insiders. But I was hoping for a more salient response and discussion to your question about why young people are enamored with socialism.

I’m very much a capitalist, but I grew annoyed with Megan’s implication that college graduates are whiny complainers. I just want to remind listeners that not everyone goes to college and that young people are financially struggling in every sector. That is why the pitchforks are out, and why all young (and old) might find socialism appealing.

Your fears of returning to the socialist state of the pre-Thatcher UK are well founded. I would love for you to have a guest with some economic bona fides to flesh out real solutions to the mess we’re in.

A reader responds to last week’s column:

I generally endorse your way of thinking, but PLEASE resist drawing false equivalence between Trump/MAGA and what you call the excesses of “Woke”. After more than a decade, I still don’t fully understand what this silly and inadequate term means, and I certainly don’t endorse the excesses of the more left-wing members of the community. But their sins are as nothing compared to the callous cruelty and gross incompetence of the Trump crew. All they ever have is grievance, nothing constructive, while the other side is often misguided, strident, irritating, but never malicious.

So many liberals say this to me. The key thing they miss, I think, is how without wokeness, Trump might never have happened at all, and Trump 2.0 definitely wouldn’t have. So wokeness is integral to populist backlash, and the left-authoritarianism is so strong and the elite so resistant to any reform that a figure like Trump becomes possible. The left cannot see outside itself.

I know of no liberals in my own life who really understand why mass immigration is a problem. Yesterday I had a chat with an extremely well-informed liberal who repeated the idiotic idea that the trans issue is irrelevant because it affects so few people. But the abolition of the sex binary affects 100 percent of all of us, as a tiny minority attempts to overhaul the entire society in order to assert its “rights”. They have no problem with hiring people on the grounds of their race and sex.

They tell me woke is over — no one is talking about this anymore — while holding on to every single tenet of the insanity. Think Remnick and The New Yorker. Woker than ever. With Trump as an insane alternative, the Dems had a chance. But if a sane Republican not wedded to the doctrines of Judith Butler and Derrick Bell replaces him — a Vance or Rubio — I suspect there won’t be a Dem president for a very long time. I sure won’t support one, and I’ve done that since 2004. Now that they’ve targeted liberal democracy for destruction, I’m out.

Another reader agrees with me:

Great piece on the cults of Trump and woke. You’ll take a lot of shit from woke apologists/lefties who’ll say Trump is the most powerful man on earth and wokeness was never that big a deal anyway, etc, etc. But it’s important to note: first, they’re wrong; and second, that the rise of woke helped create the rise of Trump, just as the rise of Trump fueled the rise of woke.

I voted for Trump three times. However much of a crook he was/is, he wasn’t telling me that I had some sort of moral obligation to agree that men can get pregnant or threaten to tattle to my employer if I disagreed that all white people are racist by their very nature. Trump was perceived as a defense against this.

If I thought wokeness was truly dying, I might gladly vote against Trumpism next time around. But we’re very much into America’s Weimar era, where it seems like the choices are communism and fascism, and not much of any heft in between. Let’s hope that changes — the sooner the better — but with the rise of the DSA, I can’t say I’m confident.

Another writes:

Your column about the dueling cults of Trump and woke is your best ever. There’s no one who better captures what I (and probably 60% of American voters) are thinking right about now. Thx and have a great vacation.

P.S. My Black American husband who grew up in the segregated South takes issue with “woke” being used as a derogatory term. He hates how the Trumpers and others (stupid White liberals) have taken what he sees as a perfectly good concept, and fucked with it.

A dissent:

It feels as though this piece (“Will The Two Cults Finally Fall?”) offers very little original insight that hasn’t already been articulated many times before — both in your previous pieces and by others on Substack, Twitter etc. Your column has become a tedious read. You might want to consider taking a longer sabbatical to refresh your creative juices. Enjoy your holiday.

One more quick dissent:

So, the Trump fever is breaking? Please tell that to our new Enabler-General Todd Blanche and his coven of enablers in the Senate.

Trump’s only real, effective opposition is in Tehran.

From a long-time subscriber who just cancelled:

The reality of a fixed income and Trump’s economy is hitting harder all the time, so I’m trying to adjust. I knew I needed to cancel and it kind of broke my heart. Much love to you and Chris. This Dishhead will never forget the first time I saw your on the Bill Maher show; you were the first conservative who made intelligent sense to me. I wish “conservative” still meant what it did then, and I just bought The Conservative Soul to learn more.

Another Dishhead:

Every year you go on the bludge for subscriptions, and every year I find myself extremely annoyed at you for not allowing me to pay a higher subscription fee. What do I have to do to get you to take more of my money?

Buying a friend a gift subscription — annual or monthly — is always a good way to support the Dish.

A reader takes care of the Mental Health Break this week: