Mark Steyn - Hugh Hewitt Transcript: The myths of change in Obama's future cabinet etc...

HH: I begin this hour as I do most Thursdays when we are blessed and thankful with Columnist To the World, Mark Steyn. Mark Steyn, you got much to be thankful for this Thanksgiving?

MS: Yes, I think so. I’m thankful to be blessed to live in one of the greatest nations on the face of the Earth, and the reasons for that blessing, those blessings, are somewhat in dispute between Republican and Democrat voters, but I think we should all be able to agree that we are nonetheless blessed for whatever reason.

HH: I agree. Now I do want to talk about one non-blessing, which is the market sell off, which has now reached 17% since Barack Obama was elected. Democrats hate when people bring this up, but it seems like the market is “pricing in” Barack Obama. Or is that unfair, Mark Steyn?

MS: Well, I think the market is no longer quite sure what it is measuring. The fact is, and let me be bipartisan here, I think both parties have done their best to give the impression in recent weeks that the rules don’t apply. The rules don’t apply to mortgages, the rules may not apply to automakers, the rules no longer apply to all kinds of areas of investment opportunity. And if you have a situation where the rules can change at any moment, then investors don’t want to make long term investments, and are wary of making long terms investments. And so I think that what we’ve seen in recent weeks ever since the big September 15th Lehman Brothers business is the Dow reflecting that fact that both parties don’t seem quite committed to the rules of capitalism.

HH: Now Rush Limbaugh made the argument today, I think it’s a good one, that if Barack Obama were to walk in front of the cameras and say no tax hikes for the next foreseeable future, and I would say for a year to a year and a half, that markets would immediately begin to steady. Do you agree with that assessment?

MS: Yes, I think so. I think he played a winning hand throughout this last year by staying aloof from any crisis of the day. On January 20th, he’s the man who has to have an answer to the crisis of the day. And I think there’s a limit to how much longer he can just do this sort of Hamlet act by looking like a sort of super cool male model version of Hamlet sort of standing thoughtfully on the battlements while everything goes to hell around him. He basically hasn’t taken a position on the auto bailout. He ought to send a clear signal on taxes. The idea of ending the Bush tax cuts in 2009, or increasing taxes, or even not lowering corporate taxes…I make this point again and again as someone who has worked in different countries. It is staggering to me that the corporate taxes of the United States are some of the highest in the Western world. Why do you think business would prefer to set up in other jurisdictions and merely sell in the United States? It’s because the United States is not a good country to operate a business in.

HH: Now Mark Steyn, we also got our first vote of non-confidence from abroad. Zawahiri doesn’t much care for Barack Obama. Do you think this surprised everyone? Obviously, we denounce the slur on Barack Obama by the terrorist in the cave, wherever he is. But obviously, he’s not for meeting without preconditions with Barack Obama.

MS: Well, I’m not you, Hugh. I’m stunned. I’m stunned that Obama’s message of hope and change, and change and hope, and the change of hope, and the hope of change doesn’t seem to be resonating with America’s enemies. What a surprise. Who would have thought it? I would imagine that in the last few days, Barack Obama has seen the same briefings that George W. Bush and other world leaders get when they go to sleep at night and when they wake up every morning. And I would imagine he is fast modifying his view of the world as one where you can just sit down across the table from the bad guys and schmooze them with your charm.

HH: We certainly hope so. Now what you make, are you secretly, as I am, hoping for Hillary Clinton to go to the Department of State?

MS: (laughing) Well, in the sense that America has had to suffer her lo these many years and it’s time for the rest of the world to get a taste of it, if that’s what you mean, then I think I would be in favor of it. In a way, it’s a measure of how the minimal expectations we have on our side of the Obama administration, that Hillary seems like a savvy choice compared to some of these other rumors like John Kerry for Secretary of State. But I must say, what it does reflect, I think, is that there are no Obama people. I mean, he protested when people brought up the thinness of his resume. But it’s a fact that he has nobody to bring to Washington. And like Clinton or Carter, or Bush or Reagan on our side, there’s no group of people who’ve been around him for years for him to fill positions in his cabinet with. I mean, he’s basically having to take the old Clinton circle that we thought he’d driven a stake through back in the Spring.

HH: Do we think, how long do you think it will be, Mark Steyn, until we hear about the Emanuel presidency?

MS: (laughing) well, Rahm Emanuel is an interesting figure. He’s in a job where he…in theory, you ought to be leaking and briefing on behalf of his president. So far, from what I can discern from his friends in the mainstream media, he seems to be leaking and briefing on behalf of himself. Obama may need to get a chief of staff to serve as his chief of staff, because Rahm Emanuel seems to be Rahm Emanuel’s chief of staff.

HH: Let’s turn abroad since our politics is so dreary on this Thanksgiving week to Great Britain, where David Cameron, leader of the Tories, actually came out today, or this week, and said I’m not going to spend as much money as Labour. And I thought to myself, this is news?

MS: Unfortunately, it is news, because in many parts of the Western world, including, I regret to say, Washington, the so-called conservative party has in recent years contented itself with trying to tell the voters that it can in effect operate the liberal state slightly more efficiently than the liberal party can. And this isn’t…for me, personally, and I think for most principled conservatives, this isn’t enough. We want a conservative party that is not just prepared to slow the growth of the state, but to reverse the growth of the state. And the idea that David Cameron, whom David Brooks in the New York Times was saying that Republicans ought to look to as a model of modern conservative leadership in the 21st Century, the fact that this is regarded as red meat from David Cameron is par for the course, and not very inspiring for us poor, beleaguered chaps on this side of the ocean.

H: Now you bring up David Brooks, and that reminds me that Kathleen Parker, another one of the not so conservative conservatives, took to the op-ed page of the Washington Post to denounce Evangelicals this week. How long is the conservative meltdown, crack up, whatever you want to call it, going to go on?

MS: Well look, Kathleen, I like Kathleen. Kathleen did me a huge favor, by the way. She gave her copy of America Alone to President Bush who read it in a couple of days and sent me a very nice letter about it. And so I’m always grateful to Kathleen for that. But I think this is ridiculous. You know, Reagan established the principle. There are three legs to a successful Republican election. There are social conservatives, there are fiscal conservatives, and there are national security conservatives. And if you chop off one of those legs, the whole things falls down. And the problem at that last election was that all three of those legs became loosened and weakened, and the idea that we can get by without any of them at the moment, I think doesn’t bear scrutiny. But certainly, if Evangelicals don’t show up to the polls, Republicans lose, and Kathleen should bear that in mind.

HH: Now last subject, let’s turn to your slight of the Canadian Intelligence Services. I am sure that both of them are upset with your disparaging of their professionalism vis-à-vis your review of the new Bond movie.

MS: Yes, the new Bond film, Quantum of Solace, has this amazing scene towards the end where Bond runs into this woman in a particular circumstance in Russia, in deep cover in Russia, and reveals her to be a woman from Canadian intelligence. Well you know, I would like it if Canada had maple sugar traps, and trapping and ensnaring Russian and Chinese and North Korean and Iranian agents. But the fact is that Canadian intelligence is one of the few intelligence agencies in the Western world that doesn’t actually have agents out in the field doing spying. And I mean, my model is MI6. I prefer the James Bond model to those deadbeats at the CIA in Langley who sit around reading e-mail all day long. I like, I think serious nations have agents out in the field. I wish the United States had more, and I wish Canada had any.

MS: I thought it was, I thought it was really a bit of a disappointment after Casino Royale. The so-called reinvention with Daniel Craig seems to be running out of puff in this second film.

Glenn Beck talks with Jonah Goldberg

November 21, 2008 - 13:30 ET

Liberal Fascism by Jonah Goldberg

GLENN: We go to one of my favorite writers, Jonah Goldberg, on the program. Hey, Jonah, how are you, sir?

GOLDBERG: I’m good. How are you?

GLENN: I’m good, I’m good. You know, Jonah, there are two books that I have found — sorry I’m losing my voice, but there are two books that I found over the last year that I talked an awful lot about and I don’t know if either author really, really understands the impact that their books could have if people really read them. One of them was Amity Shlaes. She wrote a history book on the Great Depression and she herself didn’t even see the parallels in it, as I talked to her about it a couple of years ago and I said — or maybe a year ago and I said, you know, Amity, it’s the same stuff. And she didn’t even see it until recently. Jonah, I don’t know. Do you see in your book, Liberal Fascism, do you see everything starting to come together and repeat itself right now?

GOLDBERG: Oh, I can’t imagine why you are saying that. Just because we had a cultish movement, youth movement that elected a supreme leader who was seen as a spiritual savior and redeemer of society who promised to create a civilian national security force, I mean, I have no idea why you would think there would be any relevance for my book today.

GLENN: When you started writing it, Jonah, you didn’t know this was — did you know this was all coming?

GOLDBERG: Well, you know, on one sense, you know, I would wake up over much of the last year saying, does Barack Obama really, is his chief motive here to sell more copies of my book? And so some of it really sort of surprised me. You know, the YouTube videos where they sort of turn him into this Messiah figure and the glassy-eyed children look like they are doing a North Korea pageant, that kind of stuff really surprised me but on the other hand the whole theme of my book is that these themes, these impulses, these motivating passions that we saw in, you know, the first half of the 20th century never went away and that they still exist in deluded form in contemporary American liberalism. And if that’s true, and I think it was true, then it should be true of Barack Obama and lo and behold it is. So in one sense it makes sense. It’s nice confirmation of my argument because, you know, I ended the book with a discussion essentially about Hillary Clinton and it turns out the person who defeated Hillary Clinton better represented the themes of my book than Hillary Clinton herself.

GLENN: Well, I will tell you this, Jonah. And please, if you have not picked up Liberal Fascism, when did it come out, a year ago?

GOLDBERG: In January.

GLENN: Oh, January. Gosh, time flies. In January I read this book and it opened my eyes to the history of this country and how things have been done in the past and what’s coming our way, and I tell you I was up — you know, I’m rehearsing this Broadway stage show that we’re doing, that we’re taking around and I’m in these big Broadway rehearsal halls there in Manhattan and let me just say I’m the first conservative commentator probably to ever use these rooms to rehearse in. And I was there night before last and it’s about 10:00 at night and I walk out around the corner and here are all these 20-somethings and they are all wearing either Obama T-shirts or, you know, Obama pins or anything else. And when I walk around the corner, everybody just stops and they just look at me, and I look at one of the pins or whatever on the guy’s jacket and I said, hey, how are you guys? And they went, fine. And as soon as I turn the corner — this is how stupid they are, like I couldn’t hear them — they all just started laughing at, did you see that? He looked at it, man, he looked at it; we’re showing him.

GOLDBERG: (Laughing).

GLENN: And it was, A, so ridiculous and I wanted to turn around and go, “Are you guys 12?” But it gave me the chills in the way I know how fascism has started in the past and it just feels like brown shirts are on the way. Am I —

GOLDBERG: I want to be careful.

GLENN: I’m not saying that that is but I just feel this anger from the extreme left and they could just so — you know, it’s, you’re a Holocaust denier if you don’t believe in global warming.

GOLDBERG: Well, you know, and it’s funny. I did this thing the other day. You know, during the election they were calling Barack Obama a Messiah, a redeemer, the one and all that stuff and these guys want to ratchet down expectations. So now they are just comparing him to Abraham Lincoln and FDR, you know?

GLENN: Yeah, I know.

GOLDBERG: And, you know, I agree with you entirely that the psychology of — there are a lot of college campuses talking about this book. The psychology of a lot of these Obama sort of kids, these kids with open toed shoes and closed minds, they have the same thing that youth always have, you know, more passion and idealism and certainty about the rightness of their position than they have wisdom or knowledge or experience. That’s why we call them youth. You know, but they are not going to be brown shirts. This country is just too decent a place for them to be brown shirts. I think they could be green shirts, they could be, you know, the sort of environmentalist little, you know, kids who inform on their parents, who — actually there’s a British utility that has just launched a program called Climate Talks where they want kids to inform on their parents and develop a criminal dossier on their parents when their parents don’t recycle, don’t respect the environment and all that kind of stuff. So it can still be really, really bad but I don’t think we’re going to see, you know, pure Nazi style brown shirt thuggery but we’ll see all sorts of things we don’t wanted to see.

GLENN: Jonah, tell me — thank you for saying this. You give me a little bit of hope, but I have to disagree with you. I see, I just see the beginning, and I don’t mean that it’s Barack Obama per se. I just see this, the far left, you know, the people who have been in that, you know, Michael Moore/Sean Penn kind of camp for a long time that would like to put other people in an actual camp, you know, you are seeing it now everywhere. They are starting to take on God, they are starting to blame things on conservatives, the hatred of talk radio.

I read an article where it was quoting the violence of talk radio and yet what’s his name, William Ayers, can blow up buildings, write a book about it, say that it was okay, say that there are a lot of parallels from the 1960s to today and young people might consider what are they willing to do as long as nobody’s harmed and yet we’re the violent ones. And, you know, I’ve been reading the words of — one of my researchers, I have him doing a lot of research on Adolf Hitler and Mussolini and what are the beginning signs, et cetera, et cetera, and the way that they changed religion, the way that they first reached out and then crushed it one by one, I believe it’s starting to happen.

GOLDBERG: Again there’s a lot of that stuff in my book and I agree with you with a lot of this. You know, the whole idea of fascism, people say that fascism, you know, and liberalism don’t have anything in common because fascism was totalitarian. Well, fascism was totalitarian but it wasn’t totalitarian the way the communists were. The communists just flat out took over everything. The way the fascists do it was they basically coopted one institution after another. They said basically if you’re willing to promote our values, our ideological agenda, support for our, you know, our ambitions, then you can stay a nominally independent fraternity, you can stay a nominally independent business, on your own university, so long as you agree with us on everything. And when you look at things like environmentalism, there really is that sense like, you know, I think we’re having green week again right now.

GLENN: Yeah, we are.

GOLDBERG: On NBC.

GLENN: Yes, we are.

GOLDBERG: Imagine if a network had announced pro life week, you know, the screaming about it. But all the, you know, hoity-toity establishment liberals think it’s just a wonderful effort of civic-minded consciousness raising when mainstream network, a huge corporation aligns itself with the agenda of the government and with a political movement and... anyway.

GLENN: So hang on. Can you hang on after the break?

GOLDBERG: Sure.

GLENN: Okay, hang on after the break. I want you to think about this. Did you in all of your research, did you ever see the points — because this is what I’ve been looking for — where the people should have known, could have turned the tide, could have stood up to it. What should they have done and are we approaching that point, you know, what can we do that actually makes a difference in our own personal lives. And we’ll get that answer coming up from Jonah Goldberg next.

(OUT 9:45)

GLENN: 888-727-BECK. Jonah Goldberg, the author of Liberal Fascism, a good friend of the program. So Jonah —

GOLDBERG: Terrific dancer.

GLENN: You’ve never taken me dancing. I don’t know that.

GOLDBERG: You?

GLENN: Jonah, the question that I asked you before is in all of your research when you looked at, you know, fascism, Mussolini — and everybody thinks, oh, people here didn’t love Mussolini. Yeah, they did. The liberal establishment here, the New York Times and Time magazine and FDR, everybody loved Mussolini. They thought he was great.

GOLDBERG: That’s right. That’s right.

GLENN: So when you saw all of this, did you get a chance to look at those movements, at the beginnings of them and was there a point, was there a tipping point to where the people were like, “Oh, crap, now it’s too late.”

GOLDBERG: Well, yeah. I mean, you know, as you know, there are different fascisms and they have a lot to do with the national character of where they come out and so in Germany it was just much more violent and dangerous and so historically the tipping point is the night of the long knives when Hitler basically kills his rivals in the movement. But again those sorts of tipping points, you know, they are already tipping points after the tipping point in a lot of ways. In Germany it was really, it was World War I that basically put the country on a path towards Naziism and I mean, there are lots of moments where if you were a time traveler and you went back, you would say, oh, if we had only killed Hitler after the Beer Hall Putsch, you would stop things, that kind of factual stuff. But I think in the American context the thing to keep in mind is that you are absolutely right: Among the intellectual classes there was an overwhelming consensus for something like fascism in the United States. You know, differences about doctrine or how it implemented and all the rest. But there was almost a universal yearning to restore Woodrow Wilson’s war socialism, to have something like fascism here and the greatest work against it was the deeply embedded cultural love of freedom and democracy in this country, and I think if we’re going to fight, whether you are right or I’m right about how bad it can get, the remedies are the same. You know, the remedy is fight tooth and nail on the principles of free speech. Don’t make it about defending Rush Limbaugh or Glenn Beck. You know, don’t make it about protecting conservative talk radio. Make it about protecting free speech. On the union stuff with card check, you know, it’s not about keeping unions from getting more powerful or rewarding the Democratic party with labor and all that kind of stuff. It is about protecting the secret ballot. These are the institutions that the founding fathers had in mind from the beginning to protect us, and it’s an important thing to keep in mind. When Barack Obama talks about unity, you know, how we need to have unity and hope and hopeful unity and hopeful unified hopefulness or whatever the hell he’s talking about, unity can be wonderful. Unity can be a fantastic thing. It can be profound of evils. Rape gangs are unified, the mob is unified. In our political culture the hero is the individual who stands up to the mob an says you will not hang this man today. The founding fathers, you read the Federalist Papers, federalist 10, federalist 51, it’s all about the importance of preventing unity. That’s why we have divided government, three branches of government each vying for control over the other, we have a Bill of Rights, we have separation of powers, you know, we have 50 state governments, each of them divided up and it’s all to protect against the dangers of majoritarian faction brimming with a sense of unity that gets to destroy the rights of the minority. And conservatives are uniquely positioned because we actually care about the Constitution in a way that the left doesn’t. The left, when they say they care about the Constitution, what they really mean is they care about doing good and so they invoke the Constitution when it helps them and they call for a living or new constitution whenever it gets in their way. We actually care what the actual Constitution says and for conservatives in particular, what we need to simply do is stand by these principles and point out to the opposition that simply because something seems good doesn’t mean that we should be violating the Constitution or violating the American tradition of letting liberty and democracy and republic, small R republicanism, that we shouldn’t violate these things simply because we’ve gotten caught up in some fad. Because that’s what fascism was and always is. It’s a fad. It’s one of these things where people get a fire in their mind, they get all excited, they get imbued with that same spirit that when we were teenagers we said, if we all work our hardest, we can make this our best yearbook ever.

GLENN: Jonah Goldberg, name of the book is Liberal Fascism. Always good to talk to you, Jonah. We’ll talk again.

GOLDBERG: Thanks, Glenn.

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