PBS: Think Tank: Transcript for "New Ideas, New Consequences"

« Back to New Ideas, New Consequences main page

Transcript for:

New Ideas, New Consequences

Think Tank With Ben Wattenberg
“New Ideas, New Consequences”
PBS air date 12/20/2001
Guests: David Brooks, Juan Williams, and Andrew Sullivan

BW: Hello, I’m Ben Wattenberg. Right, left, and center, intellectuals, pundits and members of the chattering class share one view in common: Ideas have consequences. Fine. It is a commonplace by now to observe that the terror of September eleventh changed everything. But it is so. And that very much includes the world of ideas and the consequences spawned by those ideas. Liberals and conservatives are reexamining some cherished and bedrock notions. Some labels now seem useless in explaining the political playbook. There seems to be a potent cultural shift in motion. New ideas are aborning. We will live with the consequences, for good or ill.
To get a fix on what’s going on, we are joined by: David Brooks, senior editor at The Weekly Standard and author of Bobos In Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got Ther; Andrew Sullivan, senior editor at The New Republic and author of the website andrewsullivan.com; and Juan Williams, senior correspondent for National Public Radio and author of Thurgood Marshall: American Revolutionary.
The topic before the house: “New Ideas, New Consequences.” This week on Think Tank.

BW: Gentlemen, thank you for joining us. I am going to categorize you because we said labels don’t count anymore, but this is a label town. You don’t have to live with this but conservative, sort of conservative, not conservative. Who’s ahead? Who’s winning and why in the post nine eleven world?
David Brooks: Anybody who believes in the sort of active, militaristic government is winning. The people who distrust militaristic government, distrust government authority whether it’s at home to crack down on terrorists or abroad to aggressively intervene in foreign affairs, they’re not winning.
BW: So you say the conservatives are winning? On balance.
David Brooks: Rudy Giuliani Republicans, Scoop Jackson Democrats, if there are any left aside from you.
BW: And George Bush Americans generally.
David Brooks: Yes.
BW: Right.
Andrew Sullivan: I agree with that. I would add that the cultural far left has taken a huge hit, as well as to some extent the cultural far right. The both have taken a really big body blow.
BW: Yeah, I want to come to that far right point because that’s a very important. Juan?
Juan Williams: Well, gee, I’m sort of stunned because I think it’s so obvious that the far right has taken a big hit here. The far right’s the one that’s sort of eating their young and fighting among each other and arguing with the administration in power, which is an administration of their own. You see these huge arguments of people in power, you know, Colin Powell versus Paul Wolfiwitz and you start to say wait a second, these are all conservatives and they’re all at each other’s throats. Meanwhile on the left you would say, well, there’s some silence and so they’re not really engaged. But the fact is if you think about the ideals, the principles, you know sort of restraint, not knee-jerk reaction, none of that took place. People are concerned that maybe some of the foreign policy arguments should be reconsidered in light of what took place, but that’s all secondary in terms of America needing to respond to being attacked. I think the left has said, you know, this is a justifiable action taken by the United States.
BW: You guys gonna let that get by?
David Brooks: No, the problem on the left – there was a divide on the left between the literary and academic left on one side and the political left. People in the political left are used to power, are used to using power, they want power. People on the academic and literary left have made a fetish out of being the out group, out of being the oppressed minority. And the intellectuals on campus define themselves as spokesmen for oppressed minorities. So they distrust the forces of power. And in a time when America is exercising power abroad, when America is exercising power at home, they instinctively side with the out-group. And the out-group in this case happen to be the Taliban.
Juan Williams: No, come on. They…
David Brooks: But they’ve instinctively sided with them.
Juan Williams: That’s not true.
David Brooks: If you go through Noam Chomsky, Eric Foner, I mean Andrew has documented all of this.
Andrew Sullivan: I’ve documented all of this.
Juan Williams: No you can cite people who are exceptional, and I think people who are sort of, you know, not even I mean people who say wild things because I think they have had knee-jerk intellectual responses saying, you know, here’s an under privileged group or you know these people are disadvantaged and clearly they are poor people in the world and all that. But there is no widespread liberal sentiment saying somehow, oh no, we should ignore what happened on September eleventh and through our sympathies side with the Taliban? Never!
Andrew Sullivan: There was an instant response from the academic and literary left – this is America’s comeuppance and they said it, they printed it, it’s documented, it’s out there. On many American campuses many of these protected leftist professors said exactly the same thing. The only reason it has disappeared is because the war has been so obviously successful that they had the rug pulled out from under them. You had a huge protest here in Washington, DC, calling Bush the real terrorist.
BW: Let me, Juan, address this to you. I just wrote down a few things that have sort of come into the dialog… give war a chance; support for the military; honor the cops and firemen; fly the flag; reinstate ROTC; the end of political correctness; anti-anti-globalism. These were the indicia of the conservatives, and now suddenly they are universal. Has the balance of power, bubbling up from the people, tended to say that this--call it conservative view--this conservative view prior to nine eleven is the one that represents the real world? That’s what I’m really asking.
Juan Williams: No. In fact, what I think of it, Ben, is that liberals to a certain extent have reclaimed the flag from people who were flying it with such, you know, anger and devotion as saying if you are conservative then only then are you legitimately allowed to wave the flag and say I’m and American. Now I think people on the left are saying you… talk about the anti-globalist….
BW: That’s setting up a strawman. I mean people who flew the flag, we’re saying nobody else is allowed to?
Juan Williams: I think people on the left were uncomfortable with the flag. Oh and because I think the flag was—I mean you know let’s…I mean I don’t want to bring in the Confederate…, but I think the flag had become like if you want to wear the flag on your lapel, if you want to have your flag on your car, et cetera, you must be true conservative. And I think now, especially in light of nine eleven, people are saying, hey, I’m a liberal, but you know what? I back this country and I’m very comfortable with it.
Andrew Sullivan: But you know what? You know what, Juan, in The Nation the week after the bombing, Katha Pollitt, a regular columnist, said she couldn’t fly the American flag, even after September eleventh, a woman who lives a few blocks away from the World Trade Center. These aren’t strawmen.
BW: But…but she let her teenage daughter fly it if she…if she…
Andrew Sullivan: Just about, yes.
BW: … if she flies it out of her own bedroom window.
Andrew Sullivan: They’re not huge numbers of people, but they’re real and I think they would be even now mobilizing and stronger if the war weren’t going as well as it has been.
David Brooks: I’d say the permanent effect of all this is that liberals will now have a distinction that they’ve had in Britain for a long time, which we haven’t had here, between the loony left and the liberals. And liberals on campus have had to say to the Noam Chomsky’s of the world, who they have sort of tolerated as sort of admirable figures, that, no, they’re wrong about all sorts of things and there is a reemergence of a liberal patriotism on campus. I met…you know if you go to campuses as I have since September eleventh….
BW: Andrew says that it’s hard for conservatives to get on. Is it hard for you to get on to campuses?
David Brooks: I sneak in. I’m the liberals’ favorite conservative.
BW: Right. I see.
David Brooks: And so you find students who are further conservative than their faculty but who want to have a set of moral arguments and reach a conclusion. And that’s an interesting shift. And it’s an interesting shift for liberals to suddenly say there’s a boundary on the left beyond which we will not go.
BW: Let me address a question to you, conservative, and, what did I say you were?
Andrew Sullivan: Sort of.
BW: Sort of. Right, sort of.
Andrew Sullivan: Psuedo. (laughter) Pseudo conservative.
BW: I didn’t say pseudo. I said sort of. The conservatives prior to nine eleven, the cultural conservatives, made a point that America was becoming decadent, flaccid, corrupt, unpatriotic; we had lost this culture war; la, la, la, la, la, la. And what do you know? Nine eleven comes and all of a sudden--no surprise to me, I must say in my own defense—but all the American flags come up, everybody flexes their biceps, and as the Japanese learned in World War Two and as Osama bin Laden is learning now don’t mess with Uncle, don’t get him really angry because… Now the conservatives basically said this couldn’t happen, or—again some conservatives. And your magazine [The Weekly Standard] had to run a special sort of deal on American greatness. Do something great, as if we weren’t doing something great. And so how do you deal with that?
David Brooks: Well, you’ve conflated two issues.
BW: Of course.
David Brooks: The first issue is the cultural pessimism, the Robert Brooks of the world--Slouching Towards Gomorra was the title of his book. Clearly disproven. But this is a perpetual problem with American history. We look like an incredibly stupid, shallow, materialistic country. Deep down, we never are. And this is a problem that people on left and right who run down America perpetually run into. They take the surface evidence and then they judge it falsely. What we call national greatness, which was an attempt to recapture….
BW: Which I favor...
David Brooks: …Teddy Roosevelt…
BW: Right.
David Brooks: …conservatism, was saying you can’t retreat into private life, which seemed to us the problem in the nineties. You can’t decentralize. You can’t forget about the national government and national service, military service, civil service. And we thought that’s what the Republican Party in particular was in danger of doing. The Gingrich, Armey revolution was based on the principal of leave us alone, that government is evil. And we wanted to reclaim a Teddy Roosevelt sense that government should be limited, but it should be energetic.
BW: Is it true that, post nine eleven, people have a new respect for government; not just on the military side but saying, wow, our government can solve the military thing, look what they’re doing in Afghanistan. Let’s spend more money on X, Y, and Z.
David Brooks: This is a really interesting question. For a generation trust in government….
BW: Now I have a nod here from our….
David Brooks: …has gone down.
BW: Yes.
David Brooks: Post September eleven it has shot up. And that’s a generational reversal.
BW: Does that trouble you?
David Brooks: Not particularly because….
BW: As a private sector guy?
David Brooks: .I don’t think we’re going to go back to a Great Society liberalism. I think the trust in government is over the institutions of government that work, which are the security institutions, the defense institutions, plenty of conservative institutions.
BW: Social Security. Works.
David Brooks: And there…that’s true, too. Social security. There is an interesting debate as to whether the political landscape changed by September eleventh. And I’m not sure it is. We assume that there’s going to be a burst of activism after a war. But if you look in history, Ulysses Grant, Calvin Coolidge, Harry Truman, these post-war presidents were not exactly activist presidents.
Andrew Sullivan: People aren’t in favor of government or against government. Government is a complicated arena. I think what people have realized is that government can do well what it should do well which is protect citizens from threats from abroad and internally. And they absolutely should. It doesn’t mean you necessarily believe that there should be a prescription drug entitlement; that’s another argument altogether. The other point I’d make is that if you add Bush’s tax cut to the expense of the war, even if you wanted an activist government, it cannot be done. We can’t afford it without doubling or tripling our deficits. And if Democrats think they can go in and say….
BW: That’s what’s Stockman accused Reagan of is…is…
Andrew Sullivan: Bush is Stockman too. It’s the most important thing he did.
BW: …which is to spend the available spendable money so you can’t…
Andrew Sullivan: Immediately. Exactly.
BW: …you can’t spend it on big programs.
Andrew Sullivan: You didn’t spend it. You gave it back to the people who earned it, the people. You didn’t give it to the special interest groups in Congress who will spend it on their special concerns.
Juan Williams: Let me offer a different view of this, Andrew, which is that I think you have, in fact, in the White House the OMB director, Mitch Daniels, literally trying to restrain spending at this moment; restrain spending first among Republicans and then defying Democrats to challenge the president on terms of his veto power because there is so much spending being thrown out now. Forget the surplus; we’re going to go into deficit spending and we do so with the American people saying, yes, and the White House having to worry that, hey, come two thousand and four this is a guy who’s gonna have deficits behind him so he’s gonna have to justify why he came into a surplus government.
Andrew Sullivan: Well that’s because some of the spending, as you point out, as David has pointed out very eloquently in the Daily Standard, this stimulus package has so much bad spending in it, so much pork spending in it, that if you….
BW: And there really is a lot of new spending for homeland defense. I mean that’s…
Andrew Sullivan: Correct. Well, that’s so if people will support that….
Juan Williams: Correct. So if ideas have consequences, if ideas have consequences, you can look at the money, look at the spending trail, and you can see that the idea of big government is now being confirmed by this conservative administration.
Andrew Sullivan: No, it’s not.
David Brooks: No.
BW: But not on poverty programs and stuff like that.
Juan Williams: No. No, but if you look at where the money’s going in terms of rebuilding New York, it goes to people who are suffering from unemployment. It goes to rebuilding city infrastructure. It goes to paying firemen and policemen….
Andrew Sullivan: That’s…that’s traditional conservative spending.
BW: Let me…let me…hold on one second. Let me just turn to Juan for a minute. One of the causes that has been put up high on the roster of some liberals is sort of this anti-globalization and anti-trade. Now in the midst of all the uproar, the Congress passed Fast Track Had he lost, you would have had banner headlines: “President Rebuked.” This is big time stuff, the whole issue of globalization. I think some of it comes out of this nine eleven feeling that we’re all one great world. I mean, isn’t that something that the liberals took a hit on?
Juan Williams: Organized labor took a big hit there. Organized labor clearly wants to limit his trade authority. But if your argument is that the idea of nine eleven is what forced that vote, you’ve got to remember that Clinton also had fast track authority that some of the Democrats had fast track auth….
BW: And then he was afraid to bring it up again ‘cause he knew he would lose. Because it was five, six years of—the last five, six years of the Clinton Administration--Am I correct?--He didn’t bring it up because he knew he would loose his Democrats?
David Brooks: Trade is the one issue that runs through American history where the parties shift every thirty years, it seems. JFK, the Democratic Party was the party of free trade.
Juan Williams: Correct.
David Brooks: That is eroding and now I think we have twenty-one Democrats in the House voting for free trade. That is a historical shift for the Democratic Party, to my view a tremendous problem for the Democratic Party if they’re going to be the protectionist party.
Andrew Sullivan: The other point I would make is that I think if you—for example the latest New York Times poll shows that Bush’s handling of the economy is supported by sixty-one percent in the second quarter of a recession. Now if you think that means that—my view is that in fact the war management will actually not be decompartmentalized by the public. They will see a successful war leader, and they will give him the benefit of the doubt on certain economic issues just as Thatcher was transformed by the Falklands.
BW: If the election were held today. But the election is a year away and we don’t know what’s going to happen. And the other thing I would point out is if sixty-one percent, is that what you said, support his views on the economy and eighty-five percent support him generally and his role in the war, that tells you that he’s got a potential problem.
Andrew Sullivan: No, that’s called a recession. I mean it’s amazing that it’s sixty-one percent. No president’s had sixty-one percent handling in a recession. My point is simply that people also underestimate Bush’s own convictions. He does not believe in big, bloated government. He has consistently supported tax cuts. He wants a flat tax in his heart of hearts. He is not going to cave in, especially now, to liberal Democrats in the Congress. And so don’t buy it. I think the spin…
BW: I haven’t bought anything. I’m trying to sort it out.
Andrew Sullivan: …they’re going to pin the recession on Bush. If the Democrats decide to pin the recession on Bush, they are going to commit suicide.
David Brooks: Bush does have a problem. In nine months and longer, we will probably be talking about domestic policy again. That’s the normal state of American political discussion. And so the question for the Bush administration, what do you come up with in nine months? My view, based on the sounds coming out of the administration, is they do not fundamentally think the political landscape has shifted from September eleventh. And they fundamentally think that compassionate conservatism and the inclusive conservatism they’ve been championing is the same conservatism they can champion. I’m a little dubious about that, whether they can go back to the status quo ante. And I think that, you know, before September eleventh, the domestic cupboard was bare.
BW: Let’s just talk for a moment and then get out. Let’s sort of review the bidding and we can have a little interchange, David, Andrew, Juan. What is the new mindset of America? If you had to sort of describe how it’s different now from then. I mean everybody’s going around, especially right after the war, everything’s changed. What’s the new mindset? The new set of ideas that will yield, perhaps, new consequences?
David Brooks: I would say if I had to put it in a word, the word would be confidence. We went into this war exaggerating the power of our enemies, underestimating our own strength, aware—keenly aware--of our limits. We had to go into every conflict with an exit strategy. We’ve come out of this war, to the extent that we’re out of it, saying, you know, actually we’re pretty strong, our air power can do quite a lot, we can do a lot around the world. This confidence reverses, yet again, the Vietnam era of a sense of limits rather than opportunities, a sense of underconfidence , a sense of skepticism about political elites. And that confidence will somehow spill out. I happen to think it’ll spill out in foreign affairs, in a more aggressive foreign affairs role, but it could spill out in a domestic role, and a sense that we have the ability to do stuff.
BW: This air power thing, I mean when I was in Air Force ROTC, which was about a hundred and twelve years ago, they were arguing then that, you know, air power has only limited use, you’ve got to send in ground forces, blah, blah, blah. In the meanwhile carpet bombing by B-52s shakes the whole earth and people start bleeding through their ears, even if they’re in trenches. And it’s turned out to be an incredible weapon.
David Brooks: It has an affect on foreign policy. If we can fight wars and topple evil regimes with air power, then you begin to think well maybe we should be a little more active in that.
BW: Mindset?
Andrew Sullivan: I would add to David’s self-confidence, self-respect. I think that what this thing did was make us look at ourselves very closely to see the kind of people that live in this country and see the fiber that they’re made of. The critics from the far left and the far right were shown to be wrong. And a confidence that actually, yes, we can defend our civilization and our civilization is worth defending. And notice that we did it. And that is a huge boon to self-respect and to self-confidence. And that’s an internal thing as well as an external thing.
BW: And that would lead right into David’s thought that we therefore might do more internationally because we are strong and we do respect ourselves.
Andrew Sullivan: I think any government that did not exploit the current situation to mop up the rest of terrorism, that didn’t go after Iraq, didn’t go into Somalia, would be delinquent in its moral responsibility.
BW: Criminally negligent.
Andrew Sullivan: Criminally negligent. And I think they’re not going to be.
BW: I agree with you.
Andrew Sullivan: And that is going to change the world. It’s already changed the world. Not just us, but the populations in the entire Middle East are looking at this country and they now know, jeez, they really do mean it. And I think for eight years we had a president who he said a lot of things could be done and didn’t do it. We’ve had in the past lots of people who haven’t made sure that American words are backed by actions. This really puts the lie to that. And it’s an amazing step forward.
Juan Williams: I think the big idea change, to my mind, has been one of--well ,David said self-confidence--I think it’s self-image. I think lots of people on the left thought, well who are we? We’re this big powerful nation; we dominate militarily, economically; we tell other people what to do in terms of foreign policy; our culture is dominant worldwide. And in terms of the sex, the violence, the racism that’s all in our movies and our TV, it’s everywhere. And some people were uncomfortable with that. But I think after September eleventh, you look at those Twin Towers and you see, well, wait a second, they didn’t just kill the CEOs, they also killed the janitor from El Salvador, the Black cook. Everybody was dying in that building. The enemy was very clear on who Americans were. And we were all Americans. I think for the left the idea was, wait a second, we have been violated here. And we understand very basically if somebody comes into your neighborhood and starts shooting up the place, you better stand up, Dude. You better do what you have to do to take care of yourself. And I think that element of thinking now is part of what the left sees. Now, if you extend this, if you will, into the realm of foreign policy, it does include, you know what, we can’t have terrorism. We like the way we live. We, as Americans, value our way of life. We like the idea that we can have civil conversations among people who may have different political points of view. We like the idea of religious freedom. We like the idea that we can earn a living; you can come to this country and you can be an aggressive immigrant and you can make a living and support your family without fear of oppression from the government. These are good things. And I think lots of people are celebrating that for the first time, having to come to the idea of you know what? I like being an American!
BW: Very well said. Let me ask you this though, the slogan of this war, and you enunciated it in effect, is “united we stand.” There was a movement on the left of one form of multiculturalism, which was sort of separate of multiculture, not multiculturalism, we’re all Israel Zangwells, we’re one big melting pot, but we’re all separate peoples and they wrote about the “peoples” of the United State. That’s gone, you’re saying. We’re all in this together, and we’re one people.
Juan Williams: I think it’s reduced radically. I mean one of the big threats, Ben, minority communities not feeling as if they were wedded to the Bush administration after the Florida….
BW: Blacks are even more supportive of the war than Whites I saw in some poll.
Juan Williams: Correct. And a little more hesitant in terms of the military action…
BW: They’re disproportionately in the military…
Juan Williams: Yeah, that’s why. Hesitant in terms of the military action because of—you know, if you’re going to put Black and Brown people at the front to die, you know, wait a second, and so. But that hasn’t occurred as yet. But you’re right, strong sense of patriotism and support for that military effort. You know, I think there are lots of people who were worried if you look back at the historical record, the historical record is if you look at World War Two, I think ninety percent of the country is White at that time. It’s, you know, the small town mythology still dominates. But you come forward to now and you have a third of the country as minority. We’re urban, big city, and the question was, oh, is this going to divide the country with all the immigrants, the Muslims as well as the Jews? You know, and it has not. It has not. That’s the big idea.
BW: Oh, I agree with that. Okay. Thank you, David Brooks, Juan Williams, Andrew Sullivan. And thank you. Please remember to send us your comments via e-mail. For “Think Tank,” I’m Ben Wattenberg.
END

Back to top

Think Tank is made possible by generous support from the Smith Richardson Foundation, the Bernard and Irene Schwartz Foundation, the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, the John M. Olin Foundation, the Donner Canadian Foundation, the Dodge Jones Foundation, and Pfizer, Inc.

©Copyright Think Tank. All rights reserved.

Web development by Bean Creative.