Rich Lowry

From opposing Trump in the beginning, to something else today. This week, on Firing Line. 

TRUMP 2015 LAUNCH: They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists.

During Donald Trump’s insurgent campaign in 2016,

TRUMP DECEMBER 2015 Donald J. Trump is calling for a complete and total shutdown of Muslims entering the United States.

the conservative publication of record, National Review, said quote, “Donald Trump is a menace to American conservatism.”

LOWRY ON TRUMP 2/3/2016 National Review has always stood up against this crude populism. 

Today, in the midst of widespread civil unrest, a global pandemic, and another bruising presidential campaign, 

TRUMP IN TULSA JUNE 2020: Joe Biden is a helpless puppet of the radical left.

BIDEN JUNE 30 PT 1: It seems like our wartime president has surrendered. 

what does the editor of National Review, Rich Lowry, say now?

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HOOVER: Rich Lowry, welcome back to Firing Line. 

LOWRY: Thanks so much for having me. Congratulations on the success of the show.

HOOVER: Listen, over the last two weeks, we’ve seen the major political parties convene in a process that occurs every four years. And it’s a place where they outline what their principles for governing are, and their philosophy of governance are. Over the last two weeks, tell me, do you have a real clear sense of what either party stands for in 2020? 

LOWRY: Yeah, I think I do. The Democrats didn’t put a lot of emphasis on that in their convention. They emphasized more the character differences between Joe Biden and Donald Trump and especially Joe Biden’s empathy. And even if you disagree with Joe Biden on everything the way I do, you have to acknowledge he has gone through incredible losses in a courageous way and a way that’s quite inspiring. And he is an empathetic man who has sympathy for others who are suffering. But they obscured and didn’t really talk very much about their policy agenda, which is further to the left of any Democratic presidential nominee in a couple of generations, at least since FDR, as Bernie said it, I think accurately, the first night of the Democratic convention. And The Republican Party, opposed to that, is an anti left party. I think it’s somewhat ridiculous the Republican Party is not going to have a platform this year.

HOOVER: We’ll get to that. 

LOWRY: Most of the Republican rhetoric you heard this week, you could have heard at any Republican convention. the basic thrust: pro tax cut, anti regulation, anti Green NewDeal, pro police, anti disorder on the streets, anti-crime, pro-life, pro-faith, all that is what we’ve heard from Republican Party in the past.

HOOVER: So let’s just take a step back for a second. William F. Buckley Jr was 29 years old when he founded the National Review. And you were just 29 years old in 1997 when you were selected by William F. Buckley Jr. to become his successor at National Review. A few years later, in 1999, you appeared on one of the final episodes of Firing Line and I want you to take a look at it right now. 

LOWRY 1999: I don’t think people develop arguments in the same way on TV as they did on Firing Line. I remember when I was first discovering conservatism, I obviously wasn’t very hip in high school, so I’d tape the shows and actually rewind them to pick up points that have been missed. And you just you’re not going to do that with MSNBC or CROSSFIRE. It’s just a different level of discourse I think. 

HOOVER: Reflecting back, how do you see the discourse today? 

LOWRY: You know, I was complaining about it then, it was the golden age compared to what we have now. I think the media environment, in general, it’s better that we have more sources. The downside is that you can also marinate in your side’s own schlock to a greater extent than you ever could before. There is, you know, on the cable networks no one would even think of having a debate show anymore. So there’s no doubt that our public discourse has taken a steady downward trajectory.

HOOVER: Partway through the Democratic convention, you wrote in your political column, “So far, the Democratic Convention has been notably bereft of policy, focusing instead on President Donald Trump’s character failings rehearsed at length and Joe Biden’s empathy and decency.” The lack of policy, the notable lack of policy was a clear choice on behalf of the Democrats. You know, why? 

LOWRY: Well, they think they can win a character election. They ran a character election in 2016. It didn’t work out, they think they can do it again because, one, we’ve had four years of Donald Trump in the White House. And, two, because Joe Biden is not as radioactive a figure as Hillary Clinton was and will probably be harder to make radioactive. So it’s definitely a gamble, it’s a bet, but one that they might well pull off.

HOOVER: There is a real tug of war on the left between the Bernie Sanders faction, the AOC faction, and what Joe Joe, whatever, whatever it is that Joe Biden is going to stand behind if he has the opportunity. You wrote, “If Biden is allowed to coast through the fall with his current image not being seriously contested. Well then, campaign malpractice will have been added to the long litany of charges against Donald Trump.” Tell us what you meant. 

LOWRY: Well, the emphasis on the Democrat side is obscuring policy. So this leaves an opening for Republicans to define what that agenda is. And we’ve seen a fair amount of that over the last week. But I think the attack on Donald Trump, obviously the senility attack is foolish and hasn’t worked because he’s not literally–

HOOVER: You mean Donald Trump’s senility attack against Biden? 

LOWRY: Correct. You know, Biden’s obviously lost a step or two. And there’ve been concerning moments in some of the debates and some of the interviews. You wonder how he’ll hold up under the rigors and pressures of the presidency if he actually wins. But he’s not literally senile. So I don’t think that attack works. I think the best attack on Biden, you’ve heard a little bit this past week, is he’s weak. You know, he’s being pushed around by the people who really have the energy in his party, which is the radical left. Joe Biden’s never literally been a moderate. He’s been a moderate in the sense that he stays smack in the middle of whatever the center of gravity is of the Democratic Party at the time. So if you look at Joe Biden in the 1970s, he shockingly conservative–

HOOVER: Yes. 

LOWRY: –by today’s standards. You project forward and you look at Joe Biden now from the perspective of the 1970s, he is a quasi socialist. But he’s just moved with the Party. And this is why–  I thought Bernie Sanders gave one of the most effective speeches in the Democratic convention. I think this is why he has been a really effective figure. And no, Joe Biden is not going to endorse Medicare for all. No, he’s not going to endorse defunding the police. He’s not going to endorse free college for everyone. But he’s moved in that direction on every single issue. And if you are in an idealogue, that is a success. You’ve moved the center of gravity of your party and then everyone else moves with you. 

HOOVER: So a major weakness, I think, of the DNC, and you write about this as well, is their failure to acknowledge the increasing lawlessness and unrest in cities around the country. You know, they can say ‘defund the police’ and they can talk about the failure for us to achieve, so far, a real reckoning with our racial history. But they can’t defend the looting and the protests. 

LOWRY: And they don’t have to defend the lawlessness, they just have to say it’s wrong, which shouldn’t be that hard. I mean it’s just a natural to say, ‘Look, we support social justice. We think there are police practices that are wrong and they’re racist. But there’s a way to go about pushing for change and rioting in the streets and looting is not that.’ But they couldn’t bring themselves to say that at one of the highest profile stages of the campaign. So that to me is a real failing. 

HOOVER: As you know, another black man, Jacob Blake, was shot seven times in front of his children by police in Wisconsin. He survived but he is paralyzed. Wisconsin is now seeing multiple nights of rioting, looting, protests, not just peaceful protests. How is this issue going to continue to play into the election? 

LOWRY: Well, it remains to be seen. The Trump bet is that there is a silent majority out there, and in the privacy of the voting booth or the privacy of filling out the mail in ballot, whatever it is, that they will make their voice heard. I don’t think that’s a crazy bet. I think there is at least some sentiment out there. But just, violence is always wrong. And violence always leads to more injustice. And this is just not the way to go about pushing for change. 

HOOVER: You mentioned at the top, and the National Review editorialized, that the Republican National Committee should have created a platform. Why is it a mistake for the party not to have a platform.

LOWRY: Well, parties are great institutions of our civic and national life. They sprung up almost from the inception of the country. But a party should be bigger than one person. And this just plays into the idea that Republicans are too beholden to Trump, they’re too beholden to him personally, and are just on board whatever he says. 

HOOVER:You know, it plays into the criticism that the party is simply a cult of personality around the president, right?  That the party is the president, and it isn’t about ideas. 

LOWRY: I think it is too beholden to Trump personally, but that’s not entirely what’s going on. You know, we saw and heard from a Republican Party this last week that wasn’t just Donald Trump. Of course, we heard from every last person with Trump in their last name, pretty much. But we also heard from Tim Scott. You also heard from Nikki Haley. You heard from other Republicans who will be part of the future of the Republican Party, whatever happens to Donald Trump and when he’s long gone. And I do think there is a core of Republican orthodoxy that is still there. This is more of an anti-government party than the Democrats are. The concern about deficit spending is obviously, mostly thrown out the window. Concern over entitlements has been forgotten. But it’s still, there’s a core of limited government there or opposition to the left’s more ambitious government plans. And it’s a culturally conservative party and a socially conservative party. And I think one thing we learned from 2016 is the relative strength of the various factions within the Republican coalition. And the economic conservatives were just weaker than a lot of people thought. And the cultural conservatives were much stronger. 

HOOVER: I want to get to your book, The Case for Nationalism. The subtitle: how it made us powerful, united and free. Let’s take a look at a moment from President Trump’s presidency that you highlight in the book from 2018. Here it is.

TRUMP 2018: You know, they have a word. It sort of became old-fashioned. It’s called a nationalist. And I say, really, we’re not supposed to use that word. You know what I am? I’m a nationalist, OK? I’m a nationalist. Nationalist. Nothing — use that word. Use that word. [USA CHANTS] 

HOOVER: Take nationalism at face value. How do you define it?

LOWRY: Well, people often confuse, I think, the words patriotism and nationalism, or think that the word patriotism is the word for everything good about national feeling and nationalism is a word for everything bad. Nationalism is the idea or doctrine that distinct people defined by a distinct culture, a distinct history, very often a distinct language, should govern a distinct piece of territory. And that basic idea defines the modern world. Eighty percent of people– they might not call themselves nationalists, but accept nationalism at the basic level, which is that people should be self-governing. They shouldn’t be governed by empires or anyone else. They should be able to govern themselves. The idea that we need to protect our culture, that we need to protect our borders and our sovereignty, those are really important ideas. I think the Republican Party had lost touch with them somewhat prior to the rise of Donald Trump. And this is one of the aspects of his appeal that was very powerful and more powerful than a lot of political observers or members of the elite expected. 

HOOVER: So you write “nationalism, like anything else in this fallen world, is susceptible to corruption and abuse and, but it is not intrinsically destructive or hateful.” People do think of nationalism as a dirty word. They think of it as divisive. They think of it in connection with the worst some of the worst atrocities in the 20th century which you go to great lengths in your book to distinguish. But it does seem like nationalism is often used to divide populations rather than unite them. Why is that?

LOWRY: Well, true nationalism should be the very opposite. The– Again, the core of true nationalism is that we are one people, no matter where you come from or what the color of your skin is. Now we’ve obviously fallen down in reaching that ideal through much of our history. But America wouldn’t be what it is without nationalism. The American Revolution was, at bottom, a nationalist revolution. 

HOOVER: So, you know, a year before President Trump declared himself a nationalist, as you know, white nationalists marched on Charlottesville. President Trump outraged many, many people, yourself included, by refusing to distinguish between the Nazis and the ‘very fine people’ on both sides. Do you consider those white nationalists to be nationalists under your definition of the word?

LOWRY: No, white nationalism is a contradiction in terms. Black nationalism is a contradiction in terms. This is racial separatism. It’s not nationalism. And the DNA of those far right marchers in Charlottesville doesn’t go back to the great nationalists of American history. Doesn’t go back to Hamilton or to Lincoln or to TR. It runs through the KKK and domestic terrorist groups. And just, just in the cause of technical strict accuracy, Trump did not say that the Nazis were very fine people. He was saying there were very fine people on the debate about what to do with the Lee statue. Now, the way he said it was disastrous. He should have been more frank and forthright and clear from the beginning. But I think it’s a bit of a myth that he is actually praising Nazis.

HOOVER: So to the question then of nationalism and your definition of nationalism, is President Trump a nationalist by your definition?

LOWRY: He is mostly a nationalist. But a big problem with President Trump by my definition is that he’s actually insufficiently nationalist. So when he says of West Baltimore, you know, no one, no human being would want to live there. Well, people do actually live in West Baltimore and they’re human beings and they’re Americans. So I think that’s where he has really fallen down, is there is a great unifying, a potential in a nationalist message that he doesn’t pursue at all because of natural combativeness and divisiveness. And I think there’s a potential for a more populous, more nationalist Republican Party to have greater appeal among a certain segment of African American and Latino voters than a more traditional Mitt Romney Republicanism. Kind of working class,  patriotic, self-reliant, proud African American, Latino males, I think, have an inherent attraction to this kind of message. But that is something that will have to be pursued down the line by subsequent Republican presidential candidates

HOOVER: Let’s move to the post office. In terms of a nationalist project, right, the post office is actually written into the Constitution. Is the post office a nationalist project?

LOWRY: It’s a national institution. There’s no doubt about it. So I think it would be a shame if the post office blinked out of existence. I don’t think Congress will ever let that happen, but clearly the post office has to change. And I think the debate lately about the post office and some conspiracy against mail-in voting, is totally crazy. Most of these reforms are absolutely necessary. They’ve been talked about forever. They’ve been implemented forever. It’s not a new thing that the post office has been decommissioning collection boxes that are underutilized. This is something that’s been literally happening for decades. So more needs to be done to modernize it and make it efficient, but it’s not going away anytime soon.

HOOVER: Do you have any concerns that the post office will be insufficiently funded to get us through the election?

LOWRY:  No, I don’t.The post office processes billions of pieces of mail every week. It deals with enormous surges of mail and around Christmas, Mother’s Day, all the rest of it. There’s no reason to believe that it won’t be able to handle the mail in balloting, even if there’s a crush of mail in ballots. 

HOOVER: All right. So from there, from a totally reasonable approach to something that strains credulity, I have to ask you about QAnon. First I need to state what QAnon is for the sake of the audience. QAnon is a false conspiracy theory that accuses Democrats and Hollywood elites of sex trafficking and cannibalizing children, and controlling the deep state seeking to undermine the president. Rich, as you know, QAnon adherents have shown up to President Trump’s campaign events. And the president has refused to denounce QAnon. You know, he said that its followers quote, ‘like him very much,’ which he appreciates. You’ve also written that the, “the spread of QAnon shows the Trump era GOP has weakened antibodies against kookery.” And I think in the context of William F Buckley, Jr., as you sit in his shadow, you know, one of the things Al Feltonberg, one of Buckley’s biographers, wrote, quote, ‘Buckley said, his greatest achievement was “keeping the conservative movement, quote, free, where he could, of extremists, bigots, kooks, anti-Semites and racists,’” end quote. 

LOWRY: Yeah. 

HOOVER: What do we say about all this now?

LOWRY: Well, I mean, he’d be appalled by QAnon. It’s certainly true that any movement is going to have a kooky fringe. There are occasionally wacky congressional candidates that make it through in any party at any time. But QAnon seems to have more purchase and traction than that. It is extremely disturbing. It’s a poisonous and malicious conspiracy theory. There’ll be at least, unless something crazy happens, at least one member of Congress next year who will be sympathetic to this theory, a woman from Georgia. 

HOOVER: Georgia.

LOWRY: And the President of the United States couldn’t denounce it. And this just shows President Trump’s overly personal way of viewing everything. It’s not just that the only thing that he knows or professes to know about QAnon is that they like him. It’s the only thing he cares about. 

HOOVER: How would Buckley respond to this now?

LOWRY: Yeah. He’d totally denounce it and excoriate it and mock it and do all that he could to try to exclude it. 

HOOVER: In 2016, in the midst of the GOP presidential primary, when National Review published the issue entitled “Against Trump,” you recall the summarizing paragraph was that, “Some conservatives have made it their business to make excuses for Trump and duly get pats on the head from him. Count us out. Donald Trump is a menace to American conservatism who would take the work of generations and trample it underfoot in behalf of a populism as heedless and crude as Donald Trump himself.” How is National Review’s position different today?

 

LOWRY: Well, I think unfortunately much of that editorial stands up pretty well. I think there are  two things that are different. We thought at the time that all these promises he made on judges, on abortion, on gun rights, a whole host of other things, there was just no way he could be relied on to follow through on them. He has. So at least from my perspective, I can’t speak for all my colleagues, and we’re all over the map on Trump. That’s been a surprise and a welcome one, and something that’s notable and we should be grateful for. The other kind of broader context was, you know, that was in January, 2016 we did everything possible to stop Donald Trump in the Republican Party when there were many, many better Republican alternatives from Marco Rubio, to Ted Cruz, to Scott Walker, to all the rest of them. What’s different now is that that era is gone, and now he’s President of the United States. And the alternative is Donald Trump or Joe Biden.

HOOVER: Look, you said at the beginning of this, Rich, that this is going to– what the Democrats want is this to be a character election. How do you advise or counsel conservatives to consider the importance of character as they weigh it against policies 

LOWRY: Yeah. Character is important. And a lot of people on the right have kind of minimized it over the last four years. They’ve defined it down into just being style, you know, or just being tweets. It’s more than that. You know, Donald Trump is thin skinned and vindictive, very often a small minded and this plays out in how he conducts himself and runs his presidency in all sorts of ways. And it’s a very bad thing. So my basic belief is that everyone on the right should be honest about that. Let’s not excuse the inexcusable. But character is not the only consideration. And as we’ve talked about earlier, Joe Biden is the most left Democratic nominee, certainly of our lifetimes in a couple of generations. And there are basically no concessions to anyone on the center-right. So, you know, endorsing Biden, going along with Biden, voting for Biden means for most conservatives rejecting every single one of your prior commitments on policy. And this isn’t just, you know, environmental regulation, not that I mean to minimize it. This is really important, moral questions like abortion and like conscience rights. So all that has to be weighed in the balance as well. 

HOOVER: National Review is going to decide later in the year, they’re going to deliberate whether they’ll endorse Donald Trump or not. How about you?

LOWRY: Will I endorse him personally? 

HOOVER: Yeah, 

LOWRY: No. I want him to win over Biden. If I’m given the choice of choosing who will be the next president of the United States, I would choose Donald Trump. But I have profound discomfort with the way he conducts himself. So, I’m never going to be wearing a MAGA hat. I’m never going to excuse the inexcusable, I’m going to remain in this somewhat uncomfortable space. And one of the things, worst aspects, I think, for debate at the moment is just everyone assumes you have to be one thing or the other. I still believe in some nuance and complexity. But Margaret, it’s occasionally a little lonely here on my little island.

HOOVER: Rich. It’s a really lonely place to be in that nuanced space. You know, there are other Republicans, high-profile Republicans, who have made a different choice, namely the Lincoln Project. who have decided not to inhabit that nuanced space that you just articulated.

LOWRY: So I totally understand Republicans and conservatives, saying, look, just the character flaws are, are so deep and so desperate and so unalterable that we can’t support Donald Trump. What I don’t get is what the Lincoln Project is doing, which is attempting to destroy the Republican Party and burn down every single vulnerable Republican senator. 

HOOVER: You mean like going after Susan Collins or Cory Gardner, anybody…

LOWRY: Right. I think Susan Collins votes less with President Trump than any other Republican. 

HOOVER: Yes.

LOWRY: And what are you going to do is, if Biden’s actually elected and gets a comfortable majority in the Senate — I still think that’s an unlikely scenario — but things will happen that conservatives have opposed for decades that will stick, and never be undone. So that just makes no sense to me. 

HOOVER: Rich, thank you for returning to Firing Line. 

LOWRY: Thanks so much Margaret.

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