Bill Kristol

Bill Kristol wants listeners to get outside their comfort zones, emphasizing the importance of rethinking one’s views. He is the editor-at-large of The Bulwark and host of the podcast Conversations with Bill Kristol.

Transcript

Bill Kristol (00:05):

These people just hate the other side. That's the charge at least. So how do you have a normal debate if that's the charge? You wish us ill and you're lying about it. Well, what's the answer to that?

Ted Roosevelt (00:17):

Welcome to Good Citizen. I'm Ted Roosevelt. In this episode we talked to Bill Kristol. Bill was a thought leader and someone I've admired for a while. I can remember sitting in my dorm room Sunday mornings watching Bill on ABC's "This Week." At times I found myself arguing with the TV, though many times his comments made me rethink my own views. Bill's the editor-at-large of The Bulwark and has his own podcast, "Conversations with Bill Kristol." He served in the administrations of presidents Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush, and has a PhD in political science from Harvard. All of these things make him a truly compelling guest, but that's not why I invited him on. I'm interested in the idea of breaking from political party and following one's own conscience. Bill, a Republican, was one of the first and most outspoken "Never Trumpers," taking direct attacks from President Trump.

(01:05):

It was a decision that left him outside both major parties, and I respect his courage to stand on his own. It was something I wanted to talk to him about. In our conversation, we zoom out to provide some historical context to the current political environment and get a better sense of how we might move forward. We also talk about nonpolitical solutions like education and technology that might break the partisan gridlock. Bill is someone who has shown a remarkable ability to remain true to his values and be critical in reevaluating his own beliefs, something I think we could all take to heart in our journey towards becoming better citizens.

(01:48):

So hello Bill, it's great to have you on the podcast. I'm thrilled to be talking to you today.

Bill Kristol (01:52):

It's great to be talking to you.

Ted Roosevelt (01:54):

Bill, you grew up in a highly political family. Many people may not know this about you, but you actually started your career as a Democrat working for Patrick Moynihan. So you've always had a contrarian streak, or at least the willingness to move away from the political party with which you're aligned. Tell us a little bit about the experience of growing up in such a political family and why you moved away from the Democratic Party initially.

Bill Kristol (02:19):

So my parents were liberal anti-communists, liberal center and centrist liberal anti-communist, but not part of the conservative movement, certainly not a Goldwater conservative or anything. So I did a little volunteering for Humphrey and then when I was in college I volunteered for Scoop Jackson. And then in 76, as you say, I worked for Pat Moynihan who was a very good friend of my parents. So I would say my contrarianism was originally to be a not pro-new left in the late sixties, even though I was on the upper west side of New York to think that a lot of the claims that the new left had discovered, new truths about politics, were not correct, that there was much more wisdom in some of our traditions and in our political system and the founders, a lot of things that people talk about today. Eventually, by about 1980, that made me into a Republican and a Reagan supporter as the Democrats, I'd say continued on a leftward trajectory, but at first I was more of a certain kind of Democrat who gradually faded out of existence maybe for a while. But I would say maybe it's made a comeback incidentally in the last couple of years. I hope so, at least.

Ted Roosevelt (03:21):

It's so interesting to hear you talking about the Democratic party leaving you behind. It's a reminder that political parties are dynamic and always moving further to the right, further to the left. Today, it seems like a lot of Republicans feel like they may have been left behind by the Republican party.

Bill Kristol (03:39):

And for me too. So having been a Republican and served in the Reagan and Bush Administrations, then being a commentator and editing a conservative magazine, the Weekly Standard—I now in retrospect think I became a little too much of a maybe orthodox or dogmatic conservative. I didn't think I was at the time and there were issues I broke with a lot of conservatives on, but still probably fell a little bit into the polarization and trench warfare that characterizes our politics and our intellectual life to some degree. I guess in my stage in life, you're supposed to be settled in your views and I find myself rethinking them, but I've got to say it's been actually interesting to do that. It'd be kind of weird if you had the exact same views as age 50 as you had at age 20 or at age 70 as you had at age 50, right? I mean, you're supposed to learn from experience and from life a little bit. It's unlikely you got everything right when you knew much less and had much less life experience.

Ted Roosevelt (04:27):

So lemme pull on that thread a little bit. And growing up in my family, the kind of love language was politics and current affairs. I mean, that was the dining room conversation and if you showed up for dinner, you were expected to have an opinion and be able to defend that opinion and to have read that day's paper. And my father was a Republican, my mother's a Democrat, and there was a space for all political stripes at the table, but there were kind of two tenets that were always true. And the first one was really that there was a presumption that everybody was speaking in good faith, that they were coming to the conversation with their own set of morals and values and that's what was driving their opinions. And the second was an allowance for people to change their mind, that if you, during the course of a conversation or in the case of the family of over time, your opinions changed, you were allowed to revisit opinions and it wasn't seen as a betrayal of one team or the other team, but that it was just simply of having learned something along the way from the conversations.

(05:25):

Maybe I'm flattering myself a little bit, but I think you would've really enjoyed these dining room conversations and we would've loved to have had you because I don't hear you speaking in absolutes. I've never really heard you speak in absolute truths and you've certainly, to your point, you've evolved and you have a dynamic approach to how you think about ideologies and politics in this country. And so I guess the question I have, is there a place for people like us at the kind of proverbial national dinner table today? Or has that seat kind of been taken away from the table, so to speak?

Bill Kristol (06:00):

Look, it's a democracy and a free country, and so if there are enough of us, there's someplace at the table and now there aren't as many of us perhaps as there once were. It seems a little more rare to say, oh, I've changed my mind on X or Y— though people do say it, after all. Same sex marriage, there are a lot of politicians legitimately were against it 10 years ago now, say no, in retrospect they were wrong. I would say that about myself. So it's okay to be educated by experience, but having said that, we have obviously a highly, very polarized politics and unfortunately quite polarized society at this point, or certainly public discourse—I'm not sure about the whole society, but political discourse. If you're in elective office especially, there's a big penalty to changing your mind and it's safer to stay in your corner or in your tribe and not raise hackles. So I hope there's some rethinking going on. I think as people look at history, they see many, many instances of healthy rethinking or people changing their minds or progressing or just adjusting to the times. It's not even changing your mind necessarily, just it's a different country now than it was 50 years ago. It's a different world. It'd be a little crazy if you thought everything—everything should be organized exactly the way it was then.

Ted Roosevelt (07:13):

So let me ask you, if you can look forward, is there a sense that the Republican party fractures and that's what brings back some people to the fold? Is there a sense that it starts moving back towards maybe a more moderate, more centrist position? Paint the picture over the next five, 10 years.

Bill Kristol (07:31):

So I mean, to be honest, I really do think it's hard to tell. When you get to these moments where one senses things are breaking up, very hard to tell how they break up. Does the party get more and more radical and the new centrist offshoot develops? Do the Democrats sweep up some of the old moderate Republicans? Does the party recoil from maybe electoral defeats and seek to be more centrist? But then what happens with those who don't want to be more centrist? Do they break off? I think it would be healthy to have a little bit of this tur—I mean, when it's in the middle of this turmoil, it's a little nervous-making and of course difficult. But in retrospect, these periods of turmoil have often been healthy for America and it's kind the way we worked out a whole lot of issues.

Ted Roosevelt (08:17):

What would you describe as kind of shared American values at this point? You used to be able to point to what I'm going to call the mythology, the American mythology. Today, it's less clear, to me at least. Are there things that you feel like, whoever you were talking to, if they said, I'm an American, this is what I stand for, fill in the blank there.

Bill Kristol (08:38):

If you asked Americans, what are you proud—are you proud to be an American? Most, very large majority say yes. What are you proud of? I think there'd still be an awful lot of pride in World War II and D-Day and a fair amount of pride in the Cold War also as well. a lot of pride in that we've moved towards racial equality. A lot of pride in our prosperity and free markets and the virtues that made that possible so that prosperity possible. Hard work and entrepreneurship and so forth. So I think progressives are always going to be a little more unhappy with our past and a little more hopeful about the future, and more willing to say the past is deeply flawed. Conservatives are going to have a ros view of the past—too rosy, often—and say, oh no, if only we could get back to the way it was in the good old days.

(09:22):

But that's a sort of normal political difference of degree really. In any country, you're always going to have people who have a more progressive and more conservative disposition. But now you just routinely see a rhetoric where it's not just that these people are mistaken or they don't understand how a healthy society works or they don't appreciate that, I don't know, the challenges African-Americans face from police forces or the other side would say the challenges cops face from difficult situations on city streets, right? I mean, it's not a matter of lack of understanding, lack of appreciation, balancing of two different things you want at a decent society. It's that these people just hate the other side. That's the charge at least. So how do you have a normal debate if that's the charge? You wish us ill and you're lying about it. Well, what's the answer to that? So that's where abandoning a common sense of truth and civic wishing well for the country in a way—common attachment to the country—does great danger, a great damage to our public discourse and to our civic fabric.

Ted Roosevelt (10:29):

So do you think of it as a political trough that's part of a cycle that happens or is it a secular change that's taking place right now?

Bill Kristol (10:37):

I feel like there is less that binds us together and more chance of things really splitting apart. I don't think literally a civil war, but different parts of the country can't even understand each other or really despise each other or I think the others are real threat to their whole way of life. And just the way in the 1850s you had just a total collapse of communication really and sympathy between the north and the south, we have some of that now between the blue parts of America and the red parts of America. Now, we don't have slavery as an issue, so presumably—I remember saying to Ron, well, doesn't that change it? Because now a lot of the fighting is about things that feel to me superficial, they're blown up to be giant culture wars. But are people really living that differently in, I don't know, parts of Texas and parts of Massachusetts?

(11:23):

Yes, somewhat, but not fundamentally. But I don't know, but I am struck—I've been surprised at how much further the polarization has gone. We've gone from partisanship to polarization, and polarization implies the country is polarized, not just 435 members of Congress. And we've gone from polarization to what the social scientists call "affective polarization," which is you sort of don't just disapprove of the other party, of the other team, you actually kind of despise it and fear it and hate it. And I do think that's dangerous and it's hard to know how to get back from that. I mean, you can, and there's still enough common ground I think to appeal to, but that requires much more of a explicit effort to fix as opposed to depending on the cycle to go, to take care of you.

Ted Roosevelt (12:11):

Bill, there was a video that went around, that sort of speaks to this in my mind a little bit. During the pandemic, sort of at the height of the mask-no mask movement where, if you were wearing a mask, you were showing your political allegiance and vice versa. And Governor Burgum in North Dakota had this press conference where he really tried to plead with people in a deeply red state and he started to cry. And it was this moment of deep humanity in the face of polarized politics. Take a listen to Governor Burgum's comments.

Gov. Doug Burgum (12:49):

[excerpt from Gov. Burgum's remarks] If someone is wearing a mask, they're not doing it to represent what political party they're in or what candidates they support. They might be doing it because they've got a five-year-old child who's been going through cancer treatments. They might have vulnerable adults in their life who are—currently have COVID and are fighting. And so again, I would just love to see our state, as part of being North Dakota smart, also be North Dakota kind, North Dakota, empathetic, North Dakota understanding.

(13:23):

[end excerpt]

Ted Roosevelt (13:24):

And I wonder—and this may just be naive on my side, and somebody who's been working in politics might scoff at this—but I wonder if there's a place for more humanity in American politics today, and that might actually be the antidote to some of the dehumanization that's taking place, and the polarization.

Bill Kristol (13:42):

It could go either way honestly, in the next two years, the next six or eight years I would say, in terms of: you can imagine that we've had a little interlude of humanity and as we did with the governor, but we go right back to polarization and people just double down and double down again. But what also sees in some of the races just this past fall, people winning on almost explicit, well, not almost on explicit platforms, of "I want to work across the aisle" and so forth. I'm somewhat more hopeful than I have been. I do think once you unleash these forces, here's the challenge: it's not so hard just to put them back. I mean, people get used to a certain type of rhetoric, a certain type of way of thinking about other people. And what's depressing is people turn out to, once they indulge in it for a while, they kind of like it, especially if it's reinforced in their community. You look at some of the rallies and some of the expressions of opinions on both sides, the relish people take in the—not just the defeat of their political opponents, but in violence to their political opponents and the humiliation of them. And I just wish it were— I saw more clearly how you get beyond that.

Ted Roosevelt (14:56):

Well, let's talk about that then. I heard you frame it I think on a podcast recently, the idea that the young generation today is faced with a challenge of the country not being in the best shape that it's ever been in, but the other side of that coin is a real opportunity, in that you're not just taking over and getting the trains running on time anymore. You're potentially really changing the trajectory of the country in a positive direction. What would you recommend in actions that people can take that would get them into the arena, get them into different organizations that can help dampen down the polarization of the country and move the country forward in a positive direction?

Bill Kristol (15:35):

The trouble is they look at today's politics and if they're sane people who don't want to be extremists on either side, they don't want to scream and yell, they decide, you know what? There's nothing really here from me. I'll go to business or to other walks of life and stay away from politics for a while. Which is okay—not everyone should go into politics and they can do a lot of good in these other walks of life, obviously. But at some point some of these people should come back to politics. I do think—so they need—but it's harder. They need to look harder to find people they want to work for, find administrations they're comfortable working for. Maybe some of it more at the state and local level where I think things are still less polarized. And so yeah, I think I would encourage people to look for chances to get involved.

(16:20):

And I guess some of the younger members of Congress I do feel have more of this attitude. Especially, and I think it does correlate somewhat with the ones who serve not just the military, but in intelligence services or in other parts of the kind of national enterprise, as opposed to—people from education often have this attitude too, that they don't ask the political views of the parents of the kids in their school, they just want the kids to get a good education. So I think there are ways to begin to fix this, but if politics is ugly, decent people aren't going to want to get involved. And then politics is just going to get uglier. So at some point people have to say this, we just shouldn't put up with this anymore. We do have to get involved.

Ted Roosevelt (17:01):

Certainly one defining characteristic of America since the Cold War has been there hasn't been a real perceived— 9/11 is an exception to this, but significant sustained threat to the country and to the way of life from the outside. Do you have a sense that that's one of the features of the divide in America today is this extended period of not feeling threatened from the outside and so it allows for a little bit more of a fracture internally until that threat is felt or experienced again?

Bill Kristol (17:34):

Yeah, and maybe not just the threat, but even just seeing what can happen when a society really goes in a bad way and with really terrible autocratic leadership, as in Russia, or just weak leadership maybe, also. I do think Americans have always cared about the world. I mean, we understand that we don't want to live in a world surrounded by brutality and genocide and autocracy. We sometimes can't stop it. We can't stop all of it obviously. I'm sort of hopeful that these early 2020s, historians might look back and say, we sort of hit bottom and we're coming out of it some. And there's a little more sense of common purpose and importance of standing up for basic aspects of liberal democracy, tolerance, decency, civility and so forth. We don't want to go another path some of these other countries have, and the world depends on us. I mean, if we go south, I don't know, other countries could do their best and obviously we'll try, I suppose, to do their best. But as we see in the case of Ukraine, if we weren't there, that war would be going in a very different direction. And that's not to take anything away from them, they're doing the fighting, but we are the arsenal of democracy, even if we're not in this case, fighting literally over there. And so I think it's sort of a reminder to Americans of what's at stake.

Ted Roosevelt (18:49):

I want to change the topic a little bit towards technology and politics. And I wonder if there are ways in which you see technology being helpful in bringing people back together?

Bill Kristol (19:02):

I do think there's huge opportunities. I mean, I just feel least personally, I mean they're the areas of—intellectual areas I don't know much about. I probably wouldn't be able to learn by going to libraries and finding the right books and so forth. But by scooting around and looking up things, I can learn a little more about, I dunno, parts of classical music, some composer. And I know young people who've heard professors they hadn't otherwise, why would they have heard of them there at some college somewhere? And they don't know about every professor in the country who studies X, Y, or Z, but they happen to have stumbled across this series of audio and video podcasts and they say, oh, this led me to read up on this part of history, or I got interested in this, and I'm now taking courses on it, or— I see this with my little grandchildren, learning things online that they're not getting from the school. I feel like the upside remains very real. Now maybe—but figuring out how to take advantage of it and how not to maximize the downside, that's tricky.

Ted Roosevelt (20:03):

Yeah. Well, it's interesting when you bring up the idea of learning about different professors, and it does seem like the democratization of education is a huge opportunity set. And yet the Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanfords, you name it, of the world, do hold very tightly that sort of IP and have not done, I think, a particularly good job of democratizing the Harvard education.

Bill Kristol (20:29):

But don't you think—I think that's true in terms of getting the degree that remains such a status symbol thing, and therefore they don't have an interest in democratizing it honestly, if they need to. But I think the democratization is happening despite the kind of clutch that the elite schools have on the credentialing. Honestly it is amazing. If you've got some interest in a particular artist— I was just reading something about Hopper, the American artist, a New York-based artist of the early 20th century— you can just look around and quickly see basically everything he's ever painted online and pretty good repro—not just reproductions, you can see the actual paintings of photos—and you can then go read some articles and suddenly there's a kind of level of culture and education. This doesn't solve political polarization, obviously, but it could. I mean, some of it could. Say with history—I think, for example, I feel personally I have a much broader sense of American history than I did coming out of college or grad school just because there's so many competing voices and some of them have something to say and some are on the left and some are on the right.

(21:31):

So I dunno, maybe I'm being too pollyannish now, but I continue to sort of be a believer in the positive side of these technologies as well.

Ted Roosevelt (21:40):

There's no question. They have huge potential and realized positive benefits. And I think with the top tier of schools, their credentialing is a huge feature of those degrees. I mean, that is the door opener for many of its graduates. So I don't want to brush over that too quickly in terms of the value proposition of what's being offered at those schools. There's this sort of joke in Good Will Hunting that Matt Damon says to one of the Harvard students that he basically got the same education he got with a $1.50 library card. I mean, the information's always been available, it's just a matter of how it's been packaged and offered to you. And the reason why I think it relates to this idea of polarization is I do think that we as a country could improve the educational system, and I don't think that's a particularly controversial comment, but particularly at the very, very high end is that there's an opportunity. And you don't have to look too far—you look at China and the emphasis on the educational system and getting people up to speed very quickly and into some of the best institutions.

(22:39):

I mean, it's a very clear goal. And here it's much more about the exclusivity of having those degrees than it is about serving the nation necessarily, which is a bit of a shame. But I'm curious about your thoughts on the, particularly coming from two intellectuals, two intellectual parents. It seems like "intellectualism" is a bad word. The idea that you're on something, that you're very thoughtful, that you're an expert even on something, is problematic in this country. One, do you agree with that assessment? But two, if you do, when did that start to happen and is there a way to kind of reverse that trend? To sort of say, hey, it's okay to actually know what you're talking about, it's okay to have studied it?

Bill Kristol (23:22):

Yes, it's gotten much stronger. It gets stronger episodically that it retreats a little bit, but I'd say the last decade or so have been pretty bad in that respect. Now elites and experts have made mistakes, and maybe they've called some of this derision upon themselves. That's a fair enough point to make. But still at some point it just becomes ridiculous to pretend that some people don't know more than others about a lot of topics. And people tend to indulge in this kind of anti-elitism and anti-expert rhetoric. They usually, at the end of the day, want to get a good doctor if they're sick and they want a good car mechanic to fix their car, and they want well-trained pilot to fly their plane. So there's a little bit cheap rhetorical indulgence here of... Yeah, I think the anti-intellectualism is really astonishing. And yeah, I don't think it's out of the question that more of that respect could come back.

(24:13):

One of the things that really is bad about the current moment: once you have conspiracy theories and it's all being, the wool's being drawn over everyone's eyes and people are lying to you, and there's a giant conspiracy out there, so we don't know the truth—it's very hard to falsify those. And that's a very bad sign for a political system when conspiracy theories get more and more prevalent. Conspiracy theories are sort of hard to fix, and people then get more and more invested in these theories and they'll get sort of more and more wrapped up in that particular bubble that they're in. So that I think is—again, I would not have predicted that. If you had told me 10 years ago: here we are in the 21st century, people are more educated than they ever were, people have more access to more information than they ever have. And we said, we're going to have just ludi— kind of crazy conspiracy theories, about everything from medicine to elections to all kinds of things. I would not have expected that.

Ted Roosevelt (25:11):

Two questions we ask all our guests: is there an organization that everybody can support? Because one of the things we want to do is really give our listeners a sense of what action they can take to help with a problem of the day. And we've been talking about a very broad societal set of problems. Is there an organization that you think is doing good work that's maybe political in nature, maybe not political in nature, that on the margin you think is doing some really good work?

Bill Kristol (25:38):

I guess I would encourage people to help out with organizations they know a lot about—they know a lot about, or they can judge. If you are in a military family, you would've a better sense of what's doing the best job of helping veterans or helping military families or helping wounded veterans. And if you're a physician, you would know who's doing the best job of either curing diseases or helping educate the public about medicine. So I think using your own education, your own background, your own friends and relatives as examples is probably better than falling for some direct mail solicitation of something where you don't know whether they're spending 90 cents of the dollar on what they claim to be spending it on or 3 cents of the dollar.

Ted Roosevelt (26:24):

The other question that we ask is to ask what one action people might do today. And my answer to that question is often to really just go for a walk in a green place. It can be a park, it can be your national park, it can be your local playground. But just to get outside and spend some time unplugging from social media, unplugging from your email, unplugging from the screens. If it's an hour a week, great. If it's more than that, even better. But I think that is a key component both to reconnecting to our humanity, reconnecting to our mental health, and I think those things may end up proving to be more closely connected to some of the underlying problems than we realized.

Bill Kristol (27:12):

Yeah, I should probably take that advice myself, now that I've heard you so eloquently explain this benefits. And I guess I would give sort of a variage what you're saying, though it's somewhat different, but it sounds similar, which is: get outside your comfort zone one way or another. I mean, whether it's online, reading things that you don't agree with, I find just learning about new things keeps you younger in spirit and I think a little more open-minded. I think it does really just keep you from being quite as dogmatic and quite as partisan. I do think trying to keep open-minded to a degree—obviously you're not going to rethink everything and you've got a life and you're living it and you have certain views about how to do that or certain preferences or just things you like doing. That's fine obviously. But yeah, a little bit of open-mindedness and exploration, I guess is the word I would use, is a good thing to try to keep as part of your life.

Ted Roosevelt (28:05):

Bill, listen, thank you so much for taking the time to chat with us today. I really appreciated it and I would've said at the onset, I'm a huge fan of yours and I have been for quite some time, and I very much appreciate you staying in the arena, having these conversations, having the courage to buck tribal politics to say what you think is right. And I think the country is better off for it, and I really appreciate it. So it's been a thrill and thank you very much.

Bill Kristol (28:31):

Well, that's kind of you, and I've really enjoyed it. It's been a very stimulating conversation.

Ted Roosevelt (28:36):

Good Citizen is produced by the Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library's content studio. Thanks so much to Bill for being on with me today. Bill reminds us of the importance of reexamining our values and being willing to change your mind. In today's political climate, I'm inspired by people like Bill, whose allegiance to their personal values are more important than party allegiance. I'll leave you with a challenge inspired by Bill's wise recommendation: find a way to get outside your comfort zone today. You can find more about Bill's work defendingdemocracytogether.org, or listen to his podcast, Conversations with Bill Kristol at conversationswithbillkristol.org. Good Citizen is produced by the Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library in collaboration with the Future of StoryTelling and Charts & Leisure. You can learn more about TRs upcoming presidential library at trlibrary.com.