The Capitol Riot in Context
2021-01-10 · Guest: Nick Gillespie (Editor-at-large for Reason magazine) · 52:17
Capitol riot and the erosion of institutional trust
Bob Zadek and Nick Gillespie discuss the January 6th Capitol riot within the broader context of a multi-decade erosion of trust in American institutions. They explore how political parties and media have shifted toward entertainment and “marketing cooperatives,” and why a libertarian focus on individual autonomy and limited government offers a necessary alternative to the current cycle of unrest.
Topics: Capitol Riot, Institutional Trust, Libertarianism, Media Polarization, Political Parties, January 6th, Reason Magazine
Speakers: Bob Zadek, Nick Gillespie
Introduction [00:17]
Bob Zadek: Good morning, everyone. Welcome to the Bob Zadek Show, the longest-running live libertarian talk radio show on all of radio. The show this Sunday and always, the voice of ideas, never once the show offering attitude.
And do we have a show for you this morning. I am offered this unique opportunity during a chaotic week, a week of chaotic politics, disturbance, rioting, and an out-of-control president in the waning moments of his office. All that crowded into the week that just preceded this show. And the opportunity I have, that I will do my darndest to fulfill, is to provide literally and figuratively the voice of reason.
What this country needs right now, more perhaps than almost ever—but that’s not a comment on 231 years of history—but what we desperately need now is for reason. And who better to offer us reason than Nick Gillespie? Nick is the editor-at-large for Reason magazine, the flagship publication of the Reason Foundation. Reason is the leading, the stellar—do not go a month without reading it—Reason magazine is the publication of the Reason Foundation. It is the voice of reason. Its tagline is “Free Minds and Free Markets,” and what can you say more than that? To help us understand in a rational, reasoned, thoughtful way, I’m happy to welcome Nick Gillespie to the show. Nick, thank you so much for joining us this Sunday morning.
Nick Gillespie: Thanks for having me, Bob. You know, when I signed up for this, I was expecting a much slower news week, to be quite honest.
Bob Zadek: Yeah, I thought we’d be talking about spring training, perhaps coming up in a couple of months and stuff like that, and just schmooze for a bit, run out of things to talk about at the halfway point and then have to find some filler. It’s quite the opposite.
The Erosion of Institutional Trust [02:31]
Bob Zadek: So, we have had a week of, obviously—let’s start with the rioting. Now, we had, of course, everybody knows what happened. We had an organized-in-advance, the opposite of spontaneous, organization in Washington, a carefully planned—I’ll say rally, but that puts too much of a gloss on it—it wasn’t a rally. It was an organized riot. Everything seems to have been pretty much planned in advance and out in the open. President Trump incited—to use a word with a technical meaning as well as an everyday meaning—incited, seems to have incited the riot, if not in the legal sense, but probably in the legal sense, but certainly in the everyday sense, incited and egged on the rioters who stormed the Capitol.
Now, and the Capitol Police were unable and did not rise to the task. They did a miserable job, exacerbating all of the problems. The Capitol grounds were breached, the chambers of the members of the House were stormed and were occupied until control was taken. Now, and the rioting—Nick, let’s talk about the rioting because obviously it didn’t happen in a vacuum. It didn’t just happen. There is, I think, it started to happen, probably to pick a reasonable starting point, the rioting we had in the spring, the Black Lives Matter rioting because of the bad actions by police in Minneapolis and the like. So, put the rioting in context. What’s your observation? What were you saying to yourself and to your colleagues over at Reason and around the country about what the riots tell us about where we are as a country today?
Nick Gillespie: Yeah, I think you are absolutely right to immediately put this in a larger context. And it’s not to even suggest any moral or political or cultural equivalency between Black Lives Matter and the pro-Trump people who, you know, were responsible ultimately for five deaths in DC. But it is important to understand that history doesn’t happen—it’s not like comets dropping from the sky or something and just starting something new.
We are in a particularly long-lived, continuous erosion of trust and confidence in all aspects of government. And we’re talking about the presidency, we’re talking about the Supreme Court, we’re talking about Congress. Congress, as bad as President Trump’s approval ratings have been historically, Congress was at various points in the past four years in the single digits. When you have a massive erosion of confidence and trust, all sorts of things happen. You have the coronavirus lockdowns. Everybody recognized that absent that, you probably would not have had the riots in the wake of George Floyd’s killing at the hands of police in Minneapolis. I think absent the Black Lives Matter riots over the summer, you wouldn’t have had this.
Having said all of that, what happened in the Capitol is indefensible, and Donald Trump and the people involved really need to be held to account for that. But it’s important to understand this is not something that is going to go away when Joe Biden shows up on January 20th. It’s not going to go away if Donald Trump is impeached or removed from power before his term is technically up in a few days. This is a long-lived kind of dialectic in American politics.
It reminds me of the 60s, where in the 80s, when Reagan conservatives were ascendant and they painted the 1960s as this act of prolonged, you know, a kind of Spiro Agnew-type panty raid, prolonged panty raid on the part of left-wing radicals. They missed the point that there were almost as many right-wing radicals and nutjobs out there and that the 60s were a violent decade on both sides of the political spectrum. We’re there now, I think, with this. So, you know, that to me is the larger context and the larger understanding of this, which is that it proceeds directly from the loss of confidence and trust in the institutions of government, also other parts of society, which have been eroded for the past 40 or 50 years for good reason. We have had governments of all stripes, of all ideologies, of every permutation you can imagine have lied to the American people, have failed to deliver what they said they were going to do, acted perniciously, and you get people rioting against the police and you get people rioting against Congress.
Rioting as a Political Tool [04:38]
Bob Zadek: You know, it’s so interesting for you to put that in the much broader context going back to 1968, because recently and during the Black Lives Matter rioting in the summer, many public officials on the left and spokespeople on the left would often drum up a pretty well-known Martin Luther King quote, which he said, I think it was in 1968 in a Mike Wallace interview. He said—and this quote, which I’m going to give you, is so taken out of context, another phrase we hear a lot—Martin Luther King said, “I think we’ve got to see that a riot is the language of the unheard.”
Now, that quote found its way into the media a lot recently, and it’s a very—it’s a misused and dangerous quote. It sort of says if you are—if you feel unheard, then rioting is okay. Instead, Martin Luther King was really saying in context that if you have a segment which is unheard, then it is logical to expect rioting will result, like if you eat too much, you’re going to be fat. It’s a symptom of something else. And so, but it’s now being used as a justification.
And starting from the spring, rioting in the—since public officials on the left especially, and even on the right that much, didn’t renounce appropriately the rioting, the destructiveness, and the wrongheadedness of rioting, it became quickly an acceptable tool. If it’s okay for the left, it’s okay for the right. And I think that is what gave birth in part—not 100%, it’s too complicated—but that is what made this rioting okay.
The Power Void and the Rise of Strongmen [08:13]
Bob Zadek: Also, you mentioned, Nick, and I’d like you to speak to the obvious, and you’re 100% right, the breakdown of so many institutions. And to me, you’re exactly right, and I’ll ask you to expand upon that a bit, but what frightens me is I would use the label “anarchy” as the result. And what I mean by anarchy—anarchy is a very inflammatory word—what I mean is anarchy means the absence of any overriding institutional control. That’s what anarchy means. And when the institutions are not respected, they lose control de facto. So we have had a period of anarchy.
Nick Gillespie: Yeah, I agree. And again, the point here isn’t to say, okay, so everything, you know, because of rioting and looting by people adjacent to Black Lives Matter’s rally in May, the Trump people get a pass on what’s going on here. You know, that’s not the point. The point is to understand what is going on.
And you know, you did have people like John Lewis, the deceased civil rights icon, who said when Donald Trump was elected, he said he is not really the president. He specifically called the election illegitimate and claimed that it was because of Russian interference. A bunch of Democrats did not go to Trump’s inauguration, pointedly claiming not that they were upset with the outcome per se, but that it was an illegitimate election. There’s a dialectic here, and things get ramped up and ratcheted up. This has been going on for a long time.
I wrote a couple of years ago for Reason, I wrote a story making two large points. First was charting the long-term erosion of trust and confidence in the aspects of government. And at every level, if you go back to the mid-60s when places like Gallup started tracking this sort of thing, well over 50% of Americans believed that government would always try to do the right thing in the various subsets. Now nobody does. And we don’t for a wide variety of reasons, most of which stem directly from the bad behavior of government.
But so you have that, and then you have as what you’re talking about is like, what happens in the face of that? And to be honest, from a libertarian perspective, I thought this was, you know, this was—we were going to win with something like this because over the past—Reason has been around for 50 years—and we’ve always said, you know, government is generally bad at what it does, so it should focus on very few things and try and do them well. As people understood government was not capable or willing to deliver the basic services and kind of structures they’re supposed to, people would evacuate government and allow us to have more freedom to live how we want.
What happened is more we got bigger and bigger government because once you get to this place where anarchy is loosed, where everybody knows the rules don’t really apply, they are masks for power in particular situations, what is right or wrong changes radically depending on who’s wielding power and to what end, people say, “Give me some of that.” And we get bigger and bigger government that gets less and less effective and more and more in every aspect of our lives. And in that sense, I hope that the Trump—you know, that the four years of Donald Trump as president, that this is finally the wake-up call to say we need a different set of structures in life. We don’t need government to regulate every aspect of every part of our lives. What we need it to do is to pull back to cover the basic services that I think most of us would agree on and to help structure certain things, adjudicate issues between people, and then do those well, get out of the way, and allow us to kind of structure our lives the way that we see fit.
Bob Zadek: You know, Nick, I am feeling, as I said a moment ago about anarchy, I feel—I just have a sense, it’s very visceral, very strong—that we have this huge, unbelievable—I don’t recall it ever happening before—void created by the loss of legitimacy of almost all of our institutions. We’re going to discuss the media in a moment, that’s a big loss.
Nick Gillespie: Yeah, throw in also things like the Catholic Church and the Boy Scouts, which have soiled themselves over the past half century for failing to rein in the worst elements within them. Nonprofits like the United Way, which went through a few years ago, went through a massive scandal that it’s never really recovered from. Even good corporate citizens like Volkswagen, you know, which is a company whose origins are shrouded in Nazism, but then rose to be one of the most reliable and dependable kind of corporate citizens of the world, they were cheating people, you know, and cheating regulators and things like that. So there has been this massive across-the-board evacuation of trust and confidence in institutions for good reason.
The Internet and the Loss of Shared Reality [11:14]
Bob Zadek: And the result of that, the result of the loss of institutions that we can rely upon—not enough said about what is the result of that. To me, the result is a power void. Like, where do we turn to? There needs to be some guiding hand or guiding hands, not a strong guiding hand, not with a bayonet, but a guiding hand just to be in charge. And when you have a void, it just like it drew in Donald Trump. You draw in strongmen, authoritarian figures, because people, whether they know it or not, they want somebody to be or some group to be more or less in charge. You want to know somebody’s home. So I fear the void and the opportunity for bad actors to fill the void. We’re just too vulnerable for that.
Nick Gillespie: Well, and we’re seeing that. We’re seeing that. And you know, in the 90s, I joined Reason in late ‘93 as the kind of internet age was beginning. And there was a great hope that cyberspace would allow for different methods of kind of interacting with one another where you would have kind of self-reinforcing systems where reputation counted and distributed knowledge. People would know who were good actors and who were bad actors. Everything would become kind of visible and transparent. And that seemed like it was working, and in many ways it has. I mean, our lives are immeasurably better because of the past 25 years of online growth of the online space as a supplement or alternative to meatspace.
But you already have now, as we have tech giants who are clearly not playing by their own rules. And you know, Twitter is a private company. Twitter has the right to kick anybody off it wants to, but you know, it kicks off Donald Trump, but it allows any number of other tyrants who have hundreds of thousands of people’s blood on their hands, they can continue to tweet, etc. And I’m not picking—I love Twitter, I love digital culture—but we see that the thing that was replacing the old wrecked world of the Great Society and of Richard Nixon and all of that kind of stuff, we had this different kind of voluntary governance that was going to structure our world and do a better job at it. It has been revealed as hopelessly interested in particular outcomes and kind of masking its will to power.
So we have a lot of work to do. And I agree with you completely that the response to this is not, “Okay, you know what we’re going to do? We’re going to get our stuff together and create a better society.” It is to look to that strong person, that strong body, that strong man to come in and save the day and tell people, “This is permissible, this is not permissible.” And that’s a bad world to be living in.
Media as Emotional Entertainment [14:38]
Bob Zadek: I am so frightened that the bad actors will opportunistically fill the void, and before we know it, we have ceded power to the wrong players. Now, I mentioned the media, Nick, because you are such an astute observer of the media in the broadest sense. Media means as broad as one can imagine. And I recall, and for most of my intellectual life, my day started reading the daily newspaper. It was every day The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal. I had my media sources. I watched the evening news like every other American who paid attention.
And now I find today, in 2021, I have in my household—we have taken a solemn oath: do not watch the news. Do not. And now, so here I—now, there’s a—the void is filled. There’s no real void, which I’ll get into it in a moment and ask you to comment on it. But what has happened is the news became—maybe it was a logical step—became entertainment. And once news becomes entertainment, fighting for eyeballs and earlobes of attention for commercial purposes, then its success is measured by a different matrix.
When you want to be entertained—the theater, a movie, a concert—and you walk out of the performance and you say, “That was a great play, oh my goodness,” what you really are saying is, “My emotions became excited. I felt sad, I felt angry, I felt passion.” You felt something. If you leave the theater feeling flat, it’s because your emotions were not excited by the performance. That’s entertainment. Entertainment equals emotional excitement.
If you apply that test to the news, how does the news excite you? Not by making you a bit smarter and more informed; it excites you by getting you fearful or angry. So the news’ success in the “news” is measured by an entertainment matrix, not an informational matrix. Nobody turns on the news because it is the most accurate. No one. They don’t even know.
Curating Information in the Digital Age [19:13]
Bob Zadek: Nick, you mentioned, and I’d like you to expand upon it, how excited you were in the early 90s when the internet was in its infancy because you’d be exposed to so many different points of view you never had access to before. And that’s what Americans have to do today. Now the task of being an informed adult is: pick your sources of information, because now you have all you want. And that’s what Americans must do. But do not pick mainstream news in any form, because that’s purely entertainment and that will just satisfy emotional needs but not intellectual needs. So what’s going on with the media?
Nick Gillespie: You also have in the media now—and you know, I agree with what you’re saying in the broadest sense possible—I resist any attempt to kind of create a golden age of American journalism, which is a subset of media, to say, well, you know, maybe The New York Times was better, was more fair and more objective in the mid-60s than it is now, or the CBS News with Walter Cronkite. I am glad that those days are long past where any single source has that much power.
Even The Drudge Report, and Bob, you live enough, as do I, in the kind of internet age where a Drudge link to something you do used to mean that you could take the rest of the week off. Even The Drudge Report doesn’t have the clout that it had. Everything is far more distributed. I think that’s good. I think that you’re right that what has happened, though, is that we almost all in our public discourse seek out, if not entertainment per se, something that gives us a warm feeling about our preferred vision of the world.
And as a result now, people can live their entire lives—I think about this, my Italian grandparents, my mother’s parents lived—they emigrated to the US in the mid-1910s, lived their entire lives into the 1980s never speaking English because they were able to live in an Italian-speaking community in a small city in Connecticut, of all places. We can now all do that where we only speak whatever language we want heard spoken. And that can become really bad because this is what you see when somebody like an Alex Jones-type character, or Fox News in a less extreme way, or MSNBC and The New York Times on the other side of the aisle, where all you are doing is confirming your existing sense of the world or burnishing it a little bit.
What the best journalism does is it forces us to kind of consider the world as it is rather than the way we want it to be. And I think there’s more good journalism out there, there’s more good media out there across every possible level, but it’s also less effective because people have more options. And this is where I think, to bring it back to politics, Congress is supposed to be a national body. The government in Washington is supposed to be disinterested. They are not supposed to be petty rent-seekers trying to ship home the public fisc one earmark at a time or something like that. They have so fallen down on the job, both Republicans and Democrats, that that’s the vacuum that worries me the most, because that’s where the guns are and that’s where the violence is.
Bob Zadek: It worries me—well, worries you the most. I don’t know how to finish that sentence if I were the speaker, because so many things worry me the most. It’s like a tie for the most. So I am jealous that you can identify what worries you the most, because to me, I can’t even get there, and therefore I envy you.
An interesting anecdote: I have a dear friend who’s very politically active, tends to be a bit conservative, although somewhat conservative, although that’s not really relevant. And I called him—he’s in another state—I called him just to see what his spin was on the week and how he’s surviving, how does he feel. And he said—and this is fascinating to me because he reached the same conclusion I did totally independently—he said he has limited his media intake to—and he used to be very politically active—he limited his media intake to only Gunsmoke reruns from radio. And all he is listening is Gunsmoke before there was James Arness on television, but most of our listeners don’t even know what I’m talking about. And he said that’s his—that’s where he finds respite. That’s the only way he can be calm. So he has to—we have to escape from the media.
And I try to help my listeners and my friends by offering this analogy. When we run our lives and we are busy and we don’t feel well, we have two choices. We can go to medical school and then cure ourselves, or we can seek help from a professional who has spent his time accumulating the information that we need. And we pick a doctor based upon reputation and the like, and then we rely upon the doctor. We outsource the medical decision-making to some degree to a doctor or a lawyer or an architect, whatever. We should do the same thing, and I am doing the same thing, with media. I carefully pick out those media—those journalists, whether it’s print or broadcast or online, who I have concluded using my brain they know what they are talking about. And just like I can rely upon my doctor, I can rely upon my journalist. And I seek guidance from them and avoiding the entertainment media and focusing only on those people who succeed based upon their proven wisdom.
And I picked up on, Nick, when you said in ‘93, now you have access to these people. That’s the gift of the internet. We have access to the world of wise people if we know how to pick wise from unwise.
Nick Gillespie: And you know, it’s when I hear you talk about your friend as well as yourself and I recognize that in myself, the first response—and again, the events, you know, of not even of the last week, let’s say Wednesday, you know, when the Capitol building was stormed and you know, among the many staggering things of that, that that level of open violence, you know, came home to roost, but then also the ease with which in these, you know, clown commandos were able to get into the Capitol building is stunning. All of that, it’s the first response really is to kind of pull back and be like, “I just don’t even want to deal with this.”
I appreciate what you’re doing, Bob, and we’re trying to do it at Reason as well, which is to offer an alternative way to talk about things like politics, where we can’t simply turn our back and watch not even seasons of Gunsmoke on TV in color, but radio serial Gunsmoke. That is not—it’s an understandable response, but we can’t do that. We need to figure out ways to engage the world and to engage one another in productive, fair, good-faith arguments about what matters in the world and how best to proceed.
Political Parties as Marketing Cooperatives [22:47]
Nick Gillespie: And I think—and this may be skipping ahead either in terms of what’s going to happen over the next couple of years in America or what your show plan was—but this is a real opportunity, I think, for libertarians, small-l libertarians, people who believe in individual autonomy, who believe in communal action that’s voluntary and things like that. We have a story to tell and we have a set of principles that I think will—you know, are—have always been in opposition to the coercion that you see in the broadly construed right-wing or left-wing.
I think what we have now is a real opportunity because one of the things to recognize is that American politics for a wide variety of reasons that are always worth discussing, but have become more and more polarized because the parties are in thrall to more and more activist wings that are unrepresentative and atypical of not just of the average American voter, the modal American voter, but the modal person who’s a Republican or a Democrat, a liberal or a conservative. What people want is some kind of not mushy moderation, you know, a moderate or a centrist, but people who have principles that allow you to predict and control and regulate where things end up.
And I think libertarianism has a real possibility here if we start talking about things in realistic terms, if we start talking about things both with idealism of the idea that America is an interesting place and the world is an interesting place to the degree that it gives individuals opportunities and means to become the best version of themselves or to actualize themselves and comes up with institutions—social, economic, cultural, political institutions—that allow that to happen. We have a lot to share right now in a world where I think a lot of people are kind of shrinking back. And as you were saying earlier, when you shrink back, it creates a vacuum in politics, in commerce, in everything. And we cannot afford that vacuum because the people who are going to be filling it, whether they’re Democrats or Republicans or have been these things, are not good for the future.
Bob Zadek: Nick, you just said a second ago you were concerned about you weren’t sure where I was going to go with the show and my outline. For the second time in 40 minutes, you have done the perfect segue into what I wanted to talk about next. And this is without you having a copy of my outline in front of you. And by the way, when I mentioned a second ago—and then we’ll do the segue that I referred to—I must say, as I said, I hungrily and every morning I turn to those people that I have concluded through the use of my own brain these people know what they are talking about. Even if they don’t necessarily agree with me, they are wise. And they have done the work that I simply don’t have the time to do because I have a life and I have a family and I have a job and my day’s accounted for. So I outsource the job of finding the truth to other people.
The two sources that are on my short list—and Nick, forgive me for being this crass promotion—but I commend to all of you out there the podcast, Nick’s podcast, The Reason Interview with Nick Gillespie. It is a—it is what, once a week, Nick, that you put it on? It’s a one-hour, it’s a long-form interview. It is in the widest range of interest because Nick’s interests are very broad. I commend it to you.
And also, Nick, every Monday when I join The Reason Roundtable, which is Nick and fellow editors over at Reason magazine with a wonderful, humorous, informed—I can’t stop listening to it. I postpone returning phone calls till I finish listening to a wonderful casual chat among four obviously dear friends and wise people. It’s Nick and his fellow editors over at Reason. I commend The Reason Roundtable every—I think it’s every Monday you drop a new show in. And that’s a great—so that’s on my short list. Forgive for the crass promotion, Nick, I had to do it because it’s such a good listen.
Nick Gillespie: I appreciate it, Bob.
The Rise of the Independent Voter [25:42]
Bob Zadek: Now, Nick, I said you conveniently segued into what this means to libertarians and to the freedom—speaking broadly—the liberty movement, speaking very, very broadly. And in thinking back to—here we had the—what I’ll call in a very crude summary—we had the left-wing riots in the summer, and we just went through a couple of days of—or one day of—a right-wing rioting. So I was struck by how much the extremes of both the Democratic Party and the Republican Party, how much the extremes of each party have in common.
And what they have in common—and Nick, I’ll invite either your agreement or disagreement and your thoughts on it—is both parties aspire to have a very muscular government. Now, they aspire to have a strong government for totally different reasons, but the tool of choice is power. They both want power over the other side. And the way to achieve power is either by illegitimate force—a revolution—or by a somewhat lawful force of taking control of government. And then you have a muscular government to carry out your ends.
So both sides have chosen government as the tool of choice to force their will upon the others. So this theory that the Republicans traditionally want smaller government—“small” is the place to hide. I don’t care about size; I care about power. A small government with enormous power over you doesn’t make me feel any better.
Nick Gillespie: And let’s just also underscore the fact that government has not become smaller under Republican rule when we talk about it in terms of spending or in terms of the things that they regulate on everyday life. And this is actually one of the great failures of Donald Trump, who came in on some dimensions talking about radically resizing or cutting back the size and scope of government. He didn’t do that at all.
I think you’re right that both the Republican and the Democratic ideal is to use political power to create the world and to regulate the world in the way that they see fit. One of the things that gives me great hope is there’s a political scientist at Stanford named Morris Fiorina who has talked about how in basically since the beginning of the 21st century, we have seen incredibly unstable majorities that each party gets either partial or complete control of federal government in an election, and then within two years or four years, it flips to the other side. This is historically very rare.
And he says it’s because both parties are so extreme that they have reduced the ability to get much more than 50% of the vote plus maybe one voter. Or in the case of many presidential elections of the past 20 years, 49%, 48% of the vote. And you get in, the party extremists take control and they start pushing an agenda which is revolting to most people, and the party gets thrown out. This is actually one of the good things about the 2020 election. Trump was repudiated at the national level, but the Democrats were also repudiated at the congressional level. And if Trump hadn’t been so awful between November and now, the Republicans would still control the Senate.
But we’re looking at a very, very slim majority for the Democrats now. And if Joe Biden pushes his agenda, which The Washington Post of all places said was the most liberal platform that any Democrat has ever run on, the Republicans will be back in power in 2022 or 2024. And until these parties, I think, get to a closer approximation of what you’re going after, Bob, which is a government that actually gives people more freedom to live how they want regardless of the dollar amount of the government, we’re going to have these unstable majorities and just keep going back and forth between competing and equally repudiated visions of control through political power.
The Libertarian Alternative [28:59]
Bob Zadek: My goodness, Nick, you’re reading off my outline with you mentioned freedom just now. I have to look around to see if there’s a cam, a video cam behind me reading my outline for your benefit. So you mentioned freedom. An observation: and you mentioned libertarians have a point of view that the time has come for it to get attention. The point is, when was the last time that either political party even mentioned the words “liberty,” said, “We stand for more freedom”? When was the last time that was a plank or a sentence or even followed by a semicolon? When was the last time that freedom—more freedom for the individual—became an element of a party platform? The answer: not in our lifetime.
But libertarians say that’s the starting point. I fear, Nick, that freedom has become like a disposable commodity. No matter what each either party—look at the plank of either party—both parties always stand for—not spoken, but as a result—less freedom. So we have two political parties who are in their—in the carrying out of their platform, they are anti-freedom. At least not for more freedom; they are for less freedom. That’s why they want more governmental power.
Also, Nick, a thought, because I have my own opinion, but I don’t know how we got there. I find it to be astonishing that both on the national level and in more than one state—like, for example, Florida, because it’s the—it seems to be always the poster child for what I’m about to say—how did it happen that the country is so close, that elections are decided by a dozen votes? It seems like it’s astonishing. Now, I have my own—I’ve reached my own conclusion about that, but it can’t be like a coincidence, can it? What do you account for the fact that we’re so evenly split, so close to 50/50? It doesn’t make that much sense to me. It almost seems like it’s random.
Nick Gillespie: Yeah, well, you know, going on eight years ago, nine years ago, my colleague Matt Welch and I wrote a book called The Declaration of Independents.
Bob Zadek: I loved it. I loved it.
Nick Gillespie: Yeah, and it was the starting point, the starting observation of that was that when you looked again, if you go to places like Gallup, survey companies that have been doing this for decades, in around 1970, almost 50% of Americans considered themselves Democrats. If you called them up and said, “What party do you identify with?” Not necessarily do you always vote with them or are you registered, but 50% were Democrats, somewhere in the 40s were Republicans. Now when you look at those same declarations, it’s 31% for Democrats, 29% for Republicans.
The two major parties have stopped representing the plurality of American people. And we are locked in, but because they are long-lumbering, slow-moving institutions, they were created to reflect political coalitions. Political parties use ideology in order to paper over the complete arbitrariness of the assembled positions that they believe in. Like, why does being in favor of a constitutional amendment banning flag burning, why does that go with lower marginal tax rates or a home interest mortgage deduction or whatever? These are just—but you create a story to say, “Oh no, these are necessarily all the same thing.” Why does being a Democrat mean that you are ostensibly in favor of free speech and of a union of massive unionization of the workforce? None of this makes any sense whatsoever.
But so they’re holding over from previous political coalitions and they’re long and slow-moving. Each of the parties has been hijacked by extremists who are the activists, who get to nominate the characters who run for office and things like that and set the national agenda. Fewer and fewer Americans—we don’t put up with bundled packages anymore in any other aspect of our lives. With the possible exception of cable TV, and people are leaving cable partly because if you want to watch sports, it means you have to get the EWTN, the Catholic network, or vice versa. People want to pick and choose among all different types of arrangements.
The political parties don’t allow for that. They say, “If you want lower taxes or less regulation, you have to be anti-abortion.” Period. Like, you cannot be a Republican and be pro-abortion. This is insanity because most Americans—and to go back to Morris Fiorina and the unstable majorities—he points out that on most cultural issues and many political issues, there’s 60, 70, 80% of Americans want things a certain way, but you can’t go from abortion to free speech to taxes to trade policy and stay in the same party. It’s impossible. And what this gets down to is the idea that the elections are going to continue to be super close and super volatile and mercurial because the parties do not represent large numbers of Americans and where we’re at.
And you know, that explains to me why going back to Florida in 2000, where it was a few thousand votes separated George Bush and Al Gore. And we’re still there. We’re still in that world where even though Joe Biden ultimately won fairly handily in the popular vote, it was much closer, and the Democrats who were projected to take the Senate in a big way and increase gains in the House actually lost seats in the House, and most people say they’re going to lose control in 2022 or 2024.
Bob Zadek: You mentioned the bundling, and that’s exactly my observation as well, Nick. I will call this—my own phrase—this is Julia Child meets politics. Now you’ll say, “What the heck am I talking about?” Julia Child, where does that come from? Here’s what I mean. When you make a recipe, I imagine, you take a bunch of disparate ingredients and you put them together and you say, “Okay, I need a little more of this, a little less of that. Ah, it tastes perfect.”
What’s the analogy? When you are designing a political campaign, you have to get to 50.1% of the vote. So you say, “Okay, we have the public service unions, that accounts for X percent. And we have the Latinos, and that accounts for Y percent. Okay, so we need another couple of percent. I know, let’s go for white college-educated women in the suburbs. Okay, great idea.” That gets us up to 48. And you cobble together disparate groups which themselves have nothing in common, but you cobble them together so you get the 50.1.
So it’s by design. The reason elections are so close is because each party has made their own calculation as to how they get to 50.1, and they’re good at it. They’re so good at it that they claw their way to 50.1 give or take. That’s why you have bundled people who have nothing in common. That’s why you have blacks voting Democratic even though the Democratic position on charter schools is so adverse to the interest of some members of a large numbers of the black community. So you have these groups that are together. It’s a marketing cooperative. It’s not a political philosophy. It’s a marketing cooperative designed to get to 50.1. That’s why these elections are so close.
But they are, as you pointed out, artificial. It’s fake. There is no party. And the only reason we have two parties is because the political parties have captured the decision-making through control of the debates and control of ballot access. So political parties have done what, when Facebook does it, they get antitrust attack. But if parties do it, it’s fine. We are more protective of our ability to buy breakfast cereal than we are to have exposure to ideas. And that’s what you are speaking to in terms of we have two political parties, neither of which represent any philosophy at all. It represents a quilt to get the 50.1 and that’s all.
Nick Gillespie: And you know, I’ll throw in—this might be a bridge too far—but to go back to the discussion of media, people now have vastly multiplied choices in what to consume in media and also how to live our lifestyles. So many of the great gatekeeper institutions, whether we’re talking about churches or government or whatever, like nobody can tell us how to live the way that they could 50 or 100 years ago.
But what we need to do, I think, as libertarians, Bob, is to really offer that principled alternative that says, “Look, this platform—not the specific policy positions, but here’s a better way to live where we come together for the few things that are absolutely necessary to help have a society where people can participate and actualize themselves. What are the things we need to do? How do we keep minimal amount of order, and then how do we allow people to flourish and follow their bliss?” This is what the libertarian alternative to where we’re at now, which is a summer of riots and a winter of riots. That’s what we’re offering, and we need to make that as widespread and as persuasive and as visible as possible because the next two years, the next four years are going to be really, really bleak if we don’t get out there and kind of start converting people to a different way of thinking about what politics is for.
Bob Zadek: This is Bob Zadek ending an hour with Nick Gillespie, host of The Reason Interview with Nick Gillespie, a podcast you must follow. Nick is editor-at-large at Reason magazine. And we hope that libertarianism will fill the very void that has been imposed upon us by the vacuous nature of the two political parties. Thank you so much, Nick, for an hour of your time. Thank you to my friends out there for listening, and I’ll be back again next Sunday. Have a wonderful weekend, balance of the weekend. And thanks again, Nick, for your time this Sunday morning.
Nick Gillespie: My pleasure, Bob. A real honor for me. Thanks.