Charles In Charge: God Save the King with Douglas Murray

>> Bill Whalen: It's Tuesday, May 2nd, 2023, and welcome back to GoodFellows, a Hoover Institution broadcast examining social, economic, political, and geopolitical concerns. I'm Bill Whalen, I'm a Hoover distinguished policy fellow, and I'll be your moderator today, a job made considerably easier by the presence of three of the smartest men I know.

Our GoodFellows, as we jokingly refer to them. That would include the Historian Neil Ferguson, the Economist John Cochran, and the geostrategist, Lieutenant General HR McMaster, the AR Hoover Institution senior fellows all. And joining us today is the author, journalist, and according to at least one American publication provocateur, Douglas Murray.

Douglass joins us to discuss the future of the west, its alliances, HR O'Neill, its economics, John, and potential unraveling of its social fabric. Something Douglas gets into in his wonderful book, the War on the west, how to prevail in the age of reason. And before that, we're gonna talk about the big news in London this weekend, which is, of course, the coronation of King Charles III and her Majesty the Queen Consort.

But first, I'd like to take you inside the world of the Hoover Institution for a moment. Last week, we Hoover fellows mourned the loss of our colleague, the economist John Raisian. I doubt many of you have heard the name John Raisian, but he was enormously important in the life of our institution.

John served as Hoover's Director from 1990 to 2015, 25 years. Yes, just as it was a different world in 1990, so too was it a very different Hoover Institution. Our finances were not secure, our relationship with Stanford University was strained at best, and the Institution's outlook was decidedly murky.

So John, who was a very quiet man, quietly got to work behind the scenes and he righted the ship and he got us on its current course, which has us back to our full health. In fact, much of what you see of the Hoover Institution today is thanks to John's hard work.

We are today, thanks to his contributions, a vibrant center of intellectual thought and stellar research, addressing today's greatest challenges. Neil, you tweeted about John's passing, would you like to offer a few words?

>> Niall Ferguson: I would indeed, John was a visionary, but a quiet, understated, self-effacing visionary. When we used the phrase, ideas defining a free society, we're using a John Raisin phrase.

At a gathering we held just after his death at Hoover, I told the story of how John Raisian wooed me, and I've never been wooed like I was wooed by John to come to Hoover. And he patiently, quietly, over the years persuaded me that that's actually where I belonged.

So I owe him, and my wife Ayan owes him a very great deal. But above all, Hoover owes him, because, as you rightly said, he righted the ship, and he did more than that. He kind of rebuilt the ship in many ways.

>> Bill Whalen: Okay, John HR.

>> John H. Cochrane: Well, I'll add two sentences there, of course, my wooing was very easy.

John Raisian, hey, John, you want a job at Hoover? John Cochran, yes. But John was the kind of guy who could do things that way, and Hoover could move nimbly and quickly when opportunities came. We tend to celebrate the prima donnas, otherwise known as the GoodFellas around here.

But an institution like Hoover's really depends on people like John who devote their lives and energies to building the great institution that is the foundation for what people like us can do. And I think John needs celebration, cuz what he achieved was really remarkable. And Hoover is very grateful for his efforts.

 

>> Bill Whalen: And HR, he was almost as happy and upbeat as you are.

>> H. R. McMaster: He was, he's a generous person, an empathetic person, and he and Claudia were just a joy to be around. And I remember when I first met him, I was a lieutenant colonel here as a military fellow in 2002 to 2003.

And that's when I first got to know him. And he said to me, hey, when you retire from the army, you know where you should be going? You should come back to Hoover. And he, I think, was a big part of me being able to join the team afterwards.

And I arrived here in 2002 as kind of a beer drinking East Coast guy, and John introduced me to California Cabernets, and I still have some of his bottles here. Which when we all get together, we'll have to toast John with one of those old 2006 bottles.

>> Bill Whalen: Great idea, so, from the Hoover family to the Raisian family, we mourn your loss.

And I'm not sure we can ever fully thank you for all that John Raisian did for the Hoover Institution, but suffice to say, he will be missed. So, on with the show, Douglas, we haven't forgotten about you, and let's turn now our attention to London. And despite the accent, our viewers should know you are not in London right now, you're in New York, I believe.

I don't know if you intend to go across the pond to the festivities or not. Let's begin this conversation with a very simple question, Charles III turned 75 in November. He held the title of Prince of Wales, I think, for 64 years. He has spent not just years, but decades preparing for this moment.

Douglas, is he the right man at the right moment to take on this responsibility?

>> Douglas Murray: That's a very loaded question, in a way. I'm going to London shortly after the coronation, my invitation having got lost in the post. One of the things about hereditary monarchy is you never really know.

I mean, it's a lottery, isn't it? It's the nature of it, it's a lottery. It's a lottery of birth, it's a lottery of accident, of person, of character, of the time they're in, luck, and much more. The king is having a sort of slight austerity coronation, for instance, because it's been deemed by his advisors that to have an awful lot of peers of the realm and dukes all arriving in Ermine and so on.

Might not hit the tenor of the times. I happen to totally disagree with that, I think that there should be as much Ermine as possible, there should be as many dukes as possible. I think the whole thing should be a spectacular parade and should be an example of what Britain does best.

And there will be lots of discussion about the anachronisms and all that sort of thing. But what's the point of having an anachronistic institution if you don't have anachronisms? As for whether or not he's the right man, the truth is there are several different interpretations of King Charles, as we now call him.

And I suppose they fall into two categories. The first is a perception which has dogged him throughout his life, that he's a sort of slightly soggy green do gooder who talks to his plants and goes on about the environment and things like that. And of course, interferes in politics, that's always dogged him.

Not without some justification, because he has certainly been found writing letters to ministers and things like that. Which in a constitutional monarchy like the UK, is a bit of an intervention in politics of a kind that's not particularly suitable. However, that interpretation of him has, I think, hidden a much deeper and to my mind, more important one, which is that he is actually a man of considerable thoughtfulness.

He's certainly an, Extremely kind and decent man. He's shown that in his dealings with his own family, testing as that has often been. But the people who know him all attest to this as well. It is not the job, of course, of the monarch to do anything really other than to preside beneficently over the progress of politics.

And I would just say that when the late Queen died, I was in America most of my time these days. And I found it very interesting the number of friends particularly of the right, who said to me things like, I admire her. I just don't really get it, I don't get what it is about the monarch that causes such.

I mean, at one point I was actually on air, and I was talking about the virtues of stoicism that her late majesty embodied. And I could feel my bottom lip wobble and I thought, for God's sake Douglas, don't cry when you're extolling the virtues of stoicism.

>> Douglas Murray: But a number of friends of mine said to me, I don't quite get it.

I don't know if it's an original observation, but it was for me that I found that I said to my friends in America, it's like the flag, if the flag were embodied, you swear allegiance to the flag. It's what you fight for, it's what you face towards. Well, the monarch is like that.

Now, of course, Queen Elizabeth II earned that as well by her decades of service. Much of that is passed on to her son, but not all of it.

>> Niall Ferguson: I grew up in a monarchist family, although my family's politics ranged from a card-carrying communist to died in the wall unionist conservative.

All members of the family, even great uncle Alfred the communist, showed great respect for the Queen and the monarchy as an institution. And I think that's an extraordinarily important point that we have as head of state in the United Kingdom, someone who is above politics and has been above politics now for centuries.

So that's important. My grandfather was really a man of the moderate left, labor supporting, later a liberal. But I can remember how he would always make us on Christmas Day, listen to the Queen's address to the nation. And he stood to attention for the national anthem, having served in World War II.

So that set an example to the younger members of the family. There was a play a few years ago called Charles III, which I don't know if you saw it Douglas, it was rather good. It was a pastiche Shakespearean tragedy in which Charles ascended to the throne and almost immediately became embroiled in politics over the issue of the freedom of the press.

And plunged the country almost in a matter of months, into a constitutional crisis. I remember going to see it with another Hoover fellow George Osborne, who was then Chancellor of the Exchequer. He was booed on the way into and out of the theater to his great delight. But the play's vision that Charles would actually break the monarchy has stuck in my mind for a while.

Because, of course, it's almost impossible for anybody to follow Elizabeth II's extraordinary reign and her amazing judgment when it came to locating the monarchy in the modern world. And Charles will have a huge challenge to achieve continuity. He can't be exactly the same, and he's not going to be.

He's going to get criticized as he has been really for most of his life, for being somewhat susceptible to modern ideological fashion. And I'm sure the Daily Mail has already run at least four pieces calling him the woke monarch. But I sense that what's going on here is pretty much what went on in his mother's reign.

They're trying to tweak an historic institution to make sure that it doesn't look hopelessly out of touch. And when I hear accusations of wokeism, I think to myself of what my own experience was when I met him and spent some time with him at Sandringham. As Douglas said, a very thoughtful, an intellectual individual with considerable emotional depth.

One has to remember how brilliantly he navigated a marriage that was really intended for public consumption not for private use, blew up horribly publicly. He handled that with extraordinary dexterity and to me most impressively, his relationship with his sons when I spent time with him, seemed extraordinarily strong, particularly with his eldest son.

So I'm not as worried as some people about how this is going to go. And I'll put up with a certain amount of fashion following cuz I think that's how the monarchy survived in Britain. If it had remained exactly as it was in Victoria's time, or God forbid, in the Hanoverian time, if nothing had changed, it wouldn't be around I suspect.

It's the adaptability that served them so well.

>> Bill Whalen: I wonder if either of our yanks on this call would like to take a contrarian view and tell me that maybe the monarchy is an outdated idea. Or just following the British royalty is kind of a phenomenal waste of time.

John H, do you wanna venture down that path?

>> John H. Cochrane: Our country is dedicated to the proposition that this is not the way to do things, that we don't do Kings and titles and so forth. And we believe in meritocracy. And we had a different solution to the problem in the 18th century of the peaceful transfer of power.

The problem with monarchy being you get whoever's there, and we supposedly had a peaceful one. But we got to look respectfully at what it has become, as our Brits told us, really a symbol of durable institutions. And I think that's something to respect. I think we need symbols of durable institutions and boy, yeah, go for the pomp and circumstance.

There's nothing like the British monarchy or the Catholic Church to do pomp and circumstance right. Now, as to the woke business, so what's a poor constitutional monarch to do all day? And they have sort of taken the idea of sort of, but what first ladies or someday first husbands do in the US, they have to work in the world of philanthropy.

Well, the world of philanthropy is nothing but untrammeled wokeism these days. So it'd be very hard for poor Charles to avoid soggy green do-goodism. I'm gonna write that one down, that was great. I do kind of appreciate his efforts on behalf of architecture and calling out how absolutely atrocious much of the modern architecture that infected London was.

So some soggy green do-goodism is useful.

>> H. R. McMaster: Yeah, I just hope the monarchy continues to unite people in the UK and in the Commonwealth, because I look at us today, it seems like everything divides us further. This is an institution that does bring people together, and I like Douglas's description of the monarch as the flag embodied.

So I just hope that continues. I mean, I hope that the That King Charles continues to be regarded as Queen Elizabeth II was, as a unifier.

>> John H. Cochrane: Is the monarchy also a little bit political? Isn't it not a break glass in case of fire institution? The Spanish king came back and sort of rescued them from a horrible situation.

 

>> Douglas Murray: Well, that's certainly true in the case of Spain. We don't actually know what would happen in the case of the UK. There have been occasions, famously in Australia at one point some decades ago, where the monarch does actually play a sort of political role. The truth is that, as we found in recent years, certainly since the Brexit vote, there are some unsettled issues in the British non-constitution.

Which occasionally risk erupting, and which, when they do, worry me deeply. But if I can just throw in one quick observation in relation to something you said, John, about the way in which America is set up versus the way in which Britain is, I would just add one thing.

I'm sure that, me, Neil occasionally gets asked about, whether you can become a. Whether you want to become a full on American citizen. And I can't remember what your situation is now, Neil, but I've come to say, well. I find it hard to forswear all allegiance to the crown, although I think one of the things that is in the wording in America, if you become a citizen, is forswear allegiance to all foreign princes.

 

>> Niall Ferguson: She's not foreign, Douglas. This is the thing. And I am a dual citizen. I became an American citizen, as my colleagues know back in 2018. And I've always felt that it's a perfectly straightforward reconciliation of two quite admirable traditions, in the political philosophy of the English speaking world.

The tradition of hereditary constitutional monarchy, which has succeeded admirably well in Britain, and the tradition of a republic based on laws. The separation of powers which has succeeded in North America, both ideas of British provenance. So, yes, when I was doing that particular oath, I thought to myself, the queen's not foreign.

 

>> Douglas Murray: I was going to make the point that, of course, among other things, there are at least two foreign princes who it's quite easy to forswear allegiance to these days.

>> Douglas Murray: But I don't know if you're allowed to pick your shoes. We must move on from the monarchy I know, because, actually, although I revere the monarchy, I find it rather boring as an institution in a way, which is as it should be.

But if I may just make one very quick observation. One of my defenses of constitutional monarchy is, I believe that all human beings are deeply interested in watching DNA work out. It's a perennial issue. We want to know the degree to which there is any elasticity in what we inherit in our genes.

And we see this in obsession with dynasties or dynasties across the world. One of my defenses of monarchy is that, it gets that out, in one grand way. In other words we obsess about one family and the way in which does he more resemble his mother than his father?

Is this his father? Is this his mother? And so on. But at least we don't get it in politics. And I would argue that the obsession in American life with dynastic politics, is one consequence of not being able to get that out of your system in a monarchy.

I mean, nobody says, I wonder whether the Blairs should be the next generation again.

>> Douglas Murray: Or, I mean, John Major's wife was never deemed likely to run for political office.

>> Douglas Murray: Nobody says, I wonder what major junior is doing. Mark Thatcher, why doesn't he run? Nobody wants to know whether, David Cameron's children are going to enter the arena.

It seems absurd in British politics, and yet in American politics, it's an overwhelming obsession. The idea that there is a sort of small number of families, who can basically run things and we'll keep our eye on them. And if only the Clintons and the Obamas would intermarry with the Bushes, then we sort of needn't have an election again.

This is a brilliant point, Douglas. I was reading Peggy Noonan's column, only yesterday, in which she prophesied that a man named Kennedy would become one of the contenders in the next presidential election.

>> Niall Ferguson: Despite the fact that he's obviously off his rocker. So, I think you've hit the nail on the head, that what would television script writers do without the Windsors and the Murdoch's to generate material?

And notice there's a further point. It's all right for a monarch to get rather old, rather long in the tooth, but we expect elected politicians in the UK to be quite young. I won't continue the thought because I think listeners can probably know, can probably infer where I'm going with that.

 

>> Bill Whalen: Gentlemen, let's move on to the larger question of the future, the viability of the West. Neil, you recently gave a presentation at the Hoover institution, and I wanna read back a little bit of what you've said in this to get your thoughts on this. And here's what you said.

Quote, the West, a motley group of former wartime allies and adversaries, mostly committed to democracy, but with heterogeneous cultures and institutions and a growing ambivalence toward free markets. John Cochran, has once again demonstrated its strategic incoherence. Agent McMaster, in the first phase of cold War II, you wanted to add, when looking at the west outlook, quote.

It is quote, bleak, because the asymmetry in the western, in the Atlantic alliance, makes it excessively reliant on US public opinion. Are things really that bad, Neil?

>> Niall Ferguson: Well, this is in reaction to my being told over and over again, that there is something called the west, that is based on a liberal international order, and is capable of solving all problems.

And from a historian's vantage point, this is something one has to question. And it seems to me that the war in Ukraine, has once again revealed, the diversity of political cultures, that really we lump together as the west. Look at a map, of the world in relation to the war in Ukraine, and it's essentially the periphery, the rim, against the Eurasian heartland.

And by rim I mean, the countries of North America, of Europe, but I really should say western and central Europe, and then the Antipodes, Australia, New Zealand, and Japan. And so it's really a very heterogeneous group of countries that wants talking about. And it's clear that the attitudes towards this conflict vary a good deal.

Germans think about this war very, very differently from Americans or Brits. And that's why I stress when we're talking about the west, we're talking about this strange group of former allies and adversaries, that came together in Cold War I, in the face of the soviet threat. The threats today are a bit different because Putin's Russia is less of a formidable foe, than the Soviet Union was, and China has become much, much more important.

And I think in Cold War II it will be hard to keep, what we've been used to calling the west together, because there are significant parts of this. Grouping that just are far too in bed with China economically, to feel comfortable with Cold War Two. I think, the most telling slide I showed when I gave that talk, was the huge imbalance between US support, financial and military, for Ukraine and the support of all the other members of the West.

And in some cases, the contributions are absolutely trivial in relation to gross domestic product. So I think we shouldn't delude ourselves about this. There's been a lot of, I think, rather starry eyed celebration of transatlantic unity since Russia invaded Ukraine. But I keep reminding people that this war could last longer than you think.

Wars that have lasted a year generally last more than one more year, and keeping this coalition together, it's going to be challenging, and that is what Vladimir Putin is counting on. He's counting on the fact that as we go on through this year and into next year, it's gonna get tougher and tougher to maintain unity and American public commitment, because that's the Achilles heel that the West has.

The American public has a tendency to get disillusioned with any long-term commitment far away, even if, as in this case, it doesn't in fact involve American lives being put on the line, just American money. So that's what motivated my somewhat skeptical take.

>> Bill Whalen: John, ambivalence about free markets, do you agree with Dr. Ferguson?

 

>> John H. Cochrane: Yes, well, you phrased this in terms of the West and the decline of the West, and I'm more optimistic than Niall in the grand strategy question. There's no other idea that anybody really believes in, for how to run things. If we fall apart, we will implode, we will not be invaded by China and set out that way.

The crowning idea of our political system is not technocratic competence, but that we stumble from disaster to disaster, but always come out on top. The central point of democracy, even of people voting, is to occasionally right the ship when the elites go off on some crazy idea, and they tend to do that in a rough and ready way.

So on the grand, is the West gonna come out on top, okay? Yes, the trend economically right now, is to sort of the Brusselsification of everything. And I'm particularly sad to see that we're going for industrial policy, for trade restrictions, for all the things we know don't work, sadly.

Cuz we were the leaders going in the opposite direction, more and more governments running things. Under the guise of resilience, we're gonna bring the great success of the Jones Act to the semiconductor industry and much else. That's kind of sad to see, sort of creeping dysfunction, but that's not, in the grand strategic terms, the end of the West.

This is a bad war, but it's not Germany invading Poland and France. I would love to see us decisively win and tell China not to invade Taiwan. But if you're asking future of the West, even losing Taiwan is probably like losing North Vietnam, it's gonna be horrible for a while, but not sort of the end of the world.

But we have a guest who has written whole books about this, who we should hear from rather than us rambling along.

>> Douglas Murray: Well, I actually want to hear from H.R McMaster, among others, about this question of unity, certainly on the military front. Because my interpretation over the last year and a bit since the invasion of Ukraine, has actually been that I sympathize with Niall's desire not to overly talk up what has been achieved.

Because this is doubtless going to be, and I agree, a much longer game than many people are prepared for. And I think public disillusionment, and particularly in America, and particularly in the American right, is one of the great threats to the unity of the coalition on this. But I just wanted to throw in that, nevertheless, if we were talking 18 months ago, would we have expected the degree of unity which we found once the Russian tanks rolled in?

There has definitely been, as Niall says, Germany has needed early on more coaxing than one might have liked, for reasons we all know. Certain allies have proved not as good allies as one might have hoped. But, nevertheless, a number of very big questions of recent decades have sort of been answered to some degree.

I remember some 20 years ago doing a report on the future of NATO, with General Shalikashvili in America, and Field Marshal Lord Inge in the UK. I remember the question we were addressing was, with a NATO, what's the point of NATO? And as of February, before last, that question was answered again.

And has there been as much unity and so on as one would have liked, no. Has there been much more than one would have expected, absolutely. And so it's possible, and the scenario that I would use, it's possible that at the top level, as it were, the penthouse level of this, things are actually rather more secure than we thought.

Nevertheless, it is the foundations, it's the basement level, it's the ground floor that I think is at risk. And before handing over to you on this, my observation early on was that it was Germany that was the weak link, that Putin was waiting for Germany, maybe France, maybe Italy, to be picked off.

And actually, I think, public opinion polls in America are the ones that worry me now. And as a friend of mine in Germany said to me the other week, who would have thought that it was America that one would have feared going weak on this question?

>> H. R. McMaster: Well, I'd love to hear what Doug thinks about the effect of leadership in galvanizing national will, and I think that's what's lacking.

Yeah, I don't think the president has done a very good job at explaining what is at stake. And then what we're doing, to support Ukraine, to help them achieve a favorable outcome at an acceptable cost and risk. And I think that lack of a clear strategic vision has mired in talking about the tactics of this weapon or that weapon, or how much military support in terms of a dollar figure.

So I do think leadership can have a big influence, and in terms of Niall's diagnosis, I think that this is, we're at the cusp of maybe a generational shift. I think in the 90s, we did take a holiday from history, we believe that great power competition was a relic of the past.

And I think the last two decades have been sort of a consistent wake up call in that connection, beginning with 9/11. But then also involving the growing strength of China and China's aggression in the South China Sea, and vis-a-vis Taiwan, on the Himalayan frontier. And, of course, various forms of economic aggression, and informational, and propaganda aggression as well, so cyber aggression.

So I think that we are now awake to the threat that the first major land war in Europe since World War Two poses, it is generational to a large extent, I think. When I was a first year, a senior at West Point, just prior to commissioning, we looked across the parade field and saw the 40-year reunion.

Of the class of 1944 and so we all knew that our mission was to prevent that from ever happening again. And I think we lost focus on that. And maybe we're beginning to understand that kind of a cataclysmic, disastrous war could occur if we're not vigilant, if we don't demonstrate strength.

 

>> John H. Cochrane: I just want to add some HR ish notes of optimism quickly. I noticed last week India and China voted in the UN to censor Russia for its invasion. That was pretty remarkable, NATO, of course, is now expanded and invigorated. And as far as getting other people to pay, we spend about 3% of GDP on military.

I don't think, correct me if I'm wrong, Neil, no great power in history has ever spent so little on its military. And when we complain about other people not spending, remember, the guy who picks up the check gets to pick the restaurant. And we might not wanna complain so much, and we might not wanna do handing over who gets to pick the restaurant if somebody else starts paying the check.

 

>> Niall Ferguson: Point of information, actually, the 19th century Britain ran an extraordinarily cost effective empire with remarkably low defence spending in relation to GDP. But what they also did was they ran a very sound fiscal policy with primary budget surpluses, reducing the debt to GDP ratio consistently from the very elevated height of post 1815.

And that's what the US isn't doing. The thing that worries me, just to go to John's favorite topic, is that at some point this decade, the cost of debt service will exceed the defense budget of the United States. And I've said for many years that that is a real tipping point for any great power.

I said strategic incoherence in that passage that Bill quoted. And I worry a little bit that the Chinese may have more strategic coherence at this point. Notice they are now the ones who appear to be posturing as the peace brokers. And this is actually quite hazardous for the United States.

If the initiative goes to China, I think that's the best news for Putin that there's been in many months, because any peace that China brokers will be a far, far better outcome for Putin than we would want to see. So the incoherence that worries me is I don't hear anybody in Washington, or for that matter, in London, telling me how this war ends in a way that would be emphatically not only to Ukraine's benefit, but to ours.

It's a very open ended commitment we've made. We consistently say that it's up to the Ukrainians when the war ends, that is not a strategically coherent way to run our foreign policy. With all due respect to Team Biden.

>> Bill Whalen: Well put, now to pose a question to Douglas, and this gets to his wonderful book, The War on the West.

In explaining the book, Douglas, you introduced two phrases. One culture of ingratitude, and the other, societies of resentment. What exactly are you getting at, and how do you reverse those mentalities?

>> Douglas Murray: Well, let me use the shorthand that actually Elon Musk rather helpfully provided the other day in his interview with Bill Maher.

It is the thing where you speak to a student at any American university and ask them what they know about George Washington or Thomas Jefferson. They tell you that they were slave owners, and then you say anything else, and hard to get anything out of them. I recently did a tour of universities in the south, and even at Thomas Jefferson's own university at UVA, they're ashamed, they're embarrassed.

They don't know what to do, because people in the past turn out not to have all the views we have in 2023, who could have guessed? I'm sure that we believe that our own views will be held for all the millennia to come. But in the meantime, we have this culture of, yes, ingratitude and self excoriation.

It is absolutely embedded now in America. It's why the rest of the anglosphere is picking up this American mind virus, and why certain countries like France are actually trying to cut themselves off from American cultural influence, because they say, we just don't want this here. To my mind, this is one of the biggest threats that America faces.

All the questions of defense spending, whether or not America wants to remain the global hegemon thing, all fall away. If you believe that there's nothing good about America. I mean, for instance, what American school child is not taught that slavery was the founding sin of America? I deeply resent this language as well as I think it being ahistorical.

If America has a founding sin, fine. What's the founding sin of Nigeria? What's the founding sin of Egypt, Zimbabwe, China, France? You could go on and on, why does only America have a founding sin? Why does everything in America have to be rewritten in this negative key in this generation?

Why after 20 something years of the Internet, have we become stupider in our public debate to the extent that we now disagree over which year or century America was founded. And where not to get into one of the distractions of our time, but where we don't even agree on what a woman is.

I mean, why why have we allowed ourselves to slip into this place of self abnegation? And my own view is that it is because in our lifetimes, in the lifetimes of all of us here, we have moved from a celebration of heroism as being the great public virtue to a celebration of victimhood being the great public virtue.

And we have all seen this coming in our lifetimes, I personally abhor it. I think everyone present, I was brought up with a different ethic. But the ethic of resentment. I quote, in the war in the west, I quote Nietzsche carefully, as I always say, one of the great thinkers of all time, but nevertheless a thinker that you have to deal with carefully.

In the genealogy of morals Nietzsche has this great insight on the person of resentment, who, as he says, among other things, likes to tear at wounds long since healed and then cry about his hurt. Ring any bells? Another example, of course, is what Nietzsche says about the person of resentment, that really what they need is somebody to stand across their lives.

Even Nietzsche isn't sure who, he says, maybe a secular priest. And it's very telling that Nietzsche can't quite say who could perform this task. But somebody needs to stand across the life of the person of resentment and say, actually, yes, you are correct. There is a person who has ruined your life, there is a person who has ruined your life in the world entire, the person is you.

Now, nobody would ever want to perform that task. That's why even the secular priest is a sort of attempt to come up with an idea of who could perform that task. But if that person does not exist and say, actually, it is you, it is you who has ruined your life.

Nobody else has held you back, as Morgan Freeman famously said in an interview many years ago, that bus leaves every day. But if you didn't get on it in America and the wider west, now, everyone can say, it's not your Fault, you didn't get on it, other people were holding you back from it.

Systemic reasons were holding you back, maybe systemic racism, maybe everybody with white skin was holding you off, getting on the bus, etc. And now this is spilled out not just from minority communities, but to the majority. Which is why we see these extraordinary figures, like almost 100%, as far as one can see now, of people at university in America identifying as LGBTQIA+.

We must have heterosexuals put into a minority group quite soon at this rate, but they identify as this because they want a bit of a victimhood pie. They want a bit of it because it's what we celebrate now in America and in the wider west. And I find it absolutely disgusting and don't mind admitting it.

 

>> John H. Cochrane: I wanna ask you, well, your view of I'll give my diagnosis quickly and maybe you'll react. What I see is a combination of a religious movement, the sort of thing that pops out every now and then, a Savonarola moment, we are all guilty moment. Largely among wealthy, college educated white people, to feel horrible for sins, and people go through that.

But that, combined with a very clever political movement which exploits this, takes over the institutions of civil society, even though not the majority of people who vote. And is quite anti democratic, is quite authoritarian, this is take over the institutions of civil society and shove it down your throat, it gives a reason for making the other evil.

All of x are evil and therefore not entitled to the usual norms of our turn now, your turn later, but rather, we'll take over in. So you merge a guilt inducing, messianic cult with a very clever political organization, and a small minority can do that in some sense.

What Bolshevik ideology did in Russia, not an exact analogy, but the marriage of a religious movement with a political movement that wants to seize power, basically.

>> Niall Ferguson: Can I give an example? Because some of our viewers may not have kids in school at the moment or students at university.

And I'm not sure that they'll be aware of how rapidly things have moved in the ways that Douglas and John are talking about. I had occasion recently to look at teaching materials that were being considered for use with grade five children, 11-year-olds or thereabouts. These were historical teaching materials, although it wasn't called history, I think it was called social studies.

And these materials came from a program called Learning for Justice, which turned out, when I did a little digging, to be run by the Southern Poverty Law Center. One of the most dubious organizations in the field of political activism, it pretends to be a civil rights organization it really isn't.

So let me give you two examples of the teaching points. The essential knowledge that these materials were supposed to give students after they had studied the module on slavery in American history. Number one, students will know that the United States was founded on protecting the economic interests of white christian men who owned property.

And here's the second one I'll give you. Students will know that after the civil war, formerly enslaved people faced many obstacles, including racism and political, social, and economic inequality. Their descendants continue to face similar oppression today. These were being presented to schools, to teachers, as legitimate objectives of education in a fifth grade classroom.

And I'm afraid to say that schools all over America uncritically take this kind of material and put it in the classroom and start instilling these ideas in children. It was only in this case because I kicked up a fuss that it didn't happen at the school my kids go to.

But that's the kind of thing we're talking about, and it is extraordinary, insidious, the way it works.

>> H. R. McMaster: Well, no, I agree completely with Douglas's diagnosis here, this is the valorization of victimhood, and it's connected to this curriculum of self loathing in the university. And when I look today at some of the recruiting problems in the military, I think part of it is connected to teaching our children that their country is not worth defending.

So I really am concerned about it, I hope that there's a corrective. I mean, we've been through periods like this, I think back to the 1970s, and I'm going to use a Clinton quotation here, and again, it's George Clinton from Parliament Funkadelic. The album was America eats its young, which came out in 1972.

Some of the lyrics were consistent with stoic philosophy, the lyrics were, ain't you deep in your semi-first class seat? You protest this and protest that and eat yourself fat, you don't like what you're about, but then it goes on to say, situation is just that it has no power over you.

And then, these are all lyrics of the track. If you don't like the effect, don't produce the cause, and so what I'm concerned about is that this curriculum robs people of agency as Douglas said, right? You put the word systemic or institutional in front of every problem, you can't do anything about it.

So you're left with a toxic combination of, really, anger and resignation. So I just think we have to make a conscious effort to correct this kind of pernicious curriculum in schools. Gosh, you know we'd be teaching 11-year-olds that, Niall, it's just, I mean, that's really, really disturbing, but Douglas, I'd like to hear what you think the prospects are for recovery here.

Like do we need George Clinton to make a comeback here? He's still on tour, but.

>> Douglas Murray: My view is that the solution is right in front of us. I mean, the thing that disturbs me, if I can just say so quickly as well, is the fact, as I mentioned or alluded to, that this comes now from the right and the left.

The American right has also become self loathing about America, with some good reason. People say, we're so degraded in our public discourse and much more that why would we, for example, intervene in another place in the world when we have these terrible ethics ourselves, what's the point? We have nothing good to give.

You do hear that from parts of the American right now, as you do from the American left. And my own view is that the solution is straightforward, as Nietzsche says, there is only one answer to the problem of resentment, and that is gratitude. And one of the things I have write a chapter on gratitude in the war on the west, because I think it is something we simply do not address enough in our culture.

The person of resentment cannot be hauled out of pit of resentment by a 15% increase in their Social Security check. They can't. Be hauled out of the pit of resentment by being given reparations for something that they didn't suffer, given to them by people who did no wrong.

The only thing deep enough that speaks at a deep enough level to try to cancel out resentment is gratitude, and the opportunity for gratitude is all around us. I have a friend who Neil knows as well, who's the headmistress in the UK, and I occasionally have asked her, as I have with other people know, in teaching.

What do you find is one of the most useful ways to deal with a child who is really playing up and is really difficult? And she said, a number of teachers have said this to me, quite often this is if they're immigrant origin children, I encourage their family to take them back to their country of origin to meet their first cousins, they come back transformed.

Here I was in London or DC or New York, thinking that no one in world history had had a worse lot in life than myself. I have all of these structures that I've been told wind around me like a spider's web so that I can achieve nothing in my life.

And yet it turns out I have food, I have rights, I have the law, and historically speaking, and in the world today, these are all very unusual, or at least most of them are. Now, if America can't say to its young and to its old as well, because, as was mentioned earlier, a lot of old people who've got this wrong as well.

If they can't say, this is highly unusual, and here's why it's good, then I don't know who in the world has a more compelling story. Maybe I can just finish on this thought, I recently was looking at, actually UVA, one of the copies of the Declaration of Independence.

And one of the things that immediately struck me, of course, was the site of the signatories Reminded me, of course, of the signatories on the death one here. Maybe we return to where we started, the signature is on the death warrant of Charles I. As everybody knows, if you appended your signature to the death warrant of Charles I, it was best that you died before Charles II came.

If you did, then it was just your corpse dug up, hung, drawn and quartered, as with the corpse of Oliver Cromwell. If you were unfortunate to still be alive, you were hunted down, hanged, drawn and quartered in real time. That was the cost of appending your signature to a document like this.

And when the founding fathers and the signatories of the Declaration of Independence appended their signatures, there they were doing something equally dangerous. And only one other place in the world, France, was attempting a non monarchical republic, and they went straight to the terror. So if there's a solution to this, I would say teach American schoolchildren the luck, the great good fortune they have to be living in a republic founded by Thomas Jefferson, George Washington and others, and not by Robespierre.

Teach them that, and that it was by the thinnest of margins, and the thinnest of margins was a small number of remarkable yes dead, yes white, yes men. Those three great sins of our time, to not only be white and male, but dead, what losers. If you taught them, it's because of these dead, white men that you have any rights today, you could turn it around.

It is as Paul Johnson said in his opening sentence of his history of the American people 20 years ago, in a sentence, you could not imagine being written today. The story of the American people is the greatest story ever told.

>> Bill Whalen: Angelus Murray, you've been more than generous with your time today, we appreciate your wise words, your keen insights.

Tell our viewers and our listeners where they can read your columns, where they can hear your voice.

>> Douglas Murray: They can read my columns in many places, including the New York Post, including in the Spectator, National Review, the Sun. Some people think almost every newspaper is not quite true, but.

And of course, my most recent book, the War On The West, is available if you can find any bookshops, otherwise, of course, online. And, I'm a prolific, not to say promiscuous, podcaster, but this has been a great, this has been a particularly enjoyable act of promiscuity.

>> Bill Whalen: Take care, Douglas, thanks for joining us.

 

>> H. R. McMaster: Thanks, Douglas.

>> Bill Whalen: Now, the moment you've all been waiting for, the Lightning round.

>> Speaker 6: Lightning round.

>> Bill Whalen: Deal, we begin with a particularly cheap shot in your direction, Manchester City, 4, Arsenal 1, how painful on a scale of 1 to 10 is this?

>> Niall Ferguson: 11, as an Arsenal fan, I kinda knew it would end this way.

Our hopes of winning the Premier League for the first time in a long time were dashed, not just by the fact that Manchester City has a vastly larger squad and is therefore less vulnerable to injury. By the way, the reason they have a vastly larger squad is that they do very improper things financially, which they, as far as I know, have yet to be punished for.

But we also bungled a series of games we should have won, giving away two goal leads, ending up drawing so, one can whine about the other side. But I think Arsenals, young squad, they bottled it, as they say in Britain, and I think the pressure was just more psychologically than these really talented athletes could handle.

But yes, you've touched on a very raw nerve there, Bill. All male Fergusons, right down to five year old Campbell, are still mourning the dashing of our dream.

>> Bill Whalen: John Cochran, two questions for you, my friend. One, JP Morgan gobbles up most of First Republic's assets and the Treasury Department assures us that, quote, the banking system remains sound and resilient, agree or disagree?

 

>> John H. Cochrane: Well, lightning round on two big questions. On the last one, I gotta bring my Ted lasso mustache for next time. Then maybe Neil will understand how Americans feel about this stuff, God knows about rugby. Yeah, I guess the government finally found a merger it likes, and Chase will merge with the Fed at some point and take over the financial system.

First Republic, look, guys, this is simple, this whole architecture of financial regulation has now been proven bust. They couldn't see plain vanilla interest rate risk first week of a banking class sitting right in front of them. In fact, the Fed was asking banks, what are you going to do when interest rates go down on the eve of the Fed raising interest rates?

This is a colossal institutional failure, smart people, but just a rulebook that nobody could do. XA cummin, yes, I don't know if it's June 1 or not, but by choice, we were talking about institutions and long runs and kings and constitutions. I'm a little shocked that this is a deliberately created problem.

If I'm treasury secretary, first day we pay interest and principal on the debt before anything else. We're just gonna take financial calamity off the table and that they are. That they are deliberately making this thing loom as a great disaster in order to force negotiations I think is irresponsible.

With our inheritance we got from Alexander Hamilton, there's a dead white man who is rolling over in his grave right now at the way this is being handled.

>> Bill Whalen: Neil, do you buy into x day, which we'd explain, by the way, is the government defaulting on its debt?

 

>> John H. Cochrane: The government hits the debt ceiling and has to stop spending on something, and they choose to default on debt rather than other things as a result.

>> Niall Ferguson: That's a common misunderstanding, and I'm glad you cleared it up. The thing here is that we're playing a kind of game of political chicken.

This game is a familiar one, it was last played when President Obama was in the White House and John Boehner was the House majority leader. The trouble is, this is a much different economic environment where we're playing the game of chicken. And I will just say that if you look at periodic outbreaks of illiquidity in the US treasury market we saw in March 2020, we've seen it even more recently.

This is much riskier than the political class understands, given the environment we're in. So I'm worried that there's going to be a financial market accident while the politicians are engaging in this entirely artificial brinkmanship.

>> Bill Whalen: HR, 160 years ago in this day, Stonewall Jackson is mortally wounded at the Battle of Chancellorsville and the McMaster big Book of American generals.

Is Stonewall Jackson overrated, underrated or treated justly?

>> H. R. McMaster: I think he's treated justly. I think that he was kind of the go to commander for Lee Chancellorsville, the battle in which he was wounded was probably his finest moment in terms of enveloping hooker's forces there. But Lee just wasn't quite the same after him.

He was a very interesting guy. He was a mathematician and a very stoic individual. He wasn't really charismatic. Of course, he got his name because he was being criticized for not taking more bold action at bull run. There's Jackson standing there like a stone wall. He should have been more active.

I think history has sort of sorted it out and he's regarded as a generally effective commander, but not a brilliant one.

>> Bill Whalen: Neil, keeping the theme of overrated, underrated. On this day in 1997, a 43 year old Tony Blair becomes Great Britain's youngest prime minister in 185 years.

Is Mister Blair overrated or underrated?

>> Niall Ferguson: He's very underrated in Britain. It's probably not well understood here in the US, how unpopular Tony Blair became, mainly over the Iraq war and his decision to give the invasion wholehearted British support. That has been a source of considerable and prolonged resentment against him, particularly from his fellow Labor Party members.

But I think that this is to misunderstand what an incredibly talented politician and very successful prime minister Tony Blair was, and he remains, I think, one of the most thoughtful people in British politics. If the Labor Party, Tony Blair as leader today, as opposed to Keir Starmer, who is a less, I think, charismatic and impressive person, there really would be no doubt about how the next election would go so under, certainly in his own land.

 

>> Bill Whalen: Final question for the group. Now that Joe Biden is officially a candidate in 2024, who has the bigger electoral handicap? Which is the bigger electoral handicap? Is it President Biden's age or Donald Trump's character?

>> Niall Ferguson: It ought to be Trump's character. It may turn out to be Biden's age.

I think most people are underestimating the probability of Donald Trump's being reelected in 2024. Look closely, number one, he's frontrunner for the nomination, and republican frontrunners generally get the nomination. Number two, recession is coming with terrible timing for Joe Biden's reelection hopes. Not for a very long time, actually, not for a century has a president been re elected when there was a recession in the two years before his reelection attempt.

In more recent times, it got rid of Gerald Ford, it got rid of Jimmy Carter, it got rid of Bush senior. So I think that the character question may be swept aside by economic dissatisfaction and memories of the Trump economy, which gave you full employment and no inflation.

 

>> Bill Whalen: John and HR had noted in the presidents three minute video explaining his case for reelection, not a single mention of the economy and HR, not a single mention of foreign policy.

>> H. R. McMaster: Well, I think it's just regrettable. I just wonder that in a country with 330 some million people, 350 million people, I think that we could come up with something better than a rematch to the last election.

But I'm not a political scientist. One thing you know about three minute videos from both of these guys is those are written by staff.

>> John H. Cochrane: It would be hilarious to see a three minute video that you just. Okay, guys, you gotta make it up, three minutes, go now on both sides.

I think what we're learning is that the American primary system has some problems to it, and the days of the smoke filled room had all sorts of proble. But at least they were focused on vetting candidates, producing vaguely reasonable candidates who might have a chance of both winning a general election and also governing with some degree of responsibility.

And I think, but, you know, lots of, I've seen this in the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. So I think people are coming to realize that there's a real problem with how we select the candidates in the first place. That we, with great benches on both sides the bench of, even the bench of the other announced republican candidates are all pretty darn good.

And the Democrats have plenty of pretty darn good people, too, who ought to be selected somehow. And this isn't the moment for how you improve the primary system. When you see problems, don't just look at personalities, look at something's wrong in the rulebook, and there's certainly something wrong in the rulebook here.

 

>> Bill Whalen: And we will leave it there for this show. We're not gonna reconvene until the second half of May, which means that Mother's Day will have come and gone by then. I'd like to wish all three of you a happy Mother's Day, and that I hope that you and your children spent it celebrating each of your remarkable wives.

I've met all your spouses, and they are all just tremendous ladies.

>> H. R. McMaster: Thanks, Bill.

>> Bill Whalen: You're welcome. So that's it for this episode of GoodFellows. As I mentioned, we will be back in the second half of May. Our next episode will feature the writer, podcaster, and opinion columnist Coleman Hughes.

We're gonna be talking about race and public policy. You don't miss this episode. On behalf of my colleagues, Neil Ferguson, HR McMaster, and John Cochran, all of us here at the Hoover Institution, we hope you enjoyed today's show, and we will see you soon. Take care, and thanks for watching.