0:14

Hey, everyone. It's Andrew Clavin with

0:17

this week's interview with R .R.

0:19

Reno. I do not subscribe

0:21

to many journals three. I

0:23

subscribe to three, but one of

0:25

them is First Things, and

0:27

it is probably one of the

0:29

best collections of writing in

0:31

the country. It contains incredibly thoughtful writing

0:33

by some of my favorite writers

0:35

like Carl Truman and Mary Harrington

0:37

and Erica Bakioki and the tremendous

0:39

and undervalued Angela Franks who really

0:41

writes some brilliant stuff. R

0:43

.R. Reno is the editor and executive

0:45

editor of First Things, and he is

0:48

also the author of many books. One

0:50

of them, The Return of the Strong

0:52

Gods, Nationalism, Populism, and the Future of

0:54

the West. I finished it just a

0:56

couple of days ago. This book came

0:58

out in 2019 and kind of went

1:00

under the radar, but now suddenly people

1:02

have discovered how prophetic and insightful it

1:04

is. So, I'm happy to have R

1:06

.R. Reno with us. Rusty, thank you

1:08

so much for coming on. I

1:10

appreciate it. Pleasure to be with you. By

1:14

the way, I agree about

1:16

Angela Franks. She's a great

1:18

expositor, and

1:20

not just expositor, but

1:22

she can frame theologically

1:24

the whole postmodern

1:26

canon. And she's done a

1:28

series of essays for us. We've

1:30

got a final one that'll come

1:32

out in a couple of months

1:34

on Althusser. And

1:36

I just think it's so valuable because

1:38

I think it helps inoculate the

1:41

rising generation against

1:43

a kind of naive hero worship

1:45

for these characters. Yes.

1:48

Well, still not helping them understand, well,

1:50

what is it? What were these projects really

1:52

all about? So I think she's great.

1:54

Thank you for commending her. Well, what

1:56

I love about her, she takes them seriously, which

1:58

is the cruelest thing you could possibly do. It's

2:02

just devastating. So this

2:05

book did kind of get ignored when

2:07

it first came out, right? But now

2:09

suddenly everybody's talking about. Probably

2:11

two factors. I think

2:13

one is the

2:15

pandemic, which kind of

2:17

closed so much. And

2:19

then secondly, I think a

2:21

lot of people, many on

2:23

the right, wanted to

2:26

believe that Trump was a

2:28

kind of weird episode and

2:30

that we were going to go back to

2:32

normal and the politics of the West

2:34

broadly. And I think

2:36

that his election to another

2:38

term in 2024 really caused a

2:40

lot of people to go, no,

2:42

no, something's really going on. And

2:45

I want to understand it. And

2:47

my book is an

2:49

attempt to explain to

2:51

readers why it feels

2:54

like the ground under our

2:56

feet is shifting. So

2:59

let's talk about this. I

3:01

thought one of the most interesting,

3:03

and it was kind of obvious after

3:06

you said it, was that where

3:08

we are is historically based. I mean,

3:10

a lot of the things that

3:12

some people are now talking about as

3:14

if they were eternal truths or

3:16

actually truths that are linked into a

3:18

moment in history. Can you explain

3:20

to people what the thesis of the

3:23

book is so everyone knows what

3:25

we're talking about? It's a straightforward thesis

3:27

about the 20th century that the

3:29

20th century is has

3:32

two basic movements. They

3:34

all revolve around

3:36

the catastrophe of 1914

3:39

to 1945, the

3:42

senseless bloodshed on the

3:44

Western Front, and

3:46

then the political

3:49

upheavals, more

3:51

pronounced in Europe than they were in the United States,

3:54

but maybe culminating with the Spanish Civil

3:56

War. And many people really

3:58

believed that the future was going

4:00

to be either communism or

4:02

fascism. And then

4:04

1939, the beginning of

4:06

World War II, culminating in

4:08

two nuclear weapons dropped

4:11

on Japanese cities and

4:13

the revelations of the

4:15

scope of genocide in

4:17

the death camps in

4:19

Europe. So I

4:21

think those really knocked the

4:23

stuffing out of Western civilization,

4:25

those events. And the

4:27

victors of World

4:29

War II, especially Americans,

4:32

really put their minds to trying

4:34

to understand what went wrong and

4:36

how we can prevent it. And

4:38

so the second half of the

4:41

20th century is dominated by the

4:43

never -again imperative. And

4:45

this leads to what

4:47

I call the post -war

4:49

consensus or the open society

4:51

consensus. It's a notion

4:53

that we need to really

4:57

drive out the

4:59

passions and

5:01

fervor that

5:03

gave rise. This is

5:06

how the analysis goes, that

5:08

the ideological passions need to be

5:10

cooled. And to

5:12

do that, we need to put

5:14

our civilization on a much more

5:16

modest footing. Technocratic

5:18

reason, liberty

5:21

and rights become super important

5:24

to protect the dignity

5:26

of the human person. And

5:29

that this project,

5:31

this post -work consensus, I'm

5:33

sure I would have supported it in

5:36

1950. And to be honest with you,

5:38

I went to college in 1979,

5:40

and I was educated in it, and

5:42

I thought it was common sense. And

5:45

it's really only really after

5:47

the end of the Cold War, when

5:50

paradoxically, it ought to have relaxed its

5:52

grip. it

5:54

actually went into overdrive.

5:57

And this consensus has

5:59

been turned into a

6:01

kind of all -out assault

6:03

on any kind of permanent

6:06

anchor in society, or

6:08

as I put it differently

6:10

in other places, it's

6:12

been an assault on love. Because

6:14

love is an anchoring

6:16

impulse of the human

6:19

heart. You know, the

6:21

things you love, you

6:23

cling to. The

6:25

things you love, you defend. And

6:29

this kind of

6:31

galvanizing of the soul

6:33

is seen as

6:35

a potential threat to

6:37

society, the open

6:39

society. So basically,

6:41

if you love your country, if

6:43

you love your God, you're...

6:47

Hitler. I mean, it's it's

6:49

amazing how quickly people leap

6:51

to calling each other Hitler.

6:53

Yes, it's also interesting that

6:55

this this is if you

6:57

look at Renaud Camus French

6:59

intellectual has a wonderful essay

7:01

called the second career of

7:03

Hitler and and we published

7:05

an article called the end

7:08

of the age of Hitler

7:10

by Alec Riri who's a

7:12

English historian and he notes

7:14

that Hitler doesn't really come

7:16

into our vocabulary as the

7:18

image of absolute evil until

7:20

the 1960s. In the immediate

7:22

aftermath of the war, there

7:24

was, I think, a

7:26

more balanced approach, and also there was

7:28

a desire to get on with life,

7:31

and there was a certain impulse to

7:33

forget. And

7:35

so it really takes on

7:37

this stronger element. In fact, one

7:39

of the theses of the

7:41

book is that The baby boomer

7:44

radicals in the 1960s, late

7:46

1960s, were not rebelling against their

7:48

parents' values. They were

7:50

rebelling against what they thought

7:52

were their parents' hypocrisy, because

7:54

the open society consensus became

7:56

the dominant consensus in the

7:58

50s. But we still had

8:01

this many, you know, strong

8:03

institutions and middle class consensus,

8:05

and it was, they

8:07

wanted to perfect it and extend it.

8:10

And that's been the project of my

8:12

lifetime. I mean, my

8:14

entire adult life has been lived

8:16

under the kind of accelerating power

8:19

of the open society consensus. Because

8:21

it does strike, on

8:23

first looking at it, it strikes me

8:25

as strange. I think it would

8:27

strike most people as strange that from

8:30

the idea of open societies, you

8:32

get people like George Soros who want

8:34

to, you know, let people out

8:36

of prison if they're the wrong color.

8:38

You get people... censoring

8:40

your opinion. I mean, basically violating

8:42

our right to free speech. How do

8:45

you get from there? The

8:47

idea is that if you don't

8:49

love anything, if you don't love

8:51

your God, if you don't love

8:53

your country, somehow we'll all be

8:55

more free and we'll be saved

8:57

from the excesses of communism and

8:59

fascism. And yet it ends up

9:01

being kind of a fascist mentality,

9:03

doesn't it? Obligatory openness. a

9:06

openness. But every society

9:08

has to have a consensus, and

9:11

that consensus has to be

9:13

defended and in some cases imposed.

9:16

And we live under this open

9:18

society consensus. I mean, in the book, I

9:20

look at what I think

9:23

is a signal document in

9:25

the formation of this consensus.

9:27

It's the Harvard report on

9:29

titled Education for Free Society.

9:32

Now, the president of Harvard

9:34

at the time was James

9:36

Conan. and Conant was the

9:39

civilian head of the Manhattan

9:41

Project and in 1943 this

9:43

the battle of Stalingrad in

9:45

the summer of 1943 and

9:47

at that point he was

9:49

aware of our technological advantage

9:51

which ultimately culminated in the

9:53

bomb. The realities on

9:55

the battlefields of Europe were now

9:57

clear. We were clearly going to

9:59

win the war and he formed

10:01

this committee at Harvard in the

10:03

fall of 1943 to think about

10:05

like how do we effectively, how

10:08

do we reconstruct our civilization? So

10:10

in this report, the faculty

10:12

members of the report,

10:14

they wanted to balance the

10:16

authority of the Western

10:18

tradition, the cannon, the Western

10:20

cannon, but they wanted

10:22

to open it up to

10:24

greater freedom for students

10:26

to ask critical questions. So

10:28

they were trying to

10:30

balance, if you will, the

10:32

authority of our tradition

10:34

with this new emphasis on

10:36

openness. But

10:38

all of the prestige went

10:40

to openness. And so

10:42

over time, this erodes

10:44

the balance. Or

10:47

you can even think of

10:49

Arthur Schlesinger Jr.'s book from 1949

10:51

called The Vital Center. And

10:53

The Vital Center is his

10:56

recognition that in a modern

10:58

technological capitalist society that you

11:00

have all this dynamism and

11:02

change and it needs to

11:04

be balanced in the vital

11:06

center, to create a vital

11:08

center, needs to be balanced

11:10

by security and sensible longing.

11:13

And I think that those, like

11:15

I say, I think I probably would

11:17

have agreed with that. In fact, I went

11:19

back and reread the vital center recently.

11:21

It's a marvelous book of political propaganda. He

11:25

was very good and it's

11:27

a smart book and that

11:29

balance is a desirable balance

11:31

But you know I got

11:33

to college. I was in

11:35

the last wave of students

11:38

to do obligatory Western Civ

11:40

year -long class Plato to

11:42

present as we called it

11:44

and we read the great

11:46

touchstones of the Western tradition,

11:49

but our faculty members they

11:51

had no They felt they had

11:53

no right to tell us what to think

11:55

about those books. And

11:57

then by the time you get to the

11:59

80s, you get the Canon Wars, and

12:01

you got Jesse Jackson at Stanford University in

12:03

1989, Hayhoe, Western Civs, got to go. And

12:06

by the time you get to the

12:08

90s, the Canon itself has been tossed out.

12:11

And all you have

12:13

is the openness, critical

12:15

questioning side of the

12:17

equation. You

12:20

know and someone like George

12:22

Soros you can understand. I mean

12:25

he was a refugee from

12:27

Budapest I think you grew up

12:29

in Budapest so Jewish refugee

12:31

survives the war comes to England

12:33

studies at University of London

12:35

where Carl Popper was teaching and

12:37

Carl Popper had an explanation

12:39

for what went wrong and he

12:41

published in his famous book

12:43

open society and its enemies and

12:45

And who is the great

12:48

enemy of an open society? in

12:50

the open society enemies, Plato, who

12:53

is the foundation of

12:55

a Western philosophical tradition, Plato.

12:58

And so if you look at

13:00

anti -Western ideology in the Academy

13:02

today, it is simply

13:04

an outworking of Popper's

13:06

own thesis. I

13:08

mean, it's not a logical

13:10

outworking. It's more that Popper, like

13:12

you have a civilizational crisis,

13:15

1914, 1945, you

13:18

have Popper who was you know,

13:20

from Vienna, he was deeply traumatized

13:22

by, I think, the rapid

13:24

fascist takeover of a

13:26

fled and wound up, I

13:28

think, teaching in New

13:30

Zealand or something during the

13:32

war, when he wrote

13:34

the book. And,

13:37

you know, so he gives

13:39

his explanation for what went wrong.

13:41

And he goes deep, right?

13:43

I mean, the rats at the

13:45

very root. of

13:48

our civilization. And so we have

13:50

to put things on a fundamentally new

13:52

footing for him. And

13:54

and he called Popper didn't want

13:56

people to be released from prison, and

13:58

he wasn't on open borders. You

14:00

know, these are these are all

14:03

things he could probably never same sex

14:05

marriage, transgender ideology. They're all

14:07

they're all border. They're all

14:09

the race erasing borders. They're

14:12

all efforts to make

14:14

things more open. He

14:16

could never have imagined those things. But,

14:19

you know, that way of thinking,

14:22

when it starts to gain momentum,

14:24

leads us to where we are

14:26

today, or at least where we

14:28

were until only recently, because there

14:30

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shop. That's

16:04

what I wanted to ask you about

16:07

next was that you mentioned in the book

16:09

that You're a Catholic. First things is

16:11

an eclectic magazine, but it has a Catholic

16:13

atmosphere, I think, about it. And

16:15

there is a movement among

16:17

Catholics, like Patrick Deneen, to

16:20

sort of give up on

16:22

the liberal idea, to give

16:24

up on the idea of

16:26

really liberalism going back to

16:28

the idea in the 19th,

16:31

centuries. But you don't seem

16:33

to feel that way. You seem to sort of

16:35

still have hope that liberty can persist. in

16:38

an atmosphere of belief and

16:40

love, or am I getting that

16:42

wrong? No, I do think

16:44

so. I mean, one thing is that I'm

16:46

an American, and so one the things I

16:48

love is liberty. You

16:51

cannot found a society solely

16:54

on that love, but that can

16:56

be a powerful love within

16:58

a society that shares other loves.

17:01

And so I just think it's, you

17:04

know, look at Look

17:06

at JD Vance's speech

17:08

at the Munich Security Conference.

17:10

He basically chastises Europeans

17:12

for failing to live up

17:14

to the First Amendment. So

17:18

profoundly liberal, but then

17:20

he pivots and he accuses

17:22

them of lacking democratic

17:24

legitimacy. And that is

17:26

a very different. In

17:28

effect, he says, you as leaders

17:30

are no longer in solidarity with the

17:32

people whom you lead. And

17:35

that solidarity is not

17:37

a liberalism has no tools

17:39

or very weak tools

17:41

to promote solidarity You know

17:43

and and I think

17:46

we're in a crisis of

17:48

solidarity most evident in

17:50

the fragmentation of our society

17:52

between the people who

17:55

are in charge and then

17:57

everybody else and populism

17:59

is a rebellion against what

18:02

is seen to be an out

18:04

-of -touch elite that has its own

18:06

interests at heart and not the

18:08

interests of the ordinary man basic

18:10

structure of populism, I think and

18:12

and so repairing that Breach between

18:14

the leaders and the lead I

18:16

think is one of the important

18:18

tasks we have in front of

18:20

us for the next decade and

18:23

And he was so it's interesting.

18:25

He combined both in those speeches

18:27

in that speech both Like

18:29

I'm an American. It's outrageous

18:31

that you have you how can

18:33

you possibly? You

18:35

know in Great Britain, it's

18:37

just unbelievable what they

18:39

tolerate and that's a country

18:42

with great tradition of

18:44

liberty, but you can't pray

18:46

within like 200 yards

18:48

of an abortion clinic silently

18:50

crazy and and so

18:52

but but but then he

18:55

combines it with And

18:57

I think that that's true for the Trump voter.

19:00

I mean, the Trump voter both

19:02

wants to go back to an

19:04

earlier liberal settlement. And

19:06

in that settlement, you didn't

19:08

have to carefully monitor what you said

19:10

at the workplace. You know,

19:12

you could talk to people

19:14

and say what's on your

19:17

mind and so on, instead

19:19

of being surveilled 24 -7. So

19:21

they want to go back

19:23

and reestablish the public -private distinction,

19:25

which is central, I think, to

19:27

the liberal outlook. But

19:30

at the same time, they also want to make America

19:32

great again. And again, that's not a

19:34

liberal project. That's a project of

19:36

national strength. It's a project of,

19:39

you know, wanting to, you know,

19:41

I remember one guy in

19:43

2016 who was driving me to

19:45

the JFK who was from

19:47

you know, Armenia and It was

19:49

you know vote for Trump.

19:52

Well, isn't he anti -immigrant? I'm

19:54

telling the devil's advocate and he

19:56

goes I don't want my

19:58

children to go up in a

20:00

country that doesn't get respected

20:02

and that feeling Wanting to be

20:04

proud. This is back to

20:06

love of your country I mean,

20:09

I use the three F's

20:11

faith family flag and those are

20:13

all areas of life where

20:15

where They're actually paradoxically

20:17

the foundations of a culture

20:19

of freedom, but they are not

20:21

zones of freedom. Right. So

20:23

to speak. That's the complexity

20:26

right there. the complexity, right. And

20:28

that's what I think, you know,

20:30

hats off to Arthur Sousinger Jr.

20:32

You know, like I say, the

20:34

book is fun to read. It's

20:36

very dated, but it's fun to

20:38

read as a kind of work

20:40

of he really goes after Liberals

20:43

who are sympathetic to communism. He

20:45

really And it's interesting, he

20:47

treats them as sort

20:49

of, you know, we

20:52

need feminine figures.

20:55

And he says we need a

20:57

more manly liberalism, a more

20:59

virile liberalism. And

21:01

so if you think

21:03

about today and this

21:05

upsurge, especially among men,

21:07

interest in this sort

21:09

of web figures who

21:11

are touting manliness and you

21:14

go back and read Arthur Schlesinger

21:16

Jr. and think, you know? And

21:19

so, yes, and then

21:21

back to Patrick DeNene, I

21:24

say in the book that we have

21:26

all these genealogies of like what went

21:28

wrong, you know, nominalism is the root

21:30

of all evil, reformation has caused a

21:32

problem, private judgment, liberalism,

21:34

you know, John

21:36

Locke is the fateful

21:39

wrong turn. And

21:41

I think you know, every

21:43

civilization has

21:46

bad DNA, you

21:48

know. And, you know, I

21:51

think nominalism is a mistaken

21:53

metaphysical view. I'm

21:56

a Catholic. I'm not in

21:58

favor of the Reformation. And

22:00

I'm perfectly willing to allow

22:02

that Hobbes and Locke and

22:04

others pioneered a kind of

22:06

deracinated view of the human

22:09

condition. But the

22:11

question is, Why did those,

22:13

if you will, errors

22:15

become so super dominant? And

22:17

I think there the historical explanation

22:19

is much more helpful. And

22:22

it really is the 20th

22:24

century. And

22:27

it's not, it's

22:29

a crisis, it's

22:31

an historical crisis. And where

22:33

it's ending is what is

22:35

really fascinating. But that's

22:38

a good question. really ending. It's 2025. I

22:40

mean, look at this. Joe

22:43

Biden talking

22:45

about Hitler, for

22:48

that matter, the Atlantic magazine 24

22:50

-7 talking about Hitler. If

22:52

you go back to

22:55

read campaign speeches by

22:57

Herbert Hoover and Franklin

22:59

Roosevelt in 1932, I

23:02

dare say none of them ever

23:04

mentioned Jefferson Davis or Robert E.

23:06

Lee. And they

23:08

were closer to the events of

23:10

the Civil War than we

23:12

are to the events of World

23:14

War II. But

23:17

that language was, I mean, but

23:19

it's interesting, they really amped it

23:21

up in the last electoral cycle,

23:23

but they were shooting blanks. It

23:25

didn't work. It's not working, you

23:28

know, fascist, fascist, fascist, fascist,

23:30

Hitler, Hitler, Hitler, Hitler, Mussolini, Mussolini,

23:32

Mussolini, Franco, Franco, Franco.

23:36

So that seems to me to

23:38

indicate that the imagination, our

23:40

political, really even kind

23:43

of metaphysical imagination as

23:45

a civilization is starting

23:47

to pivot away from

23:49

the never again. And

23:52

it's very hard for baby boomers

23:54

to get their minds around this. Like

23:57

my baby boomer friends, I mean,

24:00

are people going to forget Auschwitz?

24:02

That would be the worst possible

24:04

thing they think. And, you know,

24:06

I'm... All things pass. Exactly.

24:09

But I want to know, why

24:11

do you think you could have looked

24:13

at the cataclysm of the World

24:15

Wars, and we could have

24:17

said, oh, this is because

24:19

of the death of faith. This

24:21

is Nietzsche's catastrophe come to

24:23

life. You know, they were carrying in

24:25

World War I, they were carrying Nietzsche into

24:27

the trenches, and the Nazis

24:30

obviously adopted some of

24:32

it. Why

24:34

did the narrative that we have

24:36

to believe less win out

24:38

over the narrative of, hey, let's

24:40

return to our roots? Christopher

24:42

Dawson, that was his interpretation of

24:44

the catastrophe. That was T .S.

24:46

Eliot's interpretation of the catastrophe. I

24:49

mean, there were contenders in

24:51

the immediate aftermath of World War

24:53

II. There were contenders to

24:56

explain what went wrong. And

24:58

we held them in tension actually

25:00

during the Cold War. Certainly on

25:02

the right, we held them in

25:04

tension. you know, godless communism versus,

25:06

you know, a free

25:09

society, but not just a free society,

25:11

but a free society that's rooted in,

25:13

you know, in faith or so on

25:15

and so forth. So, so we did

25:17

hold them in tension, but why did

25:19

it get the upper hand? I

25:22

mean, part of it, I

25:24

think, was the exigencies of

25:26

political life in America. We

25:28

do put the accent on

25:31

freedom. So the

25:33

open society consensus chimed.

25:35

Well, we also faced our

25:37

own internal crisis of

25:39

racism. And

25:41

I think that that reinforced, I

25:43

mean, for Europeans, it

25:46

was, you know, Auschwitz is

25:49

for the German, it's Auschwitz

25:51

for the French minutes, Algeria

25:53

and colonialization and for Americans,

25:55

it's Jim Crow. And

25:58

so these crises, I

26:01

think, I mean, I'm not, the

26:03

book is a kind of journalistic history,

26:05

you know, it's not, I'm not,

26:07

don't want to pretend to listeners that

26:09

this is a kind of in -depth study

26:11

of this time period. And

26:14

a better historian or a more

26:16

thorough historian, I think, would try

26:18

to establish the links between all

26:20

of these crises, which were some

26:22

of which quite justly interpreted as,

26:24

especially in our racial segregation the

26:27

United States. You want to break

26:29

down the barrier that prevents a

26:31

black man from going into the

26:33

bathroom, right? But

26:36

then fast forward

26:38

an entire half

26:40

a century, and

26:43

we had to break

26:45

down the barriers between

26:47

boys and girls in

26:49

transgender ideology. You know,

26:51

Richard Weaver, in Ideas

26:53

of Consequences, he opens

26:55

that book with an

26:57

observation that we know

26:59

specific things, We have

27:01

general principles, but at

27:03

the deepest level, we

27:05

harbor metaphysical dreams. And

27:08

I think that

27:11

I see Heraclitus' permanities.

27:14

Heraclitus always fluxes, permanities cling

27:16

to that which is

27:18

and cannot not be. Heraclitus'

27:20

change, permanities, permanence. Or

27:22

you could say that there's

27:24

a kind of sense that

27:26

what's the greatest threat? claustrophobia,

27:31

your greatest fear, or

27:33

being abandoned is your

27:35

greatest fear. And

27:37

we, as a society, really,

27:40

our metaphysical imaginations revolved

27:42

around this fear of claustrophobia.

27:45

And so our project was to

27:47

break things down and make more

27:49

space, open space. But

27:52

if you're 21 years old, in

27:55

2025, You basically

27:57

have grown up in

27:59

a liquid world where everything

28:01

has been kind of

28:04

mobilized, made dynamic, and nothing

28:06

is permanent. You're treading

28:08

water endlessly in this liquid

28:10

world desperate for dry land where

28:12

you can stand on solid

28:14

ground. And so

28:17

that metaphysical, so the fear,

28:19

the deep fear is changing

28:21

from fear of claustrophobia,

28:23

you're a baby boomer, you

28:25

come of age in 1968

28:27

and this kind of claustrophobic

28:29

middle -class consensus and all the

28:31

hypocrisy and break things down,

28:33

open things up, you

28:35

know, give room for experimentation. But

28:38

now that very same person

28:40

who's at some fancy pants

28:42

university who's 18 years old

28:44

is reading stuff on the

28:47

internet. Next thing you know,

28:49

he's going to Latin mats,

28:51

right? You know and and

28:53

it's it's it is a

28:55

it is a It's a

28:58

rebellion but in a very

29:00

different direction. It's a it's

29:02

a rebellion against Limitless openness

29:04

and it's a quest for

29:06

permanence a quest for in

29:09

the book I talk about

29:11

it's home people want to

29:13

have a home. Yeah, and

29:15

so You're we're moving from

29:17

a what I call a

29:20

space making or an open

29:22

terrain project, which was the

29:24

last 80 years We're pivoting

29:26

towards a homemaking project And

29:28

America great again make America

29:31

great again is just a

29:33

kind of homemaking slogan think

29:35

about it, too You know

29:37

2016 this was what fed

29:39

me and realigned the book.

29:42

Well the reason I wrote

29:44

it Donald Trump I

29:46

build a big beautiful

29:48

wall. I mean, it's a

29:50

metaphor for home. I'm

29:52

gonna protect you, Mr. You

29:54

know ordinary American and

29:56

then you look at his

29:59

Acceptance speech the

30:01

2016 convention, you know Ted Cruz his

30:03

adversary the longest You know the

30:05

guide stayed in the race and longest

30:07

he gave the speech before Trump

30:09

did it was Reaganism on steroids. He

30:11

must have used the word freedom

30:13

a hundred times in his speech Trump's

30:15

acceptance speech does not use the

30:17

word freedom. I think he

30:19

might have said liberty twice, but it does

30:21

not. I don't believe you ever use

30:24

the word freedom. And I just was watching

30:26

that and I fell back in my

30:28

chair and said, wow, the Republican

30:30

candidate for president of the

30:32

United States is not running on

30:34

freedom. He's

30:36

running on homemaking, home,

30:39

home rebuilding. I'm going

30:41

to build walls. Walls

30:43

are the basic necessity for

30:45

a home. And

30:48

anyway, so my brain starts

30:50

to twirl and then I got

30:52

going on other things and

30:54

other directions and it gelled into

30:56

the book. You know,

30:58

I'm out of time. I have a million more questions

31:00

to ask you. I hope you'll come back and

31:02

talk to me again, but very interesting perspective on this.

31:04

And I think the question of where we go

31:06

next is what I wanted to talk about more, but

31:08

maybe next time. Our

31:10

Reno, because return of the strong

31:12

gods, nationalism, populism, and the future of

31:14

the West, the magazine that he

31:17

runs his first things, excellent, excellent journal.

31:19

Thank you so much for coming on, Rossi. I appreciate it. It's

31:21

really nice to meet you too. Good to meet you too.

31:23

Thanks for having me. All right. Once more,

31:26

R .R. Reno. And I really recommend this

31:28

book, Return of the Strong Gods, Nationalism,

31:30

Populism, and the Future of the West, since

31:32

you'll probably be at Amazon pre -ordering or

31:34

ordering the return, the Kingdom of Cain,

31:36

that you can get this at the same

31:38

time. And I also recommend First Things,

31:40

terrific magazine. And you know what else I

31:42

recommend? The Andrew Clavin Show. It's on on Fridays. I'll

31:44

be there. I hope you will be there as well.