Ask Daily Stoic: Ryan and Writer David Frum Discuss Political Courage and Standing Up For Your Beliefs

In today’s episode, Ryan and conservative pundit David Frum talk about how it feels to be a conservative who opposes Donald Trump, the limitations that political correctness imposes on our culture, and more. David Frum is a journalist and conservative political commentator who is currently a senior editor at The Atlantic. Frum worked as a speechwriter for the second Bush administration and coined the term “Axis of Evil.” He has written for The Wall Street Journal, The Weekly Standard, Canada’s National Post, Tablet, and numerous other publications, and is also the author of several books such as Trumpocalypse: Restoring American Democracy and Trumpocracy: The Corruption of the American Republic. This episode is brought to you by the Theragun. The new Gen 4 Theragun is perfect for easing muscle aches and tightness, helping you recover from physical exertion, long periods of sitting down, and more—and its new motor makes it as quiet as an electric toothbrush. Try the Theragun risk-free for 30 days, starting at just $199. ***If you enjoyed this week’s podcast, we’d love for you to leave a review on Apple Podcasts. It helps with our visibility, and the more people listen to the podcast, the more we can invest into it and make it even better. Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: http://DailyStoic.com/signupFollow @DailyStoic:Twitter: https://twitter.com/dailystoicInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/dailystoic/Facebook: http://facebook.com/dailystoicYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/dailystoicFollow David Frum: Twitter: https://twitter.com/davidfrumInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/davidfrum/Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/davidjfrum/Homepage: https://davidfrum.com/See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info. 📢 Share | ⚙️ Manage Subscription

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:05Ryan Holiday?

  Welcome to The Daily Stoic, where each day we read a short passage designed to help you cultivate the strength, insight, wisdom necessary for living the good life. Each one of these passages is based on the 2,000-year-old philosophy that has guided some of history's greatest men and women. For more, you can visit us at dailystoic.com. Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. You know, these are sort of strange, unprecedented times, not just because of the pandemic, not just because of the protests that have erupted all over the country, but just generally the sort of the political course that America has been on for the last several years is

• 0:47Ryan Holiday?

  historic and strange and surreal and deeply alarming in many ways. And yet, when I say that it's unprecedented, the irony is that it's sort of not unprecedented. This mirrors the demagogues of ancient Greece. It mirrors the political gridlock of ancient Rome. And so when I talk about politics, of course, I have my own political opinions, and sometimes people who listen get upset for me daring to express them. You know, we've talked a little bit about snowflakes here, but I'm interested in exploring what's happening today in the context of how it connects with or reveals, you know, patterns from the past and vice versa. I want to look at the lessons that ancient Greece and ancient Rome

• 1:29Ryan Holiday?

  and Cato and Seneca and Marcus Aurelius all learned. And, you know, how does that give us clarity, you know, today, here in the 21st century? What did America go through in the trial of the Civil War, in the founding of the American Republic? And how does that reflect on where we are today? And so my guest today, I'm having a conversation with David Frum. David Frum is a great writer for The Atlantic. He's a longtime journalist. He was a speechwriter in the Bush administration. He's worked in conservative politics for many years as well, but he's been a prominent voice, a prominent critic of Trump. Again, not in the sort of reactionary liberal sense, but in

• 2:10Ryan Holiday?

  In a sense of, you know, this or that is a violation of the principles upon which this country is founded. This is a violation of human decency or what is right, or this is just a violation of just the sort of the laws of politics as in it is a bad idea. So David and I talk about sort of how did we end up where we are? And I think we do that in a nonpartisan sense. I don't think, we're not saying that if you believe we need immigration reform on the left or the right, we're not talking about that. What we are talking about is how have we gotten to a place where our policies have become so cruel? Or how have we gotten to a place where, you know, the president could say with a straight

• 2:51Ryan Holiday?

  face, I take no responsibility at all for a pandemic that's killed a 110,000 Americans? How have we gotten to a place where America, you know, who was for so many years the leader of the free world, the shining light on a hill, the country that was a paragon of science and leadership and administration? How could we be in a place where we're almost undoubtedly the worst place in the world as far as the COVID-19 pandemic? How does that happen? Right? The Stokes would say character is fate. And so I talked to David about how character impacts leadership. But we also talk about courage. You know, how does David break with his party and begin to talk about these things in a

• 3:34Ryan Holiday?

  way that, you know, earns him, you know, sort of numerous enemies? And again, you don't have to agree with him to, I think, learn from what that takes, right? I think one of the things that alarms me most about where we are politically is not that that people have decided to support this person or that person, but the sort of the bootlicking that's gone along with it. I think that Stokes would have found that disturbing and disgusting. So, you know, we talk about character, we talk about courage, we talk about the Shakespearean themes that are being sort of laid out for us on at center stage. And then we talk about political compromise. How does the country move forward? How do we make progress? How do people, to use General Mattis's term, how do we unite without the president if

• 4:17Ryan Holiday?

  the president isn't interested in uniting us? How do we move forward? How do we accomplish things? How can we get past where we are? How can we learn from this? And so David's writing on the Atlantic is an absolute must read. He wrote a book early in the Trump presidency, or as Trump was getting elected, called Trumpocracy, which is talking about sort of corruption in politics, the sort of gangster style of politics and the threats that that presents. And then most recently, he's the author of Trumpocalypse: Restoring American Democracy. You know, that title might sound like the book is all about Trump, but it's not. This is a book about the future of the American system. How, as he says, you know, how does America reconcile itself with democracy and protect

• 5:02Ryan Holiday?

  or protect itself from the enemies of democracy, which is what we are seeing with the rise of this sort of authoritarianism and neoliberalism. Again, you can like the policies that Trump has put in place, but I think we all know that we can do better. As Fromm has said, that this isn't greatness, you know, where tweeting typos and we're refusing to change, where we're endorsing, you know, disgusting or disturbing individuals and people, where cruelty is commonplace, where corruption is accepted, you know, where incompetence is celebrated, right? I don't think anyone thinks that this is our best self. So that's what I talked to David about. I'm always interested in talking to people who open my mind. Fromm's writing has done that for me. I think you'll like this interview.

• 5:46Ryan Holiday?

  And again, if you are already a little bit triggered or alarmed with what I'm saying, this is precisely why I think you should listen. And more importantly, this is an opportunity to practice listening to something you don't agree with, which is something that Stokes talked about. Do you have the discipline to hear things you disagree with? Can you have the wisdom to benefit and learn from things you disagree with? That's what we do in this interview. Look forward to you listening and I'll talk to you soon. So David, I was, when I think of you, I think of the Edward Everett Hale story, A Man Without a Country, which is the story of a man who sort of loses, he's basically exiled on a ship after the American Revolution and he's not allowed any news of the United States as his punishment. And I'm curious, what has?

• 6:32Ryan Holiday?

  Sort of been the political wilderness like for you. It must be strange having been active as a Republican for so long to now find that you kind of don't belong to either party.

• 6:43Speaker 01

  You know, I've had this question asked in a less kind way than you just put it by people make it sound like I'm sleeping over a sewer grate somewhere, huddling in a blanket warrant, catching, playing the banjo for my next meal. Look, I'm a journalist first. That's my occupation. I have been involved in Republican politics and conservative politics my life, but I don't, I don't think I have ever looked, well, not in a long time, looked around me for political guidance. I've tended to try to make my own judgments. And I think in many ways, I feel about my friends who went Trump, I don't know the source of this story, but the joke about the English newspaper that ran Storm and Channel, continent cut

• 7:28Speaker 01

  off. I think they're lost. I'm not lost. They're lost.

• 7:31Ryan Holiday?

  No, that's really interesting because what I was going to ask is, is it, is it actually kind of clarifying, like in a way, belonging to a party or identifying with a certain label, it sort of makes decisions for us, but you have the ability, and I think this is what we should all be cultivating, to sort of look at each issue, each problem, each event in the news and go, what do I think about this? Not what am I supposed to think about this? And what will, you know, advance my sort of career the most?

• 8:02Speaker 01

  I think there has been, one of the themes of the Trump years has been what economists call revealed preference. The economists use this to think, you know, we all have different preferences and we don't most of the time worry too much about ordering them in any kind of rank. But if we have limited, you know, finite resources and we go to the store to make shopping decisions, we reveal our preferences, that we, we value one thing more than another. In the Trump years, we have all had to do that. And many of my Republican friends who used to say they believed in, for example, American leadership in the world or free trade, fiscal restraint, limited government, they've revealed they don't value those things that highly because they've sacrificed them for other things that they

• 8:43Speaker 01

  have demonstrated they value more. For me, my first commitment has always been to the American-led world order, liberal world order, collective security, free trade. That's the thing I've always, through my political life, cared about the most. Trump could not be a more severe enemy of that priority. So I've had to make my choices. And my friends who have chosen Trump have revealed that they value other things more, including some pretty dark things like cultural chauvinism, racial dominance, and sometimes just plain old money. Because one of the things that has bound so many people outside the Congress, the Trump administration, is this is a very corrupt administration. And if you are a Washington lobbyist in a time of a corrupt administration,

• 9:26Speaker 01

  you make a lot more money than you do in the time of an honest administration.

• 9:30Ryan Holiday?

  Well, and also, it seems like maybe the most kind of craven, revealed preference has just been sort of dominance generally, or just sort of winning generally. Like, it's like, oh, at the core of this, it was never about this idea or that idea. It was about using this idea or that idea as a means of controlling the levers of power. And now that that falls away, you still have to come up with a reason to why you should be, you and your party should be in control of the levers of power.

• 10:01Speaker 01

  Well, look, winning, Donald Trump is not a winning figure. He has not won on issues, and he hasn't won politically. I mean, the 2018 elections were a disaster for Republicans, and a highly predictable disaster. As I kept telling them through 2017 and 2018, you know, you're not going to, when you are alienating, when a Republican Party is alienating affluent and educated women, it is burning its chances because women have had the vote for a century, and you can't put together a majority without them. But the dominance, that is certainly true. I have had this sense with people I know, not people I know well, but people I've come to know,

• 10:41Speaker 01

  that a big part of the appeal of Donald Trump is he emancipates the worst instincts in us. He is guided by the worst instincts, and some people watch that and find it exciting. You know, for 500 years, I think twice a week, I mean, your class still know better, twice a week, they filled the seats in the Coliseum with the spectacle of human cruelty. It's always been a moneymaker. And Donald Trump has demonstrated human cruelty in the office of the presidency. And there are people who feel Excited by that, emancipated by that. He says the things they would like to say.

• 11:15Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, it's interesting, right? Like, it's supposedly this backlash against political correctness. And I'm not someone who believes in political correctness. But there is this sort of distinction lost between saying what is true or not caring about conventions. And then sort of embracing or encouraging cruelty, sort of indecency, meanness. You know, and it does seem like it has unlocked a sort of, there's a, I don't know if you've ever read any Bruce Catton. He was a Civil War historian and he says.

• 11:50Speaker 01

  Yes, I do. Yeah, of course.

• 11:51Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, he has this brilliant, he says, you know, the American public, he says, is sort of like a chimp wearing a mask. And you pull the mask down and you see this sort of primalness underneath. It, I think, one of what you see in great leaders is they, they, they find a way to sort of call to the higher angels. And then what you see in the worst leaders is that they, they encourage you to take the mask off.

• 12:15Speaker 01

  Well, let's talk a little bit about this concept of political correctness. I, I've written now two books about the Trump presidency, Trumpocracy at the beginning and Trumpocalypse at the end. And in Trumpocracy, I had a discussion about the power of political correctness as an issue in the 2016 vote. And the question is, what did the people who said, the problem is, we, it's an undefined term. So you ask people and they will tell you about it, but it's not clear they all mean the same thing. But one of the things it seems to mean, when you sort of go through the data, both quantitative, there's polling on this and a lot of, and there's some, some research of other kinds. Political correctness is experienced by many Americans as a kind of etiquette

• 12:56Speaker 01

  that the highly educated professional middle class imposes on everybody else. And it's an etiquette that is constantly changing. And so a lot of people, including, by the way, women, that one of the, the big reveals of the polling I used in Trumpocracy was that women were very likely to cite political correctness as something they were worried about in 2016. And putting it together with other, other research that's available, you can see what they're worried about is. My husband finished high school and has had a job in a big company. And he makes jokes that not everybody thinks are funny, but he's a good man and he's harmless. And I am terrified that one day, one of his jokes will get him fired and ruin my family economically.

• 13:39Speaker 01

  And I, and I, none of us can predict in advance what it is that he's not allowed to say. On the other hand, among us who are in the educated professional middle class, it often happens that people use the term political correctness to say, I'd like to be an enormous jerk. And I feel all kinds of social pressure not to be an enormous jerk. And I resent that social pressure because it takes away from me what I would think of as a lot of fun, which is to be an enormous jerk.

• 14:03Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, it's, uh, it's strange. And what's weird too, that there is this idea of political correctness and a pushback against it. And yet I, I would sort of define these times that we're in as, as sort of lacking, lacking the courage to tell the truth. So what I think is so impressive about your writing and, and your books and, and where you've come down on this is, is that you said, look, this is what I think is true. This is what I'm going to say, even though it's probably against my career interests, even though, you know, I could go along and get along. Why, why do you think people are struck? I mean, for the Stokes, it was all about like, you know, if it's not right, don't do it. If it's not right, if it's not true, don't say it.

• 14:44Ryan Holiday?

  How have we gotten to this place where people are afraid to say what is actually happening? And like, and, and define reality as reality is. It's this, this almost strange gaslighting.

• 14:59Speaker 01

  Well, look, most of us are not heroes and happily we live in a society where heroism is not required. The Stoics of yore lived in a world in which death always lurked, in which powerful people could easily have people who've ended them killed, tortured, enslaved, ruined.

• 15:18Speaker 01

  We don't live in that world. I mean, there are people can lose their jobs sometimes, but mostly not. And so one of the things I'm always wondering about with many of my friends here in Washington is what on earth are you afraid of? You know, you'll be booked on cable television less often, like that's the fear. Your lobbying business will not flourish quite as much as it otherwise would. That's the fear. Those are not very impressive fears. I mean, when you consider what people in other times and places have been asked to do, what is asked of us is so little, how can you decently not do it?

• 15:51Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, and I think it's, you know, I was thinking about this with the masks, people who don't want to wear masks because they think it'll make them look stupid, or, you know, people who, it strikes me that actually we've underrated just how little people have practiced or are willing to look foolish or different. So Cato, you know, famously would walk through Rome bareheaded or bare feet. He would wear worn clothes. He was actually sort of cultivating an indifference to what other people said and thought. And then, so as Rome, you know, starts to go down this dark path, and, you know, he sees Julius Caesar as does, and everyone else is afraid to say anything or do anything, you know, Cato

• 16:31Ryan Holiday?

  has actually cultivated the fortitude necessary to do what that moment requires. And I wonder if actually ironically, political correctness has set us up to be, to lack the courage we need to call a spade a spade.

• 16:46Speaker 01

  Well, that's such an interesting story, and it raises a philosophical debate, and I may be on the other side of this from you. So John Stuart Mill in On Liberty famously writes about England in the 1850s, when he is writing, is a society that is tremendously, a society tremendously free of state coercion. But Mill complains, it is a society shackled by social convention. And what he argues for in that book is we should conceive of liberty as not only emancipating us from an arbitrary state, but also emancipating us from the tyranny of our neighbor's opinions. And so it's so important, he says, to conduct experiments in living and to explore new ways. John Stuart Mill, of course, is a very famously inhibited person and had been raised in a

• 17:30Speaker 01

  very repressive way and was, you know, he was kind of like a hippie. He wanted to be a hippie, but never dared. And he was, you know, too brilliant, too logical, but he didn't want to be so logical. He wanted to be a poet instead of a logician. So this sparked a huge discussion at the time. And one of the most powerful rebuttals to John Stuart Mill was written by a man not well remembered today named Stephen, who's probably best known as he was Virginia Woolf's uncle. But he had a number, he was a jurist and had a number of important roles in the British imperial court system. And he wrote a rebuttal in which he talked about that the kinds of gestures of independence that Mill praised and that Cato practiced, nonconformity addressed. He said, this is, these are acts of independence

• 18:13Speaker 01

  of the small minded. And what he recommended was, if you want to be an independent minded person, think deeply, you know, dare adventures. But the idea that, you know, you're going to wear some unusual dress and that proves that you're an independent minded person, he thinks that is, that's just a refuge for the petty minded. You know, I've all, I mean, I've been, I'm through my life, I'm more on the Stevens side of this, which is, I think in small things, you should of course conform to the society around you. You know, if, if the card says the dinner is black tie, put on a black tie. What are you proving if you buy, you know, putting on a Hawaiian shirt? You know, it's just, you're being obnoxious for the sake of being obnoxious. And it's, look, sometimes it's true that

• 18:56Speaker 01

  people who are obnoxious for the sake of being obnoxious will be brave for the sake of being brave, or maybe they'll be brave for being obnoxious. Maybe many of the people who are defiant in times of authoritarian regimes are just people who are generally balky and they wouldn't go along with sensible orders either. But, I mean, I think in our time, in the societies we live in, you know, that political correctness raises a host of issues. We use it to mean many different things. And Balkiness will only get us so far. I think we really do need to reexamine this kind of the feeling that Trump voters in 2016 had, which is they are being policed by people who come from a different social class and don't honor them. At the same time, we are seeing in

• 19:38Speaker 01

  things like the Me Too movement and to some degree in Black Lives Matter, a protest against cruelties that we don't see because they're so familiar. And their familiarity doesn't make them any less cruel. And overcoming them is no less important for the fact that we didn't think about them until they were pointed out to us.

• 19:56Ryan Holiday?

  No, I think that's right. And, you know, Seneca talks, he sort of makes the distinction between the cynics who sort of reject all societal convention and the Stoics who just reject the unnecessary ones. So, you know, he's saying like, look, on the outside, you should look the same. On the inside, you should be different. And I think that that's maybe how you sort of split the difference between the two schools. It does strike me, yeah, that they're like, when I see the reactions to some of the Black Lives Matter stuff, particularly from people who have sort of gone on this Trump ride over the last three or four years, it's almost, you're almost seeing the opposite of it. It's like because they have practiced cruelty or raised their tolerance for cruelty, whether it's a tweet

• 20:40Ryan Holiday?

  about a POW or, you know, mocking a reporter with disabilities or just, you know, sort of general uncouthness and, you know, bad grammar. I think in a way that, and I know slippery slopes are supposed to be a logical fallacy, but to me, when I then see people who are able to watch a video of George Floyd and shrug it off as, you know, not a big deal or make fun of it or go to a conspiracy theory instead of wrestling with the horror of it, there is maybe a link there.

• 21:11Speaker 01

  Mm hmm. Yeah, Trump clearly is in touch.

• 21:16Speaker 01

  With powerful psychic forces, not in a conscious way. One of my favorite quotes about him comes from one of his early staffers who said, "People sometimes describe Trump as playing three dimensional chess. Most of the time, he's just eating the pieces." He is a profoundly reactive person. He's not strategic at all. And he's not even all that tactical. He has only got a certain number of go to moves. And sometimes they work and at other times they don't work. And he's never able in advance to predict when they will work and when they don't. But what he does have is an unerring instinct for human weakness, both individual and collective. He just find, and he has again and again through his administration,

• 21:56Speaker 01

  he has found people who seem like perfectly normal, ethical, decent people. Lindsey Graham would be an extreme example of this. Normal Republican Senator, John McCain's best friend in the US Senate. And Trump just found something in him. And I don't believe in the complex theories about blackmail or something. I don't think life works that way. I think he found just a kind of weakness and played on it and used it.

• 22:24Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, it's Shakespearean in that sense. And that was something I wanted to run by you. There's a line in Richard III, I think it's in Othello too. Shakespeare has a character go like, "I cannot think it." Basically, the idea of like, "It's too painful. It's too weird. It's too out there for me to consider. I'd rather turn my eyes away from it." And what I like in your writing, I mean, even to call it a Trumpocalypse, there does seem to be, like, even though the themes are there laid out in such bareness, you know, they are there in the tweets, they are there in the talks, they are there in the policy decisions. It's so sort of in your face and clear that it almost, it almost reveals our own,

• 23:08Ryan Holiday?

  as a society, our own psychic forces that you could show us, you know, evil might be a strong word, but I don't think that it is. You could show us evil, or you could show us stupidity, or you could show us these. But almost Greek level sort of characteristics in so indisputably and we could find a way to not see them. I think that's an interesting part of where we are.

• 23:33Speaker 01

  I want to say a word about the title Trumpocalypse. And you're interested in classics, so you'll recognize the Greek. I mean, we use the word apocalypse conventionally to mean a disaster, or the end of the world, zombie apocalypse, murder hornet apocalypse. But as you know, that's not exactly what the word means. It comes from two Greek words that mean to remove the drapery from something, to unveil, to reveal. Apocalyptic literature is literature of revelation. Now, what's being revealed in the Christian and Jewish apocalypse literature of 2000 years ago is the end of the world. That's how the two, the ideas came together. They would write revelations about the coming end of the world, and then the advent of a new heaven and a new earth. So I'm in the title playing on those puns.

• 24:17Speaker 01

  I mean, the Trump, I did not, when I wrote most of Trumpocalypse, I was able to write something for about the pandemic. I didn't expect exactly what we're having now. But I did expect a serious recession in 2020 driven by Trump's trade policies. And I did expect that there would be some series of, that Trump's increasing levels of risk taking through his presidency would lead to disasters in 2020, perhaps a shooting war, a conflict with China, something like that. So this is both a book about the likely disastrous end of the Trump presidency, the everyday use of the word apocalypse, but also about what is to come after, the more exact understanding of the word Trumpocalypse. It's a book that

• 24:59Speaker 01

  tries to predict the American future after Trump and to set a path for the 2020s, which are going to be a very difficult decade.

• 25:06Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah. And if someone was to say, how could he have predicted these things? How did he see this coming? You know, to me, it's so, you know, this is another sort of Greek concept that then comes to the Romans, but it comes from Herakles. You know, he says, character is fate. Ironically, this is also one of John McCain's favorite, favorite sayings. He even wrote a book called Character is Destiny. But, but it, yeah, you didn't, you couldn't have known a pandemic was coming. You couldn't have known any of these specifically things were coming. But, but it does seem that you were able to read character and that tells you. In not, not in specific detail, but in the big picture, almost like a law of, of gravity, what is going to happen?

• 25:48Speaker 01

  Exactly. And one of the way, what the White House is, the United States government, in all its vastness, is the greatest information gathering system on earth. It gathers so much information that no individual human mind could ever possibly process it or even begin to process. So, so what it is, so what the US government has on top of it are a series of systems for identifying and canalizing information to where it needs to go. That's essentially, that's the most important job of the White House staff. Well, it has to. It is to process information on the way in, and it is to process decisions on the way out, to make sure that decisions that the president announces actually turn into the public policy of the United States.

• 26:31Speaker 01

  That one man says things and then this vast bureaucracy has to execute them. How do we even know that it's happened? How do they know the president has said it? How does the president know that the bureaucracy has done it? So inbound and outbound, that's what the White House does. So when you smash the White House, when you fill it full of crooks and non-entities and fanatics and weirdos, you're guaranteeing the information won't flow in, decisions won't be made, and then they won't be enforced on the government. And so it's predictable, some, there's going to be something that the people at the center needed to know. As it happened, it was that there was this extremely dangerous new virus appearing in China in November of 2019. And there were elements of the US government that knew that, but there was no way to get

• 27:14Speaker 01

  that information into the center of the decision-making, partly because that, those, those wires were cut, but partly because the people in the center refused to hear. They had this philosophy, this happy talk philosophy, we only listen to good news because only, we have no ability to cope with bad news and because we need good news that we didn't earn to vindicate. I mean, Trump never earned anything in his life, and he's always bastin' in the appearance of success created by others. And so it was just predictable that that, that sooner or later, all of that would catch up with us.

• 27:43Ryan Holiday?

  And, and so if, if it is inevitable, if the costs of, you know, sort of speaking up are actually so low, what? Why is courage in such short supply? Why does it take until now for General Mattis to say what he says? And I'm not questioning his courage. I'm just saying, why does it take? Why can't people do what you did and what other people have done? Why have there been fewer whistleblowers? Why have there been fewer defections? Why are people not doing what is so obviously the right thing?

• 28:16Speaker 01

  Well, there are two parts to that answer. The first, and this is a chapter of Cromwell's, is the military has been much more resistant to the Trump presidency than I think is generally understood. And I have a whole chapter on how they have just not, they have tried to work without disobeying orders. And I, for example, after the events in Charlottesville in the summer of 2017, the first important figure in American life to speak out publicly, and this happened over a weekend, was not a member of Congress, was not a CEO, it was the Chief of Naval Operations who put on Twitter his, not any criticism of the president exactly, but a strong statement against the things that the president had just endorsed a few hours before. And then he was followed by all of the service chiefs.

• 29:01Speaker 01

  In the same way, the military just, Trump wanted a big parade by which the military would identify itself with his presidency, and the military just kept finding over two years, ways and ways and ways not to do it. It's funny, almost a funny story about bureaucracy, that he would say, I'd like a parade down Pennsylvania Avenue, and they would say, well, that's going to cost more money than you think, so we need another appropriation. And then he'd find the money, it's actually, we've studied it some more, and if we use the vehicles you want us to use, we're going to damage the streets of Washington DC, and they will charge, the city will ask us to repave them, and that'll cost them more attention. So the money you proposed wasn't adequate, we're going to need to go back to Congress and get some more money, and of course, that will take a lot of time, but can we just forget about it?

• 29:46Speaker 01

  And, no, well, you know, we don't have soldiers at hand who have the, we're going to have to train people to do marching, the marching people, they're not in Washington, they just balked them and balked them and balked them, they didn't want to do it. And so, and- And Mattis has been outspoken in some quite funny ways for a while. He spoke at the Al Smith Dinner in, I think, 2018, and just after his resignation, or six months after his resignation, in New York, where he talked, Trump had called him "overrated." And he pointed out that Trump had also described Meryl Streep as "overrated," and Mattis said, "I take some pride in being the Meryl Streep of generals." And then he said, and he didn't just say, "I was overrated," he said, "I was the most overrated." And he was very funny about that, and then ended with this rather mean punchline.

• 30:31Speaker 01

  He said, "I think the only figure in our military who Donald Trump doesn't think is overrated is Colonel Sanders." Okay, so that's, but another reason that you haven't heard more, and this pertains to something I wrote immediately after the beginning of the Trump presidency, is people thought they couldn't manage him. And they said, "If I speak out, I lose my effectiveness. I need to stay effective so I can protect the country from this bozo president." And I wrote an essay around the time of the inauguration in 2017, and it was inspired by a conversation I'd had with a friend who'd been invited to take a fairly important role in the Trump presidency. And he was weighing, in a conscientious way, whether to do it or not. So the article went through the pros and cons of whether you should do it, and how that

• 31:14Speaker 01

  you should analyze this question differently, if it was a national security job than a policy job, differently if you were at an independent agency than in the White House, et cetera, et cetera. But I ended with this question. If you are asked to take a job in the Trump White House, or in the Trump administration, especially in the White House, sooner or later, you are going to have to say no. Are you confident that you will be able to say no to the President of the United States? And then I said, and even if you are confident, I want you to consider this. If the people in the White House shared your self-confidence, they would never have asked you to take the job in the first place.

• 31:53Ryan Holiday?

  Sure. Right. No, and I saw this, I was the director of marketing at a company called American Apparel for many years, which had sort of a Trump-like figure who eventually sort of crashed and burned in similar fashion. And yet, at almost every one of the lowest points of the company, whether it was a sex scandal, or a bankruptcy, or this, or that, I watched him manage to go to Wall Street and, you know, get hundreds of millions of dollars from George Soros, hundreds of millions of dollars from Ron Burkle, you know, hundreds of millions of dollars from, you know, this hedge fund or that hedge fund. There was this, even though these are ostensibly the smartest people in finance, even though the record is indisputable, and the articles are there, what I think it's appealing to

• 32:38Ryan Holiday?

  is the ego of the person on the other side, which is, everyone who has gone before me has failed, but that's because they're not as good as me. I can manage, I can change this person, I can control this person. And I think we're seeing a little of that.

• 32:53Speaker 01

  Right. And you just can't. You just can't. And one of the reasons you can't is because the normal things that you would appeal to, and even a bad person, because Trump is so impulsive, are not going to work, which is, I forget, at one point, I illustrated something that Donald Trump had done with like, one of the statements about the United, some United States Senator saying, you know, I think he's growing into the role. And I illustrated it with that painting by Goya of Cronos eating his son. And so, I imagine, normally what would happen is, you've got your boss at American Apparel, and you'd go and say, you know, sir, I, look, I know you love the taste of fresh and delicious human baby eaten on television. But let me just explain why, from your own point of

• 33:35Speaker 01

  view, leaving all those ethics, weak-minded ethics, from your own point of view, here's why it wouldn't be a good idea to go on television and eat a baby. And probably he would listen to that advice. The thing about Trump is he wouldn't remember. He wouldn't process it. He just, even though it hurts him, he does it because he just can't not. People keep telling him, just, you know, through the first three years of the presidency, when things were sort of bumping along, when the economy was fine, you know, in Trumpocalypse, I take apart Trump's claims to have done anything on the economy. Basically, the economic trajectory from 2014 to 2019, if you look at the chart, you cannot find a point at which Donald Trump becomes president. It's exactly, there's not, the best months in that period, 2014 to 2019,

• 34:20Speaker 01

  are in 2014 and 2015. Manufacturing job growth is the same over the period. It's all, it's a consistent. So the American economy goes and, you know, really recovers from the Great Recession in 2014 and has a five-year run. That run begins to get in trouble in late 2019 because of the trade policies and then everything explodes because of the pandemic.

• 34:42Speaker 01

  But he had a three-year period where things were fine. And if he had just played golf every day and never tweeted at all, he would have had a shot at being a reasonably popular president. But he couldn't do it because he couldn't control himself.

• 34:54Ryan Holiday?

  No, and there's, there's an interview with Dove, which happened at, I think this is what, this idea of character is fate or these people can't help themselves. This is after he loses the company, after 12,000 people lose their job, after he loses all of his money. You know, someone said, you know, Dove, because his thing was he kept having relationships with his employees and someone said, all right, Dove, I'm going to propose a thought experiment. You can have everything you want in life. You can have your company, you can have nothing, none of this will happen, but you just can't eat almonds, you know? He's like, you can have all of it, but you cannot eat almonds. That's the only thing. And, you know, Dove sort of interrupts him and he goes, but I should be able to have relationships with my employees. Like, he couldn't even get the metaphor of the, of the almonds without it.

• 35:39Ryan Holiday?

  And so I think, I think that this is that, that idea of restraint and moderation, when you are not in control of yourself, you know, in some respects, it helps you do a lot of things, but ultimately it sows the seeds of your destruction because you cannot stop yourself from hitting the self-destruct button.

• 35:55Speaker 01

  Right. Well, look, and.

• 35:59Speaker 01

  You know, we can speculate a lot about the particular psychopathology. I hope no one listening to us has had the experience of being at close quarters with a malignant narcissist. Unfortunately, I have, and I have such a person in my extended family, and they do a lot of harm, but they do a lot of harm to themselves, too. But through the two books, Trumpocracy and Trumpocalypse, I've tried to stay away from the personality of Donald Trump. Because the question I am interested in is, look, obviously, obviously, all the things you're going to say, yes, no dispute.

• 36:31Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 36:32Speaker 01

  But the United States has this incredibly convoluted, intricate, and expensive system of electioneering and leadership selection that is designed, there are all kinds of psychopaths out there. And the system, the justification for our political system, which is so inefficient, so wasteful, so prone to corruption, the justification for it is, well, at least it presents a really tight screen that keeps psychopaths away from the nuclear weapons of the most powerful military force in the history of humanity. And the thing we have to confront is, that all failed. That all failed.

• 37:05Ryan Holiday?

  Right.

• 37:06Speaker 01

  And we have to wrestle not with who Donald Trump is, and what, and why, and, you know, we're all very sorry about the people who've lost their manufacturing jobs, and opioids, and the diners, all of that. Nonetheless, four years, we put a psychopath in charge of the nuclear weapons of the mightiest military force in the history of the human world, human race. How do we make sure that nothing like this ever happens again? I mean, we, at least so far, have not had a war. You know, we're careening from disaster to disaster, they're likely to get worse. How do we protect ourselves? And why did this, Trumpocracy asks, why did the system fail? And Trumpocalypse makes suggestions, how do we make the system work better?

• 37:41Ryan Holiday?

  No, and I've got two last questions for you. And to go to your point, I think, we also have to look in the mirror, right? Like, I was talking to a Republican congressman that I know a few days ago, and I was asking sort of like, you know, if you called for Trump to resign, or if you broke with Trump right now, would you lose your reelection in November? And, you know, there wasn't, there- That the answer wasn't, no, of course not, I would be fine, says something about the public as well, right? That the base of support has not turned away from him so sharply in light of what's happened. You can't blame Donald Trump for the fact that Donald Trump has been, had approval ratings

• 38:24Ryan Holiday?

  at, you know, a relatively stable level through all of this. That unfortunately, we have to look in the mirror as a country.

• 38:33Speaker 01

  Right. But something about that base. Look, the whole, the American political system, which lacks the efficiency and crispness of a parliamentary system, is designed so that politicians are not answerable only to their base. The whole point to the American political system is that member of Congress who should be thinking, that's the theory, and especially if members of Senate should be thinking, okay, yeah, it's true, the Republicans in my district really like him, but everybody else does not. And if I add the minority of Republicans who don't like him to the majority of non-Republicans who don't like him, I have to worry about all of them. The American political system since 1990, I quote in Trumpocalypse, Congressman from

• 39:17Speaker 01

  Florida, Ted Yoho, who said, "I answer to the president." Well, that's a new way for a member of the House of Representatives to think. I'm now going to forget, I think his district voted in 2016, 54% for Trump, something like that, I forget. But what he, what, what, the person who had that job in 1975 would have thought is, I answer to my district, and the majority of my district is pro-Trump, but there's an important minority in my district that is anti-Trump, and I have to think about them, if only because I have to worry about my own future. That we've reinterpreted the job of members of Congress because we've reinterpreted the way our political system works, where it's possible for a member of the House to ignore 45, 46% of his constituency.

• 39:58Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, and that was where I wanted to wrap up because I think this is where some of the writing in Trumpocalypse connects interestingly to Stoicism in Rome. There's this argument that the system in Rome wasn't working, that the government had ground to a halt, that much-needed reforms were required, and that it was the Stoics. It was Cato who had decided he was so pure, he was so true, he knew what was right, he was the sole shepherd of the, what they called the "most morium," the old ways, that he would refuse to compromise, he would consider no changes.

• 40:36Ryan Holiday?

  He pioneers the filibuster, Pompey and Caesar are proposing all these things, and Cato says, "Not going to happen on my watch." And so what I was so interested in about in your book is you propose a throwback to, let's call it, pre-Civil War America, where there are these grand compromises or exchanges of competing interests on both sides of the party to break through the... I'm talking about your environmentalism, compromising with immigration. Talk to me about this idea that, hey, actually, president or no president, America's got

• 41:16Ryan Holiday?

  to figure out some way to break this logjam, so then we can move on and deal with other issues.

• 41:23Speaker 01

  Right. Well, my big suggestion for how you break the logjam is you need us to revive the sense of nationhood and the willingness of people to make sacrifices for the nation because they get benefits from the nation. So I have a number of reforms of the political system to advance, but in the larger sense, there are three things that are really interesting. We have to find a way to take our three greatest challenges: climate, healthcare, and national cohesion, immigration, and put them together, because we're not solving any of them separately. But I think they become more solvable, actually, if you try to do them all at once. There's an old saying, and I attribute it to a lot of people, I think sometimes to Dwight

• 42:04Speaker 01

  Eisenhower, "If you can't see a way to solve a problem, make it bigger." And I think, so for something like the healthcare thing, one of the reasons we're not able to solve it is we have... You know, we have such a diverse population, becoming more diverse, many, many more. We have 10, 12 million people who are present in the country illegally. They also get sick, someday they will get old. The majority of those 10 to 12 million people have been in the country for more than 10 years. They're unlikely to be returning to where they came from. What do we do about them? And every Democrat on the stage in the debates, when asked, would you favor health coverage for illegal aliens, put up his or her hand and said, yes, well, that's a vote loser.

• 42:46Speaker 01

  But if you could combine a healthcare approach with meaningful immigration enforcement, maybe both of those problems get easier. In the same way that if you, we've been unable to deal with climate because, well, it's expensive and their powerful interests, but also, but so many Americans see environmentalism, like the masking issue, as a criticism of them, as an attack on their way of life, their, their big cars, their big houses, the air conditioning in the summer, the fast food, they feel culturally threatened by it. Is there a way to make it less culturally threatening? And I talk about how you could use action on climate to stimulate employment, especially manufacturing employment, especially for men in non-metropolitan areas. And if you can, if you can do that, something that people feel culturally threatening becomes maybe culturally inviting.

• 43:31Speaker 01

  You can solve problems that seem unsolvable by making them bigger. And that's, that's the second half of Trumpocalypse.

• 43:37Ryan Holiday?

  No, and I, I think that's great. And I think it's, it's an important sort of note that, that just because things have gotten sort of so bad and so corrupt, it, it can't create on the other side a sort of a flight towards self-righteousness and moral purity and superiority. It actually has to create the opposite, which is, how do we come together? How do we make moves together? How do we do political compromises? Or as, as sort of Mattis said in his statement, you know, sort of how do we unite, you know, in spite of what is being done at the highest level? And, and maybe that's, that's how you move forward.

• 44:14Speaker 01

  And that is how the book ends. And I tell this story, that On the night of his reelection in 1864, Abraham Lincoln stepped out onto the White House front step to greet a group of well wishers who'd come to play music and congratulate him. So, most politicians, having won reelection to presidency of the United States, on the verge of winning the greatest war in American history, might have a moment of self congratulation. Not Lincoln, that was not his style. So, he must have startled them. He gives them this very philosophical speech about the trauma the country has been through. It's not one of his better known speeches, but it's one that has always had the most resonance with me. And then, and then he ended with this observation, and these are the last words in the book. And there's, there's just five lines. So, forgive me if I read them, because I won't

• 44:58Ryan Holiday?

  No, please.

• 44:58Speaker 01

  remember them exactly, but Harry. Lincoln said to the people, the well wishers, "What has occurred in this case must ever recur in similar cases. Human nature will not change. In any future great national trial, compared with the men of this, we shall have as weak and as strong, as silly and as wise, as bad and good. Let us therefore study the incidents of this as a philosophy to learn wisdom from, and none of them as wrongs to be revenged."

• 45:29Ryan Holiday?

  That's beautiful. That's the, that's the perfect place to stop. Thank you so much. And, and most importantly, thank you for your writing. It's been a guide to me. It's, it's opened my eyes to a bunch of stuff. And I think been sort of reassuring as you, as you watch the world tear itself apart, that not, not everyone is caught up in it and that some people are sort of insisting back towards our truer principles and better angels.

• 45:53Speaker 01

  Thank you. Thanks for the hospitality.

• 45:55Ryan Holiday?

  If you like the podcast that we do here and you want to get it via email every morning, you can sign up at dailystoic.com/email.