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Opinion columnist David French is voting for Kamala Harris to save conservatism. The “Matter of Opinion” host Ross Douthat is … skeptical. On this very special episode of “Matter of Opinion,” the two Christian conservatives debate how to chart the right’s course out of Trumpism and to the future.
Below is a lightly edited transcript of their conversation. To listen to this episode, click the play button below.
Ross Douthat: This is a very special episode of “Matter of Opinion,” because we’ll be doing something a little different today. It’s just me as the host with, as my guest, my fellow columnist and fellow religious conservative David French. David, thanks so much for joining “Matter of Opinion.”
David French: Thanks so much for hosting me, Ross. I really appreciate it.
Douthat: [Laughs.] It’s my pleasure, or at least it is at the outset.
We’ll see how things end up at the end [French laughs], because you recently wrote a column that attracted attention — a lot of attention from not just from New York Times readers but from all different kinds of American conservatives.
The piece argued basically that the best way to save conservatism and even to save the pro-life movement is to cast a vote for Kamala Harris in the 2024 presidential election.
And just to give listeners a little background, you and I have both been the kind of conservative who was dismayed and appalled by the rise of Donald Trump to leadership in the Republican Party. I know that you briefly kicked around the idea of running against Trump as an independent candidate in 2016.
French: Is that something that happened, Ross? That’s all a blur to me.
Douthat: Someone at least kicked around this idea. And I think it’s very likely that, had you mounted such a candidacy, I would have cast a presidential vote for you.
French: My goodness, you and dozens of others.
Douthat: I know, it’s a heavy burden to bear. But that’s basically where we started from. And I think we still have in common a pretty low opinion of Trump as a leader. A low opinion of his fitness for the presidency.
But I think we’ve also diverged pretty substantially in our general attitudes toward the state of American politics and what’s likely to happen to conservatism in the future.
So I’m hoping that we can get into some of those differences in the course of the conversation. But why don’t we start by just having you give our listeners a sketch of the argument in the “why I’m voting for Kamala Harris” column heard around the world?
French: [Laughs.] Sure. So just to sort of set the table on where I was before this election cycle in both 2016 and 2020, I wrote in, rather than voted for either of the major party candidates.
And I like to say —
Douthat: You wrote in me, but you don’t have to say that.
French: Well, I was just going to say I wrote in Mitt Romney. So now I’ve voted for Mitt Romney probably more than any other person, including Mitt Romney.
Douthat: [Laughs.] Only Tag Romney has voted more times for his father.
French: So I wrote in in 2016, and I wrote in in 2020, and you know, by all expectations, if Trump was going to run again after 2020, I would write in again. But then two big things happened that, to me, changed the stakes and also in some important ways changed some of the issues.
Those two things are really summed up in two dates, Jan. 6, 2021, and Feb. 24, 2022. Jan. 6, of course, everyone remembers; this is the attack on the Capitol by a Trump-supporting mob that was the capstone of — as we both watched with horror — a monthslong campaign to try to overturn an American election, fueled by just the most comically ridiculous lies and vicious conspiracy theories.
And so that was a jolting event. And then when Russia attacked Ukraine, that was a world historic event. And on both Jan. 6 and Feb. 24, what I saw was it wasn’t just that I was against Trump — I was very much against Trump on Jan. 6 — and I was very much against Trump’s base line hostility to Ukraine that he had before the Russian invasion of Ukraine, but it also changed the issue set.
What are you going to do about these things? And the answer from Kamala Harris and the Democrats is, well, on Jan. 6, we’re going to respond with the rule of law. And in response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, we’re going to respond by helping and aiding a democratic ally defeat or at least stalemate a Russian invasion and maintain the independence and alliance with Ukraine. And so these two issues just really surged to the forefront.
And then sort of as a capstone to it all, Ross, was when the Republican Party watered down its pro-life platform to the point where they basically just said: Hey, whatever states want to do, states are going to do, and that’s fine. And then Trump came in and supplemented that by sort of saying: Oh, and also these heartbeat bills, they’re too much. They’re too strict.
All of a sudden, the Republican Party enacted its most watered-down platform on life that it’s enacted in the last 40 years. And so a lot of the reasons I said no to the Democrats in 2020 — the big left swing that the party took in 2019 and 2020 was entertaining “defund the police” and fracking bans and Green New Deals and all of this stuff. That appears to be over, at least for now. And Democrats have kind of moved more toward the middle.
And I live in Tennessee. I know my vote is not going to make a difference, but I think it’s very important that Trump lose, that he lose in the Electoral College, that he lose in the popular vote and that a clear message is sent to the Republicans of “Don’t do this again. Do not do this again.”
Douthat: OK, so I think that’s a great summary of the argument. But first, I want to stick with what I think are the two sort of big, substantive issues that you wrestle with in the column, both of which you just mentioned: abortion and Ukraine. And just for listeners, this is a show that generally airs a pretty meaningful diversity of views.
I suspect that our listenership is primarily pro-choice, primarily inclined to see overturning Roe v. Wade as a bad thing. I think for the purposes of this conversation, though, we are both pro-life. We have both long been opponents of Roe v. Wade. And so we’re just taking it for granted that some form of pro-life politics is good and what American conservatism should be seeking.
So with that said, I think it’s certainly fair to say that Trump is now running the least pro-life campaign, in terms of sort of his public messaging, of a Republican candidate recently.
French: Yeah.
Douthat: In the last couple of decades. At the same time, it’s also fair to say, I think, that Kamala Harris is running the most pro-choice campaign of any Democratic nominee in my adult lifetime.
You mentioned how a bunch of progressive issues have sort of fallen by the wayside. Abortion has not fallen by the wayside.
French: Right.
Douthat: Abortion is one of — if not the — centerpieces of the Harris campaign. And at the same time, the pro-life movement, while it has suffered a number of reversals and defeats in referendums since Roe was overturned, is still in a position where 15 or 20 states have substantive and serious restrictions on abortion, something that was not possible under Roe and hasn’t happened for 50 years.
So the pro-life movement is defending real policy territory in a way that wasn’t true in 2016 and 2020. And to me, that combination means that a Harris victory in this election would be a pretty severe defeat for the pro-life side.
The narrative in both parties will be abortion is toxic for Republicans. It’s a winning issue for Democrats. And there will be, I think, a ratchet effect where American politics become substantially more pro-choice in both political parties if Harris wins than it would if she is defeated.
And I’m curious how you see that playing out, because casting a vote for Harris is casting a vote, in my mind, for that near-term substantial defeat for a movement that tries to protect unborn human life.
French: Yeah. So I see it differently, Ross. I see that the movement has already suffered the most substantial defeat that it would suffer, and that is the Republican Party at the national level capitulating so thoroughly and so completely to Trump’s demands to water down the pro-life platform.
So a little bit of history. I’m a little bit older than you, Ross. Not — well, I mean, my gosh, I think we’re different generations? [Laughs.]
Douthat: Substantially older, much, much older.
French: I’m an elderly Gen X-er. So I first began my pro-life work in the late 1980s when I was a college student and began pro-life activism in college. And going back, I remember the debates after George H.W. Bush lost in 1992. The argument was he was too pro-life, he was too socially conservative. And you had this fight: Is the G.O.P. going to be an economically conservative and socially liberal party? Or maintain its economic and social conservatism?
And in each one of those iterations, the pro-life movement took a stance that this issue for us is so important that our party affiliation hinges on it. And if you think the path to winning elections is by abandoning the pro-life stance, you are wrong. And this was the message for a very long time.
And I genuinely believe that this is what the pro-life movement’s stance was. You cannot bank on all of these pro-life voters if you’re not a pro-life party. And you’re not going to have all of our loyalty if you’re just the more moderate pro-choice party.
So along comes Donald Trump, who — to say that he has seized the Republican Party is an understatement. He is the Republican Party at this point. Is there any ideology in Republicanism that won’t change if Trump demands that it change?
At this point now, it’s not a party that has a pro-life ethos. It’s a party that has a pro-Donald Trump ethos.
My argument is that you need to fulfill the promise that you’ve made that, no, I’m not going to be Republican. I’m not going to vote for Republicans once it becomes functionally pro-choice. It does not have my loyalty at all. So then the argument becomes, “Well, he’s more moderate.”
OK, but can we also have another conversation of — to take a pro-life movement, Ross, which is supposed to be built around love. Now, I’m Protestant. You’re Catholic. I’m evangelical. And I hope you don’t deal with this in the Catholic world, but we deal with this in the evangelical world, which is: It’s not just that it’s wrong in people’s minds to not vote — in the pro-life world’s minds — to not vote for Donald Trump; they say you’re going to hell if you’re not voting for the more moderate pro-choice candidate — who, by the way, has been found liable by a jury of sexually abusing a woman, who’s paid hush money to a porn star, who’s one of the most libertine and depraved people we’ve seen run for president. And I’m going to go to hell if I don’t vote for him? I mean, that’s craziness.
Douthat: In Catholicism we only threaten people with 10,000 years in purgatory. [French laughs.] So it’s a slightly different range of threats.
To your point, the last point you made about Trump’s effect on the pro-life message, I wholeheartedly agree with. One of the pieces I wrote about this issue was basically arguing that, I think, not the only reason but one modest reason public opinion has shifted in a more pro-choice direction is this association of the pro-life cause with a figure who doesn’t embody the virtues that the pro-life movement claims to be upholding.
But I want to push you on the platform question, because, yes, I think it was incredibly important in a world where Roe v. Wade was the law of the land for the pro-life movement to center the Republican Party’s national platform and its national stance, because that was sort of all the pro-life movement had to defend. It was what the Republican Party formally stood for and what it was promising, but that’s not the landscape we’re in right now.
We’re in the landscape again where lots of states have pro-life, anti-abortion laws. These laws are vulnerable. The pro-life movement is unpopular and likely to lose a lot of referendums. But they are on the books. And it seems to me that an implication of your argument is effectively that the pro-life movement should give up on this election, let Harris win a victory that will be interpreted as a huge and decisive victory for maximalist pro-choice politics. You’re essentially sort of casting all of those laws into the wind and saying: We’re just going to accept that over the next 10 years, they could all go away and we’re starting again at ground zero in terms of winning the war for public opinion.
And maybe that’s necessary. Maybe that’s going to happen anyway, but it’s a pretty big thing to give up for a movement that thinks that thousands and thousands of literal human lives exist right now who would have been killed under an alternative legal system, right?
French: Well, so Ross, Kamala Harris cannot walk into the Oval Office, wave a magic wand and achieve all of those things.
Douthat: Agreed.
French: She would need a House and a filibuster-proof Senate to do that.
And by the way, Ross, if you want to support pro-life legislation or at least to preserve the gains that have been made at state level, this is another reason to get rid of Donald Trump. Because one of the distorting effects of MAGA and Trump is that he is now impacting down-ballot primaries in a way that is deeply destructive and electorally disastrous.
So in 2022 you had a ton of winnable swing-state races in an atmosphere that should have been conducive to a red wave. These folks just fell on their face. They failed because their salient quality that got them the nomination was they were just the most MAGA option available. And so you’re just hurting the cause all the way down the line here.
My argument is if you remove the toxic Trump presence, if you defeat him, then you have a party that has a chance to breathe. Now that doesn’t mean it’s going to make the right call. That doesn’t mean that it’s going to do the right thing.
We know what it does under Donald Trump, and what it does under Donald Trump is disastrous.
Douthat: Just on this point alone, conceding that yes, probably Kamala Harris will be limited in her capacity to pass legislation that overrides Texas’ abortion ban, let’s say.
How do you think that both Republican and Democratic politicians will respond to Harris winning an election, where abortion is her centerpiece issue, where Trump is ahead of her in a lot of polls on “Who do you trust on the economy? Who do you trust on immigration?” She’s ahead on abortion.
I just think this will be interpreted as effectively a national referendum on abortion in which the pro-life side has lost. And I think politicians responding to those incentives will move substantially away from the position you want them to take. Don’t you think?
French: I don’t think so, because parties are made of people, and the people who are more likely to emerge post-Trump — it’s going to be a battle. On one side, you’re going to have people who are the dreaded — quote, unquote — “establishment” Republicans that the online right loathes but generally have, especially at the state level, this pattern of winning pretty healthfully, even when they have a very pro-life stance.
So think about Gov. Brian Kemp in Georgia. This is a guy far more successful than Donald Trump in Georgia. Far more successful than a MAGA candidate like Hershel Walker. And yet his pro-life credentials are far superior to Trump’s, far superior to Herschel Walker’s. We had Gov. Mike DeWine in Ohio, who signed a heartbeat bill and won by 20-plus points.
So this sort of idea that this is the best we can do from a pro-life perspective is Donald Trump and his collection of cruel clowns?
Douthat: But I don’t think that’s the argument. I think the argument is, most politicians don’t like the abortion issue and don’t have strong convictions on it.
And it’s not so much that, you know, tomorrow, Brian Kemp will not stand up in the Georgia legislature and say, “Let’s roll back our abortion restrictions.” But it is that candidates for national office in the Democratic Party will give up on any hint of moderation on the issue and will expect to continue to win on abortion and candidates in the Republican Party will basically say Trump was toxic but he had the right idea by trying to moderate on this issue. That’s what I expect.
French: Let’s play out your Trump-winning scenario for just a moment. So if Trump wins, then where does that leave the pro-life movement? Certainly it leaves it with the ability to block Democrats who want to advance pro-choice legislation. But if Republicans win in the Senate and the House, they can do that anyway.
But what it will say is that all of that religious pro-lifery, our key to future victory is just putting all of you guys over to the corner, over to the side. What you have seen is a Republican Party that has said that the pro-life movement is a problem. That’s going to compound itself as it learns that it can move far away from the pro-life perspective and still win.
And so what you would end up with is cementing that there’s no pro-life party in the United States.
Douthat: But David, when Trump, a week ago or so, came out and said he wasn’t sure how he was voting on Florida’s abortion referendum, the pro-life movement did effectively force him to change his stance.
It’s not clear to me that the way Trump is running now is some kind of full validation of “Trump says whatever he wants, and the pro-life movement has to go along with it.” He made a foray, and his campaign had to walk it back, right?
Didn’t that happen?
French: Yes, it did happen.
Douthat: Good! Having extracted that concession [French laughs], I’m going to use my moderator’s power. Let’s pause on abortion here, and now we’re going to dig into your argument for Harris over Trump on foreign policy.
So you had several arguments that led you to cast a vote for Harris: Jan. 6, support for Ukraine and abortion. And I want to just make a general point about foreign policy that I think you will strongly disagree with, which is that in 2016, again, we were basically on the same page. And what I expected from a Trump foreign policy and a Trump administration was a world where U.S. global leadership was substantially weakened. Where if we didn’t pull out of NATO, at the very least, there would be sort of real strains and stresses on U.S. power and influence and where nations all around the world, our big rivals, would look at America and say, “It’s time to test the United States. It’s time to push with invasions, terrorism, threats of invasions” — these kinds of things.
And all of that happened under Joe Biden. That includes things the Biden administration did that I supported, like our withdrawal from Afghanistan. I thought that was the right thing to do, but it ended up going disastrously in a way that I would have expected from Trump.
It includes the invasion of Ukraine, which happened on Biden’s watch, not on Trump’s. It includes the action in the Middle East, Hamas’s attack on Israel, and it includes the looming threat of war over Taiwan.
To me, all of that just makes me a bit more skeptical than I think you are of the idea that there is this world historical choice where Donald Trump represents the end of the Pax Americana and not Joe Biden but Kamala Harris represents some sort of Churchillian defense of the West.
How do you read the foreign policy events of the Trump era versus the Biden era? Because I know you read them differently.
French: I don’t know who’s arguing Kamala Harris is Churchillian.
Douthat: Well, you’re arguing that a hundred years from now, we’re going to look back and say it was really important that we had Kamala Harris in charge of defending Ukraine, right? As opposed to Donald Trump.
French: I would say what we’ll look back on a hundred years from now and ask is, “Did we support Ukraine in the face of Russian aggression, or did we allow Ukraine to lose in the face of Russian aggression?
I think that’s going to be the critical question. I think the heroic figure here — and this is certainly the Ukrainians and Volodymyr Zelensky more so than any figure in the West beyond them. We have a much more simple and less heroic choice to make, which is to supply the weapons and the technology necessary for the people who are actually fighting and bleeding and dying on the battlefield.
I’m going to agree and disagree with you to some extent here, Ross. I will agree with you that, like you, I went right into the Trump term quite worried. I got less worried when I saw his team around him. When I saw that he had Gen. Jim Mattis as his secretary of defense. As much as Rex Tillerson was not my first choice, he was still a very, very serious man.
H.R. McMaster, he commanded the regiment I served in Iraq before I joined it in the battle of Tal Afar. A legendary commander. And so he surrounded himself with some very serious people, and a lot of his foreign policy, especially early on, was, I thought, pretty solid. I thought he did a very good job in completing the fight against the ISIS caliphate that started under Obama.
But then the more Trump was in office, the more the situation began to degrade and to degrade pretty substantially. So you began to see him backing away from alliances. You began to see his sudden withdrawal from northern Syria. And then at the very end, you began to see what I would say is the Trump migrating from Trump 1.0 to sort of Trump True.0 — in other words, who he really is as he shed these other advisers.
We’re no longer going to be in a world of Trump plus Mattis. We’re going to be in a world of Trump plus Kash Patel. And for those who don’t know who Kash Patel is, he’s the superradicalized, hyper-MAGA guy who wormed his way deep into the Republican national security establishment.
And so you have this migration from serious people to sort of pure MAGA. I totally get and understand the argument that “Wait a minute, under Trump, Russia didn’t invade Ukraine.” OK, completely agree: It is very deeply troubling that happened.
Douthat: And the Trump administration funded Ukraine, right?
French: Right.
Douthat: The Trump administration did not, in fact, abandon Ukraine militarily, whatever Trump wanted Zelensky to do in terms of investigating the notorious Hunter Biden. The weapons that Ukraine ended up using to defend itself — many of them did come from the Trump administration, right?
French: Yeah, absolutely. But one of the interesting things is — I’m glad you brought up first impeachment, Ross, because this was —
Douthat: [Laughing] I heard them open for Second Impeachment at the Black Cat. [French laughs.] Sorry.
French: This is exactly what I’m talking about. You had Trump, who wanted to force Zelensky to investigate Joe Biden. But that wasn’t his only ask. He wanted Zelensky to produce this mythical server in Ukraine — and for people who are not deeply steeped in the MAGA extended universe of conspiracies, there is this sort of MAGA sub-conspiracy that in 2016 it was really the Ukrainians who tried to interfere with the election, not the Russians, and all of this is outlined in a server that exists in Ukraine.
So he’s trying to run our foreign policy on the basis of wild online conspiracies in the most strategic region at that moment in the world.
And, yeah, he was stopped by a bunch of people throwing their bodies in front of him. And this was a pattern consistently in his first term. He’s systematically pulling those people out of his administration. He’s not going to let that happen again in his next term.
And the other thing that I would say is this is where Trump-JD Vance gets really dangerous to me. Because it’s not just Donald Trump. Now he’s got a running mate who couldn’t care less about Ukraine. And that’s where his disregard for Ukraine, I think, is really urgently wrong.
Douthat: But I guess that’s part of my question for you: What is going to be a second Trump administration policy on not just Ukraine but, let’s say, the three zones of conflict and threat that the U.S. faces right now — Eastern Europe, Middle East, China-Taiwan?
I completely agree with you that Trump is personally feckless, guided by online conspiracy theories and likely to make a lot of mistakes and do a lot of bad things.
I think a Trump administration will probably end up negotiating a somewhat worse deal for Ukraine than a Harris administration would. I’m not sure about that, but I think that’s possible. I think that’s a valid reason to be concerned.
But at the same time, I also think that — and again, we’re taking a fairly hawkish pro-American, Republican perspective as a given here — I think a Harris administration is likely to be much more hostile to Israel and friendlier to Iran than a second Trump administration would be. And I’m not entirely sure what will happen in Asia, but at the very least, I think it is very likely that a Harris administration will spend much less money on our military than a second Trump administration at a time when the military balance between the U.S. and China is dangerously unstable and possibly setting the table for a war over Taiwan.
And I have you here making an affirmative case for Harris, so I’m curious if you think that’s all wrong or how you reckon with those possibilities.
French: On Ukraine, I don’t really see a Ukrainian theory of victory where they can realistically push the Russians completely back out of Ukraine, barring some sort of unforeseen Russian collapse. But hopes are not plans. And so I think what you’re talking about is: How can we keep Russia from grinding Ukraine into dust?
So if Ukraine has this ability to continue to stand, you have much more of a South Korea scenario that comes into view, which is a strong allied nation that does have a frozen conflict but it’s a frozen conflict against the backdrop of strength and against the backdrop of prosperity, against the backdrop of liberty.
I think it is far more likely if Donald Trump wins that we end up with a negotiated peace that creates a sort of rump version of Ukraine that is virtually Belarus, that it is not functionally independent from Russia; it is essentially controlled by Vladimir Putin. And that would be a catastrophic defeat.
When it comes to Israel, there’s this really interesting reality that we’ve seen play out, which is that Trump is kind of given credit for being — quote — “tougher,” when he is actually really erratic: Israel, just get this done. Israel, you need to get this done. That’s just not something that’s possible at all. “Just get this done” is absurd as a policy statement.
So where do we go from there? And here’s where I think a lot of American conservatives might be stuck in the early 2010s and thinking through a lot of these issues.
It’s not clear to me that the Democrats are anti-Israel as much as they’re more anti-Netanyahu. And I think there’s a narrative spinning out of sort of a Democratic weakness on Israel that’s just wrong. For example, we helped Israel shoot down an Iranian attack. We literally deployed our own forces to defend Israel from attack. That’s a very concretely pro-Israel thing to do.
When it comes to Taiwan, Ross, again, it’s very difficult to square Trump’s actions of late with Trump’s actions in 2017, 2018. Here was the pivot-to-Asia, pivot-to-China sort of view. And even in ways large and small, he’s so erratic. His administration took the lead, for example, in highlighting the problems with TikTok. The ownership is tangled, but there’s this is ultimately a Chinese-owned social media company that is vacuuming up enormous amounts of private information about Americans. And the Trump administration, to its credit in the past, took the lead on saying, “Hey, this is a real problem.”
So here comes the Biden administration — actually passes a law to deal with TikTok. And Trump finds out that there’s a bunch of MAGA influencers on TikTok. And now he’s like, “Vote for me to save TikTok.”
Douthat: OK, but so do you think a Harris administration spends more money on stuff related to Taiwan or a Trump administration?
French: I would not say necessarily that the defense budget would be bigger under Harris than Trump. I do think Trump would probably spend more money, and that would be something that I would agree with in a Trump administration.
But the issue with Trump is not how many dollars you’re going to put into the American military. The issue with Trump is: What is your strategic vision?
And this is just a purely self-interested, cruel figure who is completely erratic and under the influence of conspiracy theories. And look, if another conventional Republican was running against Kamala Harris, this would be a no-brainer for me on foreign policy. They would be stronger on Ukraine. They would be stronger on Taiwan. They would actually have a strategy with regard to Israel and Hamas and Hezbollah. To say that Kamala Harris is better is not to say that Kamala Harris is good, but she’s better enough to certainly earn my vote.
Douthat: All right. I think we’ve gone deep enough into the policy weeds. Let’s talk about American conservatism writ large and whether a vote for Harris can actually save conservatism from what it has become in the Trump era.
You’ve repeatedly alluded to changes in the culture of conservatism under Donald Trump as one of the key reasons conservatives who don’t like Donald Trump should wish to see him defeated, in the hopes that this would help essentially undo some of the shifts that we’ve seen.
And David, I wanted to talk about how in your column, you talked about the Republican convention in this light, and I think you cited Hulk Hogan. Did you cite Hulk Hogan specifically?
French: Dana White, Hulk Hogan, Kid Rock, Trump himself.
Douthat: All of these are examples of what our fellow Times contributor Matthew Walther once dubbed “bar stool conservatism,” which Kid Rock is a good avatar for, right?
We can call it a kind of blue-collar libertinism that is very distinct from a Catholic or evangelical religious conservatism, at least in certain ways.
I am a lot more skeptical than you are, David, that the influence of this libertine, lowbrow, Hulk Hogan conservatism is really just driven by fealty to Donald Trump, fealty to MAGA, Trump’s personality and so on.
I think it’s much more of an organic evolution of a political coalition at a time when religion in the United States, our shared Christianity, has been in decline. I think in many cases — and this is one of them — Trump is less a cause than a kind of revealer of things that are already happening.
I’m curious what you think about that idea.
French: Well, this is again one of these where we’re going to agree some and disagree. So here’s where I’m going to agree: I don’t think that Donald Trump is the single, key, most culturally influential individual in America, but he is very culturally influential, and he has absolutely changed the culture of base Republican politics.
I live in a very, very red part of America. And the change in the Republican Party in Tennessee since the Trump era arose has been incredibly palpable. It’s been palpable. And there are two factions, essentially, fighting. One is what you would call the more establishment faction, and they’re much more focused on conservative governance. A lot of listeners may not love these ideas around limited government or, for example, the right-to-work states or school choice or lower taxes, but they’re very focused on governance.
And then you have always had this faction that’s much more populist and reactionary, much more focused on culture war, all of those sort of Trumpian, populist, echoes of George Wallace elements. What you saw was for a long time, the people who were much more focused on conservative governance were consistently winning these internecine fights. And now it’s flipped.
And so what empowers this other faction immensely is the presence of Donald Trump at the top. Donald Trump has this extraordinary down-line influence, where people will even run for school board saying, “I’m the most ardent Trump supporter. I am the biggest MAGA person.” Even for the school board, they’re running on MAGA, which is wild.
So, for example, my brother-in-law ran for school board locally and had to have security, Ross. Running for school board! Why? Because he works for Pfizer. Because he works for the vaccine company. This is part of a broken culture here.
If you have to have security running in a local school board election because you work for Pfizer because the MAGA elements are so outraged all the time and so conspiracy driven that they’re going to lash out at somebody who’s a strong conservative person and lash out in that extreme of a way, this is the culture that is existing at the grass roots.
And I don’t sit here and think that if you just remove Donald Trump, that all of a sudden the green shoots will fly up and balance will be restored to the Force and all of that. But here’s what I do know: that as long as Trump and MAGA are the standard-bearers of the G.O.P. and that Trump is the model of what it means to be a G.O.P. candidate, this is just going to get worse and worse and worse and worse.
Douthat: OK, I don’t live in Tennessee, but I live inside liberal culture. And to me, liberal culture has manifested a number of exactly the same kinds of qualities in a different way. It’s not sort of anti-Pfizer conspiracy theories, but over the period of the last five or 10 years, there have been absolutely — to my mind, as an observer — insane internal battles within everything from English departments to poetry foundations to progressive schools and colleges to media organizations and so on.
Those kinds of battles are created and magnified by the internet and the culture of the internet, by certain kinds of cultural polarization and, I think, by the landscape of the pandemic. The landscape of the pandemic, yes, drove a lot of people in red America crazy and led them to entertain crazy ideas about Pfizer. I can promise you that it drove a lot of people in blue America crazy, too, in ways that were not caused by them being enthralled to Donald Trump.
They were caused by the crazy experience of a once-in-a-century pandemic and its effects. And when I look at the Republican Party before Trump, I see a party that nominated Sharon Engel and Christine O’Donnell and Todd Akin, right?
French: [Laughs.] She’s not a witch, Ross! She’s not a witch.
Douthat: She’s not a witch! But the tendency of the Republican grass roots to want to give the middle finger to the establishment, to want the most anti-establishment candidate — again, I think Trump has fastened on that and exploited it. But I also think that you go into the future of conservative politics with the knowledge that this is the coalition that you have.
The Republican coalition is an outsider coalition right now. It’s pitted against a liberalism that has become steadily more left wing and progressive in various ways. I guess I’m a lot more skeptical than you are that there exists any future where people with your point of view aren’t stuck choosing between, on the one hand, an alliance with Hulk Hogan and, on the other hand, an alliance with the party that temporarily elevated Ibram Kendi and Robin DiAngelo to guru status and had a Planned Parenthood mobile abortion and vasectomy R.V. on hand at its convention.
Those are sort of the options.
French: Well, a mobile abortion van that under the Trumpian approach is completely fine. Trump’s totally cool with that.
Douthat: Well, wait a minute, a mobile abortion van that in conservative states, under a Trump administration, would presumably be restricted or regulated. You can’t remove from liberalism all of its agency for its own choices. There was no mobile abortion van at the Republican convention, and there was one at the Democratic convention.
French: Sure.
Douthat: And that’s about where liberalism is right now. It’s not about what Trump has done, right?
French: Right. No, I hated to see that. That was terrible. I’m agreeing with you completely, Ross, about some of the things — was it Matthew Iglesias who coined the term “the Great Awokening”?
Douthat: He was one of them. Yep.
French: In 2019, 2020, there was this explosion of intolerance. It wasn’t just sufficient to be antiracist in some ways. You had to be antiracist in very specific ways or you could find your career destroyed, your reputation destroyed. That’s one of the reasons in 2020 I didn’t vote for Biden over Trump, because I felt like both the Republican Party and the Democratic Party were sprinting away from me.
One of the interesting things that happened as a result of an election that was, quite frankly, a lot closer than Democrats thought it would be in 2020 and led to a lot of sort of Democrats taking stock of, “Wait, where are we? What have we done?”: The Democratic Party has now stopped sprinting away from me and is now moving closer to me. Kamala Harris wants to sign the border bill that Trump torpedoed, which would be the best asylum reform that we’ve seen in generations. She is not advocating “defund the police,” Green New Deal, all of that stuff.
Douthat: Well she has no position, as far as I can tell, on the Biden administration’s own energy policies, I don’t think. I think sprinting —
French: They were sprinting away from me. And then in many ways, they’re moving concretely toward —
Douthat: Now they’re floating somewhere in the air without touching the ground, maybe?
French: But the bottom line is she is not running on Green New Deal, “defund the police,” fracking bans, all of that stuff that you heard so much about in 2019, 2020. She is running on she’ll sign a border bill that is a strong border bill. So these are areas where she has moved in that direction toward me, even apart and aside from the discussions we’ve had about the rule of law in Ukraine, which are vitally important.
The other thing with Trump, though, is that the Republicans had their own version of going crazy in 2019, 2020. And now one of those key elements, the belief in the big lie, is still sort of mandatory for full inclusion in MAGA.
And so you’ve got this situation where both parties had these moments in 2019, 2020, where elements of their coalition just really radicalized. And then on the right side, the chief radicalizer is the guy who’s running for president.
He’s the chief radicalizer of the G.O.P. The Republicans aren’t running from him. They’re not floating away from him. They’re bear-hugging him.
Douthat: I would use the term “floating above” rather than “floating away.” [French laughs.] Well, if you look at, for instance, Tim Walz’s record in Minnesota, you can find a long list of things that he did, from the new ethnic studies curriculum in Minnesota schools to abortion policy to issues around puberty blockers for teenagers. A litany of issues where, I think, you, David French — not all of our listeners but you, David French — would have said in 2020 or 2021, “These are examples of a Democratic governor sprinting away from me.”
Tim Walz hasn’t repudiated any of those positions. He’s just not talking about those positions. I agree with you: I don’t think Tim Walz and Kamala Harris would be Trotskys and Lenins of wokeness. But they will offer no resistance whatsoever to, I think, progressive consensus on those issues. They’re just trying not to talk about those issues because they’re trying to win an election.
French: Again, on a lot of these things where Harris and Walz are the furthest away from me, I would say: Let’s go back to the reality. All of these things where you’re talking about domestic policy and domestic culture war issues, Ross, is where she has the least independent authority. She has less authority, thanks to the reversal of Chevron, for example, to enact new regulation by executive fiat that departs from the text of statutes. In the absence of a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate and a House majority, she has no ability to enact a lot of these other domestic agendas. And so, again, I feel like in the areas where she has the least authority, she is most checkable and should be checked. In the areas where she has the most authority — foreign policy, control of the Department of Justice — she is much more in my direction.
One other thing that I would say on the ideological migration of Kamala Harris for the Democratic Party is, look, Kamala Harris is to my left. There is no question about it. And I think it does a disservice for conservatives who are supporting Harris to minimize the differences. But I think one of the interesting things, if you look at her career, is that this is a person who came up through law enforcement. And then here she comes into the political campaign in 2019, 2020, at a really unusual and unique time, where all of a sudden in her own coalition, all of these résumé bullet points that she’d been building suddenly become a liability. And so I don’t think she responded well to the 2019 election time period. And I think it was obvious in the results of the Democratic primaries that she did not respond well. But I don’t think that Kamala Harris, who was a prosecutor and then an attorney general, is a “defund the police” liberal. I just do not think that that is who she is.
Douthat: Unless that’s what liberals want her to be. But, OK, I have tried to make us wrangle throughout this episode with specific political issues. And so for my next-to-last question, I want to ask you about your fears as you are poised to become a Kamala Harris voter — a Democratic voter for the first time in your career? First time at presidential level and in your life?
French: Oh, yeah, for sure.
Douthat: So what issue worries you the most about a Harris administration? What is the issue where you are most concerned that you would wake up in two or three years and say, “Notwithstanding everything that was wrong with Trump, a vote for Harris turned out to be a mistake”? What do you fear?
French: That’s a really good question. Let me articulate the difference between expectations and fears. So I absolutely have an expectation that she would seek and pass a number of policies that I don’t think are best for the country. She would be fiscally a much bigger spender than I would like, although I think Donald Trump would be even a bigger spender than her. I do worry that some of that big spending could sustain inflation, so I do have some economic concerns.
In the foreign policy arena, I think there will be many days when I will make a critique of her foreign policy from the right. I have been very frustrated, for example, with the Biden administration’s extreme caution and a lot of the way it restricts the use of weapons in Ukraine. I was disappointed in the way the Biden administration dribbled out aid to Ukraine, often saying no, no, no and then yes. I expect some of that to continue. So I expect to have the conventional critiques I would have for any Democratic administration. I don’t know if I would call that a fear.
I think if you’re going to talk about an outside-the-box fear, what would be sort of a worst-case scenario for me would be maybe a situation in which the Democrats win the House, have a narrow Senate majority and then destroy the filibuster. That would be sort of a worst-case scenario for me because I’m a believer in the restraint of the filibuster. I have a fear that if the culture war intensifies to a point where the filibuster is actually undone, then it unlocks a whole different level of concern.
But I would say, in my life, we’ve been through a number of presidencies where you have a Democrat within the American political mainstream, a Republican within the American political mainstream, and they do things that I disagree with, that might be negative in some ways, but this country perseveres, and this country flourishes. With Donald Trump, he’s just not in that category.
Douthat: Well, and of course — and here’s where we’ll end — since you and I are both believing Christians, we’re not really supposed to have the most profound fears at all, right? We’re supposed to have fundamental cosmic optimism.
And that’s where I want to end. Since the Harris campaign has added joy to the national political lexicon, let’s try to end on an upbeat note. What makes you maybe not cosmically optimistic but just optimistic about the future of American conservatism?
French: One of the things that does make me optimistic is that I’m around a lot of really good people who are Republicans. Just really good folks who are Republicans. People who have good sense, have good hearts, would do anything for you as their neighbors.
If you’re listening to this podcast, you’re probably a person who pays a lot more attention to politics than the average person. So you’re hearing me talk about Trump supporters, and you’re thinking, “How can they support him even though A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I?” You know, all of the list about Trump.
And a lot of it is, Trump supporters don’t know all of that stuff. They don’t know even half of it. They don’t even know a third or a quarter. But I know a ton of really good folks who love their neighbors, who are Republicans, who have voted for Trump, will vote for him again, and one of the things that’s so grievous about this moment is that their good will has been lashed to the person of Donald Trump.
I think if you remove the person of Donald Trump, their good will has an opportunity — not a certainty — to change the course of the Republican Party. For example, in my hometown, we had a situation where a hyper-MAGA candidate arose to challenge our longstanding Republican mayor. And this hyper-MAGA candidate was deep into conspiracy theories, just unbelievably toxic.
The good folks in my community rallied against her and re-elected a very good Republican mayor. It’s that fundamental decency that I see that gives me hope. But that fundamental decency has to be given room to breathe outside MAGA.
People who don’t live in MAGA spaces don’t understand the incredible social, hostile social pressure that is put on anyone who dissents. It is intense, it is sometimes intimidating, it is sometimes threatening, it is always painful, and there are a lot of people who right now are living in that environment and want to be free of it. And I do think that by removing the dominant Donald Trump figure, you have an opportunity for the inherent decency of a lot of the Republicans I know to emerge. Maybe I’m wildly optimistic. But look, I know the people I live around in many ways, and many of them actually are ready for the Trump era to end. They are ready for it to end. They just don’t want it to end at the hands of a Democrat, but they are ready for it to end.
Douthat: So to end this on a religious and providentialist note, I think it’s also important to accept that the Trump era will end when God decides that it’s going to end. And God only knows when that will happen.
So with that, thank you so much, David, for submitting to my cross-examination. I obviously have several more hours of questions for you. But whether in a second Trump presidency or a Kamala Harris administration, I hope that we can do this again.
French: Thanks so much, Ross.
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