Authoritarianism is gaining ground in democracies around the world—often with populist, nativist rhetoric. In the United States, this trend threatens to demolish democratic government. And shifts in American foreign policy are also uprooting the previous world order around the globe. William Kristol joins host Alex Lovit to discuss what’s changed in the last few years in American politics, in international relations, and in his own beliefs. William Kristol is editor-at-large at The Bulwark and cohost of the podcast Conversations with Bill Kristol. He’s also a senior fellow with the Charles F. Kettering Foundation. He was previously the founder and editor of the influential conservative news magazine The Weekly Standard. https://substack.com/@williamkristol https://conversationswithbillkristol.org/
William Kristol:
The authoritarian leader wants to say, "I'm channeling the voice of the people," Trump is good at this, of course, "I am your voice," as a way of going around or overriding normal constitutional legal parliamentary processes. Once there are politicians who see they can take advantage of this and flourish and succeed, I think that changes an awful lot.
Alex Lovit:
We are cursed to live in interesting times. Politics in the United States has been volatile lately. Our democracy is at risk, so it's understandable that democracy loving Americans tend to turn our attention inward. We study the last election and we worry about the next one. We protest when the government abuses its powers and violates our rights. We encourage our fellow citizens to participate and to resist. And we should do those things, but it's just as important to look beyond our borders.
For one thing, it matters how the rest of the world sees us and treats us. But even more importantly, other nations are facing the same threats that we are: declining public trust and rising authoritarianism. We might even learn a thing or two from how they're fighting back because the news isn't all bad. Take Hungary. Viktor Orban spent 16 years as prime minister packing courts, squashing independent media, and rigging the system in his party's favor. But back in April, voters ousted him in favor of a pro-democracy leader. Democratic decline does not have to be permanent.
You're listening to The Context. It's a show from the Charles F. Kettering Foundation about how to get democracy to work for everyone and why that's so hard to do. I'm your host, Alex Lovit. My guest today is William Kristol. Bill is Editor-at-Large at the Bulwark, and a Kettering Foundation senior fellow. For decades, as the founder and editor of the influential news magazine, The Weekly Standard, Bill was one of the country's leading voices advocating for conservative policies at home as well as neoconservative foreign policy abroad.
Bill has always believed that the United States can be a force for good in the world and that preserving democracy matters more than any political agenda. Today, he joins me to talk about what has shifted over the last few years, not only in American politics and in the world order, but also in his own beliefs.
William Kristol, welcome to The Context.
William Kristol:
Thanks. Good to be with you.
Alex Lovit:
You've spent a lot of your career focusing on foreign policy, geopolitics. I don't agree with you on everything, but you've definitely read, and thought, and written more than I have about it. So tell me, in your view, if the globe is spinning on its correct access and everything's going well, what should be the United States' role in the world?
William Kristol:
I think we got it mostly right over the past 80 years since World War II, and I think the global order post 1945, which was US-led and sometimes dominated, but I think that order worked well. Honestly, it preserved mostly peace and security, certainly compared to the first half of the 20th century. It allowed for an awful lot of economic growth, especially for poorer countries: China and India, billions of people, I guess. It came from being very poor into the working class, middle class standards of living, that's not nothing. It promoted democracy and freedom, at least sometimes and at some places, but that was not inconsequential. I think we will look back on that period from 1945 maybe to last year until 2025 as a pretty good patch for all of its problems.
Alex Lovit:
So you're painting a rather rosy picture there of what the world looked like before Donald Trump came on the scene. You think that our allies, much of the world, saw the US as a trustworthy partner for most of the 20th century, early 21st century?
William Kristol:
Yeah, they did. I mean, they complained plenty and we complained, and there were genuine disagreements. God knows, on Iraq, France and Germany were not in agreement with us and didn't join the war effort. On the other hand, I think in a way that proves that kind of difference or disagreement or even rift at the time proves the point, which is it didn't fundamentally damage NATO. It didn't fundamentally damage US-EU, trade relations. I think now that it's all falling apart, people in Europe, I'm struck by this when I go to Europe, really thinks, you know what? We complained at times about the US, and of course we were overbearing at times and foolish at times, but better that world than the world we're now entering, which is kind of everyone for himself.
I hope that world can end up being decent in the sense that the Europeans can get together and do some good things. Japan, South Korea, hopefully they'll do good things, but I think it's very risky to get into a kind of dog-eat-dog world. I think that's the world we're getting into. It's the world that incidentally, the Trump administration says always exists. Isn't that what Stephen Miller's famous comment about, was I think January of this year, this is the way the world has always been, the strong do whatever they can do and the weak have to accommodate, and it's all about power. It's always been partly about power and obviously power undergirded this world order, but it was a power that was mostly used to help defend our allies, not to invade them, mostly used to promote democracy, not to strengthen dictatorships, used for our own benefit obviously, but also for the benefit of other nations.
So I do think others are appreciating more now in a way, and some people in the US are appreciating a little more, now that we're looking at a world in which the basic sense of security has eroded so seriously. Now to be fair to Trump, it had eroded before his second term. Russia invaded Ukraine in February of 2022. That was a huge moment. I thought so at the time, but I would say the response to that was a good one. I mean, we and Europe, and other nations around the world: Japan, Korea, Australia, nations far away, rallied to Ukraine's support. Ukraine fought incredibly courageously and held off Putin.
Even European nations that had very close relations with Russia that had economic dependence on Russia were willing to stand up to Putin. Some of them started to increase their defense spending and provide aid to Ukraine in ways they didn't think they would have to do a few years before. I think for all the talk about how old that old world order was, I think it was actually doing okay before January 20, 2025.
Alex Lovit:
Do you think it will be possible to get back to that?
William Kristol:
I don't think we can simply get back to it. I think the damage has been done. Some of it was inevitable, perhaps. 80 years is a long time, and no world order lasts forever. And so, change was certainly inevitable. I think the system could have been fixed and reformed without being toppled. I do think under President Trump, we've come pretty close now to toppling it. I mean, we've made clear we don't care much about our allies. We threaten them as much as we defend them. We make no distinction really between democracies and dictatorships and anything. We seem to get along better with some of the dictators these days than some of the democracies.
President Trump went to China recently and was very flattering of the Xi Jinping and almost obsequious, you might say, not a word about democracy or human rights, at least in public. Not much to reassure our democratic allies in Japan, and South Korea, and Taiwan, and elsewhere in the region that we were going to stand with them. I don't know that we can simply restore... So much of the order dependent on trust, it turned out. This is true of life in general, I've discovered in the last few years, there's kind of an underlying honor code and relationships of trust that aren't really necessarily captured by the formal documents, the formal treaties, the formal constitution of the United States at home.
An awful lot happens because we think it should happen and we think it's been good that it's been happening, and others think so, and we kind of just agree to have it continue to go on happening. Once that gets broken, and it's gotten broken in a pretty fundamental way, I think it needs to be rebuilt, but it will need to be a new building, not simply a going back to what was.
Alex Lovit:
I'm not a big fan of Trump's foreign policy, but what I am most upset about is how Trump is eroding democracy at home. I'm wondering in your view, how do each of those factors play into how the world sees us? Is it how we're acting on the world stage that is affecting how the world sees the United States or is it how the world is seeing what Trump is doing at home?
William Kristol:
No, it's a good point. Obviously, it's both. I mean, I do think if you're elsewhere in the world, you don't follow the ins and outs of what's happening at the Justice Department as much as we do. And so, they see this new United States more through the prism of foreign policy, but it's very much related, the sense that we can throw our weight around and bully Denmark because we decided in a sort of fit of fancy that we would like to have Greenland instead of simply Greenland being part of Denmark, which is a treaty ally, but are deciding that, "Hey, let's just talk about invading Greenland."
That's of a piece, you might say, with a lack of respect for the rule of law at home. I mean, it's literally of a piece because the Constitution says the treaty should be considered the supreme law of the land. These things really do come close. The use of executive power unmoored from congressional constraints or public accountability, blowing up little boats in the Caribbean with no proof of who's on them and why we're entitled to do this by the laws of the US or by international law, no accountability to Congress to speak of, obviously going to war without authorization from Congress. I mean, these are all things that overlap, you might say the, I guess I'll call it the lawlessness and authoritarianism at home, that those overlap with a kind of lack of respect for laws, or at least establish norms to some degree abroad.
Alex Lovit:
Thinking about all the things that Trump has done abroad in foreign policy, we've got tariffs, we've got boat strikes in the Caribbean, as you mentioned, the Iran war, what do you see as the most important, the things that have most impacted the United States' standing in the world?
William Kristol:
I think it has been cumulative. I do think the Iran war has been sort of the exclamation point where we went to war without having a real debate here in the US, without having, of course, congressional authorization, without consulting allies who were much more directly affected by what was likely to happen and what did happen in the closing of the strait than we were in Germany and France, or Japan and South Korea. They weren't even consulted. They got no notice that we were planning on this. We didn't think it through and so the strait gets closed. I mean, just a bigger event than probably each of these other events.
I think it's also the fact that it's been at the end of a series of events is what makes it sort of wake up call. It's the second or third time the alarm goes off and then you really can't avoid it anymore. I'm glad you mentioned tariffs though because I think that's something that we think of as domestic terms.
I mean, prices go up and it's not the best economic policy in my opinion, but for the rest of the world, I think we may underestimate how much of a shock it's been. I mean, again, what everyone thinks of globalization as an economic philosophy or practice, it was established in a pretty deep way, has been established over decades, the kind of just arbitrary putting on and taking off tariffs, and again, with no views to whether these were dictatorships or democracies, opponents, or allies.
I myself, I would say, underestimated the effect of that on leaders and on the public actually in countries all over the world. I mean, they're sitting there and they have a long time relationship with the US, thousands, millions of businesses of citizens who are engaged in commerce across borders suddenly getting jerked around at the whim of one man, and because he doesn't like something that's happening that the president of Brazil is doing or isn't doing, or some other foreign leader has said or hasn't said.
For me, it was a foolish economic policy here at home, and also there were real issues of congressional accountability and lawlessness there as the Supreme Court eventually decided. I think for the rest of the world, it was just another instance, maybe the first big instance in Trump's second term, of just kind of arbitrariness by one man.
Alex Lovit:
I want to ask about the relationship between the United States foreign policy, which we have a lot of power in the world, and how that plays into domestic politics. I think the conventional wisdom is that Americans don't care that much about foreign policy. There's some counter evidence that perhaps in that the Iraq war I think contributed to George W. Bush's decline in popularity. Biden's falling approval rating started with a withdrawal from Afghanistan in which several American service members were killed. Now Trump's approval rating is falling pretty quickly in the aftermath of the Iran war.
Is conventional wisdom wrong? Do Americans care about foreign policy?
William Kristol:
They care more than people think. I mean, certainly if a war goes badly and a war in which Americans are fighting and taking casualties, that is a very big deal and obviously it was very damaging to George W. Bush. Voters don't always reward you for a good foreign policy. I do think they punish you for a failed foreign policy. I also think the general wisdom, which I do find a lot among elite types who do care about foreign policy and have traveled abroad a lot, they think, "Oh, those Americans, half them don't have passports. They don't know much about the world. They don't care much." I think that's wildly overstated.
You can be in a farming community in the middle of Nebraska, and in a way you don't see a lot of foreigners, you don't travel abroad, but you still are aware that selling your grain depends on foreign trade. I think Americans do have more of an instinctive understanding that the world matters to them. I think incidentally, that's one reason Trump's numbers have dropped. Things aren't that bad at home. Inflation's gone back up in the last month or two, but Trump's economy in the first year, really first year and a quarter of his second term, was not great, but it wasn't disastrous. Wages were moving up, not as fast as they might have been, but a little bit. Unemployment wasn't particularly high.
So why were people so worried about Trump? A lot of it was other things he was doing here at home, the authoritarianism, just the kind of foolishness and personal self-indulgence, in some ways the grift, the kleptocracy, all these things mattered. I think one thing that mattered is people had a sense that, geez, the world's getting a lot more unstable and Trump's not a stable and reliable leader, and he doesn't really have a plan for this world that we're moving into. You can go back to the world of 1914. You can go back to the world of 1935 or '36. We may not be happy with everything the way it is now or the way things have been for 20 years, or 40 years, or 60 years, but let's be serious about what the alternatives could look like.
If we're not happy, let's fix things, but let's do so in a way that lays the groundwork for a better future. It doesn't just kick over the card table and hope that everything works out okay.
Alex Lovit:
Thinking from a large picture historical perspective, a trend in the world in recent years has been the rise of populist, often anti-immigrant nationalist movements in democracies around the world, including in the United States, but also in a lot of Europe. First of all, I guess, do you agree with that characterization? And if so, do you have an explanation for it?
William Kristol:
It's clear there's been a rise of populism and of discontent with the status quo and with elites in various countries in the last decade, or even before the last decade. We had things like Brexit, we had the election of Trump, and those were all pieces of evidence of a kind of populist uprising, you might say, against national elites and globalism. It all got swept up into one thing. Having said that, this has happened before. It happens in democracy. Some of its healthy. Some of these expressions of populist discontent are wake up calls to elites to, "Hey, you haven't done a good job here."
But I think what really transformed here in the US is its one thing to have a populist rebellion. It's something to have some successes electorally. It's another thing to win the nomination of one of the two major parties. That's happened very rarely in modern American history, something to win the presidency. I'd say that's really never happened in modern American history. Then to govern in a populist, nativist, nationalist way, this kind of strident nationalism, hostile to foreigners, attacking globalists and so forth, that's really not happened. And so, that, I think changes everything.
Once there are politicians who see they can take advantage of this and flourish and succeed, I think that changes an awful lot. Now I think there are counter-trends. Populism has worked out so well in so many countries and we saw what happened in Hungary earlier this year and other nations as well. We've seen other leaders in the EU and Slovakia and elsewhere change their tune a little bit and stop cozying up to Putin, stop trying to be mini Orbans as it were, but also Orban had become a symbol. He tried to make himself one of what he called illiberal democracy, and obviously the right wing in the US was very interested in Orban. Orban came here, Americans went there, CPAC, the right wing conference, met in Hungary.
And so, I do think his defeat there, pretty resounding defeat, and the apparent failure of his rule just in terms of economic performance, population growth, whatever criteria you want, is an important moment. I think it's very much of a struggle now between... I don't know what to call it, liberalism and populism. It's a little unfair to call that populism. There's a healthy form of populism. I would call it more nativism, and I don't even know if it's nationalism really. But anyway, whatever authoritarian, nativism, and nationalism versus a kind of somewhat globalist liberalism, I suppose might be the easiest way to put it.
There are wars going on that almost exemplify that struggle, don't you think? I mean, Ukraine versus Russia, right? A democratic government that was modernizing, that wanted to be part of Europe on the one hand, and on the other hand, Putin who was governing as an autocrat and who was justifying his autocracy by appeals to a sort of reactionary nationalist nativist past. In a way, that I've always thought the Ukraine-Russia war in a way captures most emblematically or clearly the choice we face for the future. If Putin succeeds, even after all the misery he's inflicted on his own people, in basically getting away with invading a peaceful democratic neighbor and either grabbing a lot of land, or changing its government, or making it a vassal state, that's terrible.
That's terrible for Ukraine, obviously, but it's a terrible thing for the future. On the other hand, if Ukraine wins, I think it's a big victory for those who would like to make sure there's an order in which dictators with nuclear weapons can't successfully invade neighboring democracies. You really don't want to live in a world where people can get away with that.
Alex Lovit:
I wanted to follow up on what you were saying earlier. You were trying to define what this movement is that Orban's a part of, that Trump's a part of in some ways. We're using words like populist, nationalist, and you also use the word authoritarian. Of course, it's the authoritarianism part of it that upsets me. There might be plenty of policies that I disagree with, but if they are chosen democratically by the people, that's what democracy is supposed to look like. People are supposed to be able to choose things that might not be what I want, but authoritarianism kind of locks those decisions in permanently.
I guess my question is, what is the connection between the nationalism, and the populism, and the authoritarianism? Do those have to go together? Why do those go together?
William Kristol:
Yeah, I think the authoritarianism is key or illiberalism, anti-liberalism because the Declaration of Independence says that all men are created equal and therefore we should have government by consent of the government. That's the democracy side, but also to secure these rights. It's the protection of rights and the consent of the governed. Authoritarianism threatens both. You can imagine, I think, authoritarian governments that are less populist rather than more in their rhetoric, but they tend to be nativists and populists for good reason.
They're populist because the authoritarian leader wants to say, "I'm channeling the voice of the people," Trump is good at this of course, "I am your voice," as a way of going around or overriding normal constitutional legal parliamentary processes, and that's been very, very true in authoritarian governments from the beginning. In the modern world, I think authoritarianism usually has a populist flavor in its hostility to establish legal processes which are considered time-consuming and boring, and sometimes anti-democratic if the courts protect rights against the majority and so forth.
The nativism too, similarly, I mean, I think if you're going to appeal to the public, authoritarians seem to have found a pretty fruitful way to appeal, to appeal against globalist elites that are selling out the public. The rhetoric tends towards the reactionary, the nationalist, the nativist. Authoritarianism, fascism, if you want to use a much stronger word that some people want to restrict to particular periods and countries, but isn't a bad catchphrase for a lot of what we're talking about, isn't a coherent doctrine, I would say. Authoritarianism certainly isn't the way communism was, or Nazism, I'd say, was. There's no car marks of fascism.
It's a mix of attitudes and psychology, and political tactics, and embrace of violence discussed with parliamentary government and the rule of law, contempt for minorities as a kind of scapegoats. I'd grown up at a time where we studied communism and Nazism a lot. They were the great horrors of the 20th century. When I was in college in the 70s in grad school, that was kind of what you looked back on is what lessons are to be learned. I underrated in a way the importance of, let's call it fascism, which is less coherent than communism and Nazism, and the continued appeal of that.
Not every aspect in every country manifests itself in the same way. Orban is a different type of person than Trump. Trump has the celebrity stuff and all that. Orban didn't have much of that. They each have their own styles, you might say, and different aspects, the militarism, the macho side of it, the nativism, the demagoguery, all these things can be features of one regime, one nation, one movement more than of another. But the features do seem to be... They're discreet, but they sort of add up to a whole, and they do tend to go together for pretty obvious, I think, psychological and political reasons.
Alex Lovit:
Turning a little bit more to domestic politics, right now in 2026, I am so upset about things that Trump has done in his second term that I see as undermining democracy. It's hard for me to remember what I thought of him in 2016 when he was just a candidate. You had been a conservative, had supported the Republican Party, and you got off the Trump train pretty early. You saw something in him that you wanted to reject before he had a chance to implement any policies.
What was it in 2016 that worried you about Trump?
William Kristol:
Yeah, no, the reason I was never Trump was that I did... I will say this is one of the things I might have gotten right among many other things I've gotten wrong, I think I saw what was coming. I saw that this is where Trumpism led to. He wasn't just a celebrity who didn't have quite the personality I would like to have a president to have, or he didn't have, as you said, particular policies that I just happened to disagree with that I thought would do some harm to the country, but we could live with. I thought there was a deep tendency there of demagoguery, nativism, bigotry that he was happy to appeal to.
That once you start down that road, it was possible he would give it up when he became president. I remember thinking in November, December 2016, hoping, talking to friends, some of whom now are ex-friends, but who were going into the administration, or who were at least wanting to give it the benefit of the doubt. "Well, maybe he would change." There have been people who've been demagogic as candidates and pretty responsible as presidents. I didn't think that's what Trump would do, but I hoped he would.
It became pretty clear pretty early that he was going to stay on that path though. The degree to which he stayed on that path is kind of startling, even now in retrospect. Then the acceleration of it, I would say late in the first term when he started to get rid of the people who were checks on him, but certainly out of office, certainly in 2023, '24, and then certainly in the second term is really what people should be scared about. It's just we have not had someone who really had contempt for democracy, had contempt for the rule of law, loves the idea of just kleptocracy and authoritarian domination of the political system.
We really haven't had someone like that as President of the United States, maybe ever. I don't know, but certainly not I would say in my lifetime. Nixon had a certain interest in it, you might say, and of course went too far in that direction, and was going to be impeached if he hadn't resigned. When you look at what Nixon was impeached for, what he did, he tried to use the CIA and the FBI to spy on enemies, a couple of domestic opponents basically, and channeled some funds in ways he shouldn't have. Even so, we didn't occur to him to do the kinds of things Trump was routinely doing in terms of the family, kleptocracy business and in terms of having the Justice Department.
I mean, Nixon had to fire, think of it this way, remember this, the special council because his Attorney General wouldn't do so, and then the new Attorney General took over and instituted a new special counsel and ended up prosecuting Nixon's people, and ended up cooperating with Congress as Congress investigated. Nixon and the Republican Party ended up going along with that investigation, went along with it at first and then ended up being quite active in it obviously and supporting impeachment, many parts of the party at least.
That's all gone. I think with the degree of risk now is so much greater and it's not like anything we've seen. I won't say I saw every bit of this coming, but I did see that Trump A, he had personal interest in this direction, B, he was unleashing forces that very much moved in this direction. The one thing I think I didn't really anticipate was the Republican Party capitulating so easily to him. It makes a big difference if you have a demagogue whose president for one term but doesn't have the support of his own party, and therefore you can contain the damage and then he loses, and leaves office and it's kind of over.
Or one who has the full support, is able to get his party to support him, keeps that support after leaving office even despite January 6th, gets renominated and gets reelected. Then for the first 15, 16, 17 months of his administration has even more on question support from his own party. Confirming all these people, Trump's nominating who would no longer stand up to him the way some of his cabinet secretaries did in the first term. The party collapse, I didn't quite expect. The collapse of business elites and other elites in the second term, the accommodation to Trump, the desire to be on Trump's good side, the unwillingness to stand up to him, I sort of expected that. That's a pretty classic thing unfortunately that happens in authoritarian takeovers.
I thought some of these businesses in the US, some of these law firms and stuff would be a little stronger in opposing Trump. But once he was reelected, I was pretty... One of the reasons I was so worried about it in 2024 and tried to say what I could about how dangerous it was... Whatever the dangers of electing Trump in 2016, the dangers of reelecting in 2024 were much, much greater. And I think that's unfortunately proven to be the case.
Alex Lovit:
Talk to me a little bit more about the Republican Party and how the Republican Party today looks different than it did 10 years ago. I see those changes as dangerous to American democracy. I don't know if you feel the same. How has the Republican Party changed, and how does that endanger our democracy?
William Kristol:
No, it's been utterly transformed. There were elements of Trumpism in the party before. I don't want to deny that. Maybe some of them could have been fought more vigorously. We fought a lot of them. We fought Buchanan, we fought protectionism. You look back and you see the elements that should have been maybe denounced more ferociously or that could mutate into Trumpism, something like the Tea Party. But yeah, no, it's totally true. The Republican Party was a traditional American political party for all of its problems in 2016, as the Democratic Party was.
The big difference today is the Democratic Party is still a traditional American party with its wings, progressives and moderates, unions and intellectuals. Everything's gotten more polarized than it used to be, partly because of socioeconomic sorting and geographic sorting, and people dividing more by educational achievement. Some of this stuff has been happening anyway, but it all happens on steroids with Trump and with the Republican Party. And so, now we don't have a party. We have a movement. Now, movement's kind of a neutral term. There are good movements. Civil Rights movement is a good movement. There are bad movements.
But the Trump movement is a bad movement, and movements are powerful, and they overwhelm the normal practice of parties. Again, in the Democrats, there's bargaining. Some places nominate a progressive and some places nominate a moderate, and then they quarrel in Congress, and some people don't go along with some of the legislation. Trump obviously has been very self-conscious about stamping out that kind of traditional somewhat pluralistic workings of a political party and making it all about loyalty to him. He succeeded way beyond what I would have expected.
There are many dynamics at work that have enabled him to succeed. Unfortunately, a lot of it is, in my opinion, pure cowardice and fecklessness by Republican Party leaders who maybe didn't see what was at stake or didn't care what was at stake as long as they could continue to be members of Congress or get favorable treatment by the White House and so forth. Then more broadly, the movement has recruited, and it's been successful, you've got to say. I mean, it's a good reminder. Authoritarianism can be attractive. A lot of young people, a lot of people have come on over, people who reluctantly went along at first are now eager participants.
As I say, the business types probably aren't really eager, but they've decided, okay, this is the future. I'm going to make my deals and do well in this future. And if I have to in effect ride the Trump administration to be well-disposed to my merger, or if not directly bribe, do things that the Trump administration would like, they'll be willing to do it. All of that means the barriers to authoritarians were much, much weaker than they were in 2017.
Alex Lovit:
You've been talking there about how the Republican Party has changed, how the conservative movement has changed. How has William Kristol changed? You've lost some friends, gained some new ones. How has your outlook changed?
William Kristol:
I mean, I've changed some. I think a lot of what I believe isn't that different from what I believed. I think our discussion of foreign policy honestly wouldn't be... I don't think I sound very different than I would've 10 or 20 or 30 years ago on some of those issues. Some domestic policy issues, I probably am more respectful of liberal critiques of capitalism, liberal concerns about bigotry and racism than I was 10 or 20 or 30 years ago. I wasn't hostile to those concerns. I just thought they were probably overstated by the left.
I used to think that as a matter of public policy, marriage could be reserved for a man and a woman, though obviously gay couples who chose to live together should have certain rights and certain accommodations. I've just changed my mind about things like that. Once people have come out and once the revolution has happened, and I give them credit for this revolution, I have many friends, of course, who have come out and that was courageous for them to do and they were the path breakers and the rest of us were way behind following them, but once that's happened, you can't really turn back the clock without engaging an awful lot of bigotry and demonization, and cruelty.
I feel that very much on trans issues today. It's not something I was very familiar with. I knew one or two academics who had transitioned decades ago when it was very rare and unpopular. Seemed like they were happy and it had been the right decision for them. I had that kind of tolerance, but I didn't think about it much as a broader public policy issue. Once it's become publicly acceptable, I think it was a good thing that it was, and it was a good thing that people are allowed to live the lives they want to live, the idea of turning back the clock or in a way, almost going after them in a vengeful way is mean-spirited, especially because it's entirely unnecessary.
They're not hurting anyone. I mean, that's what's most striking to me about the reactionary effort now to curb those rights. I mean, one thing if... Let's say environmentalism, which I think on the whole was a good movement, but let's say it also has slowed down economic growth, and has gone overboard, and there's too much regulation, there's not enough housing, et cetera. It's reasonable to say, "You know what? We should dial back maybe some of these environmental regulations and the paperwork they involve and let people build apartment houses more easily." That's a sort of reasonable adjustment.
But here, there's nothing like that. There's no harm to anyone. People are living lives as they choose and are happier doing so. It's entirely based now on bigotry, fear, fear of the other. That is where Trumpism ends up. There are real issues, with free trade overdone should we have a little bit of protection for middle class jobs, that kind of thing that is perfectly legitimate to make the case for. I feel like so much of this is driven by pure cruelty at this point, that it really needs to be strongly opposed.
Yeah, so I've rethought some of my views on particular issues, some of the weights I give, certain concerns. I think it'd be kind of crazy to go through many decades of being involved in politics and public life and not rethink anything. A kind of strange world if everything you thought at age 25 turns out to be correct and vindicated. You do have to learn from events and from experience. After such a major transformation of everything, as we've seen in the last 10 years, it'd be a little crazy not to rethink anything. Some of my friends, acquaintances, I'm still exactly where I was 10 years ago, Bill. You've moved to the left.
Well, if you're exactly where you were 10 years ago, does that mean there's nothing to be learned from what's happened over the last 10 years? That seems a little crazy to me. Anyway, everything's been changed by the last 10 years, so the "Republican Party" isn't the same because it has the same name doesn't mean it's the same party it was 10 years ago. And so, I've changed some, but again, I think it'd be kind of strange not to change at all.
Alex Lovit:
Trump is acting in ways, the Republican Party is acting in ways that are authoritarian, and the line can be a little blurry there. Gerrymandering is authoritarian in a sense, and now both parties feel the need to maximally gerrymander to press their advantage at all times. How do we get back to a Democratic world in the United States? Do you see a path there? What does that look like? What should people's role be in that?
William Kristol:
Yeah. The path is to defeat the authoritarians. I mean, you can't blame the pro-democracy side from fighting back. At times, that's going to mean using methods like gerrymandering, which they had previously been opposed to and then tried to pass legislation preventing, to be fair, to the Democratic Party. Now, once the other side starts gerrymandering, you have to think about what you're going to do yourself. That's very different, I believe, from having a Supreme Court decision on the Voting Rights Act and immediately racing to abolish basically every district you can that has a black representative, which is what's happening in states across the South.
That's really appalling. South Carolina has seven representatives, six of them are white Republicans. One is a black Democrat, Jim Clyburn, who's been there since 1993. First black representative from South Carolina since 1897. And now, they're just going to chop up his district so they can have a lily-white delegation. That's a different kind of thing than normal redistricting, if you want to say, for partisan advantage. And so, I think we should defend democracy and there are limits to what the Democratic Party or pro-democracy forces organizations and movements should do.
No Kings has been incredibly careful to stress nonviolence and to stress peace. I've been at the No Kings demonstrations, and I know the people who have organized them both locally, but especially nationally, and they have really taken some grief from some of their most strident activists by being so insistent on nonviolence, but also a certain kind of patriotism and politeness at these rallies. The ones I've been at, people got out of their way to thank the policemen who were there. And so, those are democratic protests. That's very different from rabble-rousing and what ICE has been doing in Minneapolis and so forth.
The protests against ICE are very different from ICE. As you said, there are moments that are a little gray area, you might say, but I think on the whole it's pretty clear what authoritarians are up to. When they're using particular laws gerrymandering for their authoritarian purposes, that's pretty different. I don't think the pro-democracy forces should be embarrassed to use the legal means at hand to resist authoritarianism.
Alex Lovit:
William Kristol, thank you for joining me on The Context.
William Kristol:
My pleasure.
Alex Lovit:
The Context is a production of the Charles F. Kettering Foundation. Our producers are George Drake Jr. and Emily Vaughn. Melinda Gilmore is our Director of Communications. The rest of our team includes Jamal Bell, Teo Clyburn, Jasmine O'Lare, and Darla Minich. We'll be back in two weeks with another conversation about democracy.
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Speaker 3:
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