Christopher Caldwell On Trump And Europe

We talk through the quickly evolving events.

Chris — an old friend and, in my view, one of the sharpest right-of-center writers in journalism — returns to the Dishcast for his third appearance. He’s a senior fellow at the Claremont Institute, a contributing editor to the Claremont Review of Books, a contributing writer for the NYT, and a member of the editorial committee of the French quarterly Commentaire. We covered his book The Age of Entitlement on the pod in 2021, and in 2023 he came back to talk European politics. This week I wanted to talk to a Trump supporter as we survey the first month. And we hashed a lot out.

For two clips of our convo — on the vandalism of DOGE, and why Chris thinks Trump has been more consequential than Obama on policy— see our YouTube page.

Other topics: the final demise of affirmative action; the 1964 Civil Rights Act; how DEI created racial strife; warring Dem interest groups; Biden’s belated border enforcement; why Harris was picked for veep and party nominee; the minorities disillusioned with Dems; the rise in public disorder; looming inflation; Trump’s tax cuts and tariffs; Trump vs Reaganism; DOGE vs Clinton’s downsizing; Bannon vs Musk; Thiel a harbinger of Trump’s broligarchy; USAID and NGOs; the Swamp; Musk calling for the impeachment of judges; his ignorance on government; his craving to be cool; RFK at HHS; Bezos ditching dissent at the WaPo op-ed page; America’s new foreign policy; Trump’s alliance with Russia against Ukraine; pushing reparations on an invaded country; NATO’s Article 5 void under Trump; his love of strongmen; Vance’s disdain of European leaders; Brexit; mass migration; the German elections; China and Trump; Syria and Obama; the DCA helicopter crash; the awfulness of Bluesky; the Gulf of America; and debating the extent to which Trump’s rhetoric is just noise.

Browse the Dishcast archive for an episode you might enjoy (the first 102 are free in their entirety — subscribe to get everything else). Coming up: Evan Wolfson on the history of marriage equality, Nick Denton on China and AI, Francis Collins on faith and science, Michael Lewis on government service, Douglas Murray on Israel and Gaza, Ian Buruma on Spinoza, Michael Joseph Gross on bodybuilding, and the great and powerful Mike White, of White Lotus fame. Please send any guest recs, dissents, and other comments to dish@andrewsullivan.com.

From a fan of last week’s episode with Yoni Appelbaum on his fascinating history of zoning:

I continue to learn something new from your weekly column and appreciate the variety of the different guests on your podcast. I have a rare day off on a Friday, so I’ve already listened to your episode with Yoni Appelbaum (and I look forward to reading his most recent essay in The Atlantic, “How Progressives Froze the American Dream”).

I have worked at the Lower East Side Tenement Museum for over 17 years, so I must respond to the discussion you had on the tenements and their poor reputation — especially due to the reformers of the time. I could not agree more with Yoni. Yes, the conditions were very difficult and disease was rampant, but the LES and the tenements were also great places of family, community, and work. And due to the many prejudices of the time, they were the only available housing for these people.

Tenements also allowed immigrants to start small businesses in their home while still observing their religious customs (e.g. you could operate your garment shop on Sunday instead of Saturday if you were Jewish). Moreover, the tenements were really a way for newcomers to have their first crack at becoming American, which they embraced.

At our museum, we tell stories of actual families who lived in the tenements between the 1860s and 1970s through the architecture of the buildings, primary sources, relationships with descendants, and historical context of time. We don’t try to paint a rosy picture, but we do show that history is complicated through the eyes of working class immigrants. It’s a cool little place.

This next listener didn’t like Yoni’s aforementioned essay:

I was looking forward to listening to your most recent episode, but it just couldn’t stomach listening to Appelbaum after just reading his Atlantic piece — which could only be written by someone from NYC or possibly some other very large city with lots of skyscrapers. He does not seem to realize most people in the US would hate to live in NYC. Many don’t want to live even in smaller cities or their surroundings suburbs, but they are stuck there because they can’t find employment where they would prefer to live. A lucky few ones (e.g. tech people) can move to Montana or Vermont and work online.

I myself live in a suburb of San Jose, and I like it here and have no desire to move. Although I never did, I could see myself living in a high-rise when I was in my 20s or before having children, but you couldn’t pay me enough to get me to move to NYC or any large city on the East Coast.

Many Dishheads will remember my hatred of living in NYC for several months a decade ago, chronicled in the Dish thread “New York Shitty.” Here’s the best I could muster in NYC’s defense:

This next listener “LOVED your conversation with Yoni Appelbaum”:

While his work is obviously specific to the US, it’s remarkable the extent to which the challenges he describes are common across the Anglosphere, and play a big part in the parallel housing crises occurring in the UK, Canada, Australia and even New Zealand.

On that note, I wanted to add some context about Jane Jacobs, whose legacy is getting an overdue re-appraisal. While she’s mainly known in the US for her work in Greenwich Village, she lived for much longer in Toronto — and specifically in the Annex, one of the all-around nicest urban neighborhoods on the continent. She played a leading role in stopping a horrific expressway project that would have barreled through the area. But she also helped usher in a culture of saying “no” to almost all development across Toronto’s historic core. The result was the same as in Greenwich Village, at a somewhat lower price point (not that much lower, mind you).

Fifty years later, the Annex has remained an island of largely single-family homes, off limits to all but the wealthiest, despite being walking distance from Canada’s most important business and retail districts and being better served by mass transit than anywhere in the country. And its residents are in thrall to NIMBYism of the worst kind: a while back there was a full-bore freakout over an eight-story apartment building, proposed on the edge of the area, led by a band of monied residents including … Margaret Atwood!

Another clip from our convo:

Another listener has a guest rec:

Excellent discussion with Appelbaum, but he omitted perhaps the most ironic damper on social and physical mobility: the motor vehicle — specifically, the space it typically occupies for 23 hours or more each day. Parking is a necessity not only at home and your destination, but all the stops along the way, and countless hours are spent searching for parking spots in cities.

The amount of land devoted to parking in urban and suburban North America is mind-boggling. There’s a vicious cycle in which sprawl necessitates vehicles and parking exacerbates sprawl. Most of the cost is borne by society, including by those who don’t drive. The perverse consequences are eloquently detailed in Henry Grabar’s recent book, Paved Paradise: How Parking Explains the World. Grabar — a Slate staff writer who also edited The Future of Transportation — might be an enlightening podcast guest.

He points out one consequence that would interest Appelbaum and add to his thesis. Parking has become the default NIMBY argument against affordable housing and densification, since it’s become less acceptable to say you just don’t want poorer or more diverse people in your neighborhood. Project hearings are now dominated by residents asking, “Where will they park?” The stance — seemingly less value-laden — has forced governments to require X parking spaces for each new residential unit or business, which adds significantly to the development cost and often effectively bars densification.

Maybe the advent of autonomous vehicles will eventually ease the problem, but even Waymo taxis need to park and recharge somewhere.

Here’s another rec on the topic of urban planning:

I just listened to Marc Dunkelman of Brown University on Yascha Mounk’s podcast discussing his new book, Why Nothing Works. It’s about the apparent inability of big government bureaucracies to get anything done like they used to in the days of Robert Moses or the Tennessee Valley Authority. The episode was great, but I’d love to hear Dunkelman interviewed by someone who’s more skeptical of the underlying premise — that such grand exercises of state power are desirable at all — than the center-left Mounk is. And I think you’re better positioned to do this with nuance than other good-faith commentators on the center right who hew more closely to the Friedman/Buckley fiscal-conservative school of thought.

Next up, a “white evangelical (conservative) Christian, as far as the labeling goes”:

I found your responses to Jonathan Rauch really irritating and obtuse. Each of you is allowed to be intensely concerned over what’s undermining liberal democracy, whether wokeism or Christianism. I was disappointed in not being able to hear Rauch’s position a little more fleshed out due to your nit-picky derailing and missing his point. Wokeism is being curbed (and may that continue), but Christianism has not yet reached its fever pitch. The white evangelical church needs rebuking, and we need more people talking about it. This is a multi-front war, so aid your ally. You keep harping on wokeism as much as you feel like it, and let Rauch battle this other, wildly strong, insidious, and active threat.

Whenever I hear the word “ally” in terms of political discourse, I run for the hills. We’re not at war, as such. And my job is not to rally people to one side or other — but to air arguments so listeners can judge them for themselves. I have campaigned against Christianism long before Jon Rauch and David French — and so do not feel the need to prove my concern. On the Dishcast, I try to be devil’s advocate to some extent with everyone.

Here’s a religious dissent from a listener:

I am a person of the left — not the progressive left, but more a class-based leftism, and one who is deeply uncomfortable with Democrats and critical of identity politics. But first and foremost, I’m a Christian. I have a Masters in Theology and Ethics and work in a church — a UCC congregation here in Oklahoma.

For a long time, I’ve appreciated your voice as a fair and principled Christian, one willing to put your faith forward and reject the authoritarian and deeply illiberal right that has perverted the example of Christ in favor of political power. I’ve also admired your ecumenical spirit, your willingness to recognize that other expressions of our shared faith are legitimate and have strong foundations, even if you don’t always agree with them.

So when I heard at various points in your conversation with Rauch that you believe that Jesus calls all Christians to radically disengage from all political thinking, and further, when you continued your unfair and unreasonable attack on “progressive” churches, it really left me shaken in my admiration for you.

I don’t understand how you — a political journalist and a political actor through and through — are now taking the position that Christians don’t have an ethical, public responsibility to try to change the world — and yes, sometimes even through politics. I don’t understand how you can read the words of Jesus and not see the social and political dimensions of his words — not partisan, not electoral, but definitely political, in the sense that his words require public, social actions affecting our lives together as a community.

Jesus’ instructions in the parable of Good Samaritan, for example, are deeply personal instructions for how to live with our neighbors, and how to love them; but they are also deeply political, in the sense that they animate a spirit that drives us to not settle for a society that ignores the situations that leave to our broken brothers and sisters on the side of the road. This isn’t an argument for the terrible idea that politics is everything. But, it is an argument that we need to be aware of when the political does intrude upon our lives and not overly spiritualize or turn our faith completely inward.

But more than that, I’m feeling wounded at your attack on Christians like myself who find ourselves — uncomfortably, in my case — under the umbrella of churches considered progressive. You claimed that we have allowed politics to become our religion, that we would rather focus on BLM or Pride issues than Jesus.

Andrew, I’m sorry, but you are just wrong. We proudly fly a rainbow flag on the front of our church building, but we don’t do this because we are corrupted by HRC or GLAAD, or because we want to score points on social media. We do this because, in Tulsa, most LGBT people cannot walk into a church and find welcome as they are. In most churches here, they would be turned away, or told they can’t come and worship Jesus without correcting their “sin” of being born gay. So, we fly the flag to let our brothers and sisters know: you can come here and worship Jesus, just as you are, free of judgment or hate.

I think you’ll find if you go back and read my writing about Christianity and politics that I take a very strong position in keeping them separate. A political community cannot love or forgive anyone; it’s an abstract collective without a single soul capable of loving and forgiveness. I am deeply suspicious of “Christian” social policy, for example. I perfectly understand why Christians are obliged to help and serve any stranger; I do not understand why this must translate to an open borders policy by a state. And when I read the Gospels, I see a radical rejection of all political attempts to improve the world. Everything begins and ends with the individual soul.

I understand that this is not an entirely mainstream view — my own church has a rather elaborate social doctrine. But it’s one I hold deeply. Any church with a transqueer flag outside it — the one with the BLM stripes and the trans colors invading the old rainbow — is explicitly siding with intersectional leftism. It is telling me, a gay man who does not subscribe to critical queer, gender and race theory, that I am not welcome there. I think a simple cross says all that is needed to be said. The rest is politics and posturing.

One more listener on the Rauch pod:

As a devout ex-Mormon (and New Atheist, in no small part thanks to you introducing me to Sam Harris oh so long ago), I can shed some light on the “why Mormons are different than Evangelicals” issue.

Consider first the genealogical roots of most (American) members: New Englanders, Brits, and Scandinavians. Utah stands out among deeply conservative states on various social health metrics in no small part because it’s a slice of New England Puritans transplanted in the West with a strict religion. (I was recently informed by genetic testing that I have Mayflower ancestors.) The rowdy Scots-Irish that settled in the American South have a different disposition. (The book Albion’s Seed describes these overall differences between various British settlers.)

Next, structure and mission. Unlike most protestant sects, the LDS Church has a centralized authority structure more akin to Catholicism. Furthermore, the LDS Church really is global. There is huge membership growth happening in, of all places, Africa. Many Mormon men live overseas for two years and come to love some other place and its people (and often marry someone from that place). Elderly Mormons dream of retiring and serving another mission, often overseas.

Third, doctrine and history. Mormonism really is the quintessential American religion and holds a lot of beliefs specifically related to the New World and the USA, and its inspired-by-God constitution. The fact that the LDS Church was at war with the US for a bit there and also faced a great deal of persecution for polygamy helps with remembering about the importance of pluralism. (My grandfather was a fundamentalist Mormon polygamist and was arrested in the Short Creek raid in 1953.)

Consider, though, that there is a growing divide between what we might call “Mitt Romney Mormonism” that exemplifies the beneficial civic religion, and the Culture Warrior spirit of “Mike Lee Mormonism.” Senator Lee has invoked the story of Captain Moroni and the Title of Liberty and applied it to Trump, of all people (blasphemous, in my apostate opinion). I’ve noticed a shift that some strongly anti-Trump friends and family members in 2016 thereafter either made peace, or even became supporters of Trumpism. There are conservative members who oppose the Church’s generally kind stance toward things like immigration and other culture war issues.

Regarding the question of “are they actually Christian?” Obviously Mormons are not Christian in a strict classical sense with certain required beliefs like the Trinity (though they do believe in The Fall, just not Original Sin). However, the only sane definition of Christianity in my mind is “belief in the divinity of Jesus Christ as the Messiah as foretold in the Old Testament.” They do have that.

Time will tell how the LDS culture changes. Marriages and births are down (below replacement), and simultaneously there are strong pulls to the Left (BYU has had to crack down on the woke academics of late) and Right. Mormons might just be a generation behind American society at large on macro trends.

Another listener, another episode:

I really enjoyed your recent conversation with Ross Douthat, whom I read regularly and greatly admire. However, I have some issues with parts of his argument for the existence of God. His use of the fine-tuning argument to make the case for the existence of God seems deeply logically flawed for the following reasons:

1. The argument rests on the notion that this planet’s conditions are tailor-made to support human life. It would be an illogical leap to draw from the fact of human existence the conclusion that the planet’s conditions were designed — fine-tuned — to make our existence possible. To say that human life exists because it is found in an environmental context where human life is possible is tautological; and to draw from this tautology the conclusion that God therefore exists is absurd.
2. Furthermore, this theory places an arbitrary limit on God’s power, as it unfairly presumes that an omnipotent Being’s power is constrained by a need to conform to a set of predetermined conditions for the creation of life. Why should this be so? Couldn’t God have created human life that didn’t require the specific planetary conditions we take for granted as being necessary for our existence, such as the presence of water and oxygen? Perhaps in a theoretical alternative universe, such life forms do really exist. A truly omnipotent God would not be bound in his creative power by the need to abide by specific conditions necessary for the creation of human life; any conditions He would think up would suffice.

This is not to reject the possibility that a God created the world; it’s just to reject the logic of the fine-tuning argument, which strikes me as clearly fallacious.

Instead of focusing on that argument, perhaps it would have made for a stronger case to focus on the fundamental mystery at the heart of everything, the mystery of Being itself — ie., the question of why there is something rather than nothing. While also not demonstrative of God’s existence, this mystery is at least where genuine religious awe and re-enchantment with reality can begin.

Agreed. A reader continues a debate from last week:

You wrote in response to a reader who pointed out that Biden didn’t run all the way to the left on Gaza: “And on Gaza, he was simply representing the old US position: Israel can do whatever the fuck they like. The US role is to protect and defend anything Israel does. Including ethnic cleansing.” This position is, frankly, daft.

While Biden did not adopt the “globalize the intifada” claptrap of the radical left, his administration hampered Israel along the way and prolonged the war. From Kamala Harris’ absurd “I’ve studied the maps” admonition to Israel not to invade Rafah (where high-profile hostages and Sinwar himself were found because Israel ignored the administration) to numerous Biden pronouncements that “Hamas is bad, but Israel needs to … ”, the Biden administration routinely gave Hamas and its supporters public cover to continue engaging in and supporting atrocities. Sinwar relied on this kind of cover to reject numerous cease-fire proposals from Israel and the mediating parties, always believing that he could squeeze out a better deal.

As for the tired “ethnic cleansing” trope, the Arab populations in both Gaza and the West Bank have exploded since 1948. If Israel is trying to cleanse the Arabs, it’s doing a really bad job. Come to think of it, Israel did cleanse Gaza — of Jews in 2005 when ceding the Strip, only to see it completely militarized, plundered by billionaires living in five-star hotels in Doha, and used as a base for the worst pogrom in nearly 80 years.

If my reader thinks the Biden administration was too tough on Israel, I don’t know what to say really. Look at Gaza. We gave them the munitions to turn a city into a lunar landscape. Now, we are telling them that we’re fine with ethnic cleansing anyway.

Another debate:

In your response to a reader, you indicated that a DOGE member’s political views (which you characterize as “neo-Nazi”) should disqualify him from working in the federal government (“I don’t believe Americans want full-on neo-Nazis in their government.”) As you are likely aware, the First Amendment applies to government employees as well. So long as those views are not expressed in the course of one’s employment — or, perhaps, while one is “on the clock” in one’s employment — why should those with extremist beliefs be excluded from working in the government? Assuming, of course, that they do not affect actual job performance, I see no cogent argument for why or how government employees abdicate their First Amendment rights as a condition of employment.

They don’t of course. The question is why you would want to keep a neo-Nazi in your administration. Musk has shown us what he believes. I disagree.

Another reader:

I noticed the comment from Jesse Watters you posted about his friend who was “DOGE’d” — and all of a sudden he thinks “we” should be more empathetic about it. It bought up a question: Why do some folks have to personally experience something before they “get it?” Reminded me of Nancy Reagan being supportive of stem-cell research when she discovered it might help her husband’s Alzheimer’s.

One more email for the week:

Thanks for all you and Chris are doing to help keep us somewhat sane as we journey through this hellscape of a second Trump term together. I was just attempting to articulate my thin sliver of hope to a friend this afternoon in a text exchange. Basically, I had a hunch that things will have to get really bad before they get better, but that when they do get truly awful, a certain percentage of folks who voted for Trump this time around will be horrified enough to snap out of it. Then I received today’s column and read your final few sentences, which pretty much nailed what I was attempting to say to my friend. This will be a very difficult few years, but I have to have faith that it is not a time for despair.

Thanks as always for the emails, especially the dissents, and you can send yours to dish@andrewsullivan.com.

You can also sound off in Substack Notes. From my feed this week:

Stuck with The Brutalist until the Intermission. Brutal. Extremely long and labored, the film’s problem is that it tries to get you to root for an architect whose buildings are ugly, inhuman, concrete monstrosities. I couldn’t.

I’m an amateur on these matters, but the goal of modern architecture seems to me to make the world uglier for normal people. Almost nothing built in the last four decades is better than that built a century before. Why have we gone backwards in public spaces? The elites build to impress other elites — not to build anything pleasant to look at or inhabit for ordinary people.

A reader replied:

I totally agree! In short, the architecture schools got captured by an ideology (many decades before woke captured anything). There is no institution that aligns architect schools with public opinion at all. My wife wrote a wonderful essay on the topic (and I did too but hers is much better lol).

And here’s my quick take on Bezos squeezing out David Shipley and dissent on the Opinion page:

Another media entity decides to end any real debate in its pages. Bezos first made the WaPo an unreadable woke propaganda outfit and now ends what little diversity of opinion there was within the paper to an exclusively socially-liberal-fiscally-conservative niche, which is increasingly rare even among elites.

David absolutely right to quit. Bezos has no idea of what a newspaper is supposed to do.

A reader responded:

We stopped subscribing years ago and the only thing I miss is the comics section. It became too progressive for our tastes — and my wife is a moderately liberal person (and I’m a moderate normie). I can’t imagine they’ll have many subscribers left after this change.

And another: “I’d enjoy hearing David Shipley on the Dishcast.” Truman made an appearance in the studio this week:

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