Christopher Caldwell On Europe's Turmoil

The Dishcast with Andrew Sullivan

Andrew Sullivan

Politics, News, Religion & Spirituality

4.6 • 836 Ratings

🗓️ 21 October 2022

⏱️ 79 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Chris — an old friend and, in my view, one of the sharpest right-of-center writers in journalism — returns to the Dishcast. A senior fellow at the Claremont Institute and contributing editor to the Claremont Review of Books, his latest book, The Age of Entitlement, is a constitutional narrative of the last half-century that is indispensable — especially for liberals — in understanding the roots of our polarization. We discussed the book last year. This time on the pod, Chris has just returned from Europe and discusses the rapidly shifting politics there.

For two clips of our convo — on how one-child families could be the downfall of Putin’s war, and how Biden is co-opting Trump on border policy and China — pop over to our YouTube page. Other topics: Meloni and the US media meltdown, Truss, Remainers vs. Leavers, Boris, the energy crisis, possible off-ramps for the war, Russian dissenters, and the waning of American exceptionalism when it comes to religion. Good times.

This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit andrewsullivan.substack.com/subscribe

Transcript

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0:00.0	The
0:07.0	The Hi there. It's me again.
0:31.9	Your dreaded interlocutor here to the dishcast.
0:35.4	I am thrilled to be here this week because I don't have my
0:39.6	headphones on, which is really nice. I hate having those bloody things around my ears, the same way
0:45.3	I hated having those things around my mouth for so long. It's great to be unencumbered,
0:50.7	Christopher. And here I am with one of my oldest friends and intellectual heroes.
0:55.0	He is Christopher Caldwell, one of like two or three right of center writers that I never miss anything he writes.
1:04.0	He's a senior fellow at the Claremont Institute and a contributing editor of Claremont review of books.
1:16.1	His latest book, The Age of Entitlement, is a constitutional narrative of last half century that's really remarkable.
1:17.5	I actually read it again last, well, I didn't read the whole thing again, but I read some passages
1:21.2	on it last week because I was thinking about affirmative action and where we are now with
1:24.6	that kind of essential to see that within the context of the last 100 years really as opposed to the last 20.
1:31.3	And it holds up. It's a really good, I mean, if you are a sort of basically reflexive liberal, I think it's particularly good for you to read the book,
1:42.3	because you will, you will be annoyed by it and they'll be part of it that will really actually kind of upset you. But I just think as a good exercise in reading a history reinterpreted and rewritten, it's a really helpful book. Christopher, I am thrilled to have you here.
1:59.9	Thank you, Andrew. That's great. Yeah. I, you know, I wrote that
2:03.0	book. I actually had some hopes that it would be, that it would bridge a certain misunderstanding between, you know,
2:11.2	in the way liberals and conservatives were thinking about five years ago to show that, you know, I don't think
2:19.1	the rise of Trump was due to to race specifically as a lot of people on the left had it.
2:26.6	But it was due to the way government worked in the civil rights era, let's say.
2:34.0	So there, you know, I don't think the usual
2:37.0	liberal explanation of what happened is correct, but it's not totally far off either.
	...

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