Christopher Caldwell On Trump And Europe

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.