Robert Merry On McKinley, Tariffs, Conservatism

Robert is a journalist and historian. He served as president and editor-in-chief of Congressional Quarterly, the editor of The National Interest, and the editor of The American Conservative, and he covered Washington as a reporter for the WSJ for more than a decade. He has written many history books, including the one we're discussing this week: President McKinley: Architect of the American Century. It’s a lively read, a fascinating glimpse of fin-de-siècle American politics, and of a GOP firmer on tariffs — but a hell of a lot more virtuous than it is under Trump today.

For two clips of our convo — on McKinley’s heroism during the Civil War, and the reasons he differs so much from Trump — head to our YouTube page.

Other topics: Robert’s journalist dad and his conservative influence; his own career as a journo; McKinley’s roots in Ohio; his abolitionist parents; his mentor Rutherford B Hayes; his time in Congress; the economic depression of the 1890s; the debate over the gold standard; McKinley’s “front-porch strategy” besting the great populist orator William Jennings Bryan; his underrated presidency; his modesty and “commanding quiet”; his incremental pragmatism — in the spirit of Oakeshott’s “trimmer”; ushering in American empire; the Spanish-American War; the sinking of the Maine; taking over the Philippines; annexing Hawaii; leaving Cuba to the Cubans; the Panama Canal; McKinley’s strong support of tariffs; his later pivot towards reciprocity in trade; his lackluster record on race relations; his assassination by an anarchist; Teddy taking over; his bombast contrasting with his predecessor; trust-busting; McKinley’s remarkable marriage; his wife’s epilepsy; HW Bush; and if a McKinley type of conservative could succeed in today’s GOP.

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: Chris Matthews — who just revived “Hardball” on Substack, Tara Zahra on the revolt against globalization after WWI, Walter Isaacson on Ben Franklin, Arthur C. Brooks on the science of happiness, Paul Elie on crypto-religion in ‘80s pop culture, and Johann Hari coming back to turn the tables and interview me for the pod. Please send any guest recs, dissents, and other comments to dish@andrewsullivan.com.

From a fan on last week’s pod on Biden’s decline and cover-up:

I found every minute of your interview with Tapper and Thompson fascinating, and I appreciate you holding their feet to the fire a bit when it comes to the media’s dereliction of duty throughout the Biden presidency.

There’s plenty about the actions of the political class that should make your blood boil, in particular Ron Klain’s coup in using Biden’s lack of acuity to turn it into a Liz Warren-type administration, despite voters’ wishes. But at its core, the mission of the political class wasn’t honesty; it was to win. One can understand why they’d say, “We have to lie for the good of our team,” but that should not have been on the minds of journalists. Whether in the end they helped or hurt Trump is beside the point; we shouldn’t have a media that overwhelmingly sees its mandate as achieving a partisan outcome instead of telling the truth, wherever it may lead.

I appreciate that Tapper and Thompson wrote this book. Like you, I am eagerly awaiting the sequel that digs into how the press failed so badly.

I could have gone harder on the press, I know. But of all the knee-jerk defenders of Biden, I don’t think Tapper was among the worst. A partial dissent:

I appreciate you not engaging in a congratulatory circle-jerk with Tapper and Thompson, as did every other podcast I’ve listened to. But I still think you were far too easy on Tapper (I’m not familiar with Thompson’s work). The cover-up of Biden’s cognitive decline is not primarily a story about a secretive and troubled family, interesting though that is. (Nearly every major political family has a great deal of dishonesty and skeletons in its closet.) And it is not primarily about the complicity of elected Dems; politics is ugly stuff, and look no further than the obsequiousness of prominent Republicans vis-à-vis Trump with regard to politicians only caring about their own careers.

Primarily, then, the story of Biden’s decline is about a media that is so biased and ideological that it was an active participant in the cover-up — until that cover-up exploded in spectacular fashion on the debate stage. When Lara Trump spoke about Biden’s decline in 2020, for example, Tapper browbeat her for supposedly mocking someone with a childhood stutter:

Glenn Greenwald also pointed out that CNN ran multiple segments speculating about Trump’s supposed decline because he once walked slowly down an icy ramp or held a cup of coffee in a strange way (really). Yet Tapper had the gall on your podcast to say that he and nearly all of his colleagues supposedly missed Biden‘s decline because “the sources” weren’t great. Really??? The “sources” were their eyeballs. Literally every week, there were new clips on social media showing Biden’s precipitous and impossible-to-miss decline. Here’s just one of literally hundreds of examples, from 2022:

And one more, from just before the June debate:

Americans’ level of trust in mainstream media is now in danger of falling into the 20s. Anyone concerned about people fleeing to Alex Jones and X accounts like Catturd (I certainly am) can hardly blame them when there was a concerted effort to lie and gaslight the public throughout one of the more consequential cover-ups in US history. Now would be seem to be a uniquely important time for an honest accounting of the partisanship, insularity, dishonesty, and condescension of the mainstream media. Instead, I see nothing other than heads in the sand.

I went over many Tapper clips. I don’t think that his blaming the stutter was so bad … because it was in 2020, before the obvious signs of deterioration became hard to ignore. Another on the media angle:

I wonder if the biggest problem is the pool from which so many journalists are drawn these days. That pool would be the one that I have swum in my entire life. I’m a physician who graduated from elite schools. I’m not close friends with any reporters, but I have a few on the periphery of my peer group, including two whose names I sometimes see attached to articles in the NYT, The Atlantic, or The New Yorker. My peer group is full of earnest, hard-working, very smart, generally ethical people who have achieved success by following the path that got them into good colleges in the first place: learn what the group is looking for, and then excel at it. That my peer group is a blue blob is also true, but it’s not as relevant as their institutionalist mindset.

It was interesting that you delved into Thompson’s life story as a Mormon, and then let Tapper off with “college, journalism career, let’s move on.” I’d guess that Tapper and I have fewer than six degrees of separation, whereas I know very few people who were raised as Mormons, let alone who have gone through the process of questioning and then breaking with that church. I believe that both of them are super smart, hard-working, and ethical, but I’d argue that Thompson’s personal history is as valuable to society as are his reporting skills.

Agreed. I’m trying to find guests without that kind of background. And it’s not always easy! But Thompson is terrific.

Another listener gets personal:

I nearly fell over this week when I heard your surprise at Biden’s behaviour around denial, blame, addiction, dysfunction, and not acknowledging grandchildren.

I am an Irish Catholic, as are my family. I’ve polled among my friends, and we all agree that Irish families have denial down to a fine art. I can tell you from own experience with my parents’ alcoholism that Irish families close ranks against those who tell the truth or present some inconvenience to the continued denial. My brother and I were in a care home when my dad was hospitalised with Korsakov syndrome (wet brain). His mum blamed my mum and had no contact with me or my brother for years afterwards. Of course, this doesn’t make it right, but it’s a typically observed dysfunction.

I am not unfamiliar with the pattern, believe me. I think I began my career as a journalist in some ways by calling out the bullshit in my own family as a kid and teen. On habits of denial, another listener writes, “Given that so much of this episode was focused on armchair psychoanalysis (I don’t mean that as a criticism), I will offer some thoughts of my own”:

First, I think you and your guests don’t really take into account the power of denial and the extent to which it can impact people. You ascribe conscious manipulation with regards to Jill Biden. You note that since she saw Joe every day, and even helped him more and more, she must have seen his deterioration, and thus any denial was merely fabrication and manipulation.

But let me offer this: I watched my father-in-law deny my mother-in-law’s worsening dementia for years. I watched him validate her outright denial that conversations ever took place; I watched him let her continue to see patients as a psychotherapist and deny she was losing her memory as her practice was collapsing; I watched him get a neuropsychologist’s 20-page report diagnosing her with neuro-degenerative disease and completely wipe it away from his consciousness.

And when my wife or I would speak to him privately, he’d still say everything was fine — and he earnestly believed it. He couldn’t see what everyone else could. He had convinced himself that nothing was wrong, even as the evidence was undeniable and his own actions would suggest otherwise. So don’t underestimate Jill’s own denials to herself.

Second, it is surprising to me that nobody has considered pseudo-dementia caused by depression as an explanation for Joe. The authors say it themselves — that Joe declined after his Beau’s death and Hunter’s relapse. Depression in the elderly often mimics dementia.

Next up, a fan of the Tanenhaus pod:

Thanks for the episode on Bill Buckley — twas a good one! I’m 35 and had never heard of him, and I found the episode both entertaining and so informative about periods of recent history that I know virtually nothing about. I’m trying to become more informed and principled in my politics and I think I’m leaning towards conservatism. Episodes like this help me understand at least some of the things I need to understand to know what I believe.

Another fan:

I’ve been waiting for this book for ten years. Can’t wait to get it. Buckley was my hero in San Francisco in the late ‘60s when I was in high school, and he’s the reason I went to Yale. So listening to this episode was pure pleasure. Thanks and God bless.

Buckley wasn’t a hero for this listener:

I really enjoyed the episode. No doubt, Buckley was a consequential figure of the 20th century, but for me, he encapsulates the essential hollowness of conservatism. He had no answers for the complex challenges of governing a state. He was really just the obnoxious rich kid in class posing as the contrarian intellectual all his life. As you noted, Buckley and his predecessors, his mentors, and his peers had no real answers for the Great Depression — for which they helped start — and for them, conservatism was all a subconscious desire to return the elites as rulers, with some Greek/Roman/Enlightenment philosophy added in.

Fast-forward to the present and we see this in the past few decades of Republican institutional mendacity about spending, taxes, trickle-down economics, religion, etc. — and none of it really addresses the “problems” they say they can solve. Their utopia of small government, less spending, and low taxes while claiming that the free market and religion will solve the other problems is just fiction. But if I’m wrong, please tell me where it has been realized?

Any time in America before FDR maybe? Another listener looks to the racial theme of the episode:

It was a delightful and intriguing interview. Just fantastic. But I have a thought that has nagged at me since listening to it. Could the contradiction between WFB and his family’s support for segregation and the kindness and generosity they showed to the very people they wanted to keep segregated be explained by their own experience of having been discriminated against as Catholics? In other words, their attitude may have boiled down to:

You don’t need the government to help you, so don’t go begging to them. Do it independently, within your own community. It's much more rewarding and effective, if not necessarily expedient. And with the help of God and the Holy Spirit, we will help you acquire the schooling and land to forge ahead in that endeavor.

No wonder WFB so admired Malcolm X.

I hope this doesn’t come across as a Pollyanna-ish apology for the defense of segregation. But if there’s one thing Hitch’s support for the Iraq War taught me, it’s that solid, good-faith arguments can be found to have been mounted in favor of even the most noxious ideas. And to mitigate the arrogance that often accompanies hindsight, I try to apply that notion to history. It does have its limits (paging Mr Godwin), but I find it also yields a much richer and thorough examination of the timeline of civilization — human nature being the undercurrent of all human events.

Another on the race angle:

The portion of your talk with Sam on the Buckley’s racial paradoxes in Camden, SC brought to mind the third of the three great Alabama icons, George Wallace, as presented by the band Drive-By Truckers in their song “The Three Great Alabama Icons” from the 2001 album Southern Rock Opera — the duality of the Southern thing, as they called it:

I don’t lean on music for all my history lessons, but this song has always stood out from a first-person Alabaman point of view. Well, and the band is great, too.

In the same vein, Jason Isbell — a member of Drive-By Truckers during the 2000s who experienced the traditional rock journey of substance abuse — has a Dylan lyric tattooed on his arm that “reminds him about the idea of salvaging things,” and for him it “evokes the idea of loss as well as learning and growing from the experience.” I imagine that Buckley — in his later years and minus the loud guitars — might have enjoyed a conversation with Drive-By Truckers.

Here’s a recommendation for the pod:

There’s a fascinating review of TV mogul Barry Diller’s new book in The New Yorker. An excerpt:

His gay life, sadly, is mostly a source of early misery and bitter feeling — a reminder of how recently, and how blessedly, homosexuality has been normalized. He was certain, for a time, that being gay was a kind of disease; facing an AIDS test in the eighties, he was seized not just by the rational fear of illness but by a larger dread of losing control. His tentative steps toward self-acceptance are touchingly cumbersome. Fully coming out was the work of years. He speaks of an affair with, among others, Johnny Carson’s stepson.

As it happens, the mainstreaming of gay culture was one of the engines of his creative era. Diller doesn’t say this, but [when he was CEO of Paramount Pictures] it’s striking that “Saturday Night Fever” took a gay subject, disco dancing — adapted from a New York magazine story about a working-class subculture now known to be fictional — and played it straight, projecting onto the hero an improbably heterosexual life.

Diller could be a good interview subject!

Well, yes, but I’m afraid I feel a little too conflicted, having been a friend of his for many years, and an employee (when the Dish pitched our tent at the Daily Beast) for a few years. He’s an extraordinary man, but I also felt nothing could top Maureen Dowd’s profile, and I decided to let it go. I do have a couple of hilarious stories about a dinner party he once brought me to — featuring Calvin Klein, David Geffen, Elizabeth Taylor and her then-beau, Larry Fortensky — but maybe I’ll leave that for my memoir, if I ever do one.

Next up, a reader continues the debate “regarding the complaints from a few of your readers about the percentage of foreign students at American universities”:

Their complaints are typically American: they want what they want, but don’t want to pay for it.