One of the most interesting and articulate of the never-Trump Republicans—or, rather, ex-Republicans—is Pete Wehner, a longtime Republican official and speechwriter who is deeply disturbed by what the party has become. Last December, I interviewed him about his party, the future, his Christian faith, talk radio, and more. Since that time, he has begun running in The New York Times, where he is a contributing opinion writer, a series of interviews with theologians—check out his conversation with my old teacher Nicholas Wolterstorff, for a start; and he keeps up his work for The Atlantic. He is not bitter, but he is disappointed. When we talked, Trump had not yet been inaugurated; I don’t imagine he has seen anything since that has made him more sanguine about our current president.
Mark Oppenheimer: I’m curious how you found your way into the work that you do.
Peter Wehner: I would say a lot of it was the environment and ethos of my family. My parents had a capacious view of politics, and I found myself drawn to it. I remember talking to my parents about public policy issues and politics at a relatively young age. We’d listen to the radio at the top of the hour, listen to the news, and then I would ask my parents questions about whatever the news of the day or the month was.
My first real memory of politics was the 1972 presidential race, between Nixon and McGovern. I was in sixth grade. Margaret Haney was a McGovern supporter. I was a Nixon supporter, not because I had thought anything through with any detail: I was reflecting the views of my parents. Then in junior high and high school, my favorite classes were social studies, not the hard sciences. In high school, I remember having debates with my social studies teachers.
When I was a junior at the University of Washington in Seattle, I did an internship at the Washington state senate. When I was a senior, I first went to Washington, D.C., as a part of an internship with the Center for Strategic and International Studies. That really was the foothold. It turned out that I got a series of jobs afterward in think tanks, then as a speechwriter for William Bennett, when he was secretary of education in the Reagan administration.
It’s been a more or less lifelong interest.
MO: When I talk to somebody who’s worked at the highest levels of government who went to a state college, it’s almost surprising these days, because so many people come out of the Ivy League, Stanford, or Chicago. If they don’t, they often come out of a Christian school. If you’d said Notre Dame, Hillsdale, or Southern Methodist, a place that you would have chosen for Christian ethnic or religious reasons, that would make sense. Do you feel, and did you ever feel, like an outsider because you were coming from a state college?
PW: I don’t think I really felt like an outsider because I came from the University of Washington and worked with people who had gone to Harvard and done advanced degrees. It’s interesting. In my first job in government, when I was with William Bennett, that was really an ongoing seminar. There were a whole series of people who were highly educated, very thoughtful, and were important in terms of influencing my view of politics.
I was aware that I was not a top student at Harvard, so, in a way, I felt very fortunate to get the jobs I did and have the career I did. A lot of it I would ascribe to fortune, to people that I met along the way who invested in me, helped me, and assisted me.
I also had something to do with it. I worked hard and had some measure of talent, but I felt very fortunate to be where I was. I think I recognized, or I felt like, their education was probably better than mine. Honestly, I felt like they had higher IQs than I did, in many cases. I think what that created in me was a certain work ethic and also the cultivation of a certain kind of intelligence. I remember when I was relatively young in my career, somebody that I worked for said that I had a can-do intelligence—that is, a kind of intelligence to get things done.
I also agree with you that, and I think it’s probably more pronounced now than it was in the past, the elite schools dominate in politics.
MO: Were your parents Christians of the kind that you are now?
PW: No, they weren’t. I was not shaped in terms of faith early in my life. I don’t really have a memory of going to church. I have three siblings, all older, all still alive, and I’m close to all three of them. They remember going to church when we lived in Texas. Even the early years in Richland, which is the city in Washington state where I grew up, I don’t really have a memory of—by the time I was in my early teens we just didn’t go to church. For me, Sundays were sacred because of NFL football.
MO: How did you become a Christian?
PW: I’m not exactly sure, but I can tell you my journey. Between my junior and senior year in high school, I developed an intellectual curiosity about faith. My oldest sister, Patty, had come back that summer and she was interning at Westside Church. I knew she was a person of faith, and I just began having conversations with her, probing her with questions. That was really the beginning of the journey. I don’t know what catalyzed that interest. I didn’t feel, at least consciously, that I was in search of meaning or that life was purposeless. In any event, that was really the beginning of it, and faith didn’t come easily to me.
I remember even a couple of years into my faith journey telling Patty that faith was like sand in the gears for me. There were questions that I felt like faith couldn’t answer. I think I was somewhat intimidated by some of the writings of Paul, because I felt like his love for Jesus was so profound that words couldn’t even express it. I had a sense that he had reached the limits of language. And I thought, “I’m never going to achieve that. How do you fall in love with someone you’ve never met?” I can understand respecting Jesus, admiring his ethical teachings and so forth, but this idea of really giving your heart fully to him was an obstacle.
It’s been an ongoing journey. It’s been a journey that’s been largely unanchored to denominations. I’ve been to churches of all sorts of different denominations, and I’m constantly rethinking my theology and probing even to this day.
I was somewhat intimidated by some of the writings of Paul, because I felt like his love for Jesus was so profound that words couldn’t even express it. I had a sense that he had reached the limits of language.
MO: You got your start in political work in the Reagan administration. Why were you a Republican?
PW: I would say as I got older, the Republican Party imperfectly represented a certain set of values and perspectives that resonated with me, whether it was limited government, strong national defense, or a certain kind of patriotism. The Republican Party was a more amenable home. I think on a deeper level that the Republican Party was the political home of conservatism, and I found myself, for a variety of reasons, more philosophically conservative. Some of it was instinct, some of it was analysis.
One of the reasons I broke with the Republican Party in the Trump era is because I don’t feel like it’s a conservative party. In many ways, I think it’s antithetical to conservatism.
I also grew up in the Carter years, and those were pretty dispiriting years for the United States, between the oil crisis and the Iranian hostage crisis. There was a sense that a lot of people thought Carter was in over his head. There was a degree of incompetence. When Reagan came in, won the election, won forty-four out of fifty states, there was a kind of hopefulness and optimism that Reagan embodied. He was an attractive figure, gave powerful speeches, and embodied a certain view of America that was attractive to a lot of people. I would say now, looking back, it was probably in many respects, or at least in some respects, a mythologized view of America. But it was a powerful one nonetheless, and in important ways, I think, true to what America at its best is.
MO: I’m inclined to agree with you about Reagan as a mythologizer and as a public speaker. Since you were in the Reagan administration, I want to bear down on a couple things that you’ve said that I disagree with.
You talked about Carter being in over his head. Well-meaning Trump supporters will talk about ways in which he was sort of effectual, and I’ll think it was obviously accidental, because he’s not actually a competent political maneuverer. Where his policies succeed, they succeed because a certain percentage of any president’s policies are going to succeed.
Reagan had been an actor and then a governor and was not known for being detail-oriented. He was a better person than my very liberal parents thought he was. But Carter had commanded nuclear submarines. He was an exceptionally competent human being, and he, too, had been a governor. It’s not plausible to me that Reagan had some sort of special sauce as an administrator and executive that Carter didn’t have.
Do you think it is plausible that Reagan was a more competent, efficient, skilled executive than Carter? Carter demonstrably was a gifted and skilled military man, governor, and entrepreneur. How was he in over his head?
PW: There’s no question Carter was extremely intelligent for the reasons that you stated.
The first thing I would say, I think this is relatively objective, is that the conditions of the country objectively were better under Reagan than Carter. I think it’s why Reagan won forty-nine out of fifty states in 1984. The public tends to reward people that they think are stewards of a country when it’s going well, and they tend to punish people when it’s not going well.
I’m not saying Carter was responsible for this, but on his watch you had hyperinflation, you had stagflation, which had never before happened, which was high unemployment, high interest rates. You had the gas lines, which had to do with the Middle East and Saudi Arabia. You had the Iranian hostage crisis, which for 444 days captured the imagination of the country and I think badly hurt him. There were a series of things that happened. His secretary of defense, [Harold] Brown, resigned because of disagreements with Carter.
The other thing is, you can be very smart but not necessarily put together a good and competent administration. I think Reagan’s administration was actually quite competent. Reagan himself was not detail-oriented, you’re right, but you don’t have to be detail-oriented to be successful. What you have to do is have the capacity to provide leadership and to hire the right people.
I would also say where Reagan deserves a great deal of credit, and where he probably doesn’t get enough, was his core insight in terms of the Soviet Union and communism. If you go back and read in the late seventies and early eighties, it was pretty fashionable to say that the iron discipline of communism would defeat the West. The West was decadent. Go back and listen, for example, to Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s commencement address at Harvard, which was a real indictment of the West. There was a sense that America was weak and that the Soviet Union would prevail.
Reagan had the insight that that system would not prevail. The things that he did in terms of defense spending and the pressure that he applied to the Soviet Union hastened the collapse of the Soviet Union.
MO: I’m persuaded that that’s all true, I just think maybe Reagan guessed right. He wasn’t a Sovietologist. He didn’t have any special knowledge. He wasn’t profoundly well-read in the history of communism or economics. It sounds like the way people talk about Trump—my sense of these types of people is, “You don’t actually know anything, but you get certain stuff right. You’re just really lucky, and certain people are lucky.” They guess right about stuff. But do we think he knew stuff that the real Sovietologists didn’t? I mean, he didn’t have knowledge that they didn’t.
PW: Yes and no. Of course, no president has all of the knowledge that any particular expert does. I would say it comes to discernment in wisdom, which is based on the fact sets that you have. What are the patterns that you see? What are the insights that you draw from them? I think that what Reagan understood was that Soviet communism was in some deep and fundamental way contrary to what led to human flourishing and that there were things within the system, economic and otherwise, and the broad corruption that it creates in the people, that weaken the system. He understood that there were intrinsic weaknesses. I think that knowing intrinsic weaknesses wasn’t lucky; he had some insight into the Soviet Union. I just think as it relates to what may have been the central issue of his presidency, he was right when a lot of other people were wrong.
MO: One more question on Reagan. I was born in 1974, so my early political memories are of my parents, who are people of the left, trying to explain to me that what was most wrong with him was he didn’t really care about poor people. I’ve tried to figure that out, because that was the central charge that the people my parents knew on the left had. It actually wasn’t about foreign affairs, though they would have surely disagreed with his views on that.
It was really that the political right, at the time, was caught in a kind of social Darwinism that believed that the Great Society programs had pacified people, made them lazy, and if you took away these things, they would work harder, they’d be better, they’d have better family structures. Of course, with Reagan, there’s no defense, as we now know, of his whole “welfare queen” stuff, a lot of which was built on certain mythologies. Play devil’s advocate against your own side for a moment, if you would. Is there anything to that? Were my parents and their friends onto something about the right at the time, either genuinely not caring about the poor or feeling that it was going to be advantageous to the poor to yank away certain supports, in a way that maybe comported too nicely with what they wanted to believe about the poor anyway?
PW: I’m happy to play devil’s advocate on that. I’d say just as a general matter what you described at the end is true of liberals and conservatives, which is confirmation bias and motivated reasoning. Stipulate that and let’s set it aside. I don’t think Reagan was a social Darwinist, and I don’t think there’s anything in his history that would lead him to think about that. Let me talk about sort of the right more generally and what’s a fair critique of the right.
Let me illustrate it with another issue, and that is the so-called “southern strategy” in law and order. There was a narrative that was used in the seventies and later that said that law and order was a dog whistle used by the right to appeal to ugly sentiments, racist sentiments, particularly in the South, and that there were a series of things that Republicans did that were meant to signal to more racist people that you have a home in our party.
Now, one could have argued, and in fact I did for some period of time, that that was unjustified. Law and order is a legitimate function of government, indeed a central function of government. When Republicans are arguing for law and order, that’s not only legitimate, but it’s wise to do. To take the branding iron of racism and say, “Well, they’re using these languages as code words or as winks and nods,” is not fair.
But then, this was something that was discovered: Lee Atwater did an interview in 1981, and in 2012 The Nation released an audio recording of the interview. Atwater was probably the central political strategist of the eighties, key to Reagan and George H.W. Bush and others. In that interview, Atwater was actually defending Reagan. But he said that in the late sixties you couldn’t use the N-word, so you had to come up with code words. Some of the code words were “law and order,” that kind of thing. Here was Lee Atwater, a loyal Republican, much more loyal than I ever would have been—because I wasn’t particularly a party guy—admitting that they had done that. So did that exist? Yes.
I think that it’s reasonable to say that a lot of liberals and more progressive people were too loose in their attacks on Republicans who were championing welfare reform. I think empirically that can be shown. It can be shown in the 1996 Welfare Reform Act, which of course didn’t happen under Reagan—it was a decade later. There was a heated debate about welfare reform and the liberals and Democrats. Many of them said that this was social Darwinism, and if we got rid of the AFDC [Aid to Families with Dependent Children], and put work requirements on welfare, it would be catastrophic for the poor. In fact, that legislation was passed, thanks to Republicans in Congress, and Bill Clinton signed it into law, and it created a lot of consternation among liberals, because they were angry at Clinton for signing that law. Then if you go five and ten years after that law was signed, I think there’s no question that, empirically speaking, it was a hugely successful program and successful for the poor. I think that the weakness of the liberal and progressive critique was that reforms had actually turned out to be right, but that they disagreed with and ascribed malicious motives to them.
Now, having said that, were there people in the Republican Party historically that did have malicious motives, that were social Darwinist? Sure. Every movement in every political party has people within it. In addition to that, divining the motivations of the human heart is difficult enough for us as individuals, trying to discern our own motivations, let alone the motivations of others. To add to that, I would say that this moment with the Republican Party and Donald Trump underscores that something has gone profoundly wrong, and that wasn’t just a product of the Trump era. There were things that were in motion that led to it.
MO: I take a backseat to no one in my belief that liberals suffer from confirmation bias and can be profoundly stupid. You wrote last July in The Atlantic that figures such as Newt Gingrich and Pat Buchanan de-civilized politics and turned it into a blood sport. I think that the idea that it was culturally okay to belittle people was a conservative innovation, or a right-wing innovation, of the eighties and nineties in American politics. I always wondered what it was like to be a civilized Republican or conservative in the eighties and nineties when, to my mind, cruelty became part of the product?
PW: A couple of things on that. I don’t think, as you said, that cruelty was manifest in the eighties. Newt Gingrich was not a significant figure in the eighties. He became a significant figure really in the nineties. Pat Buchanan at that point was tamed. He was working in the Reagan administration, the communications department. I don’t think Reagan himself, if you examine his rhetoric in the main, was viewed as cruel.
I’m also not sure it was a right-wing innovation. I think belittling people is probably a through-line throughout American history. Was it something that was problematic for the right-wing movement, the conservative movement? I think so. I do think that Newt Gingrich is probably a more central figure in the corrosive turn that politics took. Gingrich is a complicated and not a complicated figure. The history goes back to the late seventies, and then in the eighties, when he was a firebrand, but he was, as I said, contained. Even Reagan had a view that he was a firebrand that needed to be contained. Gingrich became a key figure in 1994, when the Republicans took over the House, after decades in which they never had control of the House. That was when he was most central.
At that time, it was Rush Limbaugh, and then that spawned lots and lots of other people. I think where Limbaugh had an appeal in that he was a genuine sort of genius at talk radio. Talented in a way that I would say was comparable to Johnny Carson. If you read about Johnny Carson, he said in person he was diffident and a removed introvert, not particularly warm. But when he was on The Tonight Show, in front of that microphone, or doing his monologue, he was the best that Johnny Carson could be. Parts of his personality came out.
Limbaugh had an appeal in that he was a genuine sort of genius at talk radio. Talented in a way that I would say was comparable to Johnny Carson.
Limbaugh had a sense of humor, and he was fighting back against liberals, including the areas where liberals deserve to be criticized. But yes, I think politics began to take a dark turn, and I think that increased. Then you had figures like Pat Buchanan. I’d say the nineties was kind of a key decade. Buchanan, you may remember, gave that speech at the GOP convention in 1992 that was very dark, talking about culture war. Buchanan had written some really ugly columns.
Now, at that time, I worked for William Bennett, and Bennett was a prominent critic of Buchanan. If you go back and read the stories, Bill had actually said in the nineties that Buchanan was flirting with fascism. This was an interesting internal conservative debate, because both of them were Catholic, both of them had gone to Gonzaga College High School. But Bill had, I think, a much more capacious view of conservatism and was calling out some of the uglier elements of the conservative movement. Eventually William F. Buckley essentially accused Buchanan of being antisemitic, which caused a split.
So what’s my point in that? My point is that the conservative movement was complicated and was not univocal. But did the conservative movement, or at least the right-wing movement, in American politics, and Republicans, do things a long time ago that explain in part the ugliness of our politics today? Yeah, absolutely.
MO: One of the things I noticed at the time was how many of these figures had messy personal lives. Limbaugh was married four times, Gingrich three times. They didn’t treat their ex-wives well. It’s almost disproportionately that these are people with incredibly messy and sometimes immoral private lives. And what’s more, nobody talks about it. But you went from a world where Reagan was almost seen as unelectable for a time, because he had one divorce in his past, to this world in which nobody cares. Did you notice this with some sort of alarm?
PW: Yeah. I suppose you have to insert the caveat, which is that personal lives are complicated, divorces are complicated. In the case of Gingrich and a lot of other Republicans, you’re absolutely right: they seem to have lived lives that were the poster child for the kind of lives that they criticized.
Throughout much of American history, the private lives of political figures were either ignored, or the argument was, “We’re electing a president, not a pastor.” We have to judge them on their policies and their political wisdom, not on their personal lives. I certainly will grant you that it was primarily people on the right who made personal lives and family values central to what they said, and that there were figures who were championing family values who themselves were living lives that were contrary to that. I think that’s a completely fair criticism.
I thought the excuses for Gingrich versus the criteria that were used against Bill Clinton in 1998, with Monica Lewinsky, were hypocritical. Bill Clinton was eviscerated for having an affair with an intern, but the impeachment had nothing to do with having the affair but with the charge that he lied under oath. If you go back and read the rhetoric, or look at the character resolution the Southern Baptist Convention passed in 1998, or look at Franklin Graham, who’s now an ardent defender of Trump, saying that Bill Clinton was a moral wreck, it gets complicated. John F. Kennedy was a moral wreck, but I think he could be judged as a reasonably successful president.
MO: In the past decade, I’m curious if you felt that you had actually been making a huge mistake in how you thought about your fellow evangelicals, that you’d gotten a lot wrong about what was motivating them or about their sincerity, let’s say. It was always my sense that, when I was reporting on the evangelical subculture, that most of these people were cultural evangelicals, which is to say that when a pollster came and said, “What are you?” they would say, “I’m a born-again Christian.” But we knew from a lot of survey evidence they were just as likely to divorce, have abortions, to have affairs, to watch pornography, et cetera. It was never my thought that they’re all hypocrites, because I understand that all people are hypocrites, but it was that I didn’t even think they were serious evangelicals. I don’t think they’re interested in the Bible as a guide to living in the way that we think they’re claiming to be.
I always said what they really like is low taxes. By the way, it’s the one thing that I think Trump actually still holds to. He could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and get away with it, but I don’t think he could raise middle-class taxes much before people turned on him. That was always my feeling: as long as the Republican Party keeps giving people lower and lower marginal rates, they’re happy to fold in a cultural style that’s called “born-again.”
But I imagine you probably took most of your fellow evangelicals to be more serious about it and maybe still do. I’m curious if you felt at some point, “Holy cow, I’ve been getting a lot of these people wrong.”
PW: Yeah, it’s a really good question. I don’t think what we have seen during the Trump era was a complete shock to my system. Mike Gerson and I wrote a book in 2011 called City Man: Religion and Politics in a New Era. We were pretty critical about the politicization of the evangelical movement. Honestly, if you go back to my writing, for example, I wrote a piece in 1996 in The Washington Post called “The Seduction of Christianity,” where I quoted Jacques Ellul saying that politics was the great threat to the church.
The first piece I ever published was in 1980 in The Tri-City Herald, which is our local paper, because a person had written an article or a letter in the Herald basically saying that the evangelical movement and Christian views were synonymous with Ronald Reagan in opposition to the Equal Rights Amendment, pro-Second Amendment, and a series of other things. I wrote at the end of my letter in response to him, “Mr. Mays seems to think that the Reagan agenda and Christianity are synonymous and conceivably they’re not. In addition, Jesus Christ lived and died for all people: Republicans, independents, and maybe even a few Democrats.” At a very young age, even young in my Christian journey, I think I was alert to several things, which is the dangerous conflation of faith in politics.
There is a tremendous amount of cynicism—I think that is true in the religious right movement. I do think that it’s complicated, and one has to disaggregate. I think that there are some people who are just cynical and are using faith as a means to advance their political ambitions or the political ambitions of their party. We’ve obviously seen that and that’s really troubling.
But I would also say that I have known an awful lot of people, and know to this day people, who are Trump supporters who take their faith seriously. Why they hold the views that they do is a mystery to me. I’ve had endless conversations with these people. I know how they think. I know what their arguments are. I know what their rationalizations are. I would say that now, having lived through so much of the Trump years, the seeds of what we’re seeing now were planted really early on. I do agree with you. I think it’s a fair critique to say that a lot of these people were using faith cynically or even not cynically. But in fact, the way it was working out is that they were using faith to justify what were ideological or political pre-commitments.
MO: There’s this cohort of conservatives I’m very fascinated by. These are people who weren’t just Christians, and they weren’t just conservatives. They were people for whom a figure such as Trump would seem to be particularly anathema because they’re so interested in probity, continence, decorum—yet they went all in for Trump. I’m thinking of people like Eric Metaxas, Larry Taunton, Hugh Hewitt, Dennis Prager. When these people go all in for Trump, some of them will say, “I don’t love Trump, I think he has problems.” But some of them, like Metaxas, they love the guy. So when you look at these figures, is something special going on there? These are people for whom temperamental conservatism was everything, and yet they love Trump.
PW: These people, who once upon a time championed the importance of civic culture, civility, decency, and political figures representing moral rectitude, and then turn and become champions of Trump, deserve criticism. I think the hypocrisy is so obvious. I think for some of them, it was just a matter of being on the team in ways that I think they probably weren’t aware of…. This tribalistic impulse was much more powerful than they knew. It took Donald Trump to expose how profoundly hypocritical they were, and, in a sense, how profoundly unserious they were in their earlier commitments.
Part of what I think happened is that Trump tapped into tremendous anger, grievances, and resentments that these people had built up over decades. They felt like they were patronized and condescended to by the elite culture. In some cases, that was true, although I think it’s overstated. But there was this roiling anger and ferocity of hatred towards the left and toward progressives.
I was a critic of Trump in 2015 and even before that in 2011. I had been quite public in my criticisms of Trump. This person at church that I was corresponding with didn’t dispute my characterization of Trump. But what he said is, “What did we get with George W. Bush, John McCain, Mitt Romney? We got Barack Hussein Obama.” And he said, “Trump is a fighter.” And that I think turned out to be the foothold for a lot of people. It was a sense that this guy’s gonna bring a pistol to a cultural knife fight, and he’s gonna use tactics that we wouldn’t necessarily approve of as Christians, but they will be successful.
All of a sudden you’ve elevated politics from traditional categories into this existential struggle, kind of a Nazi-like moment. If that’s your mindset, then you’re willing to tolerate a lot of transgressions on your side in order to ultimately prevail. I think that happened. I think it was profoundly wrong and misguided, but I think that’s part of what happened.
MO: It turns out that most people are not willing to preface decisions or choices like this with any kind of caveat. I think the reason they won’t say that must have something to do with tribalism; they don’t want their friends mad at them. You want someone to say, “He’s probably morally the worst person who’s ever been president, and it seems that he treats his own family shoddily. If my children grew up like him, I’d be mortified. But in the current moment, I’m electing a president, not a pastor.” But they won’t, and that’s what’s so heartbreaking. Because then you feel like you’re not dealing with a person. Instead, you’re dealing with a talking point or an ideological program.
PW: I completely agree with you. That was exactly my critique in 2016. I think 2024 is different, because we know so obviously who Trump is and the vastness of his corruption. In 2016, I always understood the argument—though I did disagree with it—that said, “We think that Trump is going to be better for the country and the moral values that we care for, so I’m going to vote for him rather than Hillary Clinton.” I understood it, and I disagreed with it.
But I agree with you that the tell was the fact that they would not say that Trump is corrupt and be specific in their criticisms of him, and then say, “But nonetheless, I’m going to vote for him.” I do agree with you that it was tribalistic, which is deep in all people. They wanted to be part of the team. I think that there was a kind of psychic delight that they took in Trump’s cruelty and his aggression. I think for a lot of people it turned out to be life-giving, life-sustaining, vivifying. They saw it and they thought, “Boy, we’re part of this fight.”
I also wouldn’t underestimate the psychological accommodation that happened. I do think that there were people that were somewhat uneasy, almost instinctively uneasy, about Trump and his character defects in 2016, but they made their inner peace with him and they continued to do it. So every transgression, they justified, and over time they accommodated themselves to him, and rather than a bug, it became a feature.
I think that there was a kind of psychic delight that they took in Trump’s cruelty and his aggression. I think for a lot of people it turned out to be life-giving, life-sustaining, vivifying. They saw it and they thought, “Boy, we’re part of this fight.”
MO: We can’t all stay in a perpetual state of outrage, and so it does force this weird accommodation onto everyone. When I’m talking to people with really bad Trump derangement syndrome, people who want to leave the country, I find myself looking for the things he said that I can excuse away as mere rhetoric.
PW: I think your insights are very good, and I agree with them. The Trump era and MAGA moment has been a CAT scan on the country, and particularly on American Christians and evangelicals. I think what it has shown is deeply disturbing.
MO: I am curious, have you paid any personal cost for being anti-Trump?
PW: I’ve paid a cost for sure, but nothing I particularly want to dilate on. There have been strains on personal relationships, too. I’ve tried to navigate those. Of course, if you’re a person whose life has been in the Republican Party, if you’ve served in three Republican administrations like I have, and you break as publicly and as early and as persistently as I have, that’s the nature of these things.
MO: Two policy questions to conclude with. First of all, where should the country be on abortion? Should this be decided by the Supreme Court? Should this be decided by state legislatures? And if so, what should the legislation look like? What’s the way to pull America together across such stark divides on abortion?
PW: I was always a critic of Roe v. Wade on judicial grounds. I thought they invented the decision, and I felt like the outcome they wanted drove the decision rather than the arguments that were employed. Even liberal scholars made that critique. I find abortion to be an almost hopelessly complicated moral issue.
I’m not comfortable with anybody’s position on abortion, because I think there are weaknesses in virtually any position that you hold. I don’t consider an abortion moments after conception to be the equivalent of taking a two-year-old child out and shooting him at the side of a building. I don’t think those are moral equivalents.
I find myself on a spectrum as it relates to abortion. I have intuitions on where I would begin to draw the line, but I think it’s kind of cafeteria style. Is it brain waves, or is it when the fetus begins to feel things? What’s the standard in which I would say, “Abortion is tolerable at this point, but beyond this point, it shouldn’t be allowed”? I think, at some point, the later in the pregnancy it is, the more intolerable it becomes. But again, where would you draw the line? I think it’s somewhat arbitrary. On the other hand, the people who say, “At the moment of conception, that is a human life in every meaningful way, and the law should treat it as such,” I’m not comfortable with that either.
I think it should go to the states, but then the question becomes, “What should be the laws in the states?” Whether it’s fifteen weeks or twenty weeks, that’s debatable. I’m not sure that I could make a more powerful argument for where I would draw that line. I wish I had a clearer view on abortion. I’ve tried to think it through.
The question for the progressive movement is, “Would you say there’s any point in the fifth, sixth, seventh month of pregnancy where you’d say no?” That has its own complications. Most of the time, if somebody is carrying a child that far into the pregnancy, they want the child, and there’s something catastrophic that looks like it’s gonna happen. But philosophically speaking, can they draw a line where they’d say no? A lot of progressives won’t say that they will. I think that is the weakness of the progressive side.
There’s an article that Charles Krauthammer wrote in 1985, which I remember reading at the time and being struck by what I thought was its concision, precision, and illumination. Part of what Charles wrote is this: there’s not the slightest recognition on either side that abortion might be at the limits of our empirical and moral knowledge. The problem starts with an awesome mystery, the transformation of two soulless cells into a living human being. That leads to an insoluble empirical question: how and exactly when does that occur? There hangs the moral issue. What are the claims of the entity undergoing that transformation? How can we expect such a question to yield answers that are not tentative and indeterminate?
So a difficult moral question should command humility, or at least a little old-fashioned tolerance.
MO: There was the philosopher who drew the analogy that requiring a woman to keep carrying a baby is a form of slavery, which I think is interestingly persuasive, right? [Readers: I did not get this quite right. You can read the article I’m talking about here.] You could have an intellectually consistent position that at a certain point, if you choose not to carry the baby anymore, you can’t be made to. If the baby’s viable, somebody has to try to save the fetus’s life. But in a free society, you can’t require people to incubate fetuses if they don’t want to be incubators anymore. I think that’s a more serious position than most people give it credit for. It was Judith Jarvis Thompson, who was an MIT philosopher.
PW: Interesting. I’m not familiar with it, but I may look that up.
MO: Before I discovered that a famous philosopher had that intuition, I confess that I had it: you could be entirely pro-life, and think that life begins at the moment of conception, and still think that there’s something icky about requiring any human being to therefore be the incubator. That’s a problem that I think a pro-life person has to solve in a free society.
If you think that one’s tough, I want to end on the Department of Education, which you worked for. Trump has said he wants to abolish the Department of Education. I love public education, but if somebody asked me to defend what the DOE does, I’m not sure I could tell you. So here’s my question for someone who’s been inside the belly of that beast: should we have a Department of Education, which is not to say should we fund public education, but does it have to be its own department, a cabinet-level department? If so, if it’s operating well, if all pistons are firing, what should it be doing?
PW: I don’t have a strong opinion. Public education would go on if the Department of Education didn’t exist. It was created in 1979. We had public education pre-1979. I think departments can be good or not good depending on who leads them.
What can the Department of Education do that’s good? I think one of the things that it can do is put forward rigorous empirical evidence on a whole series of metrics: scores, graduation rates, and much more than that. It can promote good education practices. When we were at the Department of Education, we put out a whole series of books about what works generally for schools, what works for disadvantaged schools, things that schools could do to prevent drug abuse in schools.
Secretary Terrence Bell released a report in the first Reagan administration called A Nation at Risk, which really galvanized the reform movement in the country, in part because it gave voice and empirical evidence to the decline that we had been experiencing in education. I think the department can do that. I think it can incentivize certain programs that are successful.
MO: You know, we got Linda McMahon, and the last secretary was from Connecticut, so Connecticut is sending all the best people to the Department of Education.
PW: Every department could use a World Wrestling Federation ethic.
MO: Before we go, are there several people whom you’re optimistic about in politics? Let’s put it this way: whom would you like to see running for president in four years?
PW: On the Democratic side, Josh Shapiro is one name that intrigues me. He seems to have a good record of being a pretty intelligent person, more moderate, I would say, than a lot of Democrats have been. But I’m sure there are others. The Democrats have a reasonably deep bench.
In terms of the Republican Party, the people I’d like to see run couldn’t run, because they’re no longer Republicans. Liz Cheney would be good in many ways. Realistically speaking, out of the people that we see, Nikki Haley would be acceptable. Although, I’ve been disappointed in her and the way that she, like so many Republicans, have made their own inner peace with the MAGA world.
But my sense is that this is a thoroughly MAGA-fied party, and that the Republican Party is going to nominate somebody who is in the Trump mold. I think that’s going to be deeply, deeply problematic. There aren’t any figures I could identify right now on the landscape where I would say, “This is an impressive political talent.” But of course, hardly anybody knew Lincoln was going to be Lincoln, right? And Bill Clinton wasn’t known outside of a small circle until 1992.
MO: You never see these things coming.