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Conversations with Bill Kristol Guest: Andrew Ferguson, Senior Editor, The Weekly Standard Table of Contents I: A Career in Writing 0:15 – 28:22 II: Revenge of the Baby Boomers 28:22 – 44:58 III: Conservatism and Journalism 44:58– 53:31 IV: “Crazy U” 53:31– 1:18:51 I: (0:15 – 28:22 ) A Career in Writing KRISTOL: Hi. Welcome to CONVERSATIONS, I’m Bill Kristol. I’m very pleased to be joined today by my colleague Andy Ferguson from The Weekly Standard, author of many, many brilliant articles over the years. FERGUSON: Three. KRISTOL: Three or four. I was going to say four. And three books: most recently, Crazy U, which we will talk about a little later, on current system of higher education; Land of Lincoln, and then a book of essays from 1996, I think, Fools’ Names, Fools’ Faces. Where did that title come from? FERGUSON: Well, it was imposed on me by my publisher through the agency of P.J. O’Rourke, who wrote the introduction. I’ve never quite figured out what it means. It was my idea, actually! KRISTOL: It’s deep, there are many levels to it. FERGUSON: Yes, I just don’t know what they are. I’m sure there are many levels. The phrase is from an aphorism. It goes, “Fools’ names, fools’ faces are often seen in public places.” The idea being that I think there are a lot of idiots in the world. And the conceit of the book was that it was a series of semi-profiles or discussions of individuals – Newt Gingrich, Bill Bennett, Donald Trump, and a number of other people – who were kind of known for their ridiculousness. I wouldn’t say that about Bill Bennett, I should take that back. KRISTOL: I picked it up just a little while ago. I hadn’t looked at it in a while. I guess it came out, what, just after The Weekly Standard began, as I recall. In ’96, yeah. I had forgotten that there was an essay on Donald Trump, which makes it very topical. Written in 1990, I think? FERGUSON: Probably, ’90 or ’91. It was a book review, and it was written – If anybody who has read a good Trump book – that is where he’s had somebody [ghostwrite it] who tries to mimic his tone and his cadence and everything – you start reading it and you just get caught up in the rhythms of these, you know, his bombastic phrasing of everything. Everything is an exaggeration; everything is to the extreme. So when I wrote the review, I thought probably the easiest way to make fun of it was just to use his tone and his conversational pacing, and so on. And so I did, and I thought it was one of the meanest things I’d ever written – up to that point. But apparently, he loved it. He called up – 350 WEST 42ND STREET, SUITE 37C, NEW YORK, NY 10036 KRISTOL: Is that right? Did he call you or did he call the [Wall Street] Journal? FERGUSON: No, no, [the Journal]. Loved it. Saying, “Good review; fair.” And I said, “Oh God, I didn’t do it then.” If he liked it, then I didn’t achieve my objective. KRISTOL: I re-read it a couple of weeks ago and it’s obvious you’re mimicking him or mocking him. But you do so in sort of a gentle way, in a somewhat kind way. The book cheered me up a lot because these are all essays from 20-25 years ago about how ridiculous our public life is. And I’ve been sitting around all year this year – it’s the end of September now, 2016 – thinking we’ve gone totally downhill from some height in the past to this new low in our politics. And reading your books made me think maybe we’ve always been this way. FERGUSON: I think you can go to any particular era, certainly in American history – you go back to the 1840s and there are people laminating the decline – I mean, Thomas Jefferson, before he died, was lamenting “the decline of character,” and so on. That was sort of the theme of this book 20 years ago, and if anything, it’s just gotten worse. I don’t think that the fact that it’s a common trope among social observers that, “things used to be better and they’re worse now,” invalidates the point. So, it’s not really an argument against saying, “God, things are really going to hell,” by saying, “people said that in 1840, and they said it in 1950,” and so on. It just may be the fact that things are always going to hell in a hand basket. KRISTOL: Let’s talk about that. Is it worse, and in what particular way – is there one thing that jumps out to you? You’ve been writing about this your whole adult life. FERGUSON: There are lots of different things that are going on that I think weren’t going on even 25 years ago. Trump is the perfect embodiment of a kind of decline. I remember Ronald Reagan running in 1980 and people said, “My God, this is the end of American politics; you got a guy who is a bad actor and in bad movies, and superficial, clearly doesn’t know anything. By God, back in the days of Ike or Roosevelt, you could never tolerate a man like this.” Of course, he turned out to be a fine president, and actually quite intelligent person, and well-read, and so on. I don’t think that’s going to happen with Trump. I mean, if, God forbid, he was actually the President of the United States. I don’t think that we will find that, you know, back of him, as it was back of Reagan, a long trail of books read and ideas gone through. KRISTOL: Handwritten radio addresses, which he himself edited. FERGUSON: And which are very well written. I just don’t think that that’s going to be the case with Trump. Reagan was a creature of fame, obviously. He wouldn’t have gotten to politics, or he couldn’t have achieved what he achieved in California politics if he had not already been famous, and very good looking, and well-spoken, and so on. But Trump has taken pure fame, which is to say, well-known-ness, fame without any particular achievement behind it. It’s almost as though there is nothing behind the celebrity. That’s different from the way it used to be. KRISTOL: I guess that became, though, a theme of critics in the ’60s, ’50s. I want to say, “famous for being famous.” Didn’t Daniel Boorstin write something on celebrity? A book or an essay? FERGUSON: Yes, he has a wonderful essay on celebrity. KRISTOL: I should go back and look at that. I haven’t thought about that until this minute. 2 FERGUSON: Actually, he wrote some amazing things anticipating what was going to happen. You know, he coined the term pseudo-event, too. KRISTOL: This is Daniel Boorstin, the great American historian – FERGUSON: And then became Librarian of Congress; Reagan appointed him, in fact. KRISTOL: Died about 10 or 15 years ago. FERGUSON: A really very impressive guy. Wonderful, wonderful writer and, I guess, a good historian, if I were able to judge that. He coined this term, pseudo-event, because he noticed in the late ’50s that the press conference, for example, was a new thing. That is an event totally manufactured just to create news. It was done with, of course, the cooperation of reporters and people in the journalism business. So, he thought, isn’t it odd that they can actually create an event that is an event just to be covered? For the sole purpose of getting publicity. Of course, now we are so far beyond that. There are layers upon layers of falsity that have gone on top of the pseudo-event. Now we are at the stage of pseudo, pseudo, pseudo, pseudo-events, I think. KRISTOL: Was TV really the break? We hadn’t really thought about this again until now, but you do think that somehow the television and mass televisions was a moment where democracy went to a whole other level of – FERGUSON: It was truly a mass phenomenon unlike anything. There was – movies, of course, were visual, but to see a movie you had to get up, go the movie theater, and then you had to leave, and so on. The TV was something that came right into your home. KRISTOL: And was live. Could be live. FERGUSON: I’m very interested, in fact, I was thinking about this the other day: Even now – with, of course, the saturation of the Internet in everybody’s lives and its ability to convey information, which has just really taken over everything else – I still believe that TV trumps, if you’ll excuse the phrase, everything. TV fame is unlike Internet fame, with all due respect to the medium. You can’t get famous as quickly and as enduringly as you can on television. There are all these YouTube celebrities and so on, but to achieve a fame that will last, say, maybe three weeks as opposed to 48 hours – television is still, you just can’t beat it. KRISTOL: I guess movies before that were extremely big but that was, again, you’d see a movie by someone every six to nine months, television’s every week or every day, if you’re a newscaster.
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