What Happened to the Republican Party?: A Conversation with Bret Stephens (Episode #329)
What this covers
Sam Harris speaks with Bret Stephens about the current state of the Republican Party. They discuss the strange change in Republican attitudes toward Putin, the character of Tucker Carlson, the war in Ukraine, the failures of elites and experts, the tension between concerns about misinformation and free speech, the Hunter Biden laptop, the 2024 Presidential election, how Trump captured the Republican Party, the criminal charges against Trump, the future of conservatism, and other topics.
Bret Stephens is an opinion columnist with The New York Times and editor-in-chief of Sapir, a new Jewish quarterly. He has previously served as editor-in-chief of The Jerusalem Post and as foreign-affairs columnist for The Wall Street Journal, for which he won the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for commentary. He was raised in Mexico City, educated at the University of Chicago, and was a NeverTrumper from Day One. In 2022 he was banned for life by the government of Russia from ever visiting that country.
Website: https://www.nytimes.com/column/bret-stephens
August 11, 2023
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Stevens argues that the Republican Party has undergone a fundamental ideological shift from Cold War internationalism to isolationist nationalism, driven by Trump's rise and exemplified by admiration for authoritarian figures like Putin, while simultaneously critiquing how institutional failures and expert overreach have undermined public trust in a way that benefits fringe voices and undermines democracy.
- The GOP transformed from the party of internationalism (Eisenhower, Vandenberg) to one embracing isolationism and 'truculent nationalism' that views Putin as a model
- Expert institutions lost credibility through arrogance and refusal to acknowledge failures (COVID school closures, vaccines, etc.), creating a vacuum filled by conspiracy theorists
- Attempts to suppress misinformation through censorship paradoxically amplify it by creating narratives of persecution, while media bias in withholding stories (Hunter Biden laptop) further erodes institutional trust
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Experts in one field (e.g., climatologists) should not presume their expertise extends to related fields (economics, politics) without acknowledging the limits of their knowledge, and large problems like climate change require weighing competing interests from multiple domains, not just optimizing for one variable.
“say you are a climatologist and you know that the Earth is warming and that this is going to have major Downstream effects for Humanity okay that does not necessarily make you an expert in economics does it make you an expert in politics it doesn't make you an expert in a number of related fields all of which need to be brought into a large conversation about the long-term effects of climate change”
We could save tens of thousands of lives annually by enforcing a 30 mph national speed limit, but we don't, because we recognize that the public interest involves trade-offs between competing goods: public health is one, but so are mobility, time, and freedom; this principle should have applied to COVID policy but didn't.
“we could save tens of thousands of lives every day or every year if we had a national speed limit of 30 miles an hour okay we could just overnight if we enforced a 30 mile an hour speed limit tens of thousands of lives would be saved so we would be doing something for the sake of Public Health but we would be doing it at a cost that I don't think anyone listening to to this podcast for a moment would accept”
Journalists should not deliberately withhold stories based on timing considerations or predictions about electoral impact; even if a story about a political opponent emerges at an inconvenient time, the editorial standard should be identical regardless of which party is involved—if you would publish it about Trump, you should publish it about Biden.
“I don't think it's the business of those of us in the journalistic profession certainly on the news side not the opinion side to try to tip the scales by withholding stories that we would otherwise consider legitimate”
Stevens wrote an anti-Putin editorial for the Wall Street Journal's editorial page at the end of 1999 and received backlash primarily from the left (writers at The Nation), but the Republican party's position on Putin reversed with Donald Trump's rise to political prominence.
“I wrote my first Auntie Putin editorial for the Wall Street journals editorial page at the very end of 1999 and would get into arguments with figures on the left particularly riders for places like the nation on the threat that Putin constituted I remember writing a column in 2006 titled Russia's becoming an enemy of the United States and all the Flack I took from that column was was from from the left and the switch really came about with the ascendancy of of Donald Trump”
Social media algorithms specifically designed to maximize engagement boost divisive lies and misinformation preferentially, which is distinct from and more problematic than the baseline human tendency to believe false things, and addressing this requires understanding that algorithmic signal-boosting is an editorial decision with consequences.
“when you're talking about social media in particular it's not really a question of platforming or not necessarily it's just the question of of what the algorithm does to boost misinformation and and outrage preferentially right so it's the signal boost that is the unique feature here and which is genuinely new”
When institutions and authorities suppress or censor claims they judge to be false or harmful, they often inadvertently amplify those claims by creating a narrative of persecution and martyrdom, making censored figures appear more credible and trustworthy to those skeptical of institutional authority.
“when you try to de-platform prominent people you're giving them a patina of victimization which they really which which benefits them in ways that those who have de-platformed them never intended”
The Republican Party has reverted from post-Eisenhower conservative internationalism to its pre-World War II isolationist stance, which Stevens calls 'truculent nationalism'—a worldview where figures like Putin who embody aggressive nationalism and reject international norms appeal to Republicans because they model the kind of nationalist self-interest Republicans now admire.
“the Republican party which starting with Eisenhower and maybe even before Arthur Vandenberg and his alliance with with Harry Truman the Republican party went from being a kind of a conservative internationalist party to reverting to what it had been in the pre-war pre-World War II years an isolationist or what what I what I call truculent nationalism”
There are still many Republicans (exemplified by Mitch McConnell) who are as anti-Putin as Democratic figures like Jake Sullivan and Tony Blinken, so the shift in Republican foreign policy is not universal but represents a shift in which faction has become dominant within the party.
“I think we should be careful because there's still a lot of Republicans you know the Mitch McConnells right of the world who are just as anti-putin as Jake Sullivan and Tony blinken and other other Democrats”
Ukraine is not an obscure country but is at the heart of Europe, and the US budget allocation to Ukraine is a small fraction of total federal spending (approximately 0.5 to 1% of the ~6 trillion dollar budget), so the argument that Ukraine aid diverts resources from domestic problems is mathematically false.
“when people say well most Americans couldn't find Ukraine on a map that to me suggests that Americans ought to spend more time looking at Maps because Ukraine is not some obscure Little Country six degrees to the left of nowhere it's it's at the very heart of Europe”
Vaccine skepticism was historically associated with the left (California-based anti-vax movements), based on the precautionary principle and concerns about inadequate testing, but this position has substantially flipped in the past 5-10 years toward the right
“up until 10 or 20 years ago it was typically the left that insisted on very very extensive testing of all new drugs because we didn't want another thalidomide...it was the left that talked a lot about the precautionary principle...back 20 years ago all of the kind of anti-vaxx woo-wooism seemed to me to be coming from kind of California lefties and people who believed in herbal solutions instead of antibiotics and then that again kind of flipped completely in the last five or ten years”
The misinformation problem is often overstated, and the real issue is institutional suppression of speech; people have always believed and circulated false claims throughout history, and a free society necessarily tolerates considerable falsehood, so the focus should be on institutional behavior rather than on eliminating misinformation.
“people are going to believe and have believed at any given time including long before Twitter and Facebook could Turbo Charge misinformation or disinformation people have believed all kinds of crap that's just in the nature of a free Society I mean you can go back at any point in history and find people fully subscribed to Preposterous conspiracy theories”
The Wuhan virology Institute as a potential pandemic origin source was effectively banned from discussion on Facebook until it turned out to be a well-grounded hypothesis, exemplifying how censorship gatekeepers can suppress accurate information
“Facebook's ban on any mention of the Wuhan virology Institute as a potential source for for the pandemic where they they'd effectively banned it until you know until it turned out it was actually a perfectly well-grounded a well-grounded hypothesis”
Twitter's blocking of the New York Post's account when it released its Hunter Biden article was a more 'heavy-handed and harder to defend' form of censorship than editorial decisions not to lead with the story, and it produced the Streisand Effect of attracting more attention
“Twitter actually blocking the New York post's account once they released an article on the topic that seemed much more heavy-handed and harder to defend and I think you know it did actually have the sort of the Streisand Effect that you just referenced a moment ago that it really brought more attention to it but it was also just less defensible in my view”
The claim that the US provoked Putin to invade Ukraine by dangling NATO membership is false; there was no realistic prospect of Ukrainian NATO membership when Russia invaded, and even if there had been, countries like Poland and the Baltic states sought NATO membership precisely because they understood from their own history that without Western security guarantees, Russia would re-emerge as an aggressive great power.
“there was no Prospect of Ukrainian membership in NATO none whatever and Putin perfectly knew it perfectly well the subject was raised in 2008 and then buried afterwards even now it's there's really not much of a prospect of at least near-term Ukrainian membership in NATO”
Sunlight (transparency and open debate) is generally the best disinfectant against misinformation, so even fringe figures like Alex Jones should be platformed and debated rather than censored, because censorship suggests institutional fear rather than confidence in the truth.
“we have this basic assumption that sunlight is the best disinfectant right so if there's if he's wrong about anything material that will be exposed if you just talk to him right so why not talk to him why not just put him on the Joe Rogan podcast for four hours and let them roll”
Supporting Ukraine is not charity but national interest because: (1) it demonstrates to other US allies (Taiwan, etc.) that the US will defend democracies against autocratic aggression, and (2) allowing Putin to consolidate gains now will make future conflicts more likely and more costly, so supporting Ukraine now prevents larger future conflicts.
“we have a vital National interest in showing that we are prepared to defend embattled democracies in the face of this kind of aggression not just for the sake of ukrainians but for the sake of whoever it is that autocrats like Putin but also ji and maybe Khamenei and in Iran want to attack next so ji is looking very carefully at the outcome of Ukraine to determine whether he's going to strike Taiwan and if Putin is allowed to win or at least to keep his gains and freeze the conflict we will be in Greater danger not less”
Populist discontent with international engagement, institutions, and experts has a kernel of truth because institutions and experts have genuinely failed and refused to acknowledge those failures, but the solution of pure isolationism is false because the US has legitimate national interests in maintaining a rules-based international order.
“we have to be able to do many things at once and so what we're devoting to Ukraine is important because we want to maintain a world in which dictators aren't rampaging everywhere and getting stronger and more confident we want to avoid a situation like the 1930s where the dictators combine and we have to face a genuine Global crisis”
Public health officials and experts during the COVID pandemic failed to acknowledge the trade-offs between competing public goods (disease prevention vs. childhood development, education, mental health) and instead treated public health in isolation as the sole consideration, then compounded this error by refusing to acknowledge their failures afterward.
“during the covet crisis we conflated the interests of Public Health with the public interest that that's to say that public health is a part of the public interest but it's not the sole part of the public interest”
During the Ukraine war, the CIA and Western military analysts have been wrong in their predictions multiple times: they estimated Kyiv would fall in 96 hours, then later predicted Russian collapse that didn't occur, suggesting significant epistemic humility is warranted about military outcomes.
“when Russia first invaded I think the CIA was estimating 96 hours or something like that until key fell then there was a period of sureness where we thought that the questions would surely fold completely because of their early reversals we've been surprised in the last few months since the counter offensive began that the Russians are not capitulating as we thought they would that there's more morale in Russian lines than had been reported”
Some prominent Republicans (Vivek Ramaswamy among them) are claiming that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump because media outlets withheld coverage of the Hunter Biden laptop, treating insufficient media attention as grounds for election invalidity.
“some some prominent Republicans walking around saying this what this was how the election was stolen from trump it was it wasn't stolen and all the ways Trump claimed it was stolen it was stolen because we did not give the hunter Biden laptop Story the appropriate Hearing in a timely way I mean this is what Vivek ramaswamy is saying and and perhaps others are saying”
Ukrainians Harris met with were unanimously determined to reclaim all territory lost since 2014 (including Crimea), not because of US pressure but because they view territorial sovereignty as non-negotiable; while settlements are possible, they are contingent on Ukrainian assessment of their military situation, not on external pressure.
“the ukrainians I met with all insisted to the last person that there is that they feel they are every bit is eager to reclaim Crimea which was seized back in 2014 as they are to reclaim the the land that the Russians took since since 2022”
Kyiv was 'thriving' during Stephens' recent visit, which surprised him given that the city has lost many residents to war, suggesting that Ukrainian commitment to normal life is strong enough to maintain a functioning economy and society despite active conflict.
“Kiev is thriving it was it was stunning to me that a city where so many people have been so many siblings are at war is insisting that life should be led as close to normal as possible”
Trump became more politically potent and polling stronger after being banned from Twitter for three years, suggesting that efforts to de-platform him backfired rather than diminished his influence.
“did Trump become more potent or less potent after he was banned by Twitter judging by how he's doing at the polls after um you know a three year ban and more potent now I don't know if there's a causation there but the extent to which the extent to which his efforts to de-platform him have backfired is is another issue to I think that's that's worth considering”
The claim that NATO expansion provoked the Russian invasion is the 'Mearsheimer hypothesis' and Stevens considers it simply false
“I guess that's the mere shimer hypothesis I think that's simply false”
The political polarization and misinformation apparatus mean that public health and other experts face a genuine communication problem: scientific nuance gets weaponized as 'they don't know anything', yet oversimplification breeds public distrust
“every scientifically scrupulous Nuance is going to be weaponized as you see they don't know anything how do you talk to trumpistan”
Totalitarian and post-totalitarian societies maintain power through psychological mechanisms including the desire to obey, the willingness to be misled as long as one feels belonging, and the psychological categories of totalitarianism that the Trump playbook echoes to an eerie degree, suggesting Trump's tactics parallel those of totalitarian leaders.
“the desire to to obey the desire to be the the willingness to be misled so long as you're you're made to feel as if you belong that those methods by which totalitarian or post-totalitarian societies were able to rule and to stay in power that those in effect recall or or well the the Trump Playbook recalls those methods it to an eerie degree”
Journalistic outlets had a defensible rationale to defer coverage of the Hunter Biden laptop until after the 2020 election, given the timing (10 days before voting), the source (Rudy Giuliani with clear partisan intent), the inability to fully vet it (Russian disinformation risk), and the 2016 precedent of Comey's email reopening affecting polls.
“I thought it was a genuinely difficult call journalistically whether to pay attention to the laptop 10 days before the election given what had happened in 2016 when Comey reopened the the Hillary Clinton email case and we knew what that you know though her candidacy might have failed for other reasons it we knew that that was the the coup de gras with respect to what you know immediately hour by hour what happened to the polls uh and we and for obvious reasons anyone who is was worried about Trump getting a second term uh him being a sitting president who would not commit to a peaceful transfer of power the idea that we had to be beholden to Rudy giuliani's timetable and take the bait 10 days before the election and and start putting front page articles about the hunter Biden laptop on the cover of your newspaper that just seemed idiotic”
Experts simplified COVID messaging (claiming vaccines prevent transmission, offering definitive claims without caveats) not primarily from arrogance but from recognizing that people treat complex, nuanced information as permission to ignore guidance; complete scientific honesty about uncertainty would have been less persuasive for the goal of encouraging vaccination.
“You could see Public Health officials essentially talking to Children right and just saying listen we know you're all a bunch of conspiracy adult Maniacs we're going to try to dumb this down to a point where you're just you know most people most of the time are not going to screw this up so yeah get the vaccine if you're being a good citizen by getting the vaccine it will reduce transmission it's safe now we know that if you double click on any one of those claims it's a far more nuanced conversation”
Media outlets that apply different editorial standards to different political parties based on their preference about electoral outcomes lose credibility, and this credibility loss drives people to seek information from fringe sources, so the attempt to 'protect' democracy through selective reporting actually undermines trust in institutions and damages democracy.
“so it's the same in a sense we're talking about the same thing by trying to have a larger role than simply the role of being disseminators of solid incredible information we harm trust in in what we do we harm trust in the concept of expertise and we drive people to the margins of the information economy”
The standard to apply to expert failure is: 'Did you acknowledge the limits of your certainty and recognize competing interests, or did you act with consummate arrogance and then refuse to apologize?' The first is forgivable; the second created the crisis of institutional trust.
“not only did did experts often insist on solutions that turned out to be inadequate but they did so with consummate arrogance and and I think that has that they have not helped their their case”
The concept of trade-offs is crucial for sound public decision-making because most major policy problems involve choosing among least-bad options, not finding a single right solution; focusing on the negative half of a trade-off can make any choice seem scarcely tolerable.
“I think the concept of trade-offs is is an important one because there's so many situations where we imagine there is just one right solution without acknowledging that you know whatever the best you know satisficing solution is it will represent a trade-off and and you know if you focus on the the other half of that trade-off it can seem scarcely tolerable you're often picking between the least bad among many bad Avenues”
Tucker Carlson is cynical and primarily concerned with advancing his own brand rather than holding any consistent political viewpoint, and this cynicism—the belief that everything is power and manipulation—is uniquely toxic to the MAGA movement because it creates an audience that views politics as pure competition rather than as a space for truth-seeking.
“I said this to my wife or someone I said I've never met anyone as cynical as this guy that you know his his principal aim is sort of to advance his brand and whether that means coming across as a kind of bow tied William F Buckley wannabe or uh you know feverish populist angry every man he'll he'll do whatever it is to advance the cause of of himself irrespective of a point of view”
Tucker Carlson held isolationist and nationalist views long before Trump, as evidenced by arguments Stephens had with him about Afghanistan years ago, suggesting that Trump did not create Carlson's isolationism but rather gave it a political vehicle.
“the the the the the isolationism the nationalism that's been there for uh I think a fairly long time I know for a fact that it it predates Trump because I once was in a argument about Afghanistan with him”
RFK Jr.'s appeal derives from two sources: (1) sympathy for someone being maligned and censored, which creates an anti-establishment identity appeal, and (2) his ability to position himself as advocating for 'free speech and open debate' which signals intellectual freedom to people skeptical of mainstream consensus.
“she didn't like the way RFK Jr was sort of being being maligned and censored and derided she liked what she thought was sort of his forthright belief and free speech and open debate which I think he's very cleverly playing up”
Ukrainians are living their lives as though there is no war while simultaneously fighting the war as though there is no everyday life, exemplified by the fact that they seek safety when air-raid sirens sound but otherwise insist on conducting normal life despite active conflict.
“I think I said this in a comment that ukrainians are living their lives as if there is no war and they are fighting the war as if there is no everyday life it's a very striking fact to be awakened multiple times in the middle of the night because Russian drones or cruise missiles are heading your way”
People have always believed absurd conspiracy theories—JFK assassination theories, John Birch Society claims—which is inherent to free societies, making it difficult to distinguish between healthy skepticism of authority and unfounded paranoia
“people are going to believe and have believed at any given time including long before Twitter and Facebook could Turbo Charge misinformation or disinformation people have believed all kinds of crap that's just in the nature of a free Society I mean you can go back at any point in history and find people fully subscribed to Preposterous conspiracy theories whether it was you know who killed JFK I grew up with that you know answer Lee Harvey Oswald although I'm sure someone listening to this podcast is gonna RFK his nephew begs to differ”
An ecology or ecosystem of truth requires the presence of falsehood—you cannot understand truth in the absence of its opposite—so efforts to eliminate misinformation actually undermine truth-seeking because truth and falsehood are mutually defining and complementary.
“in the Ecology of Truth you actually have to understand and be acquainted with what is false right like you you you cannot understand truth in the absence of its opposite so efforts to get rid of what's called misinformation or what might be misinformation aren't in fact serving the ultimate cause of truth if that's what you want to call it because it has to be present in order for us to understand what is truer than not right”
Harris personally does not care what is in the Hunter Biden laptop because he judges that any corruption revealed would pale in comparison to Trump's corruption, and his primary concern is preventing Trump's reelection, so even damaging information about Biden is subordinate to that goal.
“I still you know all this time given that the Trump has my my feeling was at the time and it is now I don't care what's in that laptop because I know in advance that even if it reveals some degree of corruption on the part of President Biden it's going to pale in comparison to the corruption I know is true of trump and his family”
Even if the Hunter Biden laptop contained evidence of Hunter's corruption and Biden's knowledge of it, voters could rationally prefer Biden over Trump as 'an ordinary decent criminal' compared to an unprecedented threat to democracy
“you might say that Biden is what the Brits call it an Ordinary Decent criminal and Trump is is a unique threat to democracy and I would sooner take the hunter Biden run of the mill you know a nepotism slash favoritism slash whatever it is to the screaming risk that Trump represents for democracy”
Harris had a friend, a center-left Democratic woman, who was seriously considering voting for RFK Jr. in the primary, which surprised Harris because he viewed RFK Jr. as ridiculous and a crank, but the friend's reasoning suggests RFK Jr.'s appeal is broader and more respectable than Harris initially thought.
“I had the weirdest experience which is you know I mean I just sort of took RFK Jr from the get-go to be ridiculous in a complete crank and then a friend of mine very intelligent person of Centrist Democratic views or at least that's how I had known her confessed to me that she was seriously thinking about voting for him in the primary so I don't think his appeals should be underestimated”
Russia's history as a great power has been one of 'constant aggression not just under the Communists but going back to the czarist' era, with Poland disappearing as an independent nation for centuries
“Russia's history as a great power has been one of constant aggression not just under the Communists but going back to the czarist Poland disappeared for a couple of hundred years”
Military casualty figures from the Russia-Ukraine war are uncertain; The Economist estimated 40,000-50,000 Russian fatalities (implying even higher total casualties when accounting for wounded), but these are based on second-tier data because neither Russia nor Ukraine release official figures.
“The Economist had a had an estimate of Russian fatalities this was about a month or two ago which estimated about 40 to 50 000 Russian fatalities which means a huge casualty rate because usually casualties you know the wounded come in multiples of the of the fatality of the fatality rate but that was based on sort of second-tier data because the Russians are not releasing figures and the ukrainians don't release figures either”
Stephens considers himself center-right to center politically, though he may have shifted slightly left in recent years not because of personal change but because the Republican Party has moved far to the right, creating alienation.
“I tend to think of myself as Center center right although the last five or six years I've probably shifted a little bit to the left it's not so much a shift it's it's that the Republican party has moved so far to the right for me right and I feel just deeply alienated from it”
Stevens studied political philosophy at the University of Chicago and developed interests in mid-20th century anti-totalitarian literature by Hannah Arendt, Czesław Miłosz, Vaclav Havel and similar writers
“I studied really I studied political philosophy...I developed this interest in the mid-20th century literature by anti-totalitarian writers people like Han arent and milosh and a bunch of other figures both from behind the Iron Curtain vaslov Havel”
Stephens was 'happily ensconced' at the Wall Street Journal until Trump's rise created tensions with the editorial page, leading him to leave for the New York Times where he has been for 'a little over six years'.
“was verily very happily ensconced there until Donald Trump and pretty much left the journal over I guess what you call Creative differences about our view of the former hopefully not future president and um came to the New York Times where I've been for a little over six years”
Stevens traveled to Ukraine by taking a nine-hour train from the Polish border to Kyiv because no planes fly to and no ships sail to Ukraine, indicating the country's extreme isolation during the war
“no planes fly to Ukraine no ships sail to Ukraine it's in that sense it's one of the most isolated states in the world we took a nine hour train from the Polish border to Kiev”