do for your country. >> the people who knocked these buildings down will hear from all of us soon. [applause] newest book the presidents, noted historians rank america's best and worst chief executives and provides insights of the 44 american presidents through stories gathered by interviews with noted presidential historians. explore the life events that shaped our leaders, challenges they faced, and the legacies they have left behind, published by public affairs, the book will be on shelves april 23 but you can preorder your copy of the hardcover or e-book today at c-span.org/the presidents, or wherever books are sold. , a discussion with tucker carlson on populism and the future of the republican party

from the national review institute ideas summit, this is about 35 minutes. [applause] michael: hi. i am michael brendan dougherty. i met our next guest 14 years ago, i was a nobody who just moved to washington. to avoid law school or graduating college at all. i landed a job that did not have any letterhead, i wrote letters to people whose writings i liked and one of them was tucker and i told him a story of three years earlier i had been in a borders bookstore and i saw his book, "politicians, partisans, and parasites: my adventures in cable news." [laughter] and i had $20, that was all the disposable income i had. i picked up the book and sat in

a chair and read it cover to cover, and i put it back on the shelf. [laughter] [applause] michael: i wrote him a letter and i told him the story, i put it back on the shelf because my friend had called me earlier and said you have to see "lost in translation." it is peak scarlett johansson. [laughter] so i told the story in a letter and i send it to tucker, he does not know who i am, i am a nobody. i get a call two days later. from tucker. he says, you made the right choice. [laughter] michael: he said, and i respect the hell out of you. [laughter] let's get lunch. one of the stars of tucker's book was a congressman you may remember, jim traficant. anyone remember? a house democrat from youngstown, ohio, and when television hosts like robert novak addressed him, congressman traficant would interrupt and

say, don't call me names. [laughter] michael: then he would start wobbling in his seat and stared directly into the camera and he would dare the justice department to go after him again and vowed to take them down. he would lower his head sometimes and speak directly into his microphone and say something like, dick gephardt does not have the anatomy to come and see me. [laughter] michael: i already knew from cable television that jim traficant was a great man. [laughter] michael: but tucker's book showed me the whole side of him, that jim traficant was the last man in congress who was proud to come on television stone drunk. [laughter] michael: a drunkard, a tax evader, basically the last founding father of our country. [laughter] michael: tucker mentions an

incident where, coming off the set, he lunges at a 22-year-old producer, says "hug me." she refuses and he just screams at her, "you god-damned communist." [laughter] jim.el: i love tucker: quick she was. -- which she was. [laughter] michael: my first question for tucker is, when did you first start to think that crazy drunken lech was onto something about trade with china? [laughter] tucker: it took many years. i like jim trafton because he was interesting and thought for himself. he had the qualities i got you most as a talkshow host, availability. [laughter] tucker: he did not have a lot going on so he was willing to come on and i am grateful for that.

the trade portion of his platform, if you could call it that, took a while army to understand and i'm still not sure what i think even today. but i have always thought that in a society that demands conformity and an increasingly our society does, it is the crazy people who are likely to see the truth, not the whole truth, no one but god can see who mayt flashes of it say something that had not occurred to me and from a young age, my advantage was i was aware of the sameness of the world i grew up in, i grew up in la jolla and then george down and stayed here. it is not like i have a variety of experiences to drive from so i listen to other experiences and have been open to the idea that what i assume is true is a matter of faith is completely wrong because it has been a number of times. traficantisten to jim

and the sick -- schizophrenics on the bus, i talked to people on airplanes and the farther out you are. and in washington it is true and always has been, the more reviled you are, the more written off you are i the cool kids, the likely you are to be saying something that is true and here is how you know, the people who are a threat to the way things are almost never engaged directly, you never hear the following come he made the point and that is wrong for the six reasons come it is always, he is in that case, racist, bigot that she is a nutcase, racist, bigot, what is he saying? case?u rebut the what is wrong with the idea? people do not want to engage at all. and jim trafton made it easy not

to want to engage -- jim it not easy to want to engage come he was like a mafia figure. he was indicted, federal indicted for corruption and he defended himself. before he made it to congress. at trial, he was presented with wiretaps and your reputable evidence he had been taking a often buying things like cadillacs and a farm. with these payoffs. they asked him what was this and he said, it was a sting operation, i was running a sting operation. [laughter] tucker: they said, did you tell your wife where the money came from? the new car and the farm? he said, you can't trust anyone in youngstown. [laughter] tucker: he actually said that elected touitted and congress come he died in the most manly way, his tractor

flipped over. michael: there is no good transition from that to this. [laughter] michael: the headline out of youngstown yesterday, quite sad, youngstown, ohio is going through a problem where cocaine is coming to town and cut with fentanyl. that was a problem that snuck up i think on people, in the new york times one day, a study done , particularly white working-class men are dying at a much faster rate, mortality is declining at a rate unseen since world war i. you have talked about -- tucker: infuriating. michael: you are in washington much of the time. the home values are going up all

the time in every county around it. but you also go to western maine. was that something that clued you in? tucker: it had a huge effect on my life, my politics, the way i see my country, going to the same time my whole life, one of the poorest counties on the east coast, a beautiful place, and i watched it dissolved, wonderful people, i spent three months a year every year there. you watch the same very familiar pathologies we read a lot about in the 1980's and 1990's and the other semis -- in the inner cities, in the middle of this overwhelmingly conservative, 100% quite rural community -- white rural communities. is this because -- is welfare doing this? i am not sure our assistance programs make it better and think they undermine the family

but they did not cause this, what caused it was the collapse of male jobs. we should have learned this. minede me reassess, not feelings about watching the family collapse in inner-city america, i still feel that is a disaster and has been a disaster, but the causes are different from what i thought. if men do not have full-time work, families fall apart. if men make less than women, women do not want to marry them, this is not talking points we on the all right believe, this is a product of a consistent social science. i wish women were very excited to marry overweight indolent men who play video games. [laughter] tucker: i am serious. [laughter] tucker: i wish it were enough to

be charming at dinner. [laughter] tucker: but it is not. that is not a choice men make it is an instinct women have and it is true over time and across population, race, income. if you are mad about it, not my problem. you have to address people as they are, it does not address human nature, if you have a society where, on average, women make more than men, you will see a predictable series of events and women will stop getting married. they will continue to have children but those children will not have a father at home. ,verything else that happens conservatives are from a with because we spend a lot of time moralizing about it. a lot of time. we spend no time asking how can

we make this better. if you have a society where the only full-time employees, true in western maine and much of rural america, hospitals and schools, you ask yourself, can you have a functioning society? the nuclear family, in such a place, the answer is, no you can't. i do not know why we spend -- do not spend more time on this. we have people on our show interested in this and they are constantly sending me stuff, i got one today, life expectancy numbers three years in a row are down. the suicide numbers are my fixation, i know for different people who have killed themselves the last year and a half, all middle-aged men. ask yourself if you do not know people who have killed themselves recently. the epidemic is that widespread. these are affluent people.

something is going on. there is no interest in what that might be. the statistic i got today, i do not care how it sounds because i think it is real, two hours ago, a new study showed the number of men under 30 who report having no sex at all has risen by threefold in 10 years. i am reading this and thinking, as a social conservative, a strident one, my first thought was porn. i think it is bad. but that is not it. what society does that remind me of? the middle east. one of the problems in the middle east, it is deeper than polygamy, the economic stratification is so profound that only the rich people can make it and you have a huge population of young men who do not have mates. i am sorry if it makes you

uncomfortable, it is true, it is nature and the farther away you get from nature the father off course you are and the nature tells you and life experience tells you you do not want a large population of celibate men. that is a recipe for instability. for chaos, a dangerous group to wonderou are lucky, no everyone is pushing we on the population. i am not joking. they are afraid. that is a picture of a society in which the spoils increasingly go to a shrinking number of people and your average young person, the poorest segment of our society is young people, they do not have enough to buy a are shacklede or to student loan's from which they cannot escape and they do not have enough to make. they are living with their parents, a high percentage of young men living with their parents than in my lifetime by far, that is an economic question. i am not espousing socialism which does not work, in the way

that it has been administered in every country i am aware of. i am saying we will get something radical and destructive and dangerous unless we address these things. michael: you say you are not a populist. tucker: no. [laughter] michael: you live among the elites, you like your home in washington. tucker: sort of. [laughter] michael: but your recent book "ship of fools," you trace it to the idea that it was democrats who gave up on youngstown. that was jim traficant's accusation, he warned outdoor not to come near youngstown -- al gore not to come to youngstown. now democrats and liberals love the largest corporations in america, they love facebook and apple. tucker: they worship power. michael: well.

as the sink as you can put it. conservativee the response when you see a liberal -- supposedly liberal or progressive party dominated by elites who love corporate power and are themselves winning more and more votes from the upwardly mobile part of america. the republican party has tried to repel working-class whites from coming in and working-class latinos from coming in but they seem to be coming into the party. what is the role of a conservative in america right now? tucker: four working-class black men. the -- or working-class black men. the obvious. there is no reason that african-american men should not be voting for a party that rejects rigid 1970's era feminism or that stands for due process and the rule of law. there is no reason.

a reason you see such chaos in our politics now is because the terms have not been defined. nobody knows where we are. you have the party of the factory owners versus the party of the workers and now they have inverted and the leadership's do not understand this is happening and did not want to understand, certainly on the republican side. my entire lifetime they would say, it is the party of the country club, that is appalling and totally untrue. and they would go toronto and say, i cannot believe they are -- to round hill and say, i cannot believe they are saying that. [laughter] tucker: i am not a populist, populism is not sustainable, it is not a form of government, it is a warning sign that you have bad elites. you will always have elites, because people are hierarchical. dogs are hierarchical, that is the way we are made.

every society is hierarchical, including venezuela and sweden, and the former soviet union. the question is, are your elites and present and wise? simpleique is not, it is , we have a populist election last time and that should be a terrifying wake-up call to anyone who is benefiting from our society right now. if you want to keep what you have, and i do, you need to pay attention to the forces that gave rise to this. you not ignore it because it will not get better. appendicitis -- it is like -- michael: what do you say to people who resist the argument? tucker: i have contempt for them. [laughter] michael: we will pretend -- tucker: sorry, sorry. michael: we will pretend i do not know what i'm quoting.

they will say, look at the unemployment rate, the basics of america, you can still get a job and more people are getting jobs now, wages are going up, we are seeing more men coming into the workforce. you are selling victimhood populism, you are telling people that they need to show up at work on time, basic skills to get a job, it is someone else's fault, someone washington, someone distant, because you have to keep people's eyeballs on the tv screen because there are commercials to run and that is the business. tucker: one, i hope not ever to wine or encourage people to be victims. i do not tolerate it at my house. i hate whining. i hate complaining. my goal in life is to die with

dignity without whining about it. i hate whining more than anything. michael: need to get a bigger mauer. -- mower. [laughter] tucker: if i am encouraging whining, i apologize, i don't mean to. it is amazing to be lectured about the market about people who work for nonprofits. [laughter] tucker: i have run a nonprofit and i'm not against nonprofits but, if you have not been fired because your boss has decided you're not making enough money for the company, get back to me after this happens. that has happened to me a couple of times, not given me -- given me perspective. the people most vocal in favor of the free markets, they cannot define it and would not know if it got in the shower with them. i am not arguing -- all i am

arguing is a clear picture of what the goal is. that is all i am arguing for, not a different economic system, i am not arguing for higher taxes, i am not a policy guide, i am a talkshow host, but i believe that no problem is solved unless you have a very clear image in your mind of what you want the result to be. what are we shooting for? trillions of dollars in the american economy, all of this effort, a few points focused on public policy, when it is all done, what do you seek to have? the vision i have for this country is may be different from you that i argue on behalf of a system where people who have no special advantage, including cognitive, people with iq of 100 make $70,000 per year, have three kids, a decent life, i do not hope they will all be

,ntrepreneurs, whatever that is but that talking point is to stupid, most people will not be entrepreneurs, they cannot pronounce it, it is a french thing. [laughter] tucker: that is not the goal, entrepreneurship for the masses, the goal is to have a normal life, not a guarantee your kids will do better than you but a plausible hope of it. goal is not a country where the suicide rate is going up. i do not care the gdp and i do not care what your fake unemployment statistics say because they're fake and i do not care what your inflation numbers are, they are fake. i care about how people are doing, think about it like your kids, you are fine in middle very, you went to choate and fine, maybe you are the steps to produce the result you desire, who knows what

happens but it does not matter because we're not getting to where we need to be. michael: if you have a 23-year-old kid and you say, this 23-year-old kid has a mid-six-figure gdp and we counted and all the college debt he has appeared tucker: or maybe there is something in the food. why are testosterone levels going down? down?appens when they go that is a disaster. nih not interested. sperm counts are way down. are you interested in continuing the species? these are the most basic markers of how you're doing. life and death. that all that matters. and we are ignoring that in favor of the most abstract stupid and totally immaterial numbers. they do not tell us anything.

those numbers tell us a lot. they do not tell us the solutions but tell us what the conversation should be and my only role as a non-public policy person, with an unimpressive andemic record, is to try start the conversation on those questions. it is amazing how hostile the reception is when you bring it up. that has everything. shut up, you are doing it for ratings, if we were just doing it for ratings, we would do the benghazi show. i mean it. do i seem like i do not need it? quite what i be a populist? none of it -- why would i be a populist? none of it affects me. immigration does not have a single impact on me. the biggest downside is my neighbors hate me for it because it is a threat to their nannies. [laughter] michael: i think it is -- tucker: i think it is true.

white house what i say it -- why else would i say it? michael: as a citizen and someone who has been identified as a conservative in the public and used to wear bow ties on television. tucker: can you imagine? [laughter] michael: i remember -- tucker: i am denying that. [laughter] michael: my own mother watched you on politically incorrect and said that bowtie looks like a middle finger waved in my face. tucker: that is totally true. she was a wise woman. that was a fact. michael: she was not happy when i wrote to you. [laughter] citizen, someone who is a public conservative, who has had god knows how many chicken dinners with other conservatives, nonprofit and fromwise, what do you want the party, the republican party? someu want them to take up

of the causes or rhetoric abandoned by the left? make the other wing of american politics work and say, uber uses a trick, the employees are counted as contractors and they owe them nothing. the primary way they make money is a way in which there are no obligations from the other side. tucker: i want to celebrate that as entrepreneurship. people are disgusting and we should say so. we should not always take the side of the ugliest kinds of capitalism as that does not amount to a defense of capitalism and m's and is what the -- and capitalism is where the defending. what i want to party and society to do is focus on making it possible for people to have kids . you see this in the republican party which is close to the point of being so useless it will start over.

the republicans look at the numbers and they are fine that numbers, usually wrong numbers but whatever, they look at the numbers and say, ok, our basic shrinkingcs is aging, , we need new people into this coalition or we will never win anything. we need to bring african-americans, latinos, asians, immigrants come into this thing. how do we do that? luntzin's says -- frank says the super liberal and everybody thinks it's a good idea. in their hearts they know they so look at the numbers, the next set of numbers, take up quite voters -- latinooters and asked voters if we need more immigration. did they are not

-- let's double it. they are not for that. they are what everybody is for, the ability to raise your own kids. if you want to win new voters, stop with identity politics and go with the universal appeals that by their nature of the of to everyone and chief among them is the freedom to raise your own kids. [applause] tucker: the only people who get to raise their own kids are rich people. everyone in my never has the parent stay home, not forever but when they are little and birth to school or whatever, several years where most parents, if given the choice, not all, nothing compulsory, but if given the choice most would stay home to raise their own children but most people cannot afford it. the one person, i hate to say this, before she went completely nuts, she wrote a book on this and it was good, elizabeth sheen, she did a study,

wrote it tenures ago before she went crazy, sort of crazy but she makes a good point. actually, we have told young women they have this moral obligation to work for some creepy big company and give their lives over to some business for the benefit of shareholders above their duty to their own family. that is the message of modern feminism, you have a moral obligation to serve the market before you serve your family. conservatives, for reasons i do not understand, that sounds like liberation, it is not bondage, but it is bondage, it is a lie and destroys people. would you tell your own daughters that? i would love to have children, no, you have an obligation, there is a quarterly earnings report and you have to work for that. you are not a shareholder but you have to work for that. that is what we are telling everybody on both sides are the complicit.

a society where, if you want to, you can afford to have a family on one income because we had that for 100 years and it worked great. we do not have it anymore. maybe you like that. would you like that? that is a concrete promise. who knows how you get there but start with what you want, and that is what i want. [applause] michael: at the end of your book, -- tucker: you made it to the end, you are the only one. [laughter] michael: i can skip. [laughter] too.el: i expensed it, [laughter] tucker: you are a good man. michael: at the end of your book, you are a populist maniac about whaty, think they want, the people, if they start dying younger or killing

themselves in large number, the rough white and terror about them, if the majority is worried about something, listen, give them back some of the the power, if they have strong feelings about an issue, do not overrule them, even if, maybe especially if their views seem reactionary. you cannot force enlightenment by fiat and in a democracy you can only persuade. if that is populism, if that is raging populism that destroys countries, let's bring the fire. tucker: you do not have an option. what people forget is how rarely tried democracy has been. between the roman republic and the american revolution, not a lot of democracy. zoero. it is a new thing and we are not exactly sure how it works and there are decent thinkers, in europe in the 18th century who looked at america and said that

would devolve into dictatorship because that form of government just dies always. these were not monarchists saying this, these were people who wanted it to work but feared it would not. it is a volatile government. it is true. the basic requirement of it is to keep the broad middle fairly satisfied and also invested in the system. when that stops happening, i am not making a moral, i tend to moralize and i'm embarrassed fight and sorry that i am not making a moral case but a practical case, it is practical, venezuela will happen, it happened not very far away, only one time zone away. it is a big country and it was destroyed. no one has thought why. a main reason why, it did not have to happen, i went there as a kid and it was a nice country,

caracas look like san diego with a big middle-class and oil reserves and an educated abolition. they are all in my -- educated population. they are all in miami now. the middle of the country, including members of the middle class, decided that it was not working for them, a small group are running things. they were mad about income inequality. thing so they hired a guide to destroy the ruling class and now they do not have toilet paper and are eating zoo animals. that is something we should pay attention to. everyone in washington says trump is an orange anomaly who will exit somewhere and we will get back to bob dole, and that will not happen at all. [laughter] tucker: as conservatives and politically minded public policy people, we should be thinking

about how to keep this from going wrong. michael: we have to wrap up. i want to thank you. michael: jonah goldberg and wrist lowry coming up and jim buckley after that. thank you all so much. we will duck out before you throw things at us. [applause] [applause] ♪ live everyon journal day with news and policy issues that impact you, coming up this morning, education week allison klein discusses the trump administration's proposed education budget cuts for 2020 and education policy overall. coalition on efforts to ratify the equal rights amendment and what implications it may have.

talksason.com editor about americans trust in government. watch "washington journal" live at 7:00 eastern this morning. join the discussion. today, former texas lawmaker kicks off his presidential bid in el paso, texas at 12:30 eastern on c-span , online at c-span.org, and on the free c-span radio app. this weekend, book tv has coverage of the virginia festival of the book from charlottesville with author discussions on music and social movements, race, politics, and crime in america starting today at 1:00 p.m. eastern with a book, may we forever stand, a history of the black national anthem and biographers on frederick douglass, and we discuss our thrash.

and on freedom fighters and hell raisers. charles marsh with can i get a witness. shout. and jason reynolds with his book "long way down." that is today at 1:00 p.m. eastern on book tv on c-span2. president trump visited florida's lake okeechobee and whichrbert hoover dike, surrounds the lake north of his mar-a-lago resort. the president of florida lawmakers spoke to reporters about funding and discussed immigration, mexico, and health care. this is about 15 minutes. about 5 minutes.