This week I’ve got University of Washington historian Daniel Bessner on the show. As frequent viewers will know, Danny is an expert on foreign policy and national security, and he’s a man of the left. In his view, the US built its post-World War II status as a great power and then, after 1989, as the great power with a military and security state unshackled from the constraints of democratic oversight. Now, with China posing a serious challenge to American influence abroad and social stagnation at home, the age of American hegemony is, Danny argues, ending. How we manage the challenges of decline—from authoritarianism to an unchecked and outmatched foreign policy establishment to generational pessimism—will determine whether we survive the challenges of a post-American world, including the ever-present threat of nuclear war.
We begin by discussing the political right’s adoption of the left’s strategies for quashing dissent—wokeness isn’t just for progressive social justice warriors anymore. Danny’s a critic of the undemocratic means through which the foreign policy establishment reproduces itself—no congressional oversight and no guardrails. In Danny’s account, that has led us to pursue unsustainable global strategies, the latest of which is our previously nonnegotiable support for Ukraine. As an historian, Danny takes the long view. We’ve been on this road since the 1940s, he says, which is the last time Congress formally authorized a declaration of war. But you don’t have to go back that far to explain Trump’s authoritarian tendencies, which Danny argues are homegrown.
I describe myself as a conservative and Danny describes himself as a man of the left. And yet we come together on many issues. Is this a sign that previously stable ideological paradigms are coming apart under the pressure of new political and historical alignments? Are we symptoms of a new order? Or are we just weird?
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0:00 Intro
1:10 Glenn meets the young Marx
2:32 The new wokeness of the political right
8:30 What is the democratic counterpart of foreign policy and national security run by experts?
17:04 Russia’s motivations: Fear of NATO or imperial ambitions
21:41 Danny: Zelenskyy made a huge misstep in the Oval Office
26:12 Does China have global security ambitions?
35:09 Ending the Middle East’s post-Ottoman redefinition
39:42 Danny: It’s gotta be rough to be Peter Beinart
43:46 Why we don’t need Hitler to explain Trump’s authoritarianism
56:29 Danny: We’ve been in the midst of a constitutional crisis since the 1940s
57:58 Can the nuclear taboo hold?
Recorded April 19, 2025
Links and Readings
Danny’s podcast, American Prestige
Karl Marx’s Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844
Walter Lippmann’s book, Public Opinion
Danny’s book, Democracy in Exile: Hans Speier and the Rise of the Defense Intellectual
Transcript of Matt Lauer’s 1998 interview with Madeline Albright
Paul Thomas Chamberlain’s book, The Cold War Killing Fields: Rethinking the Long Peace
Lindsey O’Rourke’s book, Covert Regime Change: America’s Secret Cold War
Peter Beinart’s book, Being Jewish after the Destruction of Gaza: A Reckoning
Glenn’s conversation with Peter Beinart
Glenn’s memoir, Late Admissions: Confessions of a Black Conservative
Danny’s Jacobin piece, “This Is America”
James Whitman’s book, Hitler’s American Model: The United States and the Making of Nazi Race Law
Carl Schmitt’s book, The Concept of the Political
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