1285: Wealth and Justice, The Morality of Democratic Capitalism by Peter Wehner, The Atlantic, VP & Senior Fellow for Ethics & Public Policy Center
7 Dec 2025 · 30 min
Podcast episode (Creating Wealth Show, episode 1285) — interviewer Jason Hartman hosts Peter (Pete) Wehner, senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center and contributing editor at The Atlantic, discussing the morality of democratic capitalism (co-authored book with Arthur Brooks), contrasts with socialism/Marxism, human nature, role and limits of government, and contemporary political concerns including the Trump administration and ‘the death of politics.’ The conversation touches on real-estate investing (intro), welfare reform, faith in government, judicial appointments, border policy, presidential rhetoric and truth, and a hopeful defense of politics.
Chapters
The reason I invest in real estate is because I was previously doing a 401k and put my money there and doing other, you know, traditional retirement plans. That just doesn't work, didn't work for us for 10, 15 years that we were doing it and was looking for something different. So I was doing a lot of research and listen to a lot of podcasts and found real estate as being a much better avenue for creating wealth and creating cash flow. Our first investment property actually happened by accident because of not being able to sell a previously owned house that we had and moving out of that area. So it turned out to be a really good thing for us. So after that, that made me really interested. The first intentional investment property that we purchased was in Florida. I found the Creating wealth show and Jason by him being a guest on another podcast that I had been listening to that was about creating passive income. And he was a guest on that show and I was impressed with his knowledge. So from there I made my way to his podcast. Right now we have a total of 10 properties. We decided to go all in. I mean, we'd been doing 401k and other traditional retirement plans and investments that most people are comfortable with with really terrible results for lots of years. So I was okay. So we actually liquidated everything we had in our 401ks, paid the penalty on all of that and are doing much, much better with real estate and very happy about it. But I think it just comes down to being comfortable with the education. So I felt like there's plenty of information out there about real estate. There's lots of people with great track records. And so I think if you follow a path of success, that it's a lot easier to replicate and duplicate. So I felt like I was following other people's paths of success, so I felt comfortable.
Welcome to the Creating wealth show with Jason Hartman. You're about to learn a new slant on investing, some exciting tech techniques and fresh new approaches to the world's most historically proven asset class that will enable you to create more wealth and freedom than you ever thought possible. Jason is a genuine, self made multimillionaire who's actually been there and done it. He's a successful investor, lender, developer and entrepreneur who's owned properties in 11 states, had hundreds of tenants, and been involved in thousands of real estate transactions. This program will help you follow in Jason's footsteps on the road to your Financial Independence Day. You really can do it. And now here's your host, Jason Hartman, with the complete solution for real Estate investors.
Welcome to episode 1285. 1285. Thanks for joining me today. We are going to talk about wealth and democratic capitalism with our guest today. I think you'll enjoy this interview and I just want to remind you that be sure to get your contest entries in@jasonhartman.com contest jasonhartment.com contest that ends on Monday and we will announce winners or be in contact with winners shortly after that. It's a great exercise. Tell us about how you are becoming an empowered investor. Tell us about your five year plan, whatever you want. You've got a lot of latitude on this contest so it should be a really easy one. Just make a quick video and share that with us and you can win some great prizes. Great prizes. And of course, we've got our Profits in Paradise event coming up in Orlando. Join us for that. You can check out more@jason hartmanlive.com that's jasonhartmanlive.com for the tickets to the event or or for the contest. Jasonartman.com contest and let's dive in and enjoy this interview about wealth and democratic capitalism.
It's my pleasure to welcome Pete Wehner to the show. He is a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy center, contributing editor at the Atlantic and contributing op ed columnist for the New York Times. He's former director of the White House Office of Strategic Initiatives and was senior advisor to President George W. Bush and speech writer for the Reagan administration. He's the author of wealth and justice, the Morality of Democratic Capitalism and the new book the Death of How to Heal Our Frayed Republic After Trump. Pete, welcome. How are you?
I'm doing well. Thanks for having me on.
Good, good. It's good to have you. The morality of democratic capitalism, very interesting. Is it the most moral system?
Yeah, I think it is the most moral system for a variety of reasons. I think democratic capitalism has done more than any other system, economic system, to raise people out of poverty and given people in all walks of life and throughout the world the best chance to live lives of dignity and prosperity and to promote human flourishing. And it's got an unparalleled achievement in my mind just in terms of the morality of the case. That doesn't mean that capitalism isn't flawless, that it doesn't have problems, it doesn't need to be refined from time to time. But as an economic system, I don't think there's any question. I'm a great defender of capitalism.
Yeah, I would agree. Now just make a distinction for us instead of just saying Capitalism, interestingly, you call it democratic capitalism. Is there a non democratic capitalism? I mean, what's the distinction or comparison there?
Well, you can't have countries like China was moving toward capitalism well prior to about a decade ago, fair enough, when it was politically authoritarian, but more economically open. So you can have systems of government that are capitalistic and unnecessarily democratic. So the political and the economic are tied in. But yeah, as a general matter, free societies are free all the way through political and economic, and they tend to flourish the most when there's the most amount of freedom.
Yeah, no, no question about it. Now, you know, it's interesting, capitalism, whether it's moral or not, people, I guess they could argue that, or whether it's the most moral maybe is the better way to look at it. But it's certainly very natural, isn't it? You know, even in communist countries or formerly communist countries. For example, when I was in Romania once, and I've been to Cuba as well, so that's pretty interest. I heard the stories from our tour guide, for example, in Romania, how people would wait in line for shoes. They'd wait in line for everything. And then by the time you got to your turn to get your shoes, your allotment of shoes, they didn't have your size, right. So they would trade them with each other and there was all this underground capitalism. It's just so natural. Right. What do you say about that?
I think you're right. And I co authored this book with Arthur Brooks, who's president of the American Enterprise Institute. And what Arthur and I did at the beginning of the book was actually to make the case for human nature and capitalism. And the argument is that whether it's a political or economic system, whether it succeeds or not depends on whether it has the right understanding of human nature. That was one of the great gifts that the founders had, which is they set up a system of government which in my estimation had a correct understanding of human nature. And I think capitalism does as well for the reasons that you mentioned. You believe in self interest and there is a desire to get ahead and to have rewards for work. And when you try and tamp that down or suffocate it or, or undo it, it doesn't work because human nature doesn't change really. It finds other ways to express itself. You can certainly mitigate, but you have a black market and people will trade for the shoes that they want. I think capitalism works in large part because it has a basically correct view of human nature and is designed to take Advantage of that. Right.
And, you know, if you want more contemporary evidence of this, simply look at any city with rent control and how people trade on the black or the gray market. They will artificially maintain leases on properties they don't even want anything to do with anymore, and then they'll rent them out. They'll sublet them to their friends without telling the landlord. Right. Because then the rent won't adjust. So capitalism is just such a completely natural phenomenon. And, you know, you're right. That's a good way to look at it. It correctly accounts for human nature. You know, I guess you can't quite make the argument that everything in human nature is moral, can you? Because we do a lot of things that aren't necessarily moral. So you couldn't make the argument in that direction because without some structure of society, like the saying goes, we need government because we're not all angels. Right?
Right. That was Madison in the Federalist. If men were angels, we would need government. But they're not, so we do. You're quite right. I mean, I think the success here is when you take into account human nature, and in my view, and I think history confirms this as well as probably our own daily experience, human nature is mixed. It's vice and virtue. We're capable of acts of depravity and nobility. And what we have to do to be a successful society, whether political, economic, or otherwise, is to try and accentuate the positives and to mitigate the negatives and create a system that encourages those things. And if you do that, you can get a pretty good society and hope and opportunity. And if you do it wrong, you can get the opposite. And if you do it really wrong, then you can get catastrophe.
So it's amazing that, you know, with this knowledge that we have, modern liberals like Bernie Sanders and AOC and all the rest of them who are espousing a system that has failed at every time in history and every place on earth, and they always sort of pick out the Scandinavian example. But those countries are highly capitalist countries. Yes, they're rich because of capitalism, so they can afford big social programs.
Right.
They just don't understand the way things really work. And what they're really recommending is an immoral system, because the opposite of the morality of capitalism is the immorality of socialism and its ugly big brother, communism. But it's so amazing that anyone who's looked at it would, I think, agree with what I'm about to say that the most famous and arguably successful economist that ever lived is Karl Marx.
Yeah.
How can that be? And how is it that people are trying to repeat this failed experiment today?
Yeah, it's an interesting question. If is Marx the most famous, the most successful, most consequential.
Arguably most consequential is a better word. But I'm using success in the sense that his ideas spread the most. They were the most widely adopted, no question.
Right, right. I mean, arguably Adam Smith, who was also more a philosopher because, well, Adam Smith was.
Right. Karl Marx was just more popular. Yeah, that's all I'm saying.
No, I think that's right. And I do think that if you look at the trends and trajectories over the last 50 years, fortunately Adam Smith was on the ascendancy and Marx was on the descendancy. But I take your point. Marx had tremendous influence and there was a tremendous human cost to what he did.
Well, like 150 million deaths. But, you know, minor detail.
It's complicated because Marx himself was not, you know, he was not Stalin economic system. But I grant the point. I'm not a Marxist.
He was not Mao Stalin.
But his ideas had pernicious effects and they allowed for systems of government to arise. Look, this is one of the challenges, right, which is that bad ideas have consequences, just like good ideas. And sometimes people adopt bad ideas because they forget why good ideas are worth defending, which is, you know, when Arthur Brooks and I wrote this book, we did it in part because we were anticipating an attenuation in the beliefs and commitments to capitalism. And I think since we wrote it, those concerns have accelerated and amplified. And I think you're quite right. Bernie Sanders and AOC and others are a perfect example. I remember. And you may well too, which is if you refer to a Democrat 15, 20, 25 years ago as a socialist, they would have considered those fighting words slander.
Today, now they wear it on their sleeve.
Yeah, they wear it on their sleeve. And Bernie Sanders is not a democrat. He's what he refers to as a democratic socialist. I also think the point you made about the Scandinavian countries is important because they refer to themselves as socialists, but they are capitalist, though they have a large welfare state. But as you said, the reason that they are able to afford that kind of welfare state is precisely because they've been successful with capitalism. And where you see socialism at its most pernicious and most suffocating countries like Venezuela and you mentioned Cuba and elsewhere, there's human costs and there's a human devastation. And I think that the task that we have, people who are defenders of capitalism, is to make the case for capitalism in a deep sense. I wonder, and I'm curious whether you agree with this or not, whether a lot of us just took for granted that capitalism was a given and we stopped making the arguments for defending it and why it was not only economically good but morally good. And that happens sometimes. You don't pay attention to the virtues that require attention. Attention must be paid, as Willy Loman said in Death of a Salesman. And I am worried. I mean, you're more familiar with this than I. But the public opinion polls that we see that shows that socialism and commitment and dedication to socialism is on the rise and support, support for capitalism is diminishing and that that's an area of concern. We have to attend to it.
It's pretty interesting, you know, when we talk about the morality of capitalism and we, you know, from this moral perspective. I had Steve Forbes on the show a while back and he did a book on how, and I don't remember the name of his book, but in it he talks about how the, you know, when people promote the idea of big government, which is really socialism or communism, it's just a matter of degree government wins so often, or the idea of bigger government, let's just expand, expand, expand. Because government somehow has this moral high ground. And it's weird how that is. I mean, why does the government. Granted, the government controls the court system, it's the arbiter of fairness, which is crazy to me that there should be public employee unions when the government is paying them and they're paid from taxpayer, that just seems like a total conflict of interest. But the government somehow maintains this moral high ground, you know, compared to what? Compared to the free market, compared to having more choices. It's better to have government. I mean, why? You know, it's just a weird belief system we have, isn't it?
Yeah, you know, it's an interesting question, actually, a lot to unpack. Faith and confidence in government is far, far lower now than it was decades ago. So if you go in the 50s, early 1960s, really at the dawn of the Great Society, I think the public opinion poll showed that 70% of the public thought had total confidence or confidence most of the time in what government would do. Now it's in the 20s. And one could argue that one of the reasons it's gone from such a high point to a low point is because Lyndon Johnson got through a lot of what he wanted to and government got larger. And the more things the government has done and the more activities it's gotten involved with the less confidence there's been in it. I do think that on the flip side, this is, you know, we have to acknowledge this, which is for a lot of people, government has done good. I mean, if you go back to Social Security and the entitlement programs, the GI Bill, air, water, our environment getting cleaner. I mean, government, police on the street. And of course this depends if it's late state, local or national. But people do trust government to keep them safe. And government has been effective. And sometimes it's effective in ways that we just don't really think about. But there is a point at which government tries to do too much. And there are things that are intrinsic to large government that just makes it ineffective. Peter.
Scheck has written a book on why government fails, a very interesting analysis. I talk about it in the book that I wrote, the Death of Politics, why that has happened. So what you need, you need government because we can't have anarchy and human beings need it. And government is more effective sometimes than other times. And there's an interesting, you know, in the book of the politics, let me say I'm a person, as you can tell, who is philosophically and programmatically in favor of limited government and not the concentration of power. But we've had some success in government programs, not because we reduced the size of government, but because we changed the incentives of government. And one example of that would be welfare reform in the 1990s that was pushed through by Republicans in the House. Bill Clinton ended up signing it into law. That didn't make the welfare system less. What it did is created incentives and said, look, if you're on welfare and you're able bodied, did you have to work after a certain period of time otherwise you get cut off from welfare? There was actually a lot of loopholes in that, but the signal went out. You had a 60% drop in the number of welfare caseload. And in addition to that, those people that were still on welfare, you know, did better. And you have things like the earned income tax credit, which actually helped alleviate poverty. And some of the great success we've had in the drop in crime that hasn't been because government's gotten smaller. It's because people have gotten smarter in the application of government.
Yeah, yeah, that's. It's interesting stuff. Well, you brought up Clinton. Let's bring it up to more present day than that. And let's talk about our current administration and the death of politics. What do you mean when you say the death of politics? That the discourse has died or what do you mean?
My concern is that a lot of the best of the American tradition in politics is dying not simply because of Donald Trump. I think a lot of the trends that concern me predate him, but I think he's accelerated many of the worst ones. But today, politics is as contentious, angry, tribalistic and dehumanizing as just about any time that I can remember having been in politics. And there's more and more sense of people not being able to have conversations with each other, that they can't disagree with each other respectfully, and that people feel like they don't have opponents, but that they're enemies. And I actually worry, too, that there's been a devaluation of ideas on the conservative side. I'm really a product, a child of the Reagan revolution. I remember how central, deep philosophical ideas, thinkers, books were at that time. Reagan was. I don't know if it's too much to say he was a disciple of Milton Friedman, but Friedman obviously had a huge impact on him and Hayek did as well. And there were books. Charles Losing Ground on Welfare, the Closing of the American Mind by Alan Bloom, and in the Judicial philosophy, people like Antony and Scalia. And I worry that, I think George Will said the other day that ideas on the conservative side and the Republican side at least have been crowded out by a kind of cult of personality with Donald Trump. I will say that my book is a kind of alarm bell in the night because I do have those concerns.
Okay, so question for you, though, I always like to ask, compared to what? I mean, Obama had a cult of personality. Clinton had a cult of personality. I wouldn't say either of the Bushes really did, but maybe you can disagree with me. But, yeah, Obama had raving fans that were lost, if you ask me.
Right. Look, I think Obama more than Clinton. Clinton had supporters. Obama did have something like that, I remember, and I wrote about it. Actually, I was not a fan of Barack Obama. If you read my writings over the years during his administration, I was quite critical of him, including some of those ads which really did have a kind of cult, I feel to them. But I think that what we're seeing with Donald Trump and the right is at least matched by that, maybe worse than that. And some of it, I must say, is a feeling of I'm dispirited and troubled by it in a way that I probably wouldn't have been with Obama and Democrats because I've been a lifelong Republican and conservative. And seeing the kind of enthusiastic support that Donald Trump has is something that's Worrisome to me. I'm perfectly willing to grant Trump credit for certain policy achievements.
Which ones? Talk to us about those, just for a minute.
I say probably at the top of the list. His judicial appointments, I think, have been very, very good. I think his deregulation policies have been good. I think his support for spending on defense has been good. I have concerns about his policies, too. He's protectionist, and I'm free trader. He doesn't make the argument at all for limited government. He's taken the form of entitlement programs, which I think is essential. So he's basically taken that off the table. And when he ran in 2016, he was one candidate who said he would not attempt a reform entitlement, even though the Republican Party under Paul Ryan had really made entitlement reform and really made progress on that.
So I got to ask you about. I mean, this is the one that gets all the news. What about the Mexican border?
Yeah, the Mexican border situation. I guess I have somewhat mixed feelings on it. I think there's a problem at the border. I actually think that Trump's policies have had the perverse effect of making things worse, not better. Conservatives believe in the law of unintended consequences. I think all of the talk and focus on a wall is overdone. I certainly believe in security. But look, I think Donald Trump's. His great failing, in my estimation, isn't a policy, though. Again, I think he's made some mistakes. And I do worry about the protectionism, because I think getting into trade wars, back to what we were talking about originally, capitalism and economic prosperity.
I'd love to unpack that one, but I don't think there's time. It's a big subject, so. But go ahead.
But my real concern about Donald Trump, I'd say, is several fold. Number one is I think he is psychologically and emotionally not equipped to be president. I've had lots of convers with Republicans, including people on Capitol Hill who have dealt with him, and he is not a well man. He is extremely volatile. And the stories that I've heard privately combined with what we know publicly are alarming. And I think if you take a person with that kind of personality and give him the power of the presidency, I think that's dangerous.
Well, so here's the thing. Maybe in his defense, though, you know, he's a lot more. Maybe this isn't the best word, but, you know, I really want to say transparent. You know, the fact that he tweets and that he's sort of like you know where he stands. He's very plain spoken. Maybe a lot of other presidents were really volatile like that too. But it was behind the scenes. You just didn't know it, you didn't see it. This guy is out in the open. I mean, he's a different kind of character, that's for sure.
Yeah, that's not so much it. I mean, people have flashes of anger. Bill Clinton had flashes of anger. Lots of people have flashes of anger. And you've had presidents who have been imperfect. What I'm talking about is a person who I think has a disordered personality. I think he has narcissistic personality disorder. He's a person without empathy. His ignorance is just stunning. I mean, you could go through issue after issue again, including with people who have dealt with him and who were public supporters of his, where it's shocking. I think he's a person who's corrupt. The other thing that really worries me, and it may or may not worry you or others, but it is that this is a person who is engaged not just in an assault on truth, but an all out effort to annihilate truth. The categories of truth and falsity. He is a person who is promiscuously dishonest, and not just dishonest in the normal, quote unquote way, but he attacks categories, demonstrable truths. And I think that that is very, very damaging for a free republic.
What do you mean by that? What do you mean by that?
Well, I'll give you just one example. You could choose lots of examples. But let's take the beginning of his presidency and yesterday, right? Okay, take two examples. And there are probably 1500 examples. In between the dawn of his presidency, there was this big argument that he got into about the size of the inaugural crowd. Now you may say, look, it's not a big deal. It isn't really a big deal. Who had a bigger inaugural crowd? It was a big deal to Donald Trump. And this was the debate about whether Barack Obama had more people at the inauguration than he did. The problem was that there was photographic evidence that Obama had more people. There were park service numbers that showed it. There was no question we knew that Barack Obama had a larger crowd. What did Donald Trump do? He insisted his was larger. He sounded out as press secretary on the weekend. Normally in a presidency, given the date that the inauguration was, you would have sent it out on Monday. And they went out and they said that the truth is that we had a larger crowd. And they kept repeating it. And his supporters did, but his Whole.
Angle is that, look, you know, the fake news media is attacking him all the time, which they are. Nobody can disagree with that. Maybe it's deserved. Okay, you can argue that, but you can't argue that. They're not attacking him. And they do spin things against him. I mean, it is, it's amazing. I, I just see it over and over. It's, it's during the campaign, everything, you know, I, I open up my Business Insider app on my phone. It's like every article is negative. They just hate him. Like seething hatred.
Right, yeah. No, let's unpack that because it's an important point.
Okay, so he's fighting that. My, my point is, though, just to finish, the point is he's fighting back against that.
Right, that's fine. Ronald Reagan fought back lots of presidents.
But Reagan was liked. He was likable. Trump is not likable like that.
Well, number one, Reagan was. If you go back and read contemporaneously what the left, what the liberals, what the press said about Reagan at the time when he gave the Evil Empire speech, that's romanticizing history.
Yeah, but he knew how to reach across the aisle. He was friends with Tip o'. Neill. I mean, you know, Reagan was liked.
Well, yeah. I mean, I wouldn't fight too much to defend Trump because what Trump is doing. I understand your point. Trump is infinitely less likable than Reagan. My point is that you can defend yourself without being a pathological liar. If the argument is, if you're being criticized, that it's completely fine to be a pathological liar, to lie morning, noon and night on things large and small, personal and professional, I just don't agree with that. I don't think that's ethically right. I don't think it's good for our politics.
Don't you remember Slick Willie? I mean, Bill Clinton couldn't tell the truth if his life depended on it.
Not only do I remember, I was publicly critical of Slick over these grounds. Let me tell you what bothers me. Many of the same people that took a two by four upside the head to Bill Clinton because he was unethical and was.
They're giving Trump a pass, Is that what you're saying?
I don't know. It's more than that. They do more than give him a pass. They defend him. They actively defend him. And particularly his religious supporters, evangelical Christians. Now that's the hypocrisy. Whatever criticisms one can have in my views. And that's fine. You can't accuse me of being Hypocritical. And if you compare Trump's lies to Clinton's lies, I mean, we're talking major leaguer versus a minor leaguer.
Well, they're different times, too, you know, I agree. Listen, I wouldn't trust Trump, you know, in the sense I think he does lie. Certainly. I think they all do, though. I don't know. Hillary Clinton is like the biggest liar ever. The Clintons are so corrupt.
Look, I'm not a defender of Hillary Clinton or Bill Clinton. I criticize them. Donald Trump is objectively in a category all his own. You can go through, in my book, I document them, the number of lies that he tells, and they're lies that are unnecessary. He just told a lie yesterday in his interview with George Stephanopoulos.
It's an unnecessary lie. What was the lie?
Well, there were several lies. One of them was on the polling data. They said that he's behind in a number of states. He said there are no polls that show that. They actually do have the polls. His people on his campaign released to reporters what the polls were. He kept insisting when Stephanopoulos talked to him about the Mueller report, he quoted from the Mueller report, and he asked Trump if he'd read the Mueller report. He said he had, and he kept insisting something that wasn't true. The Washington Post keeps a chart of this, of lies and misrepresentations. You may argue with some of them, but most of them are accurate. I've looked at them. There are 10,000 of them over the course of roughly 850 and 900 days. That comes out to about 12 a day. If you have the president of the United States doing lie after lie after lie, day after day after day, that affects a civic and a political culture. And conservatives once cared about that, and they should care about it again. And on top of that, Trump dehumanizes his opponents in a to agree. He mocks people with handicaps. He mocks prisoners of war. He mocks women for their works.
I'll tell you, Obama did that, too. Remember when he was on the Tonight show in his Special Olympics comment.
Let me make a couple of points about that, which is, and I find this with Trump supporters, which is every time that you press them on a point, it's whataboutism. It's, they did this, too.
No, I get it. Two wrongs don't make a right. I got it. I understand.
It's more than that, though. Whatever complaints you have about Barack Obama, and again, you can check my writings on him, I was critical with him Without. He is in a different category. If you think that Barack Obama dehumanized his opponents like Donald Trump, then you're off the ground.
No, no, no. Obama did not. Obama had his flaws, but they were like a different set of flaws.
Right.
You know, Obama was very diplomatic and cool and, you know, I mean, we know what he was like. Okay?
Yeah. And I disagree with his policies and I criticize them. I'm just saying. And I understand people who disagree with me, but my argument. My argument in the book, My argument since the book and before the book, is that Donald Trump is doing a lot of damage. I'll tell you what I would settle for. I understand the argument of people like you, assuming you voted for Trump. Conservatives, Christians, evangelicals who say they voted that it was worth voting for Trump over Clinton. I get that argument. I've never begrudged that it's always lesser.
Of two evils argument.
Yeah. But what I would appreciate, and I think would show more integrity, is whether the people who voted for him would, at least from time to time, call him out and say, when you transgress these immoral and civic lines, that it's wrong. And I think that's really a problem.
I've got a question for you. And we gotta wrap it up because we're way past time. The Death of Politics. That's the name of your book. Is it All Trump Is all about Trump. I mean, that's what we've been talking about. But is anyone else guilty in this?
The book itself is not primarily about Trump. There are seven chapters. Several of them, he doesn't appear at all. He makes some appearances in them. It just turned out that our conversation was focused on Trump. But I have a chapter on what politics is, so I talk about Locke, Aristotle, and Lincoln. And it's a story. It's about ideas. It's about compromise, civility, and moderation. It makes the argument of what the proper role of faith in politics is. It talks about why words matter. But it's a book of stories. It's a story about my own life and politics. But mostly it's a story about the history of America, the Constitutional Convention and Lincoln. And ultimately, although our conversation didn't reflect it, it's a book for hope. Because I think what we have to do is we have to push back against a corrosive cynicism and fatalism that says there's nothing we can do, that politics is irredeemably broken, and we just throw up our hands and give up on it. Because my argument is that politics is too important to give up on. Politics is finally and fundamentally about justice. We've had harder times in this country, certainly than we're facing now. And we have it within our capacity to write wonderful new stories, wonderful new chapters in the American story. And I think we can do it. And I try and show practically in the book how you can do it. So ultimately I care about politics. That's why I wrote the book. And I did my best to show why I think it's worth defending and promoting for its good and for the good of the country.
Good stuff, Pete. Give out your website.
Actually, if you go to Ethics and Public Policy center, that is where I work. I'm a senior fellow and that has my work. And then if you're interested in articles, you can Google my name in the New York Times or my name in the Atlantic.
Excellent. Pete Wehner, thanks for joining us.
Thanks so much. I enjoyed it. Appreciate it.
Thank you so much for listening. Please be sure to subscribe so that you don't miss any episodes. Be sure to check out the show's specific website and our general website, hartmanmedia.com for appropriate disclaimers and terms of service. Remember that guest opinions are their own, and if you require specific legal or tax advice or advice in any other specialized area, please consult an appropriate professional. And we also very much appreciate you reviewing the show. Please go to iTunes or Stitcher Radio or whatever platform you're using and write a review for the show. We would very much appreciate that. And be sure to make it official and subscribe so you do not miss any episodes. We look forward to seeing you on the next episode.
More from Jason


2482: AI Labor Displacement and the K-Shaped Housing Affordability: High-End Housing and the New Economic Divide with Adam Taggart


2482: AI Labor Displacement and the K-Shaped Housing Affordability: High-End Housing and the New Economic Divide with Adam Taggart


2480 FBF: Investor Mindset & DuckDuckGo Founder, Super Thinking Mental Models & Traction, How Any Startup Explosive Growth by Gabriel Weinberg


2480 FBF: Investor Mindset & DuckDuckGo Founder, Super Thinking Mental Models & Traction, How Any Startup Explosive Growth by Gabriel Weinberg


2478 FBF: Jim Rickards on The Death of Money, Aftermath, Currency Wars & The New Great Depression


2478 FBF: Jim Rickards on The Death of Money, Aftermath, Currency Wars & The New Great Depression


2477: Builder Profit Margins Hit 26-Year Lows and Solving the American Housing Crisis

