Barry Weiss
speaker
976 appearances
13 recordings
2 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard Mar 2025
Barry Weiss’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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And it has just been reissued in paperback. With the ceasefire deal underway in Israel, with Trump, I think, 72 hours into being president again, I could not think of a better person to talk to than Sebag. So, Simon Sebag Montefiore, welcome to Honestly.
It's great to see you too.
Exactly. So we saw each other the afternoon of the election.
We did call it right. But neither of us had the cojones to go on Twitter and say we think Trump's going to win. But we both acknowledged to each other privately that we thought Trump was going to win. And I think the feeling that both of us felt that day was a kind of nauseous anticipation and a sense that something big was coming.
And I don't think either of us felt like the big thing was Trump, but something maybe beyond him on the horizon. Can you maybe take us back to that conversation and take us to like how you felt on the eve of his election and how you're feeling today and what you think it portends?
I think a lot of people feel like the consensus politics that we grew up under, thinking about Clinton, I'm thinking about the idea that history had ended, as you sort of alluded to it, that liberalism and capitalism were obviously better and therefore were going to conquer the world, that now seems so naive. How did we get that so wrong?
How did so many so-called experts tell us that we had come to an end of history itself? And that's so obviously, whether it's Trump here or Maloney or Malay or I could go on and on and on, people are enthusiastically electing those that stand for a very different set of values.
If you had to diagnose the psychology of America and the West right now in a few lines, what would it be?
They have borders.
Well, if you polled most Israelis, there wouldn't be a question. If you polled most Americans, and there are polls, the number of conservatives or Republicans, I'm forgetting the details, that would serve as higher than they are for Democrats, but they're low across the board in America.
I want to pick up on what you were saying about the return to normalcy, like the return to the mean of history, and this idea that the things that growing up I took for granted, like gravity, now seem up for debate, or at least not at all guaranteed.
I think that the expression that's been used so much in the American Jewish community since October 7, and really the whole diasporic Jewish community, is this sense that the old world is shattered. And people have been talking about how they felt like they were on a holiday from history, and that is over. I want to ask you about that phenomenon.
Has there ever been a people, ever, that had the luxury of being on a holiday from history?
Looking back, now that it feels like that age has come to a close and we're on the cusp of a new emergent age that we're not sure what it looks like, although I want to have you outline some of the characteristics of this new age, was there anything that we could have done differently to keep the golden age going? And where did we go wrong?
You don't mean liberals in a partisan sense. You mean it in the capacious sense of the word.
So, for example, just to articulate it, maybe go a little further, the idea that America is bad or evil or not the greatest, the most exceptional nation, that is an idea that I heard probably expressed in different language every single day that I was in college. And no one challenged it.
I think it's important to just underline why so many people did not stand up to lies, like the dumb one I plucked out, that America is a bad country, not worth defending. There's so many other ones. Why did people not stand up against those lies? It's because it was so... chic to go along with them.
The cost to reputation and social status and prestige, I think for a lot of American Jews, felt too high. They wanted to be in the right clubs more than they wanted to stand up for the truth.
I think the subtext behind what you just said, and correct me if I'm wrong, is that's sort of the ugly way that history is made. And yet there's one country in the world for whom that ugliness has not been forgiven. Am I putting that in an elegant way?
That's your business.
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