JD Vance

you people that's right i'm doing an event with tulsi gabbard tonight in pennsylvania actually i love her she's awesome and uh yeah i think she basically decided that the left cannot be reformed in this country anymore that's what happened with bobby kennedy that's what's happened with a lot of old old school liberals is they say yeah you know we don't care what you do in your bedroom but we but we believe in the fundamental right of people to speak their mind and the democrats just don't believe in that anymore

So I thought a lot about like what's you know, what is going on there and what's driving it psychologically.

And I think that I think what's going on is the entire modern Democratic Party grew up in an era where there was consensus.

Right.

Walter Cronkite could say something about the Vietnam War.

And it turned out he's probably right about that, actually.

And it collapsed public support for the Vietnam War.

Where they grew up in America where social trust was just so much higher.

And I think that a lot of them are trying to reimpose that social trust from the top, not recognizing that that high level of social trust came organically from the way that American society worked.

And if you have...

people trying to reimpose it from the top, it actually degrades the very thing that you're trying to create.

Because I've seen, I mean, family members of mine who got really radicalized because they were like, wait a second, should we be masking three-year-olds in our schools?

Like, does that do something to their language development?

And then they would get kicked off of Facebook because a person with 900 Facebook friends who has no public profile dared to like question the prevailing narrative.

And again, they ended up being right about it.

I actually think that what the left is doing is,

is degrading social trust by trying to create it from on high.

And I kind of get the psychological impulse because, you know, like a lot of great things that we do come from high levels of social trust, but you've got to reestablish it organically.

You can't try to force it on people.

I did see that.