Thomas Zimmer
speaker
49 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard Dec 2024
Thomas Zimmer’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
I'm doing well. Thank you so much for having me.
As of yet, still, I guess, right?
Yeah, I mean, in many ways, I think he's had a fairly normal, if you want to call that, career path as sort of a career operative. He had positions at almost every level inside and around the Republican Party in Washington, D.C. over the course of almost two decades. I think he's in his late 40s now, I believe. And he went from low-level staffer to high-level...
person who is pulling the strings in the background. He was a congressional aide, a part of the think tank and the lobbying machine, a campaigner, and then a member of the Trump administration. I think in terms of where he comes from, people used to see him as a fiscal hawk, that sort
Small government conservative who's looking for ways to, you know, cut the budget and maybe cut departments or whatever.
Yeah, no, absolutely. So that's what he was known for. And then to me, he's interesting because he is, I think...
very much emblematic of the trajectory of these kinds of people who very much talked about themselves as small government conservatives to people who now whatever you want to call him now that's not what he's talking about now he now wants to mobilize government and use of the coercive powers of government to impose a certain vision on american society these are the same kinds of circles who when barack obama was thinking about using an executive order called him a tyrant and now
I mean, this guy, he himself has, will gladly tell you that he has drafted dozens, maybe hundreds of executive orders. So there's a trajectory there. And I think that is really worth getting into and sort of trying to understand what's going on there.
Yeah, I think what's interesting is that he himself calls it radical constitutionalism. That's what he wants. That's what he says what is needed now. And it's really quite interesting how someone like Russell Vogt, he will not even talk about himself and his own political project in the idiom of conservatism anymore. These people will tell you conservatism is no longer enough.
That is sort of the rallying cry of these kinds of circles. So he calls it what is now needed as radical constitutionalism because he says there is just nothing left to conserve. So he would probably tell you, okay, so 20 years ago, there's sort of traditional small government conservatism. That's what was needed if you were a constitutional conservative.
But because in their understanding, the left, the progressives, the socialists, honestly, he uses all those terms interchangeably. It's all kind of the same. They have, in this understanding, completely taken over. They've taken over government. They've taken over all the major institutions of American life. They are in charge. And so now there is nothing left to conserve.
So this kind of a conservatism of limits, a conservatism of preserving and conserving, that's just not good enough anymore. What you need now is counter-revolution data. talk about this constantly. They call themselves counter-revolutionaries, right? So again, not at all in the idiom of conservatism.
So what he will say is basically, look, what we did 20 years ago was the right thing to do at that point, but because this leftist revolution has already happened and it has succeeded, now what we're left with Nothing short of a proper counter-revolution will now suffice to save the nation and save real America and whatever they talk about.
And I think that is how they make sense of their own trajectory and how they would tell you this is not just hypocrisy or it's not just there is no tension. It's just a reaction to the fact that the leftist revolution has succeeded. And so now they have adapted to that.
And it's not just the Democratic establishment, it's the Republican establishment as well. And it's even like, Volt will tell you that he thinks what the Federalist Society is doing is completely misleading, and that's just not good enough. Because they also, that type of originalism...
It's also not good enough because it pretends we still have a constitutional order that you can preserve, but you can't. I think it's really important. He constantly says we're in a post-constitutional regime now. He doesn't just mean a kind of formalistic view of how, say, the different constitutional actors relate to each other.
It's this idea of a natural, quote unquote, natural order or divinely ordained order that was supposedly enshrined in the constitutional order, supposedly enshrined in the nation's founding documents. And that has been destroyed. So it's a much more fundamental, a much more, the stakes are so high, so existential for these people, right?
Because it's not just, oh, hey, should the administrative state do this or that? No, for them, this is just a manifestation of fundamentally, the natural order has been undermined by the radical left.
If you really believe this, if those are the stakes, if the constitutional order was the only thing that's made America good and noble and kept the evil forces of modernism and all that kind of stuff,
at bay and if that has been destroyed then yeah it totally makes sense to say we can't just sit here and do like small government conservatism we need to do something more right we need to mobilize the coercive powers of the state against you know this unnatural leftist enemy and that's where this guy has sort of arrived.
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