STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
Vice President Harris called Trump yesterday to concede defeat, and then she spoke to the nation.
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VICE PRESIDENT KAMALA HARRIS: For everyone who is watching, do not despair. This is not a time to throw up our hands. This is a time to roll up our sleeves.
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INSKEEP: She said the debate goes on, which is part of democracy, just as conceding an election that you lost is part of democracy. Americans who supported Trump or Harris or somebody else now discuss what the election results mean. Daniel McCarthy has an opinion. He is the editor of Modern Age, a conservative review which is an academic journal. He supports Trump, and he explained why in The New York Times, and he's on the line. Good morning, sir.
DANIEL MCCARTHY: Good morning.
INSKEEP: And congratulations to your side. You use a really interesting phrase in your essay - creative destruction. What is that, and what do you mean by it here?
MCCARTHY: Well, in economics, creative destruction is what happens when an entrepreneur, a new firm enters a market and discovers that the existing market relationships, the old firms that had been providing goods and services to people, were not providing goods and services that were of high enough quality or that were insufficient demand for those businesses to stay in business. So basically, it's when a new competitor shows that the old competitors were inefficient and were unsatisfactory to the consumer base.
INSKEEP: OK.
MCCARTHY: And in politics, I say, basically, that Donald Trump has been a kind of new, disruptive product or force that shows that a lot of our other institutions and political leaders have lost the trust of the public.
INSKEEP: OK. And I think that we can follow you up to there. People have lost faith in, well, faith institutions. They've lost faith in universities and governments and other things. Institutions don't seem to meet the moment for a lot of Americans. Would you say that Trump has a coherent critique of them?
MCCARTHY: Well, I think his critique is actually quite coherent, which is that there are leaders in these institutions who have consistently failed America. And while NPR listeners might want to hear more about that, the mere fact that Donald Trump is very explicit about saying that, you know, in the military, in the academy, among experts, among both political parties, you have leadership classes that have failed the country - that, I think, is something that, you know, is clear and resonates with the public and actually is a big part of why he succeeded last Tuesday.
INSKEEP: Yeah, I think that people are familiar with that critique, including listeners to this program. But I'm thinking about the way that Trump responds to this and has responded in recent years. He'll say, you know, courts and laws don't decide what is illegal. I will just say what is illegal. Science doesn't do science. I will say what is science. In 2020, the voters don't decide the election. I decide who won. Isn't that part of what his approach has been?
MCCARTHY: Well, you know, in 2020, Donald Trump really believed that he had won that election, and certainly millions of his voters believe that as well. So that's not a case of saying that the voters don't decide. That's a case of having a false belief that the voters had decided in his favor. Now, admittedly, that's very much a motivated belief, and, you know, Donald Trump is a character whose view of the world is strongly motivated by what he wants to believe in.
Nevertheless, I think that's actually very different from simply saying that I get to make up whatever I want. It's a stressful thing for our institutions, but it's actually a stress that they probably need to suffer in order to realize why they haven't had the success in stopping Donald Trump that they wanted to have. So it's really - you know, I think not only is this a test of Donald Trump's appeal to the public, but this election and now the aftermath are also going to be ways for our existing institutions to try to recognize the condition they're in and reconnect with the American public.
INSKEEP: What is an institutional change that you would like to see? And I guess I'll try to define this. I don't just mean a policy change that you might be in favor of, or that somebody else might be in favor of, but a reform to an institution that would bring it more into the confidence of a larger number of Americans.
MCCARTHY: In the case of the academy and also the media, I think you need to have more conservative voices. And that, again, isn't necessarily something that's going to be defined by policy, but it's going to be defined by a certain skepticism towards some of the existing authorities that Donald Trump has criticized, and also a willingness to present more of a commonsense or common man's point of view in a more sophisticated way, both in journalism and also in the colleges and universities.
INSKEEP: When you say more conservative voices, what do you mean?
MCCARTHY: Well, I think it's very interesting, actually, that a lot of our newspapers, for example, have conservative columnists, but these conservative columnists almost all - almost uniformly opposed Donald Trump in 2016. And again, actually, in 2020, most of them did as well. So there was a lack of a representation for Trump voters and the discontents that were driving them to vote for Trump and oppose Kamala Harris and all of the people supporting her, all of the institutions, like, you know, journalism and, you know, even parts of the Republican party like Liz Cheney.
INSKEEP: Oh, my gosh. I have so many more questions, but I guess we'd better stop here. We'll continue the discussion another time. Daniel McCarthy is editor of Modern Age, a conservative review. Thanks so much.
MCCARTHY: Thank you. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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