Jon Stewart called out after suggesting Germany may revert to Nazism without US military influence
"The Daily Show" host Jon Stewart was called out for suggesting that Germany would revert to Nazism without the military influence of the United States on Monday night.
Former Mitt Romney advisor Oren Cass appeared on Stewart's show to discuss President Donald Trump's tariffs and his forthcoming book, "The New Conservatives."
While discussing the role the U.S. military should play in overseas conflicts, specifically in Europe and Russia, Stewart alluded to the last time Germany was in the position of being a "global military power": World War II. He seemed to suggest that Germany would revert to Nazism if the U.S. didn't financially support their war efforts.
Stewart asked Cass if expecting "Germany to be able to fend off Russia on their own" would place the U.S. in a "very tenuous place."
"Why?" Cass asked.
"I have a book at home about Germany and their position as a global military power, where we didn't have sway, and they did whatever they wanted, and it didn't work out," Stewart said, to the laughter of the audience.
"No, no, no, I want to pick up on this," Cass replied over the laughter of the audience. "Because this is the fun applause line that like, 'Oh, the Germans will just become Nazis again,' like that's a weird racist critique of Germans. I don't see any reason to believe that."
Stewart responded, "Well," while grinning, to which Cass replied, "Let's be honest, it is."
Cass then asked Stewart, "On what basis are you saying this is like something about Germany that we can't abide?"
"I think it's that there is an element within their society that they've deemed… this is not me saying Germans will do that, this is Germany. This is, I didn't say they'll become that, the leaders of Germany are fearful that they have this…" Stewart attempted to explain before being interrupted by Cass.
Cass fired back at Stewart, claiming that the leaders of Germany just "really enjoy spending virtually nothing on their military while the United States spends roughly 4% of GDP on ours."
Stewart then asked if Cass felt that Germany was "freeloading on our military."
"There's no question they're freeloading on our military," Cass replied.
"The Daily Show" host explained why he doesn't see the U.S. building up its allies' militaries as "freeloading."
"I guess I don't understand the idea that they're freeloading, and we want each nation state to build up their military to the point, because to me, that makes it more likely if you build something like that, it's more likely you'll use it. Now that seems to be backed by general history when people rearm they tend to do it and use it," Stewart explained.
In a discussion about Trump's tariffs on nations like Canada and his ambitions for America to take ownership of Greenland, Stewart claimed that it feels like the current administration is trying to establish a "new world order," rather than "rebalancing economic inequalities."
"It all seems so weirdly vindictive, and then you're like, and then we're going to take over Greenland. Like, it does feel a little less like rebalancing economic inequities, and we've decided on a new world order where big does what it wants, and nation states we go back to a little bit of that colonialist model or imperialist or whatever it was," Stewart suggested.
While Cass acknowledged that this was a "fair concern," he challenged Stewart's claims by offering his own take on the situation.
"I think there's some truth to it that's not all bad when you talk about this 'new world order' idea, which is that the United States has been sort of championing this liberal world order where we have essentially taken it upon ourselves to, frankly, absorb a lot of costs from other people, right? So in the trade world, it's not just China, it's also Germany and Japan and Korea. We are absorbing their production, they get the jobs," Cass explained before being interrupted by Stewart.
Stewart asked Cass if he thought the U.S. was doing this in an effort to "buy influence," and claimed that Trump's view on the situation is that these nations were "abusing us."
"I think the view I have is, America wants to tell them what to do and so, by leveraging our military might, we have sway," he said.
Cass responded, asking, "But do we? What have we successfully told Japan or Germany to do?"
Stewart jokingly responded, "Uh, in general?" to the laughter of the audience, adding, "Uh, stop wearing the lederhosen, I think they've cut down on it."
"No, no, no, no, this is a serious point. I appreciate the joke, but there's a reason you couldn't answer the question," Cass fired back.
Stewart then alluded to Vice President JD Vance's trip to Greenland, where Stewart claimed the vice president disrespected Denmark, and that Denmark lost just as many people per capita during the wars in the Middle East as the U.S. did.
He also claimed that the "stable world order" hasn't mistreated the United States, and that he doesn't see us "as victims of a con game that Europe has been running on us."
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I invited him onto The Gray Area to talk about this new right-wing populism, what distinguishes it from the left, and whether the Republican Party is serious about adopting it. As always, there's much more in the full podcast, so listen and follow The Gray Area on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pandora, or wherever you find podcasts. New episodes drop every Monday. This interview has been edited for length and clarity. Back in 2018, you wrote: 'Our political economy has relied upon the insidious metaphor of the economic pie, which measures success by the amount of GDP available to every American for consumption. … But the things America thought she wanted have not made her happy.' Let's start there: What did we think we wanted, and why hasn't it made us happy? You're very perceptive to start there. We were just putting together this new book called The New Conservatives, which is an anthology of everything we've been doing at American Compass over the last five years. And I actually went back and grabbed that essay and made it a prologue to the book. Because exactly as you said, it is a starting point for the way I think about a lot of this. In my mind, what we saw go wrong in our economics and our politics is that we did come to think of consumption as the end unto itself. And to be clear, I love consumption as much as the next guy. I'm not saying we should go back and live in log cabins, but I think we assumed that as long as we were increasing consumption, as long as material living standards were rising, everybody would be happy and we could declare success. And it's important to say that, from a formal perspective, that is in fact how our economic models operate. Economists will tell you their assumption is that the goal of the economic system is to maximize consumption. And so that's where that economic pie metaphor comes from. Something that was so widely embraced across the political spectrum, across the intellectual spectrum, was this idea that as long as you're growing the economy, you're growing GDP, you don't really have to worry too much about what's in the pie or where it's coming from. You can always then chop it up and make sure everybody has lots of pie. And I think it's important to say that — and this is the point, that we got what we thought we wanted — it's important to say that that worked. That for all of the problems we have in this country, if you're only looking at material living standards, if you're asking how much stuff people have, how big their houses are, whether they're air-conditioned, even how much health care they consume, at every socioeconomic level, consumption is up. We did that. And yet I think it's also very obvious that that did not achieve what we were trying to achieve, that [it] did not necessarily correspond to human flourishing, did not correspond to a strengthening economy over time, that it certainly did not correspond to strengthening families and communities. And ultimately, it didn't correspond to a strong and healthy political system or democracy. And so there's obviously a lot of talk of, Okay, well, why isn't that right? Why did it go wrong? What do you do about it? The strange thing for someone like me is that American conservatism, certainly in my lifetime, has largely existed to reinforce the ideology you're rejecting here. Why do you think the political right has been blind for so long to the things you're fighting for now? There's a very interesting pivot point that you see around the time of the Reagan revolution. The coalition that Reagan assembled had these different elements. It had the social conservatives, who I would say are most closely aligned to a fundamentally conservative outlook on a lot of these questions. But then it brought to that the very libertarian free-market folks on the economic side, and the quite aggressive interventionist foreign policy hawks. And what all these folks had in common was they really hated communism and really wanted to win the Cold War and saw that as the existential crisis. But what happened is, within that coalition, a very libertarian free-market mindset was then imposed on the economic policy of the right of center, even when that was very much in tension with a lot of other conservative values. And you saw people writing about that from both sides. From one side, Friedrich Hayek, who is one of the ultimate carriers of this pre-market ideology, has a very famous essay titled 'Why I Am Not a Conservative,' emphasizing that what he calls faith in markets to solve problems and self-regulate was very much at odds with how conservatives looked at the world. And from the flip side, you had a lot of conservatives, folks like Yuval Levin, who prefer markets as a way of ordering the economy to other options, but recognize that markets are very much in tension with other values like family and community. And in some cases, markets even actively can undermine or erode the strength of those other institutions. Markets are also dependent on institutions. If you want markets to work well, you actually need constraints. You need institutional supports. And so that tension was always present. I think that the coalition made a lot of sense in the context of winning the Cold War. It made a lot of sense when markets in the middle of the late 20th century really did seem to be delivering on a lot of the things that conservatives really cared about. But I think it reached its expiration date and just lived on by inertia into the 2000s, into this era of radical embrace of free trade even with communist China and cutting taxes even in the face of big deficits. I can imagine a skeptical leftist hearing all of this and thinking it's just a rebranded democratic socialism. Why is that wrong? What makes this conservative? There's a real disconnect both on the ends and on the means. I think there's a very healthy contestation over what are the appropriate ends that we're actually building toward. And what you're seeing conservatives coming back to articulating a set of actual value judgments about, what do we think the good life consists of? I think there is a set of value judgments and preferences for, in many respects, quite traditional formations at the family level, at the community level. [For] saying that it is not merely a value-neutral choice — 'Would you rather get married and have kids or spend more money on vacations in Greece?' — that it is actually appropriate and necessary for the good society to say, No, one of these things is better than the other and more important and should be valued more highly. At the national level, you're also seeing a much more robust nationalism on the right of center. Conservatives recognize the importance of the nation and solidarity within the nation to functioning markets, to a functioning society, in a way that at least the modern left tends to resist in a lot of cases. Part of the case you're making is that there's an ongoing paradigm shift within American conservatism. When you look at what this administration is doing on the policy front, when you look at what the Republican Party is doing, do you see them moving in your direction? We're definitely moving in the right direction. On tariffs alone, [we could] spend a tremendous amount of time emphasizing the ways I think the problems that they're addressing, the direction they're trying to go, is the right one. On the specifics of how things are timed and what the levels are and so forth, what legal authorities you use for what, I have all sorts of thoughts on how it might be done better. But broadly speaking, to your question about the direction that things are headed, I think it's extraordinarily clear to me that the Republican Party and the conservative movement are shifting quite dramatically in this direction. One way to look at that is in terms of personnel. Trump has obviously been something of a constant over the last decade in Republican politics, but the distance from Mike Pence to JD Vance is pretty dramatic. The distance from [Secretaries of State] Rex Tillerson to Marco Rubio is pretty dramatic. The distance from the various secretaries of labor in the first term to a secretary of labor recommended by the Teamsters is pretty dramatic. Is it really, though? Rhetorically, yes. But substantively? If you want to know why I can't take this iteration of the GOP seriously, look at the domestic policy they just passed in the House. It's the same Republican Party. It's jammed up with a bunch of stuff that reflects conventional conservative priorities. It's not doing a whole lot to help working-class people. It's more tax cuts offset by more cuts to Medicaid and food stamps, which low-income people depend on. And the net result, as always, will be more upward redistribution of wealth. And on top of that, another $3 or $4 or $5 trillion tacked onto the deficit just for good measure. How can you look at that and feel like the GOP is genuinely pivoting in your direction? I've been extremely critical of the 'big, beautiful bill' — particularly of the deficit element — because I think if one is going to be a fiscal conservative, one has to not be adding to deficits right now. But a lot of the efforts to argue that things are not changing in the Republican Party strike me as a real disservice to people who are trying to understand where things are going. Elected political leaders are always going to be the lagging indicator of what's happening in any political party or political movement. They are by definition going to be the oldest, the ones who have been around the longest, the ones who have built their careers and ideologies and relationships around what was happening 20 or 30 years ago. And so if one wants to know what is passing in Congress today, then yes, you count the votes of the people in Congress today. If you want to know what's actually moving within a party or what's going to happen over a 10- or 15-year period, counting the votes today is just not what someone in good faith trying to understand the direction would do. The tariff regime, the trade war — that is a genuine shift. No doubt about it. It's not entirely clear to me how that helps poor and working-class people at the moment, but maybe I'm not seeing the whole picture. There's a very interesting economic debate to be had about whether it will work. I obviously have one very strong view. But it seems pretty clear to me that what they are trying to do is quite explicitly focused on the economic interests of workers. Another very interesting area — I mentioned some of the things that are going on on the labor front. One really interesting effort that's underway, and [Sen.] Josh Hawley is the leader of it, but Bernie Moreno, the new senator from Ohio, is the co-sponsor of it — they've taken the [proposed] PRO Act, which is the ultimate Democratic wish list of labor reforms, and they've chopped it up. And they've said, Look, some of these are perfectly legitimate and good ideas. Others of these we don't agree with. And we're going to start advancing the ones we think are good ideas. That's a dramatic shift in how you would see the Republican Party. I think you're seeing the same thing in the financial sector. There was a great example recently where a private equity firm that had bought out a bunch of paper plants was trying to shut down a paper plant in Ohio. And you literally had the Republican politicians out there at the rally with the union leaders, forcing a change and a commitment to at least keep the plant open for the rest of the year and try to find a transaction that would keep it open afterward. On family policy, in 2017 you had [then-Sens.] Marco Rubio and Mike Lee threatening to tank the entire tax cut bill to get an expanded child tax credit in it. Now it is an uncontroversial top priority that the child tax credit is not only kept at that level, but expanded further. And so even at the level of what is happening in legislation, it's clear that this is a very different party from 2017. If you look at who Trump has appointed, it's a very different set of appointments. If you look at the critical mass and sometimes center of gravity among the younger elected officials, the people coming into the Senate, it's a completely different set of priorities and policies from those who have been there for a long time. Like I said, I'm not convinced that the DNA of the party has changed, but I will grant that there are indications of a shift. I don't know what it's going to amount to, materially, but this is not the party of Mitt Romney. I think Trump has cultivated a very unique coalition, certainly much more working-class than the pre-Trump Republican Party. I don't know how much of that coalition is a function of Trump and how much of that coalition will fade when he fades. If the Republican Party does prove an unreliable vehicle for your movement, can you see a world in which you're working with Democrats? We do work with some Democrats. I think there are Democrats who are doing very good and interesting work. We recently had [Rep.] Jared Golden from Maine on the American Compass Podcast because he is the sponsor of the 10 percent global tariff legislation in Congress. One thing I always emphasize is that I think a healthy American politics is not one where one party gets everything right and dominates and the other one collapses into irrelevance. It's one where we actually have two healthy political parties that are both focused on the concerns and priorities of the typical American and are then contesting a lot of these very legitimate disagreements about ends and means. But based on what is happening in American politics today and the fundamental differences between conservatism and progressivism, I would expect that this is going to have the most success and salience and overlap in thinking on the right of center.
