Tim Talks Politics

It’s a week after Election Day and what a fascinating election it was. You can see my initial assessment of the election in my newsletter (link below), but in this podcast I’m going for a bit of a palette cleanser. If you’ve been feeling overwhelmed or generally weary with all the election coverage, may I recommend the Gettysburg Address? 

Arguably one of the greatest speeches, if not the greatest, in American history, Abraham Lincoln’s brief words memorializing the Gettysburg battlefield present us with enduring lessons on the nature of the American state, and casts an expansive moral vision for the future of the republic. 

Today on the podcast, I’m joined by Lincoln scholar Dr. Matt Van Hook who is an Assistant Director and Associate Professor in the Torrey Honors College at Biola University. We recorded this podcast before the November 5th election, but it’s a timely walkthrough of a timeless work of political thought and prose.

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We’re less than a week away from Election Day and the presidential race looks as tight as most people anticipated. However, recent media appearances by Kamala Harris have again failed to move the needle in her favor, and may even be accelerating a sense of alienation between independent voters and the Democratic Party as well as growing frustration within the Democratic base.

In this second of two episodes looking at the major party platforms, I sit down with my friends and colleagues in Biola University’s Political Science Department to break down the party platforms of 2024. In this episode, Drs. Scott Waller and Darren Guerra cover the Democratic Party’s platform, which is very different from the GOP platform we covered last time. 

Admittedly, all three of us are conservative voters who generally vote Republican, but we’re also scholars who are interested in pursuing truth and wisdom. So, even though we bend a rather critical eye on this document, we’re working to understand the reasoning behind the Democratic Party’s choices in terms of format, length, policy options, etc. that show up in this platform.

This is a discussion that seeks to understand how the Democratic Party views the voting public in the context of a significant political realignment. If you’ve felt a little confused over why the opposing parties seem so different this year, this is a great conversation to understand the political changes afoot in America, and I would highly recommend you listen to it in tandem with our discussion on the GOP platform.

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As America careens towards another presidential election, it’s already been a campaign season marked by once in a generation changes such as the pro-life movement getting marginalized inside the GOP, key blocs of voters breaking with the Democratic Party, assassination attempts on Donald Trump, and the list goes on. But what is it that Democrats and Republicans are trying to achieve in this election cycle, besides winning, that is? What does a vote for a Republican or Democrat even mean these days?

In the next two episodes of this podcast, I sit down with my friends and colleagues in Biola University’s Political Science Department to break down the party platforms of 2024. In this episode, Drs. Scott Waller and Darren Guerra cover the Republican platform, which is a very different kind of platform on many different fronts. As experts in religious liberty issues (Waller) and Constitutional thought (Guerra), Scott and Darren bring both a historical awareness of Republican politics as well as developments in the broader American political system to this conversation. 

This is a discussion that seeks to locate what appears to be a different kind of platform document in the context of a significant political realignment. If you’ve felt a little confused over why the opposing parties seem so different this year, this is a great conversation to understand the political changes afoot in America.

Just a reminder

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Subscribe to Tim Talks Politics⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠ on Substack⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ today and get 30% off for being a loyal listener!

As we hit the homestretch of the 2024 election, we’re witnessing significant changes to the demographics of the Democratic and Republican coalitions. Political scientists call this “realignment” and we haven’t seen one this big in a generation. Just this last week, a new report came showing that for the first time ever, registered Republicans outnumber registered Democrats nationwide.

That expanding tent creates a more favorable electoral map for the GOP, but it also creates some difficult realities for constituencies that have long formed foundational blocs in the GOP.

One such group is the pro-life movement that has anchored the social conservative vote in the GOP for the last 50-plus years. This year, however, it’s different. As public opinion has shifted on abortion and pro-life sponsored legislation on abortion failed in battleground states (and even some red ones), the GOP platform for 2024 followed the lead of Donald Trump and visibly distanced itself from the pro-life position.

In this interview, I sat down to chat with Baylor University’s Matthew Lee Anderson and unpack a recent article he wrote for The Dispatch on the future of the pro-life movement. We discuss the shifting political realities that appear to have put the pro-life movement on its back foot, before delving into how the pro-life movement can use this time of being in the proverbial “political wilderness” to hone its outreach and messaging to the broader American culture.

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Christian nationalism has gotten a lot of play the last few years, particularly in the rhetoric of its opponents in journalism, academia, and even the White House.

According to its critics, Christian nationalism is a malevolent ideology that has allied itself with Donald Trump to capture conservative politics in America with the aim of bringing about a dystopian Christian theocracy akin to The Handmaid’s Tale.

Mark David Hall argues in his new book, Who’s Afraid of Christian Nationalism?, that such claims are overblown and that Christian nationalism is not the existential threat the critics claim. In fact, Christian nationalism may not even be a helpful phrase to describe the thinking of American Christians when it comes to politics in general.

In this interview, Mark and I chart the rise of the term turned pejorative, explore both journalistic and academic writing on Christian nationalism, evaluate the data connected with that research, and discuss how those (very) few Christians who do seek to make an affirmative case for Christian nationalism aren’t even representative of most Christians.

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Joseph Epstein is back on the show to give us an update on the regional conflict in the Middle East between Israel and Iran. While Hamas remains the main target of Israeli operations in Gaza, the conflict with Iran is increasingly coming to the forefront, which is raising fears of a broader war.

We discuss how the July assassination of Hamas and Hezbollah leaders in Syria and Iran is shaping Iran’s strategic calculus, and explore why, despite the high profile nature of Ismail Haniyeh’s assassination in Tehran, Iran has yet to strike back at Israel as of this recording.

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OK, the title is a little dramatic, but I wanted to build off of comments I made in my last podcast as well a theme I’ve been developing this summer in my newsletter: The American news media is so caught up in the drama of the upcoming presidential election that it is not serving the American people well in keeping readers abreast of what else is happening in the world. 

To illustrate that point, I’m going to run you through the Council of Foreign Relations’ Global Conflict Tracker, and I’ll put a link to it in the show notes if you’d like to follow along. Or you can just open up Google maps, or a good old fashioned paper atlas if such a one still graces your bookshelf. 

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The Summer of 2024 will go down in American history as one of the most exciting, if not consequential, summers in modern history. The way I’ve been putting it to people is that it’s like we’ve taken the political violence, economic turmoil, and geopolitical tensions of the 1960s, that whole decade, and just squeezed it into one summer. That’s intense.

quick review of domestic politics in the Summer of 2024 and look ahead to what’s in store for this publication in the coming months.
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When you hear people talk about World War III do you typically envision nuclear armed superpowers slinging nukes at hordes of robot soldiers until human civilization is blasted into a post-apocalyptic desert? Or maybe you imagine something akin to the last World War with millions of soldiers fighting on every continent and in every domain.

My guest today argues that in reality, World War III may have already started and it’s not what we typically imagine. 

Joseph Epstein is the Legislative Analyst at the Endowment for Middle East Truth (EMET), a Washington DC think tank, and is an expert on foreign policy, terrorism, and the Middle East. In a fascinating discussion that starts with the war in Gaza, we broaden the scope to consider one of Epstein’s many articles exploring the possibility that World War III has already begun, and we discuss its different dimensions and implications for US policy.

Rather than an all-consuming conflict, Epstein argues that this current “World War” is being fought in the “gray zone” - a domain just below the threshold of declared war where countries seek to preserve plausible deniability and avoid direct conflict while still inflicting harm on their adversary. Think America “fighting” Russia by arming Ukraine, or Iran “fighting” Israel through its region-wide network of terror proxies. Gray zone tactics also emerge in the information domain in the form of propaganda and information warfare, and in economics via sanctions and heightened trade barriers. 

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This past semester, I had the opportunity to explore the Arab-Israeli conflict, its history and politics, with a class of undergraduate students. During that class, I brought in my good friend, and former TTP podcast guest, Judith Rood to discuss her personal background and its connection to the Arab-Israeli conflict and to explore some of the more complex elements that animate Israeli-Palestinian relations.

This is Part 2 of that guest lecture. In it, we discuss the contentious issues surrounding Israeli settlements in the West Bank and the oft overlooked issue of sovereignty in determining national claims in this contested corner of the world.

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Get the show notes at⁠⁠ www.timtalkspolitics.com⁠⁠.