In this preview from the latest “Signal Sitdown” podcast with Bradley Devlin, Michael Knowles discusses how the MAGA coalition can stay together despite all the infighting on the right. The full interview premieres on The Daily Signal’s YouTube page at 6:30 a.m. EST on May 7.

Bradley Devlin: And yetthere’sthis shift in the American lexiconthat’shappened, I guess, over the last 100 years. I hate attributing everything to the progressives.Don’tget me wrong. Manybad thingscan be attributed to the progressives. Yes. Butthey’renot responsible for every single social evil that we face right now.

Michael Knowles:Right.

Devlin:But this really does kind of start with Woodrow Wilson, where politics in the American lexicon becomes a dirty word,whereaspolitics, according to the Western tradition, was the good thing.

Knowles:Yes.

Devlin:That was the good thing as opposed to mob rule, as opposed to perverted democracies, perverted aristocracies, oligarchies, things of that nature.

And so,I think you have to recover politics properly understood in order to get there.And so often I see on the right is a full-on rejection ofpoliticsforprinciple.Right? You see this all the time on social media everywhere, that, well, my principles forbid me from working with or building a coalition with somebody.

And it can be something rather serious, right? There are fences on the island where we need to protect those fences and make sure that we keep those unsavory characters out. But these issues are super petty. It’s like, I reject a 25% tariff on EU automobiles—rather than the 15% tariff. Like, that’s the type of level that we’re dealing with when we say ‘my principles forbid me from working with you!’

How do we go about shedding the right of this idea that politics is a dirty word?

Knowles:Well, I think you’ve gotten right to the heart of the matter, and it requires a restoration of the classical view of politics over the myriad errors that have set in, not just since the 1960s or not even since the 1910s, but that have set in since, I don’t know, the 16th century, the 17th century at the latest.

And the thinker that I come back to as, toimmediatelyabstract it all the way out into the realm of theory, is Michael Oakeshott.

Devlin:You are a podcaster. This is okay.You’renot in the—

Knowles: Yeah, Igeta pass, right? And I think Michael Oakeshott, the 20th-century British political philosopher, gives us a good sense of this.

In his essay“Rationalism in Politics,”he says that ideology is to be eschewed by the conservative because he defines ideology as the formalized abridgment of thesupposed substratumof rational truth contained in the tradition. A delightfully flowery way of describing this, but itbearsrepeating.

The formalized abridgment of thesupposed substratumof rational truth, only rational truth contained within the tradition. And he saysthat’snot what we do. At that point, you have such a thin understanding of the world. This is the manifesto of the liberal or the leftist that fits in five bullet points on the back of a napkin.

But youdon’twant that. In a different essay,“On Being Conservative,”Oakeshott says that to be conservative is to prefer the actual to the possible, to prefer present laughterultimately toutopian bliss.It’sa practical inclination, and that works for me.

Soa lot of these debates that have broken out among the podcasters, one,involve, you know, you fired me from this job 10 years ago, and you said this mean thing about me on some other podcast. Like, a lot of it really is petty.

Inasmuch as it involves ideas, whichI’mhappy to debate, I delight in debating ideas, but a lot of that debate is taking place at too abstract, too high a level.

Soone will say, well, this person isadvancing,this podcaster is advancing through some nebulous means. Idon’tknow how. Through his microphone and magic, he is advancing a postliberal integralist paleoconservative, and that is completely unacceptable. I will never dine with this person because I, you see, am a pure libertarian neo-paleoconservative, who in the arrangement of Frank Meyer, but only from 1963, not 1965.

And you just say, can you—what are we talking about? What are we talking about?

Devlin:And that is actually what presents the real challenge, is for people at home who are watching this all playout,they think to themselves, the sky is falling. The sky is falling.

Now, I might be a little bit more black-pilled than you are on some of this stuff, because you’ve recently been touring the country doing speeches with TPUSA and YAF, and you said this experience has kind of been white-pilling, that there’s still a lot ofreally good youth energy—for as much as we talk about how young men in particular who swung heavily toward Trump in 2024 might be—not swinging back to the left, but not as enthusiastic about showing up for the midterms or in 2028.

Knowles:No, I was just in Idaho. It was with TPUSA. TPUSA decided to continue Charlie[Kirk]’s tour, and coincidentally, I was the first person to do that.

Charlie and I were supposed to do an event together at the University of Minnesota12 daysafter he died, and they asked if I would come out and sub in on his radio show, because they still had the radio show when he was killed. You know, the show must go on, I guess.

They were getting a bunch of his friends to sub in for weeks afterward, and I show up there days later, and they asked me, hey, are you going to do that event in Minneapolis?

I said, guys, this is entirely up to you.It’stotally your thing. If you want me to do it, I will do it.I’lldo it alone with an empty chair. If youdon’twant to do it,it’syour call.It’syour event. You make the decision. Idon’twant to weighin on it.

And they said,wethink you should do it,whichwas obviously the right answer.Very much in the spirit of Charlie. Andsowe did that.

It was a good event up there. This was right in the wake of it. People were still quite traumatized. It was clear at that point that the left was celebrating Charlie’s death.

Sowe finished that one out, and then TPUSA decided to continue the tour.

I was a little worried, because the thing about assassinations is that they work, and no one wanted to acknowledge that. Everyone said, oh, well,you’vestruck Charlie down, andwe’redevastated, butwe’regoing to come back 10 times stronger. Andit’slike Obi-Wan Kenobi in Star Wars, and that’scopium.

That’s actually not how it works.Assassinations do hurt people.That’swhy people keep doing them.

I was a little concerned. The left also has beenvery aggressivein terms of reserving seats and then not showingup, orshowing up and then leaving in the first 10 minutes.I’vedealt with these tactics for 10 years nowinmy own tours.

Sothere wasa realfear.

There werekerfuffleswhen the administration was helping them out. Butanyway,[Matt]Walsh and I show up in Idaho,totally packedhouse, maximum capacity,very bigvenue, and then more than 1,000 people were turned away at the door.

Devlin:Yeah, youdidn’teven know that many people lived in Idaho.

Knowles:Truly. Itwas justamazing.Some of the guys were following my car out of the venue. I was doing an event afterward at a cigar lounge, of course, and they were just stopping by the car as I got out and saying, “Hey, can you sign the hat? Can you sign this? Can we talk about this?”

But it was really great.It was reallywhite-pilling. The questions in the room were great. I was waiting for it to be all sorts of inside baseball personality podcast nonsense like we were just discussing.

How could you work for that dastardly Ben Shapiro? Why won’t you denounce the evil Tucker Carlson?All of this kind of meta-political stuff.It reallywasn’tthat at all.

It was people asking what to do now, how to deal with the Iran war, which is controversial among the wonk class, the right-wing think tanks, and many rank-and-file conservatives, what to do about the economy.

We had one little kid show up, mention that he wanted to become a priest, and Walsh decided to grill him on it. Very Matt Walsh thing to do. He said, “Why do you want to be a priest?” And the kid said,“I think Godis calling me,” which is the pitch-perfect answer.

You had people debating matters of theology, and it was justreally substantive,really good,a very positiveevent.

And I thought, okay,I’mnow reaffirmed in my previously held belief that I was doubting, that there is a distinction between Twitter and real life. There’s overlap, but there is a distinction.

And even to your point, thatit’snot just affecting the podcast class,that’strue.It’sall over society.

But it occurred to me that 20 years ago, you say, what kind of Republican are you? Someone would say,I’ma John McCain Republican.I’ma Ron Paul Republican.

Sixty years ago, what kind of Republican are you?I’ma Barry Goldwater conservative. No,I’ma Rockefeller Republican. It was always referring to actual politicians who created public policy.

Now if you ask,you’remuch more likely to get the answer, well,I’ma Ben Shapiro conservative, orI’ma Tucker Carlson conservative.

In other words,it now appears that the tailis wagging the dog, that the political media are really in the driver’s seat of prominence over the conservative politicians.

Which I guess is finebyme, becauseI’min that class, soI’mfine to be thebelle of the ball. But ina properpolitical order, that would not be the case.

You would have more of a focuson the real.

In some ways, the sociologist Jean Baudrillard has becomevery popularin certain corners of the right. The man who promotes society of hyperreality.wrotea famous book about how the Gulf Wardidn’treally happen. It was just a sort of illusory phenomenon on television.

Delightful writer ifyou’reintoplausibly right-wingpostmodernism.He’sa delightful writer.

But his idea thatyoukind ofabstractand concentrate something so far away thatit’salmost unrecognizable from the source material, I thinkthat’swherewe’vegotten with politics.

Andsoyou have to bring those things back together, or we will become frivolous. We will become superfluous.Andthe upshot of that will be that the left willactually do the governing, and we will all lose.