Ross Douthat
Appearances
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
JD Vance on His Faith and Trump’s Most Controversial Policies
Mr. Vice President, welcome to Interesting Times. Thank you, Ross. Try and contain your laughter. Wait, is that actually the name of your podcast? That is the name of our show, yes. Do we not live in interesting times? We do live in interesting times. So we're here in Rome. This is the day after the papal inauguration. But now it's the next day. It is. And you just met with Pope Leo XIV. I did.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
JD Vance on His Faith and Trump’s Most Controversial Policies
I mean, just to pause there, one of the most, I would say... hardcore critical of illegal immigration think tanks, when I looked into this, had its estimate, I think, in the 10 to 12 million range, right?
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
JD Vance on His Faith and Trump’s Most Controversial Policies
How does being either a Catholic or just a Christian shape your politics? In the sense of, just to be specific, what are things that you feel like you believe or care about in politics that are specific to Christianity rather than conservatism, the Republican Party, and so on? How would your worldview be different if you weren't a Catholic Christian?
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
JD Vance on His Faith and Trump’s Most Controversial Policies
But the due process— Under a legislative standard. To be clear, this is based on legislation. Like, the judges who are making these decisions are not inventing this standard. It is a legislative standard. Right.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
JD Vance on His Faith and Trump’s Most Controversial Policies
Right. But it seems like the stable way to get there, where you are creating a settlement that would outlast your own administration would involve a combination of Supreme Court rulings, and I think it's fair to say that there is a majority on the Supreme Court that is likely to be sympathetic to something other than a left NGO reading of immigration law. I hope that's right. Okay.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
JD Vance on His Faith and Trump’s Most Controversial Policies
I hope that's right. I think that's likely, combined with perhaps a recognition that maybe the legislative setup around this issue is out of date. you know, that the asylum system assumed by legislation written in the 1950s doesn't make sense and so on, right? So there you have two tracks.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
JD Vance on His Faith and Trump’s Most Controversial Policies
You have trying to get Supreme Court rulings that vindicate your interpretation of the law, and then you have potentially legislative efforts where the existing law needs to be revised.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
JD Vance on His Faith and Trump’s Most Controversial Policies
And this is what I'm asking about. The legal authorities that you guys have tried to use have been— The particular one is the Alien Enemies Act, right, which is an extremely aggressive claim about wartime powers that, as far as I can tell, even under the most aggressive interpretation, is likely to apply only to an incredibly small number of migrants, right?
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
JD Vance on His Faith and Trump’s Most Controversial Policies
The claim is not actually that 5 million migrants here illegally are in a state of war against the United States, or is that the claim?
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
JD Vance on His Faith and Trump’s Most Controversial Policies
We'll talk about that question in a minute.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
JD Vance on His Faith and Trump’s Most Controversial Policies
Shouldn't this sort of barbaric medieval landscape that you're describing show up in violent crime statistics?
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
JD Vance on His Faith and Trump’s Most Controversial Policies
So to get quickly to my idea of a zone of temptation here for you. Well, so what you're describing is, again, you and I both lived through the Bush presidency, right?
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
JD Vance on His Faith and Trump’s Most Controversial Policies
And there are elements of what you might call a kind of war on terror mentality that you're taking vis-a-vis the cartels or people associated with the cartels or people allegedly associated with gangs and cartels that seems to me similar to the approach taken to anyone associated with Islamic terrorism and so on in the aftermath of September 11th. And again, you remember and I remember that
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
JD Vance on His Faith and Trump’s Most Controversial Policies
In more than a few cases, right, this ended up with situations where the U.S. was taking people into custody and remanding them to black sites and so on, who turned out, unsurprisingly, not to be number one al-Qaeda terrorists, right? And to the extent that it is possible, and it is somewhat difficult for the media to do this, but to the extent that it's possible for the media to examine this,
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
JD Vance on His Faith and Trump’s Most Controversial Policies
the kind of figures and individuals that you guys have been trying to essentially remand to prison in El Salvador, right? Without, you know, extensive legal process. It just seems like this system is ripe for war on terror style abuses where you are going to be sending people to prison in El Salvador that advertises itself as a terrible place
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
JD Vance on His Faith and Trump’s Most Controversial Policies
And one, some of those people are probably going to be innocent. Two, some of them are going to be people who have committed a crime, who have some kind of gang affiliation, but who under normal American law, non-wartime law, would end up going to jail for six months or a year or something. And again, they're going to disappear potentially into a system for a decade or more or something like that.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
JD Vance on His Faith and Trump’s Most Controversial Policies
And that just seems like you are creating a context where injustice is – inevitable, even if your intentions are just to bring peace and order to communities along the border or anything else?
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
JD Vance on His Faith and Trump’s Most Controversial Policies
I don't think I have. No, I'm not. All right. Let me let me be perfectly honest. I'm not interested in having you trapped. We're having a conversation in Rome as a journalist and a vice president, but also as two Catholics. And I'm giving you shit, Ross. Trust me.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
JD Vance on His Faith and Trump’s Most Controversial Policies
After that pitch to yourself. And American law.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
JD Vance on His Faith and Trump’s Most Controversial Policies
The other thing that the president of the United States said was that he hoped or aspired to a situation where he could potentially send American citizens to El Salvador's prison.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
JD Vance on His Faith and Trump’s Most Controversial Policies
I think that you should be able to see, though, why in the context of sending illegal immigrants to an El Salvadoran prison and claiming to be unable for diplomatic reasons to bring them back, The prospect of then saying, and we'd like to send U.S.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
JD Vance on His Faith and Trump’s Most Controversial Policies
citizens to that prison, would raise some concerns about how the administration uses the immigration powers that you think it should have under arguable wartime conditions. Again, right? Regardless of the particulars of a case, it just seems like you are setting up a machinery –
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
JD Vance on His Faith and Trump’s Most Controversial Policies
that people of good faith who are not hostile to your policies would reasonably regard as dangerous to particular people who are caught up in the system. That's all, right?
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
JD Vance on His Faith and Trump’s Most Controversial Policies
That's my understanding of the American people. In a context where the administration is saying, Notwithstanding the Supreme Court's desire that we facilitate the return of someone who was sent there in error, we can't do it.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
JD Vance on His Faith and Trump’s Most Controversial Policies
All right, let's pull back to another issue, trade. And I'm going to ask the same question about what does success look like? So we've ended up in a place where we had Liberation Day, we had a period of, let's say, market difficulty and chaos. It seems like we're in a zone of partial stability where we're setting tariffs around 10%, we're negotiating new trade deals
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
JD Vance on His Faith and Trump’s Most Controversial Policies
So you have a policy set in motion that is trying to produce some kind of results. What results do you want? And specifically, at the end of four years, are you looking at as indexes of success? Is it the number of manufacturing jobs? Is it the number of new factories open? Is it particular industries that... are currently overseas that have national security implications that you want back home?
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
JD Vance on His Faith and Trump’s Most Controversial Policies
Is it tariff revenue to help with the deficit? What do you want from this policy that we can actually measure and say in three years it succeeded or it failed? Okay.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
JD Vance on His Faith and Trump’s Most Controversial Policies
Do you want to say something? No, I mean, I don't. I'm trying to avoid having a long argument about the wisdom of the specific tariffs that were announced on Liberation Day, which...
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
JD Vance on His Faith and Trump’s Most Controversial Policies
I found it, as someone who hosts a podcast and tries to talk to people, I found it very difficult to get anyone inside the administration or sympathetic voices outside to sort of straightforwardly say, this is why this set of policies are good and defensible, the nation by nation tariffs. However, the place we're in now with a global minimum tariff, I can find people who will defend that policy.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
JD Vance on His Faith and Trump’s Most Controversial Policies
Rather than litigating it, I want to start where we are, and I want you to tell me, let's say the economics profession is wrong in some way, and the U.S. economy can absorb these tariffs without dramatic impacts on prices and jobs and so on. Let's say that's the case. Still, you're doing these tariffs not to just have them absorbed by the economy, but to achieve something. Yes.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
JD Vance on His Faith and Trump’s Most Controversial Policies
And then how should a Catholic politician like yourself think about issues where Either the hierarchy of the church or the pope himself seems to be critical of the stances you're taking. And I just want to preface this right. This is going to lead us into a conversation about immigration.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
JD Vance on His Faith and Trump’s Most Controversial Policies
So tell me what you want to achieve. That's right.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
JD Vance on His Faith and Trump’s Most Controversial Policies
I have 30 more questions.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
JD Vance on His Faith and Trump’s Most Controversial Policies
Which is why the numbers were randomly selected by a magic eight ball. And it didn't really matter what the numbers were.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
JD Vance on His Faith and Trump’s Most Controversial Policies
Tell me about success. Tell me about success.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
JD Vance on His Faith and Trump’s Most Controversial Policies
But, you know, you mentioned migration as one of the political issues that the Holy Father wanted to talk about. It's too easy. Well, I think it's useful to have context. Historically, American presidents have tended to almost always have some set of issues where they're not in tune with the Vatican. And for Ronald Reagan, it could be the nuclear issue.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
JD Vance on His Faith and Trump’s Most Controversial Policies
Okay. So if that's the case, isn't there then a big missing piece of this agenda, which is China has major industrial policy, right? And again, if you talk to a lot of the people who are most supportive of some kind of
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
JD Vance on His Faith and Trump’s Most Controversial Policies
you know, economic change along the lines you're describing, they will say, look, tariffs and trade barriers are part of it, but you also need to increase manufacturing and domestic industry, and the government has a big role to play in that. So, one, is that true? Two, to the extent that it is true, when I look at things that Doge has done in terms of cuts it's made.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
JD Vance on His Faith and Trump’s Most Controversial Policies
When I look at the big, beautiful bill working its way through the House and Senate, I see very conventional sort of small government Republican policymaking, certainly not a kind of new industrial policy for the 21st century. So is that out there as a possibility for the administration?
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
JD Vance on His Faith and Trump’s Most Controversial Policies
Is there a legislative vision after the tax bill passes?
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
JD Vance on His Faith and Trump’s Most Controversial Policies
There was conflict, at least between the Reagan administration and elements of the church on nuclear nonproliferation. There was also conflict over Reagan era policy in Central America. Obviously, liberal and democratic administration, it tends to be around abortion and issues related to that.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
JD Vance on His Faith and Trump’s Most Controversial Policies
Okay. Speaking of the economy and industrial policy and everything else, and the Pope, bring it all together, right? No. We've come full circle. Pope Leo took the name Leo XIV for reference to Leo XIII. Of course. Who was sort of engaged in figuring out the Catholic response to the industrial era.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
JD Vance on His Faith and Trump’s Most Controversial Policies
And the new Pope has said explicitly that he's thinking about the Catholic response to the age of information technology and AI. You have been a point person for the administration on AI issues. Yes. And I'm both curious. One, there are people who think that we are essentially getting a profound economic revolution driven by AI while you guys are in office in the Trump-Vance administration.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
JD Vance on His Faith and Trump’s Most Controversial Policies
So I'm first curious how likely you think that is. And then second, because the last guest on this podcast was making prophecies of imminent AI-driven doom, how much do you worry— about the potential downsides of AI, not even on the apocalyptic scale, but on the cultural scale, the way human beings respond to a sense of their own obsolescence, these kind of things?
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
JD Vance on His Faith and Trump’s Most Controversial Policies
You know, AI... But that is then, just to be clear, that is a prediction of... by the standards of the predictions people are making, a relatively slow pace of change, I think, right?
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
JD Vance on His Faith and Trump’s Most Controversial Policies
But then even George W. Bush, as much as some conservative Catholics wanted to downplay the fact that Pope John Paul II was against the Iraq War, the Vatican was against the Iraq War. Yes. Right? And so that was a point of tension. And they were right. And they were right. You and I agree. So...
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
JD Vance on His Faith and Trump’s Most Controversial Policies
If you read the paper, you got the gist. Last question on this. Do you think that the U.S. government is capable in a scenario, again, not like the ultimate Skynet scenario, but just a scenario where AI seems to be getting out of control in some way of taking a pause?
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
JD Vance on His Faith and Trump’s Most Controversial Policies
When you have, and clearly there is some tension between Trump administration policy and things that the Pope thinks or the Vatican thinks, how do you as a Catholic think about that tension?
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
JD Vance on His Faith and Trump’s Most Controversial Policies
So a couple times in this interview, you've said something to me to the effect of, You know, I know New York Times readers hate me or I know New York Times readers don't like me and so on. But here's the reality of the last couple of years as I experienced it as a New York Times conservative.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
JD Vance on His Faith and Trump’s Most Controversial Policies
The Trump-Vance ticket won a constituency that you didn't have before, that Trump didn't have before in 2016 that included – Some of the kind of people who read the New York Times. Yes. People who were exhausted by wokeness.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
JD Vance on His Faith and Trump’s Most Controversial Policies
You still love them, but I'm just trying to acknowledge the point that I make may not land particularly well, but go ahead. I'm interested in this constituency because I talk to these kind of people all the time. So I may have an outsized sense of their importance. So do I do. They all live in Washington. They all live – they live around the country, right?
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
JD Vance on His Faith and Trump’s Most Controversial Policies
But there's a group of people who – it's not millions and millions of people but it's a real and substantial constituency that voted for you guys maybe to their own surprise or even if they didn't vote for you, woke up the day after the election. I heard a lot of people say this and said, you know, in the end, I was glad they won.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
JD Vance on His Faith and Trump’s Most Controversial Policies
And then a lot of those people have experienced the first few months of the administration as a series of unpleasant shocks, where it's not one big issue, but it'll be something that they care about in particular that Doge has cut, or it's, you know, the issue we were arguing about before with renditions to El Salvador, where they're like, well, I voted for this administration, but I didn't expect them to go this far or push this hard.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
JD Vance on His Faith and Trump’s Most Controversial Policies
And so... I want to know what you say to them in general, but I have two examples of that that I think are close to your own interests that I hear a lot about from people. One is how we handle addiction in the U.S. The Trump administration has cut staff to the health administration that handles addiction addiction and mental health. It's being reorganized inside RFK Jr. 's HHS department.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
JD Vance on His Faith and Trump’s Most Controversial Policies
But people I know in addiction medicine around, you know, people who are working with people addicted to fentanyl and other drugs are incredibly anxious and distressed about some of these changes. Another case where it's people who you know who are evangelical and Catholic who are concerned about is foreign aid. The Trump administration came in and said, look, we're reorganizing foreign aid.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
JD Vance on His Faith and Trump’s Most Controversial Policies
We're not getting rid of it entirely, but we're looking at it anew. But right now, foreign aid has been dramatically cut. So on those two issues, is your expectation at the end of four years that in the end, the Trump administration is just we're just going to spend less on drug addiction treatment and foreign aid?
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
JD Vance on His Faith and Trump’s Most Controversial Policies
Or do you think at the end of four years, people who have those kind of anxieties will feel like, no, in the end, the administration, you know, took our concerns seriously and took our concerns about life-saving treatments in Africa seriously, took our concerns about fentanyl addiction treatment seriously here.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
JD Vance on His Faith and Trump’s Most Controversial Policies
He's the archivist.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
JD Vance on His Faith and Trump’s Most Controversial Policies
This is really the last question. Frame it as a question. So then generally, you're going to face the voters by proxy in the midterm. Sure. You may face the voters personally in some future, right? But to this constituency that was pro-Trump, again, maybe it's to its own surprise, but has found itself sort of shocked at various points in the first few months. What is your pitch to them right now?
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
JD Vance on His Faith and Trump’s Most Controversial Policies
All right. Well, hopefully we can talk again around when they make that judgment, perhaps in Jerusalem. Okay. Next time, Athens. Probably not Moscow, but Mr. Vice President, thank you so much. Good to see you, Ross. It's a pleasure. Thank you. As always, thank you so much for listening. And as a reminder, you can watch this as a video podcast on YouTube.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
JD Vance on His Faith and Trump’s Most Controversial Policies
You can find the channel under Interesting Times with Ross Douthat. Interesting Times is produced by Sophia Alvarez-Boyd, Andrea Batanzos, Elisa Gutierrez, and Catherine Sullivan. It's edited by Jordana Hochman. Our fact check team is Kate Sinclair, Mary Marge Locker, and Michelle Harris. Original music by Isaac Jones, Sonia Herrero, Amin Sahota, and Pat McCusker. Mixing by Pat McCusker.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
JD Vance on His Faith and Trump’s Most Controversial Policies
Is there – Is there actually a rule that says you as vice president should not kiss the papal ring?
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
JD Vance on His Faith and Trump’s Most Controversial Policies
The first American pope. Yeah. So what did you talk about?
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
JD Vance on His Faith and Trump’s Most Controversial Policies
Some people were worried about that with John F. Kennedy, as I recall.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
JD Vance on His Faith and Trump’s Most Controversial Policies
Let me propose a theory of
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
JD Vance on His Faith and Trump’s Most Controversial Policies
sort of papal interventions in politics, which is that it might be useful to think of issues where presidents end up in some kind of tension with the papacy as zones of temptation for people like yourself, meaning that it's not that when the pope says, you know, I think you're wrong about this, that that automatically means that you say, oh, you know, absolutely, Your Holiness, we're going to change our policy tomorrow.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
JD Vance on His Faith and Trump’s Most Controversial Policies
but it might mean that you're operating in an area where you're going to be exposed to certain kinds of temptations and get into zones of danger. So for instance, to take the Iraq war example, right? Like while George W. Bush was getting ready to go to war, People who defended the decision to go to war in Iraq would say, look, even if the pope is against it, this is a prudential judgment.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
JD Vance on His Faith and Trump’s Most Controversial Policies
It's a judgment that a statesman has to make. It's not the judgment the pope has to make. And I think they were right. Nonetheless, it would have been useful perhaps for more people in the Bush administration to say, okay, as we're thinking about this war –
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
JD Vance on His Faith and Trump’s Most Controversial Policies
the fact that the Pope is against it should, you know, make us think, let's say 10% more carefully, take 10% more moral care around, you know, what's going to happen to Christian minorities in the Middle East, for instance, if we invade Iraq, something like that, right? Or to take a case like Joe Biden, the former president of the United States. I look at his career as
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
JD Vance on His Faith and Trump’s Most Controversial Policies
and his relationship to the church on issues like abortion. And I see a kind of tragic story where Biden starts out as a pro-life Catholic, pro-life politician. Biden, by the end of his career, because of the nature of partisan politics, has just ended up with a position on abortion indistinguishable from the secular left.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
JD Vance on His Faith and Trump’s Most Controversial Policies
And sort of step by step, piece by piece, he ended up alienated from his faith. So when I, I feel like for someone in your position, Whatever the pope says about immigration, yes, it doesn't imply that you need to change, you know, your general policy overnight, but it means that you need to be aware that this is a zone where you're exposed to a certain kind of partisan temptation.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
JD Vance on His Faith and Trump’s Most Controversial Policies
What do you think about that?
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
JD Vance on His Faith and Trump’s Most Controversial Policies
I think that's probably fair to say. And yeah, I would I would join you in expressing sympathy and solidarity with the former president on his cancer diagnosis. All right, but I'm going to come back to that zone of temptation idea as we get a little bit deeper into the actual policy debate.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
JD Vance on His Faith and Trump’s Most Controversial Policies
So we're going to talk about immigration and trade with a similar sort of big picture question in both cases, right? So start with immigration. The Trump administration, when you were running for president, basically made two promises. We're going to secure the border and we're going to deport a substantial number of the people who entered illegally under the previous administration.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
JD Vance on His Faith and Trump’s Most Controversial Policies
So that's the Vatican seal on polka dots.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
JD Vance on His Faith and Trump’s Most Controversial Policies
I would say that you have been honestly more successful than I expected at swiftly securing the border. Sure. On deportations, it seems like the actual process is not moving that quickly. And there's a lot of debates in the courts and elsewhere about relatively small numbers of potential deportees. Sure.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
JD Vance on His Faith and Trump’s Most Controversial Policies
So looking ahead four years from now, what would constitute success in immigration policy at the end of this term?
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
JD Vance on His Faith and Trump’s Most Controversial Policies
That's completely fair. But at the current pace of deportations, you would be deporting numbers commensurate with prior presidents and not commensurate with the numbers that entered.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What Makes Art ‘Left Wing’?
I mean, yeah, I think, I think that that, that is the, the view of many, if not most people who work in the arts that I've had sort of sustained conversations with about, um,
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What Makes Art ‘Left Wing’?
politics why art tends to be liberal or progressive coded and so on i think just you know just to speak up on behalf of the conservative critique i think you would say a couple things right one is that liberalism and progressivism itself is in 21st century america is a power structure a set of assumptions views about who's good who's bad it passes a certain kind of judgment on the past
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What Makes Art ‘Left Wing’?
So you've been frank in the past about not having been an intense Star Wars guy before you got pulled into... this universe and into this work and this project. And I'm wondering if you could talk a little bit about what that's like, what it's like to come into a story, a franchise. Were you saying to yourself, I'm going to do something inside a franchise that no one has done before?
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What Makes Art ‘Left Wing’?
I think, that can be antithetical to serious art, that you get a lot of progressivism where it's like, you know, the moral arc of the universe is always bending in a particular direction and everyone in the past who had different views is benighted and wrong and so on. And that is its own failure of empathy and understanding, I think, and one that progressives are particularly prone to.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What Makes Art ‘Left Wing’?
No, the empathy for... people who existed who had views that contemporary progressives now consider benighted, for instance. I'm trying to make a deeper point.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What Makes Art ‘Left Wing’?
Right, and I guess what I'm just trying to suggest is that some people do it better than others, right? Some artists do it better than others, but there is also a pattern where art that is made in an environment where people share a particular worldview, where it fails the test you're setting it, right?
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What Makes Art ‘Left Wing’?
The test of empathy is often when it's confronting people who hold views or represent ideas or institutions or anything else
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What Makes Art ‘Left Wing’?
that contemporary progressives don't favor so just to give you an example right and again you don't have to agree with this because you know you don't have to criticize any of your colleagues in the business right but if you go back and watch a movie like the shape of water guillermo del toro's movie that won best picture sort of at the beginning of sort of what we now think of as the great awokening right in a way it's a very empathetic movie it's a movie about how a band of
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What Makes Art ‘Left Wing’?
outsiders, minorities, non-humans, and so on, band together to defeat an evil authoritarian figure. But the evil authoritarian figure is supposed to be like the evil representative of white Christian McCarthyite masculinity. And Michael Shannon does, in a way, a very good job portraying the role. But as I sit there watching the movie, it's a movie that absolutely has no empathy.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What Makes Art ‘Left Wing’?
for anyone outside its circle of sort of virtuous outsiders. It has no sense of what it would, you know, what would it actually be like to be, you know, a sort of patriotic. I don't want to defend that picture. Okay, good.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What Makes Art ‘Left Wing’?
I don't know. Well, let me give—I agree with you completely about In the Heat of the Night. Let me give you an example from your own work, right, which is, I think, the best movie that you made. You've only actually—you've directed three movies? How many movies have you directed so far?
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What Makes Art ‘Left Wing’?
Or were you saying, look, there are other models here of how, you know, like Christopher Nolan's Batman or something like that?
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What Makes Art ‘Left Wing’?
Three movies, right. So they're all good, to be clear, but the best of them, I think, by general consensus, is Michael Clayton, which is a movie that stars George Clooney as a lawyer who's a fixer who ends up dealing with a case of corporate malfeasance where a company essentially – poison to town, poison kids, right?
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What Makes Art ‘Left Wing’?
And one of his colleagues has a crisis of conscience played by, or essentially has a mental breakdown driven by a crisis of conscience, right? And this is, again, I would describe, this is a movie I love. I love Michael Clayton. I would, again, describe it as kind of a left-wing movie. It's a movie about how they're evil. Why? Why is that?
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What Makes Art ‘Left Wing’?
Because the foundation of the movie, and I would say this, like, if you make a movie, if you make a movie that's about how, where the moral foundation of the movie is that the American military is, you know, awesome and kicks ass, I might love that movie or I might dislike it, but I would call that a kind of right-leading movie.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What Makes Art ‘Left Wing’?
And if you make a movie about how evil corporations are poisoning your children, I'd call that a left-wing movie, right? But what I want to get to is the villain in that movie is played by Tilda Swinton, terrific performance. And To me, you create her, and she creates the character too, right?
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What Makes Art ‘Left Wing’?
In a way that is, again, sort of fulfills the goal of creating a character who you're rooting against, who's obviously the bad guy, but who is deeply human, fascinating, sort of bizarre, totally relatable in various ways. Again, in a way that I think lots of movies that have a political perspective fail at. And that's all I'm getting at, right?
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What Makes Art ‘Left Wing’?
I think that there is a way in which you can make a movie that has a political point of view that captures the fullness of reality. And it's hard to do. And you do it well. And not everyone does. This isn't even a question.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What Makes Art ‘Left Wing’?
Well, it's just that this is the last thing I'll say, because I want to ask you a different question about Michael Clayton. The last thing I'll say is just, of course, of course, of course, you don't identify with the corporation that's using pesticides to poison the children, right? But if I made a movie, let's say I made a movie, right? And it was about a English department faculty member.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What Makes Art ‘Left Wing’?
That was led by a, you know, African-American lesbian professor that, you know, persecuted a virtuous Catholic conservative academic and got him fired. Right. Right. I would feel like I'd made kind of a right wing movie. And but then I could say, oh, well, what are you on the side of persecuting Catholic intellectuals? No, no one's on that side. Well, no.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What Makes Art ‘Left Wing’?
But who you choose as your villains does have political implications. That's all I'm saying. Right. Right. So let me ask you a different question about Michael Clayton. Okay, go ahead. So why didn't you make more movies like Michael Clayton? It's been 18 years. Duplicity came out after that, and then you did a Bourne movie, and then you got sucked into the Star Wars universe.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What Makes Art ‘Left Wing’?
But I watched that movie. I was like, I could watch five more movies, ten more movies like that from Tony Gilroy.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What Makes Art ‘Left Wing’?
And that is... It's the story of the... For listeners and viewers who are not huge Star Wars fans, right? This is the story that Andor tells is the story of the rise of the Rebel Alliance. How you get to the point in the original Star Wars where Luke Skywalker comes in and there's already this rebellion ongoing against the Empire. And... You're telling a very, very political story.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What Makes Art ‘Left Wing’?
So I grew up younger than you I grew up in the 1990s which meant that you know for me as a teenager someone who was not as crazed about the movies maybe as you were but who liked them a lot and they were a big part of my life hanging out going to the movies on weekends right I sort of took it for granted then that you would have serious movies for grownups, fun, original movies.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What Makes Art ‘Left Wing’?
A movie, you worked on Devil's Advocate, right? The Al Pacino, right? Keanu. So that was the kind of movie that going to the movies meant. You were going to see a big movie star giving you a big speech, playing Satan in a Manhattan skyrise. It was great stuff, right? And to me, the big change in American pop culture in the last 20 years is that the world that
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What Makes Art ‘Left Wing’?
made movies like Michael Clay, movies like Devil's Advocate possible has just sort of gone away. And I'm wondering if you agree with that, right? It just seems incredibly hard.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What Makes Art ‘Left Wing’?
No, I take that personally because I do have a lot of kids and I don't get to the movie theater. You don't. So it is my fault personally.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What Makes Art ‘Left Wing’?
Well, there aren't movie stars anymore, right? Yeah.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What Makes Art ‘Left Wing’?
From New York Times Opinion, I'm Ross Douthat, and this is Interesting Times. American popular culture is in trouble. The Hollywood dream factory has gone stagnant, recycling the same stories time and time again. Giants like Marvel feel too big to fail, but they've lost the ability to tell us new and surprising stories. But there is one notable exception.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What Makes Art ‘Left Wing’?
What gives you hope right now? Like, do you think that we're just stuck in a world where you can maybe make something great inside a franchise? but mostly movies for grownups are over? Or do you think things are going to get better?
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What Makes Art ‘Left Wing’?
I get those notes. I get those notes from my producers every week.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What Makes Art ‘Left Wing’?
I didn't fully believe it. That's the truth. I don't think the world's ending in 2027. I think with the movies, it's a question about... I hope I'm right, too. I hope you're right, man. To me, the question with AI, the great question, is an audience question, right, for your business.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What Makes Art ‘Left Wing’?
If you get an AI that can generate, you know, 1,500 simulated versions of Michael Clayton or Andor, and let's be honest, there'll be 1,500 simulated versions of a Marvel movie or a Star Wars show, right? And the actors aren't real, and there's no actual screenwriter behind it. Do people want that? And I sort of think that they don't in the end.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What Makes Art ‘Left Wing’?
That, like, even if most people watch Andor don't know who Tony Gilroy is, in the end, they want to think that there is a mind and a human being behind the story, just as they definitely want to think that, you know, you're talking about the work your actors do, right? That it's like, it's Tilda Swinton and George Clooney playing those characters.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What Makes Art ‘Left Wing’?
Even in an age when movie stars have declined, people want to think they don't want a... AI simulacrum playing a fictional character. And this may be my total naivete, but I do think that's what it comes down to for Hollywood with AI. It's does the audience accept the substitution of whatever AI can do for what you can do? And I'm hopeful that they don't.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What Makes Art ‘Left Wing’?
So that's a dark place, Tony. So give me some light. Give me some advice right now. Set aside AI, just the movie industry without the total transformation, just the movie and TV industry that you're in right now. Give me advice for the young Tony Gilroy or the would-be Tony Gilroy, the would-be screenwriter, director, whatever else of 2025. What would you tell them
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What Makes Art ‘Left Wing’?
We tell ourselves stories in order to live.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What Makes Art ‘Left Wing’?
Good. Well, then we'll, if the AI 2027 scenario is real, we'll agree to meet up around the campfire in the post-apocalyptic ruins. And you can tell me a story, Tony.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What Makes Art ‘Left Wing’?
I think this is a good place to pivot more to a discussion of politics and art. Because Andor is, it's telling a political story in a way that goes beyond anything Star Wars has done before. It's not just the world of Skywalker family and the Jedi Knights. It's a world of bureaucrats and senators, politicians, and so on, right? So talk a little bit about what is this world that you're showing?
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What Makes Art ‘Left Wing’?
As always, thank you so much for listening. And as a reminder, you can watch this as a video podcast on YouTube. You can find the channel under Interesting Times with Ross Douthat. Interesting Times is produced by Sophia Alvarez-Boyd, Andrea Batanzos, Elisa Gutierrez, and Catherine Sullivan. It's edited by Jordana Hochman.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What Makes Art ‘Left Wing’?
What is the political world that you're depicting in this show?
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What Makes Art ‘Left Wing’?
So is Andor a left-wing show? Because this is something that I've said a couple times in my writing about it, using it literally as an example as a conservative columnist of a work of art that I think of as having different politics from my own that I really, really like. And I've had friends...
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What Makes Art ‘Left Wing’?
especially on the right, come back to me and say, oh, you know, it's not it's not left wing or right wing. It's just a TV show about resistance to tyranny. But I think you've made a left wing work of art. What do you think?
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What Makes Art ‘Left Wing’?
I don't... But it's a story, but it's a political story about revolutionary... Do you identify with the empire?
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What Makes Art ‘Left Wing’?
The Star Wars serial Andor has somehow managed to pull off originality within the constraints of a familiar franchise. And part of its originality is that it has an explicitly political and, to my mind, left-wing perspective on its world without feeling at all like tedious propaganda. My guest today is the showrunner behind Andor, Tony Gilroy.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What Makes Art ‘Left Wing’?
No, I don't. But I don't think that you have to be left-wing to resist authoritarianism, right? But I see the empire as you just described it, right? It's a fascist... It's presented as a fascist institution that doesn't have any sort of, you know, communist pretense to solidarity or anything like that. It's it's fascist and authoritarian.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What Makes Art ‘Left Wing’?
And you're meditating on what revolutionary politics looks like in the shadow of that. Right. I mean, who. So you talked about all this history that you brought in.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What Makes Art ‘Left Wing’?
Talk about that history a little bit.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What Makes Art ‘Left Wing’?
But in the end, I mean, in the end, you're rooting. I guess here's how I think about it.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What Makes Art ‘Left Wing’?
Right, so this is a show, it's a story, where you are rooting for... against a fascist regime, right? Okay. As you said, you're not rooting for the empire in the end, right? No. So that to me is sort of the political foundation of the work, right?
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What Makes Art ‘Left Wing’?
And that's why I use the term left-wing, not because you have a 10-point list of revolutionary demands that you, Tony Gilroy, support, but you're telling a story in which basically you're on the side of the radicals and the revolutionaries, but then at the same time, and this is why I think it is effective art
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What Makes Art ‘Left Wing’?
what i think you've been able to do maybe coming out of all of this autodidactic reading right is give people a window into why the radicals even if you're rooting for them you can see how things can go wrong right But that is what I really like about the show's approach to politics, right?
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What Makes Art ‘Left Wing’?
We're going to talk about how art and politics interact in a show about radicals trying to defeat fascism and whether Hollywood can ever tell stories for grownups again. So, Tony Gilroy, welcome to Interesting Times. Thank you for having me.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What Makes Art ‘Left Wing’?
No, that's fair. And that is, in fact, literally the argument that some of my more libertarian friends who love the show have made to me, saying, oh, you know, this is ultimately a show about localism and, you know, leaving us alone against the depredations of tyranny. But talk a little bit about how you portray the people who serve the empire, though.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What Makes Art ‘Left Wing’?
I mean... And these are just, again, these are the characters who are imperial in various ways. Gestapo.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What Makes Art ‘Left Wing’?
I mean, to me, what you've just described, the sort of mentality of always trying to see the world through your character's eyes, through each character's eyes, right? Even when they're on opposing sides, even when they represent a community-destroying perspective that, you know, you yourself are against, that is the key to doing successful art about politics, right?
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What Makes Art ‘Left Wing’?
So I want to start by congratulating you on what I personally think a large number of critics and a sizable fraction of the viewing public consider the most successful Star Wars production maybe since the original trilogy.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What Makes Art ‘Left Wing’?
But it seems tremendously hard, right?
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What Makes Art ‘Left Wing’?
I think, for people to do in the sense that, like, when I think about most art that tries to capture American politics, certainly, but, you know, any kind of politics that gets close to the present moment, certainly, there's just a failure of... a conspicuous failure of empathy for anyone who's not on the same side as the screenwriter, the novelist, the filmmaker, and so on.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What Makes Art ‘Left Wing’?
That's my sense of things. And again, it's one reason that I appreciate... and or, I think. Do you think that there, like, in terms of cinema, modern cinema, or modern TV, do you think there are other shows and movies that tackle politics that you admire, that you think pull this off, this kind of cross-political empathy?
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What Makes Art ‘Left Wing’?
That's even better. Please push deeper.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
The Democratic Senator Taking Cues From Trumpism
From New York Times Opinion, I'm Ross Douthat, and this is Interesting Times. It's a difficult time for the Democratic Party. Donald Trump's approval ratings have dropped sharply, but the Democrats remain incredibly unpopular. Liberalism is searching not just for a clear agenda, but also a clear idea of why it lost, why the country turned right, and where the left might go from here.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
The Democratic Senator Taking Cues From Trumpism
In Wethersfield, just south of Hartford, which for those who don't know Connecticut geography intimately is a beautiful colonial era town with all these houses from the 1700s. If you've read the children's novel, The Witch of Blackbird Pond, right? Isn't that set in Wethersfield? It's the kind of place where you can go and, you know, do...
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
The Democratic Senator Taking Cues From Trumpism
drawings of gravestones from the 1680s and all these kind of things.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
The Democratic Senator Taking Cues From Trumpism
If you drive through it, you will believe it. So I like Wethersfield. I like Connecticut. It's a beautiful state. But it does often seem to me like the perfect embodiment of a kind of liberal or left-of-center politics That you personally seem to be saying is part of what's wrong with the Democratic Party. Right. In the sense that just in my lifetime. Right.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
The Democratic Senator Taking Cues From Trumpism
So I grew up in Connecticut in the 1980s. And at that point, there was still a kind of residual Rockefeller Republican, upper class Republican mentality. base in the state. If you went down to the richest towns closest to New York, you found a lot of Republicans. And if you went to sort of the more middle class areas, you found a lot of Democrats.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
The Democratic Senator Taking Cues From Trumpism
Since then, the state has generally moved to the left. But the way the Democratic Party works in Connecticut is you have rich people who've become more Democratic close to New York in finance and industries connected to finance. You have university towns like New Haven, where I live, which have a lot of academic liberals. And then you have some very poor cities, Bridgeport and Hartford, notably.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
The Democratic Senator Taking Cues From Trumpism
What you don't have is a big middle to working class Democratic constituency. The rural parts of the state are quite Trumpy. And just in like the towns near me, the sort of lower middle class, working class towns, at the very least, they're purple. They're not blue. Right. So this is the coalition. This Connecticut is in a way the sort of the modern Democratic coalition.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
The Democratic Senator Taking Cues From Trumpism
So I guess the straightforward question is, are you saying that the Democrats need to reject the Connecticut model of Democratic politics? Tread carefully with your re-election.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
The Democratic Senator Taking Cues From Trumpism
All right. Terrific. That will give us some real urgency behind this conversation. So I want to jump right in and talk about your party and the state of the Democrats, because we just marked 100 days of the second Trump administration. The media was full of takes on those 100 days, how Trump was doing, how the White House is governing. And I want to ask you about the Democrats' first 100 days.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
The Democratic Senator Taking Cues From Trumpism
So I agree that a bigger Democratic tent probably would not lose, let's say. sort of left-leaning voters in academic towns who have social issues litmus tests. We'll get into in a minute sort of some of the issues for Democrats around that kind of movement. But what about people who have moved into the Democratic coalition who themselves represent the upper class, right?
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
The Democratic Senator Taking Cues From Trumpism
Some version of the American oligarchy. And again, we don't have to personalize it. We won't say that they're living in Greenwich or Darien or any particular town that you might have to fundraise in. But aren't you imagining that there are voters who would be comfortable voting for the Democrats?
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
The Democratic Senator Taking Cues From Trumpism
Under conditions where they aren't seen as a party fighting plutocracy, let's say, who might be alienated. Right. There has to be some interest group in the current Democratic coalition who would be alienated by the shifts you have in mind.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
The Democratic Senator Taking Cues From Trumpism
But or some of those voters and I know some of these voters were with you precisely because of the issue with which you started this conversation. Right. the dangers posed by Trump's authoritarian tendencies right and it seems like one reason that the Democrats maybe have shied away from some forms of economic populism is that they felt like they were building a coalition around
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
The Democratic Senator Taking Cues From Trumpism
issues of, you know, protecting democracy, protecting Republican norms. That is certainly that's part of how you end up with figures like Liz Cheney involved in Democratic campaigns and so on. Right. So do you think there's any tension between you're trying to put together the populist anti-oligarchy message and the it's an emergency for our democracy message? Can you make those two fit together?
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
The Democratic Senator Taking Cues From Trumpism
What do you think of your party's performance since Donald Trump was inaugurated?
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
The Democratic Senator Taking Cues From Trumpism
Okay, let's pause there. When we come back, we'll talk about the more spiritual crisis unspooling in America. I want to come back to some of those questions about democratic strategy, but let's talk now about some of the voters who you think Democrats need to win. I think clearly Democrats do need to be able to win Senate races in states that right now are red tilting and so on, right?
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
The Democratic Senator Taking Cues From Trumpism
Certainly that's the case if Democrats are going to win back elections. Senate in 2026. And one of the arguments that you've made, and you made it especially before the last election, is that part of what has alienated working class, lower middle class American voters at the moment isn't just sort of class issues alone. It's not just economic policy in and of itself.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
The Democratic Senator Taking Cues From Trumpism
You've also talked about the idea of a social cultural crisis in American life. You've described the crisis as a spiritual unspooling kind of loneliness and disconnection and uncertainty that's pervasive in American life. I have thoughts on that, but I want you to give me more thoughts. Tell me more about what you see as the spiritual crisis in American life right now.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
The Democratic Senator Taking Cues From Trumpism
What role does government play in that? In that question specifically, I'll get to some distinct questions about spiritual crisis in a minute. But just on the question of how people experience the internet, which I completely agree is responsible for at least a certain degree of unhappiness and even derangement in American life right now.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
The Democratic Senator Taking Cues From Trumpism
It seems like Democrats have a narrative that you gestured at earlier in this conversation, right, where the problem with big tech is that it's so big, it's monopolies, corrupting the government in various ways, right? But the problem with like doom scrolling on social media is not a problem of monopoly power. If you split up TikTok into 15 tiny little TikToks,
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
The Democratic Senator Taking Cues From Trumpism
That would not necessarily improve the mental well-being. And if anything, like they would be in fierce competition with each other to hook your children's eyeballs more intently. So I'm curious what you think is sort of the distinctive political response to let's call it a problem of technological addiction in American life. Like what is government actually supposed to do about that?
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
The Democratic Senator Taking Cues From Trumpism
Yeah, I mean, I think that that is a set of issues and ideas that already has a certain degree of bipartisan purchase. It does. You know, you see Glenn Youngkin in Virginia signing bills about cell phones in schools and these kind of things. I do think, though, it is... kind of an upper middle class to upper class fixation or source of interest right now.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
The Democratic Senator Taking Cues From Trumpism
And when I look at sort of the wider landscape of American life, yes, of course, there are parents who are anxious about how much time their kids are spending on phones. But there's also a lot of parents and communities where the phone is kind of a tether. It's like you, you know, don't have strong institutions like churches and local associations and so on. You don't have, you know,
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
The Democratic Senator Taking Cues From Trumpism
You don't have as many two-parent families. You have a lot of parents raising kids as single parents, raising kids in difficult situations. And especially in those environments, I think people see the benefits of the phone. It's like, okay, I know where my kid is. I'm connected to my kid, all of these things.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
The Democratic Senator Taking Cues From Trumpism
So I both wonder how much appetite there is for this kind of regulation in that population, which is, by the way, again, part of the population you think Democrats need to win. But I also think it's connected to issues that are also connected to any kind of spiritual and cultural crisis that Democrats also are challenged to figure out exactly how to talk about. Right.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
The Democratic Senator Taking Cues From Trumpism
Like if you think there's a spiritual crisis in America, well, guess what? Religion and churchgoing and church attendance have been in decline for a substantial period of time. Those are issues, again, where one, it's hard to know what the policy response is. But there are also issues where Democrats are not at all perceived as the party of the two-parent family, the party of religion and so on.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
The Democratic Senator Taking Cues From Trumpism
There are plenty of religious Democrats, but it's not the party's brand, right? So I'm curious if there's anything you think Democrats can do differently now. or way they can talk differently that is responsive to family and religion, the sense that family and religion are declining.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
The Democratic Senator Taking Cues From Trumpism
But also it's just because a lot of Democrats are less likely to be
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
The Democratic Senator Taking Cues From Trumpism
Again, there are many, many religious Democrats, but at the elite level of American politics, if you're talking about people who run campaigns and increasingly, to some degree, people who hold elective office, one reason Democrats are less comfortable talking about religion is it's hard to talk about religion effectively when you're not especially religious.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
The Democratic Senator Taking Cues From Trumpism
I certainly think there was an element of this in Kamala Harris's campaign, and that seems like a real problem. hurdle and difficulty for Democrats to overcome. I'm curious just in your own life, like, do you feel a sense of spiritual crisis or malaise or disconnection personally?
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
The Democratic Senator Taking Cues From Trumpism
Why has that been unsuccessful? I'm really curious.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
The Democratic Senator Taking Cues From Trumpism
Maybe, but I mean, I think, I mean, certainly you can to some degree, right? But so if we're talking about like, why do voters in Missouri or Tennessee or Nebraska or any state where you're imagining the Democratic Party winning more elections, why do they feel a certain kind of cultural and spiritual connection to the Republican Party, right?
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
The Democratic Senator Taking Cues From Trumpism
And certainly you can say, oh, the Republican Party is failing to be Christian in all kinds of ways. I will concede that there are ways that the Republican Party is failing to be Christian, right? But voters identify with people and with parties and with institutions.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
The Democratic Senator Taking Cues From Trumpism
And I think there is just an inherent and inevitable identification that someone who gets themselves to church on Sunday morning because they're afraid that God might be disappointed in them otherwise feels for a party that sort of speaks that language. That's I don't know. I just imagine. And again, you're not running for Senate, obviously, in the states that you just said Democrats need to win.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
The Democratic Senator Taking Cues From Trumpism
So just as an outsider to Democratic Party debates, it doesn't seem to me like the party went easy on the argument that Donald Trump is a threat to democracy in 2024. This was obviously a centerpiece of Joe Biden's arguments in the midterms and before he ultimately dropped out of the race.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
The Democratic Senator Taking Cues From Trumpism
But it just seems like Democratic leaders, they need a religious language that's somewhat different from the language you just gave me. Right. The language you just gave me, again, is very Connecticut. Right. I hear that language all the time. Oh, you know, I would like to go to church because I get a lot from it socially. OK.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
The Democratic Senator Taking Cues From Trumpism
But when Barack Obama ran for president, he said, we worship an awesome God in the blue states. Can you say that for me?
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
The Democratic Senator Taking Cues From Trumpism
Could you say could you say we worship an awesome God in the blue states? Would you say that?
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
The Democratic Senator Taking Cues From Trumpism
in your right that we should talk about it in your case right like you would be uncomfortable standing up in front of a crowd and saying brothers and sisters the God of Abraham Isaac and Jacob who is real and who will judge you after you die commands you to love your neighbor in a way that means you should support Medicaid Right. It sounds like you would be uncomfortable with that. That spiel.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
The Democratic Senator Taking Cues From Trumpism
Right. Sure. I don't know that I'd say it the way you just said it, but I. Right. But the way I would say it is the way I think that like if Democrats were serious about making the religious arguments you want them to make, they wouldn't just say, you know, in the story of Jesus. were taught to care for the needy. They would frame it as a divine imperative.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
The Democratic Senator Taking Cues From Trumpism
And you need some kind of belief to do that, I think. I think that I'm just trying to get at what I think is a limit that Democrats hit in these kind of debates.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
The Democratic Senator Taking Cues From Trumpism
And while there were various different, you know, Harris Waltz messages over the course of the campaign, democracy ended up being a big part of the closing argument. So one, what makes you say that Democrats weren't ready for a thing that Your standard bearers were campaigning on. And two, just as a political matter, Democrats did lose with a version of that message just four to six months ago.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
The Democratic Senator Taking Cues From Trumpism
All right, that's enough talk about Almighty God. When we come back, we'll talk a little bit more about how Democrats should integrate cultural and economic issues. I have three more challenging questions for you. I'll leave the metaphysical behind for a minute and go back to the practical and political. So first, on this question of what's wrong with the Trump administration,
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
The Democratic Senator Taking Cues From Trumpism
You're putting together a couple of different arguments. You're saying there's a threat to democracy from Trump, a threat to the American Republic. There's also that is connected to Trump pursuing oligarchic policies and enriching his billionaire friends, a line that's come up a lot, not just in your rhetoric, but in democratic rhetoric writ large.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
The Democratic Senator Taking Cues From Trumpism
On that second point, is oligarchy really the right way to describe Trumpism as we see it right now? Like, just to go through some of the issues that Trump is pushing, certainly it's clear that most American business leaders do not support Trump's approach to tariffs, right? His FTC and people associated with it, they have their own critique of Silicon Valley, right?
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
The Democratic Senator Taking Cues From Trumpism
The Republicans are not fully on board with Silicon Valley. Doge has made all kinds of cuts to government headcount and government programs, but not in a way that sort of tracks, I think, directly with what corporate America wants. Big Pharma, who you've mentioned, they clearly don't like RFK. Corporate America likes immigration, which Trump is cutting and so on.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
The Democratic Senator Taking Cues From Trumpism
I guess, is this really an oligarchic administration? Like, is it doing what the rich actually want?
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
The Democratic Senator Taking Cues From Trumpism
OK. And so I think that's a reasonable answer. But that is somewhat distinct then from a general sort of the traditional Democratic message about Republicans is Republicans are the party of the rich. They're the party of the country club, party of the upper class and so on. So oligarchy is a refinement of that.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
The Democratic Senator Taking Cues From Trumpism
However, however long it was, time time has changed a bit. So on on both fronts, why didn't that message land and why would it be the right message for Democrats right now?
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
The Democratic Senator Taking Cues From Trumpism
You're saying the Republicans right now are a party of Trump and a gang of his friends as distinct from being a general party that defends upper class interests.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
The Democratic Senator Taking Cues From Trumpism
Right. But there are also groups in biotechnology and research and so on that are quite unhappy with, for instance, the cuts to scientific research.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
The Democratic Senator Taking Cues From Trumpism
And again, this may not be that different from your point, but there's a way in which a lot of powerful groups, it seems like less that they are getting what they want from Trump and more that they are nervous about what he might try to do to them and are trying to be on side.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
The Democratic Senator Taking Cues From Trumpism
Right. Okay. Now that seems like a plausible argument. So let's turn then to something you've gestured at a few times in this conversation, which is cultural and social issues and the idea that the Democratic Party has to be a bigger tent on those issues. And I was gratified to hear you making that argument because I do feel like often you will hear Democrats talk about Thank you for having me.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
The Democratic Senator Taking Cues From Trumpism
to whether transgender athletes should compete in sports of the opposite natal sex and so on. So you think the Democratic Party needs to be a bigger tent on cultural issues. But what does that mean in actual policy terms? Does it go beyond just you saying, well, of course, people who are skeptical about immigration or skeptical about transgender issues are welcome in the party?
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
The Democratic Senator Taking Cues From Trumpism
Does it get beyond that to actually being open to Democrats taking conservative stances on those issues? How far does it go?
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
The Democratic Senator Taking Cues From Trumpism
Well, no, wait, just so you... You don't have any fear of it. Do you think it's – if you had a daughter competing against a biological male, would you find it unfair?
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
The Democratic Senator Taking Cues From Trumpism
Have some empathy, right, for those of us who do. Right. So would you find it unfair? No.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
The Democratic Senator Taking Cues From Trumpism
I think everybody can come to their own conclusion, but all I'm saying is that— Right, but your conclusion is the official line of liberalism right now.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
The Democratic Senator Taking Cues From Trumpism
How should the U.S. government be focusing its resources in terms of removing people who are here illegally right now?
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
The Democratic Senator Taking Cues From Trumpism
Going back to where we started and the arguable threat that Donald Trump poses to Democratic norms and the Democratic Party's response. So my general perspective on where things stand now is that Donald Trump has made a large number of extreme claims about executive power, pushed executive power to the limits in various ways.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
The Democratic Senator Taking Cues From Trumpism
And many, if not all of these efforts have been met by pushback in the judiciary from the courts, including from Republican appointed judges. Right. As long as that remains the case,
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
The Democratic Senator Taking Cues From Trumpism
I personally am skeptical that most Americans are going to see Trump the way you portrayed him at the beginning as a definite threat to democracy if he is seen as ultimately deferring to the Supreme Court, even if he's criticizing individual judges and so on. If he's deferring to six to three, seven to two rulings from the Supreme Court, I just don't think Democrats are going to win this.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
The Democratic Senator Taking Cues From Trumpism
campaigns with that issue at the center. So I'm curious, both if you think that's wrong, and then to finish on a note of prophecy, is your expectation that the Trump administration is going to end up in some kind of collision with the Supreme Court? You mentioned people taking to the streets earlier.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
The Democratic Senator Taking Cues From Trumpism
Or are you imagining a kind of constitutional crisis in America as something that Democrats should be prepared for in the next two years?
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
The Democratic Senator Taking Cues From Trumpism
I'm not—I mean, as someone who follows— the progressive left and, you know, the center left and what people are saying on social media and so on. I think there's plenty of people ready to talk about a constitutional crisis long before you get to a direct Trump-Roberts clash. I think the question is,
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
The Democratic Senator Taking Cues From Trumpism
Do most Americans buy into a narrative where the United States, in all its diversity and complexity, is likely to go the way of Erdogan's Turkey? And I will say I am personally skeptical of that narrative as well. But I think we'll just have to have this conversation again in 2026 after the election and see how things turned out.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
The Democratic Senator Taking Cues From Trumpism
Yeah, well, then let's end on a note of relative agreement, because I do agree that most voters went to the polls with a narrative like the one you had in mind, and that the performance of the Trump economy will determine a lot about every other question as well. So, Senator Chris Murphy, thank you so much for joining me. Thanks. Take care. Thanks for listening, and we'll be back next week.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
The Democratic Senator Taking Cues From Trumpism
And as a reminder, you can watch this episode and others as a video podcast on YouTube. And see my handsome face. The channel is Interesting Times with Ross Douthat. Interesting Times is produced by Sophia Alvarez-Boyd, Andrea Batanzos, Elisa Gutierrez, and Catherine Sullivan. It's edited by Jordana Hochman. Our fact-check team is Kate Sinclair, Mary Marge Locker, and Michelle Harris.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
The Democratic Senator Taking Cues From Trumpism
Original music by Isaac Jones, Sonia Herrero, Aman Sahota, and Pat McCusker, with engineering by Isaac Jones, Efim Shapiro, and Sonia Herrero, and mixing by Sonia Herrero. Audience Strategy by Shannon Busta and Christina Samuluski. And our Director of Opinion Audio is Annie Rose Strasser.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
The Democratic Senator Taking Cues From Trumpism
So what is it that you think Democrats should be doing then? What is the strategy, given that obviously Democrats don't have a majority in the House, don't have a majority in the Senate? You already mentioned the idea of it sounds like, of slowing down Trump's nominations to various cabinet agencies.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
The Democratic Senator Taking Cues From Trumpism
You've obviously had figures like Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez doing a kind of politics of rallying, basically, sort of around the country. But what more is there that a engaged Democratic Party sort of focused on the threat to democracy in Washington, D.C. would be doing right now?
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
The Democratic Senator Taking Cues From Trumpism
One notable searcher is Democratic Senator Chris Murphy, who happens to represent my own home state of Connecticut, the green suburban heart of blue America. Murphy has been front and center lately as an advocate of renewed capital R resistance to the Trump administration. But he's also been a would-be theorist of the rise of populism.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
The Democratic Senator Taking Cues From Trumpism
But so are any of those issues actually top one or top two or top three for voters?
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
The Democratic Senator Taking Cues From Trumpism
Because it seems to me that if you look at Trump's relative unpopularity at the moment, it's heavily driven by pocketbook concerns, by anxieties over tariffs and trade wars and their effect on people's incomes to the extent that a lot of the cuts that Elon Musk and Doge have done or tried to do, to the extent that those have been unpopular, it's because they've been touching on
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
The Democratic Senator Taking Cues From Trumpism
Places like Social Security that obviously are sort of crucial to American sense of their own economic security. Whereas talking about insider trading by members of Congress, talking about campaign finance reform, those aren't kind of bread and butter issues. economic issues. They may be part of a plausible narrative about what's gone wrong in our democracy.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
The Democratic Senator Taking Cues From Trumpism
But if I look at the polls right now, Donald Trump has become substantially more unpopular since he took office. Democrats have not become substantially more popular. So it seems like there has to be some other missing element to a democratic narrative beyond just attacking insider trading and self-dealing and corruption.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
The Democratic Senator Taking Cues From Trumpism
He's argued, in language that, let's just say, doesn't always come easily to Democratic politicians, that the Trump era should be understood in terms of cultural, even spiritual, crisis. Can this theory fit with the practice of Democratic Party politics? Can you resist Trump while understanding and adapting to Trumpism? Let's find out. Senator Murphy, welcome to Interesting Times.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
The Democratic Senator Taking Cues From Trumpism
How do you unrig the economy from the point of view of the Democratic Party?
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
The Democratic Senator Taking Cues From Trumpism
Do you think that there's some overlap here between the way that certain kinds of right-wing populists talk about the economy? Because it's striking to me that when I hear – What, you know, try to be the more sophisticated arguments for something like the tariff regime that Donald Trump has been pushing and trying to impose. Right.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
The Democratic Senator Taking Cues From Trumpism
They don't sound exactly like the case you made, but they are somewhat similar. There's a kind of argument that the economy is structurally unfair because under the influence of big corporations. We, you know, entered into global arrangements with countries like China that have worked out well for the plutocrats, maybe pretty well for the upper class, badly for the working class.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
The Democratic Senator Taking Cues From Trumpism
And I think a lot of right wing populists would also say it's not enough to just write checks. Right. If you've hollowed out the industrial heartland, people don't want to check. Right. They want a job. They want their industries back and so on. So is there a kind of parallel? Obviously, you think that the substance is different, but is there a parallel there between
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
The Democratic Senator Taking Cues From Trumpism
the Chris Murphy agenda and let's say the Steve Bannon agenda on particularly on this idea that the structure of the economy is unfair to the working class.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
The Democratic Senator Taking Cues From Trumpism
They are interesting times. Thanks for having me. That's right. Well, we paid you extra to confirm that for us. You're joining me from the bowels of the Capitol in Washington, D.C.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
The Democratic Senator Taking Cues From Trumpism
Well, yeah, let's get into your personal responsibility for everything that's gone wrong with the Democratic Party or not your personal responsibility, but let's call it your geographical responsibility, because you and I were both from Connecticut. Where did you grow up?
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How the iPhone Drove Men and Women Apart
Women without a college degree, the marriage rate is way down.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How the iPhone Drove Men and Women Apart
And so one way to look at this is that, you know, men are losing a certain kind of status. They care about status. When they lose status, they become more sexist, more hostile to women, become less attractive to women by virtue of being hostile. That's one way to look at it, right?
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How the iPhone Drove Men and Women Apart
And what do you think a man is supposed to do in this kind of situation, right? Because on the one hand, there clearly is a male reaction to this sort of economic landscape that's very toxic, sort of anti-female misogynist lashing out. At the same time, There's a cultural script that says it's really good for women to be independent. You don't need a man, right? And...
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How the iPhone Drove Men and Women Apart
women still like male status, right? It's not just men who want status. Women like it. Like, there's a lot of data on women like the idea of having a man who can potentially earn more than them, who can be a breadwinner, maybe not all the time, right? But if you're going to have kids, it's nice to have a man around, right, who can be the primary earner for a period of time. So it's not that...
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How the iPhone Drove Men and Women Apart
women are really excited to enter into relationships with men who have less education than they do or who earn less than they do. So those men are in a kind of trap that isn't just created by their own sort of sense of masculine identity. It's also created by women's preferences.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How the iPhone Drove Men and Women Apart
But before we dive into why population decline is happening. I'd like to try and sort of quantify the issue a little bit and maybe help sound the alarm for some of our listeners who, unlike myself, haven't been obsessed with this issue for years or decades and may still assume that we're living in a world where the biggest problem is likely to be overpopulation. So let's start out.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How the iPhone Drove Men and Women Apart
Open-ended question, what can bring the sexes back together?
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How the iPhone Drove Men and Women Apart
Right. This is what strikes me about his ideas, right, is that it's very easy. I shouldn't say it's very easy, but it's relatively easy in a liberal individualist society to say, OK, we need to make a certain set of social changes that impose restrictions on kids because kids are the great the great exception that doesn't quite fit within liberal liberal social.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How the iPhone Drove Men and Women Apart
They're not really part of the social contract and so on. Right. And he's he's gotten a lot of traction. I think there will be there already is, but there will increasingly be an attempt to sort of master. The sort of lure of the virtual as it applies, especially to younger kids.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How the iPhone Drove Men and Women Apart
It's harder for me to see that once you get further into adolescence where so much of the adult life you're trying to get kids to join is online. And then it's really hard for me to see how certainly any kind of sort of political restriction could – like adults just seem very, very unlikely to accept it.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How the iPhone Drove Men and Women Apart
Now, maybe there will be cases where people say, ah, in the U.S., this sports betting experiment that we've done, bit of a mistake, right? Maybe – Maybe it wasn't the best idea to put ads for sports gambling on every TV network that, you know, airs a baseball game or something. Maybe that gets walked back.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How the iPhone Drove Men and Women Apart
But it does seem harder to see how you get any kind of social restrictions on adult distraction. What do you think?
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How the iPhone Drove Men and Women Apart
When we talk about declining fertility and population decline, what do we mean by
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How the iPhone Drove Men and Women Apart
Then what about culture, apart from politics? Because while it is the case that culture is determined to some degree by tech, the smartphone creates culture in its own way, it's also the case that the issue of declining birth rates is not one that much of elite Western culture has taken seriously.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How the iPhone Drove Men and Women Apart
It's not something that's entered into sort of the mainstream cultural mind the way that, say, the threat of climate change has done. So you could imagine... if it became a more important part of the cultural imaginary, some kind of self-conscious attempt to like treat this as an important issue, right? So like, let's say, you know, right now, people in Hollywood would feel bad, right?
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How the iPhone Drove Men and Women Apart
If they were perceived to be not doing something. To, you know, fight climate change or something like Hollywood used to make a lot of romantic comedies doesn't really anymore. There's still a few. Right. But like, are there cultural scripts that could be written, whether in, you know, movies or TV or elsewhere that you think could actually make a difference?
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How the iPhone Drove Men and Women Apart
Right. Well, let's talk about that for a minute, right? Because that's sort of where people have naturally gone for a long time, people on the left, as I mentioned earlier, but also some people on the right. You have models in Eastern Europe, Poland and Hungary of sort of conservative or traditionalist governments trying to boost the birth rate or boost the marriage rate through incentives.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How the iPhone Drove Men and Women Apart
But yeah, I mean, my impression is, as you say, right, in part, it's these policies can work, but you have to spend incredibly large sums to do it, which gets harder when your country is experiencing economic decline caused by falling birth rates, right? Yeah, yeah. And then also your gains are... Like they get swamped by larger effects. Right.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How the iPhone Drove Men and Women Apart
So Hungary seemed to have some success pushing its birth rate, I think, from like one point three to one point six. So you're making your investment is reaping marginal gains, which I think are worth it. It could mean, you know, hundreds of thousands of lives potentially, but it's not actually a fix. What about religion?
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How the iPhone Drove Men and Women Apart
Overall, it's the case that religious people tend to have more kids than secular people. Do those differential birth rates mean that, for instance, eventually the secular Western world will just become more religious because only religious people will be having kids? Like what role does religion play?
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How the iPhone Drove Men and Women Apart
But don't you need a certain kind of separatism to have big effects, right? So the ultra-Orthodox in Israel are a fairly separate religious community, right? And my reading of the literature for Muslims in the UK and in Europe is the more those communities integrate, the more their birth rates converge with the European norm. And the same goes in the US. I don't know. I tend to be skeptical of...
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How the iPhone Drove Men and Women Apart
prophecies of massive religious revival, although I will say that if birth rates are falling this fast, then suddenly the religious advantage looks more important. And then maybe at the opposite end of the spectrum of possibilities from traditional religion, right, you have reproductive technology offered as a kind of response.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How the iPhone Drove Men and Women Apart
So there was a big pronatalism conference that was held recently in the U.S. that attracted a lot of media attention because, of course, it was filled with a lot of very curious characters, you know, some of whom are my friends, some of whom are not.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How the iPhone Drove Men and Women Apart
But what everyone who was there said is that it's this really weird mixture of sort of serious conservative religious people and Silicon Valley people who are convinced that there's going to be a technological solution, and maybe the solution is artificial wombs. Maybe it's a cure for menopause that extends female reproductive life deeper into middle age or something.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How the iPhone Drove Men and Women Apart
What effect has reproductive technology had so far? Has IVF mitigated the trend, do you think?
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How the iPhone Drove Men and Women Apart
But IVF right now is very costly, difficult, and obviously does not deliver guarantees of success. Unreliable, yeah. a reason why it's safe to postpone marriage and fertility. You know, you have the companies offering egg freezing services, right, that are unreliable guarantors of fertility, right?
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How the iPhone Drove Men and Women Apart
So when I look at that landscape right now, I wonder if for every benefit to fertility you get from assisted reproduction, if there isn't a sort of cultural sense that like, okay, I can put this off that then ends in disappointment when it turns out that the tech is not all that people expect it to be.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How the iPhone Drove Men and Women Apart
Right. But then by that logic, let's say you could extend, you could reliably extend female fertility by 10 years. That doesn't actually solve... the coupling crisis, right? If maybe it ends up meaning you have more, at least some more women who don't pair off, don't partner up, but end up having maybe one child.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How the iPhone Drove Men and Women Apart
From New York Times Opinion, I'm Ross Douthat, and this is Interesting Times. 50 years ago, the world feared a population bomb, an explosion of population growth that would yield famine, war, and disaster. But for most of my career, I've been trying to persuade people that actually population decline is now the greater peril.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How the iPhone Drove Men and Women Apart
But I mean, that's part of the reality here is that, in fact, it's just harder to raise children on your own, right? So even people who want children outside of a coupled situation are going, even if they have a kid, they'll probably have fewer kids. And it just seems like you're still stuck in the same general trap, even if you can add a little bit to the reproductive life cycle.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How the iPhone Drove Men and Women Apart
Right. But to the extent that you can tie all of that together. So you wrote a fascinating paper recently about the Islamic religious revival.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How the iPhone Drove Men and Women Apart
So this is the broad trend across the Muslim world towards increasing piety and religious practice that helped define the late 20th century and was not entirely expected. Yes.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How the iPhone Drove Men and Women Apart
One of the arguments you make in the paper is that there is just an element of prestige at work here, that a lot of Islamic schools and preachers and so on and revivalists, if you will, did a really good job of making Islam seem prestigious, like it was something you wanted to be part of, right? And so, in a way, we're talking about a similar problem here, right?
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How the iPhone Drove Men and Women Apart
In the end, you're trying to make both... Coupling and kids, I think those things together, prestigious in a way that they aren't right now.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How the iPhone Drove Men and Women Apart
Right. Do you have I mean, do you have totalitarian aspirations?
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How the iPhone Drove Men and Women Apart
No, I mean, no. I mean, this is well, but this this is the I guess this is one one more interesting question. Right. Is that we're talking about this in the context of primarily of liberal democracies. But all of the trends that you describe apply to places like the People's Republic of China. China's birth rate is headed towards South Korean levels.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How the iPhone Drove Men and Women Apart
But China is, I mean, you can argue about how totalitarian it is. It certainly is an authoritarian society with a state and a leadership class that that, you know, thinks naturally in terms of five-year plans and thinks naturally in terms of social engineering. And they are, I mean, they take the fertility crisis seriously.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How the iPhone Drove Men and Women Apart
Do you imagine that China is going to sort of succeed in social engineering their way? out of this?
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How the iPhone Drove Men and Women Apart
And when did you become interested in the fertility crisis? You started out working on gender equality, the socioeconomic status of women in developing countries. How did this issue, which I should say it has long been the province of, you know, to be kind to ourselves, right wing cranks, right? How did this issue become a big part of your focus?
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How the iPhone Drove Men and Women Apart
All right, let's take a break there. And when we come back, we'll try and figure out what could bring men and women back together. I want to stay on that idea of the pain of pregnancy and childbirth, because this is more speculative, right? But we've been talking about virtual life as a distraction, right?
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How the iPhone Drove Men and Women Apart
from reality, from physical reality, a distraction from going out to a bar and meeting someone or just hanging out with friends and getting introduced to someone. But isn't there also a way in which... I mean, it is true that sex is dangerous, right? It's high risk. Pregnancy is dangerous. Having kids is obviously more dangerous for women than for men, for obvious reasons.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How the iPhone Drove Men and Women Apart
Do you think there's a way in which virtual life... makes physical, carnal, painful human life seem more dangerous than it would have? Just by virtue of like, you're living in a phone, right? You're detached from, you're abstracted from your own body in a more profound way than usual. I just wonder if this kind of propaganda about
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How the iPhone Drove Men and Women Apart
what reproduction does and how dangerous it is fastens more easily in minds that are already a little bit detached from their own embodiment.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How the iPhone Drove Men and Women Apart
But maybe not pain, right? OK, so maybe there it's more a kind of idealized fantasy of youth. Because yes, people are willing to go through painful processes of calisthenic activity and facial surgery and so on. But both of those things for men and women are attempts to sort of retain a kind of eternal youth, right?
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How the iPhone Drove Men and Women Apart
And in that sense, sorry, I'm just trying to push us a tiny bit, tiny bit into the philosophical, right? But like the act of You know, I mean, I had hair before I started having kids, right? Like the entering into parenthood is inherently a confrontation with your own mortality. Maybe.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How the iPhone Drove Men and Women Apart
Right. We've been talking about solutions and responses. But overall, we're describing a problem to which there is not a single solution. There might be a large number of sort of small bore responses that make some kind of difference. But basically, the low fertility future, the population crash is going to happen in most places. Yes.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How the iPhone Drove Men and Women Apart
Almost certainly there is not going to be a worldwide pro-fertility mobilization that suddenly reverses birth rates and takes these trends off the table. So I just want to speculate at the end, right? Like, what does that future look like? Like, what do you think the world looks like in 2080 if these trends continue?
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How the iPhone Drove Men and Women Apart
I want to be clear. These are imaginative speculations.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How the iPhone Drove Men and Women Apart
This is what I say to my colleagues, too. So it's, you know, it's not just Zambia.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How the iPhone Drove Men and Women Apart
Just say a little more about the politics. What does it mean when you say more conservative?
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How the iPhone Drove Men and Women Apart
So there it's just sort of replacement. Conservatives have more kids. Liberals have fewer. Conservatives own the future. Yes. I guess I'm wondering, though, what like surely there are also kind of political adaptations. You can see in Europe already with some of the kind of some of the populist parties. Right.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How the iPhone Drove Men and Women Apart
This sense of like we're trying to sort of protect Europe. the aging society and you know we want to keep out immigrants because immigrants threaten a culture that is disappearing but the culture is disappearing because we ourselves haven't had enough kids i don't know but it's people worry about the authoritarianism of that kind of politics and i
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How the iPhone Drove Men and Women Apart
I think there is a pull towards authoritarianism, but it seems like in a weird way the opposite of like an aggressive, you know, 20th century fascism that wants to, you know, make Hungary or Germany or Austria great. It's more this kind of like cocooned authoritarianism. I don't know. It just seems like you will get novel forms of politics in this environment.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How the iPhone Drove Men and Women Apart
No, it seems like a very dark future. And this is sort of the problem of a low fertility trap, right? Is that once a society gets old enough and it's democracy, the older voters are just going to keep voting for benefits for older people. Yes, exactly. And it's still going to be difficult.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How the iPhone Drove Men and Women Apart
It's going to be increasingly difficult to get the government to spend money on the young people, even if you need the young people, right? So
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How the iPhone Drove Men and Women Apart
Right. But then finally, just to keep being speculative, the world in this future will have a lot more empty spaces, though, too, right? Like China has spent 20 years building all of these huge cities. And if China's population falls by half, those cities will be empty. Like big regions, big rural regions of Latin America will be empty and so on. Yes.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How the iPhone Drove Men and Women Apart
Right. And a country like South Korea has a fertility rate of 0.7. That means that over the course of two generations, the population goes from 50 million to, what, 20-odd million, let's say, 15 to 20 million. Does that sound right? I'm just trying to give people a sense that when we talk about in these – with the numbers we have now, when we talk about –
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How the iPhone Drove Men and Women Apart
So sometimes when I'm trying to be optimistic and I want to... I don't want to end on a super optimistic note because the point of this show is that people should be alarmed and concerned by this. But there are ways in which like a young person could look at that world and say, okay, you know, the mega cities of Western Europe and North America are actually bad places to be young.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How the iPhone Drove Men and Women Apart
But there's a kind of reopened frontier in Uruguay or Eastern Europe or the hinterlands of China or something. Right.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How the iPhone Drove Men and Women Apart
I guess I'm thinking more like imagine that you wanted to be like a pirate. Like imagine that you, you know, were like a 19th century would be desperado. I'm more imagining a world of like groups with high intentionality, right?
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How the iPhone Drove Men and Women Apart
Like this new world is going to reward people who are unusually intentional about things like getting married and having kids, but also maybe about building a community and trying to sort of set yourself up in one of the spaces created by the retreat of the human race.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How the iPhone Drove Men and Women Apart
Yeah. You have kids? Yes.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How the iPhone Drove Men and Women Apart
No. Okay. So I have kids and my kids are maybe tired of hearing their father mentioned to them just occasionally that global population is going to collapse over the course of their lifetime. Normal children of New York Times employees are worried about climate change. My children are worried about the demographic cliff.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How the iPhone Drove Men and Women Apart
I know I keep trying to prod you towards optimism, but what would you say to the children of this future? Because when I talk to my kids about it, I do try to frame it as an opportunity. It's like, yes, the world is going to grow old, but you will be young.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How the iPhone Drove Men and Women Apart
And you will have agency and you will have opportunities to shape a world in which there are fewer young people to compete with and maybe your horizons will widen. So how do you think young people should think about this future? Apart from, you know, they should probably have some kids.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How the iPhone Drove Men and Women Apart
The reason you use a term like population collapse is we aren't talking about a kind of gentle slide from above replacement fertility to slightly below replacement fertility where you need to adjust the retirement age so that people stay in the workforce five years longer.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How the iPhone Drove Men and Women Apart
Okay, so we're ending on an agreement of a massive government program to subsidize a new revival of Jane Austen adaptations for the 21st century.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How the iPhone Drove Men and Women Apart
On that note, Alice Evans, thank you so much for joining me.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How the iPhone Drove Men and Women Apart
As always, thank you so much for listening. And as a reminder, you can watch this as a video podcast on YouTube. You can find the channel under Interesting Times with Ross Douthat. Interesting Times is produced by Sophia Alvarez-Boyd, Andrea Batanzos, Elisa Gutierrez, and Catherine Sullivan. It's edited by Jordana Hochman.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How the iPhone Drove Men and Women Apart
Our fact-check team is Kate Sinclair, Mary Marge Locker, and Michelle Harris. Original music by Isaac Jones, Sonia Herrero, Amin Sahota, and Pat McCusker. Mixing by Pat McCusker. Audience strategy by Shannon Busta and Christina Samulowski. And our director of opinion audio is Annie Rose Strasser.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How the iPhone Drove Men and Women Apart
You're talking about cities being empty, buildings standing empty, economies grinding to a halt, and just seeing a country that has gone furthest Yes, absolutely.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How the iPhone Drove Men and Women Apart
No, we took our family to Rome and we're trying to find a children's store. And it turned out that there was an important children's chain that had closed a bunch of its stores. of its places. But also, I mean, when I traveled around Italy, the hill towns are empty, right? The rural areas are aging and emptying. The big cities, people move there.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How the iPhone Drove Men and Women Apart
And so they stay densely populated, even if they're having fewer kids. And so this can actually end up being kind of invisible in an interesting way, because if you're in the big city, there are more people there than ever, right? And so you think to yourself, well, how can there be a population crisis?
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How the iPhone Drove Men and Women Apart
So, okay, why is this happening? And just before you tell us, I think it's safe to say everyone has a sort of particular pet theory, right? So if you talk to people on the political left for a long time, they would insist that it's just a problem of the provision of public services, right?
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How the iPhone Drove Men and Women Apart
And they would say, you know, the developed world just needs to become more like Scandinavia in terms of paid leave and parental support and People on the right, conservatives, are more likely to talk about the decline of religion and a sense of moral obligation to the future.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How the iPhone Drove Men and Women Apart
And in the last few years, the world has finally caught up with my once eccentric anxieties. We're undeniably headed towards a period of global population collapse, one that threatens to maroon today's children, mine and yours if you have them, which, by the way, you should, in a world of emptying cities and slowing economies.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How the iPhone Drove Men and Women Apart
You have people who focus right now, especially in developed countries, on climate change and say, oh, you know, the young people don't want to have kids because they're afraid of the human future. And you'll have people who say, look, this is just about women's choices. This is just once you have a more egalitarian society, women understandably are less likely to choose to have kids.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How the iPhone Drove Men and Women Apart
And this is where we end up. And all of these arguments have problems and as you know it's hard to fit them all to the general trend and especially since even places like scandinavia have sort of headed towards the cliff in recent years generous benefits and all so what is your master theory of all of this
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How the iPhone Drove Men and Women Apart
So this rise in singles, you frame it as a kind of crisis of coupling. Can you define that crisis for me and why it's, in your view, the leading explanation for the larger trends we've been talking about?
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How the iPhone Drove Men and Women Apart
So the coupling crisis writ large seems to be linked somehow to technology, right?
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How the iPhone Drove Men and Women Apart
Podcasting, you know. Yeah, all these charismatic podcasters. That's right.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How the iPhone Drove Men and Women Apart
This is a new podcast. It's played no role at all yet. Oh, okay. You protest your innocence. In distracting the young people of America.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How the iPhone Drove Men and Women Apart
Our guest today has literally traveled the world studying this issue, trying to answer the hardest question. Not just why birth rates have declined, but why they've declined so far and so fast in so many different places. So, Alice Evans, welcome to Interesting Times.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How the iPhone Drove Men and Women Apart
And that holds then as a global explanation because even though there's tons of variation in Internet access and so on, smartphone penetration is a global phenomenon, right? You know, you go to India and Africa and you find people with smartphones.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How the iPhone Drove Men and Women Apart
Right. So as the iPhone moves across sub-Saharan Africa, you would expect fertility rates to fall. So how much of this, so you've just been talking about distraction, entertainment, right? That it's easier to play a video game than go to a bar. It's easier to do sports gambling at home than, you know, meet a nice lady in a broad-brimmed hat at the racetrack. as one does.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How the iPhone Drove Men and Women Apart
But how much of it is distraction per se in your view? And how much of it is a sort of, you might say, like digital segregation of men and women, where men and women aren't just going online, but they're going online in sort of distinct ways and not interacting with each other?
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How the iPhone Drove Men and Women Apart
Right. Well, no. And that's one of the distinctive features of current politics around the developed world, certainly, is some kind of polarization of the sexes. And it was, I think, less extreme in the end in the most recent U.S. election than some people had anticipated. But I wonder, too, if... there's sort of a feedback loop here, right?
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How the iPhone Drove Men and Women Apart
Where the sexes don't interact and therefore are more likely to sort of, like marriage and relationships are themselves a moderating influence.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How the iPhone Drove Men and Women Apart
And so people don't have that influence and then they go online and like if you're on social media where people are always sort of performing their politics and you see a lot of liberal women or a lot of conservative men sort of performing their politics and those aren't your politics, right? And you have no relationship to those people. It just seems a lot easier to...
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How the iPhone Drove Men and Women Apart
create a kind of hostile generalization about right-wing men or left-wing feminists than if you're having any kind of interpersonal face-to-face interaction.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How the iPhone Drove Men and Women Apart
So you're a sociologist at King's College London, is that correct? Yes. And you write a lot about, and I think you're working on a book, about the key social forces shaping the decline in fertility around the world. And those include, in particular... The failure of men and women to relate to one another and pair off. And those issues are part of why I'm especially interested in talking to you.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How the iPhone Drove Men and Women Apart
And so what about economic forces besides the smartphone? So digital life has entered into a world where young men are falling behind young women in education. Men with lower levels of education are having, I think, a particularly hard time finding a mate or pairing off. If you look at trends, at least in the U.S., for marriage rates, college-educated women, marriage rate is down a bit.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
Can the Catholic Church Quit the Culture Wars?
And the pretty stringent line on sexual ethics that has been part of Christian teaching from the beginning. And one of the frustrations that, to be honest, conservatives, whatever, however I define myself, some kind of conservative like me, sometimes have, is that there's this sense that the liberal argument is always sort of open-ended.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
Can the Catholic Church Quit the Culture Wars?
It's always saying, we're not saying exactly what church teaching would be. We just want to start a conversation. But then it seems clear to the conservatives that in the end, the conversation only ends when the liberal perspective carries the day, which is sort of what has happened in a certain number of more liberal Protestant denominations. So I want to push you to be a little bit concrete.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
Can the Catholic Church Quit the Culture Wars?
I'm going to frame the question in a different way from your perspective. on issues related to sex, marriage, sex and marriage in particular. What is the thing that Christianity teaches, that Jesus Christ teaches, that has to be held onto, that is different from what a nice, well-meaning, secular liberal listener of this show might believe about sex?
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
Can the Catholic Church Quit the Culture Wars?
What is the Christian difference that needs to remain no matter what kind of conversations and evolutions we have?
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
Can the Catholic Church Quit the Culture Wars?
You are a Jesuit. You are a priest. You are, you know, a man. I think you're eminently qualified to answer the question.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
Can the Catholic Church Quit the Culture Wars?
Positive. He's pro that marriage, at least.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
Can the Catholic Church Quit the Culture Wars?
So, we're speaking, I think, 72 hours after the death of Pope Francis, and... I feel like I've already heard at least 117 interviews that start with a big question about the pope's legacy. So I want to start smaller by talking about Francis as you personally experienced his pontificate and also as you experienced him. He was the first Jesuit pope. You are a Jesuit.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
Can the Catholic Church Quit the Culture Wars?
It's not. It's accepted by a lot of, I mean, I think the secular liberal narrative of sex that I certainly hear would say they might not use terms like reverence and sacred, but they would use terms like consent and respect and so on. And at least when I read the New Testament, right? And again, I quite agree. Jesus says much more about the sins of rich people than about sexual sins.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
Can the Catholic Church Quit the Culture Wars?
That's absolutely true. But the things he says about sex are quite stringent, right? He doesn't say anything in particular about homosexuality, but he speaks very strongly about homosexuality. marriage as lifelong, permanent, as divorce, as remarriage after divorce, as a form of adultery. And I would say, you know, I became a Catholic in my teens after some time in different Protestant churches.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
Can the Catholic Church Quit the Culture Wars?
And one of the things that always struck me about Catholicism in its sort of weirdnesses, including the things it says about sex, including like saying, you is that it seemed very biblical in that way. That, like, the Catholic Church is the only major Christian church, in the West at least, that still seems to say something about what's wrong with divorce.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
Can the Catholic Church Quit the Culture Wars?
And there are a lot of divorces in my family tree. And I have a pretty good sense, I think, of what is wrong with divorce and why it's good for a church to say something about that. And so I think conservatives... in these intra-Catholic debates are often framed as, you know, trying to hold on to some sort of rigid understanding of human beings. And I think that sometimes can be true.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
Can the Catholic Church Quit the Culture Wars?
But again, just in this conversation, I feel like I can see why I am worried that the more liberalized church of an imagined successor to Pope Francis, that some of those things would slip away. To me, it's just not enough to say Christianity teaches some kind of generic reverence.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
Can the Catholic Church Quit the Culture Wars?
I think it's important that Christianity teaches something like marriage is an indissoluble one flesh union that you, you know, can't easily get out of. Do you agree with that? Which part? The part that there has to be something more than just a general statement. That there is sort of a specific concreteness to the way Jesus talks about sex as the way he talks about wealth and poverty.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
Can the Catholic Church Quit the Culture Wars?
From New York Times Opinion, I'm Ross Douthat, and this is Interesting Times. So interesting, in fact, that God, in his wisdom, has decided to call one pope home and let the cardinals of the Roman Catholic Church choose another. The death of Pope Francis ends, or at least temporarily suspends, a tumultuous period in the life of the world's largest religious institution.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
Can the Catholic Church Quit the Culture Wars?
You met on a number of occasions. You interacted. He wrote the introduction of your latest book. So I wondered if you could just talk about Pope Francis as a priest, which is something that he very self-consciously aspired to be, not just the pope of the Catholic Church, but a priest of Catholicism.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
Can the Catholic Church Quit the Culture Wars?
Do you think that's a stable equilibrium, though? I guess it's my question. Like, say, 100 years goes by. And that becomes the equilibrium of the Catholic Church. The church has a very pastoral case-by-case approach to issues around sex and sexuality. But nothing ever changes in the formal teaching of the church.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
Can the Catholic Church Quit the Culture Wars?
The church never sort of recognizes same-sex unions the way it recognizes heterosexual unions. It just sort of remains in this place. Are you personally content with that kind of...
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
Can the Catholic Church Quit the Culture Wars?
Yeah, yeah. So would you be comfortable if in 100 years it seems like the church has to be more oppositional to the modern world than it did in the 1960s?
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
Can the Catholic Church Quit the Culture Wars?
All right, let's take a quick break. And when we come back, I'm going to offer a more conservative interpretation of Francis's record and legacy. Thank you. Let's talk about the lived experience of more conservative Catholics during this pontificate.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
Can the Catholic Church Quit the Culture Wars?
From your point of view and from the point of view of a lot of Catholics, the Francis pontificate was experienced as just a period of greater freedom. Like you're a priest, you have vows, you're part of an order, you're under certain kinds of obedience. And it was clear to me, certainly, that the pontificate was a period of greater freedom.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
Can the Catholic Church Quit the Culture Wars?
That there were lots and lots of people inside the church who had opinions that they didn't feel comfortable expressing under John Paul II and Benedict, who felt comfortable expressing them under Francis, right? Is that a fair description?
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
Can the Catholic Church Quit the Culture Wars?
Do you worry in a different pontificate that you will feel less freedom? Oh, sure. Are you sitting here in this podcast worrying that things you say could be held against you under a future pope? I'm just curious.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
Can the Catholic Church Quit the Culture Wars?
Well, no, that's a good place to take it, right?
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
Can the Catholic Church Quit the Culture Wars?
Because I'm curious what stabilization looks like, because the flip side of what I just described, the phenomenon where some, maybe many Catholics felt more comfortable, more free to speak freely under Francis, was the experience of a lot of conservatives and traditionalists, I knew, which was kind of a mirror image of the liberal experience under John Paul II, right?
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
Can the Catholic Church Quit the Culture Wars?
Which was that, you know, you mentioned at the outset that there were a lot of Jesuits in Argentina, right? who felt that Francis's leadership as a young man was authoritarian and rigid. The reality is that a lot of conservative Catholics felt that his pontificate was not sort of open and free-flowing, that it was authoritarian in his own way. It used to be that
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
Can the Catholic Church Quit the Culture Wars?
The papacy would investigate more liberal religious orders, and suddenly it was conservative and traditional orders being investigated. And then especially you had a very explicit crackdown on the traditional Latin mass, which is something that is attended by a very small number of Catholics, but it's very meaningful to that number of Catholics. And Francis was not an admirer of traditionalists.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
Can the Catholic Church Quit the Culture Wars?
I would say he spoke very harshly at times about conservatives and traditionalists, like a kind of paternal but scolding in certain ways.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
Can the Catholic Church Quit the Culture Wars?
So I'm curious both what you think about that perspective, having been talking about the pope as a figure of openness and dialogue, but also whether you think, like, should it be possible for a pope to be pope without either liberals or conservatives feeling persecuted?
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
Can the Catholic Church Quit the Culture Wars?
So my sense was that he was pretty— The czar was very patient with his subjects.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
Can the Catholic Church Quit the Culture Wars?
I think it's less – I mean, from my perspective, right, it's less about sort of – the general idea as sort of, to me, a kind of concrete lack of pastoral care in the sense that my impression, again, observing Rome from far away, is that Francis has a lot of critics and he had a lot of American critics. Very vocal. Very vocal. Sometimes even in the hierarchy. Sometimes even in the hierarchy.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
Can the Catholic Church Quit the Culture Wars?
I was such a critic. I think probably the most, you know, the most challenging emails we ever exchanged. when I was writing some very pointed criticisms of the Holy Father. But most of the people who attend Latin Masses, in my experience, they're in the position of looking, as so many people are in this 21st century world of ours, for a tangible connection to the divine. And I
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
Can the Catholic Church Quit the Culture Wars?
Some people find that connection more fully in an ancient liturgy, right? And so it seemed to me that there was just a sense in which that there was a failure to, again, to use the language that you've been using in this conversation, meet the conservative or really the traditionalist part of the church where those people are.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
Can the Catholic Church Quit the Culture Wars?
And it made me worry, and this is a larger question, right, about the question of unity and how a church that has these divisions holds together.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
Can the Catholic Church Quit the Culture Wars?
Yeah. I mean, one interesting question connected to that, right, is this question of what draws people together. to Christianity and what draws people to church right now.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
Can the Catholic Church Quit the Culture Wars?
Because I think one of the interesting questions hanging over the church right now is that in certain ways, the liberal conservative splits are generational, but not in the way that people usually expect, certainly among priests. If you look at surveys of Priests in the United States, for instance, I think this is true maybe not to the same degree elsewhere in the world.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
Can the Catholic Church Quit the Culture Wars?
Younger priests, while not necessarily politically conservative, tend to be more theologically conservative than older priests. And so as someone who is seen as more on sort of the liberal side of the spectrum, first, what do you make of that trend? But also – What does it say to you about sources of zeal, sources of intensity in the future?
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
Can the Catholic Church Quit the Culture Wars?
Or you're not a good Catholic because you're a convert. There's a whole discourse where, I mean, there are phenomena certainly where people convert to Catholicism and within six months have decided that they know absolutely everything about the faith. It can become very annoying. But there is also a... I think, a weird anti-convert tendency and discourse.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
Can the Catholic Church Quit the Culture Wars?
All right, let's take a quick break. And when we come back, we'll dig a bit more into some of the ideological divisions of the Francis era. So then how does it all hold together? What keeps – so you've described something that is real, right? The vast diversity of the Catholic Church. But you do have this set of issues that have –
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
Can the Catholic Church Quit the Culture Wars?
led to outright schism in many of our fellow Christian churches, Anglicans, Methodists, and so on. And you do have a landscape where, as you said at the outset, the Pope pushed a certain distance on hot-button issues and then said, okay, if we're keeping the Germans and the Africans in the same church, we can't push any further. But what does hold the church together in the end?
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
Can the Catholic Church Quit the Culture Wars?
We have had a great schism where we lost the Orthodox or they lost us. We had the Protestant Reformation, an unfortunate period of trouble that we're still recovering from, right? So the Holy Spirit holds the church together in some form. But in this form, the church of you and I in the 21st century, what makes people of these different perspectives want to stay together?
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
Can the Catholic Church Quit the Culture Wars?
Now, a cynic, and I don't think... I don't think this is entirely unfair, right? But a cynic might say it is the pope that holds the church together. It's the papacy that holds the church together. But it does because it offers this point of influence and shaping power that everybody wants a chance to to ultimately control, right?
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
Can the Catholic Church Quit the Culture Wars?
So no one in the end wants to leave the Roman Catholic Church and just become the German Catholic Church or the Sub-Saharan African Catholic Church because Rome itself offers this place of influence over the world that you would be foolish to give up. And I don't mean – I think the cynical perspective has some of the truth.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
Can the Catholic Church Quit the Culture Wars?
Like I'm very interested as someone who was a Protestant, who watched how quickly
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
Can the Catholic Church Quit the Culture Wars?
You guys are stuck. Let's be clear about that. I also wonder, though. in this landscape, right? Like, how much influence can a pope or the hierarchy have over Catholics, lay Catholics, not priests and religious, but lay Catholics who disagree with them, right? Because you said, you know, well, hopefully the hierarchy unites us. Hopefully the pope unites us.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
Can the Catholic Church Quit the Culture Wars?
I think the pope is unifying, but since the sex abuse crisis, I think... You know, when I think about like how ordinary Catholics think about the hierarchy, just in my own lifetime, I think it's changed dramatically and people have just less respect for the bishops than they did. And just in terms of Catholic politics, right, that cashes out in this world where, you know,
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
Can the Catholic Church Quit the Culture Wars?
It just doesn't seem like the bishops have very much authority over Catholic politicians, for instance. So for a long time, you had pro-choice Catholic politicians who, you know, favored abortion rights and the bishops would criticize them. And that didn't seem to go anywhere.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
Can the Catholic Church Quit the Culture Wars?
And now you'll have sort of politicians on the right who take anti-immigration stances and the bishops will criticize them. And that doesn't go anywhere either, right? So... Do you think that the hierarchy has real influence? Can it regain real influence of that kind? Or is it just stuck sort of presiding in this way that... doesn't matter that much to a lot of ordinary Catholics?
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
Can the Catholic Church Quit the Culture Wars?
No, I think they can. But I think certainly bishops bureaucracies, the National Councils of bishops and so on. I feel like imagine themselves having a kind of authority that has completely evaporated.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
Can the Catholic Church Quit the Culture Wars?
And personally, I would like to live in a world where Catholic politicians of both the left and right, not a world where they changed their position entirely because of something a bishop said, but a world where they felt like they had to address a bishop's critique. And I just don't know how we get... back to that world, right?
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
Can the Catholic Church Quit the Culture Wars?
I feel like, and I'm curious for your reaction to this, but I've been writing about this a little bit lately. I feel like there is a renewed interest in religion in the Western world right now, definitely. But I think it's happening very much at a kind of ground level, and maybe that's where renewal always happens, right?
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
Can the Catholic Church Quit the Culture Wars?
But it's people reacting, as you said, to sort of what's going on in the world, things in their own lives, but it's not about... Suddenly having the debate about gay marriage settled or anything like that.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
Can the Catholic Church Quit the Culture Wars?
But it's almost if I'm being optimistic, I would say it's almost people moving past some of the culture war arguments that you and I have been having for a long time and just sort of saying, well, you know, these are not fully resolved, but I'm going to go back to church anyway. But there's also a way in which it feels like it's happening now.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
Can the Catholic Church Quit the Culture Wars?
And it has nothing to do with the hierarchy of the church. The hierarchy is just sort of not not in the action.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
Can the Catholic Church Quit the Culture Wars?
All right. So last two questions for you. Looking beyond some of the culture war issues and church debates we've been talking about, what would you like to see the next pope do?
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
Can the Catholic Church Quit the Culture Wars?
Give me somewhere he should go. Oh, gosh. Somewhere he should go.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
Can the Catholic Church Quit the Culture Wars?
They've gone everywhere, but you're his traveling secretary and you get to pick the first destination. A refugee camp, I think.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
Can the Catholic Church Quit the Culture Wars?
Pick it this way. How about a place, you mentioned Lourdes, a place associated with the supernatural in Catholicism? Where should, which, a shrine, a site of a visitation?
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
Can the Catholic Church Quit the Culture Wars?
I like the idea of lords and the Sea of Galilee somewhere associated with Our Lady of Guadalupe. But I do. I like the idea. I think I suspect that we are headed into an era where sort of secular. I mean, the church has been consumed with issues about sexual behavior and its relationship to secular politics and so on.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
Can the Catholic Church Quit the Culture Wars?
And one of my sort of prevailing views is that we're entering a much weirder time. when it might be just really good for the pope to be at the Sea of Galilee, in places associated with the moments when Christianity claims that God has actually reached down and touched the things of earth. So something in that zone is appealing to me. Last question, who is going to be the next pope?
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
Can the Catholic Church Quit the Culture Wars?
Yeah. I mean, I think people talk about a moderate choice and that could just sort of mean a boring choice, right? In the sense that you could pick someone who is a Vatican bureaucrat or a diplomat who doesn't have an incredibly strong public presence. That would be my impression of Cardinal Parolin, maybe unfairly, but who is sort of the insider candidate.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
Can the Catholic Church Quit the Culture Wars?
But my assumption is it's either going to be that very quickly or
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
Can the Catholic Church Quit the Culture Wars?
It's either going to be a situation where you have all these cardinals. They don't know each other as well as as normally they might. And so there's a very quickly a couple of front runners and consolidates very quickly.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
Can the Catholic Church Quit the Culture Wars?
But then if that doesn't happen, then it seems like you get into territory where you should just scratch off all of the leading contenders because almost almost anything can happen.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
Can the Catholic Church Quit the Culture Wars?
All right. Well, on that note, and speaking in agreement in favor of openness to the Holy Spirit, Father James Martin, thank you so much for joining me. My pleasure. God bless you. Thank you. And thanks to all of you for listening again. We'll be back next week with another episode. Please follow us wherever you get your podcasts, and you can also watch the show on YouTube.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
Can the Catholic Church Quit the Culture Wars?
And if you enjoyed the conversation, please recommend us to your friends and leave a review. Interesting Times is produced by Sophia Alvarez-Boyd, Andrea Batanzos, Elisa Gutierrez, and Catherine Sullivan. It's edited by Jordana Hochman. Our fact-check team is Kate Sinclair, Mary Marge Locker, and Michelle Harris.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
Can the Catholic Church Quit the Culture Wars?
Thanks to Google Translate. I was always struck and thinking about his legacy now, I'm struck by it even more by what you might call the visual element of his papacy. After he died, a lot of people on social media were sharing the photograph of him in the empty St. Peter's Square holding the monstrance, which holds the Eucharist, the host that Catholics believe is the body of Christ.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
Can the Catholic Church Quit the Culture Wars?
Again, in this sort of empty, darkened square in the midst of the worst pandemic in 100 years. And I feel like at the beginning of his pontificate, there were a lot of those kind of moments. The one that I remember most is him embracing Christ. a man who had boils, I believe, or was disfigured in some way. And I feel like he had a certain kind of genius for
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
Can the Catholic Church Quit the Culture Wars?
in effect, creating Christian iconography in his sort of public moments that I think will be one of the more lasting elements of his papacy.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
Can the Catholic Church Quit the Culture Wars?
Yeah. So let's talk about the doing, though, as well as the showing. This was a dramatic pontificate in a lot of different ways. But from my perspective, I'd say the great drama of the pontificate was, you could call it a push to change church teaching or practice on a host of difficult and controversial post-1960s issues.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
Can the Catholic Church Quit the Culture Wars?
I would say that that sort of went on as a thread throughout the, you know, was it 12 years? 12 years, right? Where you had...
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
Can the Catholic Church Quit the Culture Wars?
controversies that conservative Catholics regarded as having been sort of addressed and settled under prior popes over whether divorced and remarried Catholics should take communion without getting an annulment, over the possibility of female deacons, if not female priests, the possibility of allowing blessings for same-sex couples. All of these were suddenly sort of in the air.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
Can the Catholic Church Quit the Culture Wars?
And that mattered a great deal to you because as you just mentioned, right, one of the One of the forms of work that you took up under Francis was writing and arguing about gay Catholics and their place in the church. So from your perspective as a sympathizer, I would say, with that kind of push and that kind of opening of debate. How far do you think it went?
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
Can the Catholic Church Quit the Culture Wars?
How far did Francis go on those issues?
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
Can the Catholic Church Quit the Culture Wars?
A period that saw the pope often pitted against his own bishops and cardinals in arguments about how much and in what direction Roman Catholicism should change. My guest today and I were often on the opposite side of those debates.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
Can the Catholic Church Quit the Culture Wars?
I want to talk about that question of sort of breakage and conflict. But then what were the concrete changes? Because the point you make about sort of disturbing or disappointing people runs both ways. So you had a certain kind of disturbance from conservative Catholics to the way the pope talked about these issues, the debates he wanted to open up.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
Can the Catholic Church Quit the Culture Wars?
And so I'm hoping that our conversation can help illuminate the stakes in Roman Catholicism's conflicts, the prospects for the church's continued unity, and the implications of these debates for the future of religion in the modern world. Fr.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
Can the Catholic Church Quit the Culture Wars?
But then, especially by the end of his pontificate, There was a certain kind of disappointment from more liberal Catholics, right, saying, well, he sort of left us in a place of ambiguity where he talks about, you know, the individual soul and discernment and so on and issues statements and teachings that can be, let's say, read in somewhat different ways, depending on depending on where you are.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
Can the Catholic Church Quit the Culture Wars?
But there isn't like a concrete change to the catechism in what it says about the immorality of same-sex relations. He opened the debate about possibly ordaining women to the diaconate, but it didn't really go anywhere. So first of all, what concretely changed do you think under Francis? And then I'll ask you about where the different sides would want to push things beyond him.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
Can the Catholic Church Quit the Culture Wars?
James Martin is one of the most famous Catholic priests in the United States, I think the only Jesuit to ever appear on Stephen Colbert's late-night TV program, and the author of many, many books most recently come forth, a meditation on the New Testament story of Jesus' raising of Lazarus from the dead. So, Father James Martin, welcome to Interesting Times. Good to be with you, Ross.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
Can the Catholic Church Quit the Culture Wars?
So, you know- But is that the hard limit from your perspective, right? So let's say that we elect Pope Francis II or Pope John XXIV, someone who's seen as sort of a successor to Francis in terms of being open to liberalization. And you were named head of the Inquisition. I mean, sorry, you were named head of the head of the Office of Doctrine.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
Can the Catholic Church Quit the Culture Wars?
Would you see the limits on changes to church teaching as being primarily about church politics? Right. You need to keep conservative Africans and more liberal Germans together in the same church. Or is there just a limit? And here I'm speaking as someone who obviously thinks there is on just how much the church can change what it says about sex. period, no matter what changes in modern culture.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
Can the Catholic Church Quit the Culture Wars?
So for listeners who are not intimately familiar with sort of the endless wrangling within the Catholic Church about some of these questions, which...
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
Can the Catholic Church Quit the Culture Wars?
It's a wrangling that has been going on in every religious tradition, certainly every Christian church, but also non-Christian churches as well, that there is just sort of this running tension between where late modern life has ended up in terms of people's lived experiences, who people sleep with, who people get married to, when people get divorced, all of these kinds of things.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What if There’s No Way to Stop Trump’s Approach to Power?
From New York Times Opinion, I'm Ross Douthat, and this is Interesting Times. One of the defining features of the second Trump administration has been the aggressive use of executive power over the administrative state, over the global economy, and potentially over and against the other branches of government.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What if There’s No Way to Stop Trump’s Approach to Power?
Right. I want to pull back from this just for a second and talk about the larger... Well, it's...
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What if There’s No Way to Stop Trump’s Approach to Power?
There's a moral question here, and I'm curious how much of a legal and constitutional question it is, which is that a big part of why these deportations have become so understandably controversial is not just about whether they are following the precise procedures involved, whether there have been mistakes made, all of these things, right? It's because we're deporting people to a prison. Yeah.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What if There’s No Way to Stop Trump’s Approach to Power?
And a bad prison. And a prison that advertises itself as a bad prison. And the Trump administration has explicitly said, we are glad we're sending bad people to this tough, tough prison.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What if There’s No Way to Stop Trump’s Approach to Power?
Right. Right. So, one, I mean, to me, politically, in the realm that I mostly write about and talk about, I think clearly the Trump administration came in with a political mandate to increase deportations. The Biden administration's immigration policy was, I think, widely acknowledged to be at least somewhat disastrous. I would say generally disastrous. The Trump administration, I think, is...
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What if There’s No Way to Stop Trump’s Approach to Power?
understandably impatient with realities like in the case of Garcia, where you have someone who he's been in the United States illegally for many years, and yet you can't deport him to his home country because of a judicial order, right?
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What if There’s No Way to Stop Trump’s Approach to Power?
When I've talked to people who are sympathetic to the administration's position, they've said, look, if you're doing this for every illegal alien, we're never going to be able to achieve anything. And my response generally is, That's fine to say, but you're sending people to prison, right? How much does that enter into the legal and or constitutional side of this debate? Maybe it doesn't, right?
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What if There’s No Way to Stop Trump’s Approach to Power?
Maybe we're just saying, well, we deported them to El Salvador. That's a sovereign country. And by coincidence, the government of El Salvador put them in prison, right? I mean, what's the legal...
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What if There’s No Way to Stop Trump’s Approach to Power?
Right. A shortcut, though, for a pretty, I mean, even if the Supreme Court blesses it, right? It's narrow. It's still just talking about a particular gang from Venezuela.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What if There’s No Way to Stop Trump’s Approach to Power?
So are you asking me, does the moral argument... I'm asking you, are there any particular legal issues raised by deporting people to foreign prisons that would not obtain if you were just deporting them and, you know, leaving them at the border of El Salvador and waving goodbye?
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What if There’s No Way to Stop Trump’s Approach to Power?
How about the citizen-noncitizen distinction here? Let's say that after this podcast airs, you know, someone comes up and puts us into custody and we get sent to El Salvador together. Hopefully we share a cell. Yeah. And and the government says, oh, we're very sorry. We meant to remove two illegal aliens who are also in the New York Times building at that time.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What if There’s No Way to Stop Trump’s Approach to Power?
We accidentally took Jack Goldsmith and Ross Douthat. Unfortunately, they are in custody. a foreign country under the government of El Salvador sovereignty. And, you know, we can negotiate, but we can't guarantee we'll get them back. Is that a different legal issue than the one the Garcia case presents?
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What if There’s No Way to Stop Trump’s Approach to Power?
And obviously, this is a... That seems like a problematic argument.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What if There’s No Way to Stop Trump’s Approach to Power?
Would there be any distinction in, let's say, the legal exposure of, you know, the agency that did the deportation? I'm just, you know, my lawyer, I'm talking to my lawyer from El Salvador, right? And I'm saying, who are you- Can you sue the government? Yeah. Who are you going to go after? Right.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What if There’s No Way to Stop Trump’s Approach to Power?
That sounds good. I'd like to sue for that. Yes.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What if There’s No Way to Stop Trump’s Approach to Power?
Okay. So it seems like the Supreme Court has a very, very strong interest in figuring out how to get the Trump administration to get Garcia back to the U.S.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What if There’s No Way to Stop Trump’s Approach to Power?
Who would the sanctions be on?
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What if There’s No Way to Stop Trump’s Approach to Power?
Are you familiar with Gödel's loophole? No. Okay, so this is the idea that the famous Austrian mathematician Kurt Gödel. Oh, yeah, okay. Right, who supposedly told friends that he had studied the U.S. Constitution and discovered the loophole whereby a president could become a dictator. And the story goes that, you know, he found it, but essentially...
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What if There’s No Way to Stop Trump’s Approach to Power?
He knew what it was, but no one else knew what it was, and the secret died with him. And listening to you describe these scenarios, it does sound a little bit like Gödel's loophole, right, where essentially the president can do whatever he wants as long as he manages to remove his enemies to foreign soil, right? Yep.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What if There’s No Way to Stop Trump’s Approach to Power?
To the extent that this is a suddenly discovered loophole, what would be the remedy for it? So let me back up.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What if There’s No Way to Stop Trump’s Approach to Power?
So this would be a case where if this practice continued, you would need congressional legislation basically saying, You know, we are imposing penalties for removing American citizens from the country without trial.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What if There’s No Way to Stop Trump’s Approach to Power?
All right. I'm going to leave our hypothetical selves in Central America then for the moment. And when we come back, we'll talk about Trump's assertions of executive power over other areas of government, in particular over federal spending.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What if There’s No Way to Stop Trump’s Approach to Power?
Now I want to turn to a different area, which we've already previewed a little bit, which is President Trump's claims of power over the administrative state, but then beyond that over federal spending as a whole. So these categories include all of the attempted firings of federal employees, the restructuring of agencies like USAID and others.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What if There’s No Way to Stop Trump’s Approach to Power?
At the baseline, this to me seems like both the place where a conservative-leaning Supreme Court is most likely to be sympathetic to the president, and also the area where at a baseline, I think the administration just has the strongest case. You mentioned already the unitary executive theory, which is a sort of right-leaning theory of constitutional power.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What if There’s No Way to Stop Trump’s Approach to Power?
Why don't you just talk for a minute about that theory and how it shapes this debate? Sure.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What if There’s No Way to Stop Trump’s Approach to Power?
In practice, though, they have been trying to fire within administrative law. Right. Like they've this is why they've tried to fire people who are provisional or people who've been newly hired or I think, you know, idiotically, but people who are on track for a promotion. Right. And therefore fall into this category that is legally vulnerable to firing.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What if There’s No Way to Stop Trump’s Approach to Power?
And then the end game here, it's not just the place where they seem to have the strongest constitutional argument. It's also the place to me as an observer of American politics where they seem to have the strongest political argument. And I just spent the weekend reading in our own newspaper.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What if There’s No Way to Stop Trump’s Approach to Power?
accounts from the Biden administration of how impossible it is for the executive, the actual executive, the president of the United States to effectuate policy through the system of government that we have built up. And the roadblocks are not obviously all just within the administrative state. There's lots of different roadblocks. But it does seem to me that the system as we have it is one
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What if There’s No Way to Stop Trump’s Approach to Power?
where we elect a president, the president has incredibly broad powers in theory, and then in practice, the inability to exert control over the government is a big problem for American governance. And I can certainly see why Liberals and Democrats would not want the Trump administration in particular to exert that kind of control.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What if There’s No Way to Stop Trump’s Approach to Power?
But it also seems to me like an endgame where there's a bunch of Supreme Court decisions favorable to executive power and presidents just have a little more direct control over who is hired and fired. in their agencies and administrations is something that in the long run could be good for the workings of American government.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What if There’s No Way to Stop Trump’s Approach to Power?
And I know this is a political question and not a legal question, but I'm curious.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What if There’s No Way to Stop Trump’s Approach to Power?
Well, then let's talk about sort of what seems to me like the furthest extent of this argument and the place where my own sympathy for it starts to break down, which is the question of presidential control broadly over how congressionally appropriated funding is spent and ultimately whether it's spent at all.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What if There’s No Way to Stop Trump’s Approach to Power?
And so there's a couple of questions here where I think, again, we're going to have Supreme Court cases on all of these things, right? But first you have the question of, Congress, you know, appropriates money for USAID. Question is, how much control can the executive exert over how that money is spent?
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What if There’s No Way to Stop Trump’s Approach to Power?
So we're going to get into each of those areas or try to. But just at the outset, you know, we expected something like this. I think it was clear from the beginning that Trump back in power was going to be a more aggressive figure. What in this area has surprised you the most, I guess, given that anticipation?
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What if There’s No Way to Stop Trump’s Approach to Power?
Can it take that money and say, okay, Congress appropriated this money for foreign aid, but we think the interests of the US government are served if we define foreign aid to mean... Subsidies for conservative podcasters in, you know, East Asia, you know, Singaporean podcasters instead of humanitarian aid or something. Right. To take an imaginary example. So that's you're still spending the money.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What if There’s No Way to Stop Trump’s Approach to Power?
But then there's also the more potentially sweeping claim, which I'm interested in because it seems like it would push executive power basically as far as it can go, which is the claim that the president has what's called impoundment power. over federal spending. Can you just describe what that argument is? Sure.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What if There’s No Way to Stop Trump’s Approach to Power?
And this was passed under Nixon, under Richard Nixon.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What if There’s No Way to Stop Trump’s Approach to Power?
So your perspective is first that the Supreme Court would probably say that the Impoundment Control Act is constitutional?
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What if There’s No Way to Stop Trump’s Approach to Power?
Because a war could end, right?
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What if There’s No Way to Stop Trump’s Approach to Power?
Right. So those were just just to be clear, because I think it's a useful thing. The Obama administration, in my view, essentially tried to change U.S. immigration policy in a pretty sweeping way in its second term by saying we are going to carve out big enforcement discretion, discretion exemptions. Yeah.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What if There’s No Way to Stop Trump’s Approach to Power?
And by the way... Neither did the Supreme Court. Right. And...
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What if There’s No Way to Stop Trump’s Approach to Power?
And now- Right, no, I mean my own. I wrote a couple of columns that I referred to it as Caesarism.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What if There’s No Way to Stop Trump’s Approach to Power?
Right. I mean, so this is what I don't understand about that argument. And maybe it's connected to the practice of the past prior to the Impoundment Control Act. But if you took that argument to its logical conclusion, wouldn't it mean that Congress could create Medicare by statute and a Republican president could just say, we're not going to run Medicare? Yes. Right.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What if There’s No Way to Stop Trump’s Approach to Power?
But if this kind of argument came before the Supreme Court and you were a lawyer for the administration... And the Supreme Court said, okay, well, what is the limiting principle on this claim? Do you think they would come up with a limiting principle? Would they say, well, of course, all this means is we can cancel discretionary spending but not entitlements or something?
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What if There’s No Way to Stop Trump’s Approach to Power?
And this relates to the work that you did under George W. Bush.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What if There’s No Way to Stop Trump’s Approach to Power?
Right. I'm interested in this both because I think it's a terrain where they have signaled potential for litigation, but it is also the place where if you were imagining a total constitutional revolution as the outcome of the Trump administration, this would take you to a total subordination of the legislative to the executive, right?
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What if There’s No Way to Stop Trump’s Approach to Power?
Yeah, well, and then obviously, in certain ways, the biggest dimension that it's happening on is the economic policy of the United States. And the tariff debate, I think, has not been framed as much as these other debates that we're talking about as a kind of legal constitutional issue, right? But the scale of the Trump tariffs has prompted lawsuits, or at least one lawsuit, I think, and threats.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What if There’s No Way to Stop Trump’s Approach to Power?
Yeah. of further lawsuits. Again, as a layman, I read through some of the claims and arguments that Trump is exceeding his authority, that nothing in the tariff delegation power allows for these kind of moves at this scale with this kind of duration. What do you think?
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What if There’s No Way to Stop Trump’s Approach to Power?
Well, it's had – I mean, in fairness to the conservatives, it has had – These are my friends, by the way. Right. It has had immediate and dramatic effects on conservatives. The global economy has, you know, has threatened. I mean, there are principles at work in legal debates, but there's also policy scale matters. And the scale of this policy seems quite substantial.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What if There’s No Way to Stop Trump’s Approach to Power?
But those tricky legal issues also matter because the framing for this entire conversation, right, is not just what the Constitution says, but the political context and the political climate. Yes. And the Supreme Court clearly doesn't want to be in 17 different direct collisions with an aggressive administration. And so if you tell me, I think the administration has a pretty good case here.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What if There’s No Way to Stop Trump’s Approach to Power?
Plausible case. Plausible case. What I hear is that. John Roberts and Brett Kavanaugh and maybe Amy Coney Barrett are going to want to pick their fight somewhere else.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What if There’s No Way to Stop Trump’s Approach to Power?
All right. Let's take a quick break. And when we come back, we'll talk a little more about potential conflicts at the place where all of these debates are heading, the Supreme Court. All right, Jack, we were just talking about how the court might rule or how the court might think about a ruling on tariffs and presidential power over tariffs.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What if There’s No Way to Stop Trump’s Approach to Power?
And I offered a kind of political framing for that decision where the court might be calibrating. how it rules and also which cases it takes and which battles it picks to a difficult political moment. So making decisions based on politics as well as just a straightforward interpretation of the law. Do you think that's a good way of thinking about these issues?
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What if There’s No Way to Stop Trump’s Approach to Power?
Like how much in this highly politicized moment is the court thinking to itself, we are dealing with a difficult administration with threats of, you know, at least threats of something that someone would call, could call constitutional crisis, maybe not you, right? And therefore we are really self-consciously picking our battles.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What if There’s No Way to Stop Trump’s Approach to Power?
Yeah, fair point. It's Roberts, Kavanaugh, and Barrett.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What if There’s No Way to Stop Trump’s Approach to Power?
And you've written about this. You don't think that they're ducking fights.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What if There’s No Way to Stop Trump’s Approach to Power?
Okay. Then let's just push a little further from that into actual worst case scenarios. And I'm going to try and force you. We were talking earlier, right, about the case of Garcia sent to El Salvador, right? That's sort of, in a way, the clearest point of tension right now.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What if There’s No Way to Stop Trump’s Approach to Power?
Your argument there is that that's a case where you could effectively have a kind of collision between the executive and the courts. But in the end, you know, the executive doesn't do what the courts want, but there isn't sort of. a formal constitutional argument that they have to, right?
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What if There’s No Way to Stop Trump’s Approach to Power?
Right. So that would be one set of cases where the court just decides that it has some constitutional limits on what it can force the executive to do, even if it thinks the executive is doing the wrong thing.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What if There’s No Way to Stop Trump’s Approach to Power?
But you could imagine then a situation where the court would pick a fight. Your view right now that you've expressed elsewhere is you don't think the administration, in a case where the Supreme Court was on pretty strong constitutional ground, would want to defy or be seen as publicly defying the court.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What if There’s No Way to Stop Trump’s Approach to Power?
You've said that. You can say something different now.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What if There’s No Way to Stop Trump’s Approach to Power?
Okay. But now I'm going to force you to give me in a scenario where you get such a Supreme Court ruling that is clear what compliance means and what noncompliance means. And the Trump administration straightforwardly is not in compliance. And this is my curiosity. If you're John Roberts in that situation, what tools does the court have to
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What if There’s No Way to Stop Trump’s Approach to Power?
in a situation of clear noncompliance to use besides its moral authority and so on?
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What if There’s No Way to Stop Trump’s Approach to Power?
Ultimately, I mean, you know... It does have, you know, it has marshals, right?
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What if There’s No Way to Stop Trump’s Approach to Power?
And do you think, again, going back to the hypothetical calculations of the Supreme Court, do you think then that their calculations change after 2000 and where are we now? 2026, right? So suppose you have a Democratic House after 2026. Does that make the court feel more confident in how it pushes against the White House?
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What if There’s No Way to Stop Trump’s Approach to Power?
Certainly, you'd have mass protest and so on. I think, to me, the question in that case is, what does John Thune do? Yeah, exactly. What do the embodiments of Senate Republican legitimacy do in that situation? You're the political expert.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What if There’s No Way to Stop Trump’s Approach to Power?
You noticed I took a delaying sip of coffee. I mean, I think it depends, you know, to use the hedge that you've availed yourself of on what the case is and what the circumstances are. I guess my sort of running question is, what kind of conversations are people like Thune having? having around those kind of issues and what kind of conversations are they having with the White House and so on.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What if There’s No Way to Stop Trump’s Approach to Power?
And I have a certain amount of confidence that is not universally shared in American democracy as an actual check on a rogue president. And
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What if There’s No Way to Stop Trump’s Approach to Power?
I had this confidence when the positions was reversed and I had a lot of conservative friends who looked at sort of the convergence of unified democratic control of Congress with unified progressive control of Silicon Valley institutions and these kinds of things and said, oh, you know. We're headed for a world where no Republican can win the presidency again.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What if There’s No Way to Stop Trump’s Approach to Power?
And I think it's clear that that assessment was wrong and that American democracy was resilient to a certain kind of left wing consolidation of power. Trump is a very different kind of figure, but. Yeah, I'm hopeful that American democracy is the interest, and the interests it creates for Republican senators in swing states, right?
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What if There’s No Way to Stop Trump’s Approach to Power?
So let's say there is no worst case scenario. There's no explicit conflict between Trump and the Supreme Court. There's wins and losses. But overall, the court blesses a lot of what the administration wants. The administration accepts whatever curbs it offers. So this is sort of The best case scenario for a Trump executive power revolution, what does that look like going forward?
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What if There’s No Way to Stop Trump’s Approach to Power?
How would you describe the post-2028 constitutional landscape that that would usher in? Okay.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What if There’s No Way to Stop Trump’s Approach to Power?
So it's... So this is places where they could lose and it could weaken the presidency's powers relative to Bush and Obama.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What if There’s No Way to Stop Trump’s Approach to Power?
Right. And so connected to that point, there's been a lot of talk just in the first few months from critics and skeptics of the administration looking at these kind of things and saying we're already in a constitutional crisis that, you know, the administration is messing with the courts. It's being disrespectful to the courts. It's not following congressional statute and so on.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What if There’s No Way to Stop Trump’s Approach to Power?
On the abuses, without getting into all the details, maybe let's end by imagining a future democratic president or a future democratic control of government, right? Yeah. Two related questions, right? One, Democrats win and have a trifecta in 2028 after a period where there's been a consolidation of executive power, but there've also been a lot of abuses.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What if There’s No Way to Stop Trump’s Approach to Power?
Do you imagine the Democratic Party taking up some of the ideas that you advocated for after the first Trump administration and saying, we are going to limit our own, you know, we're looking at what Trump did and we think he went too far in all these ways and we are going to, through statute, put in new limits on presidential power?
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What if There’s No Way to Stop Trump’s Approach to Power?
Obviously, if things are decided constitutionally, they can't, you know, they can't limit it. But can you imagine executive power limits as an issue reemerging the way it was in the 1970s, right?
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What if There’s No Way to Stop Trump’s Approach to Power?
All right. It gets worse in the next round. On that note, Jack Goldsmith, thanks so much for joining me. Thank you very much, Ross. And if you enjoyed the conversation, please recommend us to your friends and leave a review. Interesting Times is produced by Sofia Alvarez-Boyd, Andrea Batanzos, Elisa Gutierrez, and Catherine Sullivan. It's edited by Jordana Hochman and Alison Bruzek.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What if There’s No Way to Stop Trump’s Approach to Power?
In your view, what is a constitutional crisis and how will we know we're in one?
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What if There’s No Way to Stop Trump’s Approach to Power?
Donald Trump is attempting a revolution in executive power arguably unseen since the time of Franklin Roosevelt and one that whatever happens will probably leave the executive branch dramatically changed. So we're going to talk today about where this push is meeting the most resistance, but also where and how it might succeed.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What if There’s No Way to Stop Trump’s Approach to Power?
So let's get into some of the specifics. We're not going to tackle all 1,233 pieces of standing litigation, but I'm going to pick up on some of the categories you talked about and I guess give them my own spin for a minute and say I'm interested in talking about Issues of deportation, especially deportation to El Salvador, in particular, to a Salvadoran prison, especially.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What if There’s No Way to Stop Trump’s Approach to Power?
There's power over the federal bureaucracy, and you've been talking about that. And then I think we should mention power over economic policy and tariffs. And then we'll get we'll circle back, I guess, to crisis scenarios and also non-crisis scenarios at the end. So let's start with power over non-citizens.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What if There’s No Way to Stop Trump’s Approach to Power?
You've had visa and green card holders have been detained and people have had their visas canceled over political activism, participation in campus protests. There's some debate about the specifics. In one case, it appears that a woman had her visa canceled because of an op-ed she wrote. So there's that terrain.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What if There’s No Way to Stop Trump’s Approach to Power?
And then the administration has invoked the Alien Enemies Act, a law dating to 1798, giving the president broad wartime powers to detain and deport non-citizens and use that as a justification for the deportations to El Salvador in particular. Right. So first, just to continue what we were saying before, just how radical do you think this set of actions are?
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What if There’s No Way to Stop Trump’s Approach to Power?
And I'm joined today by a man with a lot of direct experience working on questions of executive power as the head of the Office of Legal Counsel under George W. Bush, a president not known for taking a minimalist view of executive power. Jack is now a professor at Harvard Law School, and he's been writing eloquently about executive power throughout the entire Trump era.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What if There’s No Way to Stop Trump’s Approach to Power?
And that was the precedent, right? That even in cases like World War II, that if you, you know, detained someone and deported them because they were German or you had suspicions of Nazi sympathy, right? The precedent suggested that they still got a hearing, right?
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What if There’s No Way to Stop Trump’s Approach to Power?
So in this case, you would be able to contest whether you are actually a member of the Venezuelan gang.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What if There’s No Way to Stop Trump’s Approach to Power?
Right. And that's the claim that's being made on behalf of the people who have already been sent to El Salvador, that they were not actually in the gang, that they were misidentified as gang members based on tattoos and so on.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What if There’s No Way to Stop Trump’s Approach to Power?
Right. But that would be litigated, I mean, like most of these things, all the way to the Supreme Court, right? Yes. In the end, the Supreme Court is going to issue, presumably, a ruling on whether you can apply the Alien Enemies Act... To this gang. To this gang. Yes. But for a little while, was the administration formally arguing... that its power here was unreviewable?
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What if There’s No Way to Stop Trump’s Approach to Power?
But then they walked part of that back, right? By the time it had reached the Supreme Court, they were saying, well, of course we concede that people get some kind of review.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What if There’s No Way to Stop Trump’s Approach to Power?
So let's talk about probably what is now the highest profile case involving law. an illegal alien remanded to El Salvador. And that is the case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia. He was deported to the Salvadoran prison. He is presumably held there at the moment. And there was essentially a stay of removal. Is that right?
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What if There’s No Way to Stop Trump’s Approach to Power?
Jack Goldsmith, welcome to Interesting Times.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What if There’s No Way to Stop Trump’s Approach to Power?
And something may change with this case between the time we're having this conversation and when the podcast actually appears. But right now, what is the state of play in terms of – because the Supreme Court has actually spoken on this case to some extent. Yes.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What if There’s No Way to Stop Trump’s Approach to Power?
So, let's dive right in. In a recent essay just a few days ago, you wrote that Donald Trump is, quote, taking a moonshot on executive power. So, let's start generally. What does that mean, and how is this administration different from all other administrations?
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What if There’s No Way to Stop Trump’s Approach to Power?
Right. And the government's claim, just to be clear, is that they made a mistake. But now he's in a foreign country under foreign sovereignty. The foreign sovereign, as of this taping, has said they're not going to return him. And then presumably you could argue that it's not in the interests of U.S.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What if There’s No Way to Stop Trump’s Approach to Power?
foreign policy to force that foreign country to return him, which is, you know, a not entirely plausible argument, given that El Salvador is a client state of the United States.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
An Interview With the Herald of the Apocalypse
So Daniel, I read your report pretty quickly, not at AI speed, not at super intelligent speed, when it first came out. And I had about two hours of thinking a lot of pretty dark thoughts about the future. And then fortunately, I have a job that requires me to care about tariffs and who the new pope is. And I have a lot of kids who demand things of me.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
An Interview With the Herald of the Apocalypse
And so I was able to sort of compartmentalize and set it aside. But this is currently your job. right, I would say. You're thinking about this all the time. How does your psyche feel day to day if you have a reasonable expectation that the world is about to change completely in ways that dramatically disfavor the entire human species?
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
An Interview With the Herald of the Apocalypse
From New York Times Opinion, I'm Ross Douthat, and this is Interesting Times. The age of AI is already with us. The big question is how far and fast the revolution goes. My guest today represents the very far, extremely fast perspective. He was a researcher at OpenAI who quit because he thought the company was acting recklessly.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
An Interview With the Herald of the Apocalypse
And he's the co-author of a new forecast which predicts that within just a few short years, we might be living in a post-work pleasure dome under the rule of oligarchs managing a machine god. Or we might all be dead. I'm personally skeptical that the danger we're facing is quite this immediate and dire. I suspect that there are more limits on AI's capacities than my guest's scenario envisions.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
An Interview With the Herald of the Apocalypse
But it's important to hear from insiders who take these possibilities seriously, because many people deeply involved in AI work believe that they're bringing this future to life and assume that they're working and we're living in the shadow of a possible apocalypse. So, Daniel Coccatello, herald of the apocalypse, welcome to Interesting Times.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
This Instability May Be Worth It. Here's Why.
From New York Times Opinion, I'm Ross Douthat, and this is Interesting Times. Just in time for the debut of this show, almost as if he planned it that way, Donald Trump has taken a sledgehammer to the global economy, as his new tariff regime yields crashing stock markets, rising global uncertainty, and widespread fears of a recession.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
This Instability May Be Worth It. Here's Why.
But there isn't really, from the age of globalization, I concede that relative to how the U.S. economy was doing in the immediate post-war period, the age of globalization has been a disappointment. But it's not like there is some counterexample where you say, you know, oh, the French practice more protectionism or the Germans or the Japanese and their economies are in much better shape.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
This Instability May Be Worth It. Here's Why.
Isn't the U.S. economy still in the best shape of any developed nation, of any big, rich, developed nation right now? And doesn't that suggest something about the potential scenarios on the table?
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
This Instability May Be Worth It. Here's Why.
economy, where the tariff debate centers in, before we get into the Trump tariffs themselves, so that hopefully the conversation will still be of use, even in a future in which the audience knows more about how all this plays out than we do. So that's the plan. And I want to start with a big picture question.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
This Instability May Be Worth It. Here's Why.
Okay, let's take a quick break there, and we'll be right back. So what do you make of other arguments for tariffs? We've been focused on manufacturing, but in the swirl around President Trump's tariffs, you've had a lot of other cases made, right? One is pretty clearly linked to the rebuild manufacturing case. It's a national security case. It says that
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
This Instability May Be Worth It. Here's Why.
Look, you know, China is a great power competitor. It's possible that a global pandemic originated in certainly it originated in China. It could have originated in one of their own laboratories. They could invade Taiwan. There's all kinds of ways where we could have to. We already did briefly decouple and could have to decouple from them.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
This Instability May Be Worth It. Here's Why.
And so therefore, again, it's worth a little bit off GDP to have more of our supply chain domestically and so on. I assume that you find that argument somewhat convincing as well.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
This Instability May Be Worth It. Here's Why.
When Donald Trump was reelected and entered office, a lot of people thought he had gotten very lucky, that he had inherited an economy that was in really good shape, with low unemployment, with inflation finally coming down after the Biden era, with a high stock market, and with a sense of big technological breakthroughs potentially on the horizon.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
This Instability May Be Worth It. Here's Why.
But isn't that partially just a case for industrial policy of the kind that, for instance, the Biden administration tried to pursue? I'm sort of looking for substitutionary policies that serve the same kind of goals without taking the growth hit from tariffs. It seems like you could argue, well, we have a certain set of industries that aren't technically part of the defense industry.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
This Instability May Be Worth It. Here's Why.
budget, but that we want more of in America. We want more chips and so forth manufactured in America. Why not just make that part of our spending program, right? And support those industries because we know the specific things that we want instead of putting up general barriers around the world that slow growth.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
This Instability May Be Worth It. Here's Why.
So, Oren, to begin with, what's wrong with that narrative from your perspective? What is wrong with the American economy in the year 2025 that could make anyone interested in any kind of radical or dramatic restructuring?
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
This Instability May Be Worth It. Here's Why.
And what about deficits? One of the arguments that, again, has floated around in the last few weeks is that tariffs are a way to raise revenue, right? Which they obviously are. The U.S. has a big deficit problem. And the deficit problem is itself taxable. connected to the global trading order. And it has to do with the strength, in part, the strength of the dollar relative to other currencies.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
This Instability May Be Worth It. Here's Why.
So you have people arguing, one, tariffs will raise revenue directly, helps cut the deficit, and you don't have to do some kind of grand bargain between Democrats and Republicans. That's very difficult. The president can just go ahead and do it. It's the only way a Republican president can ever raise taxes. I've heard people say that.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
This Instability May Be Worth It. Here's Why.
And then maybe people say it can also be linked to some global negotiation where countries come to the table and all agree to change sort of how their currencies work or accept lower rates on U.S. debt or something that – helps us deal with our budget deficits.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
This Instability May Be Worth It. Here's Why.
The difficulty there, right, is that, especially in the first case, if tariffs do what you want them to do and lead to the reshoring of manufacturing, over time they raise less and less revenue. So a successful tariff that helps reindustrialize America is not going to be a big revenue generator. So where do you see the deficit-cutting stuff fitting into this?
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
This Instability May Be Worth It. Here's Why.
And do you buy the idea that you could do some sort of grand renegotiation of U.S. debt?
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
This Instability May Be Worth It. Here's Why.
budgeting process has been known to do that.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
This Instability May Be Worth It. Here's Why.
All right, let's take a break. And when we come back, we'll talk about what the Trump administration is actually doing. Okay, so this you have brought us to the actual tariffs, not the theoretical tariffs. And I'm going to put words in your mouth and say briefly that the Oren Cass preferred tariff program is one that specifically tries to isolate China.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
This Instability May Be Worth It. Here's Why.
generally imposes a 10 percent global tariff that is sort of stable, persistent and compatible with global trade and maybe include some other country specific tariffs related to negotiations. Now, you could argue that is what Trump has done. The tariffs on China are quite high. There is a flat 10 percent tariff.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
This Instability May Be Worth It. Here's Why.
And then there are these country by country tariffs that people have been arguing about. But I want you to tell me because I read your take on the tariffs and it seemed like it was very general praise wrapped around a pretty actually specific critique. So I want you to tell me what you think is wrong with what Trump is doing on tariffs.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
This Instability May Be Worth It. Here's Why.
And what about the country by country tariffs as they exist right now? Because there was the Trump administration used the rhetoric of reciprocal tariffs, which implied to most people that essentially we were saying, if you have X tariff on our goods, we will have the same tariff on your goods. And we want to mutually then negotiate down from there.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
This Instability May Be Worth It. Here's Why.
In practice, instead, the Trump administration has a formula seemingly that's just designed around trade deficits with other countries, where if you have a trade deficit with us, we are putting a big tariff on you. And it seems to me pretty obvious that in a global economy, we're going to have lots of countries that we have trade deficits with.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
This Instability May Be Worth It. Here's Why.
Maybe we want to have trade surpluses with more countries. Fair enough. And that's what we're working towards. But it seems completely bizarre to say, you know, any random country that has a completely different economy from ours, if you're not importing exactly as many American goods as you're exporting to us, we're going to tariff you. Isn't that just daft?
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
This Instability May Be Worth It. Here's Why.
One is— You can say it's just daft. You can just say it's daft.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
This Instability May Be Worth It. Here's Why.
But you were just telling me in the case against industrial policy from the right that the conservative, the free market oriented conservative would say, you know, we're not going to be able to micromanage. you know, which factories to build exactly, which industries to support. We want to set something low and flat in tariff policy that just encourages domestic manufacturing in general, right?
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
This Instability May Be Worth It. Here's Why.
It seems to me like the same has to be true with this country by country stuff, that you're not the idea that we're going to be micromanaging the trade balance with, you know, Italy, Hungary, Turkey, India, Bangladesh to figure out like, you know, how do we get them all back in balance? One, that seems unworkable. And two, And this is something that just hangs over this whole conversation.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
This Instability May Be Worth It. Here's Why.
It just seems like a way to fit in with the president of the United States' particular obsession with the idea that, from his perspective, all trade deficits seem to be bad, at least in the way he talks about it. So everyone who's designing these policies in the White House is sort of working around a core Trumpian perception that probably is wrong. Thank you.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
This Instability May Be Worth It. Here's Why.
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you for watching.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
This Instability May Be Worth It. Here's Why.
So let's be a little more specific about those broader challenges, because as you mentioned, U.S. GDP has continued going up throughout this period. And in fact, so has, to some extent, middle class incomes, not just middle income, but working class incomes. They went up in Trump's presidency. They went up in Biden's presidency, even though then inflation ate into them.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
This Instability May Be Worth It. Here's Why.
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Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
This Instability May Be Worth It. Here's Why.
And overall, middle class Americans, just in terms of the numbers, are meaningfully better off than they were in the 1970s. But you don't think that captures something really important, right? There's something those numbers are missing?
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
This Instability May Be Worth It. Here's Why.
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Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
This Instability May Be Worth It. Here's Why.
So to try and understand where this radical policy came from and where it might be taking us, our 401ks, our unemployment rate, I'm joined by Oren Kass, who's the founder of American Compass, a populist conservative think tank that has for a while now been arguing for tariffs and for some kind of dramatic change in America's relationship to global trade.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
This Instability May Be Worth It. Here's Why.
Okay, so stipulating that there is a big debate about all these numbers, as you mentioned, the American Compass Index of Human Flourishing is hotly contested and much argued over. Stipulate for the sake of argument that there is some kind of stagnation here, especially for young men. What does trade have to do with it?
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
This Instability May Be Worth It. Here's Why.
Okay, but so is the issue that we've lost manufacturing or that we've lost manufacturing jobs? Because one of the arguments that you often hear is that American manufacturing in terms of how much stuff we produce is still roughly where it's been for decades now. We've lost ground in comparison to China because China has become such a powerhouse.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
This Instability May Be Worth It. Here's Why.
But the American manufacturing sector has not collapsed. What's collapsed is the number of Americans who work in jobs in that sector. Do you agree with that?
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
This Instability May Be Worth It. Here's Why.
So what is so special about a manufacturing job as opposed to a service sector job? Because someone might say, look, yes, the U.S. economy has fewer people working in factories than it did in the heyday. of, you know, Detroit and the big three auto manufacturers and all the rest. But America is also a lot richer than it was back then.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
This Instability May Be Worth It. Here's Why.
And I think most people argue that global trade has led to lower prices in at least some areas for some goods. So what's wrong with a world where someone works in a service sector job instead of a manufacturing job? enjoys lower prices. And then beyond that, presumably the richer U.S.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
This Instability May Be Worth It. Here's Why.
economy can pay for under an income tax credit or a larger child tax credit to essentially increase wages and give a kind of premium based on the surplus of a wealthy society. Why is that not just as good as a world with many more manufacturing jobs?
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
This Instability May Be Worth It. Here's Why.
So, Oren Kass, welcome to Interesting Times.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
This Instability May Be Worth It. Here's Why.
But suppose you had a resurgence of manufacturing jobs right now. Wouldn't they look quite different from manufacturing jobs in 1985 or even just before the China shock? Because yes, manufacturing jobs have even now have some of the features you describe, but we have passed through an age of automation and robotics. We are entering some kind of age of AI driven automation.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
This Instability May Be Worth It. Here's Why.
I hope it is. So, a podcast, like everything, is a moment in time. And the moment in time in which you and I are speaking is Monday morning. The markets are open and down so far for the third day since Donald Trump announced the great liberation of America from the foreign yoke.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
This Instability May Be Worth It. Here's Why.
And when I hear people talk about the factory jobs of the future, even people who are bullish on there being good factory jobs, it's sort of taken for granted that these are not actually the kind of jobs that, you know, a blue collar steel worker would have had in 1977, right? The argument is, well, these are actually better jobs, they're less backbreaking, they require more skills, and so on.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
This Instability May Be Worth It. Here's Why.
But then, if that's the case, and maybe it's not the case, aren't they not filling in the same niche in the economy, right?
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
This Instability May Be Worth It. Here's Why.
So when I interviewed the vice president before he became the vice president, and we talked a little bit about this issue, and he talked about the idea of, you know, the six or seven million American men who have dropped out of the workforce, who are particularly vulnerable to opioid addiction and family breakdown and all of these things.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
This Instability May Be Worth It. Here's Why.
Are those the kind of workers who are likely to be hired in the factory of the future that is highly, highly automated?
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
This Instability May Be Worth It. Here's Why.
Right. But do you think that there is a cost to overall GDP from using tariffs, essentially to wildly oversimplify the argument for tariffs that is implied by what you're saying is that you raise the cost of importing from factories outside the United States. So it becomes more economically viable to build factories inside the U.S.,
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
This Instability May Be Worth It. Here's Why.
And this podcast, therefore, may not cover events that transpire between now and Thursday morning when it's released, but we're going to try and have a fairly high-level discussion about the condition of the U.S.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
This Instability May Be Worth It. Here's Why.
The typical economist responds, that may be true, and you do get some potentially specific benefits, although they would have doubts about how all this works. We'll get into in a minute. But they would say, but look, your overall, the overall society is going to be somewhat poorer.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
This Instability May Be Worth It. Here's Why.
And is that a tradeoff we should be willing to make some points or fraction of a point off GDP to have more people working in upstate New York and central Ohio?
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
The New Culture of the Right: Vital, Masculine and Intentionally Offensive
Hey, how are you? Hey, Ross. How are you? I'm great. I'm great. What an amazing head of hair you have. This is great. Thank you. Thank you. You look fantastic. You look vital, one might say. Thank you. This is a very important part of the discourse on the online, right? Well, we're going to get into that. From New York Times Opinion, I'm Ross Douthat, and this is Interesting Times.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
The New Culture of the Right: Vital, Masculine and Intentionally Offensive
But isn't that then a little circular? Then you're saying all great art is somehow right wing. Like to me, for instance, I feel like, you know, a TV show that I've enjoyed is Andor. It's one of the few Star Wars shows that I've enjoyed. I see that as kind of left wing art. It's a show that uses the background of...
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
The New Culture of the Right: Vital, Masculine and Intentionally Offensive
you know, the empire in the Star Wars universe to tell a story about sort of, you know, punishing militaristic tyranny and resistance to it in ways that are sort of left coded, but also it's a really good show. Whereas I would look at at at girls and say, look, it is a in the end, it's a scabrous satire of a particular kind of upper middle class lifestyle in a liberal city.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
The New Culture of the Right: Vital, Masculine and Intentionally Offensive
And so it is it is coming from a right wing perspective. So do you think there can there be great left wing art from your perspective?
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
The New Culture of the Right: Vital, Masculine and Intentionally Offensive
That's a deep cut. So that shows just how far back your online experience really goes to the days when I had more hair and it was me and other junior varsity pundits arguing on the internet. But I think, and you can correct me about this, I think the first time that we actually seriously interacted was... Correct. Correct. And at that point, right, you had a dual identity.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
The New Culture of the Right: Vital, Masculine and Intentionally Offensive
Okay, good.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
The New Culture of the Right: Vital, Masculine and Intentionally Offensive
Yes. So this takes us into one of the phrases that I think gets used to describe what the counterculture is up to. And I know you're ambivalent about this phrase, but it's the idea that gets called vitalism, right?
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
The New Culture of the Right: Vital, Masculine and Intentionally Offensive
Which is this term that means, let's say, a celebration of individuality, strength, excellence, and an anxiety about equality and democracy as, just the way you described, as leveling forces, enemies of human greatness. And it gets connected to Friedrich Nietzsche, You know, I think there's an Ayn Rand who's, you know, a very popular novelist on the American right.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
The New Culture of the Right: Vital, Masculine and Intentionally Offensive
Whatever you make of her actual books is in some sense in this school. But that to me seems like one common thread, including in the books that you yourself have published. Like what links the white Russian general standing athwart the Bolsheviks? to the Hardy Boys, to Conan the Barbarian. It is some kind of idea of human greatness beset by mediocrity and so on. What do you think about that?
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
The New Culture of the Right: Vital, Masculine and Intentionally Offensive
Right. And it's an escape from, and now I'm going to move to a second term that you yourself have used, right?
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
The New Culture of the Right: Vital, Masculine and Intentionally Offensive
It's an escape from what gets called the longhouse. And You mentioned, you know, sort of men and women as sort of each vital in certain ways. But The Long House is a specifically feminine coded narrative of like what's wrong with contemporary life. So what is The Long House?
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
The New Culture of the Right: Vital, Masculine and Intentionally Offensive
And just so listeners are clear, this is a reference to I mean, there's a kind of I'm going to call it a pseudo anthropology because I don't think you're actually making specific claims about the human past. But there's a contrast between sort of longhouse culture of a literal longhouse of a tribe sort of crowded together under one roof with what the freedom of the step barbarian.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
The New Culture of the Right: Vital, Masculine and Intentionally Offensive
I agree.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
The New Culture of the Right: Vital, Masculine and Intentionally Offensive
As Jonathan Kieperman, you were still, right, a lecturer in English at UC Irvine? Correct. That's right. And then you were Lómez, a right-wing anon is the term that people use. That's right. Who wrote pseudonymously online. So that was 2020. And then in 2022... you founded a right-wing publishing house called Passage Press.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
The New Culture of the Right: Vital, Masculine and Intentionally Offensive
So concrete examples would be the crusade against Greek life at universities, right? You would see as... Longhouse in action and corporate H.R. departments and sensitivity trainings. Longhouse in action. Right.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
The New Culture of the Right: Vital, Masculine and Intentionally Offensive
two objections or responses. The second one will be more specific to my own worldview. But the first one I think is a more general one that many listeners would have. They would say, look, What has actually happened in the last 25 years in the longhouse era, as you describe it, is guess what? We removed restrictions on women's advancement and they started out competing men.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
The New Culture of the Right: Vital, Masculine and Intentionally Offensive
They're not longhousing men. They're just getting the promotions that men used to get and, you know, succeeding in corporate America where men used to succeed. And yes, there are specific cases like the military where physical differences between men and women matter and, you know, maybe...
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
The New Culture of the Right: Vital, Masculine and Intentionally Offensive
Maybe there you could say sort of gender equality has gone too far because it ignores those physical differences. But when you're talking about corporate America or political America or any of these environments, women are succeeding. Men aren't. And now men are complaining that women are oppressing them.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
The New Culture of the Right: Vital, Masculine and Intentionally Offensive
Like, isn't this just isn't the longhouse just a long male whine about a failure to adequately compete? And you're pretending that. You know, oh, for the days of the step barbarians. But, you know, maybe you should suck it up and and actually, you know, actually compete on the grounds that we have in 21st century America. What do you say to that?
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
The New Culture of the Right: Vital, Masculine and Intentionally Offensive
And that, I would say, raised your profile pretty dramatically to the point where you were important enough to have your real name exposed by a reporter for The Guardian. Correct. In 2024. And then by January of 2025, just recently, you were notable enough to host one of the big inaugural balls, which was called the Coronation Ball. So... Did I miss anything?
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
The New Culture of the Right: Vital, Masculine and Intentionally Offensive
Now a more personal objection rooted in my own religious commitments, which is that, as you say, I have a lot of sympathy for the broad view that. Late modern life has become decadent and some kind of sense of possibility, some kind of sense of action, some kind of sense of human capacity is really important to getting us either out of this trench or through whatever weird bottleneck
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
The New Culture of the Right: Vital, Masculine and Intentionally Offensive
digital life and AI are going to create. I agree with all of that. However, I'm also a Christian. And all of the authors that I've mentioned who are part of the vitalist tradition, Nietzsche, Rand, Bronze Age pervert, see themselves operating in opposition to Christianity.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
The New Culture of the Right: Vital, Masculine and Intentionally Offensive
They see Christianity as fundamentally, it's either, you know, it's a religion of the weak, it's a religion of women, perhaps, it's against the erotic. And so when I look at the right-wing counterculture right now, I see A force that has sort of, you know, there are people who are, you know, really into traditionalist Catholicism and whatnot there.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
The New Culture of the Right: Vital, Masculine and Intentionally Offensive
But there's also a lot of people who I think in their own story about what went wrong with the right, the normie right, the boring right of Kevin McCarthy, you know, sort of think at some level, you know, it was a bunch of weak, thin milk drinking people.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
The New Culture of the Right: Vital, Masculine and Intentionally Offensive
Christians who didn't understand that, you know, what is actually best in life is to crush your enemies, to see them driven before you and to hear the lamentations of their women. Right. So I'm curious, what is your attitude towards those debates? What's your attitude towards Christianity and religion?
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
The New Culture of the Right: Vital, Masculine and Intentionally Offensive
But so younger, if I'm remembering his trajectory correctly. Yeah, he was part he's part of the German right. He's not a Nazi, but he serves in the Third Reich and he's not someone who Listeners should think of as like Heidegger, who just sort of goes who goes Nazi in that way. But he remains very much on the anti-liberal right throughout that period.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
The New Culture of the Right: Vital, Masculine and Intentionally Offensive
And my sense of him is that he he did have that sort of a view of Christianity, as you described, to some degree. But it was sort of Christianity as a kind of useful force for. for resisting the degradation of modernity and so on. And then he does actually become a Catholic in very old age, right?
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
The New Culture of the Right: Vital, Masculine and Intentionally Offensive
How is that for an account of your trajectory?
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
The New Culture of the Right: Vital, Masculine and Intentionally Offensive
So it's like you get to be a vitalist for many decades, and then at the end, you're like, all right, all right, time to succumb to full Christianity. And it just seems to me that even in vitalism, there are people who are anti-Christian, like Bronze Age perverts, like the Nazis, right? And then there are people who want to put it to use.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
The New Culture of the Right: Vital, Masculine and Intentionally Offensive
But I'm a little ambivalent about having my religion put to use in that way.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
The New Culture of the Right: Vital, Masculine and Intentionally Offensive
well. All right, let's pause there. And when we come back, we'll talk about Donald Trump's role in all of this. So let's talk now about Donald Trump. Trump starts as a cultural figure. Anyone who's old enough to remember the Trump who existed before he became a politician remembers the tabloid fixture, the reality TV star, the self-creator whose life is in a
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
The New Culture of the Right: Vital, Masculine and Intentionally Offensive
But you've written a bunch about Trump as a heroic figure. You've explicitly compared him to Aeneas, speaking of sort of mythological heroes. Talk to me about that, Trump as hero. What does that mean?
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
The New Culture of the Right: Vital, Masculine and Intentionally Offensive
Yeah. I mean, look, my my own view of Trump, as you probably know, has all has changed. I think we have sort of each moved and each shifted. And I've ended up closer to where you were four years ago and you've gone a bit further. Right. So I just had trouble from the beginning of seeing Trump as anything other than a symptom of.
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The New Culture of the Right: Vital, Masculine and Intentionally Offensive
of decadence like you know the reality TV host becomes president of the United States because you know he's triumphing over all these mediocrities and failed politicians and so on but it's only and he is representing a kind of revolt against decadence I agree a desire for something more but he manifests that decadence at the same time that was sort of my basic take and then over the same period that you have come to see him as a heroic figure
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
The New Culture of the Right: Vital, Masculine and Intentionally Offensive
I've come to see him as, yeah, someone who has a more providential place, a bigger place in history, who is still part of a decadent era, maybe is still more of an anti-hero than a hero, but is bigger than I thought. And there is some of that, you know, that retrocausality. Once you have Trump surviving the assassination attempt, you read that back into the past.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
The New Culture of the Right: Vital, Masculine and Intentionally Offensive
But I wouldn't go as far as you do, I guess... For reasons, I think part of the reason maybe connects back to what we were just going back and forth about, like about my Christian doubts about vitalism. To me, I look at Trump and I see someone who has more capacities than I credited with him at the start. But the capacities that he lacks are restraint.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
The New Culture of the Right: Vital, Masculine and Intentionally Offensive
Magnanimity a sense of sort of moral limitation and I think that lack is connected to the fact that I don't I don't think he's fundamentally religious I think maybe he believes in Providence now that Providence saved him but but not in any kind of conventionally Christian way and I think it's the reason why.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
The New Culture of the Right: Vital, Masculine and Intentionally Offensive
It's both reasonable for liberals to worry about where that appetitive side of him takes us, but also just to worry about sort of, you know, again, chaos and mismanagement and all the things that also come in from an absence of restraint.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
The New Culture of the Right: Vital, Masculine and Intentionally Offensive
No, I think the issue is more that if you see the hand of Providence operating through George Washington and John Adams in the founding of America, you could see the hand of Providence operating through Donald Trump. in the chastisement of America.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
The New Culture of the Right: Vital, Masculine and Intentionally Offensive
That like Trump is a great man of history whose role is to chastise the liberal intelligentsia and the never Trumpers and all these groups that failed to govern America. But it doesn't mean that at the end of the day, he's actually saving America. Sometimes it's just a chastisement, right?
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
The New Culture of the Right: Vital, Masculine and Intentionally Offensive
Like that, I feel like that possibility deserves more consideration from people who have this kind of mystical reaction to the drama of the Trump era.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
The New Culture of the Right: Vital, Masculine and Intentionally Offensive
But I wanted to just sort of on that question of restraint, like part of what Trump does, part of his lack of restraint, right, is, you know, a refusal to respect any taboos to sort of push through, you know, whatever the taboos of progressive culture are. And in the same way, part of the right wing counterculture is all about taboo busting. Yeah.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
The New Culture of the Right: Vital, Masculine and Intentionally Offensive
But, you know, one of those taboos, and this is something that connects Trump in some ways to the counterculture, is taboos around race, because there's a lot of racism in right wing counterculture in various forms. It's there in the online memes. It's there in the would be Nietzscheans like BAP. Anyone who goes from this conversation and gets a copy of
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
The New Culture of the Right: Vital, Masculine and Intentionally Offensive
Bronze Age mindset and reads, you know, certain paragraphs will say, well, this guy is a terrific racist. Right. Sure. And I want to offer before you interpret this, I want to offer three interpretations. Take the interviewer's privilege. I think you could say, OK, this is just about performative rebellion. A counterculture needs to shatter taboos.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
The New Culture of the Right: Vital, Masculine and Intentionally Offensive
The taboos of liberal culture around race and gender. Right. Possibility to you want to reclaim and re legitimize parts of the American past. American past had a lot of racists, right? You're trying to restore and reconstitute a lost pre-progressive world. Okay.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
The New Culture of the Right: Vital, Masculine and Intentionally Offensive
It's sort of inherent in the project that, you know, you're basically trying to rehabilitate writers and thinkers who contemporary piety would try and rule out because they held at the very least un-PC opinions. So those are two arguments that I see as sort of justifications, complete or not, for the kind of racist stuff.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
The New Culture of the Right: Vital, Masculine and Intentionally Offensive
But then there's also the possibility that there's just a serious belief in racial inequality. And maybe it's not religionizing Nazism, but, you know, if you spend a fair amount of time online, it's not that many degrees of separation from the right-wing counterculture to the, you know, people on X.com talking about what a great artist Hitler was. You know, such a great artist.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
The New Culture of the Right: Vital, Masculine and Intentionally Offensive
Yeah, I mean, I think so. Those were columns that I wrote where I essentially deliberately cultivated a kind of split personality and drew up out of my union subconscious a version of myself that was that would be pro-Trump, right? So I was never for Trump. I was part of never Trump, whatever that may have been way back in the past.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
The New Culture of the Right: Vital, Masculine and Intentionally Offensive
So anyway, I wanted to offer those as interpretations today. And then have you talk about why is the right-wing counterculture racist? Sure.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
The New Culture of the Right: Vital, Masculine and Intentionally Offensive
The technical deficiencies of Adolf Hitler are definitely definitely there in a few places in his life.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
The New Culture of the Right: Vital, Masculine and Intentionally Offensive
So I buy a version of that argument. And it's very clear just from like watching the culture that that the sort of ascendance of certain kinds of DEI narratives, the kind of Robin DiAngelo stuff where it's like white people are conducting psychological self-scrutinies and so on to root out the hidden structural racism in their heart, all of that contributes to
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
The New Culture of the Right: Vital, Masculine and Intentionally Offensive
And I retained a basic view that it was a mistake for conservatives to sort of lash themselves to the Trump phenomenon. And so for me, it was like Italics Ross was not the true Ross lurking below the surface. That wasn't how I thought about it. But I thought about it as, you know, a set of ideas that certainly existed in my consciousness.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
The New Culture of the Right: Vital, Masculine and Intentionally Offensive
an emergence much more than at any point in my lifetime of a kind of distinct, like white racial identity among some conservatives, younger conservatives, especially online conservatives, especially people in the orbit of the right wing counterculture, especially this is all, I guess, several different questions though, right? One, That still might be bad, right?
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
The New Culture of the Right: Vital, Masculine and Intentionally Offensive
If it's bad to have sort of a tribalist view of politics among non-whites, isn't it potentially bad to have a tribalist view among whites, even if you're creating a cultural political explanation where it's understandable? That's question one. Question two is more concrete, right? It's like, okay, how far back... Are you trying to turn the dial, right?
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
The New Culture of the Right: Vital, Masculine and Intentionally Offensive
And I want to keep it in culture, so I'm going to give a cultural example. I grew up, I was a big fan of the Tantan books, the Tantan comics, the Boy Detective, Captain Haddock, and so on. Those were a huge influence in my childhood in the 1980s, 1990s. The Tantan books are from like 1920 through 1960. One of the early Tantan books is called Tantan in the Congo. And it's super racist, right?
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
The New Culture of the Right: Vital, Masculine and Intentionally Offensive
Like it is a set of super racist caricatures of Africans that are not like friendly ethnic stereotypes the way the appearance of like Arabs and Italians are elsewhere in the book. They're more racist than that. Well, I'll just be really explicit. Would you publish Tantan? Like Tantan in the Congo sort of disappeared. Was it good that it sort of disappeared?
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
The New Culture of the Right: Vital, Masculine and Intentionally Offensive
You know, I'm not familiar with this exact book.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
The New Culture of the Right: Vital, Masculine and Intentionally Offensive
Imagine you could you can pick another. But but like, is it is it OK that certain things from the past that were very racist disappear?
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
The New Culture of the Right: Vital, Masculine and Intentionally Offensive
Most Americans would say Tintin. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
The New Culture of the Right: Vital, Masculine and Intentionally Offensive
I don't know how to pronounce these things. Trump supporters say tin-tin. New York Times columnists say tan-tan.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
The New Culture of the Right: Vital, Masculine and Intentionally Offensive
and that were really useful for understanding sort of where American culture was, why people supported Trump, and that New York Times readers needed to engage with.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
The New Culture of the Right: Vital, Masculine and Intentionally Offensive
But but still. There's sort of a question beyond that, right, about the cultural side of this, like, again, the world of sort of memes and discourse and so on.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
The New Culture of the Right: Vital, Masculine and Intentionally Offensive
I'm curious, before we sort of dig into the ideas themselves, was there like a moment when you felt a kind of shift in the culture just in the last few years where it seemed like, you know, you were going to exist as yourself as a public figure instead of as an anonymous arguer online?
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
The New Culture of the Right: Vital, Masculine and Intentionally Offensive
Yes, it includes some, you know, rehabilitation of traditional conservative arguments about problems with the welfare state or the necessity of policing that are familiar from the 1980s and 1990s that sort of the progressive consensus suppressed. That's different to me from, you know, kids online posting racist memes and saying, it's just irony. I'm just being ironic. I'm busting taboos, you know.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
The New Culture of the Right: Vital, Masculine and Intentionally Offensive
Okay. But at a certain point, doesn't the mask become the face? Doesn't the irony become indistinguishable from just, you know, being against kind of against black people? And then for you as a publisher, right? Yeah. It's fine to say we should preserve these, you know, we should have historical memory. We should know what the past was like. Right.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
The New Culture of the Right: Vital, Masculine and Intentionally Offensive
But I don't think you'd want to be like you would have a certain audience if Passage Press pivoted further right and was like, we're publishing, you know, we're publishing Rommel books by, you know, Alexander Stevens and, you know, Confederates and so on. Wouldn't you worry? And I guess this connects to the question about like moral restraint. Wouldn't you worry about yourself? in that scenario?
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
The New Culture of the Right: Vital, Masculine and Intentionally Offensive
Even if you thought it was fine to, you know, don't want these things banned, but do you want to be the person publishing all of that?
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
The New Culture of the Right: Vital, Masculine and Intentionally Offensive
I guess I'm more skeptical of that. Not in the sense that I think that if you – sort of allow or encourage certain debates that suddenly the U.S.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
The New Culture of the Right: Vital, Masculine and Intentionally Offensive
turns into the antebellum South or Nazi Germany, but just that there are a lot of people and this, you know, there's versions of this on the left and issues around anti-Semitism especially on the left that are sort of a separate conversation, but there is some overlap between
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
The New Culture of the Right: Vital, Masculine and Intentionally Offensive
I think it is bad for people to sort of be in a position where they are questioning not, you know, what is the proper design of welfare policy and policing, but, you know, do we need to give some reconsideration to, you know, Hitler's views about Jewish conspiracies? And I'm not I'm not saying I'm not I'm not accusing you of taking that position.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
The New Culture of the Right: Vital, Masculine and Intentionally Offensive
I'm just saying right now, when I look at these spaces, it's like I'm a child of the 1990s. Right. I think it was OK to live in a world where there were taboos about Nazi Germany and the Jim Crow South and that that didn't have to preclude having honest debates about race and crime and policing and all of these things. But I just when I look at like, again, the sort of the moral character of
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
The New Culture of the Right: Vital, Masculine and Intentionally Offensive
that is encouraged by sort of racist meme culture, I'm not worried they're gonna take over. I'm just worried about them, I guess.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
The New Culture of the Right: Vital, Masculine and Intentionally Offensive
Yeah. And again, this is the last thing I'll say, but I think it's partially like you started out talking about how your sense, I think you would put it this way, right? That there was anti-white racism at work in progressive politics and culture in the last five or 10 years. That like, you know, there was sort of a critique of whiteness
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
The New Culture of the Right: Vital, Masculine and Intentionally Offensive
as this miasmic force that was, you know, functionally applied a kind of suspicion and hostility towards anyone who was white, certainly anyone who was white and male. And I wouldn't go as far as you with that, but I don't think that's wrong. I think it was bad.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
The New Culture of the Right: Vital, Masculine and Intentionally Offensive
I'm comfortable saying it would also be bad for there to be more and more anti-black racism or sort of anti-Semitic curiosity on the right, just because it affects our shared life. And I think, you know, in ways that have cultural effects, have political effects, I think they have effects on the Trump administration.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
The New Culture of the Right: Vital, Masculine and Intentionally Offensive
I think one of the ways that the Trump administration may fail, as I said before, is that This is not a racial issue per se, but it regards some of its fellow citizens with a certain kind of contempt. That's a problem for a would be great leader. I think contempt is bad. I think racism encourages a kind of contempt.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
The New Culture of the Right: Vital, Masculine and Intentionally Offensive
And so, yeah, I don't have a single like America is going to become Nazi fear, but I do have a fear about the impact of racism. Taboo busting around race on the kind of institutions that right wing people might build and so on.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
The New Culture of the Right: Vital, Masculine and Intentionally Offensive
We'll be right back. All right. Let's just talk briefly about the future. How lasting do you think that the vibe shift or whatever else is will turn out to be? At the start, I introduced you, right, as the host of an inaugural ball. You're appearing on a New York Times podcast, very prominent position, right? But Passage Press is a boutique publisher.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
The New Culture of the Right: Vital, Masculine and Intentionally Offensive
And we didn't really get into this, but there is a sort of mass, obviously a more mass market side of the vibe shift, I think. You know, the Joe Rogans and Theo Vons all the way to Andrew Tate, Vitalist. All of that is there and part of the culture. But even that still, to me, exists in a pretty separate universe from the people who make pop music today. Or TV or who publish mass market fiction.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
The New Culture of the Right: Vital, Masculine and Intentionally Offensive
So I'm I'm curious. Do you see that part of the culture moving rightward books, movies, TV? What would what would that look like?
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
The New Culture of the Right: Vital, Masculine and Intentionally Offensive
All right. So last question. Donald Trump calls you up and he says, you're in charge of the National Endowment for the Arts and you're setting up a program to celebrate America's 250th. And part of that program is you're going to ask every high school senior to
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
The New Culture of the Right: Vital, Masculine and Intentionally Offensive
to public high school senior, maybe use the leverage remaining in the half dismantled Department of Education to enforce this to read one book and see one movie.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
The New Culture of the Right: Vital, Masculine and Intentionally Offensive
Are you going to say the Godfather? Because, OK, good. See, there you go.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
The New Culture of the Right: Vital, Masculine and Intentionally Offensive
All right. On that chthonic note, Jonathan Kieperman, thank you so much for joining me. Thanks, Ross. This was great. Mixing by Pat McCusker Audience Strategy by Shannon Busta and Christina Samuluski. And our Director of Opinion Audio is Annie Rose Strasser.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
The New Culture of the Right: Vital, Masculine and Intentionally Offensive
There's been a lot of talk about a vibe shift since Donald Trump's election and return to office. A change not just in American politics, but in American culture. A sense that right-wing personalities are suddenly driving cultural discourse. And one way I've been thinking about this is in terms of a phrase that is traditionally applied to the left. And that phrase is counterculture.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
The New Culture of the Right: Vital, Masculine and Intentionally Offensive
That's that's a boringly respectable story. OK. And I and I don't I don't believe it. I mean, I do believe it. But I think what you're describing there is a description of the trajectory that you see, you know, for instance, with my former colleague.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
The New Culture of the Right: Vital, Masculine and Intentionally Offensive
Barry Weiss, right, and her publication, The Free Press, which has been tremendously successful and has represented sort of a meeting place for former liberals disillusioned by progressivism, various eccentric people who wouldn't have called themselves conservative but have ended up on the right. Passage Press, you're not publishing...
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
The New Culture of the Right: Vital, Masculine and Intentionally Offensive
you know, a sort of respectable libertarian critique of the welfare state. You're publishing fiction, weird stories, and radical philosophy. You published The Hardy Boys, the original Hardy Boys, before some sort of multicultural PC cleanups. You publish a war memoir by a Russian general who fought against the Bolsheviks.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
The New Culture of the Right: Vital, Masculine and Intentionally Offensive
You publish writing by Robert E. Howard, the creator of Conan the Barbarian, H.P. Lovecraft, but someone like Curtis Yarvin, who is an example of an author you've published, right?
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
The New Culture of the Right: Vital, Masculine and Intentionally Offensive
Curtis Yarvin thinks that the United States should become a kind of based monarchy run by some kind of Silicon Valley-esque chief executive with a dissolution and revolution of the order of government in Washington, D.C.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
The New Culture of the Right: Vital, Masculine and Intentionally Offensive
Nick Land is another example of sort of subterranean far-right intellectuals who would not have fellowships at the American Enterprise Institute, who would not operate in mainstream conservative or sort of centrist or center-right circles. So tell me about that stuff.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
The New Culture of the Right: Vital, Masculine and Intentionally Offensive
So let's try and get into what is an authentic cultural right. To me, Passage Press and the work you're doing is clearly linked to a bunch of different groups. So you have the sort of Silicon Valley right of someone like Yarvin. Peter Thiel is obviously often invoked as sort of a godfather in that zone.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
The New Culture of the Right: Vital, Masculine and Intentionally Offensive
I think the best way to understand politics right now is that the United States, for the first time in my lifetime, has a real right-wing counterculture. A edgy, radical-seeming alternative to the status quo. And so I thought one way to talk about that counterculture was to invite someone who I see — we'll see if he disagrees — as one of its representatives. And that's you, Jonathan.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
The New Culture of the Right: Vital, Masculine and Intentionally Offensive
There is the Red Scare podcast, right, and the so-called Dime Square scene in New York, which is basically... And again, for listeners who think this is a contradiction in terms, it's basically right wing hipsters. Yeah. Then you have the Nietzschean former graduate student turned online essayist and influencer Bronze Age pervert. Right.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
The New Culture of the Right: Vital, Masculine and Intentionally Offensive
Who has received, you know, interesting profiles in mainstream publication. So those would be examples that I would see. But who do you see as your allies and fellow travelers in the cultural project?
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
The New Culture of the Right: Vital, Masculine and Intentionally Offensive
So why is that? What is right-wing art missing that... That the right wing counterculture is trying to supply. What are the ingredients?
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
The New Culture of the Right: Vital, Masculine and Intentionally Offensive
Well, I want to make this just a tiny bit more concrete and say from any period, not the last 20 years, any period in American life, modern Western history, give me an example of something you consider successful right-wing art that doesn't fall into the traps you've described.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
The New Culture of the Right: Vital, Masculine and Intentionally Offensive
So, Jonathan Kieperman, welcome to Interesting Times. Ross, it is great to be here. We've known each other for a while online, of course. Purely as digital entities, yes.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
The New Culture of the Right: Vital, Masculine and Intentionally Offensive
What is the coding? What makes, you know, to a listener for whom it seems absurd to call No Country for Old Men right-wing, what makes that right-wing to you?
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
The New Culture of the Right: Vital, Masculine and Intentionally Offensive
Yes, this is this is a this is a hobby horse of mine.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
Introducing ‘Interesting Times’
There's a saying that comes to mind these days. May you live in interesting times. It's understood to be a curse, even though it sounds like a blessing.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
Introducing ‘Interesting Times’
The smartphone and virtual reality are forcing deep changes to basic human relationships.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
Introducing ‘Interesting Times’
She's not just a computer. She's her own person. And some of the most advanced societies on Earth are facing demographic collapse. The reactionary and radical and simply weird are here to stay. Are we entering a dark valley of authoritarianism and conflict? Or are we on the brink of a technological golden age? No one really knows, but I'm trying to find out.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
Introducing ‘Interesting Times’
My new show is called Interesting Times. It's about a future that's much more open and uncertain than at any point in my own adult lifetime. Every week, I'll be exploring some aspect of the new world order through interviews and conversations. So join me, listen and subscribe to Interesting Times wherever you get your podcasts.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
Introducing ‘Interesting Times’
From New York Times Opinion, I'm Ross Douthat. Donald Trump's return to power is a clear sign that we've experienced a real turning point in history, a shift from one era to the next. That shift wasn't always so obvious. Trump's victory in 2016 was seen as an accident, an aberration. The election of Joe Biden was interpreted as a restoration of normality. But that's not how it went.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
Introducing ‘Interesting Times’
Somewhere between the emergence of COVID and Russia's invasion of Ukraine, the normality that Trump's opponents aspire to restore has slipped into the past. If you look around, it's clear the post-Cold War era has ended.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
Introducing ‘Interesting Times’
American power is still with us, but its preeminence is under threat.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
Introducing ‘Interesting Times’
Technological innovation is suddenly accelerating. A lot of people have said that this is the craziest technology they've ever seen. At the same time, the spiritual landscape is shifting. The old-time religions still win converts, but there's a yearning for other gods as well. Pagan, psychedelic, extraterrestrial, the machine god of AI.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How Democrats Drove Silicon Valley Into Trump’s Arms
Hey, listeners, it's Ross Douthat. We're hard at work developing my new show, which is going to be called Interesting Times, a reference to the curse disguised as a blessing, or maybe the blessing disguised as a curse. May you live in interesting times, which we are. And our first few episodes will be coming out soon.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How Democrats Drove Silicon Valley Into Trump’s Arms
But when you say they radicalized, what did that mean for Silicon Valley? What did they want? I mean, at this point, just sort of listen to know, you're a venture capitalist. You're no longer a startup guy, right? So you're investing in a lot of different companies. So you have a pretty, I assume, pretty wide view of the action.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How Democrats Drove Silicon Valley Into Trump’s Arms
But I really didn't expect so many figures in Silicon Valley, starting, of course, with Elon Musk, to throw their support and their money and their social media clout behind Donald Trump in 2024. My guest today is one of those tech leaders, venture capitalist Marc Andreessen. For decades, he was, in his words, a good Democrat.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How Democrats Drove Silicon Valley Into Trump’s Arms
What was it that was desired from the new left-wing politics pre-Trump? Because we'll get to post-Trump in a minute.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How Democrats Drove Silicon Valley Into Trump’s Arms
These are people who are working for you.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How Democrats Drove Silicon Valley Into Trump’s Arms
Anyway, so this is all happening by 2016. Yes, that's right. Donald Trump becomes the Republican nominee, which we'll treat as sort of. a decisive break towards whatever the next phase of Silicon Valley ideology is. But in 2016, the Democratic Party as an institution actually starts putting sustained pressure on Silicon Valley.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How Democrats Drove Silicon Valley Into Trump’s Arms
Like what you're describing with, you know, radicalized employees is pressure, but it's not Washington, D.C. getting involved. It's only after the election that Silicon Valley is seen as you know, responsible through Facebook, through social media, through Russian disinformation, through allowing disinformation for getting Trump elected.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How Democrats Drove Silicon Valley Into Trump’s Arms
And that's the point at which the Democratic Party in Washington starts putting pressure on tech companies. Does that seem fair?
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How Democrats Drove Silicon Valley Into Trump’s Arms
But now he's been spending time at Mar-a-Lago and advising on the Trump transition. Mark Andreessen, welcome to the show. Thank you, Ross. It's great to be here. So I'll start by introducing you. You're the co-founder of the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, whose portfolio includes Airbnb and over 100 AI companies.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How Democrats Drove Silicon Valley Into Trump’s Arms
Are you, so are you watching MSNBC every night at that point, Mark? Yes.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How Democrats Drove Silicon Valley Into Trump’s Arms
And it was an hour of just... Didn't you have companies to invest in, though? I mean, every night?
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How Democrats Drove Silicon Valley Into Trump’s Arms
Wait, did you DVR'd? Of course.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How Democrats Drove Silicon Valley Into Trump’s Arms
But—so I want to push on this, though, a little bit. So do you think that when Mark Zuckerberg gets hauled in front of Congress to be grilled about disinformation and things like that, do you think that he thought to himself— yes, Facebook is deeply and profoundly responsible for Donald Trump getting elected and Vladimir Putin influencing American politics.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How Democrats Drove Silicon Valley Into Trump’s Arms
Because my my perception in the Trump years was that a lot of the people at the top of Silicon Valley were sort of essentially going along with these narratives because they were afraid of their employees and because they were afraid of Democrats in Washington. I mean, I wrote a column about this at the time.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How Democrats Drove Silicon Valley Into Trump’s Arms
I said basically that, you know, in any dispensation, businessmen have to ask themselves, what am I required to do to make money unmolested by the government? And so Zuckerberg is thinking to himself, right now, what I'm required to do is run a sort of strict anti-disinformation fact-checking apparatus and say the right things in front of congressional committees.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How Democrats Drove Silicon Valley Into Trump’s Arms
People high up, generally.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How Democrats Drove Silicon Valley Into Trump’s Arms
So this is interesting because what you are arguing for is basically. the normie conservative take on Silicon Valley across the Trump years, right? Which was that there was a kind of emerging political cultural media establishment that had sort of come into being fully in order to resist Trump. Everyone was on the same page. Silicon Valley was effectively the information policing entity.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How Democrats Drove Silicon Valley Into Trump’s Arms
And I always tended to think that there was this sort of profit-seeking mentality where Silicon Valley was kind of making political compromises to stay in business the way you would make political compromises in a foreign country. But you're saying basically the normie cons were right about how fully Silicon Valley bought into a kind of unified liberal establishment mentality.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How Democrats Drove Silicon Valley Into Trump’s Arms
A long time ago, you co-founded Netscape, the web browser that first brought many of us to the internet in the 1990s. And just as a political matter, you supported Barack Obama for president. You voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016. And then in 2024, you supported Donald Trump. And we're going to talk about that evolution.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How Democrats Drove Silicon Valley Into Trump’s Arms
Not my columns, other people's columns in the New York Times.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How Democrats Drove Silicon Valley Into Trump’s Arms
But wait, the federal government is run by Donald Trump.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How Democrats Drove Silicon Valley Into Trump’s Arms
In this period, right? So this is—I mean, this is the peculiar thing about— About the narrative, right? You were saying everyone is possessed by all these fears, and I grant you they're powerful fears, but they are in an era when officially the Republican Party and Donald Trump are in the White House and have not complete but real power in Washington, D.C.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How Democrats Drove Silicon Valley Into Trump’s Arms
Not entirely effectively. I wouldn't say that. At the same time, it wasn't the case that the Democratic Party in 2018 or 2019 was in a position to pass some sweeping new legislation, whether to raise taxes or regulate Silicon Valley in all kinds of ways, right? The Democratic pressure was a mixture of
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How Democrats Drove Silicon Valley Into Trump’s Arms
bureaucratic power that I agree Trump did not actually control and congressional hearings and outside pressure. But it is still interesting that there were obvious things that you would expect a business community to be afraid of that the Democrats couldn't do in, you know, 2018, 2019, 2020.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How Democrats Drove Silicon Valley Into Trump’s Arms
All right, let's take a quick break and we'll be right back. OK, so it's 2020, it's 2021. Biden is president. All of Silicon Valley is, again, seems completely on side for the defeat of Trump, the deplatforming of Trump. And, you know, we're only four years removed from that. So how do we get from Biden being sworn in to here? And you can talk more about your own. political evolution, too.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How Democrats Drove Silicon Valley Into Trump’s Arms
I'm asking you to sort of describe Marc Andreessen's perspective specifically. Yeah.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How Democrats Drove Silicon Valley Into Trump’s Arms
But I wanted to start by just going way back in time to the origins of your career, because you were present for... the early days of the internet, not really the beginning of Silicon Valley itself, but the beginning of Silicon Valley as a crucial influence in American life, I would say.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How Democrats Drove Silicon Valley Into Trump’s Arms
Anyway, so that's happening. That's happening to you. Yes. So you are radicalizing in the late Trump years. Yeah, for sure.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How Democrats Drove Silicon Valley Into Trump’s Arms
But before then, I wanted to reshare the interviews that started it all, a set of conversations that attempt to map out the new political order with some of the people at the forefront. So enjoy, and please subscribe to Interesting Times wherever you get your podcasts. From New York Times Opinion, I'm Ross Douthat.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How Democrats Drove Silicon Valley Into Trump’s Arms
So what about so what in what in concrete terms does that mean? What are the policies that I mean, they came for shocked or surprised you about the Biden administration?
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How Democrats Drove Silicon Valley Into Trump’s Arms
And since we're talking about how the tech industry has changed, how it's interacted with big shifts in American politics, I was hoping you could just talk a little bit about what it was like for you to go from It's a small town in Wisconsin where you grew up, New Lisbon, right? Yeah, that's right.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How Democrats Drove Silicon Valley Into Trump’s Arms
Just to zero in, when you say kill AI, what does that mean? Because the Biden administration obviously would not say that it intends to kill AI. It would say that it wants to make America the world leader in AI while regulating it in a way that prevents our enemies around the world from obtaining potentially world-altering technology. That would be the narrative, right? So why is that wrong?
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How Democrats Drove Silicon Valley Into Trump’s Arms
But that is a national security argument. That is an argument, right, that it's about China, basically.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How Democrats Drove Silicon Valley Into Trump’s Arms
Not a large population to, let's say, the point where you were involved in selling Netscape for billions of dollars in the late 1990s.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How Democrats Drove Silicon Valley Into Trump’s Arms
I feel like we would have to do a separate show about the future and risks of AI. Yeah. But it is – my perception is there is a large constituency, not just in Washington, D.C., but in Silicon Valley as well, that regards some form of AI as potentially dangerous assets. human civilization or US national defense as nuclear weapons.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How Democrats Drove Silicon Valley Into Trump’s Arms
And during the Cold War, we obviously did not allow, you know, random startups to manufacture nuclear weapons in, you know, the nuclear corridor in Poughkeepsie, New York, right? I mean, that is important to the thinking.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How Democrats Drove Silicon Valley Into Trump’s Arms
Absolutely. No, no, I'm not. I'm by no means arguing that this theory is correct. I'm just saying my sense is that there is presumably some version of AI that you would wish to see regulated by the federal government. Right.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How Democrats Drove Silicon Valley Into Trump’s Arms
All right, let's take a break there. And when we come back, we'll talk about what the tech right wants from the Trump era.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How Democrats Drove Silicon Valley Into Trump’s Arms
So this is sort of the moment when you can start to talk about a tech right. So it's not just Peter Thiel and it's not just Elon. It is you and a larger number of people who sort of came out in support of Trump. And now there has been, you know, reporting that, you know, the Trump administration is hiring people from your own company for positions in the administration.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How Democrats Drove Silicon Valley Into Trump’s Arms
So the tech right has gone from basically not existing in some way, right, a year ago, to helping to staff a new administration. So what does it want?
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How Democrats Drove Silicon Valley Into Trump’s Arms
But so that means, okay, Trump administration is not going to do the things that the Biden administration was doing that you regard as a mortal threat to AI, crypto, other industries, right? What else besides not doing things? What is the functional pro-business agenda? I mean, I'm not asking you to make a prediction. I'm saying like, what would you like to see?
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How Democrats Drove Silicon Valley Into Trump’s Arms
So where do you think Doge, the Elon Musk-run Department of Governmental Efficiency, which is promising some number, trillions of dollars of savings, where does that fit into a tech right agenda?
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How Democrats Drove Silicon Valley Into Trump’s Arms
Yes, I remember it well.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How Democrats Drove Silicon Valley Into Trump’s Arms
Well, no, I don't think the compelling question about Doge is whether it's fascism. I think the compelling question is whether it's a kind of trap for, if not the whole tech right, at least for... Elon Musk, right? Which is to say, you know, you're giving him a portfolio over a set of issues that are the most intractable in Washington, D.C.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How Democrats Drove Silicon Valley Into Trump’s Arms
And yes, they were more tractable in the 1990s, but we were in a completely different demographic landscape then. It's much easier to make your Social Security and Medicare payments in the world of 1996 than the world of today. So you have a commission of some sort that can make recommendations but doesn't fundamentally have legislative power.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How Democrats Drove Silicon Valley Into Trump’s Arms
And personally, right, I would like Elon Musk to succeed in things like going to Mars. I'm less convinced that he's capable of succeeding in rationalizing the entitlement system. And I feel like it's quite plausible that he he at least again, maybe not the whole tech right, whatever it may be, but he at least could get lost in this setup.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How Democrats Drove Silicon Valley Into Trump’s Arms
In terms, in terms of their understanding of the federal bureaucracy, their understanding of American politics, which, how are they light years beyond?
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How Democrats Drove Silicon Valley Into Trump’s Arms
I mean, I guess my my view would be I can imagine a remarkable new plan for making the federal government in various ways much more efficient. I can totally imagine that. I am skeptical that such a plan would in the end make a big dent in the federal government's costs, not least because. You know, let's say you have tons of dead wood in a particular federal agency.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How Democrats Drove Silicon Valley Into Trump’s Arms
He took the lead in inventing the internet.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How Democrats Drove Silicon Valley Into Trump’s Arms
Well, you're going to get rid of that dead wood. But in fact, you're going to need to hire better people to replace those people. And you're going to need, you know, to pay those people appropriately and so on. And all of this is just sort of in the shadow of.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How Democrats Drove Silicon Valley Into Trump’s Arms
Social Security, Medicare, and a range of federal commitments that there is no magical argument on social media that will suddenly make cutting those commitments popular, I think. But this is, of course, the cynical, you know, the cynical Washington, D.C. view.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How Democrats Drove Silicon Valley Into Trump’s Arms
Right? Like... No, no, no, no. This is all... This is... The answer when we're challenged on it is... This is the actual spending that the federal government does is either big ticket things that the average taxpayer supports or smaller bore things like funding for students with disabilities across public school districts or something like
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How Democrats Drove Silicon Valley Into Trump’s Arms
That if the average taxpayer doesn't support it, at least a very vocal and influential constituency supports it. Those are the two groups. It's not dripping with contempt for the taxpayer. It's the taxpayer that, you know, because of their desire for large amounts of federal spending tends to support.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How Democrats Drove Silicon Valley Into Trump’s Arms
Does the taxpayer not... I mean, Mark, having, you know, I wrote many, many columns in support of various versions of Paul Ryan's plan to cut Medicare or reform Medicare and reform Social Security. And the reason those plans went down to defeat was not that federal bureaucrats had contempt for the American taxpayer. It was that the American taxpayer...
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How Democrats Drove Silicon Valley Into Trump’s Arms
in election after election, likes and supports and votes in favor of Medicare and Social Security.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How Democrats Drove Silicon Valley Into Trump’s Arms
So let's get to the last crucial question, right, which is setting aside the opinions of the median voter and the opinions of the American taxpayer. What about the opinions of other factions in the Republican coalition? Because basically, you have become a faction, right? Congratulations. Yes. Welcome. Welcome to life. Welcome to life as a faction on the American right.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How Democrats Drove Silicon Valley Into Trump’s Arms
And there are obviously other factions on the American right that have already begun to clash with the tech perspective. There was a big sort of blow up just over Christmas. Over H-1B visas and the extent to which Silicon Valley tends to support sort of maximal recruitment of high skilled immigrants.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How Democrats Drove Silicon Valley Into Trump’s Arms
A big part of Donald Trump's coalition does not support maximal recruitment of high skilled immigrants that thinks that America first includes Americans first when it comes to, you know, hiring in greater San Francisco. Right. We've already got Steve Bannon promising to, you know, get Elon Musk out of government immediately, which is clearly not going to happen.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How Democrats Drove Silicon Valley Into Trump’s Arms
But what's your sense of those kind of conflicts? And also, like, because of everything that we just spent this whole interview talking about, there is a really big constituency on the right that maybe they trust Elon Musk. They don't trust Silicon Valley at all. They have supported, in different ways, right-wing ideas for regulating and, you know, doing antitrust regulation in Silicon Valley.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How Democrats Drove Silicon Valley Into Trump’s Arms
That constituency is still there. What do you make of all of those challenges?
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How Democrats Drove Silicon Valley Into Trump’s Arms
This is, sorry, this is, this is, you mean Donald Trump?
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How Democrats Drove Silicon Valley Into Trump’s Arms
But the last time we mentioned Donald Trump in this interview, you and I were agreeing that he was not actually in command of the federal government in his first term, right?
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How Democrats Drove Silicon Valley Into Trump’s Arms
So there is some, presumably there is some space for, you know, factional conflict under his benevolent rule.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How Democrats Drove Silicon Valley Into Trump’s Arms
Right. I guess my fundamental question is just – you know, well, maybe put it this way. Are there deal breakers for you in the new alliance that you forged? I guess I'm curious when you look at the Republican Party that you yourself and, you know, in your own narrative spent a long period of your life regarding as the great enemy.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How Democrats Drove Silicon Valley Into Trump’s Arms
You know, are there things you can imagine happening that would make you walk away from this coalition?
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How Democrats Drove Silicon Valley Into Trump’s Arms
Part of part of what's happened is, again, lots of different people have had versions of the narrative that we've talked about throughout this conversation where they have become alienated from, you know, whatever the liberal establishment was or what it became over the course of the last 10 or 15 years. But those people are themselves alienated. widely divergent.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How Democrats Drove Silicon Valley Into Trump’s Arms
And they range from, you know, people on foreign policy who have very hawkish views to people who have more isolationist views. They range on tech policy from people who have your views to, you know, I'm very familiar with people on the right who have very anti-Silicon Valley views. Or just to take, you know, in health policy, right?
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How Democrats Drove Silicon Valley Into Trump’s Arms
You mentioned the second tier appointees being very, very talented and impressive in this Trump White House. I think that's right. But, you know, there may be some differences of opinion between some of the second-tier appointees in, for instance, the Department of Health and Human Services and their boss, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., right? Certainly, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How Democrats Drove Silicon Valley Into Trump’s Arms
and Elon Musk have quite different views on public health, the role of science, and these kind of things. So... I'm not making a, you know, I don't foretell the future particularly well. I think that's certainly the case.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How Democrats Drove Silicon Valley Into Trump’s Arms
But I think that the Trump administration has succeeded in part by bringing together a lot of different factions that share a common sort of recoil from where we've been over the last 10 years, but have fairly different views about where we're going to go.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How Democrats Drove Silicon Valley Into Trump’s Arms
So, like— Well, that—but some people would say that that's been a big problem for the right— Of course. Over the last couple hundred years.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How Democrats Drove Silicon Valley Into Trump’s Arms
I guess my last question for you then, though, is do you to some extent, since we started this conversation talking about the beginning of your career in a very different Silicon Valley in the 1990s, right? And from my perspective, part of what made... The period that you talk about where, you know, the Democratic Party could be four square for, you know, everything Silicon Valley was doing.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How Democrats Drove Silicon Valley Into Trump’s Arms
Part of what made that possible was that Silicon Valley was not yet the decisive, most powerful and influential force in American life. And now it is. And I think it's totally plausible the Democratic Party will moderate on issues, especially cultural issues, that have been significant over the last 10 years. I don't think we're ever going to a world where
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How Democrats Drove Silicon Valley Into Trump’s Arms
the companies that you are investing in are not zones of political contestation, right? I agree. Crypto, whatever you think of regulation, is going to be a zone of contestation. AI, absolutely a zone of contestation, right? And that wasn't true in the 1990s because you guys hadn't won. And now you guys won and that's it. Welcome to politics, right? Right.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How Democrats Drove Silicon Valley Into Trump’s Arms
I mean, do you see things that way to some extent? Yeah.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How Democrats Drove Silicon Valley Into Trump’s Arms
It's dragging you across the bridge to the 21st century.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How Democrats Drove Silicon Valley Into Trump’s Arms
All right. Well, maybe you can be back on this podcast to talk about some of those issues in the future. I'd love to. But for now, thank you, Mark Andreessen, so much for taking the time.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How Democrats Drove Silicon Valley Into Trump’s Arms
Right. So it's the 90s, and you're essentially building the interfaces through which the mass public is going to enter the digital age. How would you characterize the Valley's worldview and also your worldview at that point as a kind of young startup founder?
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How Democrats Drove Silicon Valley Into Trump’s Arms
I want to talk about the deal for a minute because it certainly lasts culturally down into the Obama years, right? So by the time Barack Obama is running for president, it's sort of taken for granted that there's going to be a ton of Silicon Valley money on his side. The incredible enthusiasm for the Obama candidacy is particularly strong among sort of tech-savvy young people.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How Democrats Drove Silicon Valley Into Trump’s Arms
There's a huge narrative with that campaign about how the Democratic Party is on the cutting edge of digital technology. You know, they're using the Internet to defeat the stodgy Republicans, right? So stodgy, they can't even use the Internet to organize a campaign. right? So that narrative certainly persists.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How Democrats Drove Silicon Valley Into Trump’s Arms
But through this whole period, the Democratic Party was still the party of higher tax rates and higher spending relative to the Republicans. So Silicon Valley was accepting at some level in this era that in supporting Democrats, you were going to get a slightly higher top marginal tax rate, a slightly higher corporate tax rate, a slightly higher tax rate on capital gains than if you went in for
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How Democrats Drove Silicon Valley Into Trump’s Arms
you know, whatever the Republicans from Bob Dole down to George W. Bush and John McCain were offering. Is that right? Was that sort of understood, too, that part of the deal was you were on board with, again, sort of moderate liberal, slightly higher taxes policies?
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How Democrats Drove Silicon Valley Into Trump’s Arms
So listeners, I'm going to be hosting some one-on-one conversations to help you, and quite frankly, me, understand the factions and the players that are likely to shape the incoming Trump administration. And today, we're going to start with Silicon Valley and the so-called tech right. I'm someone who follows politics primarily and Silicon Valley secondarily.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How Democrats Drove Silicon Valley Into Trump’s Arms
And then running through that, too, though, there was also sort of a cultural assumption, not just that it made sense to be liberal on social issues like same-sex marriage and abortion, but also that liberalism was going to be the party of sort of openness, free speech, free argument, and a kind of...
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How Democrats Drove Silicon Valley Into Trump’s Arms
utopian vision, I would say, of human freedom, which obviously wasn't always there in the institutional Democratic Party. But there's this term I'm sure you've heard that was coined, I think, by critics of Silicon Valley called the Californian ideology, which they describe, I think this was in the 1990s, as
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How Democrats Drove Silicon Valley Into Trump’s Arms
marrying the cultural bohemianism of San Francisco with the high-tech industries of Silicon Valley. The Californian ideology promiscuously combines the freewheeling spirit of the hippies and the entrepreneurial zeal of the yuppies.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How Democrats Drove Silicon Valley Into Trump’s Arms
Obviously, they're taking a dig, but I think that the spirit of the hippies is also important here, this sense that you're on the side of this kind of cultural openness.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How Democrats Drove Silicon Valley Into Trump’s Arms
Yes, everyone who was a young person on the political right in the 1990s and early 2000s, as I was, has had at least one encounter with David Horowitz of one kind or another. In which, yeah, the spirit of 60s radicalism definitely lived on in his post-radical phase, I think it's fair to say.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How Democrats Drove Silicon Valley Into Trump’s Arms
And to me, the alliance between that industry and the Democratic Party has always seemed like a pretty solid fact of American politics. I could definitely see the leaders of the tech industry souring on certain aspects of progressive politics, especially the parts that cast them as special villains.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How Democrats Drove Silicon Valley Into Trump’s Arms
So from your perspective, when did you start to have doubts about the synthesis of Silicon Valley and the Democratic Party?
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How Democrats Drove Silicon Valley Into Trump’s Arms
And so those changes you're talking about, are they fundamentally about Trump? policies being made by the Obama White House, or are they fundamentally about sort of the big shift leftward among young people that clearly starts in that era?
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
Steve Bannon on ‘Broligarchs’ vs. Populism
Hey, listeners, it's Ross Douthat. We're hard at work developing my new show, which is going to be called Interesting Times, a reference to the curse disguised as a blessing, or maybe the blessing disguised as a curse. May you live in interesting times, which we are. And our first few episodes will be coming out soon.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
Steve Bannon on ‘Broligarchs’ vs. Populism
Yeah, I want to get into the policy from the first term, but it's just worth thinking about, like the time you're talking about the most powerful idea in politics.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
Steve Bannon on ‘Broligarchs’ vs. Populism
sort of elite discourse about politics was this idea that there was a sort of emerging democratic majority that basically consisted of, you know, white, college-educated, socially liberal Americans, the growing population of especially Hispanic voters, minority voters, and so on, and that the only way for the
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
Steve Bannon on ‘Broligarchs’ vs. Populism
compete in this environment was, as you say, to either become more liberal on social issues generally or to become more liberal on immigration in particular. And Shantrande wrote this series called The Missing White Voters, basically. And it's funny about how there were all these voters, right, who didn't turn out for Romney, who could turn out for a Republican. And
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
Steve Bannon on ‘Broligarchs’ vs. Populism
My guest this week, Steve Bannon, represents what I might call Trumpism classic, the populist and nationalist movement that brought Trump to power in the first place and that aspires to exert significant influence in Trump's second administration.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
Steve Bannon on ‘Broligarchs’ vs. Populism
And then connected – the other argument connected to that that also turned out to be right was that there were a lot of Hispanic voters who weren't actually interested in necessarily voting for open borders, large-scale illegal immigration, who were culturally conservative, who didn't want to vote for a sort of racist-seeming Republican Party but would be open to a kind of populist appeal.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
Steve Bannon on ‘Broligarchs’ vs. Populism
And it's funny because I used to go on – cable news back then in a different incarnation of my life. And I was on a few times with Stuart Stevens, who ran Romney's campaign in 2012. And this was while, you know, the Trump campaign was getting going and competing. And look, you know, I didn't think Trump was going to win. Right. So I don't claim any foresight there.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
Steve Bannon on ‘Broligarchs’ vs. Populism
But Stevens would come on and he would say, oh, you know, Trump is trying to get voters who just aren't there. He's like going up the river, beating the drums, you know, trying to summon voters from the hills, and they're just not there. And that was the default assumption that I do think, not just your 2016 campaign, but then 2024 proved wrong.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
Steve Bannon on ‘Broligarchs’ vs. Populism
Another name out of the mists of memory.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
Steve Bannon on ‘Broligarchs’ vs. Populism
Indeed, a lot of executive orders we've already seen from this White House on immigration, reshaping the federal bureaucracy and more are clearly stamped by Bannon's populist anti-establishment aspirations. Bannon is also emerging as one of the most vocal critics from the right of Elon Musk and other members of the tech right. And so we're going to talk a lot about that brewing conflict.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
Steve Bannon on ‘Broligarchs’ vs. Populism
So let's talk. Let's just drill down on immigration for a minute. Why is it so central? And what do you say to someone who might be on the left who'd be listening to this conversation and would say, oh, look, you know, Bannon's absolutely right. There was a financial crisis. Wall Street got away with murder. Right.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
Steve Bannon on ‘Broligarchs’ vs. Populism
Not literally, just to be clear, but – and there needed to be a populist surge, but all being anti-immigration does is scapegoat a bunch of hardworking people trying to come to America for the sins of global finance and so on. What is the –
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
Steve Bannon on ‘Broligarchs’ vs. Populism
Steve, welcome to the show.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
Steve Bannon on ‘Broligarchs’ vs. Populism
All right. Let's take a quick break and we'll come right back.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
Steve Bannon on ‘Broligarchs’ vs. Populism
So let's talk about the first term, Trump's first term, and how this cashed out then. And I want to read a quote.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
Steve Bannon on ‘Broligarchs’ vs. Populism
I just want to read a quote from you via Michael Wolff. So, you know, we can take it with a slight grain of salt. But this is you talking just before Trump was inaugurated. And he quoted you saying this. look, the conservatives are going to go crazy. I'm the guy pushing a trillion-dollar infrastructure plan.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
Steve Bannon on ‘Broligarchs’ vs. Populism
With negative interest rates throughout the world, it's the greatest opportunity to rebuild everything. Shipyards, ironworks, get them all jacked up. We're just going to throw it up against the wall and see if it sticks. It'll be as exciting as the 1930s, greater than the Reagan revolution. So that's a vision of populism where... It's secure borders. It's cutting immigration.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
Steve Bannon on ‘Broligarchs’ vs. Populism
It's everything that you've just been talking about. But it's also industrial policy. Yes. Rebuilding industry. Yes. And I think it's fair to say that, you know, a lot of that just didn't happen in Trump term one.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
Steve Bannon on ‘Broligarchs’ vs. Populism
All right. Yes, that's right. No. Were there only 300? Every week. Every week was infrastructure week.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
Steve Bannon on ‘Broligarchs’ vs. Populism
Every week was infrastructure week. Yeah. So what happened to that, the industrial policy side of things?
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
Steve Bannon on ‘Broligarchs’ vs. Populism
So you got it. So you got it. But as you said, you got it with a coalition. And the coalition doesn't want, they don't want industrial policy. They don't want the big deal, the big deal spending. And so that doesn't happen. And I'm going to try and bring us forward quickly to the present, right?
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
Steve Bannon on ‘Broligarchs’ vs. Populism
The economy is good and it's better. No, I think this is absolutely true. It's better even without the trillion dollar infrastructure bill. It's better for blue collar workers than it was under Obama.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
Steve Bannon on ‘Broligarchs’ vs. Populism
So flash forward. So here we are. Trump has more of a mandate for some form of populism than before. He clearly has more of a mandate on illegal immigration, in part just because of how much of it there's been under Biden. So clearly you've got a populist focus on that issue, right? It's no question about that. But on everything else, what does populism want?
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
Steve Bannon on ‘Broligarchs’ vs. Populism
as a movement on economic policy from this administration and related to that, the administrative state stuff. And we're having this conversation in a week where, you know, a bunch of the headlines are about both The Trump team trying to sort of, you know, take more control over the agencies, also claim more power from Congress.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
Steve Bannon on ‘Broligarchs’ vs. Populism
There's going to be a Supreme Court battle probably over presidential authority, over sort of certain kinds of spending. But you say deconstruct the administrative state. OK, for what? What is the actual goal of that?
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
Steve Bannon on ‘Broligarchs’ vs. Populism
But before then, I wanted to reshare the interviews that started it all, a set of conversations that attempt to map out the new political order with some of the people at the forefront. So enjoy, and please subscribe to Interesting Times wherever you get your podcasts. All right, Steve, you ready? Born ready, sir. I know, born fighting. If we don't have a fight, why are we populists?
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
Steve Bannon on ‘Broligarchs’ vs. Populism
All right. We're going to get into that. But first, I thought I should do a little resume refresher just at the top about who you are. It's a detailed resume. I'm going to go through it.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
Steve Bannon on ‘Broligarchs’ vs. Populism
But I want to go back to... The populist, so the voter, right, the blue-collar voter in 2016, it's the blue-collar white voter. In 2024, it's the middle-class Hispanic voter. They vote for Trump in part because they agree with a populist critique of how the economy has been run the last 25 years, in part in this election because they were just sick of inflation and the border being out of control.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
Steve Bannon on ‘Broligarchs’ vs. Populism
What is the concrete deliverable for those voters out of the deconstruction of the administrative state. That's what I'm trying to get at.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
Steve Bannon on ‘Broligarchs’ vs. Populism
But is it just immigration then? Is that what it – I mean, I'm not trying to minimize immigration. We had the largest surge under Biden in decades. All of that's real. And inflation. Hang on. And inflation. And inflation. But inflation cuts both ways. Right. Because, yes, immigration gives you competition for jobs, but immigration also can reduce prices. Right.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
Steve Bannon on ‘Broligarchs’ vs. Populism
I think a man of parts is what we like to say. So we're going to say Steve Bannon, U.S. Navy, Goldman Sachs, Hollywood producer, impresario behind the success of the website Breitbart, founded by Andrew Breitbart, but I think raised to special prominence by yourself. One of Trump's leading strategists in 2016, an architect of an upset victory over Hillary Clinton.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
Steve Bannon on ‘Broligarchs’ vs. Populism
You take low skilled workers out of the economy. Prices go up. Right. That that cuts in both directions. But I just want to say I just want to focus in for a minute because to me, looking at a lot of the different people you've mentioned and the agenda you're talking about. Right.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
Steve Bannon on ‘Broligarchs’ vs. Populism
To me, there's still sort of a through line from the Tea Party era where you have a lot of people voting for Republicans who hadn't voted for Republicans before, who have sort of big picture economic concerns, law and order concerns and so on. But there is a part of the Republican Party that I think is part of your part of your sort of vision of the MAGA coalition. Right.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
Steve Bannon on ‘Broligarchs’ vs. Populism
That still wants to deliver those voters. We're going to keep taxes low for the upper class and we're going to pay for it by cutting Medicaid and and so on. Right. And like that, that still seems like a pretty powerful part of that. whatever the Republican Party is right now.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
Steve Bannon on ‘Broligarchs’ vs. Populism
do a version of the tax reauthorization that either – that actually takes out some of the upper bracket stuff and combine that with discretionary spending cuts? I just want to be clear. Is that the combination?
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
Steve Bannon on ‘Broligarchs’ vs. Populism
Briefly, a leading advisor to the Trump White House. Exiled from Trump world after Michael Wolff's book Fire and Fury came out because you were a source, prominent source, a would-be organizer of international populist movement, host of the podcast show War Room, involved in the January 6th protests, and a very prominent promoter then and now of President Trump's stolen election claims.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
Steve Bannon on ‘Broligarchs’ vs. Populism
I think you're totally right that there is a big constituency, especially now that the everyone you just described who are fanning out over the agencies that would be up for that beyond like, you know, on the margins, like we're going to, can the Trump administration tax university endowments? Sure. Absolutely. They can do that.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
Steve Bannon on ‘Broligarchs’ vs. Populism
You know, just maintaining the changes to the state and local tax deduction that was, I think, one of the genuinely populist victories of the first Trump term, which, and I should say, it soaked me, right? It soaked the upper middle class. in blue states. Just maintaining that, I think, will be challenging.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
Steve Bannon on ‘Broligarchs’ vs. Populism
But I want to turn us and bring us back to where we started, I guess, because the last conversation I had ended with me arguing with Marc Andreessen, the Silicon Valley venture capitalist, about whether he and his allies, who also have a big role in the Trump administration, who are filling a lot of jobs, could easily find big spending cuts.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
Steve Bannon on ‘Broligarchs’ vs. Populism
I'm just generally a skeptic of the ability to find big spending cuts. So maybe that's one small point of overlap between... You and I won't call them the tech right. We'll just call them Silicon Valley people who support Donald Trump.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
Steve Bannon on ‘Broligarchs’ vs. Populism
But we don't even have to go into the overlap.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
Steve Bannon on ‘Broligarchs’ vs. Populism
They're in a total different – This phrase is sitting here in my notes because you've used it a bunch, techno-feudalism. We've talked about immigration, right? You've talked about the idea that Silicon Valley is basically trying to bring in as much foreign labor as possible to presumably keep its own costs down. That's obviously part of what you mean by techno-feudalism.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
Steve Bannon on ‘Broligarchs’ vs. Populism
But I don't think that's all of it, right? This is not just about H-1B visas. No. it's fine, I'm reforming the H-1B program. You would still disagree with him. So give me a broader view of what you think is wrong with the Silicon Valley view.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
Steve Bannon on ‘Broligarchs’ vs. Populism
A four-month stint in prison—see, I said we'd get around to it—for defying a subpoena from the January 6th committee. Released, Donald Trump wins. You've been in D.C. celebrating while also, as we've already heard, attacking some of the president's key allies, including Elon Musk. Is that a fair sketch?
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
Steve Bannon on ‘Broligarchs’ vs. Populism
All right, Steve, hold that thought. We're going to take a quick break and we'll be right back.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
Steve Bannon on ‘Broligarchs’ vs. Populism
I want to go to the transhumanist stuff first and then to the policy stuff and Trump and whether any of this can be stopped. So to me... I think that there are different groups in Silicon Valley.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
Steve Bannon on ‘Broligarchs’ vs. Populism
I think that you're right that generally people, including readers of this newspaper, listeners of this podcast, underestimate just how weird the long-term ambitions of a lot of people deeply involved in Silicon Valley are, especially around artificial intelligence.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
Steve Bannon on ‘Broligarchs’ vs. Populism
The network state we can save for the next time I have you on. For now, let's just focus on- I'm going to be invited. I'm going to be invited.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
Steve Bannon on ‘Broligarchs’ vs. Populism
We're going to every week, man. No, stop. So listen. So the transhumanism stuff, though. So to me, it seemed like one of the things that pulled Elon Musk into the conservative coalition was that while he's not... Certainly not a religious conservative, but he is a kind of weirdo humanist, right? He likes the human race. He wants the human race to continue. Oh, no. Stop. No. Okay.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
Steve Bannon on ‘Broligarchs’ vs. Populism
So you don't – see, to me it seems like Musk is in one group. Look, Musk is – Just as transhumanist as the rest of them?
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
Steve Bannon on ‘Broligarchs’ vs. Populism
Not big fans of each other.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
Steve Bannon on ‘Broligarchs’ vs. Populism
But so let's then take it back to politics, right? I don't see this critique that you're offering, a kind of – we'll call it a kind of religious humanist critique of Silicon Valley, where AI is going, maybe where digital augmentation is going. I don't see this as – expressed in any kind of powerful way in the Trump White House.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
Steve Bannon on ‘Broligarchs’ vs. Populism
Two weeks in, you know, making big announcements with, you know, with Sam Altman, right? Big announcements about investing in AI. One of the main reasons, clearly from my conversation with Marc Andreessen, that part of Silicon Valley swung toward Trump was a fear of regulation on AI from the Biden administration.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
Steve Bannon on ‘Broligarchs’ vs. Populism
I completely agree with you that the Obama era made this kind of broad-based deal with Silicon Valley. Different people would describe it differently, but there was a deal. The Biden administration reneged on the deal, right? They did antitrust stuff. They tried to regulate all these things.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
Steve Bannon on ‘Broligarchs’ vs. Populism
Yeah, Andreessen, he was, yeah, he obviously did not like that. But I mean, even from, but from your perspective, right, if AI is a threat to our humanity, right, And it's going to happen in some form. It's going to happen in China in some form, right? Wouldn't it be better to have the Biden approach of a kind of state capture of AI than to have, you know, endless proliferating technology?
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
Steve Bannon on ‘Broligarchs’ vs. Populism
Or is it better to have, like, which form of AI do you as an AI skeptic prefer? The Andreessen version or the Biden, you know, three big company version?
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
Steve Bannon on ‘Broligarchs’ vs. Populism
Well, and there's a difference. I mean, I think what you said about Zuckerberg, though, is right. There's a group of people in tech who decided to support Trump The night that he won the 2024 election. That's absolutely true. And a lot of the guys who were there for the inauguration were, you know, I think general defeated generals paraded in a Roman triumph. Right. But Musk is not like that.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
Steve Bannon on ‘Broligarchs’ vs. Populism
Right. No, Musk is not like that. No. A bunch of the people around Musk are not like that.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
Steve Bannon on ‘Broligarchs’ vs. Populism
Right. No, these are people who were who were already deeply alienated from.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
Steve Bannon on ‘Broligarchs’ vs. Populism
We are competing with China on a technological frontier. Andreessen basically made a kind of his own. He did not make a populist argument, but he made a nationalist argument. He said, look, we want and what the Trump administration has promised us is for America to win.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
Steve Bannon on ‘Broligarchs’ vs. Populism
for our companies to win, for us to outcompete the Chinese and have what it takes to keep America, you know, sort of ahead of the curve, which we are at the moment. Even, yes, I agree that, you know, deep seek the sort of the Chinese AI raises a lot of questions about AI strategy.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
Steve Bannon on ‘Broligarchs’ vs. Populism
I mean, I don't know. Just to defend prior guests on this program as a matter of policy, I think there is a big difference between how the big social media companies regarded themselves and how venture capital world regarded itself.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
Steve Bannon on ‘Broligarchs’ vs. Populism
I'm not going to look into anybody's soul and think about whether they believe in America, but they do believe they believe in a different form of competition than does Google and Facebook and so on. And I think that's why they've always been. That's why they were always more sympathetic to the right.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
Steve Bannon on ‘Broligarchs’ vs. Populism
So that's good. Let's bring it back to policy and then to Trump himself on policy. Again, I don't think any of this is happening, but what is, you know, what is the specific populist answer to the oligarchs that you're talking about? Is it, you know, we should, you know, Trump should keep Lena Kahn around and do antitrust stuff. Is it taxation on these companies?
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
Steve Bannon on ‘Broligarchs’ vs. Populism
Is it just not spending money and not investing in AI? Is it regulations on AI? What... You could wave a magic wand and have the Trump White House do what you want around this stuff. What would you do?
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
Steve Bannon on ‘Broligarchs’ vs. Populism
Right, they're reading, they're memorizing. Memorizing. Memorizing the great books. The humanist... Well, we'll have podcasts, though.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
Steve Bannon on ‘Broligarchs’ vs. Populism
We're in a real fix. So Trump himself. Let's let's try and wrap up there. Right. Because early early in our conversation, you said something about, you know, how there's this idea that, you know, populism is just like a cult of personality around Trump or that Trump has all the power. Right. And.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
Steve Bannon on ‘Broligarchs’ vs. Populism
Obviously, that's not true in the sense that there really are big divides within the Republican coalition. There are big divides within this administration. What is true, though, is that President Trump has a lot of power, a lot of personal power over what. many, many conservatives tend to think, right? He's got a lot of sort of trust built up, right?
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
Steve Bannon on ‘Broligarchs’ vs. Populism
Where, you know, people are like, well, you know, I don't know exactly where to look, but I stand with Trump. If he's here, I'm there, right? He's got that. And then he also is, I think it's fair to say, you know, not an ideological guy, a flexible guy, a guy who, you know, listens to the last person in the room. And then he's a guy who has his own incentives, right? And
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
Steve Bannon on ‘Broligarchs’ vs. Populism
Donald Trump had one position on TikTok before he got some... Oh, you're so cynical.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
Steve Bannon on ‘Broligarchs’ vs. Populism
I hate to be cynical about our president. You're so cynical. He had that position, and now he has a different position on an issue that you say is an example of effectively a Chinese communist PSYOP infecting American life. So to what extent is populism, in all the forms you've described, just completely lashed to the personality and character of Donald Trump?
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
Steve Bannon on ‘Broligarchs’ vs. Populism
And to what extent is there a world beyond it Where, you know, is there going to be a moment where populism needs a new leader and you're back to that cattle call in New Hampshire looking at different opportunities?
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
Steve Bannon on ‘Broligarchs’ vs. Populism
I've heard that. I've heard that about him.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
Steve Bannon on ‘Broligarchs’ vs. Populism
They've seen a lot of him.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
Steve Bannon on ‘Broligarchs’ vs. Populism
So let's talk about the kind of populism that you've been involved with basically, you know, from its beginnings as a force in global politics, right? Populism in the U.S. goes back to Andrew Jackson. It's had a lot of different incarnations, a lot of different versions, some more cultural, some more economic versions.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
Steve Bannon on ‘Broligarchs’ vs. Populism
I'm not a big fan of Jack Kennedy's Profiles in Courage, but I take your point. I should say Ted Sorensen's Profiles in Courage. Yeah, Ted Sorensen's Profiles in Courage. Yeah, go on, go on.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
Steve Bannon on ‘Broligarchs’ vs. Populism
Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. But you're all in for transhumanism if he says that. If he's like, Steve, get the chip in your brain. Let's do it.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
Steve Bannon on ‘Broligarchs’ vs. Populism
We're going to have so many fights going down. That's basically my position.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
Steve Bannon on ‘Broligarchs’ vs. Populism
You pussy. Especially the ones who write columns for the New York Times, Steve. No, you're too much of a humanist. That's your problem. You're too empathetic. The vision that you have then in the next four years I guess we can talk about a future, you know, J.D. Vance presidency on another show. But your vision of the next four years is, in effect, a battle for Donald Trump.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
Steve Bannon on ‘Broligarchs’ vs. Populism
Right? That's what it comes down to. So it's like I wrote a column over the weekend, you know, the court, the idea of like this is court politics. Yeah. Right? And in a way, I'm just trying to end us on a pretty strong note here. You're basically saying that the future of homo sapiens—
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
Steve Bannon on ‘Broligarchs’ vs. Populism
People in my line of work have been arguing since Donald Trump came down the escalator about what Trumpism is, right? Is it about economics? Is it about class, race?
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
Steve Bannon on ‘Broligarchs’ vs. Populism
The future of the human race itself, as we've known it for 6,000 or 6 million years, depending on your interpretation of creationism, depends on people arguing and contending for the views and positions of Donald Trump. Is that what you think right now?
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
Steve Bannon on ‘Broligarchs’ vs. Populism
Steve, thank you so much.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
Steve Bannon on ‘Broligarchs’ vs. Populism
This episode was produced by Sophia Alvarez-Boyd, Andrea Batanzos, and Elisa Gutierrez. It was edited by Jordana Hochman. Our fact-check team is Kate Sinclair, Mary Marge Locker, and Michelle Harris. Original music by Isaac Jones, Sonia Herrero, Amin Sahota, and Pat McCusker. Mixing by Pat McCusker. Audience strategy by Shannon Busta and Christina Samulowski.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
Steve Bannon on ‘Broligarchs’ vs. Populism
And our executive producer, as always, is Annie Rose Strasser.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
Steve Bannon on ‘Broligarchs’ vs. Populism
If you want to deliver a long monologue about the genius of Elon Musk and Silicon Valley, if you've had AI write one for you, we can do that too.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
Steve Bannon on ‘Broligarchs’ vs. Populism
Franklin Pierce just breathed a deep sigh of relief.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
Steve Bannon on ‘Broligarchs’ vs. Populism
From New York Times Opinion, I'm Ross Douthat. On this week's show, we're continuing my one-on-one conversations with figures who represent different, potentially clashing worldviews within the new Trump administration. Two weeks ago, I talked to venture capitalist Mark Andreessen about the newest faction in Trump world, the so-called tech right.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
Steve Bannon on ‘Broligarchs’ vs. Populism
And it was more. Let me go back for a minute, though, to to the genesis. Right. Yeah. So and let me let me tell you what. I see as sort of the Tea Party to Trump narrative. And you can tell me what's right or wrong with this story. To me, I agree. The Tea Party comes in as sort of the first reaction on the right to bailouts, to the financial crisis.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
Steve Bannon on ‘Broligarchs’ vs. Populism
But it starts out with, you know, Rick Santelli giving this famous cable news speech. But he's not talking about the biggest Wall Street bailouts, right? He's talking about basically bailouts for homeowners. Yeah.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
Steve Bannon on ‘Broligarchs’ vs. Populism
And this turns into for a little while in the history of the Tea Party, a narrative that sort of works well, I think, with what used to be movement conservatism, this narrative that the only problem here is big government. You know, there's just too much spending. We have to cut spending. This gets taken up by Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
Steve Bannon on ‘Broligarchs’ vs. Populism
They run in 2012 on big plans to overhaul Medicare and Social Security. That version loses. And then Trump comes in. as someone who has no background in movement conservatism, like yourself, not a conservative, right, a populist, comes in and says, well, actually, we're going to protect Social Security and Medicare, right? We're not going to be the big government cutters. We're going to be
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
Steve Bannon on ‘Broligarchs’ vs. Populism
economic nationalists. We're going to do industrial policy. We're going to change the trade rules. We're going to cut immigration and, you know, try and raise wages that way and so on. And that, to me, it's some of the same energy that's in the Tea Party, but it's a pretty different agenda and a clearer break in principle with what came before. This is just in 2016. No, no, no.
The Ezra Klein Show
Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
Like there's sort of an idea that you get from religious conservative supporters of Trump that you have these figures in the Bible or Christian history who are rulers, who are sinful in various ways, but maybe in a way like I've been describing, sort of advance God's cause despite their sins and failings.
The Ezra Klein Show
Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
I don't really think of Trump that way, but he is committed in an explicit way to Christianity. And To me, the bargain with Trump has always been, for religious conservatives, some mix of protection and support, a transactional bargain, and then more recently, a kind of hope that some kind of renewal of American dynamism can sort of bring
The Ezra Klein Show
Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
religion itself back with it, which I will say is a hope that I have indulged in myself, that it's like, OK, you have different varieties of post-Christianity out there and you don't want to ally with the Andrew Tates, but you do want to ally with the people who have sort of big hopes for the future rather than a woke progressivism that just seems sort of inflected with cultural despair.
The Ezra Klein Show
Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
That would be an argument that I think a Christian who was trying to sort of explain to themselves how they find themselves in alliance with Elon Musk
The Ezra Klein Show
Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
might say, you know, better Elon, who has some good desires and believes that humanity is good in some way and wants a sort of more dynamic future, better that than pure pessimism, that climate change is going to kill us all and structural racism means we deserve it kind of perspective. That would be the argument.
The Ezra Klein Show
Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
Yeah. I mean, I know the meek will inherit the earth is a famous, I would say renunciation more than meekness.
The Ezra Klein Show
Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
Yeah, I mean, I think the... aspect of populism, conservative populism, right-wing populism, whatever you want to call it, that does see itself in clear continuity with Christian ideas and Christian views, basically holds
The Ezra Klein Show
Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
that it is speaking on behalf of the weak and the oppressed, people who don't have a voice in society, and those people are the native-born working class of the Western world who have been asked to bear inappropriate burdens, beginning with economic... I'm just framing the case, right? Beginning with the economic burdens imposed by...
The Ezra Klein Show
Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
free trade regimes that sent their jobs overseas and continuing with the burden of, again, this is the argument of sort of social disorder and breakdown associated with the drug trade in a globalized world, the free movement of peoples that sort of transforms cities and neighborhoods and in ways that, again, fall most heavily on
The Ezra Klein Show
Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
lower middle class Americans and are sort of avoided and evaded by the upper class. The narrative is basically that the beneficiaries of globalization are the equivalent of the rich person in various of Jesus's parables. And certainly Jesus does not hesitate at various moments in the Gospels to say pretty harsh things about people who have betrayed their leadership role.
The Ezra Klein Show
Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
Well, there were other passages in that column that are worth emphasizing. But yeah, I stand by that reading of the Trump phenomenon. I think one of the ways in which my sense of politics generally has changed over the course of the Trump era is just I have more appreciation for weird forces that are outside, certainly outside the control of people who write about politics.
The Ezra Klein Show
Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
One reason I pushed back on meekness is, yes, Jesus uses the word meek, but Jesus himself is not a meek figure. You can go through the New Testament and find plenty of cases where Jesus says incredibly harsh things, mostly about powerful people, about sinners, where Jesus cleanses the temple and drives the money lenders out. and curses the fig tree that doesn't bear fruit.
The Ezra Klein Show
Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
No, and I think, as I said before, you have what you're describing as Christian and pagan tendencies braided together in the Trump administration. And I think that not all but many of the things that you describe absolutely reflect more of a... pagan sensibility than the Christian one.
The Ezra Klein Show
Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
But I agree with you that particular steps the Trump administration has taken in this term are not Christian, anti-Christian. And I think the forces, you know, I mean, I think it started with the cuts to foreign aid. I think you can completely justify some kind of renovation of the foreign aid program. Christians are not bound to support any particular set of programs.
The Ezra Klein Show
Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
But I think the way in which the foreign aid programs were reshuffled and cut off and so on was a failure of Christian duty in a pretty obvious way. And the core motivations there were just different from the motivations, the evangelical motivations of the Bush era and reflected, frankly, just overall the decline of Christianity. Christianity in American life since then.
The Ezra Klein Show
Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
I will just say, though, since, you know, we're taking a pretty hard line of critique, I think you watch this happen all the time on the left in different ways over the last five or 10 years, where people who I considered sensible, good, well-meaning, moderate people were in a coalition with
The Ezra Klein Show
Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
with people who had more intensity, more passion, more zeal, who made a certain set of demands on them that led people I knew and admired and respected to, I think, compromise their own values in ways that also had sort of real-world material consequences.
The Ezra Klein Show
Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
I don't want to, like, re-litigate... I don't want to re-litigate wokeness, but part of the nature of politics in a landscape where there's no kind of religious consensus, there's no kind of moral consensus, right, is that... forces that appear to have energy behind them.
The Ezra Klein Show
Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
Again, to go back to where we started, world historical energy, perhaps, will sort of draw people who have convictions that should put them in tension with those views into certain kinds of compromises. But I agree.
The Ezra Klein Show
Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
I absolutely think, I do not admire the way that the Trump administration approaches any of the policies that you're talking about, from humanitarian aid to the deportations to El Salvador.
The Ezra Klein Show
Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
You can't have lived through the Trump era without As a conservative columnist or newspaper writer and not have the sense of how fundamentally unimportant columnists are, what happens in American politics. It is a consistent exercise in humility. It is. Well, but even beyond that, you and I both grew up in a period that was, I think, reasonably described as a kind of timeout period.
The Ezra Klein Show
Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
Right. So, well, two things. One is that, yes, you are describing the story of both Judaism and Christianity's engagement with history and fallen human nature.
The Ezra Klein Show
Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
And this is something that is, in fact, advertised in both the Old Testament and the New Testament and all of history since, is that the story of the Jewish people in the Old Testament is not a story of people who were chosen by God and given a bunch of commandments and then obeyed them all. It's a story of people who remained the chosen people despite failing in every possible way, including
The Ezra Klein Show
Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
to fit our conversation, repeated flirtations with heathenism and paganism and idolatry. And then you can obviously tell a similar story, you know, the New Testament, Christians don't have political power, but the apostles are always screwing up and messing up. And then, of course, the history of Christianity's entanglement with political power is filled with sins and failings that, again, like...
The Ezra Klein Show
Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
This era's set are, you know, are sort of not atypical, I guess. But then the second point that I want to push you on is like, what kind of argument is this that you think you're going to win with religious believers who disagree with you? You're like, well, I don't believe in your religion. But I really wish that you would follow your religion so that your politics were more aligned with mine.
The Ezra Klein Show
Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
Like, that's just not much of an argument at all. And to the extent that all of liberalism, the ideology that you subscribe to, trades on inherited ideas from Christianity about morality and equality and so on, while you've jettisoned the portrait of the universe, the metaphysical structure that gives them meaning.
The Ezra Klein Show
Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
I think it's really hard from that point of view for you to get anywhere in arguments with people who still believe in that structure because you're essentially saying, I've stripped away the conceptual framework that makes your moral ideas make sense, but now I'm going to complain that you're not living up to your moral ideas. I just think that's a really weak argument.
The Ezra Klein Show
Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
Oh, but I'm not arguing it. Well, you're saying it to me. I'm right here.
The Ezra Klein Show
Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
You're arguing. You're expressing sorrowful disappointment that Christians are not living up to a worldview that you think is false. Well, I think parts of it are.
The Ezra Klein Show
Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
Ezra, does anything about our long relationship suggest that you could possibly offend me? I've known you long enough to know when you're getting a bit heated. That's totally different. Heatedness, I mean, as I was saying, the New Testament is filled with heated encounters.
The Ezra Klein Show
Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
Christianity does not provide some kind of incredibly strong bulwark against powerful people doing the kinds of things that powerful people do, which means self-interested conquest of various kinds and so on.
The Ezra Klein Show
Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
from grand historical dramas. It was not the end of history in the totalizing sense, but the kind of Francis Fukuyama view of the post-Cold War era as one that had a certain kind of predictability and order and stability. History felt under control. History felt under control, right? And the reality is that much of human history is just not under control in that way.
The Ezra Klein Show
Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
What it does provide is an ongoing internal critique that those powerful people have to wrestle with and address in ways that are fairly unique in the historical relationship of power and piety. So if you look at something like, to take the most famous example maybe, the Spanish conquest of the Americas.
The Ezra Klein Show
Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
In terms of what is actually done in the course of the Spanish conquest of the Americas, you can find plenty of terrible crimes that you, Ezra Klein, would say, well, you know, what good is your religion if your civilization commits these kind of crimes?
The Ezra Klein Show
Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
But from the very beginning, in Spain itself, in the heart of super Catholic, like, you know, counter-Reformation era Spain, there's an ongoing and agonizing and sometimes intensely legal and practical, sometimes high-level philosophical theological debate that
The Ezra Klein Show
Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
that subjects the behavior of the Spanish conquistadors and others to this kind of sustained critique and leads to, at various times, sometimes successful, mostly unsuccessful reform efforts driven by the Catholic monarchy of Spain and ultimately
The Ezra Klein Show
Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
builds out and influences everything from the anti-slavery movement in the 18th and 19th century that's ultimately successful down to contemporary ideas about human rights and international law that, again, today's secular liberals take for granted as a kind of scripture. All of that emerges out of the efforts of serious Christians in a context of profound
The Ezra Klein Show
Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
historical temptation and constant sinfulness to sort of generate from within the resources of their religion and i think you know if you take the trump administration for instance it's not as though you cannot find christian critiques of trump administration cruelty they just are not at the moment the primary thing i would expect i mean we'll find out right we're
The Ezra Klein Show
Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
three months into a kind of shock and awe administration. And people have been sort of, I think people have been sort of baffled and surprised by some of the turns that things have taken. But certainly people I take seriously within conservative Christianity have spoken out against things like the cuts to humanitarian aid or anything like that.
The Ezra Klein Show
Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
But again, I completely agree with you that history supplies constant tests of what your religion is for. And there's no end until the end to the testing. And sometimes you succeed. More often you fail, but hopefully you do something that has good effects down the road. And sometimes you fail entirely, and then maybe God... sifts you and finds you wanting. I'm not kidding here, right?
The Ezra Klein Show
Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
This is actually like, it is important to see every moment as a potential moral test that you might well be failing. I'm a conservative Christian, you could say. I'm a member of the Christian right for your purposes, right? As Christianity has weakened in American life, a really hard question has become like, who is the most dangerous of your different enemies?
The Ezra Klein Show
Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
Or who is most threatening to the Christian view of the good society? Is it a woke progressivism that wants to, again, this would just be the narrative, right? I think it has, you know, wants to abolish basic ideas about differences between the sexes. It supports, you know, abortion at any stage in pregnancy.
The Ezra Klein Show
Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
That's hostile to the basic religious liberties of Christians, again, from the conservative Christian point of view. Is it Donald Trump's populism with its heathen cruelties? Is it transhumanism? Like, is the final boss of this era that religious believers will have to confront actually Silicon Valley? And if it is, like, can you make alliances within Silicon Valley?
The Ezra Klein Show
Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
And there are forces that move through history, generally forces that move through history that are sort of hard to predict and assess. But I do think often they are connected to specific personalities. And there is some kind of marriage between particular personalities and particular moments.
The Ezra Klein Show
Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
Is it better to be with Elon Musk and his 117 children than to be with some other people involved?
The Ezra Klein Show
Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
It's pushing transhumanism forward very fast, if it can. Well, but there's also different transhumanisms, like, which, you know, what... Anyway, all I'm... No, these are actually... These are things that I, myself, am profoundly uncertain about in this moment. Like, what is the greatest danger from a Christian perspective to the future of the human race? I'm not entirely sure.
The Ezra Klein Show
Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
Well, one can use the word materialist in different ways. Sure.
The Ezra Klein Show
Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
I mean the view that all of existence, life, the universe, and everything is finally reducible to matter in motion. That matter is primary and mind is secondary rather than the other way around. I don't mean materialism in terms of Madonna's material girl or something like that, although the two can be connected.
The Ezra Klein Show
Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
So one of the various arguments in my book is that disenchantment is fake, fundamentally. The idea that you can enter a secular age where once upon a time people had wild religious experiences, but now we inhabit the iron cage of modernity and all of those are off the table, that just doesn't describe reality.
The Ezra Klein Show
Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
mystical experience religious experience it's not just the impulse like i think secular liberals are very comfortable saying oh well there's always a religious impulse but it's more than that it's that people have encounters with god whatever god may be some kind of higher reality that enters them and transforms them and gives them visions and gives them intense experiences or maybe they have them on the verge of death and come back to tell about them you know this is just a feature of human life it's a very profound and important feature of human life
The Ezra Klein Show
Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
And the idea of a man of destiny, a great man of history, is a useful way of thinking about that when it happens, as I think it has happened with Donald Trump, the rise of populism, the crackup of the liberal order, and so on. The reason I laughed at the outset is that it's important to stress that someone can be a man of destiny and be bad.
The Ezra Klein Show
Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
Maybe it can be explained in non-religious terms. Maybe there's some reductive explanation, but there isn't a good one on offer right now. And so the persistence of that means that religion always regenerates itself because even under conditions where almost nobody is committed to a particular church or creed, people are going to go on having, you know, dramatic encounters, right?
The Ezra Klein Show
Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
Like someone like, you know, Barbara Ehrenreich, who's famous. I had her on for this book. Right, famous left liberal writer, wrote a whole book called- And a famous atheist. Yes, famous atheist called Living with a Wild God, right?
The Ezra Klein Show
Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
And it was just a book about a very secular person who had a lot of religious experiences, like experiences that if you went and read William James or read like a medieval Catholic mystic or something would be totally familiar. And she, you know, didn't have sort of a framework, a conceptual framework to fully process them and wrote a great book, really interesting book about it.
The Ezra Klein Show
Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
Right. So this is Michael Shermer, who is one of the more famous professional skeptical debunkers of religious claims, supernatural things, and so on. And in one of his books, but he's told this story several times to his great credit, he was getting married and his wife had, I'm going to butcher this slightly, but had a great uncle named
The Ezra Klein Show
Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
who had been very close to her and was the kind of person who would have given her away at the wedding, but had passed away. So she was feeling sort of lonely and isolated, and they had a radio that had come from him. And the radio was broken, didn't work, had never worked. Shermer had tried to fix it. It just didn't work. It was broken, right?
The Ezra Klein Show
Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
And at the end of the wedding, during the reception, they heard music from the back of the house and went back into a back room, and there was the radio playing a love song. And I think it like transitioned from that to some kind of classical music for the late later in the evening and then shut off and never worked again.
The Ezra Klein Show
Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
And this experience, you know, affected Schirmer again to his credit, right? It was like evidence against interest. And I think, again, you have to sort of trust, as always with these stories, right, you have to sort of trust his general reliability and so on, that it wasn't just that, like, there was a battery that was jiggled or something.
The Ezra Klein Show
Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
The radio really didn't work and really never worked again. There really was no obvious material way that this could have happened. Shermer, in the end, works out a theory of the multiverse where in some different timeline, much like in the movie Interstellar, His wife's great uncle is capable of accessing our timeline. And to Shermer, this is sort of an escape from like supernatural explanations.
The Ezra Klein Show
Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
But one reason to just tell that story is that, as I think you know, because I was joking about your show being the epitome of secularization, the apogee, whatever, people have experiences like this all the time. This is why I'm not a materialist. Right. This is a very commonplace kind of experience. Not super commonplace. You're not going to have one tomorrow, probably.
The Ezra Klein Show
Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
But like this stuff just is part of the warp and woof of reality. And so to finally long-windedly answer your original question, I think what happens in conditions when you have weak institutional religions and a secular expert class that is not militantly atheistic, but sort of says, you know, officially these things don't happen, is that people feel like they can't really go all the way up to
The Ezra Klein Show
Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
Someone can be a great man of history and be worth opposing. You can look back at Napoleon and say, man, he was sort of above and beyond in terms of historical forces and also root for Wellington at Waterloo. That's okay.
The Ezra Klein Show
Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
the creator god, Yahweh, Jehovah, outside of time and space. And they start looking for sort of intermediate powers to become a kind of locus for their own spiritual impulses. You know, stuff with psychedelics, stuff with literal paganism, including stuff on the right.
The Ezra Klein Show
Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
And then the interesting zone, in a way, is AI, which is the place where sort of scientific ideas meet a kind of, you know, slightly... supernaturalist sense of like the machine God as this power that is into which we are going to commend ourselves. But yeah, and I think that tendency, and this is what Christians would say, but that tendency is bad.
The Ezra Klein Show
Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
It's not that secondary spiritual powers don't exist in the universe. There are, in fact, angels and demons and things like that, saints and other powers, perhaps more mysterious still. But not all those powers have human good in mind, and it's better to approach them through one of the big old traditional religions that tries to subject them to a kind of higher ordering.
The Ezra Klein Show
Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
Let me hold you there, because we'll get to this.
The Ezra Klein Show
Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
Well, a couple things. So first of all, I don't think that the case for not being a materialist is a case for sort of total unruliness. To the contrary, I think part of the case for not being a materialist is precisely the order of of the universe.
The Ezra Klein Show
Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
One of the problems that materialism has, that you sort of gestured at, is accounting for the specific ways in which the universe is ordered, the beauty and precision and symmetry involved, and also, as far as we can tell, the extreme unlikeliness that this particular order would be selected for unless Whoever selected it were interested in listening to lots of podcasts.
The Ezra Klein Show
Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
No, you know, creating planets, stars, and conscious beings. So you have the religious argument is an argument for overarching structure. And then the ways in which it is weird are not themselves entirely random. Like there are patterns in spiritual experience. There's no sort of predictability to it overall, right? But the kinds of experiences that people have have a certain kind of consistency.
The Ezra Klein Show
Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
You can track different kinds of spiritual experiences across different cultures. You can track them in near-death experiences. You can track them in terms of, like, studies of what appear to be miraculous healings and so on.
The Ezra Klein Show
Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
And, again, there just seems to be a way in which you have this overarching order, you have some sort of mysterious relationship between our consciousness and that overarching order, and then you have a lot of religious experiences that seem like higher forces trying to be in touch with us and have some kind of relationship with us.
The Ezra Klein Show
Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
That's the basic picture that, again, most of the big religions offer, allowing for all their differences. Buddhism and Christianity have pretty substantial differences, but they each describe a universe that's generally like that.
The Ezra Klein Show
Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
Arguably, from your premises, you should probably be Hindu.
The Ezra Klein Show
Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
I think that it is very hard to go through the kind of drama that Trump himself personally went through in... We can go back further, but let's just say the world that ran from January 6th through his return to power. And if you're on his side through that story, not come away with the feeling that you were sort of moving with the wave of history. For people in Trump's circle, this sense of...
The Ezra Klein Show
Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
I think that there's a balance that you have to strike in looking for a particular religious tradition as opposed to just being a kind of open-ended seeker. And you want, I think, a religious tradition that has a set of sort of core views that make sense of a lot of what you've described.
The Ezra Klein Show
Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
and also a certain degree of flexibility and uncertainty about some of the things that don't fit into exactly its world picture. But yeah, the wide array of religious experiences, the data on its own would make you a kind of, like the term I use in the book is perennialist, right? This is the theory that all the great religions encode some of the truth about reality.
The Ezra Klein Show
Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
You kind of can't go wrong, right? with any of them, as long as they're big enough and old enough, but none of them are like the fieffulness of truth. I would say, though, just as a Roman Catholic, that Roman Catholicism, again, one of the things that I appreciate about it is that it has a certain kind of supernatural Not in terms of all its formal doctrines.
The Ezra Klein Show
Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
It's not like you open up the Catechism of the Catholic Church and they're like, well, here's what we think about aliens. I mean, it's in there. It's on. But the pages are taped.
The Ezra Klein Show
Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
In the Vatican, there is some stuff about that stuff. But, you know, if you look at actual the history of Catholic cultures, for instance, in terms of like the afterlife, right, zones like purgatory and limbo and so on. have some kind of connection to people's arguments about ghosts and hauntings and that form of the supernatural.
The Ezra Klein Show
Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
Catholic cultures have always been pretty hospitable to ideas about fairies. I don't know how I've ended up on Nice New York Times podcast talking about the good people, but... the idea of sort of like there are angels and demons and then there are these sort of weird like trickster beings. If you ask me to like make a case for Catholicism's capaciousness, I could make that case.
The Ezra Klein Show
Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
But then the other thing is, and this is, I'm curious what you think about this, right? Is that one of the things I argue in the book, it's not an approvable assertion, right? But it's the idea that if there is this overall belief structure and order to the universe.
The Ezra Klein Show
Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
And if there seem to be sort of higher powers interested in talking to human beings, then maybe you should assume that like God is not out to trick you. The universe is not a trick. Like, it's not actually presenting you with this sort of impossible open-ended question. It's basically, there's a certain number of big religions. They've stood the test of time.
The Ezra Klein Show
Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
They've had a pretty powerful shaping influence on human history. Why wouldn't you go in for one of them rather than saying, you know, in good California style, like I just have to remain perfectly open. I think that if you can accept that the universe might have been created with us in mind, then you should give deference. So I want to say that I loved the book.
The Ezra Klein Show
Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
It doesn't matter what the polls say or the naysayers say. Certainly doesn't matter what squishy New York Times conservatives say, right? They saw the bottom. Trump was disgraced and ruined and persecuted, and he was going to be sent to jail.
The Ezra Klein Show
Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
You know that as well. Right. I guess—see, I think you're making actually precisely the case for, in different ways, both Judaism and Christianity as probably divinely founded, which is to say these religions have survived and persisted across centuries. multiple different kinds of cultures, multiple different kinds of regimes in each era, exactly as you say.
The Ezra Klein Show
Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
Elements of these religions have made compromises, have intertwined themselves in profound ways, right? Like, you couldn't get more intertwined than medieval Catholicism and medieval feudalism. And I think if you are a secular historian looking at that intertwinement, you'd say probably whenever feudalism breaks up, Christianity is going to go away too. Or Judaism, right?
The Ezra Klein Show
Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
Judaism is a, you know, religion of temple prayer, religion that's centered on the temple and the Holy of Holies and everything else. You look at that as a secular historian, you're like, well, obviously, you know, if some empire, we'll call it the Romans, comes along and destroys that, then, you know, Judaism is going to disappear too. That's not what happens.
The Ezra Klein Show
Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
And then the next thing you know, assassins' bullets were missing him by a hair's breadth, and he was making this incredible, unprecedented historical comeback. And having lived through that, I think it's hard to be swayed by people saying, hey, guys, you know, your poll numbers are not looking so great. You know, this tariff rollout, not that well thought out.
The Ezra Klein Show
Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
Instead, you have these periods of intertwinement that are then shattered in some way. And in each case, I mean, the first thing to say is that the radicalism that you describe persists in those eras as well. And again, to go back to the point I was making earlier, this is something the religions themselves advertise.
The Ezra Klein Show
Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
The Old Testament, the Hebrew Bible, right, is a story where the Jews are failing your tests, the tests that you, Ezra Klein, are setting. You're like, well, if this religion was really from God, they probably wouldn't all become idolaters. And they're like, Ezra, here's our holy book. It's all about how we became idolaters. But guess what?
The Ezra Klein Show
Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
Then God did something new and people did something new and the story changed. And I mean, I just think what you're offering, I think you think it's, I don't want to, I think, yeah, I think you think you're setting God free a bit from what you see as the corruptions of Trump era Christianity or medieval Inquisition era Christianity. And you're like, no, God is bigger than that. Therefore, no.
The Ezra Klein Show
Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
A religion that is always getting entangled with worldly power, that can't be where God is. But what you end up with is a council of despair where you're like, well, the only religion that would be worthy of God is one that would be exterminated within like 50 years of its founding by the cruel state. You're ending up saying that a religion good enough to join could not exist on the earth.
The Ezra Klein Show
Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
I'm not trying to be too aggressive, Ezra. I think that, as you know from reading the book, I think that the intuition that a lot of modern people have about that even if you can see that materialism is too limited, there is just this fundamental unknowability hanging over everything. I think that intuition is mistaken. I think it is correct about certain ideas
The Ezra Klein Show
Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
aspects of religion i think there are issues in religion and questions in religion that hang over every tradition imperfectly resolved i'm not here to tell you i've resolved the problem of evil problem of evil is a real problem it's a real issue again i think it's an issue that's sort of there and acknowledged and wrestled with throughout the old and new testament but i don't think you're going to sit down and just reason your way into a solution to that problem i do think though that you can get a little bit further like just even in the example
The Ezra Klein Show
Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
that you cited. I don't know what your sort of metaphysical perspectives as a kid were, but I certainly agree that I would personally find it more comforting to believe that death is a mystery than to be Richard Dawkins, right, and believe that death is just the absolute end and never could be anything else.
The Ezra Klein Show
Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
What are the implications of, you know, sending people to El Salvador without due process? Like, those are sort of normal, quotidian-sounding objections to administration policy. And I think at least for some people... caught up in the Trump phenomenon, they just seem sort of incommensurate to the reality that you're like riding a historical wave.
The Ezra Klein Show
Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
I just think it is, in fact, more probable than not that after you die, you will meet God, whatever God is, and be asked to account for your life and so on. And that's not inherently comforting.
The Ezra Klein Show
Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
But I think it is—that's quite terrifying. But I think that it is something that is— reasonable to believe that should give you a little bit more than just a sense of mystery. And more than that, I think it is what God himself in his infinite mystery and power wants you to believe, which is why he has me here. talking to you. Heaven sent. I've often thought of you in my life as heaven sent, Ross.
The Ezra Klein Show
Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
Yeah, I don't think you should take on faith that the major world religions are providential. And I think you could imagine yourself, if you lived in a world where the dominant set of religions all practiced human sacrifice, and, you know, I mean, you can imagine that kind of situation. I think the case for taking the big religion seriously, therefore, you've push me on this effectively.
The Ezra Klein Show
Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
Yeah, can't just rest on their size and scale alone. You do also have to think that in the aggregate, they've had what you as someone who has, you know, particular moral intuitions given by God, one hopes at some level. have had a positive impact on the world and shaped it in positive ways. And also that they have, and this is also sort of important to my argument, that they do have real overlaps.
The Ezra Klein Show
Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
And I think that they do. I think the major world religions, if you look at them just and sort of analyze the ethical perspective of the major world religions, you do see a certain kind of overlap. It is not enough to say these things are big and present and you have to take it on faith that they're where God wants you to be.
The Ezra Klein Show
Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
You do also have to actually look at them and pass some kind of judgment on them.
The Ezra Klein Show
Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
One of the other arguments you make is that the organized— We should call them the good—you don't want to attract too much of their attention, so why don't you call them the good people?
The Ezra Klein Show
Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
Openness to the occult is not what I want to advertise. That's not how you want to talk about it? Well, I mean, the reality is that, like, you know, in the book, as you know, I have an entire chapter on sort of supernatural experience and weirdness. And I actually debated with myself how much to write about things that are explicitly demonic. Catholicism obviously has its special...
The Ezra Klein Show
Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
focus on this through the Office of the Exorcist. There's lots of literature on the demonic and demonic possession. And I ended up feeling quite uncomfortable writing about it too much. And so there's a couple paragraphs and some footnotes and people who are interested in it can follow that material. But there is a kind of, yeah, there's a kind of
The Ezra Klein Show
Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
balance that you want to strike as just an observer or a writer between sort of acknowledging those kind of weirder and darker and more disturbing realities, but not like focusing too much attention on them. And maybe the joke, or is it about saying the good people, right, is sort of part of that, part of that, hey, now, part of that perspective is
The Ezra Klein Show
Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
But I mean, this is one thing I'm absolutely certain about is that if there is a realm of supernatural experience that is real, that is not just your brain chemistry, you can access it maybe through altering your brain chemistry and taking ayahuasca and whatever. But if that reality is real, it is 100% dangerous. dangerous.
The Ezra Klein Show
Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
I don't mean like every aspect of it is dangerous, but I mean it is certainly dangerous. There are dangers within it. There are serious dangers within it.
The Ezra Klein Show
Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
So I have never taken psychedelics. I've never been at an ayahuasca retreat. This is entirely based on reading and conversations. My view is that some psychedelics almost certainly open you to contact with non-human spiritual entities and that they do so in a way that is different from other forms of spiritual experience in that, again, not in every case, but it can be sort of a shortcut.
The Ezra Klein Show
Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
but that shortcut means that you're entering these landscapes without the kind of preparation that not only the traditional religions, but the shamans who use ayahuasca in the Amazon, right, or wherever they use it, would say is necessary for these kind of encounters.
The Ezra Klein Show
Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
And there's, you know, a Twitter joke or a social media joke, right, about, you know, getting one-shotted by a six-dimensional Mesoamerican demon or something like that that
The Ezra Klein Show
Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
people make about these kind of drugs and that's a joke but I don't think it's entirely a joke and so yeah I think that that possibility is real and it does not at the same time mean that lots of people can't take these drugs and have mystical experiences that just sort of convince them that there's more to reality than just the material and That is a correct view.
The Ezra Klein Show
Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
So in that sense, the drugs teach you something real about the world. But it can be like anything in human life. And one of the points I try and stress is that religion is not like out there in some compartment where it's totally different from every other thing and you can't argue about it the way you argue about other things and so on.
The Ezra Klein Show
Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
No, like in other aspects of human life, dealing with the supernatural is like dealing with the natural. There are good things and bad things and dangers and opportunities, and you just want to be aware of that before you throw yourself into a realm of experience that you might not be prepared for. But I haven't done it, and you have, or have you? Say what? Have you? Yes.
The Ezra Klein Show
Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
So you have, you know, immediate information that I may not have. But, you know, one could argue that,
The Ezra Klein Show
Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
doing those kind of drugs and coming back from it, not with a sense that you've been possessed by a Mesoamerican demon, but coming back with a sense that, man, there's more to the universe than I thought, but I can never possibly figure out the truth, also could be a deception that has been imposed upon you.
The Ezra Klein Show
Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
Can you give me a bit more? No.
The Ezra Klein Show
Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
I've done a lot of these conversations, right? And this is not the first time. when someone in a conversation who is officially sort of a mysterian, as you are, has said, oh, but by the way, I did have that one experience where it did sound like God was talking to me. I've had a few conversations like that.
The Ezra Klein Show
Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
But why, I guess, why isn't that, so again, without like over-describing your own experience to you, Like, why isn't that enough to say, okay, the God of my fathers in some way gave me a glimpse of what, you know, why we're Jews and not Mysterians. And I'm just going to go to my—I mean, you need to pick a politically appropriate synagogue and so on, right?
The Ezra Klein Show
Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
And there are all kinds of issues with that. But I'm just going to go—I'm going to go to synagogue even if I don't feel— Gnosis? Like, I mean, I don't feel gnosis from Sunday Mass with my oversupply of children, right? I mean, occasionally, maybe— You seem more comfortable with that than I am. Yeah, a lot—well, this is an interesting psychological thing that I've found in these discussions.
The Ezra Klein Show
Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
I think part of it is— having been around other people who had spiritual experiences, right, and sort of observed them and therefore accepted that, like, okay, some people have profound experiences. I don't. Maybe I would if I took ayahuasca, but it's okay for me to be a person who isn't getting gnosis all the time but is, like... I feel good at Mass, not always, but most of the time.
The Ezra Klein Show
Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
But it just seems to me that, like, you know, when you're called before the throne of, you know, the Most High, and the cherubim and seraphim are there, and you're like, well, I wanted some gnosis, and God is like, I gave you gnosis. I gave you the big dose, right?
The Ezra Klein Show
Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
No, that's fair. And honestly, we had, I mean, as a kid, we had experiences like that in my own family where my parents, especially my mother, we were Episcopalian, which is, you know, a very anti-mystical part of Christianity overall. And my mother had these intense experiences in a context of like charismatic healing services. And then we wanted a church to go to.
The Ezra Klein Show
Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
And it was hard to find, starting in mainline Protestantism, a church where it seemed like the thing that she had encountered was also there in some way. And I think in the end, you know, we went through a lot of places and ended up as Catholics in part because I do think Catholicism does a good job of saying, look, we're not expecting the Holy Spirit to descend constantly all the time.
The Ezra Klein Show
Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
We have, you know, it's a ritual religion and the sacraments work whether or not you're feeling a blast of God's presence, but it is a reasonable desire to feel like the encounter you have has some relationship to what is being done on the altar or done in the rituals. I think that's completely understandable.
The Ezra Klein Show
Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
Yeah, I think there's also a way in which the kind of mystic drama of his return to power is also sort of projected back onto his first term, where The experience of Trump's first term, not just for liberals and Democrats, but for a lot of Republicans, was obviously sort of chaotic and bizarre and difficult and so on.
The Ezra Klein Show
Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
No, I think that's a fair question. And I think one answer is that they, like all things that operate in reality, from a Christian perspective, they must have some providential expression. And the Catholic view basically is that you're not supposed to try and commune with spirits
The Ezra Klein Show
Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
speak to the dead in certain ways like you shouldn't go to a seance like there's a certain set of supernatural experiences that catholics are not supposed to seek out and there's some biblical warrant for this and there's sort of the the explicit teaching teaching of the church and the simplest way to express why that is maybe is to say that the church thinks there's a certain set of things that we know god is present in
The Ezra Klein Show
Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
And then there's a certain set of things that are just like opening doors. And God and his providence can certainly be there when you open the door, but we don't have any kind of guarantee of that. And by opening the door, you are opening yourself in a way that is fundamentally unsafe. Now, again, does that mean that someone can't come to God by taking a psychedelic?
The Ezra Klein Show
Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
No, absolutely someone can under this theory. But for the church itself or for Christians in general, there is a sense, I think, that like, well, once you are in, then you aren't supposed to go looking in those places anymore because we just don't know what the potential dangers are there.
The Ezra Klein Show
Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
But there were ways in which the results of that term were better than people anticipated. I think certainly they were better than I anticipated. I expected, as like a columnist observer, economic crisis and foreign policy crisis to sort of define Trump's first four years in office. And prior to COVID, they didn't. The economy was in good shape.
The Ezra Klein Show
Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
Right, and to be clear, I don't think... that one should ever rest the case for the existence of God or the supernatural on psychedelic experiences alone, anything like that.
The Ezra Klein Show
Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
I think what one should take seriously is the fact that clearly our minds exist in a dynamic relationship to our bodies and to physical reality. And religious experience, again, to take the Barbara Ehrenreich example, there is the kind of religious experience that falls on people unbidden. In some way. And I have seen this happen.
The Ezra Klein Show
Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
And I think it's a little bit hard to tell a brain chemistry story where it's like, why do human beings suddenly have this God apprehension thing that just sort of turns on? Like, where did this apprehension device come from? All our other apprehension devices are evolved to meet some sort of actual reality.
The Ezra Klein Show
Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
But we do. Yes, but religious experience and spiritual experience are at the very least in a distinct category from mental illness in that people who have religious experiences are very often entirely sane and entirely aware of the strangeness of the experience they've had and so on. Again, which doesn't, I take your point about the Oliver Sacks stuff, like you could just say, okay, well,
The Ezra Klein Show
Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
people's brains can misfire in this way and it yields mental illness and they misfire in that way and they think they're encountering the numinous or something like that. I don't think that's an impossible view to hold. All I'm saying is that the religious world pictures already takes it for granted
The Ezra Klein Show
Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
that your body, the physicality of your body, has some kind of connection to your apprehension of the divine. And most of the time, you are not supposed to be apprehending the divine. And this goes to your, you know, to go back to your vision, right? The idea that, like, religion is a scaffolding. Okay, like, reality itself is kind of... The Silicon Valley guys would say it's a simulation, right?
The Ezra Klein Show
Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
Okay, well, it's a world that you're supposed to be in. You're supposed to be in this world. Whatever God is up to doesn't work if we're not in this world most of the time. And having a spiritual experience is getting our mind a little bit out of this material world. But it's not the way things are supposed to work all the time. We're here as material embodied creatures for a reason.
The Ezra Klein Show
Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
I think you can make a case that his foreign policy in the first term worked better than Biden's. You can make a strong case, actually, that it worked better than Biden's foreign policy.
The Ezra Klein Show
Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
But yeah, I don't think there's anything...
The Ezra Klein Show
Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
Yeah, that's just the idea that whatever the mind or soul or consciousness is, is capable of this much wider apprehension of reality, including divine realities, whatever those may be, that aren't really fully compatible with being an embodied creature in the world. And so to be an embodied creature in the world...
The Ezra Klein Show
Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
your mind's capacities and experiences need to be reduced, funneled down to the sensory inputs being processed by your eyes and nose and mouth and ears. And so that's why when you have moments when you shake up the brain, when you put the brain in extreme circumstances via fasting and these kind of things, or when you reach the threshold of death,
The Ezra Klein Show
Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
the mind's experience doesn't actually seem to contract. It seems to expand. And one of the challenges in explaining something like near-death experiences from the materialist perspective is that they are described not as fragmentary hallucinations, dreamlike experiences, random, chaotic. They are described as more real than real, incredibly intense. They carry back into people's
The Ezra Klein Show
Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
And I think what's happened now is that not just people around him in the White House, but also congressional Republicans, people who, you know, would have doubts about the tariffs and so on, have sort of combined the mystical drama of
The Ezra Klein Show
Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
post near death experience lives. They cause big changes to people's near death experience lives. And it really is a little bit hard to tell an evolutionary just so story about why the brain is wired for some Darwinian reason to generate its most intense experiences at a time when for most people, you're just going to die. You talk in the book about something you call official knowledge.
The Ezra Klein Show
Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
Official knowledge is the knowledge about the world that is considered normal and respectable in publications like the New York Times, Ivy League universities, most Wikipedia entries. You can find very strange things on Wikipedia. You can, but to their credit, in a certain way, the editors of Wikipedia try to impose some of the same assumptions
The Ezra Klein Show
Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
about the world that are shared by most of the formal institutions of knowledge creation out there.
The Ezra Klein Show
Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
with the surprisingly successful first-term record, put them together and said, it's both that Trump has some sort of mystic intuition about what to do, and it's also that we doubted him before, but it all worked out okay. Now, obviously, the problem with that is that
The Ezra Klein Show
Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
Yes. No, I mean, that is the feeling that you have, right? And so I had, still have to some degree, but I'm much better, a chronic illness that is not officially recognized by the Centers for Disease Control. And indeed, to say that you have the chronic form of Lyme disease is to identify yourself in some way with... just the world of everyone from RFK Jr.
The Ezra Klein Show
Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
to, you know, holistic wellness practitioners, and so on, a whole world that is held in severe disrepute by official knowledge, official medical knowledge. You say kind of pointing at me. Pointing... No, no, no. I mean, I think at the, you know, this conversation has been the most serious blow to official knowledge since... No, I don't know. Yeah, and so that obviously... Like, I really was sick.
The Ezra Klein Show
Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
I really did get better using a combination of really strong antibiotics and other stranger things that are not recommended by the CDC. But it really did work, and I am morally certain both that chronic Lyme disease absolutely exists and the CDC's recommendations are absolutely wrong. So then the challenge is you've seen that the pillar of official truth has a hole in it.
The Ezra Klein Show
Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
How many holes does that mean that there are? And something that I have very self-consciously tried to do in my own thinking about this, and this applies to arguments about religion and religious belief as well, is to not assume that because official knowledge is wrong about one thing, it's wrong about everything. That seems like a big mistake. And two, not to assume that
The Ezra Klein Show
Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
because official knowledge is wrong about one thing, one important thing that really affected my life, that all evidentiary standards should be thrown out or anything like that. But that's clearly a really hard psychological balance to strike. I think you just see this. I saw it myself.
The Ezra Klein Show
Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
I spent a lot of time in worlds of chronic illness and alternative medicine, and people just, for totally understandable reasons, became full spectrum skeptics about anything the government said, anything that the American Medical Association said. It was just, if they're wrong about my illness and my experience, they must be wrong about The pull of that is incredibly strong.
The Ezra Klein Show
Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
And in the case of religion, right? Like, I think one of the things, understandably, that nice, secular, agnostic people fear about going too far with, like, my arguments is that the next thing you know, we're going to be... throwing out all of modern science and progress and locking up Galileo and so on, all of these things. And I don't want to say that that's not a legitimate fear.
The Ezra Klein Show
Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
One of the reasons it worked out okay was precisely that there were a bunch of people in the White House the first time around who didn't have a mystical sense of Trump's perspective or his goals or anything like that. And that is, I think, very clearly what is missing this time around. There are people in the White House who could play that role.
The Ezra Klein Show
Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
There clearly are ways in which religious belief and religious doctrine can end up being an impediment to finding out what is true about the world. I'm interested in what is true about the world in the end. That is my goal. And your goal, right? Hopefully, right? All of our goal as journalists is to figure out what is true about the world.
The Ezra Klein Show
Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
And I think, to my mind, very clearly, certain things are true about the world that have to do with God and the possibility of the supernatural that are not encompassed by current official knowledge. And I think the modern liberal project is correct that there are just limits to the kind of certainty you can have and how that certainty should cash out. Certainly, in politics.
The Ezra Klein Show
Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
So there is a balance. And yeah, anytime you're trying to correct an official consensus, you are looking for a balance where the correction doesn't become an overcorrection.
The Ezra Klein Show
Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
No, no, I absolutely do. Although, yeah, I mean, I would, on your last point. Yes, you would. Well, I would push harder on, I think one reason that Donald Trump is president again is precisely that the party of official knowledge is, seem to do a lot of really crazy things and that made people more sympathetic to the party of outsider knowledge.
The Ezra Klein Show
Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
But look, now the party of outsider knowledge is in power.
The Ezra Klein Show
Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
I think a lot of people expected Scott Besant, the Secretary of the Treasury, or Marco Rubio, the Secretary of State, to play the the kind of role that Gary Cohn and Steve Mnuchin and H.R. McMaster played in the first term. But no one is actually playing that role as far as anyone can sort of see.
The Ezra Klein Show
Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
Yes. And I think one of my disappointments about the Trump administration in the first three months is just how pure and uncut its outsiderism seems to be. And, you know, I think it was an open question when Trump was reelected. Would RFK Jr. be running HHS or would he be running the president's counsel on making America healthy again? Right. And
The Ezra Klein Show
Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
We got the timeline where he's running HHS, and you can multiply examples. And I think in many of those examples, you can see a version of the problem that I identified to you just now, which is that you can see it in the trade and tariffs debate, this assumption that the experts got something big wrong, and therefore, Peter Navarro should make trade policy.
The Ezra Klein Show
Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
The second does not follow from the first. The huge challenge for conservatism, right now, is to figure out how you generate some kind of stability of actual expertise in a party that is now temperamentally completely anti-establishment, populist, and so on.
The Ezra Klein Show
Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
I think there was a hope that the sort of Silicon Valley faction that migrated into the Republican camp, in part in reaction to some of the failures of expertise that you just acknowledged, would sort of play a version of that role. And I think definitely Elon Musk has not played a version of that role to date.
The Ezra Klein Show
Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
So the Republican Party is a party in search of a stable system of official knowledge generation besides whatever Donald Trump decides, right? And it doesn't have one at the moment for the foreseeable future.
The Ezra Klein Show
Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
So I'm going to give three books on religion that connect to my attempt to sort of shift what official knowledge or the official knowledge of New York Times podcast listeners think about religion. The first one is a book called from about 20 years ago by a physicist named Stephen Barr called Ancient Physics and Modern Faith.
The Ezra Klein Show
Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
that is, I think, despite being a little bit dated, is still really the best overall survey of sort of where arguments in modern physics that relate to religion stand and how a reasonable person might think about it. It's not a dogmatic book. It's a very open-minded and interesting book. So that's book one. Since we were talking about near-death experiences,
The Ezra Klein Show
Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
And so in an odd way, the very success of sort of Trump as man of destiny is unmaking the conditions that made his first term a success. But that is itself a dramatic arc. You know, if you're writing the novel of the story of sort of hubris and nemesis, that would be a characteristic way that hubris and nemesis would manifest themselves.
The Ezra Klein Show
Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
There's a million books about near-death experiences, many of them bad. I think people who are interested in this subject, interested in the conversation, one recommendation would be a book called After by Bruce Grayson, who's a, I think, psychiatrist or neuroscientist from the University of Virginia, who just has a good overview, I would say, from a perspective of a practicing physician.
The Ezra Klein Show
Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
of why people take these strange stories seriously and why it might unsettle a materialist worldview.
The Ezra Klein Show
Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
And the third book, I mean, honestly, Ezra, since you've, you know, maybe this is unnecessary since you conceded so much ground to the Mysterians, but I think a final book that's useful to people who listen to this show and are like, what are these two guys smoking talking about consciousness like this is a book that was very controversial in the philosophical community when it came out.
The Ezra Klein Show
Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
But a book called Mind and Cosmos by Thomas Nagel, who's a famous philosopher, not religious, but arguing for the fundamental limits and problems with a materialist framework on the world. And it is a very short book. book, which is why I don't hesitate to recommend it.
The Ezra Klein Show
Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
A lot of books about consciousness are not short, but this one I think you can read and get a sense of why intelligent people might at least be inclined towards an Ezra Klein-style mysterianism, if not quite towards the militant Catholicism of Ross Douthat. Ross, I enjoyed it a ton. Thank you very much. I enjoyed it as well, Ezra. Thank you so much.
The Ezra Klein Show
Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
Right. Well, I mean, I think a mistake that I think some religious people make is to see a kind of force of destiny at work in a particular figure and assume that that force of destiny must mean that God, the author of history, wants you to be on that person's side directly. But in fact, if you read, let's say, the Old Testament, there's all kinds of moments when God
The Ezra Klein Show
Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
God is working through figures to accomplish something in the world or to move history or the drama, the drama of salvation history, to put it in Christian terms, in a particular direction. But it doesn't mean that the instrument that God is working through is in fact the Messiah or the chosen one. If God sends the Babylonians to chastise the wicked kings of Israel,
The Ezra Klein Show
Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
It doesn't mean that you're supposed to necessarily say, oh, hail Nebuchadnezzar. You know, you are the chosen one. Sometimes I think you can see Trump in several different lights. You could say he's a man of destiny and therefore he is bringing about in some weird way that we didn't see coming the new American golden age. And this is obviously what a lot of people on the center right think.
The Ezra Klein Show
Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
wanted to believe, especially when it became clear that he was returning to power. Or you could say he's a great man of history who's unlocking some sort of change that was necessary, but bringing chaos in order to do it. I wrote a lot about the concept of decadence, this idea that the West, the developed world, was sort of stuck in these kind of cycles and needed to break out somehow.
The Ezra Klein Show
Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
But the reality is you often can't break out of decadence without decadence. a big, big mess. So maybe Trump is the agent of that mess. Doesn't mean he's a good person. Or finally, it could just be chastisement for everyone. All are punished, as Shakespeare said. I think all of those possibilities have to be taken seriously as readings of the Trump phenomenon.
The Ezra Klein Show
Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
I remember it, but the League of Shadows, right? Destroying Gotham.
The Ezra Klein Show
Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
Well, and I've carried on a couple of different running arguments throughout the Trump era that are going to continue, I guess. And one is with people on the right who have a sort of League of Shadows view of the overall situation, right? It's like things are so bad. that you might as well unleash chaos. You saw a lot of this in response to the tariffs.
The Ezra Klein Show
Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
People mostly on social media, real politicians don't say this, but people on social media who are like, fine, we need a 10-year reset of the whole global economy because things are so bad and so on. And I've spent a lot of time disagreeing with those people. I would prefer not to take the black pill, but I've also spent time disagreeing with
The Ezra Klein Show
Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
The kind of liberals and sometimes, you know, never Trump Republican critics of Trump who I feel like don't quite grasp why he's successful and what you need to do in response. Because I don't think he could be this successful if it were enough to just elect Joe Biden to fix our problem.
The Ezra Klein Show
Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
I mean, honestly, I think Trump may have come to some conception of belief in God after the assassination attempt. just sort of observing his comments a little bit. But I think of Trump as just sort of persistently as a kind of pagan or heathen figure, much more than he is a Christian figure, notwithstanding the attempts to sort of claim him as a kind of King David or Emperor Constantine, right?