Ross Douthat has been with the New York Times for the past 11 years. He writes a column twice a week, covering topics like the Pandemic, the Will of God, and what will happen to conservative Catholicism in the age of American despair. In our conversation, Ross tells me what it's like to be a conservative working at the Times, his thoughts on adapting conservative policies for populism, and his warnings of America s future in the midst of stagnation and decadence. He also discusses his new book, The Decadent Society: How We Became the Victims of Our Own Success, and why he thinks the best solution to America s problems has to come from cultural and religious revival, and that government can t do it alone. He also talks about the coronavirus epidemic, and why it's a good idea to try to spread the spread of the virus in order to spread good vibes everywhere. Ben Shapiro is the host of the conservative podcast The Weekly Standard and host of The Ben Shapiro Show on Fox News Radio. He is a frequent contributor to conservative publications and blogs at The Daily Wire, and is a regular contributor to the Weekly Standard, and has been featured on CNN, CNN, NPR, and the Atlantic, among other publications. He is also the author of five books, including The New Republic and The New York Review of Books, and he has been a frequent guest on the radio show on conservative radio stations across the country, including Sirius XM Radio and NPR. and CBS Radio. The View From The Ground Ground Zero and the National Post Offices. His latest book is out now, and is available on Amazon Prime and The Huffington Post. Subscribe to his new podcast, The Dark Side of the Internet as well as on Audible, Podchaser, and The Atlantic on the Apple Podcasts, and many other platforms, wherever else you get your favorite podcasting platform. You can find him on social media, including if you search for him, he is listening to his work. . Subscribe and subscribe to his podcast, Ben Shapiro s newest book The Best of Ben Shapiro's newest book is available here: or you can find Ben Shapiro on his podcast on the internet is a must-listeners can also be found on his social media account Ben s latest book, Ben s podcast on The Daily Mail, The Weekly Mail is .
00:00:00.000An ultimate solution to a lot of the problems that you and I agree face America, it has to come from cultural and religious revival, and government can't, like, will that into being.
00:00:10.000Articles like, Don't Be Fooled by America's Flattening Curve, No One Deserves to Die of COVID-19 in Jail, and Trump, Why Waste a Crisis?
00:00:19.000It's no surprise that one of America's most well-known media outlets leans to the left.
00:00:23.000But a few writers for that fabled newspaper are, on the right, voicing their opinion on the Times' pages.
00:00:28.000Ross Douthat is one of these few, and has been with the paper for the last 11 years.
00:00:32.000He's made a career of sharing conservative thought in liberal circles.
00:00:35.000Back in the day, Ross ran his high school newspaper, and founded an underground paper with none other than Michael Barbaro, host of the successful podcast, The Daily.
00:00:43.000As a Harvard student, he edited the campus' conservative newspaper and wrote for the Harvard Crimson, and after graduating, rose through the ranks at the Atlantic to be their senior editor.
00:00:53.000His latest is The Decadent Society, How We Became the Victims of Our Own Success.
00:00:58.000And, twice a week, he writes a New York Times column covering topics like the pandemic and the will of God, our liberals against marriage, what will happen to conservative Catholicism, the age of American despair, often exploring conservatism in the 21st century.
00:01:12.000In our conversation, Ross tells me what it's like to be a conservative working at the New York Times, his thoughts on adapting conservative policies for populism, and his warnings of America's future in the midst of stagnation and decadence.
00:01:23.000Welcome to the Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Specials.
00:01:36.000Just a reminder, we'll be doing some bonus questions with Ross near the end of the show, but the only way to get access to that part of the conversation is to become a member.
00:01:43.000So head on over to dailywire.com, become a member, you'll have access to all of the full conversations with every one of our awesome guests.
00:01:49.000Before we get started, I want to take a moment to give a shout out to all of our advertising partners who helped make this show possible.
00:01:55.000Honestly, without them, we couldn't keep the show going.
00:01:56.000And without you patronizing those advertising partners, they couldn't keep our show going.
00:02:00.000So we really appreciate you continuing to do business with our advertisers.
00:02:03.000We're all going to get through this together and we'll continue to bring you information and content that you want.
00:03:55.000Just in my time at the New York Times, American liberalism has moved rapidly towards becoming anti-abortion, towards skepticism of big government.
00:04:10.000I'm obviously kidding about the second part, but I do think it's a gift to get to write for a newspaper that does, you know, as the stereotypes suggest, but they're correct, our audience is predominantly liberal, and sometimes it's a little stressful and exhausting, and I get, you know, dragged on Twitter, as everyone does, from time to time.
00:04:33.000You know, the times in general, I think I've been there for 10 years, 11 years?
00:04:38.000I've been there for a long time, amazingly.
00:04:40.000And I think sometimes, you know, I'll get questions from conservatives like, you know, do they hang you in a birdcage in the office and pelt you with rotting fruit and so on?
00:04:50.000And in fact, my experience of working there and being edited there has always been Excellent.
00:04:56.000And, you know, to the extent that sort of I watch what I say, it's not because anyone's looking over my shoulder.
00:05:03.000It's just because I'm sort of aware that I am writing for people I disagree with, and I'm trying to be as persuasive as possible.
00:05:10.000So in that context, what do you make of a lot of the conservative critiques of the so-called mainstream media?
00:05:14.000The accusations that places like The Times are wildly biased to the left, or as President Trump puts it, the failing New York Times and how it's fake news.
00:05:22.000How do you deal with that being sort of inside the house there?
00:05:25.000I mean, I think that, you know, the basic conservative critique of the mainstream media is right in the sense that the media has a, you know, institutions, elite newspapers are primarily staffed by people who vote for Democratic Politicians and candidates.
00:05:45.000It's just the function of the fact that journalism has become an upper-middle class, you know, elite college-educated profession.
00:05:53.000And people who come out of those colleges, as, you know, I did once upon a time, tend to be overwhelmingly liberal.
00:06:00.000And then there are also some other, I think, sort of psychological reasons why the kind of sort of mental makeup that a lot of reporters have biases them maybe a little bit against sort of traditionalism and towards an ideology of sort of newness, novelty, progressivism, sort of psychological reasons why the kind of sort of mental makeup that But yeah, I mean, that's just a reality that inevitably, I think, informs the way that the news gets made.
00:06:29.000And I think people at places like The Times and, you know, The Washington Post and Politico and so on are aware of that.
00:06:37.000And, you know, there is an actual attempt to sort of try and correct for those biases.
00:06:42.000And it just doesn't always work, right?
00:06:45.000So, you know, I'll read things in my own paper that I feel like are inflected with too much liberal bias.
00:06:52.000At the same time, what I say to conservatives is, you know, you don't have to like the editorials that The New York Times runs.
00:06:59.000You're obviously going to disagree with most of them and you're going to see sort of, you know, things that seem like bias creep in.
00:07:06.000But there are things the New York Times does that nobody else does.
00:07:09.000and especially in an era when most newspapers have shrunk or declined.
00:07:14.000Nobody covers sort of the breadth of the news, national and international, the way The Times does.
00:07:21.000Nobody, you know, we're talking about the coronavirus.
00:07:23.000Nobody has been covering what's been going on in China, you know, long before it came here like The Times does.
00:07:29.000Nobody has the resources, nobody has the talent, nobody has the reporters.
00:07:33.000And I think for conservatives who are interested in sort of, you know, encountering the world as it actually is, the, you know, the biases that creep into mainstream media coverage are not a reason not to read the Times.
00:07:48.000You just have to be aware that, you know, That isn't maybe the only newspaper that you should read.
00:07:53.000But you should certainly read it and subscribe.
00:07:55.000I mean, I generally have the same take.
00:07:57.000I mean, I do tell people they should read the New York Times.
00:07:59.000They should just understand that what they're reading is going to be inflected in a particular way.
00:08:03.000I'm not going to make you answer for all the decisions of the editorial board of the New York Times, obviously.
00:08:09.000I mean, one of the great critiques, obviously, of sort of the editorial board, at least on the op-ed page, is that even among the conservative wing on the op-ed page, And this is true for virtually all the mainstream newspapers.
00:08:19.000It's hard to find a single person who either did vote for President Trump or plans to vote for President Trump in 2020.
00:08:26.000I mean, 50% of the population, presumably, around that number, will vote for Trump or voted for Trump last time.
00:08:32.000Why is it so hard to find people to write for op-ed pages who voted for him or plan to vote for him next time?
00:08:37.000I mean, I think part of it is just that, and you know this even better than I do, right, that there was intense resistance to Trump in especially, I'd say, the print portion of conservative journalism.
00:08:50.000So it wasn't that, you know, the Times and the Washington Post and so on set out to hire a bunch of conservative columnists who would be squishy never-Trumpers, right?
00:08:58.000I mean, someone like George Will, who's, you know, far more anti-Trump in certain ways than I am, was considered like a rock-ribbed sort of defining figure of the conservative movement until Trump came along.
00:09:11.000So the reaction to Trump in that sense isn't just a function of who the New York Times hires.
00:09:17.000It's a function of the fact that a lot of people, some of the, you know, best and smartest writers on the right, places like National Review and the now defunct Weekly Standard, and people like you yourself had strongly negative reactions to Trump.
00:09:31.000And that has sort of then carried over into, you know, who's sort of on staff and who's writing about Trump as his presidency proceeds.
00:09:42.000Now, I will say that the Times, you know, I'd say we have myself and Brett Stevens and David Brooks are sort of three workmen.
00:09:51.000Right-of-center sort of permanent columnists, but we also have as contributing columnist both Chris Caldwell and Dan McCarthy who are in certain ways pro-Trump and have ended up writing more for us since Trump was elected.
00:10:06.000And I do think there's a consciousness at The Times.
00:10:12.000I think there's a balance between figuring out how do you get voices on the page who You know, do represent the breadth of American opinion and the 46 percent of America that voted for Trump, but also not just, you know, saying, well, we need to sort of hire someone to fill a quota if the conservative columns we already hired don't like the president enough.
00:10:35.000But I think it's, you know, I did Ben Domenech's, you know, the publisher of The Federalist, I did his radio hour as part of this book tour, and every time I'm on his show he gives me like a ten minute harangue about the Times' failure to have a pro-Trump columnist.
00:10:53.000So, what do you personally make of Trump?
00:10:54.000I mean, you're an opinion columnist, obviously.
00:10:56.000So, we're now three and a half years into the Trump presidency.
00:11:01.000From where I sit, as you mentioned, I didn't support Trump in 2016.
00:11:03.000I didn't vote for either of the candidates in 2016.
00:11:06.000He's been significantly more conservative on policy than I, for one, thought he would be.
00:11:09.000A lot of my fears about what he would be have come true.
00:11:13.000Some of them have been, I think, a little bit, were overstated in terms of the durability of institutions has been pretty good with regard to hemming in Trump's ability to break those institutions.
00:11:23.000But some of my fears about, you know, the coarsening of American politics or the driving away of young voters from the Republican Party or the Republican Party centralizing around some of the worst instincts that Trump has.
00:12:03.000So I agree with you in part in that, I mean, my biggest concern about Trump was actually less ideological because I'm probably a little more sympathetic to some of his sort of populist heresies and heterodoxies than you are.
00:12:21.000So I was always, you know, mildly comfortable with the idea of a more populist president.
00:12:26.000I was morally uncomfortable with, you know, Trump's morals, right?
00:12:30.000But then I also had this basic fear that his level of competence was too low to execute the office, right?
00:12:37.000And so, and that the world would react to this kind of level of unpreparedness in the American president with a series of sort of tests, crises, and calamities.
00:12:48.000And, And that was something that, you know, for the first few years of his presidency, I think I mostly got wrong.
00:12:54.000I thought the stock market would go down like my colleague Paul Krugman famously predicted.
00:13:07.000But in general, in spite of a lot of stumbles, I think Trumpian foreign policy The world has been more self-stabilizing than I thought, and Trump has made some decisions that I agree with.
00:13:18.000So in that sense, I get in a lot of arguments with people who, like you, have sort of shifted and are probably going to vote for him next time, where they say, well, Ross, since you were wrong about that, shouldn't you come around?
00:13:31.000And right now, my answer is sort of conditioned on the fact that we're kind of living with the coronavirus through the kind of moment that I feared, right?
00:13:41.000You know, I'm not sure where the story will be once this airs, so I don't want to be too speculative, but I will say that Trump made a really good decision when the outbreak started in China, sort of against sort of the weight of conventional liberal opinion to have a travel ban and to sort of, you know, try and maintain some kind of quarantine at the U.S.
00:14:09.000a month, and then as far as I can tell, Did nothing with it, and there's just been a lot of really incompetent execution in the White House in the face of, you know, a crisis that could kill thousands and thousands of people, you know, push us into recession and so on.
00:14:23.000So my concern with the logic of, you know, I didn't vote for him last time, it hasn't been as bad as I thought, let's go again, is that you could make the opposite argument and say, okay, we gambled on Trump.
00:14:40.000He appointed two Supreme Court justices.
00:14:42.000We're no longer in danger of having this big progressive swing on the court.
00:14:47.000And now we're playing with house money.
00:14:49.000And maybe, and, you know, there comes a moment when you make a series of gambles on a guy who, you know, has some qualities that don't make him an ideal president, where you want to take your chips and leave the table and say, you know, at some point, a Democrat is going to be elected again.
00:15:06.000Better four years of Joe Biden now and a Republican party that can define itself pretty effectively against him for the future.
00:15:14.000Then let's see what four more years of Trump bring.
00:15:18.000You know, I mean, I lived through, as you did, obviously, the George W. Bush presidency, right, where you had a series and Bush was a much more competent and engaged president by far than Donald Trump.
00:15:29.000And yet, you know, from the Iraq war to Katrina to finally the financial crisis, you had a series of rolling calamities that wiped out the Republican Party, gave us the sort of big liberal wave of the Obama era.
00:15:42.000And I think culturally, too, had a big effect on sort of the culture's swing to the left.
00:16:00.000And then you'll get the actual rolling calamities.
00:16:03.000And at the end, we'll look back and say, wouldn't have been the worst thing to have, you know, John Karius, our foil for four years and our, you know, our best young politicians getting ready to run against him instead.
00:16:14.000So with all of that said, would your logic change if Bernie Sanders had been the nominee?
00:16:19.000So it's pretty obvious when we're filming this that Bernie Sanders will not be the nominee.
00:16:23.000Joe Biden, basically because, in my view, people actually, for one moment in time, actually looked at Bernie Sanders.
00:16:31.000It was one thing when he was off to the side and he was just shouting at the moon.
00:16:33.000And you could be like, OK, well, this is kind of fun.
00:16:54.000I mean, Biden is less threatening for the country.
00:16:56.000I think it's a very good thing that Joe Biden wins the Democratic nomination and not Bernie Sanders, namely because I think it would be horrible for the country if half of the country had had to centralize around an anti-American communist.
00:17:06.000It's much better for them to centralize around they don't like Trump and here's just an old politician who's been an old politician since he was 29.
00:17:14.000So the logic that you're speaking makes a certain amount of sense versus Biden, who's basically a status quo candidate.
00:17:20.000Would it have changed radically if Bernie Sanders had been the candidate?
00:17:24.000So on the one hand, obviously, Sanders is from any conservative perspective more ideologically threatening than Biden.
00:17:35.000At the same time, there are ways in which because Sanders is an ideological outlier and he would, you know, he probably wouldn't carry lots of down-ballot races with him, Democrats would be less likely to win the Senate.
00:17:52.000You could imagine Sanders being actually a much weaker president, even than Biden.
00:17:56.000And I expect Biden to be a pretty weak president too.
00:18:00.000And oddly, I mean, I think from, and this is, you know, goes back to our mild disagreements, but I think if you're a populist conservative, A Biden presidency is better for you because Biden is like Mr. Status Quo, you know, Mr. Return to the Obama era, you know, Mr. Making deals with China, Mr. Soft corruption in his family.
00:18:20.000And it lets the sort of the people who want to continue some form of Trumpism sort of pivot off that.
00:18:28.000But if I'm Ben Shapiro and I want the party to sort of swing back a little more towards Reaganism and limited government, then actually a Sanders presidency is the better I mean, I think that argument exists.
00:18:40.000I think there's an argument for Shapiroism, right?
00:18:43.000That a weak and constrained socialist in the White House is actually what you would need to get the Republican Party back where you want it to go. - I mean, I think that that argument exists.
00:18:55.000My fear is that just for the country, it would be, listen, I'd mint money if Bernie Sanders were president. - You would literally build your own mint.
00:19:06.000I mean, I would be stocking up like the whole deal.
00:19:08.000But with that said, the great fear, of course, is that for the Republican Party, you always center around the person who is the head of the party.
00:19:16.000So yes, there would be a better foil for Republicans to work off of.
00:19:19.000But that foil would also now represent the heart and soul of the Democratic Party in a way that it's not clear that full-on anti-American socialism does at this point.
00:19:27.000I don't think that Joe Biden has a knee-jerk dislike of Americanism in the same way that That Bernie Sanders does.
00:19:33.000I think Bernie Sanders is basically an old communist fellow traveler, and he has yet to identify a thing that American foreign policy has done right.
00:19:43.000And Joe Biden is basically, you know, A softer version of Barack Obama, but dead.
00:19:49.000Yeah, I mean, Sanders in foreign policy would be... That's what frightened me, honestly.
00:19:55.000Domestic policy wasn't going to get me.
00:19:56.000You would get a more sort of withdrawalist approach to foreign affairs.
00:20:03.000You would get a little more moralism in the sense that Sanders, because, you know, there isn't a...
00:20:12.000If you want, weirdly, the most pro-communist figure in the democratic field, in terms of what communism is now, was Michael Bloomberg, who couldn't find a bad thing to say about the Politburo, right?
00:20:22.000So if you get Sanders in, you know, Sanders would talk probably more than Trump about human rights vis-a-vis Russia and China, but he would also give Russia and China more space to maneuver on the global stage.
00:20:34.000So in a second, I want to get into what you've described as Shapiroism versus maybe Douthatism.
00:20:46.000Who could have predicted anything that's going on right now, say, like four months ago?
00:20:49.000But one thing you definitely can predict is the path of your future life, which means that you need life insurance if you are a responsible human being.
00:20:56.000PolicyGenius will help you get the life insurance that you need by competitively pricing the life insurance policies out there and helping you find the very best life insurance for the best possible price.
00:21:04.000PolicyGenius will compare quotes from the top life insurance companies in one place.
00:21:08.000It takes just a few minutes to compare quotes from the top insurers and find your best price.
00:21:12.000This doesn't just save a lot of legwork.
00:21:13.000You could save $1,500 or more a year by using PolicyGenius to compare life insurance policies.
00:21:18.000We're going to be able to compare life insurance Once you apply, the PolicyGenius team will handle all the paperwork and the red tape for free.
00:21:22.000They're in contact with the life insurance companies every day, monitoring developments, helping customers navigate every single step.
00:21:28.000So, if you're one of the many people looking to buy life insurance right now, but you're not sure where to start, head on over to PolicyGenius.com.
00:21:34.000PolicyGenius will find you the best rate, handle the process completely.
00:21:38.000You can stop worrying about life insurance and go do something fun.
00:21:40.000Instead, go check them out right now at PolicyGenius.com.
00:21:43.000Alrighty, so let's talk a little bit about the sort of populist-conservatism versus non-populist-conservatism battle.
00:21:48.000Because this is really, I think, the most interesting battle inside the Republican Party.
00:21:52.000And it's been sort of papered over to a certain extent by the Trump victory.
00:21:57.000I think it was going to break out into the open if Trump had lost.
00:21:59.000But it was really interesting because this has long roots.
00:22:03.000Obviously, you've been writing about this for a long time.
00:22:05.000You were writing with Raihan Salaam about a more interventionist sort of conservative view of government that shares some features of Bush-era compassionate conservatism in some ways.
00:22:15.000I grew up opposing a lot of that, opposing the compassionate conservative label, because in my view, markets are not uncompassionate.
00:22:22.000But maybe you can spell out what you think conservatism should look like, because it's been articulated in a bunch of different ways.
00:22:29.000I've heard sort of the Lockean versus Burkean argument, the idea being that John Locke is government is there only to protect fundamental rights, and Burke being government is there to protect a traditional culture that leads to the rights arising.
00:22:40.000I've heard this Kirkian argument that conservatism is more an attitude than a set of policy prescriptions or even a philosophy.
00:22:49.000How would you describe the conservatism that you'd like to see?
00:22:53.000I guess I'd frame it this way, which is that conservatives should support free markets because free markets are efficiency and growth maximizing structures.
00:23:06.000But free markets are not always maximizing for every human good.
00:23:11.000And I think there are certain social goods in American life that over the last 50 years, as cultural conservatives have been arguing for a while, have started to crumble.
00:23:24.000Meaning that, you know, sort of the two-parent family is in decline, religion is in decline, sort of social engagement and community joining and so on, all these things are in decline.
00:23:36.000And on the one hand, there are limits, obviously, to what government can do, Government can't start a religious revival, government can't make you love your wife, and so on.
00:23:46.000But there are also ways in which globalization and changes that have been, in certain ways, efficiency-maximizing for the world, but not necessarily for, like, middle- to working-class America, have weaken the economic structures that are underneath sort of the ability of like, you know, somebody to raise three kids on a single income, right?
00:24:08.000And so my view basically going back, as you said, to the Bush era is that there are things that you can do with the design of, you know, tax policy and the welfare state that we have now and so on that can build a somewhat firmer structure under those sort of tax policy and the welfare state that we have now and so on that And so, you know, my primary interest, which is, you know,
00:24:34.000not identical to where all of the populists go has always just been family policy.
00:24:39.000And basically the view that, you know, everything in Western life has gotten more efficient in certain ways, except taking care of and raising kids, right?
00:24:48.000There's no like labor-saving device, except maybe, you know, maybe an iPad to get on a plane, right?
00:24:58.000And that means that the costs of raising kids have actually gone up in various ways over the last 30 years.
00:25:05.000And birth rates have obviously gone way down, including in the U.S. over the last 10 years.
00:25:14.000This is something that wasn't true back in the mid-2000s in the Bush-Compassionate-Conservative era.
00:25:19.000You could still say that America was a birth rate outlier, and now it's not.
00:25:23.000So with all of that in mind, I basically support using government power to do more to support families.
00:25:29.000And that can take the form of tax credits, it can take the form of child allowances.
00:25:34.000I'm basically in favor of proposals that are totally neutral between working parents and stay-at-home parents, so I'm against the sort of, I'm very against universal daycare and pre-K.
00:25:45.000I think there's room probably for a little more family leave policy, but mostly I just want to give families of young children more money.
00:25:53.000So that's sort of my that's my version of the larger populist thing.
00:25:58.000But then there are obviously, you know, whether it's someone like Orrin Cass or Tucker Carlson, most famously, who, you know, argue that we should go beyond this and basically have a kind of industrial policy that focuses on building up American industries.
00:26:12.000And I'm not all the way with all those ideas.
00:26:15.000I do think, though, that there are reasonable points, again, particularly in the context of like the coronavirus thing, right, where, you know, the sort of pure free market view says, well, look, the most efficient thing is to have all of our factories in China.
00:26:30.000because that maximizes our GDP and maximizes China's GDP, and we all get rich together.
00:26:35.000But there are also some reasons why it's not good to export your entire industrial base to China when China is, one, ruled by a mix of communist and fascist dictatorship, and two, China is totally vulnerable to things like this pandemic, where suddenly you can have a China is totally vulnerable to things like this pandemic, where suddenly you can have a shutdown in the global supply chain, and we can't even manufacture the N95 masks that you're supposed
00:27:00.000So that has made me, I'm a little bit agnostic about the industrial policy stuff, but the coronavirus thing has made me a little more open to the idea that, again, public policy should say, look, there's a national security interest in not totally de-industrializing the United States.
00:27:18.000Again, even if in global terms that's not the perfect efficiency maximizing perspective.
00:27:24.000I guess that's douthatism to the extent that it exists.
00:27:28.000I mean, the strongest case, obviously, with regard to not investing in China is, in fact, not in direct conflict with the sort of long-term free market case, meaning that if you're fostering the growth of a communist regime that exploits labor, that is actually not helping the free market.
00:27:45.000You're actually propping up a massive government infrastructure that is repressing a billion people.
00:27:51.000I want to go back and examine a couple of the premises that we're talking about here.
00:27:54.000So when you first said you support the free market, the rationale for supporting free markets was a utilitarian one.
00:27:59.000You said the free markets are efficient, they're excellent at building prosperity.
00:28:04.000Folks like me, I've suggested that free markets are not just Good in that they are utilitarian.
00:28:09.000Free markets are good in that they are inherently moral, meaning that you own property as an individual human being.
00:28:15.000That is, it's a Lockean argument, essentially, that as an individual, you have a right to the property that you create, that people do not have a right to take that away from you in the name of broader communal interest, and that the general notion of being able to violate somebody's consent because you have higher priorities through a simple majoritarian vote is a violation of and that the general notion of being able to violate somebody's consent And my great fear with sort of arguing for the market in utilitarian terms is that you're correct in the sense that you can always argue different forms of utilitarianism.
00:28:44.000What's more utilitarian, a higher GDP or more working families, if you believe that the market is working in direct opposition to that, which I'm going to get to in a second.
00:28:51.000I'm not sure that that's the case from what I said.
00:28:53.000But what do you make of the moral argument for markets?
00:28:55.000Because some people say they're two cheers for the free market kind of people.
00:29:00.000I will count myself in the three cheers for the free market person.
00:29:03.000I just think that the market doesn't do everything that people want it to.
00:29:05.000The market isn't the end of the human need.
00:29:09.000Markets are great at what markets are supposed to do, allowing me to keep what I build and alienate that which I build and alienate my own labor, allowing me to create more prosperity.
00:29:17.000And then there's an entire other side of human life, which is the spiritual need, which is not going to be filled by materialism, no matter what you do.
00:29:25.000And that leads to sort of the second question.
00:29:27.000I don't mean to dump all the questions at once.
00:29:30.000It leads to the second question, which is, you know, the sort of common good conservatism has suggested that it's the markets that have worked in opposition to family that has driven childbearing rates down, that has broken up families.
00:29:42.000I would suggest that government interventionism over that same period has been extraordinary.
00:29:46.000that government is far larger now than it was in the 1930s, 40s, and 50s when family structures were far more intact, that the welfare state, there's a solid case we made that it had horrific impacts, particularly on black families, and that the problem here is trying to solve a cultural problem, namely the decline of religion, with a government infrastructure that is not designed to fill that gap.
00:30:07.000So, I mean, yeah, I am more of a two cheers for capitalism guy, which doesn't mean that I reject the moral case that you make.
00:30:17.000It's more that I think that in the real world, it can be hard to separate out the forms of capitalism where you are achieving something that is sort of your personal achievement alone.
00:30:33.000And where you are embedded in structures that make that kind of achievement less.
00:30:42.000I mean, and this is going to sound, you know, a touch like the you didn't build that on the Warren stuff, right?
00:30:47.000Which is, and I think there are bad things about those arguments.
00:30:52.000But what's bad about those arguments is that they discourage people from being entrepreneurial.
00:30:57.000That it is good for people to believe that they can build something and that it is something that they have an ownership stake in.
00:31:05.000And, you know, human creativity is an incredibly important part of all of the great things that capitalism has done.
00:31:11.000That being said, like, if you, you know, inherit $5 million from your father, right?
00:31:17.000It's not clear how that fits into the lock-in process.
00:31:21.000paradigm exactly of, you know, that you deserve everything you earn and so on.
00:31:26.000And similarly, and this is something that libertarians don't disagree with at all, right?
00:31:30.000But the structures of crony capitalism and the linkages between government and business and so on make it, if you're looking at a given society, it's not always easy to say he deserved that, she didn't deserve that.
00:31:43.000It's, You know, there's a mixture going on.
00:31:48.000And that's been true from the beginning of capitalism, right?
00:31:50.000that the free market is something that has always been structured in part by government decisions and government interventions and so on, going back to, you know, in the U.S., back to the public improvement programs of the 19th century, and, you know, in the case of Europe, going back even further than that.
00:32:08.000And I guess that reality, I think, makes me comfortable balancing sort of your moral argument and saying, yes, that's true, we want a society where people think it is, you know, moral to build and keep what you build, but also say, you know, that we can have a certain amount of you know, that we can have a certain amount of redistribution because we can't quite see where perfect justice lies, and so you want to have some, you know, some sort of baseline where you're not letting people fall below certain floors.
00:32:37.000And then you also want to recognize that while markets, you know, while there is a moral case for markets, they do, in some cases, select for efficiency rather than sort of perfectly shared human flourishing, right?
00:32:54.000So, like, I agree with you, right, that, you know, the free market did not destroy the American family, right?
00:33:01.000I'm a cultural conservative because I think that the cultural story matters more than the economic story, and I've had plenty of arguments with liberals where I'll say, you know, if you look at the timeline of divorce rates and these different things, it's not deindustrialization that did it, that sort of the cultural revolutions of the 60s mattered more.
00:33:21.000That being said, it's also the case that Um, that, you know, the shift from an industrial to an information era economy has been very rewarding for highly educated Americans and less rewarding for people who would have done better in the industrial economy.
00:33:39.000And that's not a sort of moral failing on the part of factory workers who just need to, you know, learn to code, right?
00:33:47.000And so, you know, there, when something like that happens, there's room for policymakers to say, How can we one, preserve the utilitarian gains or the utilitarian advantage of the free market?
00:34:00.000Two, avoid creating a society where people don't accept the moral case that people should be able to be entrepreneurial and keep what they build, but also figure out how to avoid ending up in a country where you have a sort of depopulated, drug-addicted hinterland and, you know, these sort of rich urban cities where everyone has college degrees and is clustering, but no one can afford to live there and nobody has kids, right?
00:34:27.000And there are libertarian responses to that, right, that are sort of reasonable, you know, sort of build more housing stock, right?
00:34:34.000I mean, it's not—I think there is a version of libertarian populism that would accomplish some of the policy goals.
00:34:42.000And some of the people—I think some of the people like Tucker and others, you know, when they talk about, like, well, the rising cost of medical care or the rising cost of education and so on, there are libertarian policy proposals that would help reduce those costs and make things easier for families.
00:34:57.000But, yeah, I'm also perfectly comfortable, you know, as was Friedrich Hayek, right?
00:35:05.000Like with the idea of a certain amount of redistribution.
00:35:07.000A lot of the original sort of founding fathers of libertarian conservatism were not sort of full tilt boogie Ayn Randians.
00:35:16.000They said, you know, we need a certain amount of, we need a certain kind of welfare state to Sort of maintain people's commitment to capitalism in certain ways.
00:35:28.000And I think, you know, at various points in time, you want to redesign the welfare state you have.
00:35:33.000I mean, just to take one very small example, right?
00:35:35.000So in the 1990s, you know, you mentioned the perverse effect that anti-poverty programs had on family formation on, you know, encouraging Teen pregnancy and so on.
00:35:46.000That was sort of the conservative argument in the 80s and 90s.
00:35:49.000And conservatives, along with Bill Clinton, passed welfare reform, and lo and behold, teen pregnancy went down.
00:35:55.000And liberals don't think that the welfare reform led teen pregnancy to go down, but I think it was probably one factor, and that was a conservative policy victory.
00:36:03.000But here we are now, 25 years later, and our social challenge isn't a skyrocketing teen pregnancy rate, it's the fact that people aren't getting married and aren't having kids at all.
00:36:14.000And in that situation, I'm worried less about, you know, the perverse incentives of spending, you know, if you'd spend a little more money on families, maybe some people are more irresponsible with what they do with that money.
00:36:25.000I'm less worried about that in this moment than I would have been 25 years ago.
00:36:29.000And I'm more of the view that, you know, if you encourage people to have more kids, you know, I'd rather have a society where there were a few more out-of-wedlock births if we were getting the birth rate up.
00:36:57.000Why didn't Ted Cruz's arguments carry the day with Republican voters?
00:37:02.000Well, let's take our voters seriously and, you know, look at things that went wrong.
00:37:06.000Let's look at things we predicted that we were wrong about, where we thought that, you know, opening trade with China would, you know, produce many more winners than losers, and in fact, it produced some real concentrated job losses.
00:37:18.000You know, what can public policy do about that?
00:37:20.000So I think there's room for that without, you know, casting Adam Smith and John Locke into the outer darkness, right?
00:37:27.000So in a second, I want to ask you about the differences in culture versus sort of government policy.
00:37:33.000But first, let's talk about the fact that you are spending tons of time with your kids these days.
00:37:36.000This means that you are not getting the kind of sleep that you need.
00:37:39.000I can tell you, I mean, my level of stress with my kids really high right now.
00:37:43.000But when I lay my head down on my Helix Sleep mattress, I am good to go because Helix Sleep made a mattress just for me.
00:37:48.000Helix Sleep has a quiz that takes just two minutes to complete.
00:37:50.000They will match your body type and sleep preferences to the perfect mattress for you.
00:37:54.000Whether you're a side sleeper or a hot sleeper, whether you like a plush or a firm bed, with Helix there's no more confusion and no more compromising.
00:37:59.000Helix Sleep is rated the number one mattress by GQ and Wired Magazine, and CNN called it the most comfortable mattress they've ever slept on.
00:38:38.000So let's talk for a second about the differences between sort of culture and economics and what they can do.
00:38:43.000So one of the reasons that I can afford to be quite libertarian about, you know, what I think government ought to do is first, there's the affirmative argument, which is that I'm very much afraid that there's not a limiting principle to government should do X to support families and government should just do X period.
00:38:58.000Meaning that that assumes that the right people are in control of government and my basic assumption about government is that somebody who I don't like is going to be in control of those same mechanisms five minutes from now and using them against me.
00:39:08.000And so my comfort level really exists, particularly on the federal level, at the government should not be able to do many of the things that the government is doing and that the gap needs to be filled really at the local level where you have much more agreement.
00:39:21.000I'm much more willing to, in my local community where I know everybody, pay taxes for redistribution to people that I know and who go to my synagogue than I am for people who are across the country.
00:39:37.000In other words, this more libertarian orientation of American government that existed for most of the early history of the republic, that was predicated upon the existence of a virtuous citizenry that was going to be organized Basically by church, and the church was going to fill that gap.
00:39:51.000As churches waned, this is where I think government has replaced churches.
00:39:56.000As government has grown, churches waned.
00:39:58.000Government has been fulfilling the supportive nature that church once played.
00:40:03.000It's sort of an argument that Tim Carney makes.
00:40:07.000As that happens, church has declined and now you have a perverse cycle where church declines, there's more need, government steps in even more, there's more need, government steps in even more, and then there's no limiting principle at all.
00:40:24.000And two is that Even if they can, would it be better to try and solve these problems on a cultural level?
00:40:32.000So to take an example, if you're talking about giving certain tax credits to people for having children, I don't know very many people who think about the tax credit they're going to get when they have kids.
00:40:43.000Most people in a prosperous society recognize that kids are more of a net drain on your resources than are a net benefit to your resources, no matter what you do.
00:40:51.000The reason that prosperous countries don't have as many kids is because when you're poor, you need kids for your labor force.
00:40:56.000And when you're prosperous, it costs you hundreds of thousands of dollars.
00:40:59.000And so, why would you bother with that when you can spend that hundreds of thousands of dollars vacationing or doing whatever it is that you want to do?
00:41:05.000I'm not sure that that's a problem that is curable by a simple tax credit.
00:41:08.000The reason that, I mean, you're religious, I'm religious, the reason that I have kids is because I think there's a moral injunction to have kids, that it makes the world a better place to have children, and that I have a religious obligation to have kids.
00:41:18.000As that wanes, I'm not sure that simply saying to somebody, here's 4,000 bucks extra a year for your kid, who's going to cost you five, that that's really going to solve the problem.
00:41:27.000One, I totally agree that there is, you know, there's a basic limitation to what public policy can do to reshape culture.
00:41:35.000And, you know, to the extent that there is sort of a ultimate cultural solution, an ultimate solution to a lot of the problems that you and I agree face America, it has to come from cultural and religious revival.
00:41:50.000And government can't like will that into being.
00:41:53.000That said, I do think people make decisions on the margins about whether to have kids with financial concerns in mind.
00:42:01.000And so it's not that, you know, a couple who are enjoying their lives going backpacking and going on cruises and so on are going to say, oh, I get this, you know, $4,000 tax credit, I guess we'll, you know, become pronatalist and, you know.
00:42:14.000convert to Orthodox Judaism, right, and start having kids.
00:42:19.000But there are lots of families that sort of do end up deciding between having two or three kids, having three or four kids.
00:42:26.000And when they make those decisions, finances definitely enters into it.
00:42:30.000So if you say, you know, well, this kid is going to cost me $10,000 a year, but, you know, I know that, you know, because of a tax credit or some other public program, it's actually only going to cost me five.
00:42:43.000I do think that makes a difference on the margin, and there's a fair amount of research on this.
00:42:47.000A demographer named Lyman Stone, who's a Lutheran missionary in Hong Kong, has written a lot about how these different programs work, and some of them don't work at all, and some of them are badly designed, some of them seem to work.
00:43:00.000On the margins, you can have some kind of effect on family formation and birth rates if you're willing to put enough money towards it, which I guess I am willing to do.
00:43:11.000On the philosophical point, I think the problem there is that We're not sitting here in 1920 before the New Deal happened or in 1955 before the Great Society happened having an argument about whether a broad-based federal bureaucracy and a whole welter of programs should exist.
00:43:36.000We're having an argument in a world where the administrative state and all its sort of colonies has existed in some form for almost 100 years.
00:43:44.000And the problem for conservatives who say, well, it shouldn't exist because I want there to be a limiting principle, is that you're only limiting yourself.
00:43:53.000I mean, that's, I think that's what, you know, if Sorab Amari were sitting here talking to you, and I'll try and channel him, he would say, well, all you're doing in this case is, for philosophical reasons, tying one hand behind your back and saying, Well, I don't want the other party to get in power and have these powers, but the other party has those powers and is using them when they're in power, right?
00:44:12.000When a liberal administration is in power, it does not hesitate to sort of, you know, find the intersections of of government power and cultural power as, you know, the Obama administration did, for instance, all the time in its second term in the creative ways it used Title IX and so on to push private universities to do things and push state governments to do things that advanced various forms of the progressive agenda.
00:44:38.000And I think the problem for social conservatives especially is that if you just say, we want there to be a limiting principle, so when we're in power we're not going to push hard for things that we think help, you know, our vision of the good society.
00:44:55.000What happens with Republicans is not that Republican politicians say, oh that's great we're going to have an austere libertarianism and Justin Amash, you know, will set the agenda.
00:45:04.000Republicans say, okay well we've got some business groups over here that are very happy to take federal money and you just get Under Republicans, a sort of ill-thought-out crony capitalism, and you end up with a Republican Party that has the rhetoric of libertarianism and the reality of sort of just serving business interests.
00:45:23.000And this is sort of my attempt to bridge the gap between populists and libertarians.
00:45:29.000The populists say, the libertarians control everything and free market fundamentalism rules the Republican Party.
00:45:35.000And the libertarians say, what are you talking about?
00:45:37.000When the Republican Party is in power, it does crony capitalism.
00:45:42.000The rhetorical frame of the party has been libertarian.
00:45:46.000But then, once in power, it just sort of spends money on business clients and tends to ignore families and sort of culturally conservative clients.
00:45:58.000And I'm just not sure that the very principled approach that you take has ultimately served conservatives well in the culture war, which, again, doesn't mean that I have a 10 point plan for, you know, here's everything the federal bureaucracy should do to advance conservative goals. here's everything the federal bureaucracy should do to advance conservative But, you know, in the case of the Trump administration, even things like, you know, their their attempt to raise taxes on university endowments.
00:46:40.000But so I think there are creative ways for cultural conservatives in power to think, you know, a little bit.
00:46:47.000How do we weaken institutions that are our foes and strengthen groups and cultural forces that are our friends?
00:46:55.000And it doesn't have to take the form of, you know, spending a ton of money on something, but it does require a certain creativity about the uses of power.
00:47:06.000And I think where I agree with the populists is I don't think social conservatives have thought as creatively as they should about the uses of power.
00:47:14.000The countervailing point of view would come from sort of a utilitarian place, meaning I'm a social conservative.
00:47:19.000I wrote a book, my second book was all about the evils of pornography and why there should be significant regulation on pornography.
00:47:26.000I was 20 at the time, 21, so it's been a while.
00:47:30.000But with that said, one of the concerns that I have is that it seems to me that a lot of the populist conservatives, particularly some of the social conservatives with whom I totally agree on principle, that they're operating from a premise which is that we are at knife's edge on a lot of these issues when I think that in many cases, the issue has basically been lost, not only at the legal level, but at the cultural level.
00:47:49.000And so arguing that the government should be used in order to do acts that I like, that while I may like that, while that may be nice, while the left may do exactly the reverse to me, if it's just a question of whose ox is being gored, the reality is that my ox is likely to be gored a lot more often than the other guy's ox is likely to be gored.
00:48:08.000And not only that, If the country basically just becomes a raw battle between two competing poles of power who are just going to gore each other, that the country actually doesn't have a future, that there's no way for us to live together.
00:48:20.000Because at a certain point, one of those groups is going to become the permanent minority.
00:48:24.000And then the question is going to become, well, why do I stay in a country with this other group of people who are cramming down their version of policy on me?
00:48:30.000When it's possible that Republicans, by taking the government out of the equation, in some cases have actually allowed more room
00:48:37.000for cultural conservatism to thrive, meaning that when people don't feel threatened by cultural conservatism, when they don't feel that cultural conservatism is going to come along with the power of the government gun and compel particular activity, it's easier to make a case, like, leave my church alone, and people say, okay, well, you're not trying to force anything on me, so I guess I'll leave your church alone a little bit more than, okay, well, my church is really important to me, and it's so important that when we get power, we're going to reverse Obergefell, and we're going to pass a federal marriage amendment.
00:49:06.000Yeah, and I agree that there is a certain over-enthusiasm, maybe.
00:49:11.000And it could drive a reaction, is the point that I'm making.
00:49:13.000It's sort of the same point that you were making about Trump could drive a reaction that pushes everybody to the far left in the Democratic Party.
00:49:19.000The cultural conservative point is, if you say, I'm going to use the government to come after things that you like, and then they say, OK, well, when we get power, so far we've basically left the churches alone, but now we're going to go full Beto O'Rourke.
00:49:30.000We're removing all 501c3 status from every church that doesn't I'm pretty sympathetic in certain ways to the case for de-escalation, and I wrote a lot after Obergefell about sort of, you know, how do we figure out pluralism, right?
00:49:49.000I'm pretty sympathetic in certain ways to the case for de-escalation.
00:49:53.000And I wrote a lot after Obergefell about sort of, you know, how do we figure out pluralism, right?
00:50:01.000How do we figure out a way for religious conservatives to sort of be respected as a minority in the society that has changed?
00:50:10.000And, you know, how do we live together in peace and so on?
00:50:13.000I will say that I didn't feel like I got a ton of take up on those arguments from my liberal friends.
00:50:20.000And the I mean, I think part of what the social conservatives are reacting against, too, is the speed with which we went from, you know, same sex marriage, Doesn't affect your marriage, and it's just a sort of expansion of freedom.
00:50:42.000Substantial infringements on religious liberty and infringements contemplated further, you know, where, right, O'Rourke is like sort of doing the full, you know, tax your churches and take your guns kind of liberalism.
00:50:55.000Although the fact that O'Rourke and other candidates like him didn't actually Go anywhere in the end maybe is a sign that some kind of cultural truce is more possible.
00:51:08.000I think there is definitely an argument for cultural de-escalation that is not where the sort of younger religious conservatives are right now.
00:51:21.000I think the challenge for Republicans though in sort of managing all this is figuring out You know, where they can deliver actual victories to religious conservatives too, right?
00:51:32.000Because if you say to religious conservatives, you know, well, we're never getting rid of Obergefell, you know, we're never having the federal marriage amendment or anything like that, religious conservatives can say, okay, I can live with that, but You know, what I've given blood, sweat, and tears to get justices on the Supreme Court, and at least they're going to create more space for abortion restrictions, right?
00:51:55.000And so, like, this is sort of the unanswered question right now of the Kavanaugh appointment and sort of where, you know, where does the court end up going on abortion, right?
00:52:05.000And if we go through another five years where the sort of Roberts and Kavanaugh between them sort of At best, maybe chip away a tiny bit at Roe.
00:52:15.000I think you're going to have a lot of religious conservatives who say, why did we fight so hard for Kavanaugh while Susan Collins was telling everyone he wouldn't overturn Roe?
00:52:25.000We're going to impose firmer litmus tests on judges that are more ends-based, more outcomes-based, more like what liberals impose.
00:52:35.000So I think that sort of That's like a zone where you can imagine, I think, religious conservatives justifiably saying that this whole system has not worked out well for them.
00:52:46.000I mean, I think that there should be plain, plain litmus tests when it comes to Supreme Court justices from the right.
00:52:51.000I mean, the left is not shy about this, but it's not even because the left ain't shy about it.
00:52:54.000I think that originalism does lead to particular results.
00:52:56.000And one of those results is that Roe is a bunch of crap.
00:52:58.000And pretty much everybody who has studied Roe as a legal matter, right, left, and center, and is honest about it, recognizes that whether you like the outcome or not, Roe has absolutely nothing to do with the Constitution of the United States.
00:53:14.000One of the interesting things about sort of the populist versus non-populist fight on the right is how much miscommunication there is.
00:53:22.000What I mean by that is this is a perfect example.
00:53:24.000I don't think there are a lot of people, even on the libertarian right, who would be anti.
00:53:27.000I mean, aside from maybe people who are overtly in favor of just pro-choice mechanisms.
00:53:32.000But if they're honest about their legal analysis, I don't think there are that many people on my side of the aisle who would say, There shouldn't be a litmus test on Roe.
00:53:41.000I think there absolutely should be a litmus test on Roe for judges.
00:53:44.000I'm not willing to trust justices with their vague articulations of originalism.
00:53:50.000I mean, I was the only person I know who came out against Roberts before he was actually confirmed in 2005 because he didn't have a track record.
00:53:56.000I came out against Kavanaugh because he didn't have a track record.
00:53:58.000So I'm very much in favor of conservatives driving a hard bargain.
00:54:03.000And I don't think, right, and I think that's too a case where, yeah, I don't think it's I don't think it's mostly the sort of, you know, limited government conservatives who are against imposing litmus tests.
00:54:15.000It's more there that they sort of, you know, the institutional Republican Party is not enthusiastic about overturning Roe and that in turn creates sort of pressures where It's easier for Republican justices to give the Federalist Society a little of what it wants on Chevron deference than it is to go further on Roe.
00:54:39.000Although, to be honest, even on the sort of administrative state stuff, I think you may get less from this court than some conservatives want or expect.
00:54:52.000So, I do want to ask you about where you think the Republican Party is going post-Trump.
00:54:57.000But first, let's talk about how you can save money at the post office right now.
00:55:00.000Well, number one, don't go to the post office.
00:55:02.000Number two, go to stamps.com, because anything you can do at the post office, you can do at stamps.com.
00:55:07.000Their on-demand postage means you can skip that trip to the post office and save money with discounts you can't even get at the post office.
00:55:13.000Here at DailyWare, we've been using Stamps.com since 2017.
00:55:17.000No more wasted time, no more schlepping boxes over to the post office.
00:55:20.000Stamps.com brings all the services of the U.S.
00:55:22.000Postal Service direct to your computer.
00:55:24.000Whether you're a small office sending invoices or an online seller shipping out products, even a warehouse sending thousands of packages a day, Stamps.com handles it all.
00:56:25.000And I think that you could easily see that accelerating.
00:56:28.000But as we sort of move Presumably at some point into a future where it's non-oxygenarians running against each other.
00:56:34.000Where do you think that the Republican Party goes?
00:56:37.000Do you think that it sort of reverts to the social conservative populism that you're talking about?
00:56:42.000Do you think it moves in a more libertarian direction?
00:56:44.000That's been sort of the great battle, I think.
00:56:45.000Yeah, I mean, I think that so one, as I said earlier, I think a Bernie Sanders presidency would probably produce more of a libertarian swing and the Joe Biden presidency would produce more of a populist swing.
00:56:56.000But I think generally in sort of demographic terms, the Republican Party has less of a sort of naturally low tax limited government base than it used to.
00:57:10.000And its coalition consists of Religious conservatives, many of whom are probably somewhere in between the two of us on these issues, and then a lot of the sort of more secular working-class voters who were moving into the coalition before Trump, but that's obviously accelerated.
00:57:26.000So that means I think that, you know, some form of populism is going to be with us for a while, and the question is what form does it take, right?
00:57:37.000I think that every Republican president comes in and ends up, you know, being a little more activist and interventionist in government policy than you would like.
00:57:46.000And so I think if I were, if I had your views, I would be spending a lot of time thinking, you know, what, what's the least bad form of activist government, right?
00:57:56.000Is it, you know, what George W. Bush did was very focused on education and poverty, right?
00:58:02.000And whereas what the populists now want is more focused on family and industrial policy.
00:58:07.000So those are two Different ways of compromising your libertarianism.
00:58:12.000And it's, you know, since politics is the art of compromise, it's worth thinking, for more libertarian conservatives, it's worth thinking about, you know, well, which of those is better?
00:58:22.000You know, would I rather have compassionate conservatism come again, or would I rather have Josh Hawley and, you know, his sort of, like, war on Silicon Valley as the thing in my party that I don't love but I have to live with?
00:58:38.000Let's talk about kind of the state of the country overall, because while we're having this argument, are we just shifting around the deck chairs on the Titanic a little bit?
00:58:45.000So in your book, The Decadent Society finally gets a pitch here.
00:58:49.000So you give a definition of decadence, which suggests economic stagnation and a certain level of cultural stagnation.
00:58:54.000I'm sympathetic to the argument, honestly.
00:58:56.000More sympathetic on the cultural stagnation than on the economic stagnation I think there are a lot of buried elements of statistics that tend to suggest that Lifestyle has risen fairly dramatically actually over the last three to four decades including the amount of space that we live in I think a lot of definitely have bigger houses.
00:59:13.000We are working fewer hours on the job than we ever have, really, and we're spending more vacation time.
00:59:18.000So those were usually fairly good indicators of an economy that's doing fairly well.
00:59:22.000But you're right that it's a less ambitious economy, and it feels like it is bifurcating between sort of knowledge based economy and people who are maybe getting left behind in The so-called IQ economy.
00:59:31.000And it's also an economy that is floated on, and here I'll speak your language, it's floated on unprecedented deficit spending.
00:59:55.000There are sort of advantages to the economy right now.
00:59:59.000That being said, right now at this sort of, you know, pre-coronavirus peak of economic activity, we've got 2% growth with trillion-dollar deficits.
01:00:09.000And 50 years ago, or even, you know, briefly under Reagan and then briefly again in the late 1990s, we had 5% growth with either much lower deficits or no deficits at all.
01:00:20.000And so that's, when I talk about economic decadence, that's sort of what I'm talking about.
01:00:26.000It's not that things haven't improved on the margins.
01:00:29.000It's that we have become a rich society that sort of pays ourselves to feel richer than maybe we actually are.
01:00:36.000And that doesn't mean it's unsustainable.
01:00:39.000I think actually with low interest rates and an aging population, you can carry these deficits longer than the Tea Party thought in 2011.
01:00:49.000But it's still a sign that the underlying structures of the economy are not great, and certainly not what they were under Eisenhower or under Reagan.
01:00:59.000It's never great when you're turning to the central bank as your chief method of dumping the economy.
01:01:04.000And you can't, the central bank prints money and we never get inflation, which again suggests that we're a long way from sort of being the truly hot economies that we had under Reagan in the 50s.
01:01:18.000And I think that's, I mean, my basic view is that we're not rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic because I'm not sure we're about to sink.
01:01:29.000I think the issue is more that we are sort of stuck, basically, and we still have technological innovation but it's concentrated heavily in Silicon Valley, heavily in communication and simulation, and we haven't achieved the things that we expected we'd achieve in You know, cost of energy, in transportation changes, in medicine, we've made sort of grinding progress against cancer, but we haven't had any of the leaps that we had with penicillin and other things in the past.
01:01:59.000You know, we were talking before, we're having fewer kids, people are, you know, enjoying their vacations instead of having the extra kid, and that in turn puts more, it puts more pressure towards stagnation, because societies get older, They're less entrepreneurial.
01:02:15.000And they're, you know, less averse to fundamental change to any system.
01:02:21.000So, like, a libertarian is going to be very frustrated in this society because there's this huge barnacled bureaucratic welfare state built up that nobody can actually reform, right?
01:02:32.000So the big reforms are, you know, a little bit of tinkering around the edges under Ronald Reagan, and then Obama sort of jerry-rigs an extra arm onto the whole system to give a few more people health insurance.
01:02:47.000But you don't get sweeping programs of reform.
01:02:50.000And I think that the danger where, you know, is that you then There was sort of a dystopian slide here, right, where if all your progress is in your phones and your video games and your technologies of simulation, and if politics isn't responsive to movements and activists, you can't actually change anything.
01:03:13.000And if society is getting older, then you just can easily imagine a world where the trends of the last 10 years continue, where you have this retreat into virtual life, pornography, You know, we legalize marijuana and give everybody opioids and you sort of numb everything down.
01:03:33.000And, you know, I'm not saying we're going to be there in 50 years, but I think if you were saying... Brave New World is not, in fact, a horrible place for the people living in Brave New World.
01:03:41.000No, they're very comfortable, you know, right?
01:03:44.000It's like, you know, we need to do the Elon Musk, Joe Rogan thing where I light up a joint.
01:03:52.000But therefore, because it's not that bad, there's a lot of people for whom what in the book I call sustainable decadence becomes the best thing they can imagine.
01:04:01.000Where it's just like, all right, you know, we thought we could go to the moon, but we can't go to the moon.
01:04:05.000We thought we could cure cancer, but we can't cure cancer.
01:04:28.000It was like... And, you know, Trump's best speech of his presidency was his last State of the Union, which was basically him saying, we beat decadence.
01:04:45.000But I think it spoke to people's discontents with this, that people know that there was an America that you can see if you go watch the Apollo 11 documentary that came out last year.
01:04:56.000You can see the remains of it everywhere in Southern California, right?
01:04:59.000This was like the future of the entire world.
01:05:04.000Um, you can see it if you watch Tarantino's Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, right?
01:05:08.000Like, this culture that was so young and filled with energy, some of it toxic and some of it terrible, but energy all the same.
01:05:16.000But we don't know how to get back to that.
01:05:21.000Yeah, and I don't think you can get back to it without something disjunctive happening.
01:05:27.000And so the last part of the book is me talking about the various weird things that would have to shift for us to get out of decadence.
01:05:34.000And some of those have to do with invention.
01:05:36.000You could imagine scientific breakthroughs that take us out of our phones and into some different world.
01:05:43.000And some of them have to do with politics and political realignment.
01:05:46.000But ultimately, I think you and I agree on this.
01:05:49.000I think the sort of despair of the late modern world has to be answered ultimately by a recovery of a sense of purpose, the sense that the human story is a story and that somebody, capital S, somebody is actually telling it.
01:06:06.000So, that's my Catholic bias, but I don't think it's wrong.
01:06:09.000I think the ennui of decadence is in part, it comes in with a view that, you know, we filled the world.