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#3 Jonathan Rauch on the 2024 election, 1960's Star Trek, and the magnetism of sociopaths
64 Plays6 months ago
Jonathan Rauch is a senior fellow at The Brookings Institute and the author of eight books, including Kindly Inquisitors: the New Attacks on Free Thought and my favorite mini memoir, Denial: My 25 Years without a Soul. Jonathan is a friend, the father of the introvert liberation movement, and one of the reasons our country has expanded marriage rights to the LGBTQ community. I brought Jonathan on to talk about the 2024 election, one month later.
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- Why voting makes us stupid
- Walking the Transgender Movement Away from the Extremists
- Star Trek and Sociopathy
- The Happiness Curve
Jonathan’s film recommendation: Network (1976)
Ken’s recommendation: Star Trek: The Next Generation, episode “The Inner Light”
Jonathan’s list of good Star Trek (1966-69) episodes
- Devil in the Dark. Second episode to air, revolutionary in its day; inverts the usual story about monsters and aliens being the bad guys
- Balance of Terror. Two commanders struggle to out-psych each other and develop professional respect. (Based on a movie about WWII submarine battle
- Amok Time. Ultra-logical Spock has a dark side…as does civiliation (a recurrent theme). Written by Theodore Sturgeon, one of the sci-fi Golden Age greats
- The Doomsday Machine. Great performance by William Windom as Commodore Decker as the Enterprise confronts a planet-destroying robot
- The Ultimate Computer. Computerized warfare gets out of hand. Imagine this on network TV in 1968!
- The Enemy Within. Kirk can’t command without his sociopathic side.
- The Trouble with Tribbles. The lightest episode, a fan favorite. An alien species takes over the ship…but not the way you think
- The City on the Edge of Forever. By critical consensus, probably the greatest episode. Grapples with the contingent and tragic nature of history. Ends on a deeply ambivalent note (and includes TV’s first use of a cuss word, “hell”). Written by the sci-fi great Harlan Ellison. Again, amazing to imagine this on prime time in that era. (The guest star is young Joan Collins, no less.)
Music by Duncan Barrett, who you can follow and listen to, here and here.
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Transcript
Introduction and Jonathan Rauch's Works
00:00:05
Speaker
This is the Out of the Wild podcast with Ken Ilgunis.
00:00:19
Speaker
Jonathan Rauch is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institute and the author of, is it eight books now, Jonathan? Eight, nine, I lose track. Eight and a half, I think. Eight and a half, I think. One of them is Kindly Inquisitors, The New Attacks on Free Thought, in which you wrote about free speech before that was the cool thing to do. And you also wrote one of my favorite mini-memoirs, or just memoirs in general, called Denial, My 25 Years Without a Soul, which is a book about you denying and then becoming aware and embracing your sexuality.
00:00:55
Speaker
Jonathan, you are a friend, the father of the introvert liberation movement, and you are one of the reasons our country has expanded marriage rights to the LGBTQ community. Thank you for that.
00:01:11
Speaker
And according to your website, you don't like shrimp. Jonathan, welcome to the show. Nice to be here. I'm guessing you're calling from Washington, DC, but I understand that you're from Phoenix, Arizona. So let me ask you something. Will someone from Arizona always have an affinity for the desert?
00:01:36
Speaker
Well, I sure do. I miss it every day. I grew up in a part of Phoenix which was landscaped as natural desert. I would leave the front door of my house and be on the desert with mountains in the north, Squaw Peak as it was then called, and Camelback Mountain to the east and this enormous sky overhead and the sunsets that you used to see in Arizona highways magazine and the sounds of the desert.
00:02:07
Speaker
and especially the smells of the desert, which are unique. So yeah, part of me every single day wishes I could be back in the desert.
Post-Election Reflections: Trump and Voter Behavior
00:02:17
Speaker
We're one month after the 2024 election, and I wanted to bring you on um to talk about the election from our our vantage point now. And I'm wondering what the emotion is that you're feeling about this election, because mine, despite doing a lot of reading,
00:02:36
Speaker
And a lot of podcast listening is ultimately confusion. Um, and I know there's a couple of like logical reasons behind the victory of Trump, whether it was, um, inflation or Harris just not being a super popular candidate, but I still ultimately find Trump as our next president to be like an incomprehensible thing. So, so where are you? How are you feeling about this?
00:03:03
Speaker
Well, there's there's a few different ways to combat that. One is how I'm personally feeling. And um there I would share your sense of bewilderment in comprehension, dismay, alienation, almost but not quite disbelief. The man is so completely unfit for office that it is difficult emotionally to reckon with what's happened here. I call it a a moral catastrophe because this election has validated all of the terrible things he's done and put the public stamp of approval and said, now you can do those things. Like the massive lying, the stop the steal campaign, the biggest disinformation campaign ever run in the United States, the crude personal conduct, the personalization
00:03:58
Speaker
of government, the ignoring of laws, the attempted coup, all of that has now been approved by voters. So yeah, at that level, I feel exactly as you do. And I feel like I've lost a lot of faith and confidence in the wisdom of my fellow citizens. So that's one level.
Voter System Flaws and Candidate Selection
00:04:19
Speaker
But then I put on my Brookings Institution analyst hat and I think I know exactly what happened and it's not mysterious and it's not even that unusual.
00:04:29
Speaker
which is voters thought that Joe Biden was a failed president and they wanted change and Donald Trump looked like change. And actually given the amount of discontent with the Biden administration, Biden's approvals on election day were in the low 40s and high 30s. And normally the president the the incumbent's approval rating is the cap on how the incumbent or the incumbent vice president will do in the election.
00:04:56
Speaker
That means that Harris was facing a tremendous headwind, a gale force headwind. She beat Trump's approval ratings by seven or eight percentage points.
00:05:07
Speaker
She made this a very close election. If the candidate had been someone other than Trump on the other side, the Republicans would have won, you know, with five percentage points. So at that level, this is a very ordinary election in which voters want to change. It's the third election in a row in which they rejected incumbents. Voters all over the world are rejecting incumbents. France, Germany, Japan, incumbent governments are falling.
00:05:33
Speaker
So we have this weird bifurcated phenomenon where we just had a very ordinary election with a very extraordinary candidate and a result which will be four years of, I um if i fear, chaos and corruption.
00:05:47
Speaker
So that's not a very satisfying answer, is it? Which story do you want? It's kind of what i'm what I'm feeling as well. I mean, my problem with that, looking at Biden's approval ratings, either going into his tenure or leaving his tenure, it just feels like wrong. I felt like he was fine.
00:06:05
Speaker
Yeah, I understand inflation was bad. I understand that a lot of people are suffering, but I just feel like the dissatisfaction in life is being kind of improperly placed on on on Biden. And i just I just want to say what is not allowed to be said, Jonathan, and I'd like to get your reaction to it. And this is this is a headline you'll never see in the New York Times opinion page, but um ah American voters or at least a lot of American voters, they're just dumb. I resist saying that because one, I want to be a very kind and polite person and two, I'm kind of a a systemic thinker. I think dumbness is not a choice. There's a whole bunch of.
00:06:51
Speaker
factors behind dumbness. but i mean like Do these voters have the memory of a goldfish? like Don't they remember anything about 2016 to 2020? There's just something kind of morally bankrupt about someone to me who would vote for trump i mean i could point to a whole bunch of different examples why but. Just looking at to like the insurrection on january sixth and him calling the georgia secretary of state for twelve thousand votes that should be enough for. Any voter to be like no i'm not going with him.
00:07:31
Speaker
You won't have me on your show again after this, but but I'm going to give you another of my bifurcated answers, okay my conflicted answers, because conflicted is how I feel right now. I am deeply disappointed with the American electorate for all the reasons you just said. Donald Trump should have been disqualified.
00:07:50
Speaker
in the voters' minds many times over. And he did many things that that you and I growing up, 20, 30 years ago, we assumed were disqualifying and in fact would have been disqualifying. That's dismaying. It shows that democracy is not safe in the hands of the American electorate.
00:08:10
Speaker
Something we know from political science and sociology and so forth going back many years, nothing new about it. In fact, it it goes back to the French mathematician Condorcet in the time of the founders, was that voting makes us stupid. That's the that's a ah statement that encompasses a lot. I won't try to get into it all. I wrote an article about it, a Brookings paper, which you can put in the show notes.
00:08:35
Speaker
But there's just all kinds of flaws with voting systems. Often people don't make good choices or they make choices that don't even reflect what it is they really want. So we know that voters are hugely uninformed most of the time. And we know why they're uninformed, which is they have busy lives and it is not their job to keep up with all the ins and outs of policies. A lot of them aren't even reading the newspaper and they're it's not frankly their job to keep up with the ins and outs. It's not even their job to know something as basic as who's on the Supreme Court, because we know they don't know that. They don't know how many branches of government there are. That's the way it always has been. That's the way it always will be. It's called by political scientists rational ignorance. If you're busy with your job and your kids and taking care of your parents and everything else you're doing, it's not rational for you to bone up on all that stuff which doesn't affect your life. So you know very little
00:09:32
Speaker
and you go to the polls every four years, and that's the only involvement, or every two, maybe, if you're lucky, and that's the only involvement you're asked to have in politics. like No one's coming around between elections and involving you in politics. Of course, you make underinformed decisions. and People vote based on emotion, they vote, they they treat their vote as a kind of as a kind of ah but as an approval rating. Am I happy? Am I unhappy?
00:10:00
Speaker
They have very little understanding what presidents can and cannot do. You know, presidents can't lower the price of gasoline. And we have known this for years.
00:10:13
Speaker
So voters are not individually dumb. They're like you and me. They're mostly making good decisions about their lives. They're mostly leading good lives. Collectively voters are dumb. And that, by the way, includes you and me. So what do we do about this weird phenomenon of individually being smart and collectively being dumb?
00:10:33
Speaker
Well, the founders had an answer to that, and it was the right answer, which is a hybrid system. Partners, voters who check in every so often to express whatever they want to express with party and political professionals whose job is to do politics, to steward the government, to build coalitions in government, to think about policy, to do that right. That's the system the founders created.
00:11:00
Speaker
they As you know, they they didn't set up direct democracy. They set up layers of government. Madison himself, the designer of our system, was a professional politician. So they wanted it to be a hybrid system in which the public provides inputs and the professionals provide some guidance and they work together. And that worked very, very well until 2016. What changed is that the professionals were pushed out of the picture.
00:11:29
Speaker
They were unable to prevent a completely unqualified person from becoming the Democratic nominees, the Republican nominees, someone who wasn't even a Republican. And they were almost unable to prevent someone who wasn't even a Democrat from becoming the Democratic nominee, that's Bernie Sanders. The system that we we relied on to vet candidates before they reached the ballot to say, okay, this person's got some experience governing, they will be fairly responsible, they will be fairly law abiding, they can do the job of building a coalition and expanding the party. That was shot, and it still is shot.
00:12:06
Speaker
So what we now have is the professionals not able to do what they need to do, the choices being put before the voters that would have been screened out and should have been screened out earlier. I'm sorry I'm filibustering, Ken, but. No. And this this gets me to one of my next questions. And I know you've written on this subject a number of times. In fact, just this past summer, you wrote for The Atlantic.
00:12:33
Speaker
And with the headline, the party is not over nominations belong to parties, not to candidates. And in that you're kind of, you've already said it, but you're arguing that primary politics can at times be too democratic and it's wise to have some battle hardened.
00:12:51
Speaker
party gatekeepers who can have a lot of influence and and smoky rooms and i'm i think i'm i'm there with you and you you kind of celebrate the democrats smoky room people's decision to urge biden to leave what you did this past summer.
00:13:11
Speaker
But you know someone like Ezra Klein was thinking the Democrats needed a quick primary so that voters could
Democratic Challenges and Image Perception
00:13:19
Speaker
kind of take the temperature of candidates and find a winning candidate. candidate So in this in this case, Klein to me appears to be right and a more democratic approach to selecting the next candidate could have helped a lot. um Do you have any second thoughts about that?
00:13:41
Speaker
No. Well, the first thing to say is that there's nothing very democratic about our current primary system. In fact, it's less, I believe, genuinely democratic than smoke-filled rooms because you've got an unrepresentative 10% turnout in primaries. You've got the decision being made in a small number of states So you've got a tiny unrepresentative sliver of the American population choosing candidates for all the rest of us and doing a terrible job, especially in the Republican Party. So at least the smoke-filled rooms where people who got together represented a whole bunch of different factions and geographies within a party and said,
00:14:23
Speaker
Who can we select who will do a good job representing the most people, can unify the party, and bring us together? So they were bringing in more voices, more representative politics. That was their job. So let's not confuse what's happening with democracy. It's plebiscitary.
00:14:43
Speaker
But that's not the same as democratic. ah So to the people who say the Democrats should have run a beauty contest in three weeks before their convention, they're on drugs. That was just never going to happen. You can't do that. There is no system to do that. There is no money to do that. There is no way to organize to do that. It wasn't going to happen. What had to happen is what did happen, which is that the party had to step in and make a quick decision.
00:15:13
Speaker
and it made a decision based on, well, for example, um the Biden campaign's very considerable war chest could flow to Kamala Harris seamlessly.
00:15:26
Speaker
If they started over with a different candidate, they'd have to start from scratch on fundraising, which would be a terrible disadvantage. And second, you need to unite the party very quickly. I mean, you you can't have it split up into factions and have you know the equivalent of what killed the Democrats in 2016, the Sanders people and the Clinton people going down to the wire. It's fun for journalists, but you can't do that three or four weeks before your convention. You'll break the party. So they had to move very quickly.
00:15:55
Speaker
to get behind someone, and so they did. Within 36 hours, Harris had the delegates. um And that's the key thing. these These are delegates. They're independent actors. They're people in the party who reached the conclusion quickly that they needed to come together. So that's the right thing to do. It is the only thing to do. Would it have been better if Joe Biden had not broken his implied promise, if he had not run again, if there had been a whole primary in which voters could get acquainted with but the candidate? Sure.
00:16:25
Speaker
um there There are two big reasons why Donald Trump won this election and Kamala Harris lost, and those two reasons are Joe and Biden.
00:16:40
Speaker
Everything you just said made a ton of sense to me. um And ending with your last line there about Joe Biden, Kamala Harris was kind of stuck with his legacy and she didn't have much of a chance to really kind of divorce that legacy from her campaign and.
00:17:02
Speaker
As you said at the beginning, Joe Biden was incredibly unpopular. People were sick of inflation and she just had a ah really hard time kind of distancing herself from the memory of Joe Biden in in all of our minds. So part of me just wishes they had an opportunity to find a candidate who could be both a Democrat, but also kind of a reformed Democrat who kind of wants to, you know,
00:17:30
Speaker
change things from the previous administration? Maybe. I'm not sure it would have made any difference, frankly, because Democrats were the incumbent party and voters made very clear that they want to change. So those headwinds would have been strong with anyone. um And I think that that Harris ran an exemplary campaign um You know, we can quibble about the answer to this this or that question or whether she should have gone on Rogan. But in terms of hitting all the basics that a candidate needs to do, she did an astonishingly good job very quickly of assembling a coalition unifying the party.
00:18:06
Speaker
raising a billion dollars, putting together a very good campaign team that worked seamlessly together. She squashed, she just completely thrashed Donald Trump in a debate. She had a very good convention and she was doing these rallies that were just superb. ah She was a little weaker in interviews, but on the stump, she was excellent, much better than people realized that she would be. People who had watched her since um since the abortion decision said, you know, if you've been following her, you know that this has really changed her as a campaigner and improved her. But we saw that. So I just don't think the Democrats could have done a lot better than that. um The fundamental problems when we keep going back to, which is it is really hard to separate yourself from the incumbent administration when you're the incumbent administration um and the voters want to change.
00:19:01
Speaker
I get the sense that Democratic voters were kind of doing a lot of self care and dark court, dark cuddly corners of our houses right now. We're doing kind of a lot of introspection. We're trying to figure out. You're sitting in a corner with your knees tucked under your chin. Basically, just rocking back and forth. I think we're all kind of wondering, like,
00:19:22
Speaker
What we did wrong, what's wrong with our messaging, what's wrong with the kind of political vibes that we emanate. you Looking forward to the next four years and beyond, do you have any sense of in which direct direction Democrats need to go so that they can be you know, whoever the Republicans throw at us next time. I know, you know, I know special expertise on that. Your view is as good as mine. And in fact, I'd like to hear it. um It is. It looks pretty clear that the Democrats inability or in willingness to diso to distance themselves from genderqueer bullshit
00:20:06
Speaker
you know the pronoun stuff and the people with uterus stuff was a problem for them. And in my opinion, I speak as a gay man, an activist for many years, it should be a problem for them. um That stuff is is strange and not right. So they have ah They have some work to do to distinguish themselves as a party from the far left of their party, the cultural left, the academic left, the people who make a lot of noise on on X and throw around jargon like Latin X.
00:20:45
Speaker
and that's all perfectly true. On the other hand, Harris didn't campaign that way. ah She didn't allow those people anywhere near her campaign. Should she have had a sister-soldier moment you know where she just publicly said, no way, it's nonsense? Well, maybe, but her campaign people believed, and I think probably rightly, that it was the economy stupid and that her energy, her voice should be on that and convincing people in swing states on the economy.
00:21:13
Speaker
So I think they need to move, the Dems need to move toward the center, but not necessarily to harvest votes, though I think it would help there, but because the center is where the right answer is. ah The left is just out to lunch on a lot of things. But I'm a person of the center right, so so I would say that. um So another factor, which you know something about, is the hemorrhaging of support among men, especially working class men.
00:21:43
Speaker
and the sense that the Democrats don't understand the concerns and the kind of vibes of what it is to be masculine, male in today's society. on Harris, again, she she gestured in that direction. Her campaign understood it. She said at the convention, she used the word lethal in describing America. that's That's not the way that you would have heard Democrats talk in the past.
00:22:11
Speaker
But I would need to ask someone like Ken Ilgunis, who's very plugged into the world of masculinity and has thought about it, can Democrats build back credibility with you know the guys who, in my day, I guess you can't really do it anymore in your front yard, but you know who fix their truck in their front yard? I think more broadly for a second, I think, and you touched on this earlier, but people vote the way they do for irrational and rational reasons. like i think they Here's a little theory I established in two minutes last night as I was preparing for this, kind of my theory of why people vote the way they do. Number one is just like, is my life going well? And if it's if it's going well, they're going to vote for you know the the party that's in power. If it's not, they're just going to vote against them, regardless if that party did or did not make their lives any better.
00:23:07
Speaker
The second thing is like the policies of an administration. um you know Did you like the stimulus payments? Did you like the tax cuts? Did you like the infrastructure law? And I think this is actually the least important. As you said earlier, people just aren't paying that much attention to that stuff, but some people are. And I think the third and perhaps biggest kind of factor in why we vote the way they do is just the the political vibes in the air.
00:23:33
Speaker
And I ah completely agree with you that Harris and Waltz, they didn't have any of that kind of objectionable, you know, woke or DEI stuff about them, but they carried eight years of baggage from kind of the progressive left. So they, even if they tried their best, they couldn't kind of really get rid of that nasty smell in the room. So.
00:24:00
Speaker
Yeah, when I think of something like young men who've experienced light misandry over the past many years, and misandry is, you could call it the hatred of or prejudice against men, you just seal it all over the place. You see Elizabeth Warren kind of insinuating that men are homophobic. You see Hillary Clinton saying the future is female. like Isn't the present already female? like are aret all our Mother strong and our teachers female and our bosses you know our female bosses you see it michael moore just kind of jubilantly claiming that you know the future is black latino lgbtq men are we're we're just kind of fossils right now. And you get these little micro aggressions like but better you might might call the micro annoyances many times over the course of many years.
00:24:56
Speaker
uh, the Harris waltz campaign just can't easily divorce themselves with that. It's just a nasty smell in the room that they can't dissipate. So I think one thing the democratic party needs to do is get some air freshener out and make the, make the, make the party and the political vibes around the party less, less about self loathing.
00:25:21
Speaker
and scolding and correcting people and making them feel guilty for feeling patriotic. ah Stop reminding us all about all the bad things we did. Let's talk about the good things we can do. Yeah, impersonating a Democrat for a minute. I think they might say with some justice, look, that's that's what Kamala Harris did. She ran a future-oriented campaign. She had page after page of policy proposal, um a lot of it directed toward helping this this very constituency. The Biden administration did tons more for the working man in America, far more than the Trump administration. I mean, for heaven's sake, the Trump administration cut taxes for corporations. Biden launched infrastructure projects all around the country, disproportionately actually in in red areas. Democrats would come back to you and say, so what is it exactly you want us to do?
00:26:15
Speaker
I don't know, but these these kind of vibes are just everywhere. You got to get rid of these these vibes and it's getting in the way of people seeing genuinely positive and helpful legislation um pushed forward by Democrats in administration. So many Democrats so befuddled is that that the stuff that the Republicans are doing that seems to be attractive to A lot of men, especially non-college men, are things that just to Democrats seem fundamentally crude, not rational, and and not good. you know and and pretty In many cases, sort of blatantly circus-like at a convention, having a pro wrestler like you know tear his shirt off to show masculinity. and The Democrats will say, well, where we can't do that.
00:27:15
Speaker
We can't outdo that. And if if that's the level on which men really want to be appealed to, that that level of almost, can I say theatrical or or comical? I don't know what's what's the adjective, but but that level of pure performative masculinity unmoored from you know the reality of things like who is really building a stronger defense for the country and who is really putting people to work.
00:27:46
Speaker
Well, that leaves him kind of stuck, doesn't it? There's a problem when we associate masculinity with, you know, Hulk Hogan ripping his his shirt off at the at the convention. And I'd like to think that, I don't think that appeals to young men. Young men probably don't even know who Hulk Hogan even is. And the thing is with with Gen Z men is I don't think they're looking for, you know, hegemonic domination over women or anything like that. I think Gen Z men are probably very progressive in their beliefs. They believe that people of color are equal. They believe that women are equal. They believe in all expressions of LGBTQ identities. So I think they're very kind of progressive in those ways. I just think they've been annoyed to the right.
00:28:40
Speaker
And that's just been a huge loss of votes for for the Democrats. I was just looking at some exit polling data. Trump won Gen Z men by 49 to 47. The data goes back to the 2008 election and Gen Z men always voted Democrat.
00:29:01
Speaker
before Trump. So yeah, I think it goes back to just being annoyed to the right, not feeling seen, not feeling understood. I like that phrase, annoyed to the right. So what you're saying makes some sense to me, which is, some of this is just for the Democrats to stop doing some things that they've been doing. I think so, but it's not just the Democrats. There is genuinely annoying Democrat woke is on this is what i wanted to say earlier and forgot where i was going there's genuinely annoying democratic woke woke woke ism but then there's the republican propaganda that. Amplifies that all and makes it seem far more pervasive and is invading your home more than it really is.
00:29:50
Speaker
um like I've made my career as ah a public speaker at high schools and colleges for the past six years. So I've gotten to see a lot of that kind of annoying wokeism with hollow land acknowledgents asking for obvious pronouns, constantly asking me to check my privilege as a straight white male. But in my other, like the rest of my life, I don't have kind of trans ideology affecting me you know i haven't had to go to a dei workshop or anything like that i don't know anybody who's really been.
The Ordinary Nature of an Extraordinary Election
00:30:29
Speaker
Canceled and i think that's republican propaganda taking some genuinely annoying things but making it seem a lot bigger than it actually is.
00:30:40
Speaker
Well, I'm i'm certain there's there's something to that. um You're tired of my my bifurcated answers, my conflicted answers, but I kind of feel strongly both ways. On the one hand, Democrats have work to do, and you've just outlined some of what that is. And it's what I said earlier, even apart from the question of where the votes are, the right answers are toward the middle.
00:31:03
Speaker
and throwing overboard the strange academic baggage of DEI and genderqueer and Latinx and identity politics and misandry and all the other weird shit that they've got going on over there. those are Those are the wrong answers. So for that reason alone, on the other hand, at the same time, it is tempting to overread this election. When you see the entire country, every state, every region,
00:31:33
Speaker
pretty much every demographic move, move toward the Republicans ah by roughly the same amount, except for Hispanics who really are realigning. there's That's seriously happening. That's a big deal. But other than Hispanics, when you see that kind of uniform shift in the same direction, that's the climate. That's an anti-encompency vote. That's voter dissatisfaction with the status quo and what they perceived as a failed president across the board.
00:32:02
Speaker
that's not about whether you're appealing to particular groups in particular ways and if it's a messaging problem about this or that. That's a gale force win. And so the solution to that is to some extent, don't be the incumbent, which the Dems won't be in 2026 and 2028. And then the second thing is have a candidate who can exploit not being the incumbent. Parties don't gel around you know, white papers. It certainly helps. The Democratic Leadership Council and the work that it did after after the loss of ah Michael Dukakis in 1988 made a big difference. But it takes a candidate, right? it It takes a bench to define who you are and begin to rally voters. I'm pretty confident that that work will get done.
00:32:53
Speaker
So I'm cautioning people on the one hand, yeah, the but party has to change, but on the other hand, don't overread what just happened here. um I don't think Harris's messaging was very far off on the essentials.
00:33:06
Speaker
It's just hard for me to think of this as an ordinary election when a convict, con man, insurrectionist, vote denier is is our is our president again. But yeah, I take everything you say on board. It was a ah very ordinary election with a very extraordinary candidate and the heartbreak is that the public just couldn't recognize the extraordinaryness of this particular candidate. So they they treated him as they would any other Republican, which is, well, they're better than what we got. He won't be, but that's the mistake they made. I have a premonition, Jonathan. I have a premonition of my own Schadenfreude. Does that make sense to you? What do you mean? I can see myself in two years just wagging my finger saying, I told you so. What what were you what were you idiots thinking?
00:34:03
Speaker
Oh, to the public. To the to the the Trump voters. It's just like, you you made your bed. Now go ahead and and lie in it. Oh, sure. Well, as you remember, H. L. Mencken's definition of democracy, which is that people should get what they want and get it good and hard.
Free Speech and Political Correctness: Then and Now
00:34:25
Speaker
Um, let's, let's switch gears to kindly inquisitors, which isn't so much switching gears because it's all very much related. Now kindly inquisitors, your book from 1993, I just read about half of it and I was quite taken with it and you seem kind of like, uh, what is the word prescient or prescient? You seem like a, like a prophet for the free speech issues that were going to hit us in kind of the mid 2010s.
00:34:54
Speaker
Now my college time, I went to college in 2001 and after my master's degree, I graduated in 2011. That was kind of a period of.
00:35:09
Speaker
I didn't, I didn't really see much kind of campus unrest, no protest. It was kind of a, as a so I don't know if sweet spot is the right word because you do want to see a campus engaged in political issues, but I didn't see any of that. Now you're writing this in 1993. What, was there a lot of kind of free speech issues happening on campuses and elsewhere during that time?
00:35:33
Speaker
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. So just to begin with, just to get it out of my system, um if you all allow me a pet peeve, I wrote that book, Kindly Inquisitors, The New Attacks on Free Thought in 1993. And ninety ninety three and it's ah it's a good little book. It's actually a pretty bold and ambitious and striking and passionate little book. And it disappeared without a trace.
00:35:58
Speaker
And now every time someone says, as they do all the time, Ken, that this was prescient, could have been written yesterday, can't believe this is 31 years ago, my reaction is always, so where were you 31 years ago? You could have made it a bestseller back then.
00:36:13
Speaker
um What Kindly Inquisitor shows is that that what's happening now, what's sometimes called wokeness, is not a new phenomenon. It was predictable 31 years ago and in fact was predicted. It was it was seen 31 years ago. It had a different name back then. People called it political correctness. and There were certainly some differences. DEI had not been invented and you know all of that. but um We already knew by the early 1990s that we were looking at a a will predominantly left wing movement that was fundamentally illiberal in its attitude towards speech and inquiry.
00:36:55
Speaker
in that it was it was radically egalitarian. Egalitarian means you know basically treat everyone alike. And radically egalitarian means treat everyone alike except some groups are more equal than others. So in the early 90s, you already had you know the Afrocentric curriculum. You had the idea of dividing science up into interest groups. You had the idea of preferences for certain groups um and deep preferences for white males. um All of that was there.
00:37:26
Speaker
You also had the emergence of what's ah which's now referred to, you know people talk about snowflakes and microaggressions. Those words were not around, but you had the emergence of of what I call the humanitarian attack on and thought and speech, which is words are like bullets. And if you hurt people with words, you're traumatizing them and violating their human rights.
00:37:55
Speaker
And that is a doctrine which is 100% fundamentally inconsistent with free speech, free inquiry, the pursuit of knowledge and learning because it turns criticism into a human rights violation. Both of those things were happening. We had speech codes breaking out on campuses across the United States, but we also outside of campuses had, for example, when Salman Rushdie,
00:38:22
Speaker
was when a death sentence was put on him by Ayatollah Khomeini, a lot of very confused people in the West said, well, yeah, you shouldn't threaten Salman Rushdie with murder. But on the other hand, um didn't he hurt a lot of people with that offensive book? So you know the harm runs both directions here. That's a very confused idea. But you see here the roots of everything that we see now.
00:38:47
Speaker
And you were so far ahead of time, and i you dedicated the book. I can tell you, can you? Journalism, the only thing worse than being too late is being too early. You admire Salman Rushdie. Didn't you dedicate the book to him in your first edition? I did, yes. come And I also know that you're a big fan of George or Orwell, and both those writers are writers who always write bravely. They write with Muscle and i i recognize that in your own writing you don't mince words you don't pull punches but i'm also curious. um Have you ever done that have you ever had to pull punches have you ever gone um have you have you ever had ideas that you just felt were too dangerous to talk about everyday.
00:39:38
Speaker
um I'm careful about. Tailoring messages to audiences and understanding how to be effective. You know you learn that when you're spending almost 20 years of your life as an advocate for same-sex marriage, which when I started was the screwiest, nuttiest, most implausible idea ever. um so ah So sure, that's that's part of a writer's job. Something I learned early is that ah writing is ah it's a communications job.
00:40:11
Speaker
And in communications industry, failure to be always under failure to be understood is is always the fault of the sender, never the fault of the recipient. Something we were talking about earlier, are the voters dumb? um I'm going to be careful. i'm yeah I'm going to go there, and I did go there. I sent you a link. You can put in the show notes to a paper I wrote um saying the subtitle is, Why Voting Makes Us Stupid.
00:40:38
Speaker
Uh, but, but sure, sure. I have to modulate. I'm sure you do too. Of course. Yeah. As I mentioned before, I have a speaking career going for six years and a lot of them are for high schools and you know, these are paid gigs and I've had a couple schools cancel on me because they went through my social media and saw some anti-Trump stuff.
00:41:01
Speaker
There's a lot of stuff that I want, like critical of of progressive culture in the far left that I would never write down because I'm worried about losing money. And my money is what keeps the lights on and mortgage paid and my my like kid fed. So yeah, I find myself really limiting what I want to talk about. And in some ways I felt shackled these five or six years and I just can't wait to shake those off. I'm just curious because you know these are kind of literary heroes for you, Rushdie and Orwell. Do you feel any like um um embarrassment or or shame or or regret about maybe the things that you could have written but haven't? Oh, no, don't get me wrong. It's not that I leave unsaid things that I think are important. You're just more careful. I find ways to talk about them to be effective. Okay.
00:41:59
Speaker
um and And one can always find ways to be effective. Nothing important that I've had to say has gone ultimately unsaid. Right now, I am i am more critical of genderqueer ideology in private than I am in public.
00:42:18
Speaker
I've written only one article, ah very critical, but only one article about it. But that's not self-censorship. It's not because I'm super worried about being canceled. It's because I'm not sure that I have the standing necessary to be a constructive voice in that debate. And part of what we do as as writers, thinkers, attempted influencers is pick our shots.
00:42:46
Speaker
So you you do want to invest in the places, not where just where you feel strongly about something, but where you feel strongly about something and it can make a difference. And as a master communicator, you'd probably do some throat clearing before you scrutinize, what would you say, gender?
00:43:03
Speaker
trans ideology, what would that throat clearing be? Well, I can send you the article and you can see for yourself, but I was very careful in this article. It's very critical of it's it's called walking the transgender movement back or something. And it basically says that the gender queer was a radical ideology, which has captured LGBT civil rights movement and driven it in a very bad direction. um And I'm not the first to say that, lots of people say that.
00:43:33
Speaker
But what I did is very intentionally begin that article, not with my own voice, but that of a transgender woman um who is one of the actually many transgender Americans who feel abandoned by the radical ideology that has taken over their movement. These are not people who question the the um gender binary. They, in fact, transition to be the other side of the gender binary.
00:44:02
Speaker
um So the first voice in the article was not me just saying what I think. It was a transgender person saying what she thinks. So that's how you do it. Gotcha. You sent me this wonderful article um talking about Star Trek and sociopaths.
Exploring Leadership and Sociopathy in Star Trek
00:44:21
Speaker
ah First of all, can you talk about your relationship with those early Star Trek episodes? I will, I just have to ask you, are you a Star Trek fan? I've seen one Star Trek episode from The Next Generation and I loved it and I'll talk about it in a second, but that's it.
00:44:41
Speaker
Have you seen any of the original series no no and it's amazing that they kind of pack the cultural punch that they do i was really surprised that it only ran from sixty six to sixty nine i thought it was running for fifteen. Years because everybody knows those those actors and and the ship and whatnot.
00:45:00
Speaker
Oh my god, Ken, you've got to watch. i'll send you the There's some bad episodes, but the great episodes are among the the greatest TV and entertainment ever produced and will be watched 100 years from now. I'll send you a list. I want you to watch them and tell me what you think because you are that you're like a ah Petri dish of a fully mature adult very intelligent thinking person who will be getting your first exposure to Star Trek original series. I have got to know what you think about that.
00:45:36
Speaker
I'm looking forward to it though when I see like the action scenes, it's just, oh my God, they look so dated. Yeah, well, there's that. um They had no money, they had no special effects to speak of um and it's incredible what they did. the the The brilliance of that show is in the writing and that it's fundamentally character driven.
00:45:59
Speaker
and that it's grappling with serious issues. It's it's doing like bioethics, if you can modify people should you do it. It's dealing with the ethics automated warfare. Now remember, this is 1966 and 67 and 68, and they're doing shows about what happens if computers are running warfare and making lethal decisions in combat faster than humans can act. It's not just that, but they're trying to like work out these complex psychological theories and they're doing it in kind of these entertaining and ridiculous scenarios. so With regard to the sociopaths, can you describe one of those one of those episodes and what it what is it what it says about sociopaths and politics?
00:46:46
Speaker
Sociopathy may be Star Trek's number one obsession. there are There are four or five shows that are centered on sociopathy and and it's always the question of Star Trek understands that sociopaths, the person who is able to break rules without remorse and who as a result has charisma and develops a following and leads people toward the dark side. They understand that this is a fundamental and human affairs and that it's not even always a bad thing. In one of the the greatest episodes, Captain Kirk's personality is split so that his humane civilized self is split away from his sociopathic dark self.
00:47:32
Speaker
and it turns out that without the sociopathic element of his personality, he is too indecisive to lead the enterprise in a crisis. Very sophisticated thinking about how you do need this what we sometimes think of as darker element.
00:47:51
Speaker
in in human psychology. But it's like you know when war breaks out, you need someone like a general patent. But you need these people who are capable of doing really hard, difficult, dark things at certain times. So maybe the most famous episode about sociopathy is Space Seed.
00:48:14
Speaker
in which the enterprise encounters a very charismatic kind of biologically bioengineered sociopath named Khan who takes over the ship. His greatest weapon is his very seductive personality. People come, feel drawn to him,
00:48:33
Speaker
by this sense of great strength um and his willingness to do whatever it takes. This should all sound very familiar in the current environment, right? Because we've been talking about it for the last almost hour. Khan comes back, of course, as the villain in Star Trek II Wrath of Khan, the movie, a great movie. So I honestly think that's that Star Trek, if you watch these episodes, you come away with with genuine learning about the the role of sociopathy in making us who we are and in leadership. I want to read one of your quotes here. As America's founders understood, but as today's Americans too often forget, we all harbor an inner sociopath.
00:49:21
Speaker
If a sociopathic leader gets control of our institutions and incentives, he can twist the settings towards lying, cheating, and bullying. He can bring crowds of decent people to stomp their feet with praise for violence against reporters and chants of lock her up.
00:49:40
Speaker
He can make decent politicians look away from violations of decency that they would not have previously tolerated. It seems what you're basically saying there that a sociopath can push others.
00:49:55
Speaker
whole groups of people towards sociopathy. oh of course Is that what we're seeing today? Yeah, sure, sure. these These elements of the human personality are fundamental, and sure, they can be unleashed by demagogues. That's what demagogues do. ah and Part of this goes back to what we were talking about earlier, which is the men's abandonments, a lot of men's abandonment of of Democrats. you know Democrats try to always be so kind and decent. um And that's a good thing. We like that. But there is an attraction to the other side of leadership, you know the the ruthless side, the get it done side, ah the slightly sociopathic side. And the founders understood this. Hamilton warns about it very specifically.
00:50:48
Speaker
that they're going to be these figures who come along, these demagogues, who are who are dark figures, people who don't follow the rules. And they consciously design a system not to eliminate that part of our personality, but to channel it. It's Madison's greatest inspiration. I think the greatest political breakthrough in history is how do you How do you cope with ambition he understands the danger of ambition to politics. The strong figures who will want to take over the system the answer is the only force sufficient to contain ambition. Is ambition so you channel it you pit ambition against ambitions the greatest political inside of all time.
00:51:31
Speaker
So that's what those people are all about. It's a very sophisticated understanding of of human um human leadership. In terms of like progressive masculinity, so some of my favorite historical figures are, say, a John Brown, who not only went to bleeding Kansas and you know actively fought slavers, but He led the raid on Harpers Ferry which ultimately triggered the Civil War and then there's of course Ulysses S. Grant who had to send hundreds of thousands of troops to enemy enemy lines and what became in the end against Lee. ah
00:52:08
Speaker
a war of attrition so here you might I guess see a couple of guys exercising there's ah sociopathy in a constructive way because it's for a much greater good which is preserving the union and abolishing slavery so that's one way to think of it. um curious famously Grant famously said is Or is it Sherman? Gosh, I forget. ah Well, Sherman was definitely a sociopath. Sherman was cut from the same cloth. Grant, by the way, was not a sociopath, but far from it. ah Same with Sherman, but he did understand the appeal of the dark side and he said famously, it is well that war is so terrible or we should love it too much. There's a scene in the movie Patton, which I just watched, an incredible movie.
00:52:55
Speaker
I hadn't seen it since it first came out when I was 10 years old. And Patton, the character played by George C. Scott, has just finished. He's he's walked through a battlefield of a devastating battle and soldiers Dead bodies are strewn around, hand-to-hand combat, Germans next to Americans. um You see the camera flashes past bodies with with limbs severed and um tanks are smoking. And the camera cuts to Patton who says, by God, I love it.
00:53:37
Speaker
He doesn't mean that he loves the killing or the death, but that the spectacle of war, the drama of war, the warrior in him loves this. yes And you see this and you think this was a dangerous man.
00:53:52
Speaker
Are you in touch with your own dangerous man? Are you in touch with your own inner sociopath? No, not really. You just don't want to say it out loud. I don't understand sociopathy. I've i'm you know but to so i've been very civilized. I feel like I'm 15% sociopath. Really? No, I'm just repelled by... By what I see the sociopathic elements of the Trump movement, I find nothing appealing about it at all. You're half sociopathic. No, I said 15, not 15. 15, not 50. Okay, let's clarify that. Like when I have to make like a tough decision, like with a roster move on my so softball team, which might, you know, hurt someone's feelings, like, you know, I have to
The Happiness Curve and Media Reflections
00:54:34
Speaker
think about winning. I have to think about,
00:54:37
Speaker
The greater good, um, or even like writing a memoir. Like, I think to be like a good memoirist, you have to have that inner sociopath because you've got stories to tell and they're going to include other people and you might hurt those other people. So you have to ask yourself if this is.
00:54:55
Speaker
If I should, if I should put that in and really make the artwork the best artwork it can be, or should I take it out and preserve those friendships and family bonds as well as I could. So to make those tough decisions for the sake of your art, it requires a little, I can't even say the word sociopathy.
00:55:17
Speaker
Let's talk about the happiness curve, why life gets better after 50, which you wrote a few years ago. So not only are you, um, after 50 or after 60, if, if my research did me right, um, does life continue to get better after 60? Has for me, I feel more settled. Um,
00:55:42
Speaker
there's There's less I feel that is that is unfinished. you know The things that I thought when I was younger I would have to complete in order to have a satisfying life i've I've let go of. um i' I've come to understand my limitations. and you know For us writers, people who get hooked on it early in college, which I think you did and which I did, we read people, we read the greats.
00:56:09
Speaker
orwell or or Dickens or whoever. And we think, well, I can do that even better. And then we grow up and and we can't do it even better. And in our 40s, we're thinking, well, I failed. I haven't made it to the level that I want to be.
00:56:24
Speaker
And 20 years later, you're like, yeah, but I've made it to still a pretty decent level. So I've i've been able to let go some of those those expectations. um And my personality is is more settled than it was. So yeah, I wouldn't trade this age for anything actually, it's it's a great age. i am So my book, The Happiness Curve is is about the U-shape life satisfaction curve.
00:56:50
Speaker
aging itself entirely apart from the circumstances of your life. It turns out that the process just of aging, the passage of time has an effect on average on human well-being, doesn't affect everyone the same way or even at all. But on average, the middle of life is going to be the least happy part if if you isolate the effect of aging. And The bottom is around statistically around age 47, 48, and then emotional well-being continues to improve. Again, other things equal, which they never are, but background
00:57:25
Speaker
emotional well-being tends to improve right through the end of life. And I'm textbook on all of that. I bottomed out in my late 40s and began to sense improvement into my 50s, early 50s, and it's continued ever since. But for humans, roughly age 47 and a half is where people's emotional well-being tends to bottom out if you're just looking at the effects of age. You're taking out you know education and unemployment and divorce and all those things.
00:57:54
Speaker
um By 54 you're on average already around the bend and starting to improve. I see. Okay, I have lots to not look forward to and some things to look forward to then. Well, I tell people that the best thing about your 40s is that they end. I'm 41 right now and yeah, I'd say the past two or three or four years has been really tough for some of the reasons you write about in your book. You know, this is when you're You really got to make money. You're raising a kid. Maybe one of your parents is starting to to get sick. So there's just a lot of stresses and I'm surrounded by 40 year olds in the same situation as me. They're just like not getting enough sleep. They're burnt out. So yeah. it's it's they should They should all read my book because what you're up against here is
00:58:48
Speaker
is not just the circumstances you faced. Your kids and your need to earn an income and recalibrating your career so that you can make things add up, all of which you're dealing with. But you also have this additional factor of the age itself that you're at. The brain is changing in the 40s and your expectations and hopes are changing, your values are changing. All of that is happening even independently to some extent of those other things. I see.
00:59:15
Speaker
It's like, so we make false weather forecasts ah in our early 20s. It's like moving to Seattle when you're 21 and thinking you're there for the sunshine. And the first five or six years, it's not sunny, but you think, OK, well, next year will be sunny. But after you've lived in Seattle for 20 years and it's never sunny, it finally starts dawning on you that you're going to be disappointed in Seattle. And that occasion's an adjustment um until you come out the other side realizing, well, you know it's not going to be sunny here, but actually, I kind of like the way it is. So that adjustment where you readjust your your values, your hopes, your ambitions to your actual life situation, that happens in the 40s. And the good news is it's a transformation for the better. You come out of that better balance with a keener sense of yourself,
01:00:08
Speaker
um and better able to value what you have accomplished as opposed to kicking yourself for what you have not. and that's It's a very healthy adjustment. It's a big payoff. That's the good news. The bad news is it's a pain in the ass to go through. It lasts for most of your 40s and the only way out is through. and Remember, just don't take it that seriously. This is an effect that time is having on you to a large extent.
01:00:35
Speaker
It's part of the aging process, it's part of the growth process, you're growing. And it won't be fun, but it's all good in the end. It's really nice to hear that you look back on your career with some ah some affection and all the admirable things you've done, which which you most certainly have. I asked you to bring something um cultural to recommend to the audience, um a movie or a book or something, what would you like to talk about?
01:01:03
Speaker
My movie recommendation is now 48 years old. You used the word prescient earlier. It is the extremely prescient movie network. um you Have you seen network? 20 years ago, yeah. A lot of people haven't seen it. They've never heard of it. This is a film written by Paddy Chayefsky. It is a brilliant script.
01:01:31
Speaker
um And the story it tells is what happens if a news network realizes that by throwing out the rule book and putting wild conspiracy theories and pure raw emotion and reality TV on the air to the extent of reality TV about actual Marxist terrorists who are killing people and um And then the network sees its ratings go through the roof. It goes from struggling and almost dying to making scads of money. What does that do to ourselves as people? What does it do to the news business? So this is a movie that foresees exactly what's happened.
01:02:17
Speaker
almost 50 years ago. um And it's hilarious and and very cutting. There's a scene that that makes me laugh just to think about it where you've got a Maoist terrorist leader. I mean, these people are killers, right? They're not joking around.
01:02:31
Speaker
on the phone negotiating residuals with her agent. This is the world that it envisions. um So everyone should see should see network because we still have a lot to learn from that movie. There's that amazing tagline in the movie, like, I'm mad as hell and I can't take it anymore. Is that right?
01:02:52
Speaker
Right. a A network anchor gets fired because of low ratings and he goes crazy on the air and he encourages everyone to ah stick their head out the window and shout, I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take it anymore and they all do and it goes viral. And of course, this not only gets him back on the show, but transforms the whole industry. And that goes to a lot of what we've been talking about, the fact that voters vote expressively. They use their vote to express generalized anger you know about gas prices, or about their own lives, or the world is more disorderly than they like. it's It's not a rational way to vote, but it's how people vote. I'm mad as hell and I am not going to take this anymore.
01:03:34
Speaker
I'm going to recommend, um, the only Star Trek episode I've ever seen. It was in 1993, same year as your kindly inquisitors. It was the fifth season and the episode is called the inner life. This is when, uh, captain Jean-Luc Picard, he gets struck by an energy beam and he goes unconscious for 25 minutes. And are you familiar with this episode?
01:03:58
Speaker
No. Oh, i okay. I can't wait to tell you. What's it called again? The Inner Life. The Inner Life. And while he's unconscious, he's only unconscious for 25 minutes, he lives another whole life on this planet named Catan. So he he wakes up in like another human being's bo body. He's an iron weaver. He has a wife, a child. You see him age. He has grandkids.
01:04:26
Speaker
you see him kind of learning the flute and eventually he he he dies as this person and wakes up back as Jean-Luc Picard and he picks up this flute. He knows how to to play the flute. There's a whole other side plot where you know these people on Catan, their whole planet is about to go extinct because there's a drought coming. I won't go into all of that, but I was just amazed with what the show could do in 45 minutes.
01:04:56
Speaker
You know every all these movies now they're so bloated two and a half hours you could have you could watch someone move into and another whole person live out their whole life die and wrap up the story in this amazingly tight way just within forty five minutes so yeah i probably need to read to watch some star trek both new generation and old.
01:05:21
Speaker
Those of us in my generation who actually saw Star Trek on primetime TV in real time in the 60s when no one had ever seen those episodes before and the only way to see them was to go be home at a certain time and turn on the television set, those of us in that camp will always think that the original series stands apart.
01:05:43
Speaker
and alone. And um I will always think that partly for sentimental reasons, but partly because I think it's true. That said, I will rush to see the inner life. It sounds great. What Star Trek, the the first series and the second series and then some of the later stuff,
01:06:00
Speaker
was able to do to put on television was landmark. It it gave American viewers credit for a kind of intelligence that television had never discovered in them before. Before Star Trek, there was you know F Troop and Gilligan's Island. Jonathan, this has been absolutely wonderful. Thank you for being on the Out of the Wild podcast. I hope you come back on when your your next book publishes. I'd love to. Thanks. Thanks, Jonathan. Bye-bye.