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“Conservatism is gratitude” – Jonah Goldberg
2.5k Plays11 months ago
Australiana is now Fire at Will - your safe space for dangerous conversations.
Western liberal democratic capitalism has created more prosperity, and enabled more human flourishing, than any other social system. It is something we should be proud of. And yet, Jonah Goldberg argues it is under attack, both from illiberal progressive identity politics, and right-wing populism.
Jonah is one of America's most esteemed political pundits. He was the first editor of National Review Online, before founding The Dispatch - a digital media company providing engaged citizens with fact-based reporting and commentary on politics, policy and culture. He is a regular contributor to CNN and The Los Angeles Times, and a #1 New York Times bestselling author.
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Transcript
Podcast Introduction
00:00:14
Speaker
G'day and welcome to Australiana from The Spectator Australia. I'm Will Kingston.
Douglas Murray's 'The War on the West'
00:00:20
Speaker
Regular listeners will recall that I chatted to Douglas Murray on the show a few weeks ago. His latest book is titled The War on the West. At first glance, the title of Jonah Goldberg's most recent book is similar, The Suicide of the West. And indeed, there are similarities between Jonah's book and Douglas's. They are both New York Times bestsellers from two of the most esteemed political pundits in their respective countries.
00:00:45
Speaker
But there are distinctions between a suicide and a war. A war may not be self-inflicted, it can be noble, it is sometimes unavoidable, it is temporary, and a war is winnable. Suicide is self-inflicted, it is not noble, it is avoidable, it is permanent, and, once committed, it's certainly not something that can be defeated.
Cultural Malaise and Jonah Goldberg's Insights
00:01:06
Speaker
How should we think about the cultural malaise that citizens of the West find themselves in? And what can we do about it? Jonah is uniquely placed to help me answer these questions. He is one of America's true polymyths, blending political history, social science, economics, and pop culture in his musings for The Dispatch, the online media platform that he founded, CNN, the Los Angeles Times, and the American Enterprise Institute. Jonah, welcome to Australiana. It's great to be here. Thanks for having me.
00:01:36
Speaker
It's an absolute pleasure to have you on. I read The Suicide of the West when it first came out around 2018, and I revisited it for this podcast. Perhaps, unfortunately, it is still just as relevant today as it was then. I will follow the rule that you have on your podcast when you have an author on, which is you start by asking them, what is their book about? But I will add, what is your book
Regrets on 'Suicide of the West'
00:02:00
Speaker
about? But has your thinking in any way evolved since you first wrote that book in 2018?
00:02:05
Speaker
So there should be a German word for, I love German, crazy, weird German words. There should be a German word for the sense of anxiety, Welschmerz, annoyance that comes with
00:02:19
Speaker
reading things that you wish you had read before you wrote your book so you could put it in your book. But my biggest regret about Suicide of the West is really the title. I stand by the title on the merits and all of that, but my publisher wanted something that sort of punched the reader in the nose a little bit.
Critiquing Tribalism and Identity Politics
00:02:37
Speaker
My first book was called Liberal Fascism, which certainly did that. And the working title of the book from the beginning was The Tribe of Liberty.
00:02:46
Speaker
And the argument that sort of suffuses suicide of the West, regardless of the title, is this idea that tribalism.
00:02:55
Speaker
is besetting us in all sorts of different ways. I think identity politics is a form of tribalism. And we can come up with a better word than tribalism, but I think it works. That sense of team solidarity, zero-sum thinking, us versus them, that sort of thinking, which we can call tribalism, suffuses the West these days. And it's a problem on the right. It's a problem on the left. It goes by many different names. It has many different agendas.
00:03:18
Speaker
And so part of the argument I wanted to make was that, and I think I made, is that what we actually need is a sort of a tribal attachment, a pre-enlightenment sort of attachment to the principles of liberty, rightly understood.
Liberty and England's Unique Development
00:03:32
Speaker
And part of my argument is that, you know, one of the reasons why we get what I call the miracle or the Lockean revolution or whatever, you know, the modernity is that England's weird.
00:03:44
Speaker
England's just a weird place. It's this island nation. And because it's an island nation, it didn't have standing armies because it didn't have standing armies. It allowed for competing spheres of elites to reach a kind of equilibrium that created social space. That's how you get how you get. I don't know. The Australians put a the in there for Magna Carta. I don't know.
00:04:05
Speaker
Did you say Magna Carta or? We would just say Magna Carta. Yeah. The weird way Brits don't use the for various things like hospitals and stuff drives me crazy. Anyway, the point being is that a lot of the things that we've reified that we have turned into abstract principles.
00:04:22
Speaker
begin as weird, quirky tribal customs of a weird island people. And I've read a lot since the book came out exploring on this point more that, you know, the new nationalists, the post liberals, all of these people, they've got this incredible vendetta against John Locke.
Liberal Democratic Capitalism: Progress and Challenges
00:04:42
Speaker
And they seem to think it's sort of like a fantasy Game of Thrones type magic spell. They think if they can prove John Locke was wrong, all of a sudden
00:04:51
Speaker
Liberalism will just die, right? It's like a portrait of Dorian Gray kind of thing. Just get rid of the John Locke and all of a sudden it all unravels. And the truth is, is that Australian culture, American culture, English culture, most normal Americans, most normal Brits, most normal Aussies.
00:05:06
Speaker
I don't know Jack all about John Locke or Montesquieu or any of these people, but they're liberal. It's written on their hearts. And that's a cultural affinity that we should cultivate. So anyway, the larger point of the book, just to get to the actually answer the question, is that natural rights or I shouldn't say natural rights, human rights, democracy, capitalism, liberalism broadly understood. None of these things are natural.
00:05:36
Speaker
If they were natural, they would have occurred a lot earlier in the evolutionary record. We are really the only species to create a novel environment.
00:05:46
Speaker
begins economically at the very least about 300 years ago. And I argue England, there are people who say that Holland deserves as much credit and that's fine. If there are any Dutch jingoists listening to this podcast, they can email me. We have millions of listeners in the Netherlands. I'm sure they will. And so through sort of a Hayekian process of discovery, trial and error, wars of religion, we stumbled our way, we muddled through
00:06:14
Speaker
to come up with liberal democratic capitalism. And liberal democratic capitalism is the only political system ever conceived of and operate, I shouldn't say conceived of, operationalized, put into practice that has actually solved poverty, as Deirdre McCloskey and others have argued and demonstrated. And this is not a controversial point among economists or sociologists or anthropologists. For 250,000 years,
00:06:41
Speaker
Everybody was poor. The average human being lived on basically no more than $3 a day for ever. And then once and only once in human history does that flat line chart turn into a hockey stick. And it's because of these, this what I call a Lockian revolution, but it doesn't have to be Betlock. It's just that placeholder name. And for the first time in human history, the average human being gets richer in the past.
00:07:08
Speaker
There have been moments where the chart goes up a little bit, right? Innovation creates new stuff and people get a little richer. And then the powers that be see the disruptive effect of innovation and they shut it down. And this happens over and over again. The Chinese shut down steel making or not steel making so much, but printing presses and they give up on the great fleet. They do all these sorts of things because innovation is threatening to the status quo. And for weird reasons in the
00:07:36
Speaker
18th century, essentially, innovation, which had been in Europe, a sin, the sin of curiosity, questioning the established order. Innovation seems good. Building a better mousetrap is a good thing to be celebrated. Creating wealth because you've come up with a better product is something to be celebrated. And you just see astronomical growth in prosperity and human flourishing and life expectancy and all of these kinds of things. Doesn't mean we didn't have ups and downs along the way, but the secular trend has been skyrocketing upward.
00:08:07
Speaker
And we should be grateful for that. And that's the really the sort of, that's why I don't like suicide of the West. It sounds like I should have written, here's why you should take a bath with a toaster, right? It's a very depressing kind of title when in fact,
00:08:20
Speaker
My point is it's a much more hopeful
Gratitude, Conservatism, and Identity Politics
00:08:22
Speaker
thing. It's that this is a fantastic story. It's a story we should be proud of. It's a story that we should protect. All civilizations are, are the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves. And when you abandon this idea of innate human dignity, of the equality of all human beings, of the right to property, the right
00:08:43
Speaker
Now this idea, the locking revolution boils down to this notion that we are citizens, not subjects, that we are captains of ourselves and that the fruits of our labor belong to us.
00:08:56
Speaker
And that idea has generated more human flourishing when put into practice than any other idea out there. And we don't teach anyone to be grateful for it. Conservatism rightly understood as gratitude. Patriotism rightly understood as gratitude. These are the things in my life, in my society, in my community that I find lovely and deserving of love.
00:09:18
Speaker
And I want to protect and defend and preserve them and pass them on to future generations. Instead, what we teach, I don't know too much about what taught in Australia, but I think it's true of the United States for sure in the UK to a large extent. And this is where Douglas Murray and I agree is like this. The identity politics bullshit is premised on this idea that simply through an accident of birth,
00:09:41
Speaker
Some people are owed more are more deserving of more and that they should be resentful and embittered because they're not getting it. That's why i think aristocracy is one of the for nobility was one of the first forms of identity politics is the idea that certain people just because they were born to the right people.
00:10:00
Speaker
were more deserving as human beings. And these ideas of teaching resentment and entitlement, which is literally the opposite of gratitude. You know, gratitude says, be grateful for what you have. Entitlement says you deserve, you're entitled to so much more.
00:10:15
Speaker
And so the way out of this mess is to stop thinking this way, teaching kids to think this
Threats from Progressivism and Populism
00:10:23
Speaker
way. And that's doable, great, because suicide is a choice, as my late friend Charles Cranheimer would say, decline is a choice.
00:10:30
Speaker
We can choose the better angels. We can choose the better rhetoric. We can choose the better educational philosophy, but we're beset by a sort of collective action problem and public choice theory problem and all these kinds of things that doesn't incentivize people to see society that way.
00:10:47
Speaker
You are not quite a lone voice on the right, but you are a relatively isolated voice on the right in saying that that idea of Western liberal democracy and the ideals that you've just espoused is under threat from, yes, illiberal progressives with identity politics.
00:11:03
Speaker
But it's also under threat on the right from Trumpian populism. How do you think there and you think of them both as forms of tribalism? In what ways do you see those two phenomena that are the defining features arguably of our times politically? How do you see them as similar and how do you see them as distinct?
00:11:26
Speaker
Sure. So you're right. I see them all as kinds of tribalism, right? They all operate at some level with a us versus them, a zero sum. You know, if they benefit, we lose attitude. Culture war thinking suffuses all of this stuff.
00:11:46
Speaker
But there are obvious differences. I, for most of my professional career, hated what we call in the States both sidesism, where you just sort of say, oh, there's not a dime's worth of difference between the parties and both sides suck and both sides are wrong and all that kind of stuff. And I've become a born again, both sides are. But simply saying that both sides have a tribalism problem,
00:12:08
Speaker
doesn't address the fact that there's an asymmetry involved. The left, and we'll just use that as a shorthand for a diverse group of people, progressives, whatever, right? They control the commanding heights of the culture. They control Hollywood, they control the universities, they control mainstream media, they control publishing, they control the fashion industry. I used to have this
00:12:29
Speaker
Back when I was in good odor on the right, I used to love to go to college campuses and say, you know, because they're one of the things that universities do. It's a very transgressive, brilliant form of conformity enforcement. They teach kids that being left wing or liberal or progressive, whatever term you want to use is rebellious. You know, they teach them that you are, you know, speaking truth to power.
00:12:52
Speaker
by taking these positions. And I would always love to say, you know, let me get this straight. Your professors are liberal. The administration here is liberal. The media is liberal. Hollywood is liberal. Fashion industry is liberal. Publishing industry, and go down the list. And you think you're sticking it to the man by agreeing with them?
00:13:11
Speaker
And they would look at me, you know, the way my old Basset Hound would look at me when I tried to feed it a grape, just sort of this head tilting, you know, incomprehension, you know, because they've so internalized this idea that they are the rebels when in fact, you know, they all agree with each other and they agree with their professors and all their learning is passive. And that creates a certain hubris, that creates a certain bubble think that has very different real world ramifications.
00:13:37
Speaker
than the problems on the right. The right has a very well cultivated, less academic, less full of academic jargon, less talk of intersectionality and critical this and critical that BS. But they still have this profound sense of grievance, right? That's what populism is almost always is, is this sense that you're being, that someone's getting over on you, that the system's rigged against you. And that is the rhetoric of the right all over the place.
00:14:07
Speaker
that you deserve more, stuff's being taken from you, you do not have status, you're deplorable, right? And it pisses them off. The great irony is that was once the talking points of the left. For sure. And it's still on parts of the left, the talking point of the left, I just don't think it really has much correspondence with reality. But look, I mean, I'm one of these people who thinks that there are very few new ideas
00:14:31
Speaker
You know, I'm on the side of Francis Fukuyama on this. I think he's been really misunderstood, right? His, so my first book liberal fascism was predicated on this fundamental idea that, I mean, we don't, we can get into liberal fascism if you want, but like all forms of illiberalism sell themselves as new and modern and revolutionary and transgressive and a great leap forward.
00:14:57
Speaker
All of them are in fact reactionary. Communism is tribalism for one class.
Old Ideas as New Solutions
00:15:02
Speaker
Italian fascism was tribalism for one state. Nazism was tribalism for one race. It is still this collectivist notion that the group is the fundamental unit of politics and those in the group are good and those outside the group are bad and it's a struggle of power and zero sum, you know, that kind of thing.
00:15:22
Speaker
Fukuyama's point was not that history was over. Events would still happen and all of these kinds of things. But his point was that we're not going to come up with an improvement on the basic philosophical construct of liberal democratic capitalism. And he likes Denmark more than he likes the United States. And that's fine. There are many rooms in the mansion of democratic capitalism. But the second best thing
00:15:48
Speaker
All right, a third best statement on the Declaration of Independence after Martin Luther King's I Have a Dream speech.
00:15:55
Speaker
Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address is Calvin Coolidge's address on the 150th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration. And I can't quote it from memory, so I'm paraphrasing, but the gist of it is, if you believe that we are endowed by our Creator with inalienable rights, if you believe that these rights are fundamental and irrevocable, then it's final. That's it. No supposed advance can improve upon that.
00:16:26
Speaker
And so my argument is that conceptually liberal democratic capitalism is at the summit. It's at the top of the mountain.
00:16:32
Speaker
And so when people say, oh, we have to go left towards this or right towards that, when you're at the top of a mountain, whether you go left or right, you're still going down. You're still going back to the sort of thinking that defined humanity for 250,000 years until basically the 1680s. And so the nationalism talk, I see it as a throwback. I mean, at least some of them are honest about it. It's a throwback to what we used to call romantic nationalism of the 1800s, the sort of,
00:17:02
Speaker
religious post liberal theocracy stuff. It's not hard for me to explain why that's an old idea, but they always sell it as something new. Technocracy is supposed to be something new. You know, socialism was supposed to be something new. Socialism is a very old, you know, that's what a tribal economy is. And so for me, the, and I know I'm filibustering here, but one of the most useful conceptual ways to think about this comes from Friedrich Hayek, who says,
00:17:33
Speaker
The microcosm is the universe or the microverse that you live in with friends, family, community, people you know by name, people who you have a sense of their character and their soul, that you have non-commercial or non-contractual relationships with. I often say that in my family, I'm a communist, right? Because in a communist society, from each according to his ability to each according to his need, right?
00:17:56
Speaker
There's a microcosm and a macrocosm.
Trade, Specialization, and Freedom
00:18:00
Speaker
Parents may have favorites.
00:18:02
Speaker
but you don't distribute food unequally to your children, right? You don't charge children, at least not until they're grown up, rent or for clothing and these kinds of things. It is a communitarian enterprise. The macrocosm is the extended order, right? It's the gazelle shaft versus the gamine shaft. And then the gazelle shaft, liberal democratic capitalism, the extended order of liberty, whatever we're gonna call it,
00:18:29
Speaker
That's the best system ever conceived of and put into practice for dealing with strangers. Because in a natural environment, in a prehistoric environment, you have a bushel of apples. I want your apples. My go-to way of getting your apples is to hit you over the head with a rock.
00:18:49
Speaker
free exchange, I have money, you have apples, you like money, I like apples. We come to an arrangement where it's no longer zero sum. And any other conceptual framework that gets rid of that is illiberal and I don't think is some sort of modern advance. Now we made through genetic engineering or AI come up with some new idea for this crap and I'm open to it, but until then,
00:19:13
Speaker
I think this is as good as it's going to get. I've heard that quote extended before along the lines of with my family, I'm a communist in my local community. I'm a socialist with other people's money. I'm a rapid capitalist or words to that extent. The sad reality is and partially because of the very effective branding of both
00:19:35
Speaker
Trumpian populism and illiberal identity politics, which are both in their various ways, very appealingly branded to particular groups. The type of liberal conservatism, which you would espouse on the right, which was once the hallmark of, say, the Republican Party in America, no longer holds sway in the Republican Party and no longer potentially holds sway in the popular right wing discourse.
Trumpian Populism vs. Conservative Values
00:20:02
Speaker
Is there a path back for, let's call it traditional conservatism in the Trump and post Trump ages? So certainly in the post Trump age, I think it's possible.
00:20:15
Speaker
It's worth acknowledging that a lot of the stuff that I spend my time arguing with, that you're seeing from abroad about the, you use the word discourse, which I think is the right word, a lot of it is shadows on the cave wall, right? It's Twitter fights and stupid cable television fights and it's...
00:20:34
Speaker
you know, when you're talking, when I'm talking about reactionary tribalist thinking, right? I mean, a lot of it just stems from the fact that the Republican party is bedeviled by a cult of personality with Donald Trump. When I was growing up, up until, you know, up until a few years ago, really, the term Rhino, Republican in name only,
00:20:56
Speaker
was the term we used, I don't know if Australians use wets, right? But it's like for squishes, for moderates, people who were weak sisters on abortion or national defense or tax cuts go down a long list, right? Or they weren't doctrinaire down the line, reliable conservatives.
00:21:13
Speaker
regardless of whether the policy positions were right or wrong, that's just the way it worked. And the only operational definition of a rhino today is someone who is insufficiently loyal to Donald Trump. Chip Roy is a congressman from Texas. I like him. I have my sincere disagreements with him about a bunch of things. But
00:21:32
Speaker
He is like a hardcore, yee-haw, Reaganite, right-winger, a little too isolationist for my taste, but he has seriously well-formed convictions on ideological things that put him, if you're looking through the prism of issues or policies or philosophy,
00:21:50
Speaker
decidedly on the right end of the political spectrum in all sorts of ways. Donald Trump wanted him primary because he's a rhino for no other reason than he endorsed Ron DeSantis and was insufficiently loyal to Donald Trump. Trump would be happier to have a rump party that was a pure cult to him
00:22:12
Speaker
than to be the leader of a philosophically consistent, robust party where he was an important voice. And because of changes in the media, because of all of these other things going on, he's been very successful at that. Have you seen any comparable cult of personality in your lifetime?
00:22:31
Speaker
The only one that comes to mind to a certain extent was with, in my lifetime, was with Obama. There was, for a period there where I'm not making up, the sort of elite left discourse was that he was a messiah figure, right? I mean, like Barbara Walters, major journalist here, you know, said we thought he was a messiah. Oprah Winfrey would refer to him as the one.
00:22:51
Speaker
Deeprak Chopra said he was this consciousness-raising figure. There's a guy in the San Francisco Chronicle who wrote a famous piece where he described him as a light worker, which are these semi-mystical beings that are more evolved and all. So there was a lot of that crap. Hollywood stars put out a video where it ended with Demi Moore saying, I pledge allegiance to my president, which as a traditional conservative makes me want to cut myself. So there was some of that stuff.
00:23:20
Speaker
It's deeper and weirder on the right, I think in part precisely because of Donald Trump's deformed and corrupt character. It's sort of like the Irish mom, stereotypical Irish mom, who's got a screw-up son and insists he can do no wrong, right? And every time he does something wrong and people criticize him, she double or triples down on how everyone's being unfair.
00:23:50
Speaker
There's a weird codependent thing going on on big chunks of the right where part of it stems from populism and he's a battering ram and all that nonsense, but part of it stems from
00:24:03
Speaker
the cognitive dissonance of admitting that you've hitched your wagon to this thrice-married serial adulterer con man. And people don't want to admit what that says about them, so they create this alternative universe that just simply erases all of that and says, no, he's been put here by God to solve all of our problems, and he's a fool.
00:24:26
Speaker
four-dimensional chess player and all this nonsense. This is also what makes the strategy of the left so difficult to understand because whenever they attack him say through the courts and whenever they go after him it reinforces that mentality on the right and it makes it incredibly difficult for me to comprehend any sort of strategic coherent thought as to why they would be taking some of the attack lines that they have been taking.
00:24:49
Speaker
Yeah, so I mean, again, I have a lot of criticisms for the left, but the unstated assumption in that critique, which I agree with on the sort of the substance of it, is that there is a left where there are people in a room strategizing about how to do things and they're making bad decisions. When the reality is, is one of the reasons why our politics
00:25:13
Speaker
is so screwed up in the US these days, it has more to do with the fact that it's a collective action problem, is that there are, take this criminal case against Donald Trump right now in New York. I agree entirely, it is a bad case.
00:25:27
Speaker
It's a good example of Trump law, where you'd only, you wouldn't prosecute this case against anybody but Trump. But Alvin Bragg, the Manhattan DA, he doesn't answer to Joe Biden. He doesn't answer to anybody, but he ran for office promising, as did the attorney general of New York, to go after Trump. And I think it's bad for the better cases against Trump to bring this case. I think it's bad for Joe Biden to bring this case. Bad for the left. But it's really good for Alvin Bragg.
00:25:57
Speaker
Similarly, I think Margie Taylor Greene, this crackpot right-wing congresswoman, or Matt Gaetz, this siberitic gargoyle, these guys are doing things that are terrible for the Republican Party. I would argue terrible for the country, but really, really good for them.
00:26:15
Speaker
And you add in these larger frames of populism, of social media, always amping up people to make them angrier and angrier. The general mood of catastrophizing throughout American culture
00:26:31
Speaker
You could come up with a better strategy about how to deal with Donald Trump, but you couldn't operationalize it without other people being free agents and ruining it all. And the same thing applies on the rage, but party. This is sort of the greatest hits from my podcast, The Remnant, but like.
00:26:48
Speaker
Hyperpartisanship is the result of weak parties, not strong parties. The Republican Party and the Democratic Party are free-floating brand names that can be hijacked by anybody with the popularity to get elected.
Media, Bias, and Democracy Concerns
00:27:01
Speaker
We are, in America, I believe we're still the only advanced industrialized democracy in the world whose parties have voluntarily given up the ability to pick their own candidates.
00:27:12
Speaker
Like people say, why didn't the elders of the Republican Party tell Trump not to run or to resign? Why don't the elders of the Democratic Party tell Joe Biden that his time is over? Either those such people don't exist or the ones who you could say do exist have no power. There's no ability to force. There's no forcing mechanisms.
00:27:29
Speaker
to do any of these kinds of things. It's the Wild West politically where you could set up your own YouTube channel and monetize the hell out of conspiracy theories and bullshit. And it doesn't matter if you're not in the mainstream media anymore. And it's everything's sort of vulcanized and siloed and people get their media bespoke to the extent where everybody is just finding
00:27:56
Speaker
including among elite media, but really the sort of one man band sort of world of YouTube and podcasts and Twitter and Rumble and all of these things. Media is obsessed with telling people what they want to hear these days rather than what they need to hear. Audience capture is a problem across American politics and media. And the irony here, it's sort of like my thing about telling college kids that the, they're conformists by being liberal.
00:28:20
Speaker
Everyone is told whether the sort of Occupy Wall Street left or the Tea Party right or the Trumpian, you know, MAGA crowd, they're all being told to stay mad and stay fighting because
00:28:34
Speaker
The powers that be are so powerful and they're running their lives when in fact nobody is running their lives. Nobody has that kind of power in American culture. Nobody. There is no secret star chamber or secret room. There is there is a deep state, but it's a bureaucratic thing. It's not someplace where the egg council and the Jews are controlling people's lives.
00:28:54
Speaker
But people want to believe that and they act on it. And there's money to be made in telling people that crap. And that's what I mean. It's a both sides problem. But the messages and the demons vary depending upon the cultural slice that you're in.
00:29:11
Speaker
I latch on to that mention of the deep state because the rise of the administrative state is indeed a thesis that you put forward in your book as being a catalyst for some of the problems that we see today. Some people do denounce this as a crackpot conspiracy theory, particularly when it's couched in the Trumpian language of
00:29:32
Speaker
the deep state. You think that the rise of the administrative state is very real, it is a very big problem, and it is a threat to democracy. Explain or expand on that for me. Sure. The easiest way to get into this, and there are serious scholars on this, this guy, Philip Hamburger, who wrote
00:29:50
Speaker
Is administrative law lawful or legal or something? He's been banging his spoon on his high chair about this stuff for 30 years. It's a very serious legal argument and a lot of it is in public choice about regulatory capture. I mean, there are very serious people who get into this, but I think the easiest way to stay out of a lot of the theory is to basically start with Congress. Congress is the most powerful branch of government, according to the US Constitution. It's the first branch. It is the only branch of government that can
00:30:18
Speaker
fire people in the other branches through either through impeachment or not just simply impeachment. It controls the purse strings, right? It controls the power to tax. You probably know that the American revolutionaries had invested a lot
00:30:34
Speaker
in the moral power and importance of taxation. It's the only branch that can declare war. It creates basically all the agencies of the other branch, other branches, right? It creates the FBI, it creates the Department of Agriculture, it funds these things. It creates all of the courts, except basically for the Supreme Court and like, I don't know, maybe maritime courts, I'm not sure, but like all the lesser courts in the federal system are creations of Congress, which sets their pay and all of these things.
00:31:01
Speaker
And the founding fathers conceived of Congress, both the House and the Senate, but really the House, right, as the place where politics is supposed to happen, where competing interests meet and debate and haggle and work things out through a process of discovery and horse trading and all of these things, and come to some sort of compromise about distribution of resources, allocation of taxation, all these kinds of things. Congress has, and this is where the founding fathers screwed up.
00:31:29
Speaker
They never imagined that Congress would cease to be a jealous guardian of its rights and prerogatives. But really going back almost 100 years now, Congress has piecemeal outsourced its responsibilities and its powers to the executive branch and to a lesser extent the court. But the thing is when you outsource these things to the executive branch, you're empowering the executive branch to do whatever it wants
00:31:56
Speaker
So the only check on it is going to be the court. So the courts get put into this position of essentially being cleanup artists for Congress after the fact. And so that has increased the role of the courts and all sorts of things. And so the result is you have this permanent bureaucracy with massive powers that is unaccountable to the voters, bureaucrats, administrators, whatever we want to call them, they are making decisions
00:32:23
Speaker
with very little to no democratic accountability and very little public visibility. And Congress has been rendered in many respects to sort of this, I sometimes call it a parliament of pundits, but in this case, it's a lobbying operation where they don't actually wanna do this thing called right laws. They wanna lobby the executive branch to make tweaks to various regulations, like we're having these huge fights about student debt cancellation. The president has no frigging authority to cancel student debt as a law is moved by Joe Biden.
00:32:54
Speaker
Congress, because after Congress are Democrats, they want Biden to do it because they know they can't do it in Congress. Congress wants whichever party controls the White House, its party in Congress wants the White House to do all of the things that Congress should be doing. And this process over the years has empowered this cadre, this managerial class of people,
00:33:18
Speaker
who are immune to democratic accountability and are operating, you know, administrative law is so nuts that they have their own courts where the presumption of innocence doesn't really apply in the same way. And I think that that's one of the things that understandably fuels a sense of populist outrage is that these nameless, unaccountable people are making decisions
00:33:43
Speaker
that nobody voted on and that Congress is not doing any oversight of. And so there's no political outlet to adjudicate a lot of these things. Why has that almost century long process of power outsourcing taken place? Well, it's a lot like a Hemingway's thing about bankruptcy. It's been gradual and then sudden, but some of it made sense. I mean, like some of it, like a lot of decisions in the context of the moment, some of these things make sense. Like Congress is supposed to be in charge, in charge of trade.
00:34:13
Speaker
But as time went on, it became more and more clear that like there were too many vested interests, too many specific regional industries that wanted specific carve outs and protections that you couldn't get anything through Congress. And so Congress created mechanisms to outsource trade authority to the executive branch. And then they get the benefit of when it doesn't go their way, they get to be outraged by it without having any accountability for it.
00:34:40
Speaker
And so this is part of the collective action problem is that when you have congressmen who are representatives, senators who want to get reelected, being a griper on TV is a much better business model than actually doing the hard work of legislating. And that dynamic has accreted over time to where
00:35:06
Speaker
There are a lot of people in Congress now who don't know how to legislate. They literally just like, they don't know the bells and whistles of how to do it. All they know how to do is calm stuff. I mean, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is one of the most famous Congresswoman in America. She's a very attractive lady. She's a very effective pundit.
00:35:25
Speaker
All she does is name post offices. She doesn't do any legislation. Bernie Sanders doesn't do anything. But they get reelected because, in part because of the primary system that we have and the big sort which has caused most states and congressional districts to be uncompetitive. They're overwhelmingly either red, Republican or blue, Democrat. The only threat to incumbency is in the primary.
00:35:54
Speaker
And so all you have to do is be really mad at the other party to win the nomination. And the worst thing, it's now gotten so dysfunctional that the easiest way to lose a primary contest is to say, when I'm elected, I'm going to work with the other side to get things done.
00:36:09
Speaker
what hardcore Democrats want to hear and what hardcore Republicans want to hear is when I get to Washington, I'm going to tear off the head of the opposition and use their skulls as a goblet to drink from. And so this collective action is persistent and you add into it because of the populism and the big sort, most prime, then there's all sorts of social science data on this. Most hardcore, passionate primary voters
00:36:37
Speaker
hate their own party. They just hate the other party more, right? Negative polarization or negative partisanship. And so you get this situation where we're having this crazy drama in the House of Representatives as we're recording this, but whether or not they're going to depose the Speaker of the House, Mike Johnson, and the indictment of him from the hotheads is that he is
00:37:01
Speaker
gaining to use democratic votes to get legislation across.
Abortion Debate and Political Dynamics
00:37:05
Speaker
Now, it'd be one thing if he was solely relying on democratic votes to pass democratic legislation, but unlike aid to Ukraine, somewhere close to 95% of, I don't want to say 95%, 80% of the Republican caucus is in favor of providing more military aid to Ukraine. 95% of Republican caucuses is in favor of providing more military aid to Israel.
00:37:28
Speaker
But if Mike Johnson brings this stuff to the floor without doing the things that they want him to do, the indictment is how dare he use democratic votes to get legislation that most Republicans want passed. And that is astoundingly stupid. But this is a very stupid time in America.
00:37:45
Speaker
Yes, there was once a time when politics was called the art of the possible and compromise was seen as a good thing. That's no longer the case. You've mentioned a couple of the issues of the day there and I want to use that as an opening to talk a bit more tactically about some things that are going on in American politics. I'll try to keep it shorter. I know I'm rambling. No, not at all. That is one of the charms of the Remnant podcast.
00:38:08
Speaker
The first is abortion. Now, I think this is a really difficult one for non-Americans to feel viscerally in the same way that Americans do. It is just a different debate in other parts of the Anglosphere and it's a more settled debate. Give me, and this is a broad choose your own adventure question, give me the state of play with abortion and perhaps then tied into what you think of Trump's federalist take on basically this is now a state issue and I'm comfortable with that.
00:38:37
Speaker
Yeah, so before it was talking about the deep state, administrative state or whatever, talking about how it's circumvented democratic processes, where politics gets to play out on the ground in an organic way. Abortion is a perfect analog to this.
00:38:50
Speaker
The country was moving towards a general consensus about abortion policy, which probably would have ended up looking a lot like French abortion policy, where largely free to have an abortion for the first trimester, more regulations kick in for the second trimester, and then on the third trimester, if you don't have a really good reason, you probably can't have one, right? Something along those lines was starting to gel as an American consensus.
00:39:18
Speaker
And the Supreme Court came in, short circuited all of that, and issued Roe v. Wade and also a companion case called Doe, and then reaffirmed it with case that we don't have to get into all the legal history. And what it did is it put a one size fits all policy on the United States. That is what created the pro-life movement in America. It did not exist. Yes, there were pro-life people, but there were more broadly just sort of socially conservative Christians and that kind of thing.
00:39:45
Speaker
The pro-life movement, in many ways, the religious right, as we've known it, I mean, there have been previous religious rights, is created by Roe.
00:39:55
Speaker
because it takes this stuff out of the democratic process. This is precisely Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the most famous sort of left wing justice of the last couple of decades. This was her critique of Roe, right? She's very pro-choice, but she was like, this was not the way to do it because of the unanticipated consequences of it. And so for all of my adult life, abortion
00:40:18
Speaker
was a non-negotiable position among the non-rhinos, right? That was one of the main things that got you called a rhino is if you were squishy on abortion. And that's one of the things that fueled the big sort. If you were irretrievably pro-choice, lots of people became Democrats because of that. If you were irretrievably pro-life, lots of people became Republicans. It was dogma.
00:40:40
Speaker
And the problem is, I mean, among the problems, you could make the arguments against Roe v. Wade, which I agree with entirely. I think it is completely made up constitutional law. It was a horrible decision. It deserved, it shouldn't have been issued and it shouldn't, and it should have been overturned. But you could say you were pro-life by just saying Roe is bad or you need to get rid of Roe. And you didn't actually have to develop any arguments about what came after.
00:41:07
Speaker
a lot of Republican pro, quote unquote pro lifers became lazy and complacent because again, they're only talking, the way they get elected is by pandering to the base on this stuff anyway. And it's kind of a free position because the Supreme Court was protected. Nope. No one thought Roe was going to go away. And so you got people to be, they could be uncompromising without cost on this issue. And then the dog caught the car.
00:41:34
Speaker
And Republicans, a lot of them had no frigging clue about how to talk about this and no frigging clue about how to deal with the hard cases.
00:41:44
Speaker
we spent most of our time on the right in the last 15 years talking about late term partial birth abortion, which is abhorrent and most, you know, it was always, my friend John O'Sullivan always used to say, you go around Europe and Europeans are like, why are you guys so crazy about abortion? You know, why can't you just, you know, why is this such a hangup? And then you'd say to them, well, you do know that according to the regime established by Roe and Doe and Casey, you can abort a fully viable
00:42:13
Speaker
healthy baby up until seconds before delivery legally. And people are like, my God, that's barbaric, right? And so that conversation no longer applies. Now it moves to like, what do you do about the teenage girl who was raped by her father, right? And are you really going to force her to bring a baby to term?
00:42:32
Speaker
And Republicans have terrible answers about this. They have terrible answers about IVF. And so Trump, who was most of his life pro choice and adamantly so and had a conversion to get the Republican nomination, is reverting back to his old position, which is essentially nominally, essentially pro choice. He's not saying he's pro choice, but that's what he is. And what he's trying to do is just say, I don't want to talk about this. Let the states figure it out.
00:42:59
Speaker
I agree with him on the merits. There are very few things I agree with Donald Trump on, but this is one of them. I think that is the right position, but I'm not running for president. And given the politics of the moment,
00:43:13
Speaker
He can't just say, let the states figure it out. He's asked, well, do you think what they're doing in Arizona is okay? And he throws Arizona pro lifers under the bus and says, no, I think that's terrible and they should fix it. Because he was running against Ron DeSantis who put in a six week abortion, you know, after six weeks abortion was banned. He says that's terrible. So his actual rhetoric is pro choice in effect.
00:43:36
Speaker
But it goes to this cult of personality thing. No other president, certainly before Roe was overturned, no other president could dare talk about abortion like this. They get destroyed in primaries in Republican politics. But so many people have been converted to the cult, they just simply defer to him. And I don't think it's gonna get him out of his electoral problem with people, because anybody who votes on abortion, on abortion rights, anybody who's pro-choice,
00:44:05
Speaker
They're not going to say, well, the guy who overturned who taking credit for overturning Roe v. Wade and says that states can do whatever they want. I'll vote for that guy. That's not going to. It's not really going to help him. Do you think if Trump was a more nuanced political philosopher than he is,
00:44:24
Speaker
going up and running for president on the argument that I believe in federalism, we are a country with many different cultures within it, and I think it is more appropriate that those different cultures make decisions on this issue. If he could make that argument in a more nuanced way than obviously he can, do you think that is a reasonable thing for a presidential Republican candidate to do?
00:44:48
Speaker
Personally, I do. I have 21 years at National Review, very pro-life. One of my closest friends is Ramesh Pinuru, one of the most philosophically sophisticated pro-lifers I know. He's in favor of a federal regime using the 14th Amendment to have a nationwide abortion policy. I think it is philosophically and intellectually consistent. I personally think it's one of these things like crime.
00:45:12
Speaker
Whether you think abortion is or not, having abortion is or is not a crime, I'm not trying to bait that argument. All I'm trying to say is that under the Constitution, there are only three crimes. It's like treason, piracy. I can never remember the third. It's kind of like copyright infringement, but there's just not a lot of crime in there.
00:45:31
Speaker
And that's an interesting insight into the priorities of the founding fathers, isn't it? Yeah, you know, because they thought it was a state issue. Right. So like all murder statutes until fairly recently in American history. I mean, there are some weird federal murder statutes, but it has to be on like federal property and or Indian reservation and all those weird stuff. Right. Or active duty troops abroad and that kind of thing. Most homicide law in the United States.
00:45:54
Speaker
is a state issue. And abortion is a kind of homicide. I personally think it's the kind of thing that letting states come to some sort of equilibrium on this, it'll be an ugly fight for a while. It'll be bad for a lot of Republicans for a while.
00:46:12
Speaker
But I think Americans ultimately will come across, come to a compromised position that sincere pro-lifers and sincere pro-choicers will not like. But I can live with that. And I think a more sophisticated and articulate and plausible Republican president could come to some sort of situation like that. That's what Bill Clinton did, right? Bill Clinton's famous line, I mean, it was deceitful because he was doing it in defensive row, was abortion should be safe, legal, and rare. That's what most Americans think. And that's this political safe space.
00:46:42
Speaker
In the wake of the Higgs decision, people are not hearing that when you say states' rights, and passions are high. For most of my life, abortion was a great issue for Republicans to get voters to the polls, because people who voted on abortion as a single-issue voter were on net pro-life, and it was a great issue for Democrats to raise money on.
00:47:04
Speaker
Now I think it's flipped. Democrats, they're having massive turnout on referenda on abortion, on abortion rights. They're activating low propensity voters.
Election Influences and GOP Reshaping
00:47:14
Speaker
They're activating independents and Republicans who would otherwise vote Republican to vote on these ballot measures and to vote for pro-choice candidates. And Republicans are in a panic about it. And that's life as far as I'm concerned.
00:47:27
Speaker
That's a segue to another question on my list, which is, and it's a double-barrel question. What are the issues that you think will decide the election in November, but perhaps more importantly as well, what do you think are the issues when you look at America as a country today that should decide the election, but perhaps won't?
00:47:47
Speaker
Yeah, so very complicated sort of answer to this because because of the stuff I was talking about before, particularly in the Republican Party, issues don't matter, right? That's my point about the Rhino thing. If the de facto Republican nominee can take and affect a pro-choice position, abortion doesn't really matter as an issue for Republicans anymore.
00:48:08
Speaker
taxes, national defense, these things are all just a hot mess. I mean, it was fun watching the Republican primaries that Trump didn't, primary debates, which Trump did not participate in, they were all having real arguments about issues. And there was a sort of this otherworldly debating society aspect to it because none of it mattered.
00:48:27
Speaker
because Trump was going to be the nominee and nobody was going to change their vote because of Nikki Haley's different approach to the income tax or to foreign aid or any of that kind of stuff. And so it was a big waste of time in a lot of ways. Similarly, at the national level for the for the general election, I think abortion will definitely matter. And I think it's a legitimate thing to matter. Like it's not the issue I want to have the biggest fights on, but it's perfectly legitimate issue to have big fights on.
00:48:56
Speaker
And that's because, I mean, just to take a step back for Australian listeners who might not realize what, and I don't know if cursing is okay on here, but American politics is such a clusterfuck that for the second time since 2016, we're gonna have two candidates so unbelievably unpopular, they have a chance to lose to the other one.
00:49:23
Speaker
And nobody wants to, like 70% of Americans don't want these choices, right? And this gets to the fact that the parties are so weak that they cannot actually do the things that a party that wanted to be a majority party would want to do because they're captured by their most intense bases.
00:49:41
Speaker
So the issue of abortion rights is vastly more popular among Democrats, liberals, whatever than Joe Biden is. And so the issue of abortion will have coattails for Joe Biden. Joe Biden will not have coattails for the issue of abortion. Similarly, Donald Trump is so despised by rank and file Democrats that they are rank and file Democrats
00:50:08
Speaker
It was true in 2020, to a certain extent. It's definitely true now. There's some great polling on this. My colleague Nick Cottojo just ran through some of it. The overwhelming majority of Democrats are going to be voting against Donald Trump, not for Joe Biden. Donald Trump is the defining issue for the bulk of Democrats and the job we call them in our politics, we call them double haters. These are the candidates, these are the voters who dislike both candidates.
00:50:38
Speaker
they are going to decide the election. And the job for Joe Biden is to make a majority of the double haters vote against Donald Trump rather than for him. And Donald Trump's position on abortion is entirely about winning over the double haters who are
00:51:01
Speaker
more sympathetic to him, but are pissed off about this stuff. And so I, there'll be a lot of talk about issues, foreign policy and whatever, but like in 2016, but for 68,000 votes in five States, Hillary Clinton would have won because we have this electoral college thing, right? In 2020, but for I think 48,000 votes in three States, Donald Trump would have been reelected.
00:51:26
Speaker
It is very much looking like this election is going to boil down to three or four states and it's going to be close. And these battleground states right now, they're effectively tired or Trump is slightly ahead. And so we can talk about the effects of this issue or that issue, Israel, Ukraine, Trump tax cuts expiring, all sorts of things. Or we can talk about the weather on election day.
00:51:51
Speaker
because the margins are going to be so narrow that it's going to be an overdetermined phenomenon and you're going to be able to credit almost any single factor as the decisive one. So as for the issues that should be determinative, personally, I think, and this is one of the reasons I'm fairly loathed by large swaths of the sort of partisan right these days,
00:52:11
Speaker
I simply think that a president who I thought president Trump, I thought Donald Trump was unfit in 2016. I thought he was unfit. I thought he proved me right for four years. It doesn't mean I disagree with him on everything, but I think a president who creates deliberately creates the circumstances and then defends what happened that
00:52:31
Speaker
made it impossible for the United States to talk about an uninterrupted non-violent transfer of power in our country is inherently disqualified from running. And I wish that were the issue in the Republican primaries, but it was not.
00:52:47
Speaker
And I think it will be something of the issue in because again, it goes right to the sort of why a lot of people don't like Trump. It will go to the sort of pro-Trump anti-Trump issue that Biden is manipulating. But look, I mean, I'm a fairly typical conservative. I have so many idiosyncrasies circa 2015. I think we should do something about Social Security and Medicare because of our insolvency stuff.
00:53:09
Speaker
I think we need to have robust spending on defense. I think we should be helping Ukraine, you know, do everything it can to not just survive, but win. I think we should be helping Israel. Go down a whole list of things that I think should be the issues that I think Democrats are institutionally and philosophically wrong on and that Republicans circa 2015 were right on.
00:53:30
Speaker
But I'm not allowed to determine these things. And so I think these things will only peripherally be determinative in the actual election. And this gets to sort of the longer term damage that Trump has done to the Republican Party. He's made it a more nativist, a more nationalistic, a more isolationist party. That is where the passion is.
00:53:50
Speaker
I think if Trump, let's just say Trump were to be on the golf course, say, does anybody smell burnt hair and keel over? I think the J.D. Vance and Josh Holley crowd would would shrink in significance. They are leeching Trump's authority to hitch their own ideological wagons to.
00:54:08
Speaker
I don't think they could win those arguments internally in the GOP, but for Trump. And I don't think there's anybody who will come after Trump that will have the same kind of cultural personality hold on the party. So I'm actually more optimistic about the future of the GOP than a lot of my anti-Trump friends are. But none of that is possible so long as Trump is around and everybody's internalized this victim martyr hero bullshit about
Classical Liberalism and Its Challenges
00:54:51
Speaker
Donald Trump.
00:54:51
Speaker
I wouldn't call myself a conservative, I'd call myself a classical liberal. What I think we've got to in this conversation and what you've written about is that the arguments for classical liberalism are being swamped, not just in the US, but they're being swamped in the UK, in Australia, and it is a worry. As a result of that, civil liberties, I think, are under attack. There are economic consequences of that.
00:55:14
Speaker
We are not winning the war when it comes to the fight for classical liberalism. My question would be, how can people who are passionate about this? How can classical liberals make the argument classical liberalism better in countries like the U.S. and like Australia? So it's a great question. And I agree with you. Look, I am a classical liberal. I just am. But my argument would be that this is something that Hayek writes about. You know, he has this in this famous essay called Why I'm Not a Conservative.
00:55:42
Speaker
which was a sort of sub-tweet attack on people like Russell Kirk and other conservatives who liked European continental conservatism. Lots of libertarian friends love to quote the title of the essay without quoting the actual essay. And the actual essay, Hayek explicitly says that in America, America's like the last place, I don't know what he thought about Australia, but when he was writing, he says, America is the last place where you can call yourself a conservative
00:56:10
Speaker
and be a defender of liberty because what conservatives are trying to conserve is a liberal revolution in the American founding.
00:56:17
Speaker
And you can find, I've been on this weird kick about the revolutions of 1848 lately. And, you know, one of the things that's kind of amazing is these liberals who are fighting for constitutionalism, liberalism, bourgeois, this, you know, whatever, a lot of them went, a lot of them went into exile and came to the United States. They're called 48ers. And a lot of them, including like the chartists from the UK, you know, they, when they got to America, what made them radicals or revolutionaries or subversives in Europe
00:56:44
Speaker
led them to start calling themselves conservatives in the United States, because when they got here, they got the thing that they were fighting for over there. And I would be perfectly happy to, you know, I think, because I do think there are some things about conservatism that aren't, that conservatism is about more than just classical liberalism, but that's the line I had in liberal fascism, that conservatism that doesn't conserve classical liberalism isn't worth conserving. I would love it if progressives could just be called progressives,
00:57:13
Speaker
Libertarians got rid of the unEuphonious crap word libertarian and went back to being called classical liberals. It would just be wrecked. You know, it would as Confucius says, we need a rectification of the names. So when I set out to write.
00:57:27
Speaker
suicide of the West, nobody thought Donald Trump was going to run for president. The nationalism stuff, populism, yes, was a big thing on the right, but it was containable and arguable with, but the Donald Trump is the guy who introduced this nationalism stuff into the bloodstream.
00:57:43
Speaker
He's not a philosophical nationalist. He doesn't have any conception of like what intellectual roots of nationalism are. He hasn't read and he's not like Yoram Hazoni and Patrick Dineen and these guys who use them as a battering ram for their ideas. He doesn't know anything about that crap, right? He just likes the connotations and the emotional appeal of nationalism. He's explicitly said he doesn't believe in American exceptionalism. But anyway, when I started out to write the book,
00:58:12
Speaker
You know, just so listeners know where I'm coming from, I used to be quite the red meat right-winger, right? I would dole out red meat to conservative audiences like it was an abattoir. I was in very good standing. I used to do a lot of stuff for young Americans for freedom, and I would be an after-dinner speaker at all sorts of right-wing groups because I could tell a joke and also do rah-rah partisan stuff and all that. And I got a little tired of it because I thought, I always believed, but I don't think I actually modeled the behavior sufficiently.
00:58:41
Speaker
that the point of politics is persuasion. Like the whole, like going back to Aristotle, the idea is to convince people that in another coalition that their interests are better served by joining your coalition. And the right had become so performative and so echo chambery where they were only talking to audiences that already agreed with them that I thought it was losing the plot.
00:59:07
Speaker
And so part of the impetus, and I was deeply influenced by my friend, Arthur Brooks, who was the president of the American Enterprise Institute. What I wanted to do was stop doing the smash mouth stuff, stop doing the tackling the easy arguments of the left and actually make the case that classical liberalism, you know, what I would call conservatism in the American context,
00:59:32
Speaker
is actually better for the things that progressives claim to care about. We ask a fairly normal progressive, what do they think politics is for? What do they think government should be doing? What are the problems it should be addressing? And you'll get a list of things. Poverty, big one, right? Going back.
00:59:50
Speaker
300 years, education, public health, literacy. You go down a long list in the environment. Climate change is a little bit of a different issue, but conservation, endangered species, all of these things. What I wanted to demonstrate, and I personally think I did a pretty good job in that book doing that, is that liberal democratic capitalism is more successful
01:00:17
Speaker
at fixing those problems, then status, command and control, left-wing approaches. It drives me crazy in the 1990s, you had people like Tom Friedman, New York Times columnist, who was just cravingly praising communist China.
01:00:34
Speaker
How great is China? Look how awesome China is. There's this whole thing about authoritarian capitalism being the new future, right? Lots of books were written about all this kind of stuff. And it drove me batty, right? So like authoritarianism has been around for a while.
01:00:49
Speaker
is actually, in many ways, the natural form of social organization for humanity. And humanity was poor for most of the time, authoritarianism was the operational thing, divine right of kings, emperors, sun gods, whatever. Then all of a sudden, there's this other idea, this Lockean revolution idea, and people start getting richer, right? Well, you saw this on display in microcosm in China. China tried really hard to make authoritarianism work.
01:01:20
Speaker
They tried so hard that they killed somewhere between 30 and 60 million of their own friggin' people trying to make it work. It didn't work. And then in like 1978, Deng Xiaoping says, you know what?
01:01:31
Speaker
let's give markets a try. Dirty markets, corrupt markets, you know, problematic in all sorts of ways, but better than command and control stuff, right? And they let people keep the fruits of their labor. They let people make investments. They gave people economic freedom, not political freedom, but they gave people a lot of economic freedom. And for the first time, hundreds of millions of Chinese people
01:01:54
Speaker
had indoor plumbing because of this. Hundreds of millions of people had literacy because of this. Hundreds of millions of people were lifted out of poverty. And people like Tom Freeman, looking at this like a kid with his nose pressed up against the candy store window says, wow, it must have been the authoritarianism.
Economic Prosperity, Environment, and Solutions
01:02:12
Speaker
And that's my problem with so much of this illiberalism on the right and illiberalism on the left is it's really actually about power worship.
01:02:22
Speaker
Because if you actually just looked at the data, you might have a more generous welfare state. Hayek was okay with a more generous welfare state, you know, than people think he was at least. Denmark and the Scandinavian country, I mean like Bernie Sanders talks about the Scandinavian countries.
01:02:37
Speaker
like he is some sort of weird 1950s tour guide at Epcot Center, where he's just like pointing out of these Potemkin socialist villages saying, look at how great socialism is. But in reality, like they have market systems in these countries, right? They have property rights. They have, you know, I think their taxes are too high, but, you know, that kind of stuff can work for a small Scandinavian country. These are liberal democratic capitalist countries. And we've lost the plot about being able to explain that that as a look, I can do the poetry.
01:03:06
Speaker
about, as Tommy Lee Jones says in Firebirds, I have my head and my heart wired together for some full tilt boogie for freedom and justice. I can do all of the liberty is great, freedom is great, don't tread on me stuff. But I was trying to talk to
01:03:23
Speaker
earnest, sincere progressive types, technocrat types, normal people who believe those people in higher education, in academia, in the media, who think that we need experts to plan and run things to achieve prosperity in a more fair and just society. I was trying to say, well, wait a second.
01:03:45
Speaker
Look at how this actually works in reality. When you give the experts total control to run a society, they screw it up and they make people poorer. When you let the genie out of the bottle and let people innovate, pursue happiness as they see it individually, people get richer. The pie grows. Air gets cleaner, right? I mean, people hate it when I say this, but environmentalism is a luxury good.
01:04:13
Speaker
The second countries get rich enough where they can afford to protect their environments, they protect their environments. The American environment is vastly cleaner than it was 50 years ago. There are more trees on the eastern seaboard of the United States than there were 100 years ago by far. And rivers are being cleaned up. The air is cleaned up. All of these things. There's still work to be done. Microplastics are a problem. You can point to all sorts of things. Climate change is real.
01:04:40
Speaker
This sort of gets to my point, the people who use climate change as an issue to say we have to put the experts in charge.
01:04:46
Speaker
It's pretextual. What they really want is the experts in charge, because the example I often give is, again, I think climate change is real, but it's not the extinction level event that it's portrayed as, right? And so I remember in the Democratic primaries, Bernie Sanders would say, they would all say it, but Bernie Sanders would say it the most about how it's an existential extinction level threat to the United States. We have to drop everything that we're doing, Green New Deal, yada, yada, yada, right? And then he was asked, well, what about nuclear power?
01:05:17
Speaker
He says, well, no, no, no, no, we can't do that. And then we'll wait a second. Like the classic metaphoric example of an existential extinction level event is an asteroid coming to planet Earth.
01:05:28
Speaker
I totally respect people who do not like nuclear weapons. They are gross. They're kind of horrible things. But imagine someone saying, okay, this asteroid is going to wipe out all life on planet earth if it hits. And the only way we can stop it is by sending a bunch of nuclear missiles into space and intercept it. And we have to do it really soon or it'll be too late. And someone saying, no, no, no, no, no, there has to be a better way. We can't use nuclear weapons. Nuclear weapons are evil.
01:05:55
Speaker
I get not liking nuclear power, but if you are actually serious about climate change being a threat, you'd be opening up nuclear power plants left, right, and center. What they want is the command and control that comes with this stuff. And I utterly reject, I mean, I'm a crisis and Leviathan guy, right? But I utterly reject the people who say, because these guys were right about identifying the problem, I therefore have to agree with them on their solutions.
01:06:23
Speaker
You could point out that I have a knife protruding from my chest, but I don't necessarily, and I'm grateful that you noticed, I don't have to then rely on you about how to deal with the medical problem that we're dealing with. And so on so much of these pressing issues that progressives claim to care about,
01:06:43
Speaker
I wanted to meet them where they are and argue on their terms. And that's why the first sentence of the book is there's no God in this book. I wasn't gonna make any appeals to authority. I wasn't gonna do any of the sort of romantic stuff. I wasn't gonna claim all the stuff about God-given rights and all of these kinds of things because they're real intellectual flaw with the whole God-given rights. I mean, I have my own views about they are God-given rights, but like if they're God-given rights, we didn't operationalize that for hundreds of thousands of years. And maybe it was the realization that they're God-given that
01:07:11
Speaker
flip the switch, but anyway, my point is like, I really wanted to sort of persuade people. As I'm finishing the book, it turns out that these arguments that I needed to aim leftward, turns out I also needed to aim rightward because the same sort of, again, they're not symmetrical, but the same sort of reified in gratitude, this conspiratorial tribal bullshit was overtaking big parts of the right.
01:07:40
Speaker
And that's where we still are. And I wish we could get back to a time when like making these kinds of arguments mattered more, but they don't. And I'm long-term bullish that we're going to get past this moment.
01:07:54
Speaker
but it requires people in every generation to make these arguments. And, you know, my friend Andrew Breitbart, you know, he used to say, if you can't sell freedom, you suck. And it turns out that for some people, they want to hear about security, right? Or they want to hear about punishing their enemies, or they want to hear about elevating their status more than they want to hear about
Discussion Conclusion
01:08:15
Speaker
freedom. And it turns out that you actually have to sell freedom. You have to make the arguments. And that's sort of the life I've chosen.
01:08:22
Speaker
Selling freedom also requires independent thinkers and critical thinkers. They are increasingly rare on the left and the right. In American politics, in Western politics today, it is why Jonah, you are such an important voice in the American political discourse. I obviously wholeheartedly recommend everyone gets all of the dispatch stuff and all the podcasts and subscribes online, as well as your books. They are an incredibly important contribution to American and Western conversations.
01:08:50
Speaker
Thank you very much for coming on, Australiana. It was an absolute pleasure and I don't take compliments well, so I'm glad it's over. Thank you very much for listening to this episode of Australiana. If you enjoyed the show, please leave us a rating and a review. And if you really enjoyed the show, head to spectator.com.au forward slash join. Sign up for a digital subscription today and you'll get your first month absolutely free.