Reactionary Minds with Aaron Ross Powell

Listen to Zooming In at The UnPopulist in your favorite podcast app: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Google Podcasts | RSS | YouTubeLandry Ayres: Welcome back to Zooming In at The UnPopulist. I'm Landry Ayres.We find ourselves in a deeply troubling moment for American democracy, grappling with the stark realities of a political landscape increasingly defined by fear, performative cruelty, and a conscious assault on established norms and institutions.This special live recording from ISMA's “Liberalism for the 21st Century” conference features host Aaron Ross Powell, as well as longtime observer of the militarization of police and author of the Substack, The Watch, Radley Balko, and co-founder and former contributor of The Bulwark, Charlie Sykes, author now of the Substack To the Contrary. They explore the mechanisms of this assault, how a manufactured crisis of fear is being weaponized by law enforcement, and the profound implications for civil liberties and the rule of law in America.The discussion is insightful, if unsettling.A transcript of today's podcast appears below. It has been edited for flow and clarity.Aaron Ross Powell: Welcome to a special live recording of The UnPopulist's Zooming In podcast here at the “Liberalism for the 21st Century” conference in Washington, D.C. I am Aaron Powell and I'm delighted to be joined by Radley Balko and Charlie Sykes to talk about the situation we find ourselves in.To me, the most striking image of Trump's campaign, months before he was reelected, was from the RNC. Before that, there was the weird one of him in the construction vest. But the most terrifying image was the one depicting the “Mass Deportation Now!” signs and the sneering and cruel faces celebrating the culture that they were wallowing in. Those faces made me think, as I was looking at them, of the faces in photographs during the Civil Rights Movement of police officers about to inflict violence, turn on firehoses, let dogs loose, and so on. And it felt like what we are seeing now.The “Mass Deportation Now!” images characterize not just the policies of Trump 2.0, but the attitude that they're trying to inflict upon the country. It feels like a rolling back of what we achieved in the 1960s from the Civil Rights Movement—it feels like we're in a retreat from that. This is a conscious attempt to roll that back. So I wanted to talk about that.Radley, I'll start with you. We're sitting in D.C. right now as National Guard troops and members of all sorts of agencies are patrolling the streets. Is this surprising to you—the pace at which these nominally public servants, who are supposed to serve and protect, have embraced this role of violence and fear and chaos?Radley Balko: I'm surprised at how quickly it's happened. I've been talking to people about this day for the last 20 years. I've been warning about the gradual militarization of our police, which is something that has happened in conjunction with the drug war and then the war on terror over 40 or 50 years.That debate was always about, “How militarized should our police be? How do we balance safety, and giving police officers what they need to protect public safety, with civil liberties and constitutional rights?” The fear was always that another Sept. 11 type event would cause what we're seeing now—that there would be a threat, a threat that everybody acknowledges as a threat, that would cause an administration, states, mayors, to crack down on civil liberties. But it would at least be a threat that everyone recognizes as a threat. We would be debating about how to react to it.When it comes to what's playing out today, there's no threat. This is all manufactured. This is all made up.Your juxtaposition of those two images—the clownish image of Trump in the construction vest and the other one depicting this genuinely terrifying anger and glee a lot of his followers get from watching grandmothers be raided and handcuffed and dragged out of their homes—show the clownishness and incompetence of this administration juxtaposed with the actual threat and danger, the hate and vitriol, that we see from his followers.We always hear that story about Ben Franklin after the Constitutional Convention: a woman comes up to him and says, “So, what is it, Mr. Franklin, do we have a republic or a monarchy?” And he says, “A republic, if you can keep it.” That phrase, of course, has been echoed throughout the ages. If Franklin were alive today, he would say, “You know, when I said that, I was worried about a Caracalla or a Sulla or a Caesar.” Instead it's like, this guy, the guy that has to win every handshake, that's who you're going to roll over for?I saw a lot of libertarian-ish people making this point before the election—that Trump's not a threat, he's a clown, he's incompetent, he's not dangerous. And you know what? He may be incompetent, but he's put people around him this time who do know what they're doing and who are genuinely evil.So, on some level, this was the worst case scenario that I never really articulated over the years when I've talked about police militarization. This is actual military acting as police, not police acting as the military. But here we are and they're threatening to spread it around the country to every blue city they can find.Powell: He's a clown, he's rightfully an object of ridicule, he doesn't know anything, he's riddled with pathologies that are obvious to everyone except him. And yet it's not just that he won, but that he effectively turned, not all of the American right, but certainly a large chunk of it into a personality cult. Charlie, given that he seems to be a singularly uninspiring personality, what happened?Charlie Sykes: Well, he's inspiring to his followers.Let me break down the question into two parts.I was in Milwaukee during the Republican Convention, when they were holding up the “Mass Deportation” signs—which was rather extraordinary, if you think about it, that they would actually put that in writing and cheer it. It's something that they'd been talking about for 10 years, but you could see that they were ramping it up.But you put your finger on this culture of performative cruelty and brutality that they have embraced. Trump has made no secret of that. It's one of the aspects of his appeal. For many, many years he's been saying that his idea of law and order is to have cops who will break heads and inflict harm. He's talked about putting razor blades on the top of the wall that Mexico was going to pay for. He's told stories about atrocities. One of his standard stories—that I think the media just stopped even quoting—was about Gen. “Black Jack” Pershing in World War I taking Muslim terrorists and shooting them with bullets that had been dipped in pig's blood. Totally b******t—he made the whole thing up. But it was an indication of a kind of bloodlust. He's talked about extrajudicial killings. He has expressed his admiration for strongmen like Duterte in the Philippines who have done this. He's talked about having drug courts that would have trials and executions the same day. So this is not a secret.What is really remarkable is the extent to which he's communicated that to his base. I mean, there are Americans who legitimately have concerns about immigration and about the border. But what he's also tapped into is this really visceral hatred of the other and the desire to inflict pain and suffering on them. I think that that is one of the ugliest aspects of his presence in our politics, and we saw that with the “Mass Deportation Now!” signs.Now, the second part is how he is implementing all of this with his raw police state, his masked brute squads sent into the city streets. And, again, he's made no secret of wanting to put active military troops into the streets of American cities. He was blocked from doing that in Trump 1.0, but obviously this is something that he's thought about and wants to do. And one of the most disturbing parts about this is the embrace of these kinds of tactics and this culture by law enforcement itself. Radley's written a lot about this. Donald Trump has gone out of his way, not only to defend war criminals, but also to defend police officers who've been accused of brutality. So he's basically put up a bat signal to law enforcement that: The gloves are off. We're coming in. There's a new sheriff in town.What's happening in Washington, D.C. is just a trial run. He's going to do this in New York. He's going to do this in Chicago. He's going to do this in one blue city after another. And the question is, “Will Americans just accept armed troops in their streets as normal?”Now, let me give a cautionary note here: Let's not gaslight Americans that there's not actually a crime problem. I think Democrats are falling into a kind of trap because there are legitimate concerns about public safety. So the argument shouldn't be: There's no crime problem. The argument should be: This is exactly the wrong way to go about dealing with it. Having mass, brute squads on the street is one step toward really running roughshod over a lot of different rights—due process rights and other constitutional rights—that most Americans are going to be reluctant to give up. But we're going to find out, because all of this is being tested right now.Balko: I'd like to jump in on the crime point. I mean, crime is down in D.C. D.C. does have a comparatively high crime rate for a city of its size. There's no question. It's always been that way here. But the idea that there's something happening right now that merits this response is what I meant when I called it a manufactured crisis.I think it's important to point out that, like you said, he's always wanted to do this. This is just the reason that he's managed to put his finger on and thinks is going to resonate.“I've been talking to people about this day for the last 20 years. I've been warning about the gradual militarization of our police, which is something that has happened in conjunction with the drug war and then the war on terror over 40 or 50 years. That debate was always about, ‘How militarized should our police be? How do we balance safety, and giving police officers what they need to protect public safety, with civil liberties and constitutional rights?' The fear was always that another Sept. 11 type event would cause what we're seeing now—that there would be a threat, that everybody acknowledges as a threat, that would cause an administration, states, mayors, to crack down on civil liberties. But there would at least be a threat that everyone recognizes as a threat. We'd be debating about how to react to it. When it comes to what's playing out today, there's no threat. This is all manufactured. This is all made up.” — Radley BalkoI do think we need to talk about crime and about what works and what doesn't. But I think it's important to acknowledge that “crime” is just the reason that he's found right now. This is something that he's been planning to do forever. Like Kristi Noem said, it is basically about deposing the leadership in these cities. In Los Angeles, she said that their goal was to “liberate” it from the socialist elected leaders.Sykes: I agree with you completely about that. I'm just saying that there is a danger of putting too much emphasis on the idea that there is not a crime problem—because in Chicago, there's a crime problem, in New York, there's a crime problem. People feel it. And, I mean, didn't Democrats learn a lesson in 2024 when there was inflation and they said, “Oh no, no, no, there's not really inflation here. Let me show you a chart. You can't think that the cost of living is a problem because here are some statistics that I have for you. There's not really a problem at the border—if you think there's a problem of immigration, a problem at the border, here, I have a chart showing you that there isn't a problem.” Well, you can't.If the public honestly thinks that there is a problem at the border, that there's a problem with inflation, and that there's a problem with crime, it's politically problematic to deny it because as David Frum wrote presciently in The Atlantic several years ago: If liberals will not enforce the border—you could add in, “or keep the city streets safe”—the public will turn to the fascists. If they think you will solve this problem and you're pretending it does not exist or you're trying to minimize it, they'll turn to the fascists.Balko: I don't want to belabor this, but I just think it's dangerous to concede the point when the premise itself is wrong.So, Trump made crime an issue in 2016, right? Recall the American Carnage inauguration speech. When Trump took office in Jan. 2017, he inherited the lowest murder rate of any president in the last 50 years. And yet he ran on crime. I think that it's important to push back and say, “Wait a minute, no, Obama did not cause a massive spike in crime. There was a tiny uptick in 2015, but that was only because 2014 was basically the safest year in recent memory.”Trump is also the first president in 30 years to leave office with a higher murder rate than when he entered it. You know, I don't think that presidents have a huge effect on crime, but Trump certainly does.So, I agree with you that we can't say crime isn't a problem, but we can also point out that crime went up under Trump and that what he's doing will make things worse.Sykes: I think these are all legitimate points to make. It's just that, Trump has this reptilian instinct to go for vulnerabilities. And one of the vulnerabilities of the progressive left is the problem of governance. If there is a perception that these urban centers are badly governed, that they are overrun with homeless encampments and crime and carjacking, then the public will see what he's doing as a solution.By the way, I'm making this argument because I think that we can't overstate how dangerous and demagogic what he's doing is. But I'm saying that this is going to be a huge fight. He's going to go into Chicago where crime is just demonstrably a problem, and where I think the mayor has an approval rating of about 12 to 16%, and he's going to say, “I am here with the cavalry.”There's got to be a better answer for this. There's got to be a way to focus on the real threat to the constitutional order that he is posing, as opposed to arguing on his ground and saying, “No, no, don't pay attention to crime, inflation, the border.”And, again, I'm making this argument because this is one that I think the country really has to win. Otherwise we are going to see militarization and an actual police state.Powell: Let me see if I can pull together some of the threads from the conversation so far, because I think there's a nexus, or something that needs to be diagnosed, to see the way through.When you [Charlie] were mentioning the bullets covered in pig's blood, what occurred to me was ... I was a kid at the height of '80s action movies. And that's the kind of thing that the bad guys did in '80s action movies. That's the kind of thing that justified the muscular American blowing them up or otherwise dispatching them.There's been a turn, now, in that we're seeing behavior from Americans that they would have at one point said, “This isn't who we are.” The Christianity that many Americans hold to, this is not the way that Jesus tells them to act. There's been a shift in our willingness to embrace this sort of thing, and it's behavior that I would have expected to horrify basically everyone watching it happening.And it is—his approval readings are declining rapidly. It is horrifying a lot of people—but fewer than I would have hoped. One of you mentioned that, on the one hand, there's the cruelty, but there's also the fear—and those are feeding into each other. And what I wonder is, yes, there's crime, but at the same time, if your media consumption habits are those of a committed Trump supporter, you are being told constantly to be afraid that everybody outside your door, except for the people who you recognize, or maybe the people who share your skin color or speak with the same accent you do, is a threat to you and your family.I see this with members of my own family who are Trump supporters. They are just terrified. “I can't ride the subway. It's too scary to ride the subway.” Or, “I go out in D.C. and I see youths doing the kinds of things youths do, and now I don't feel safe having my family there.” We don't have a war. We don't have a crisis. But we've told a huge portion of the country, “You should be afraid of every last thing except your immediate family and that guy who now rules the country.” And the crime rates are part of it. It's like, “You should be scared of every single one of these cities.”Sykes: It's a story. One of the speakers today was talking about the power of stories, that demagogues will tell a story. And a story of fear and anger is a very, very powerful story that you can't counteract with statistics. You need to counteract it with other stories.“This culture of performative cruelty and brutality is one of the aspects of his appeal. For many years he's been saying that his idea of law and order is to have cops who will break heads and inflict harm. He's talked about putting razor blades on the top of the wall that Mexico was going to pay for. He's told stories about atrocities. He would tell the story about Gen. ‘Black Jack' Pershing in World War I taking Muslim terrorists and shooting them with bullets that had been dipped in pig's blood. He's talked about extrajudicial killings. He has expressed his admiration for strongmen like Duterte in the Philippines who have done this. He's talked about having drug courts that would have trials and executions the same day. What is really remarkable is the extent to which he's communicated that to his base. He's tapped into this really visceral hatred of the other and the desire to inflict pain and suffering on them. I think that that is one of the ugliest aspects, and we saw that with the ‘Mass Deportation Now!' signs.” — Charlie SykesPart of the problem is that Trump has made that narrative. So, for example, you have members of your family who are Trump supporters. My guess is that they could name the young women who had been raped and murdered by illegal immigrants. Because, I mean, on Fox News, this is happening all the time, right? On Fox News, illegal immigrants are criminals. “Look at the crimes they are committing.” They tell that story in the most graphic way possible, and then turn around and say, “If you oppose what Donald Trump is doing, you are defending these ‘animals'”—as Trump described them.It is deeply dishonest. It is deeply dangerous. But it is potent. And we ought to look at it in the face and recognize how he is going to weaponize those stories and that fear, which is really the story of our era now. We're living in this era of peace, prosperity, general safety—and yet he's created this “American carnage” hellscape story.Balko: Yeah, I also think there's this weird paradox of masculinity in the MAGA movement. It's not about masculinity—it's about projecting masculinity. It's about co-opting aspects of masculinity. And it's like, “We're the manly men. We need men to be men again. And that's why we support men who sexually assault and sexually harass women. And, at the same time, we're all going to genuflect and debase ourselves in front of this 79-year-old man, because he's our leader and we need to let him insult our wives. And we're also scared to take the subway.” I think there were 10 murders last year in the New York city subway. The subway is one of the safest public spaces you'll find anywhere. But you'll regularly see MAGA people go on Fox News and talk about how scared they are of it.I mean, I don't know how persuadable any of MAGA is, but I do think pointing out the sheer cowardliness might resonate. When Markwayne Mullin goes on the Sunday shows and says he doesn't wear a seatbelt anymore because he's afraid he'll get carjacked and he needs to be able to jump out of his car quickly ...Sykes: ... He actually did say that.Balko: Yeah. And, I don't know what the stats are, but it's something like you're 40 or 50 times more likely to die in a car accident than you are in a carjacking. So, you know, he's sealing his own fate, I guess.But I do think that maybe there's something to appealing to their lack of masculinity when they try to push some of these narratives.Sykes: Well, yeah, I do think there are narratives out there.We have National Guard troops here in Washington, D.C.—where were they on Jan. 6th? Why did the president not bring them in then? We had one of the greatest assaults on law enforcement. So we can call b******t on Donald Trump being the “law and order,” “back the blue” president.One of the first things he did when he took office was issue the blanket pardons to all the rioters and seditionists who not only assaulted the Capitol, but specifically the ones who attacked police officers. We can stand up and say, “I don't want to be lectured by the man who gave the Get Out of Jail Free card to the people who tased and bear sprayed police officers in this city. Not to mention,”—before he brings up the whole “defund the police” thing—“the man who right now is dismantling the nation's premier law enforcement agency, the FBI.” Because all of these FBI agents who are being gutted or tasked with hassling homeless people in Washington, D.C., you know what they're not doing? They are not investigating child sex trafficking. They are not engaging in any anti-terrorism activities.So, what you do is call them out, saying, “You are not making this country safer. You are not the ‘law and order' president. You are a convicted felon. You in fact have freed and celebrated people who actually beat cops.” If Barack Obama would have pardoned someone who had attacked police officers, the right would have been utterly incandescent. And yet Donald Trump does it and he's not called out on it.I understand that there are some who are reluctant to say, “Well, no, we're actually the party of law and order. We're actually the party of public safety.” But you hit him right in what I think is a real vulnerability.Balko: One of the guys who literally told Jan. 6 rioters to kill the police is now a respected senior member of the Justice Department, whereas the guy who threw a sandwich at a cop is facing a felony charge. That is Trump's approach to law enforcement.Sykes: I always hate it when people go on TV and say, “This should be a talking point.” But that ought to be a talking point. Don't you think everybody ought to know his name? We have the video of Jared Wise saying, “Kill ‘em! Kill ‘em!” and calling the police Nazis. And he is now a top official in Donald Trump's Justice Department.Powell: This is my concern, though—and this allows me to belabor my Civil Rights Movement point some more. One of the reasons that the anti-civil rights movement, the counter-movement, was as vicious and as ugly as it was is because it was a group of people who felt like they had a status level by virtue of being white, of being men. As they saw things, “If we help minorities and others rise up, that lowers the baseline status that I have.” So they wanted to fight back. It was, “I'm going to keep these people down because it keeps me up.” And when Radley said that they're “projecting masculinity,” I think that's a big part.A big part of the appeal is, “Now I'm seeing guys like me dominating. Now I'm seeing guys who are from my area or share my cultural values or dress like me or are into the same slogans or have the same fantasies of power as I do, or just aren't the coastal elites with their fancy educations and so on, dominating.” And my worry is if that's what's driving a lot of it—that urge to domination coupled with the fear, which I think then allows them to overcome any barriers they have to cruelty—if you marry, “I can have power” and “I'm scared of these people,” that to them justifies their actions in the same way that it does the action movie heroes killing the guys who put the pig's blood on bullets. It becomes justified to inflict cruelty upon those they hate.My worry is if you go after them in that way, it feels like, “Okay, now what you're saying is these guys who look like me, who were dominating, don't actually deserve it.” I don't think that means that we stay away from it, but I think it risks triggering even more of this, “What I want is for it to be my boot on people's necks and I want them to stop putting me down. And I want them to stop telling me that I'm not good, that I'm incompetent, that it's not okay for me to beat my wife” (or whatever it happens to be). Trump is like an avatar for very mediocre men.Sykes: Well, I wouldn't use that as a talking point.Balko: A few years ago, I wrote a piece about a Black police chief who was hired in Little Rock by a mayor who ran on a reform platform and this police chief had a good record. He was in Norman, Okla. before that—he was the first Black chief in Oklahoma. And he was not a progressive by any means, but he was a reformer in that he wanted things to be merit-based and Little Rock has a really strong white police union. I say that because they also have a Black police union, because the Black officers didn't feel like they were represented by the white union.One of the first things that Chief Humphrey did was make the promotional interviews, that you get to move up through the ranks, blind. So you didn't know who you're talking to. If you were white, you didn't know if it was a fellow white person you were interviewing. Most of the people in charge were. The result of removing race from that process was that more Black officers were getting promoted than before. And I wrote about him because he ended up getting chased out of town. They hit him with fake sexual harassment charges; the union claimed he was harassing white women. Basically, they exerted their power and managed to chase him out.But one of the things he told me when I interviewed him was—and other people have said different versions of this—that when your entire life you've been the beneficiary of racial preferences as a white person, as happened in this country for most of its existence, meritocracy looks a lot like racial discrimination. Because things that you got just simply because you were entitled to now you have to earn. And that looks like, “Hey, this Black guy is getting this job over me. And that's not right. Because my dad got that job over the Black guy and his dad got the job over the Black guy.”And I think this backlash that we're seeing against DEI—I'm sure there are parts of this country where DEI was promoting unqualified people just to have diversity, and I do think there's there's value in diversity for diversity's sake—is white people, who have been benefiting from our racial hierarchy system that's been in place since the Founding, were starting to see themselves passed over because we were now moving to a merit-based system and they saw that as discrimination. That's a big part of the backlash.I don't know what the solution is. I don't know that we just re-impose all of the former policies once Trump's out of power, if he's ever out of power. But I do think that there is value in diversity for diversity's sake. Obviously I don't support strict quota systems, but I do think it's important to make that point that addressing historical injustices is critical.We went to the art museum in Nashville the other day and they had a whole exhibit about Interstate I-40 going through Nashville. It was supposed to go through this industrial area where there were no neighborhoods or private homes. And the Tennessee legislature deliberately made it run through the wealthiest Black neighborhood in Nashville and destroyed about 80% of Black wealth in the city. That was 1968—that was not 1868. That's relatively recently that you're destroying a ton of wealth. And you can find that history in every single city.I think a big part of this backlash is not knowing that history—and only knowing what's happening now and experiencing it out of context. For those people, it feels like reverse discrimination.Sykes: So, yes, a lot of this is true. But it's not the whole story. In the state of Wisconsin, overwhelmingly white voters voted for Barack Obama, a Black man, twice in a row before voting for Donald Trump. So we do have that long, deep history of racism, but then also an America that I think was making some progress. I'm just going to put this out as a counterpoint: I think that if people were appealing to the “better angels of their nature,” a lot of these people would not be buying into the cruelty, the brutality, the racism. Instead, we're appealing to their sense of victimization.But let's be honest about it. We moved from a Civil Rights Movement that was morally based on fairness and the immorality of discrimination to one that increasingly was identity politics that morphed into DEI, which was profoundly illiberal. What happened was a lot of the guys we're talking about were thinking not just that they want their boots on people's head, but they're constantly being told that they were bad, that their contributions were not significant. There were invisible tripwires of grievance—what you could say, what you could do, the way you had to behave. In the before times, a lot of the attacks on free speech and the demands for ideological conformity on university campuses were not coming from the illiberal right—they were coming from the illiberal left.And as I'm listening to the speakers at this conference talk about the assault on liberalism, I think one of the questions we have to ask—and maybe this is a little meta—is why it was so brittle. Well, it was brittle because it was caught in a pincer movement by the illiberal left and the illiberal right. My point is that a lot of this reaction is in fact based on racial animus, but there's also a sense that I hear from a lot of folks, a sense of liberation that they feel, that the boot was on their necks and is now being taken off, that they're not having to go to these highly ideological DEI training sessions where they were told how terrible and awful they were all the time. And how, if you believed in a race-blind society, that was a sign you were racist. If white women actually were moved by stories of racism and wept, that was white women's tears. This was heavy handed.“I do think the people who signed off on extraordinary rendition and snatching people off the street and sending them to a literal torture prison in El Salvador, those people need to be criminally charged. But I also think there need to be civil society repercussions. There are so many people in media—pundits, politicians who know better—who have a long record of pointing out how dangerous Trump was and then turned on a dime and started supporting him. I don't wish any physical harm on those people. I don't think any of those people should be put in prison. But I think those people should never be trusted as public intellectuals.” — Radley BalkoSo there was a backlash that was going to be inevitable. What's tragic is the way that it has been co-opted by the people who have really malign motives, who are not acting out of good will—the Stephen Millers who have figured out a way to weaponize this. But that line that goes from the racism of 1957 to the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s, to a broad-based civil rights consensus—and, again, there's caveats in all of this—to identity-based politics. Let's be honest about it. That was not without sin. That was not without problems.Balko: So, I agree that there was I guess what you could call an illiberal approach to a mutual exchange of ideas on college campuses. There was a lot of shouting down of conservative speakers. In some cases, there were invitations revoked to valedictory speeches. There was some cutting off of funding for conservative speakers. But I want to make sure we're not delving into false equivalences here. I mean, the boot that you're talking about, Charlie, was a metaphorical boot, and we're talking about a very literal boot now.Sykes: Absolutely. That distinction is a significant one.Balko: So, my preferred way of expressing my disagreement with someone isn't to shout them down. I will say, though, that protest is a form of speech. I think, even to some extent, interrupting speeches that are particularly problematic or extremist is a form of speech. It's not one that I personally would engage in. But the type of censorship we're seeing now is direct. It is government censorship. It is not a violation of the spirit of free expression that we were seeing on college campuses before.Sykes: Oh, it was more than just that kind of violation. You had universities that required people to sign a DEI statement where they had to make ideological commitments in order to get a job. I mean, this was very heavy handed. There were no literal boots, but ... I like Jonathan Rauch's analogy that the illiberalism of the left is still a real problem, but it's like a slow-growing cancer. Right now, what we're facing with the illiberalism of the right is a heart attack. We have to deal with the heart attack right now, but let's not pretend that everyone who objects to some of the things that were happening are doing so because they are just vile, white racists.This is part of the problem. People spent decades accusing others of being racist on flimsy grounds. If you support Mitt Romney, you're a racist. If you support tax cuts, you're a racist. You know what happened? I come from this world and there was a time when to be called a racist was the worst thing you could possibly say about somebody. And it got to the point where, literally, if you were in favor of school choice, you were racist; in favor of tax cuts, you were racist. If you voted for a Republican … John McCain was a racist, George Bush was a racist. So when the real thing came along, guess what people said? They just rolled their eyes, shrugged, and said, “We've heard this before.” I mean, it was crying wolf for decades.And I've had these conversations when I would say, “How can you support someone who is just espousing this raw, vicious racism about Haitians eating dogs?” You know what I would get? “Oh, we've been hearing this for 20 years. Literally everyone I know has been accused of being a racist.”So we need to come back to a consensus. If we're going to restore that liberal consensus, we're going to have to say, “This is acceptable behavior. And this is not acceptable behavior.” But we are not going to use these labels to vilify. The politics of contempt is just not helpful. It is not helpful to tell people, “By the way, I think you're an idiot. I think you're stupid. I think you're racist. Would you like to hear my ideas about taxes now?” It doesn't work. And I think that one of the things that, tragically, Trump has tapped into is the sense that these elites look down on you.So, Aaron, when you say that this is the revolution of mediocre men, not helpful. Now, some of them are mediocre. I certainly agree. I write about mediocre people all the time—but, again, the politics of contempt is not the way to get ourselves out of this.Powell: I think there's a distinction between messaging and diagnosis. And if we're to understand how we got here, or the kinds of beliefs or values that can lead someone ... and I don't mean, you've been a partisan Republican voter for your entire life, and you come from a family of this, and you pulled the lever for Trump, but you're mostly an uninformed voter, which is a lot of people—I mean, the people who are cheering on Stephen Miller, they're in a different category. So it might be that, if you have one of those people in front of you, the message is not to say, “There's a broken set of morals at play here,” or “there's a cramped view of humanity at play here,” because they're not going to hear that in the moment.But if we're to understand how we got here and what we're up against, I think we have to be fairly clear-eyed about the fact that the [Trumpian] values that we've discovered over the last 10, 15 years have much more appeal and purchase among a lot of Americans than I think any of us had really expected or certainly hoped, and then figure out how to address that. And, again, it's not everybody—but it's more than I would like. If those values are central to someone's being, and the way that they view others around them and the way they relate to their fellow man, then I think a lot of the less condemning arguments also won't find purchase because, ultimately, it's not a policy difference. It's a, “I want a crueler world.”Sykes: This is where I think the argument that says, “Let's look at this cruelty. Let's look at this brutality. Let's look at the Stephen Millers” ... believe it or not, I actually think it's potent to say to somebody, “Do you want to be like that? Is that really what you want America to be? You're better than that.” And then, “Let me tell you the story of decency.”The story that we heard earlier today about how neighbors who are Trump voters will be there if your house is burning down or your father dies ... you appeal to that innate decency and say, “Do you really want this cruelty?” This is what's lacking, I think, on the right and in the Republican Party right now: people who say, “Okay, you may want less taxes, smaller government, a crackdown on street crime, less illegal immigration ... but is this who you want to be?” Show them the masked officer who is dragging the grandmother away. I do think that there is the better angel that says, “No, that is really not the American story.” You have to appeal to them as opposed to just condemn them. I'm not sure we're disagreeing, but I actually think that that's potent.Balko: I think there is not only room for ridicule when you're up against an aspiring authoritarian, but a lot of history shows it's often one of the few things that works because they really hate to be disrespected.I agree with Charlie that I don't think it's necessarily productive to make fun of people who have been tricked or who have been lied to, but I also think it's worth pointing out that Trump has contempt for his own supporters. I mean, one of the great ironies of our time is that when Trump would need a boost of self-esteem, he would go hold a rally in a state that, before he ran for president, he would never have been caught dead in. He grifts from his own supporters. His lies about Covid got his own supporters killed at higher rates than people in states that didn't vote for him. But I agree that it doesn't serve much benefit to denigrate people.Sykes: But do ridicule the people who are doing it. I mean, don't get me wrong. South Park is doing God's work right now.Balko: Absolutely.Powell: What, then, is the way forward?“This is part of the problem. People spent decades accusing others of being racist on flimsy grounds. If you support Mitt Romney, you're a racist. If you support tax cuts, you're a racist. You know what happened? I come from this world and there was a time when to be called a racist was the worst thing you could possibly say about somebody. And it got to the point where, literally, if you were in favor of school choice, you were racist; in favor of tax cuts, you were racist. If you you voted for Republican. John McCain was a racist. George Bush was a racist. So when the real thing came along, guess what people said? They just rolled their eyes, shrugged, and said, ‘We've heard this before.' I mean, it was crying wolf for decades.” — Charlie SykesLet's assume that democracy survives this current moment and that we somehow put Trump behind us. We can't go back to the status quo before this. We can't just say, “We're going to go back to the kind of politics we had during the Biden administration.” That seems to be off the table. We need something new. We need a new direction. What does that look like?Sykes: I honestly do not know at this point. And I don't think anybody knows. But I do think that we ought to remember, because we throw around the term “liberal democracy” a lot, that democracies are not necessarily liberal. Democracies are not necessarily kind. And I think we need to go back to things like the rule of law.I think it's going to involve some kind of restoration of balance in society. The damage that's being done now is so deep and some of it is so irreparable that I'm hoping that there will be a backlash against it, that there will be a pendulum swing back towards fundamental decency. And even though we keep talking about democracy a lot, I think we need to start talking about freedom and decency a little bit more.You know, I was listening to the Russian dissident who spoke tonight and he asked us to imagine what it's like trying to create a democratic society in Russia with all of their history and all their institutions. As bad as things are for us, we have a big head start. We still have an infrastructure, compared to what he is up against. We still can restore, I think, that fundamental decency and sense of freedom and equality before the law.Balko: I also don't know exactly what it's going to look like. I will say this: I think one of the big reasons why we are where we are today is that there wasn't a proper reckoning, and no real accountability, after the Civil War and Reconstruction. It's been the same with Jan. 6. There was no real accountability. The Democrats waited too long for impeachment. The DOJ was slow.I do think there have to be repercussions. I'm not saying that we throw everybody in the Trump administration in prison, but I do think the people who signed off on extraordinary rendition and snatching people off the street and sending them to a literal torture prison in El Salvador, those people need to be criminally charged.But I also think there need to be civil society repercussions. There are so many people in media—pundits, politicians who know better—who have a long record of pointing out how dangerous Trump was and then turned on a dime and started supporting him. I don't wish any physical harm on those people. I don't think any of those people should be put in prison. But I think those people should never be trusted as public intellectuals. We shouldn't employ them in that realm. I think they should be able to earn a living. I don't think they should earn our trust.I have zero confidence that that's going to happen. But I can personally say that I have no interest in participating in events like this with those people. I have no interest in giving those people any kind of legitimacy because they tried to take our birthright away from us, which is a free and democratic society—the country that, for all its flaws, has been an exemplary country in the history of humankind. They literally are trying to end that. And I don't think you just get to walk away from that and pretend like it never happened.Sykes: I totally agree.Powell: With that, thank you, Radley. Thank you, Charlie.© The UnPopulist, 2025Follow us on Bluesky, Threads, YouTube, TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, and X.We welcome your reactions and replies. Please adhere to our comments policy. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.theunpopulist.net

At a recent conference at the Heterodox Academy, an organization founded in 2016 to promote viewpoint diversity on college campuses and defend academic freedom from the “woke threat,” attendees grappled with the new threat to academic freedom, this time coming from the White House. There was real disagreement about how much attention each threat deserved and we explored these tensions in a podacast episode with writer Cathy Young, who attended the conference. This week, we take a look at that topic from a different perspective, as Berny Belvedere sits down with another guest at the conference; Michael Roth, the president of Wesleyan University. Roth advocates forcefully pivoting to take on the authoritarian threat that Donald Trump poses.They discuss how concepts like "safe spaces" and "DEI" have evolved, often serving as convenient scapegoats for political ends and the Trump administration's efforts to strong-arm universities through funding threats and legal action. They also discuss whether the failure to appropriately prioritize the relative threats coming from right and the left would risk undermining liberal democracy itself.We hope you find the discussion valuable.***Thanks for checking out The UnPopulist! Subscribe for free to support our project.Follow us on Bluesky, Threads, YouTube, TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, and X.© The UnPopulist, 2025 This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.theunpopulist.net

For decades, many observers held onto an optimism that, despite occasional setbacks, the arc of history inevitably bent towards a richer, freer, and better-governed world. However, the political turbulence witnessed across established democracies in the past decade has shattered this optimism and exposed deeper problems.Today, The UnPopulist's Editor-in-Chief Shikha Dalmia is joined by Brink Lindsey, senior vice president at the Niskanen Center and writer behind the Substack The Permanent Problem.Shikha and Brink explore Brink's central concept: the permanent problem, or how mass affluence has radically transformed human expectations, leading people to seek not just basic needs, but also fulfillment, meaning, and belonging, and how paradoxically, this success has led to a crisis of legitimacy for liberal democracy, as the institutions that delivered such prosperity are now struggling to meet these new, elevated expectations.We hope you enjoy.***Thanks for checking out The UnPopulist! Subscribe for free to support our project.Follow us on Bluesky, Threads, YouTube, TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, and X.© The UnPopulist, 2025 This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.theunpopulist.net

Academia finds itself at a critical juncture, navigating internal debates over the lack of intellectual diversity and too much in the thrall of prevailing orthodoxies, while simultaneously facing unprecedented external pressures from political forces intent on reshaping higher education. How can institutions uphold their mission of truth-seeking and open inquiry amidst such formidable challenges?Today, senior editor Berny Belvedere sits down with distinguished journalist Cathy Young, who recently covered the Heterodox Academy's annual conference for The Bulwark. Together, they examine how internal criticisms of “woke” excesses and progressive orthodoxy intersect with the Trump administration's aggressive assault on academic freedom and civil society. They explore the critical question of whether focusing on internal academic illiberalism inadvertently aligns with broader authoritarian aims, and what it means for a heterodox movement to truly champion intellectual diversity against threats from both the left and the right.We hope you enjoy. Thanks for checking out The UnPopulist! Subscribe for free to support our project.© The UnPopulist, 2025Follow us on Bluesky, Threads, YouTube, TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, and X. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.theunpopulist.net

For generations, the idea of American liberty has been synonymous with limited government and individual freedoms. Yet, since the Founding, the reach of state surveillance has grown exponentially, often shrouded in secrecy and justified by the need to fight threats to safety and security.To explore the historic choices and institutional dynamics that paved the way for the modern surveillance apparatus, Aaron Ross Powell sits down with Patrick Eddington, senior fellow at the Cato Institute and author of the new book, The Triumph of Fear: Domestic Surveillance and Political Repression from McKinley to Eisenhower.They discuss the long and often unsettling story of state surveillance in America, how it has led to a system susceptible to profound rights violations and political repression, and how actions—or inaction—by all three branches of government have allowed these capabilities to grow.You will finding it interesting if deeply troubling.© The UnPopulist, 2025Follow us on Bluesky, Threads, YouTube, TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, and X. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.theunpopulist.net

When President Trump launched his so-called Liberation Day tariffs, he didn't just ignite a global trade war—he may have also triggered yet another constitutional crisis. This week, first an international trade court and then a federal court ruled those tariffs unlawful, striking at the heart of Trump's sweeping claims of executive power under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act. But almost immediately, an appeals court hit pause.To help us unpack what these rapid developments mean—not just for trade policy, but for the separation of powers and the future of emergency authority in America—director of Executive Watch, Rob Tracinski, talked to George Mason University law professor, Ilya Somin. Somin is co-counsel in the case and the legal brains behind the lawsuit. They explore whether emergency powers have become a blank check for presidential overreach, and what this case could mean for rebalancing power between Congress and the White House.© The UnPopulist, 2025Follow us on Bluesky, Threads, YouTube, TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, and X. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.theunpopulist.net

America's Founders believed religion and liberty could not only coexist but be mutually reinforcing. Today, some influential intellectuals on the right are flatly denying that idea of alignment and arguing for society to be reordered around their vision of Christian orthodoxy.In this episode, Berny Belvedere, The UnPopulist's senior editor, sits down with Jerome Copulsky, research fellow at the Berkley Center for Religion, Peace & World Affairs and, from 2016 to 2017, senior advisor at the U.S. Department of State's Office of Religion and Global Affairs. The two discuss Copulsky's book, American Heretics: Religious Adversaries of Liberal Order, paying special attention to its chapter on the the current right-wing revolt—from groups such as postliberal Catholics and national conservatives—against America's founding liberal ideals.We hope you enjoy. © The UnPopulist, 2025Follow us on Bluesky, Threads, YouTube, TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, and X. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.theunpopulist.net

The executive branch is currently being run by an aspiring autocrat who neither respects institutional safeguards nor accepts the separation of powers. As part of his project to subsume all governmental authority under his control, he has empowered a tech billionaire to reshape and repurpose government agencies—through what they've called the U.S. Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE—so that those agencies and their information can be weaponized for his purposes.To explain how all this is unfolding, Zooming In host Aaron Ross Powell sits down with Julian Sanchez and Noah Kunin, the co-hosts of Watch Cats, a new podcast dedicated to critically covering DOGE. They discuss what DOGE actually is and what it is doing, and assess what its impact is likely to be on future attempts to pursue government reforms.We hope you enjoy. © The UnPopulist, 2025Follow us on Bluesky, Threads, YouTube, TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, and X.We welcome your reactions and replies. Please adhere to our comments policy. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.theunpopulist.net

In a post on Truth Social on May 2, President Trump promised to “[take] away Harvard's Tax Exempt Status,” because, “it's what they deserve!" While Trump may succeed in initiating such an action, our guest today doubts it will last, due to a long history of Supreme Court precedence regarding the tax code's application to private institutions.Speaking with the director of Executive Watch, Rob Tracinski is New York Times columnist David French. They discuss the Trump administration's hypocritical implementation of viewpoint diversity, the rushed and indiscriminate defunding of scientific research, and whether to consider if the social compact of government is based on the honors system of mutually assured destruction.We hope you enjoy.© The UnPopulist, 2025Follow us on Bluesky, Threads, YouTube, TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, and X. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.theunpopulist.net

Immigration policy has long been a battlefield for ideological disputes. But what we're witnessing during Trump's second term isn't just a debate over border security or visa policy. It's an attempt to reconfigure the U.S. immigration system into a tool for authoritarian governance—an assault not only on due process, but on the foundational belief that laws must constrain power.Joining Shikha Dalmia is immigration expert and senior fellow at the American Immigration Council Dara Lind. Together, they explore how Trump's second term has differed from his first in his weaponization of obscure legal tools and administrative procedures—many of them relics from the Cold War and even the John Adams era—to strip people of legal status, bypass the courts, and normalize practices once considered unthinkable.Tune in for an informative but chilling discussion.© The UnPopulist, 2025Follow us on Bluesky, Threads, YouTube, TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, and X. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.theunpopulist.net

In a piece for our new project Executive Watch, Walter Olson, senior fellow at the Cato Institute's Robert A. Levy Center for Constitutional Studies, clarified the dangers of a recent presidential memo from the Trump administration, which accuses prominent law firms of “grossly unethical misconduct” and threatens them with severe penalties—such as revoking security clearances and cutting off federal contractsSpeaking with the director of Executive Watch, Rob Tracinski, Olson explains how, under the guise of promoting “accountability” for “frivolous, unreasonable, and vexatious litigation,” this move threatens the current means of accountability relied on by judges and undermines the independence of the entire legal profession.We hope you enjoy.© The UnPopulist, 2025Follow us on Bluesky, Threads, YouTube, TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, and X. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.theunpopulist.net

For much of American history, Christianity has played a crucial role in shaping the nation's moral framework. But as political and religious identities become more entangled, has the church strayed from its traditional role as a moral anchor? And can it find its way back?To explore these pressing questions, Berny Belvedere sits down with Jonathan Rauch, author of the new book, Cross Purposes: Christianity's Broken Bargain with Democracy. Together, they examine how the historic relationship between Christianity and America's liberal democracy has fractured—and what that means for the future of both.We hope you enjoy.© The UnPopulist, 2025Follow us on Bluesky, Threads, YouTube, TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, and X. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.theunpopulist.net

For years, traditional media—newspapers, cable news, and radio—dominated the political conversation. These were the institutions that shaped public discourse, set the agenda, and determined which ideas gained traction. But as the digital ecosystem evolved, a parallel and sometimes overlapping infrastructure emerged—one where influencers, niche content creators, and algorithmically curated feeds have redefined how people engage with information.To understand this evolution, host Aaron Ross Powell sits down with Renee DiResta, an Associate Research Professor at the McCourt School of Public Policy at Georgetown and author of Invisible Rulers: The People Who Turn Lies Into Reality. Together they unpack how this shift has upended not just how news spreads but also how political identities are formed, narratives take hold, and, ultimately, how power operates.We hope you enjoy.© The UnPopulist, 2025Follow us on Bluesky, Threads, YouTube, TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, and X. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.theunpopulist.net

We have entered another Trump term, and the political landscape has shifted in ways that challenge the very foundations of our liberal democracy. With unprecedented executive power and a growing ecosystem of loyalists surrounding the president, we must ask: What happens when political institutions are no longer able to constrain a populist authoritarian president's ambitions? And how do institutions, the media, and civil society respond?Today, The UnPopulist's editor-in-chief Shikha Dalmia is joined by senior editor Berny Belvedere and contributor Andy Craig. They explore the risks of an unchecked executive, the breakdown of institutional safeguards, the chilling effect on dissent in both politics and culture, —and whether libertarians, who put checking abusive state authority at the heart of their political project, will stand up to Trump in his second term, which is already shaping up to be far worse than his first.We hope you find the discussion interesting, if depressing.© The UnPopulist, 2025Follow us on Bluesky, Threads, YouTube, TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, and X. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.theunpopulist.net

Does Christianity, or the Christian Bible, endorse a particular social configuration? What happens when faith communities tie their identity to political power? And can liberalism, with its emphasis on individual liberty and mutual respect, offer a path forward in a time of heightened polarization?Today, Berny Belvedere, The UnPopulist's senior editor, is joined by Russell Moore, who is editor-in-chief at Christianity Today, to discuss all of this and more.Whether you're a believer, a skeptic about matters of faith, or simply curious about the interplay between religion and politics, this episode raises questions that resonate far beyond any single election cycle.We hope you enjoy.***© The UnPopulist, 2024Follow us on Bluesky, Threads, YouTube, TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, and X. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.theunpopulist.net

What happens when the ideals of democracy are used to justify its own erosion? Can liberal democracy endure in an era where its strongest proponents appear to embrace the very authoritarianism they once opposed?In this episode, The UnPopulist's editor-in-chief Shikha Dalmia is joined by Zack Beauchamp, senior writer at Vox.They discuss why authoritarian leaders often present themselves as champions of democracy and how they use democratic language to consolidate power, and delve into topics such as the resilience of liberal democracy in the face of these challenges. What causes democratic societies to turn against their own principles? How do cultural and economic anxieties fuel the reactionary movements seen around the world? And is it still possible to reverse this trend in countries where authoritarian practices have taken root?© The UnPopulist, 2024 This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.theunpopulist.net

Today, our senior editor Berny Belvedere is joined by Shikha Dalmia, Editor-in-Chief of The UnPopulist, and columnist Andy Craig, as they dive into the reactions and political dynamics of a pivotal election. Following Trump's decisive comeback, they confront the profound societal and electoral shifts that made it possible, exploring everything from the anti-incumbent sentiment driving voter behavior to the challenges the Democratic Party faces in effectively messaging to a skeptical electorate.Together, they dissect how populism, economic grievances, and cultural divides intersect to influence American politics today. They question whether recent results signify genuine support for Trump or are simply a symptom of frustration with the status quo. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.theunpopulist.net

Today, we're excited to welcome back The UnPopulist's editor-at-large, Tom Shull. The last time we spoke with Tom was back in January, when he shared insights from the groundbreaking survey he developed for the Institute for the Study of Modern Authoritarianism, the publisher of The UnPopulist, focused on populist attitudes and beliefs in the electorate. Now, nine months later, Tom is going to walk us through the results of a new, even more comprehensive survey. His essay summarizing some of the survey's main finding for Trump supporters was just published at The UnPopulist, and more findings will be released there in the coming weeks.So what's changed since the last survey? What are the key insights? And how has our understanding of populist sentiment evolved? We'll cover all of this and more in today's conversation. We hope you enjoy.© The UnPopulist, 2024 This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.theunpopulist.net

Today on Zooming In at The UnPopulist, we're diving into one of the most pressing issues of our time: free speech. Our host Aaron Ross Powell is joined by a special guest, Ken White—better known online as Popehat—a First Amendment expert, seasoned criminal defense attorney, civil litigator, and cohost of the Serious Trouble podcast. Together, they'll explore some of the most pressing questions in free speech discourse today: Have we become too quick to label some speech as offensive? Are we idealizing a past where free expression was supposedly more open? And, most importantly, how can we foster richer, more nuanced conversations in an increasingly polarized world?Stay tuned as Aaron and Ken skillfully navigate these difficult waters. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.theunpopulist.net

Earlier this summer, the German far-right party Alternative for Germany, or AfD, came in second place in Germany's European Parliament elections, despite Germany's postwar aversion to far-right populism. The AfD is known for inflammatory rhetoric about migrants and other marginalized people, and recently a member aided and assisted a full-blown coup attempt against the government … sound familiar?On today's episode, host Aaron Ross Powell is joined by UnPopulist contributor Tim Ganser to discuss how the AfD has capitalized on discontent, the limitations of technocratic or incrementalist politics, and what liberal movements around the world can do better to reach disaffected constituents, to reach those who feel abandoned. We hope you enjoy.© The UnPopulist 2024 This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.theunpopulist.net

Listen to Zooming In at The UnPopulist in your favorite podcast app: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Google Podcasts | RSS | YouTubeLandry Ayres: Welcome to Zooming In at The UnPopulist. I'm Landry Ayres.As the 2024 election draws nearer and Donald Trump's second-term plans come into greater focus, critics of his, across the ideological spectrum, are torn as to whether Trump's movement is continuous with historical fascism. Does the dreaded “f”-word apply to him? Or is it an unhelpful exaggeration?On today's episode, The UnPopulist senior editor Berny Belvedere reconnects with his former Arc Digital colleague and international relations professor at the University of Illinois, Nicholas Grossman. The two discuss the propriety of using historically-weighty labels in our public discourse today, where to situate Trump within the not-so-grand tradition of authoritarianism, and break down how the Heritage Foundation-powered Project 2025 would fuel further democratic backsliding. We hope you enjoy.A transcript of today's podcast appears below. It has been edited for flow and clarity.Berny Belvedere: Nick, do you believe terms like “fascism,” “Nazism,” “communism” are overused today? If so, why do you think they are?Nicholas Grossman: So, in a way they're overused and also not. “Nazi” came to be a word that just meant bad, the thing that we all agree on is bad, and can be used in very serious contexts and comedic contexts—like the Soup Nazi in Seinfeld, and all the running jokes and memes of Godwin's law and “everything I don't like on the internet is Hitler” and anything else along those lines. So people do overuse it. But also, with “Nazi” in particular, it can reach a level where people then think that any lesson from Nazi Germany or any lesson from the 20th century more broadly is ipso facto wrong, that there's something inherently wrong about comparing the right-wing nationalist-populist movement that won an election and then lost power and then attempted a putsch and then reconsolidated and ran for power again, to America's right-wing nationalist-populist movement that won an election and then lost power by election and then attempted a putsch and then sought power again. That seems pretty ridiculous that you couldn't connect any of those.As for “fascism,” with thinking of it as this thing nearly everybody agrees was wrong that happened in the 20th century, when people try to apply it more loosely to things that are, say, authoritarian but not necessarily fascist … that could reduce the power of the word. But I think at this point, people using the word like Joe Biden used “semi-fascism,” to describe Trump's authoritarian project … I don't think is unreasonable.Berny: So when Biden used “semi-fascism,” how is it that that qualifier, “semi,” managed to successfully avoid the trap of requiring a perfect historical parallel while at the same time bringing in a term that has enough connotative heft to meet the gravity of Trump and MAGA's offenses? How is it that a word as simple as “semi” is able to successfully get us out of this jam?Nicholas: You know, that's a really good point. I hadn't quite thought about it that way, but it does look like the “semi” modifier has threaded that needle where it's a way of indicating, “Okay, I'm not saying this is literally Hitler and that we are headed for World War III and another Holocaust.” I mean, to pick a kind of obvious example: When Hitler wrote Mein Kampf, there is explicit calls for genocide. In Trump's largely ghostwritten books, you don't see anything like the final solution for the Jews. That runs into the problem of, “No, you're being hyperbolic.” So “semi” makes it where, “I'm not saying it's exactly that. I'm saying it bears enough resemblance to that that we should think of it as serious and bad.” And given that I and many others do think of it as serious and bad, and in particular as anti-democratic and authoritarian, the “semi” adds a way to use a word that connects with a lot of people without running into those, “So you're saying this is literally Hitler” counterarguments.Berny: As an international relations professor who has taught classes on terrorism, you've argued convincingly that misapplications of that word, “terrorism,” can have real consequences and that therefore applying the word well, in a more narrowly defined way, is really important. Is the issue with misapplications of the word “Nazi” or “fascism” on that same level, or not really?Nicholas: You're right that I'm a stickler on the word “terrorism,” that it's something that I teach and have taught for a while, and I take issue with a common usage of it to be basically a synonym of “bad,” a synonym of “thing I don't like.” If you Google “Republican terrorists” or “Democratic terrorists,” you get millions of hits. I think it is important for us to be able to really understand that “terrorism” refers specifically to violent political actions targeted against non-combatants by non-state actors. It's important for conceptual clarity, but in particular for developing counter-strategies and executing them well.I tend not to use “fascism” as well. I stick more to something like “authoritarianism” because the usefulness about it is: Trump's project is clearly authoritarian and there's no ambiguity about it. He's calling for the termination of the Constitution, saying, “I'll be a dictator”—he's quite open about it. You could have judged it from actions, but also now from statements. Whereas with something like the word “fascism,” that leads to debates that are potentially distracting. So I think it's a mistake to really fixate on the word, to be very insistent upon it.My concern with the word “terrorism” is not throwing it around so often and so loosely that it loses its power. And I feel that way about “fascism” as well—as a word that we shouldn't throw around loosely. I'll give you a recent example of this. When some people were reacting to police shutting down various campus protests, some cases seemed, to me and to many others, like an excessive use of force, just the sheer number of manpower and police presence that was being used. I saw comments along the lines of, “Why would you be concerned about fascism? Fascism is clearly already here.” And, no, that's really not it. So, the police arrested a bunch of people and, if any of them are charged with a crime, they'll have a chance to defend themselves in court. And that maybe is bad—certainly somebody can criticize it—but it's also not fascism. There's a danger of a “boy who cried wolf” effect where, if you're constantly calling anything you don't like this maximal bad word, then when something that is actually like that thing comes around, people are less inclined to believe you.Then again, the lesson of “The Boy Who Cried Wolf” is not that wolves aren't real and you don't need to worry about them.Berny: We're going to focus on more than just the term “fascism” here in this discussion, but I want to stay on the term for just a sec because it is a prominent issue in our discourse that keeps popping up.So, we humans tend to be incorrigibly committed to clarifying our world by describing it, by capturing it linguistically. But there's an inherent limitation to doing that that seems to always rear its head. Calling something a “Nazi” or “neo-Nazi” initiative helps to situate it within a particular historical movement. But the downside to that is historical episodes, by their very nature, are in the minds of many people tethered to particular circumstances, the ones that they temporally existed in. So history gives us these movements that have a fixed shape. And that can somewhat frustrate new applications of those labels.The part that a lot of people are underestimating is just how incredibly powerful institutional authority is. This idea of, it's norms all the way down … the idea that powerful people should follow the law is a norm. It is only a law to the extent that the people in power enforce it. And if the people in power, just enough of the people in power, don't enforce it, then it might as well not be a law. — Nicholas GrossmanSo to continue with the Nazi example, when some form of discourse today, whether it's a meme or a trope, or some rhetoric that a politician uses, gets characterized as “Nazi” or “neo-Nazi,” skeptics who don't detect a full-blown, genocidal antisemitism in that discourse will suggest that the “Nazi” label is overblown or being unfairly applied. I think the same thing happens, though at a lower scale, with “fascism.”My own take is that proponents and skeptics alike of these terms have in mind different aspects of those movements when they apply the labels or when they hear the labels applied. So when Trump gets called a “fascist” or a “neo-fascist,” the idea isn't necessarily that he's literally continuing Mussolini's project or that he's done the same exact things Franco did in Spain or whatever. Sometimes it means that. But sometimes I suspect the term is applied because a commentator or analyst just wants to note that Trump has similar impulses or inclinations or beliefs. The idea isn't that there's a perfect or near perfect match between the concrete actions Trump has taken and the ones past fascists have taken—because those will always be indexed to a particular time horizon. I think the idea, instead, is that Trump's posture toward democracy, toward the nation, the individual's role within the nation, and so on, is meaningfully similar to past fascist leaders and how they viewed things.If institutions exist today that reliably frustrate Trump's ability to carry out a more full-bodied fascistic reign, more so than they ever did for someone like Mussolini, that doesn't suggest, and it shouldn't suggest, that Trump lacks fascistic tendencies. Because, of course, that's just something external. Trump has routinely praised Putin and Kim and the way the societies they rule over are organized around their whims and wishes. The fact that he can't achieve that level of compulsory, fawning admiration here doesn't mean that he doesn't hold those yearnings.Does the fact that at any given time some discourse participants may have in mind tendencies and beliefs, whereas others have in mind concrete actions and historical parallels, and that therefore there's always going to be a talking past each other dynamic, does that suggest that historical terms like “fascism” are more unhelpful than helpful and should be retired?Nicholas: It can. I think that makes a lot of sense. This is also the purpose of those qualifiers like “semi.” One that's especially popular when you talk about things like political ideologies is “neo”—like a new version that's kind of like the one in the past. That tends to be how people thread the needle.But I do think that you're right in the tied-to-historical-circumstances aspect of it. And that also makes it where it is not necessarily the best or clearest form of communication or of persuasion because it can send some people down a rabbit hole of, “Let's compare that circumstance in history to this today,” whereas somebody who is using it might want to say, “These are similar”—or, often in some cases, it's a way of almost saying, “I think this is really bad.” So maybe a word like “authoritarian” doesn't have a real kick; “fascist,” “Nazi,” you know, has more of a kick and maybe is more likely to get people to pay attention—but it also, as you say, can make it more likely for people to shut off or to resist it. That's why I tend to say “anti-democracy” or “authoritarian,” or a more political science term, “democratic backsliding,” because that is unambiguously what is happening and it doesn't carry that same “historical circumstance” baggage.Berny: So, what is fascism, historically?Nicholas: So there's some debate about that, which again is one of the reasons why maybe it is not the most politically useful, or I guess discourse-useful, word. Historically, people place the origins in Italy, with Mussolini as the first real practitioner. When I was studying this, the person that I read the most was an Italian named Alfredo Rocco. He said that there were a couple of central principles: there's a hyper-nationalism, and an ethnic nationalism. Organicism, which is the sense that cell is to body as individual is to state … in other words, you give over everything to the state, as if you don't personally matter. Belief in superiority, then also militarism and foreign aggression. There are a number of other points that people like Umberto Eco have listed.There is a kind of later argument, and one that I find pretty persuasive, that fascism is almost a kind of anti-politics in that it is fixated on the past, often a fictional past, one in which there's not only nostalgia but trying to reclaim past glory and is a rejection in a way of the very idea of politics in the sense of we debate and argue about various pieces of evidence and facts and then come up with things like what might be the best solution or what do we agree would be a better solution rather than a worse solution. Whereas fascism often is much more an appeal to feelings and a fundamental rejection of the value of truth itself.Berny: I want to shift to a description of actions that can be categorized as fascistic, although if you just use a pure description of them, as you were suggesting earlier, you could also analyze them purely on their own merits. You were talking about how you prefer the word “authoritarianism” and “assaults on democracy.” In your latest for Arc Digital, you write that “American institutions are hanging by a thread.” And you argue that a model of instantaneous authoritarianism or revolutionary illiberalism, or as you put it, “a dramatic seizure of power,” is kind of the wrong model to expect America to fall prey to. Instead, you argue that if authoritarianism arrives in the U.S., it will do so via a more incremental process of democratic backsliding. Can you expound on what that is?Nicholas: Sure. That's a term that I think is very valuable in describing what's happening. So a lot of people, when they picture authoritarianism, they think of—and probably a lot of 20th-century takeovers were a big part of this—something like a big dramatic scene, something out of a movie. Think Mussolini or Hitler, the Iranian Revolution in 1979, or the Russian revolution, communist revolution—any of these big dramatic moments in which somebody seizes power and then holds onto it and then executes their authoritarianism and asserts their power throughout the country. What is more likely to happen in the United States, what in fact has been happening decently more to some democracies in the 21st century, is this idea of democratic backsliding, which is the process by which a leader gains power legally, legitimately via election, and then proceeds to abuse power while in office, to erode rule of law, erode checks and balances, try to put themselves above the law, and give themselves unfair advantages in elections.An egregious example of this, one that was backsliding from an already low baseline, is Putin's Russia. That Putin just got reelected—I don't know if you can hear my air quotes through the mic—in what was very clearly not an actual election, and yet they went through the motions and he claimed a popular mandate from it. Earlier, when Russia's laws had required him to step down, he just reworked the offices of president and prime minister, gave himself the prime minister job, gave his flunky, Dmitry Medvedev, the president job and continued running the country until that term was up and then just became president again.In the 21st century, we've seen versions of the sort of democratic backsliding that the U.S. should be afraid of in Turkey, India, Israel, Hungary, Poland, Peru, and a few others. Hungary, in particular, is the model for Trump in that the leader there, Viktor Orbán, won via election and then proceeded to do things like force just about all independent media outlets to go into this new kind of umbrella corporation which he had a flunky run and then change their commentary from sometimes critical of the government to basically government propaganda. An example of what happened in Poland was, they didn't like some of the judicial rulings, so they made a law that said that the maximum age for a Supreme Court justice or their equivalent is set at just right below the people that they wanted to get rid of. Then they got rid of those. And then they said, “Actually, the age can be different,” and then appointed their own people.We can also see that that sort of democratic backsliding has happened in part of the United States: with the failure of reconstruction after the Civil War and the imposition of Jim Crow—that people in those southern states did get power via elections and then you abuse that power to reduce the ability to vote and generally repress black people. So they still had elections, but they weren't free and fair, especially not in the way that the post-Civil War amendments tried to create and which the U.S. didn't really have until the Civil Rights acts.If he manages to get power again, there is zero reason to believe that he wouldn't try to do the thing that he literally did last time that he and his team have been spending over three years planning for, to try to fix the problems of that so they could do it again more successfully. I think there's a lot of naïveté about how somebody would stop it. Well, who? Congress? Why? — Nicholas GrossmanWhere we are hanging by a thread is: Trump has managed to already break through a lot of those institutional barriers that separate democracy from authoritarianism. And one of the things that a lot of people tend to misunderstand about this, and this also goes back to the glorious takeover vision of authoritarianism, is that authoritarians don't actually need to be strategic and good at this for it to work. This was a point that Hannah Arendt made in The Origins of Totalitarianism in 1951 that really resonates today, which is that incompetence can be an asset to wannabe authoritarians because it ends up getting competent people to quit and then opens up more spots for loyalists and makes it that they don't have this fundamental hesitancy when it comes to, “But, I'm violating a norm or I'm violating a law.”That can create a lot of the democratic backsliding. The United States saw that with Trump beating both impeachments. Why would he be concerned about Congress? And if he does manage to get reelected after being charged with a number of very serious crimes, including crimes associated with a coup attempt to overthrow the Constitution, if he then gets national power anyway, after all of that, there is no reason to expect that he will be bound or restricted by the law at all because he clearly does not respect it himself. At that point, there will be nobody left to potentially enforce it against him.Berny: In that same Arc piece, you made a list of the battles Trump has waged against our democratic institutions, and you put the number at nine. One of the battles that he's waged includes that he's violated internal rules of the executive branch. Can you give me an example?Nicholas: That was one of the easiest for him to violate because it was within the executive branch and the president is the elected head of the executive branch, so legal authority in the executive branch flows from the president. Just about everything you think of as government, besides the courts and Congress, is executive branch. So there's this immense power. And yet: America has a president, not a king. Presidents are subject to rule of law. As Teddy Roosevelt famously put it: “No man is above the law.”In response to Watergate, there were a number of reforms to try to create some internal restrictions on the power of the presidency—an example of this was to create the position of Inspector General and put it in a variety of executive branch departments. The press tends to refer to these people as the internal watchdog of whatever, and Trump, because he was doing things that was tripping these wires and getting these internal watchdogs to publicize the violations that he was doing, he then removed the inspectors general from Health and Human Services and the Defense Department and the intelligence community, among some others. And the only purpose of those positions is to monitor the executive branch, make sure that everybody's following the law, and if they're not following the law, report it, especially to Congress. So by removing them and either not replacing them or putting some loyalist hack in their place, that meant greater ability to get away with more.The Mueller investigation was another example of this in what finally ended it, at least the potential threat it posed to Trump, was he got a new attorney general, William Barr, and Barr proceeded to mislead the public about what the Mueller report had actually said. And he set a lot of the narratives and then he shut down further investigation of the president. That was an example where the executive branch was investigating itself for some malfeasance by its own leaders, and yet he was able to shut that down in part because it is entirely within the executive branch. So those were the first barriers that he got through. And the third, the one that ended up then bringing in congressional oversight, was when Trump tried to extort Ukraine by secretly withholding military aid and saying to the Ukrainian president Zelenskyy that he would release the aid if Zelenskyy did him a favor by lying and manufacturing an investigation into Joe and Hunter Biden, which Trump would then use as a basis for lies for his reelection campaign. That got caught by a whistleblower, someone on the National Security Council, who went through the proper procedures that got that information to Congress. That's what led to the first impeachment.So it was Trump's repeated efforts to break through various internal executive branch controls that eventually got the attention of Congress, which is a bigger barrier, but he burst through that too.Berny: Another battle he waged was against the transfer of power itself—a key presidential tradition within American history. He met that process, that idea, with violence rather than with peaceful acceptance. Do you consider that one to be the most dangerous, or is there one that's worse than that?Nicholas: I don't know if I can pick out an individual worst one because it's cumulative. My first instinct was to say, “No, the worst one is the current one against the legal system.” But a lot of what the legal system is trying to hold them accountable for was the coup attempt, which grew out of a violation of bunch of norms. So if I had to pick one, I'd still say the January 6 coup attempt, where introducing that level of political violence into American politics, making it the first in all of modern U.S. history to not have a peaceful transfer of power—it was literally not peaceful.The one about post-election norms … I think it's easy to underrate that one. Norms, because they're not codified, they're not laws, they're not written down, sometimes it doesn't feel like violating something important, but those are the ways that we do things. And if somebody then does it egregiously differently, violates those norms and gets away with it, or manages to even succeed with it, then what they've done is create a new normal, new expectations.With every previous losing presidential candidate, as soon as the election was called, shortly after they gave a concession speech. Hillary Clinton did it the morning after networks called the election for Trump in 2016. Probably the biggest example of this was Al Gore, who pursued legal means. I'm not criticizing Trump here for doing things like filing lawsuits to try to question some aspects of the election. Some of those were in bad faith, probably all of those were in bad faith, but still it is a legal measure. Others have done it too. But what Gore did was, after the Supreme Court made a ruling about the Florida recounts that resulted in George W. Bush becoming president, Gore publicly accepted the results of the election. And then, because he was vice president, he was in the Mike Pence role of being the presiding officer at the Senate that was officially acknowledging the Electoral College votes. And he gaveled in his own loss. So that was the norm.The other part of that was an outgoing president brings the new president-elect to the White House to peacefully transfer power, to begin the transfer. Obama did that with Trump—invited him to the White House, hosted him as the president-elect shortly after Hillary conceded. Every previous president did this. George H.W. Bush famously lost reelection and wrote a—what is now publicized, what was then private—letter of encouragement to Bill Clinton that basically amounted to, “I didn't want you to be president, but now that you are, I really wish you the best. You're the leader of our country and I love our country and I want you to do really well. Here are some suggestions.”That was just the way we always did things. By Trump incessantly lying about the election and conspiring to overthrow it, and after exhausting legitimate means, turning to illegitimate and illegal ones, and then, of course, after all of this, just hammering the Big Lie, the “up is down” lie, about the election results over and over and over again, and turning it into this kind of loyalty litmus test for Republicans that want to seek office or just want to speak in public about this stuff, has made it now where most Republicans just expect that challenging an election result and insisting that if you lost you actually won is just something you do now and that that is normal. Then a lot of the mainstream press treats it as, “Well, that's just another political strategy” and talks about it in these kind of horse-race sports language type of terms as opposed to, “This was a egregious violation of the most core principle of constitutional democracy and not something that we should treat lightly at all.”Granted, a lot of people didn't. Liz Cheney is a good example of somebody who did not treat it lightly. Nevertheless, it has become more normalized and it's reached a point where just about everybody expects that, if Trump loses the 2024 election, there will be similar claims that it's illegitimate, that it doesn't count, that it should be overthrown, or any other version of that. And that alone is something that is bad for the country, bad for democracy, and I don't really know how we fix.Berny: What is Project 2025?Nicholas: Project 2025 comes out of the Heritage Foundation think tank, and it is essentially a blueprint for democratic backsliding, for an internal authoritarian takeover after winning election. The biggest provision along those lines that is in it is a plan to purge the federal government of people who were hired because of their qualifications, not because of their political loyalty—people who are fundamentally loyal to the Constitution, not to Donald Trump personally. People have to swear to honor the Constitution. You don't swear to the president. The oath is to the Constitution—to protect and defend the Constitution. The plan is to get all those people out of the federal government. We're talking literally thousands of federal employees. That amounts to removing the barriers that thwarted Trump's last coup attempt.Where he ultimately failed was not enough people went along with the lies—Mike Pence being the most prominent one. So, Project 2025 is best understood as a plan to get anybody who followed the Constitution out and replace them with people who think that Donald Trump being in power is the end all, be all and are perfectly fine with breaking the law about that.That goes back to the Hannah Arendt line about you don't really need to be competent to do this. If anything, having competent people, smart people, there makes them less likely to be blind loyalists. So, they don't even need to necessarily be good at it. The first coup attempt failed, because it was haphazard, something that Trump and Co. came up with on the fly. Their plan was to win the election, and if not, lose it by one state, probably Pennsylvania, and then try to throw the count in Pennsylvania into chaos. But they weren't able to do that because Biden won most of the swing states, with Arizona and Georgia being two, plus Michigan and Wisconsin.There's a danger of a “boy who cried wolf” effect where, if you're constantly calling anything you don't like this maximal bad word, then when something that is actually like that thing comes around, people are less inclined to believe you. Then again, the lesson of “The Boy Who Cried Wolf” is not that wolves aren't real and you don't need to worry about them. — Nicholas GrossmanNow, they've spent the last three-and-a-half years stewing about that failure and trying to figure out ways to make it work next time. Project 2025 is already on the way. So whereas Trump came into office last time—and this is pretty typical of wannabe authoritarians in their first term—and didn't really know what he was doing, didn't really know how the system works, took some time to learn it as is fairly typical of populist leaders, he hired a number of establishment figures that the press called “the adults in the room.”—think, for example, Secretary of Defense James Mattis. Those were ones who were not willing to put Trump above the Constitution. Gradually, over the course of his term, accelerating in his last year after he beat the first impeachment, they started removing a number of these people and replacing them with loyalists. So now you've got people at the Heritage Foundation who have been working on vetting people to make sure that they are loyal to Trump and his authoritarian project rather than to the Constitution and American democracy. They are ready to hit the ground running with a lot of these democratic backsliding plans.Also connected to this are policy ideas like abortion bans and rounding up all the illegal immigrants and deporting them, which is a good one to describe how this would actually go because it's not that they would necessarily succeed at finding 11 million people and removing them from the country. It's that such a project is so massive and, because they are not the most competent people when it comes to policy execution, even trying would be chaotic and would lead to a lot of federal officers, probably state officers, and vigilantes going after people that they think look illegal, meaning just basically Latino, rather than, say, carefully checking everybody's papers and making this more of a rule of law effort. But that project couldn't happen without having enough of the people in place that would carry it out, people who react to it with, “Yes, sir, absolutely,” or in a bloodthirsty nature of being excited to do it.Berny: I want to bring the word “fascist” back in here for a sec. The threat of political violence can sometimes be just as effective as political violence itself. Figures associated with Project 2025 have called on Trump, if he gets reelected, to invoke the Insurrection Act on day one. Can this sort of preemptive reliance on police or military force in order to quell popular demonstrations of dissent be characterized as fascistic or semi-fascistic, in your view? Nicholas: I think so. That's one where I would use the label of authoritarian, because you don't necessarily have those ethno-nationalist aspects to it, though I do think the rounding up of a whole bunch of brown people and putting them in camps, yeah, you can safely call that fascist.Berny: You've written that if Donald Trump wins the 2024 election and becomes president again, American democracy is done. Why are you so definitive about America's prospects if Trump wins again?Nicholas: Because the record of national leaders who attempt a coup, fail, and then get power again is really bad for democracy. And because I think that people are—not everybody, of course, but quite a few Americans—stuck in a “it can't happen here” complacency, or just a natural tendency to think that the future will look like the past, that there isn't going to be any sort of drastic change. Also, they did see him in office and see that America did not turn into a dictatorship—so, you know, why necessarily would that happen in a second term?That gets it backwards in that it's the second term when democratic backsliding tends to go really bad. Turkey and India are both good examples of this, because then you had a leader who is not uncertain at all, who has shown their true colors. And we have in Trump's case very serious, just egregious, violations of the law.To put this in perspective: the trial in New York for fraud, to cover up hush money payments that he paid to porn star Stormy Daniels, is the sort of thing that's being treated as trivial. If it were at any other person at any other time in the past, it would be one of the biggest scandals in all of presidential history. It's the sort of thing that you'd have to say is at least on par with something like Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky, and yet it pales in comparison to the charges that he's facing for things like stealing, retaining, and exposing very high-level national-security secrets, and of attempting to overthrow the government, conspiring to defraud the United States out of its presidential election, conspiring to defraud Georgia out of its presidential vote.If he manages to get power again, there is zero reason to believe that he wouldn't try to do the thing that he literally did last time that he and his team have been spending over three years planning for, to try to fix the problems of that so they could do it again more successfully. I think there's a lot of naïveté about how somebody would stop it. Well, who? Congress? Why? He got impeached but didn't get kicked out of office because Republicans protected him even when he caused a violent attack on their own building. So, in that case, Congress is toothless. He'll be protected legally from anything. And if he manages to beat the criminal justice system, then anytime somebody says, “That's a violation of the law,” you can just say, “I don't care. What are they going to do about it?”The part that a lot of people are underestimating is just how incredibly powerful institutional authority is. This idea of, it's norms all the way down … the idea that powerful people should follow the law is a norm. It is only a law to the extent that the people in power enforce it. And if the people in power, just enough of the people in power, don't enforce it, then it might as well not be a law. So the inflection point is the 2024 election. If they get power, they are not going to willingly give it up and they're not going to be checked while using it because they have already burst through those barriers, all those checks and balances. They've already beaten them—or, at least, if he gets reelected, would have already beaten them.Some people get into a bit of a fantasy: “Well, it'll be like the past in that we'll work hard in the midterms and then Congress will check him.” But why? Or, some that I've seen, especially from more radical people on the left, that there'll be all these great protests. You mentioned the Insurrection Act—I don't think Americans have really absorbed what it looks like when the government sends the military to fire on protesters. We already saw Trump do a bit of this in his first term in the infamous photo-op at Lafayette Square in DC in which had security services violently clear an area so that Trump could go through to this church and take a photo. Incidentally, he took it with the Bible upside down, but you know, still.There were also these weird paramilitary forces that showed up in Portland, Oregon that were throwing people into vans that were federal officers, but unmarked and turned out to be this force cobbled together from border patrol and others. That was basically a separate, semi-legal force. So having seen this already, and then having that validation of reelection despite fighting the law, despite not following the law and violating the law, there is a decent chance that would do it.This doesn't mean that every single member of the U.S. military is going to go, “Yes, sir. I'm going to violate my oath and shoot people.” But some probably will. Certainly some will out of a sense of, “Look, this is the commander in chief. That's what he's saying.” Some will because they like it and because they agree with him. The two possibilities, then, are either the security forces and the military honor the order and then they violently put down these protests in a way that modern America at least has never seen or that causes some sort of split in the military, which is also devastating and would break the country.This was a point that Hannah Arendt made in The Origins of Totalitarianism in 1951 that really resonates today, which is that incompetence can be an asset to wannabe authoritarians because it ends up getting competent people to quit and then opens up more spots for loyalists and makes it that they don't have this fundamental hesitancy when it comes to, ‘But, I'm violating a norm or I'm violating a law.' — Nicholas GrossmanBerny: Imagine that we stripped our vocabulary of labels and just used descriptors. Imagine that historians all formed a pact to no longer use labels and just lay out what each historical movement and figures have done. And so we get to a point where, with historical distance, we read descriptions of what Mussolini and other fascist movements in the 20th century believed and carried out, and we get descriptions of what Trump in the 21st century believed and carried out. What do you think would be the biggest difference in those descriptions? And then what would be the element with the most overlap between them?Nicholas: The most overlap is democratic backsliding: an elected leader abusing power to gain unchecked authority and then use that to violate our various core tenets of democracy up to and including individual rights and future elections.For the least parallel, maybe actually not as sound as it used to be, but the part where it's most different is in the aggressive military force abroad, the desire for conquest. You have a number of these historical cases where the new leader goes to conquer some foreign people, usually some people that they consider lesser, racially or in some other way, where they consider themselves the rightful masters. We talked about the Europeans a lot, but you can see this with Imperial Japan in the 20th century.With Trump and the MAGA movement, something that has caught my attention is increasing discussions of invading Mexico, of using military force against Mexico, usually tied up not in a desire for conquest and domination per se … it's usually more to stop illegal immigration, or to stop drug dealers. But if they had actually thought any of it through, it amounts to a U.S. war with Mexico. The Mexican government already works with the United States in a coordinated fashion on things like dealing with drug traffickers—maybe not as much or as well as some would like, but nevertheless there is a decent amount of coordination. So, if they actually tried to go through with this, Mexico would resist it and that could create really serious problems spiraling from there. But I'd say the main focus of the MAGA movement is a lot more domestic and really want to dominate and repress groups of Americans that they don't like, rather than to be violently dominant and repressive of bordering countries as well. So I would not expect that the U.S. is going to gear up for a military invasion of Canada. That would be lower on my list of worries, whereas something like an authoritarian power within the United States that focus on domestic enemies is decently more likely.Berny: Nick, thank you so much.Nicholas: Thanks, Berny.Landry: Thank you for listening to Zooming In, a project of The UnPopulist. For more like this, make sure to subscribe for free at theunpopulist.net. Until next time.The UnPopulist invites interesting thinkers from across the political spectrum to foster a wide-ranging and thoughtful conversation to advance liberal values, including thinkers it may—or may not—agree with.© The UnPopulist 2024Follow The UnPopulist on: X, Threads, YouTube, TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, and Bluesky. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.theunpopulist.net

On today's episode, The UnPopulist's editor-in-chief Shikha Dalmia and senior editor Berny Belvedere are joined by guest Ian Bassin.Ian previously served as Associate White House Counsel under President Obama and is the founder and Executive Director at Protect Democracy, a cross-ideological coalition defending America's system of government against the threat of authoritarianism. They discuss the challenges of recognizing and addressing threats to democracy when they don't fit traditional narratives, how to implement measures to slow down autocratic tendencies, and the importance of our rapidly shrinking civil society. We hope you enjoy. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.theunpopulist.net

On today episode, Aaron Ross Powell is joined by guest Richard Rothstein,  a Distinguished Fellow of the Economic Policy Institute and a Senior Fellow (emeritus) at the Thurgood Marshall Institute of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. He is the author of The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America. His latest book is Just Action: How to Challenge Segregation Enacted Under the Color of Law.He and Aaron discuss the root of America's modern segregation, the role of the Supreme Court in its development, and what we can do to remedy it. We hope you enjoy it. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.theunpopulist.net

On today's episode, Aaron Powell interviews Rachel Kleinfeld, a senior fellow in the Democracy, Conflict, and Governance Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a member of the Board of Directors at the National Endowment for Democracy, and a trustee of Freedom House.She recently authored a piece at The UnPopulist titled, “Right-Wing Populists Are Just as Bad for Business as Left-Wing Ones,” in which she outlines the folly and falsehoods that form the foundation of populist economics.In today's discussion, they cover the story populists tell their followers about economics, how that same narrative has taken root in America, and what it takes to resist falling under the populist spell. Enjoy. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.theunpopulist.net

On today's episode, The UnPopulist's editor-in-chief Shikha Dalmia and senior editor Berny Belvedere are joined by Matt Yglesias. Matt is a journalist, blogger, and podcaster who's written for The Atlantic and Slate. He's also a co-founder of Vox and now writes his daily Substack newsletter Slow Boring, which is dedicated to realizing a better world through rigorous conversations and a spirit of pragmatism.Matt joins us to discuss the media's adversarial role in politics, how polarization and populism foster conflict, and what both the left and right can do to make sure our politics are more productive moving forward. Enjoy. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.theunpopulist.net

It's official: NATO has officially grown yet again. The international alliance now boasts 32 member states following the most recent additions of Finland and, as of this week, Sweden. But what are these Nordic neighbors getting into?Today we have the pleasure of bringing you a conversation between our Editor in Chief Shikha Dalmia and Senior Editor Berny Belvedere. While they have different positions on the benefits of NATO, this episode is less of a debate and more a conversation discussing the merits and drawbacks of arguments for and against it. With historical grounding and moral reasoning, they tease out nuanced and complex reasons for both positions, often with one another's help. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.theunpopulist.net

On our last episode, we heard from UnPopulist columnist and Director of Election Policy the Rainey Center Andy Craig on why he believes removing Donald Trump from the 2024 presidential ballot is, in fact, not anti-democratic. Today, we wanted to give you the opportunity to hear a counter-argument.Today's debate, which features both Andy and, for the opposition, the Washington Post's Jason Willick, is not filled with bad-faith interruptions, name-calling, or any of the other shallow chaos associated with modern debates. Andy and Jason discuss whether or not January 6th was an insurrection, the merits of the argument that the President is not an “officer”, and what we can expect from the Supreme Court's soon to be released decision.Further Reading:Allowing Trump on the Ballot Is What Is Truly Anti-Democratic by Andy CraigOn Ballot Access, Trump Shouldn't be Treated as More Equal than Others by Andy CraigWhat a 1790s Rebellion Shows About the Campaign to Disqualify Trump by Jason WillickThe Antislavery Giant at the Center of the Trump Disqualification Case by Jason Willick This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.theunpopulist.net

At the very end of last year, Donald Trump's presidential campaign hit a large roadblock when the Colorado State Supreme Court ruled him ineligible for the office under Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, also known as the Insurrection Clause, due to his actions during January 6th. While many of his opponents praised this decision as justice finally taking course, there has of course been backlash.A major complaint about the decision to take him off the ballot is that doing so would be anti-democratic, a circumvention of the people's will by unelected politicians in robes. Exercising judicial power to remove a candidate who has on occasion been leading in the polls does seem remarkably anti-democratic. Even some liberals have expressed some qualms about such a course like this. But are they justified in their worries?Today is our Editor's Roundtable. Host Landry Ayres is joined by The UnPopulist's Shikha Dalmia and Berny Belvedere, as well as Director of Election Policy at the Rainey Center and an adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute, Andy Craig.Read Andy's piece for The UnPopulist here. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.theunpopulist.net

The Institute for the Study of Modern Authoritarianism, the nonprofit parent organization of The UnPopulist, recently fielded a survey to measure populist attitudes among Americans. The poll of 1,000 respondents was administered nationwide from November 17th to the 27th 2023, as a supplement to the weekly America's Political Pulse Survey conducted by the Dartmouth-based Polarization Research Lab.Last week, The UnPopulist published its findings, and they're fascinating. On today's episode, host Aaron Ross Powell is joined by the survey's author, Tom Shull, Polling Director at ISMA. They dig into how the survey was designed, what it tells us about the state of American populism, and what questions still need answers. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.theunpopulist.net

Aaron Ross Powell: Welcome to Zooming In, a project of The UnPopulist. I'm Aaron Ross Powell. I'm joined today by my colleagues, Shikha Dalmia and Akiva Malamet for our editors' round table. Recent reporting has uncovered plans by Trump allies, and Trumpist think tanks, and other organizations to deconstruct the administrative state.A transcript of today's podcast appears below. It has been edited for flow and clarity.Aaron Ross Powell: I think all of us agree that the administrative state is unaccountable and too large, so what's wrong with Trump's plans to reform it?Shikha Dalmia: Good morning, Aaron and Akiva. We haven't done this in a while, right? We are getting together in this format after a long time, but I'm surprised, Aaron, you didn't use the word “deep state,” because that's the term of art these days, right? What's wrong with the “deep state?” There are actually plenty of things wrong with the deep state, but we actually in the US don't really have a deep state.Deep state is an idea that was originally meant to describe the kind of bureaucracy we had in countries like Turkey and Egypt, which was controlled by the military and security forces. They engaged in all kinds of machinations behind the scenes to control civilian authorities and the populace at large. Their functioning was completely opaque and the subject of all kinds of conspiracy theories in the Middle East.That's not what we have here in the United States. What we have in the United States is a problematic situation, where those of us who believe in government of limited size and scope, the federal government is very large. It performs functions far beyond what, I think it's fair to say, the Founders originally visualized and the bureaucratic state, the administrative state, has grown apace.Now, if you talk to my friend Frank Fukuyama, he will tell you that actually, the bureaucracy is not large enough because the federal government's functions have grown far, far more than the bureaucracy has, and the bureaucracy simply can't keep up with providing the kinds of professional and efficient execution that it was meant to do. Now, regardless of what you think about that view, I think from our point of view, an administrative state that in its current form is quite problematic, but it is part of a bigger problem with the federal government.As the federal government was originally envisualized in this country, each branch had very specific role, and had very specific powers and functions. Each side was supposed to guard that, guard their functions in a very, very jealous way. The idea was that would allow the public at large to keep each government branch publicly accountable, and at the same time, each branch would provide a check on the other.Now, that actually has not how things have worked out in the United States. Over a period of time, Congress has delegated too much of its authority to both the president and the executive agencies under the president. If you think of the War Powers Act, it was supposed to curtail the president's war-making ability. But Congress has got used to giving very large authorization of power to wage all kinds of wars in all kinds of countries post 9/11. That was one huge usurpation of power by the executive, not intentionally, but in effect from Congress.Congress also writes very broad and vague legislations and then lets the administrative branch define them in any way it wants to. That essentially means, this is the critique of the administrative state, is that therefore the administrative branches have very sweeping legislative powers through their powers of interpretation that nobody can really control. Congress can't control the executive agencies and the president can't control the executive agencies either, because many of these people are civil servants and bureaucrats and they are protected by rules of a professional bureaucracy. So they become largely unaccountable.If you are listening to our conservative friends, there's an additional problem, which is that the civil servants tend to be somewhat leftist in their biases. They have an ideological agenda…to promote environmental legislation or equity legislation and what have you. All that becomes a problem for them. Now, I would be in favor of limiting the size and scope of the administrative branch if it was part of broader reform of government, where the Congress took back its legislative powers and therefore the administrative branches had to do less in terms of interpretation and execution. Then you could shrink the size of the administrative state too. But that's not what Trump is proposing.What Trump and the Republicans are proposing is not, in my view, a deconstruction, which is a term of art, or the rationalization of the administrative state. They want to co-opt and take over the administrative state for their own ends. Their ends are essentially twofold: To punish their enemies and rewards their friends. That's what the right has been saying it wants to do for a very long time.“What Trump and the Republicans are proposing is not, in my view, a deconstruction, which is a term of art, or the rationalization of the administrative state. They want to co-opt and take over the administrative state for their own ends. Their ends are essentially twofold: To punish their enemies and rewards their friends.”— Shikha DalmiaIn Trump's case, it means punishing enemies means not just ideological enemies, which is certainly a part of it, but actually, his personal enemies who have tried to hold him accountable for things like calling a mob to ransack the Capitol. He wants to go after Biden and Hunter Biden for purely political purposes. That's not really a reform of the administrative state. That's a co-optation of the of the administrative state.Now, how is he planning to do that? He's got a three-part plan to do this. The first part is that all presidents get to appoint 4,000 political appointments across federal agencies. That is not something that Trump alone would do, every president does that. What is different in this case is that most presidents will look for people who have expertise and merit, have some kind of claim to merit to run the agencies. That's not what they want to do. Heritage Foundation and America First Policy Institute and then Steve Miller's, I think it's America First Legal. They have a plan to install loyalist—Trump loyalists in these positions. That's a problem.The second part that they want to do is there are 50,000 employees who are Schedule F employees, and they are off-limits to the political branches in a certain sense. Trump wants to re-up his old executive order, which will essentially make them at-will employees and allow him to fire them. Again, if he was planning to do this in order to streamline and rationalize the administrative state, that would be one thing. That's not what it is. He [Trump] wants to flatten the points of resistance that he encountered in his initial first term that prevented him from implementing unconstitutional plans, many of which he still managed to do. For instance, on immigration and what have you. That's what he's trying to do. That's why it's all problematic from our point of view. Even though we want a smaller administrative state, we want a well-defined government with specific roles. This is not what that is.“He [Trump] wants to flatten the points of resistance that he encountered in his initial first term that prevented him from implementing unconstitutional plans … That's why it's all problematic from our point of view. Even though we want a smaller administrative state, we want a well-defined government with specific roles.”— Shikha DalmiaAkiva: I think those are excellent points, Shikha. I think one of the things that's important to emphasize here is the idea that there is a distinction between harnessing government for your own ends and making government smaller in general. That really the function of what Trump wants to do is to make government a tool of his own ends. One of the things that I think is critical here is that he doesn't really have a plan for what he wants to do in society. What he does is he has certain temperaments about who he likes, who he doesn't like, who his friends are, who his enemies are, and then follows those as a almost random or not random, but very disorganized set of policies to—what he wants to do is in a very disorganized way, punish his friends and reward his enemies and rather than enact any comprehensive plan of reform. In general, what he wants to do is change institutions wholesale so that they no longer serve the so-called “liberal elites” that he's so constantly in favor of attacking.Now, this resembles in many cases a similar plan that has been enacted in many European populist contexts in Hungary, Turkey, Poland, and so on, where there's no real plan for what government should or shouldn't do. There's an idea that there are certain people in power who we don't like, certain outgroups, social outgroups—liberals, feminists, gay rights advocates, and so on. We want them out of power. Instead, we want to put in our own socially conservative, hardline, nationalist stormtroopers. In essence, what we have is a cultural fight over which culture should the institutions of government be wielded. Should they be wielded in favor of a progressive "woke agenda" or they should be wielded in favor of a socially conservative, regressive, reactionary agenda? Of course, independent of whether you're on one side or another, there's one question which neither side has asked, which is should the institutions of government be wielded for these purposes at all? It's clear that what Trump is doing is simply agreeing with the progressives that the institutions of government should be wielded in order to force people into certain modes of action and modes of being but he wants to do it on behalf of his own conservative, reactionary forces rather than progressive ones.“There's one question which neither side has asked, which is should the institutions of government be wielded for these purposes at all? It's clear that what Trump is doing is simply agreeing with the progressives that the institutions of government should be wielded in order to force people into certain modes of action and modes of being but he wants to do it on behalf of his own conservative, reactionary forces rather than progressive ones.”— Akiva MalametAaron: That seems like that describes Trump who is just pure id without much in the way of ideological grounding or even conceptual coherence. He has a sense that there are people who are obsequious to him and he likes those people and people who aren't and he doesn't like those people. Does that describe the broader plan here?When the Heritage Foundation is putting out its 900-page proposal for policies, their Project 2025, I think it's called, or when they're vetting people to take over all of these roles in the administrative state that Trump will make vacant through these various machinations, it feels like those sorts of organizations and people like Stephen Miller do have a more coherent view of what they want society to look like, why they are doing this. They're using Trump as the way to gain power, and then these mechanisms are a way to further assert power because Trump has a certain sort of popularity with a distressingly large portion of the population and we can leverage that, but this feels much more calculated than what you're describing, Akiva.I agree, the Viktor Orban analogies, I think, hold, that there is this sense that we just-- what we want is what we, meaning the people advancing these plans, not me, want is a society that holds to a certain set of conservative views and values and uses the oppressive power of the state to stamp out feminism and LGBT identities and wokeism, whatever they happen to mean by that, and doesn't make white people uncomfortable by teaching the history of racism, and so on.It doesn't feel like just we want to change the culture of the institutions. It feels much more like there is a specific end goal of remaking society to look like a certain thing in mind.Shikha: No, I think that's exactly right. In Trump's first term, there was a disconnect, right? The existing conservative establishment had, which reflected the Reagan era consensus of a certain fealty to limited government principles … at least it offered lip service to those principles, and also wanted certain limitations on the power of the state. They may have had a cultural agenda, just as the left had a cultural agenda, but they had a higher loyalty to these sort of other principles. And they felt that if Trump came along, they could use the Federalist Society to put such jurists in courts and who were not primarily—who were originalists, limited government types, textualists, and what have you, first, and culture warriors second.Trump came along on a populist agenda. His was a populist mandate. He got elected as a culture warrior. Now, one can debate whether Trump is truly a culture warrior or not, it doesn't matter, but he got elected on a culture warrior agenda. That was combined with a certain taste for power in him. To the extent that the courts, the bureaucratic branches, the Republican Party was populated with these other kinds of conservatives, there was a mismatch in what he wanted, and his mandate, and what they wanted, and their long-standing, loyalties and commitments.That has all shifted now. Now there is a harmony in the mandate that Trump wants to get elected on and what the right-wing establishment wants to do. That's where the Heritage Foundations of the world come in. Heritage now looks very different. Heritage was never to my taste, but the Heritage of today is very different from the Heritage of pre-Trump. Now it's in it for the power. The whole idea of a limited government because you at least worry about what your opponents are going to do when they come to power is gone through the window. They want to amass as much power to cram as much of their culture war agenda as they possibly can. Trump, they see, will play ball on that. There will be no tension between that agenda and what Trump wants to accomplish.Trump's added need is for loyalty. Trump's added need is for personal power which they are just happy to go along with because in this case, his power will, in fact, serve their ideological goals.“The right is arguably the most radical political contingent in the United States right now, has abandoned conservatism and doesn't hold at all to a desire to maintain governing institutions but instead…is simply a political movement for exercising heavy power in the service of creating or reestablishing certain hierarchies that they see as having eroded under liberalism.”—Aaaron Ross PowellAaron: It seems like we are seeing then in the way that you describe it, something of a broader version of a longtime hobby horse of mine that I've written about, which is we, especially United States, tend to treat the right and conservatism as synonyms. They both just mean the same thing. If you're on the right, you're a conservative, if you're a conservative, you're on the right and their political projects are identical. It feels like what's happening now and what was recognized in the first Trump administration with the kinds of people, they appointed a lot of conservatives to positions of power.What they didn't get from that was a sufficient quantity of people who were the necessary degree of being on “the right” to do the things that they wanted. That these people had conservative commitments to institutions and principles and so on that got in the way of a far-right agenda. A second Trump term and this split in the Heritage Foundation, the Heritage Foundation used to be a conservative organization. Now it is a far-right organization that is not conservative. That there is this real decoupling and that the right is arguably the most radical political contingent in the United States right now, has abandoned conservatism and doesn't hold at all to a desire to maintain governing institutions but instead, it ties back to what the right has traditionally meant, is simply a political movement for exercising heavy power in the service of creating or reestablishing certain hierarchies that they see as having eroded under liberalism.Akiva: Yes, I think that's right. I think what's happened is we've had a destruction of the idea of conservatism, not just in the sense of small government, but in the sense of conserving institutions, in the sense of there being checks and balances and balance to power and preserving a certain liberal legacy of America's founding documents and a shift towards trying to exercise power for its own sake and to exercising power on behalf of certain culturally conservative ends. We have a shift from conservatism in the sense of conservation or conservatism in the sense of limited government to conservatism as revolutionary.“We've had a destruction of the idea of conservatism, not just in the sense of small government, but in the sense of conserving institutions, in the sense of there being checks and balances and balance to power and preserving a certain liberal legacy of America's founding documents and a shift towards trying to exercise power for its own sake and to exercising power on behalf of certain culturally conservative ends.”— Akiva MalametThis is something that Tom Palmer talks about in an unpublished paper that he delivered to the Mont Pelerin Society about the idea of a conservative revolutionary. This is something that the conservative revolutionary in the original sense were actually the predecessors to the Nazi regime in Germany. These were people who saw the whole business of democratic politics, of the give and take of democratic politics as impeding their ability to enact their will on the populace and to impose their social conservative agenda, and to revive the cult of the nation, and so on.Describe themselves very much as conservative, but not in the sense of everlasting principles and certain code of ethics and so on, but conservative in the sense of being right wing and right wing in the sense of being nationalist, being socially conservative, and so on. We see this repeat itself in the Trump administration to a greater extent and which is trying to follow in the lead of contemporary populists like Viktor Orban, like the former prime minister of Poland, like Giorgia Meloni in Italy and so on, and who see their role as agents of the right and the right being defined in a revolutionary way to transform society into an organ of their own making. An organ that is suffused and constructed to favor certain social classes and hierarchies to defend traditional gender roles, to defend the traditional family unit, to be anti-LGBT and so on.Shikha: Right. Yes, I think, Tom Palmer's piece on the conservative revolution was actually sort of eye-opening because it was so historically grounded, right? If you don't like the so-called liberal radicals, wait till you get the conservative radicals who get their hands on the levers of the state. It is pretty terrifying what they would want to do. If you look at some of like the blueprints of what the Heritage Foundation and Steve Miller have in mind, it's downright chilling.Steve Miller, his immigration agenda, and he has said that, he's openly mocking immigration advocates right now and saying, wait till our second term, you won't know what's hit you. The kinds of things he wants to do, not only will he re-up everything he did in his first term, he has plans to build all kinds of huge detention camps to throw immigrants, undocumented immigrants and anybody else coming into the country. There will be deportation raids galore. Beyond that, plans to take away, deport people who are openly pro-Palestinian or anti-Israel. At least this is Steve Miller's agenda.There will be litmus tests on the immigrants who are coming into the country to make sure they actually tow sort of like a right-wing line. Now, this kind of meddling, trying to socially engineer a public to serve the state ends of the right is kind of scary and not where this country has gone before, as best as I know, even under the worst of circumstances. Yes, so sort of the idea is to have some a conservative revolution in which you use the levers of the state to cram as much of the conservative social agenda as possible and then to hell with the next, the Democratic government once it comes into power. My fear is not just that, what conservatives are doing will end with conservatives, but then it will be picked up by progressives in future administrations to push their own, draconian ends. It's a downward spiral.I don't think we want to do is become cheerleaders for the administrative state in the way that in the early Trump administration and throughout the Trump administration, you suddenly saw progressives embracing the FBI as this force for preserving and protecting democracy and our freedoms.—Aaron Ross PowellAaron: We have a situation where you have a past president who hopes to be a future president who wants to come in and re-engineer the state along essentially to be what Polemicus thought of as justice, which as we've mentioned, is punishing your enemies and rewarding your friends. Married to these conservative intellectuals who want to take those urges and use them in the service of re-engineering society towards far-right ends.A lot of this is being spoken about is, to go back to our opening remarks, a lot of this is being spoken about in the language of reforming the federal bureaucracy, shrinking the administrative state, making it accountable, making career bureaucrats easier to fire so that we can get turnover and we can get accountability. All of these are things that classical liberals have talked about for decades, right? These are, we need to reform the administrative state. We need to figure out how to reform the administrative state. We need to figure out how to make it more accountable. We need to shrink it. We need to return lawmaking power to Congress or demand that Congress retake lawmaking power instead of writing this legislation that's like, this bill will, tasks the EPA with making the environment better and then lets the EPA fill in all the details of what making the environment better means and so on.All of that sounds very classical liberal, but is now being co-opted for decidedly anti-liberal, if not, outright authoritarian ends. What do we do about that? Because what I don't think we want to do is become cheerleaders for the administrative state in the way that in the early Trump administration and throughout the Trump administration, you suddenly saw progressives embracing the FBI as this force for preserving and protecting democracy and our freedoms. Shikha, when you were saying at the beginning that you didn't think there ever was a deep state in the US, the one counter example I could think of is like J. Edgar Hoover's FBI was about as close to what you were describing as I think, as far as big institutions go.We don't want to just become Pollyannish about the administrative state because all of those classical liberal critiques still hold, right? What do we, what do we do about this current situation? How do we fight back against misuse of administrative state reform without giving up on the real need to reform this for liberal ends?Shikha: One of the things that the Trump era did was to make me re-evaluate my positions about the administrative state. I think I've mentioned to you guys, I grew up in the India of the License Raj and the Yes Minister BBC series. The License Raj was this hidebound bureaucracy which controlled the lives of citizens because it had these powers to extract rents in the form of bribes from them for everything that an ordinary citizen wanted to do. You want to build a house? You're not going to get clearance from the bureaucrats till you give them a hefty bribe. There was so much corruption in India due to the administrative state that the reform of the administrative state was something that appeals to me inherently. The one thing that the administrative state in the US has done well—and I take your example of J. Edgar Hoover, Aaron completely, not just that he was going after Martin Luther King, they were going after Martin Luther King, the FBI was, and infiltrating civil rights groups for the worst possible ends—but that said, by and large, the administrative state has done a pretty good job of keeping public corruption at bay in this country.American bureaucracy and American government, at least at the federal level, is really not all that corrupt. I can't overstate just how much stability and trust that builds in institutions when you have institutions that at least don't have this one big vice, which is corruption. In the Trump era, the administrative state performed quite well, I think. It provided advice to him and provided resistance to his worst possible designs. Things on immigration would have been a whole lot worse if there hadn't been bureaucrats within the Department of Homeland Security telling Trump, no, you can't throw people into concentration camps, essentially, right?“American bureaucracy and American government, at least at the federal level, is really not all that corrupt. I can't overstate just how much stability and trust that builds in institutions when you have institutions that at least don't have this one big vice, which is corruption. In the Trump era, the administrative state performed quite well, I think. It provided advice to him and provided resistance to his worst possible designs.” — Shikha DalmiaYou can't simply go around taking funds from the military and putting them towards the wall, although Trump tried to do it via an executive order. The one role that the administrative, and this is where I agree with Frank Fukuyama, is there is a need to defend a certain amount of independence of the administrative state so that it can provide a check on the nefarious designs of government officials who wield a whole lot of power and ensure that they are wielding this power in a responsible and a non-corrupt way. How do we give some autonomy to the administrative state to provide this check on public corruption, while at the same time, not becoming monstrous and a bane on the public itself is a difficult question.What you don't do, you don't do is flatten these points of internal resistance so that a populist demagogue can simply come in and do exactly what he pleases, regardless of whether it fits in with the broader constitutional design or not. I don't know, that doesn't answer your question, but I think, the issue is to get the incentives right within the administrative state rather than to simply throw out the baby with the bathwater.Akiva: Yes, I agree with that. I think one of the things that classical liberals often overlook is that they may not want much of a state, but those parts of a state that they do want to function, have to function well. Even if you wanted a really small state, a night watchman state even, you need the courts to be not corrupt. You need the bureaucracy to be non-corrupt, to be accountable to people. One form of accountability is avoiding awarding political office on the basis of patronage, on the basis of nepotism, on the basis of special connections, because of bribes, and so on.“Even if you wanted a really small state, a night watchman state even, you need the courts to be not corrupt. You need the bureaucracy to be non-corrupt, to be accountable to people. One form of accountability is avoiding awarding political office on the basis of patronage, on the basis of nepotism, on the basis of special connections, because of bribes, and so on.”— Akiva MalametYou want a culture of meritocracy to exist so that you have a set of people in these agencies who are loyal to the agency and to upholding the rule of law and to upholding norms of impartiality rather than worrying about whether they're friends with their boss or whether their boss is friends with the president and so on. You want to avoid these kinds of norms of corruption that are so common in so many parts of the world in which the deep state is really unaccountable and in which you really don't have the kinds of checks and balances between the legislature, the executive, and the administrative state that you do in the United States.Aaron: Thank you for listening to Zooming In at The UnPopulist. If you enjoy this show, please take a moment to review us and Apple Podcasts and also check out ReImagining Liberty, our sister podcast at The UnPopulist, where I explore the emancipatory and cosmopolitan case for radical social, political, and economic freedom. Zooming In is a project of The UnPopulist.© The UnPopulist 2023Follow The UnPopulist on X (UnPopulistMag), Facebook (The UnPopulist), Threads (UnPopulistMag), and Bluesky (unpopulist.bsky.social). This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.theunpopulist.net

Listen to Zooming In at The UnPopulist in your favorite podcast app: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Google Podcasts | RSSAaron: Welcome to Zooming In, a project of The UnPopulist. I'm Aaron Ross Powell. Repressive regimes don't like critics, and they aren't satisfied to let their repression stop at the border. When they set their sights on threatening, coercing, or even killing critics who have fled to other countries, it's called transnational repression. My guest today is Annie Boyajian, Vice President of Policy and Advocacy at Freedom House, which tracks instances of transnational repression and helps governments prevent it.A transcript of today's podcast appears below. It has been edited for flow and clarity.Aaron: What happened to [Saudi Arabian journalist] Jamal Khashoggi?Annie: Great question. We would say that the murder of Jamal Khashoggi is an emblematic case of transnational repression, which is when governments reach beyond their own borders to target critics in an effort to silence dissent. For Mr. Khashoggi, he was lured into a consulate in Istanbul where he was suffocated and dismembered in what is still one of the most shocking cases of transnational repression that we have heard. He was, of course, lured into the Saudi consulate as he was a citizen of Saudi Arabia and a well-known journalist and regime critic.Aaron: The response to this, I think, speaks to a lot of the issues that you raise in the article that you wrote for The UnPopulist because there seemed to be a lot of anger about this from U.S. citizens, shocked that someone who was a U.S. resident, that this would happen to them from journalists because he was a Washington Post journalist. Then nothing really happened. The perpetrators, the ultimate perpetrators, skated. There were no consequences. Why not?Annie: I would say it's the age-old answer to why things don't happen to other human rights abusers or corrupt actors, and it's because there are politics at play. On the one hand, I would say you did see something happen that was unusual, right? The FBI did an investigation and report that you had senators talk about publicly. That is certainly unusual. There were sanctions of varying levels of strength that were imposed on some of the individuals involved. To your point, the Crown Prince himself, the well-known architect of this, according to reports, nothing has happened to him and he's continued to be a player on the world stage.I think part of the reason that this issue shocked people and captured everyone's focus and attention is, one, it was incredibly egregious, but two, it really showed how human rights abuses in a country can have an impact, a global impact, in a way that other human rights issues don't necessarily show. It's just so evident because of the reaching into another country, because of the violation of sovereignty, how the security and human rights issues interact and interplay here. I think that's part of what was so shocking about it.Aaron: How often does this sort of thing happen?Annie: We have a database that looks at instances of physical transnational repression. That's things like assassinations, so the Jamal Khashoggi case, but also assaults, detentions, deportations. We have tracked, since 2014, 854 incidents of transnational repression committed by 38 governments in 91 different countries around the world. That is just a drop in the bucket. Our database does not include the indirect tactics, and that's things like spyware, and the use of spyware is so widespread right now, digital harassment, coercion by proxy.We do think that the database paints a clear picture of the threat posed by transnational oppression and what is happening. We do see additional governments engaging in transnational oppression as we track information in our database. In 2022, I think we saw two additional governments added.Aaron: You said 38 countries in the current date. How spread out is that? Is this something where there's a lot of it's happening across a lot of countries, or is it heavily concentrated among a small handful of regimes?Annie: Great question. I would say the majority of countries engaging in transnational repression are countries that are rated as not free in our Freedom in the World Report. Our top 10 offenders are responsible for 80% of all of the incidents we have in our database. That is China, Turkey, Egypt, Russia, Tajikistan—I'm probably not remembering them all in order—but it's also Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Belarus, Rwanda, Iran, that's the top 10. And 80% that's significant, but it's global. It's in Asia, it's in Latin America, it's in the Middle East, it's everywhere.This is partly because we are such a globalized world. We have tracked at Freedom House 17 consecutive years of decline in democracy around the world. That has been driven, in part, by worsening repression at home. Because we're so globalized, we see people flee, and it's easier sometimes for people to flee now than previously. It's also a lot easier for governments to engage in transnational repression. You can get spyware very cheaply. The digital age, where everyone needs to be online, and everyone is connected has made it very easy for governments to target dissidents and critics, even after they've fled abroad.“We have tracked at Freedom House 17 consecutive years of decline in democracy around the world. That has been driven, in part, by worsening repression at home. Because we're so globalized, we see people flee, and it's easier sometimes for people to flee now than previously. It's also a lot easier for governments to engage in transnational repression.”Aaron: Just staying for a moment on definitional questions, how narrowly tied to, I guess, the state does it need to be to count? What I'm thinking of is you can have an instance where the state leadership basically hires people or sends its own people off into another country to assassinate someone. It's like a very direct tie. Then you might have something like the Salman Rushdie situation, where it's more just we're going to foment a lot of anger at a given person and then hope violence against them falls out of it. Does that count as well?Annie: Great question. We do look at non-state actors who are tied to governments. For our definition, there would need to be some sort of clear linkage between the government and the actor. For example, when a government hires private investigators to surveil, technically, whether those investigators know it or not, they would be engaging in transnational repression. You also have instances where governments have been linked pretty clearly to organized crime or other individuals who are, thugs for hire who will go intimidate and beat people up. That would count.I think it gets a lot more tenuous if it's just anger fomented at someone like Salman Rushdie. That's less clear for the purposes of our database. There are indeed non-state actors who have been involved.Aaron: Can you talk a bit about the link between this and accusations of terrorism? I found that an interesting part of the argument of basically claiming critics are terrorists.Annie: Yes, absolutely. We see governments around the world copy laws or arguments made by democracy for their own purposes all the time. We definitely see this in the case of terrorism. The pervasive use of the term terrorist following the 9/11 attacks by the U.S. and other democracies made it easier. I'm not saying here we should not have called those individuals terrorists. I'm not speaking to that at all.There are a lot of governments now who the first thing they will do when you try to say, "Excuse me, you are targeting someone because they are a critic." They'll say, "No, I'm not. This person is a terrorist." They will toss all sorts of spurious charges at them. This in the case of Russia, of China, of Iran. The government of China is responsible for 30 percent of all the cases in our database. They'll say, "Oh, they're inciting violence or a national security threat. They're a terrorist."“The government of China is responsible for 30 percent of all the cases in our database. They'll say, "Oh, they're inciting violence or a national security threat. They're a terrorist."“It's one of the top things we see, one of the top excuses that governments use in going after critics. One of the things we talk about with policymakers is just being really aware and not taking some of these charges at face value, particularly when the government's making the allegations are ones we have documented as engaging in transnational repression.Aaron: Is the audience for this terrorist label? If I'm a repressive regime that wants to target a critic overseas and I am now publicly labeling that critic a terrorist. The people that I'm doing that labeling for, you've mentioned, to some extent, it's an excuse you can give to other countries. I was not just targeting a critic. This person was dangerous and I was therefore within my rights or justified. Is there also an element of talking to their own people in doing that? Even in authoritarian regimes, if you can convince the people that you're doing these things for their own good, that's an easier sell?Annie: Absolutely. Transnational repression is one of a wide array of tactics that governments use when they're trying to repress, and control, and manipulate their population. Particularly for individuals who only have access to state propaganda. Or only consume state propaganda for a variety of reasons, it's a very effective argument to make for their domestic audience. It's part of the reason why they do it. Definitely, in terms of the countries that do engage in propaganda, I think, the propaganda arm goes hand in hand with any charges of transnational or any allegations of terrorism.“Transnational repression is one of a wide array of tactics that governments use when they're trying to repress, and control, and manipulate their population.”Or any of the other charges they lob at individuals. We see this, in Hong Kong and mainland China all the time in the way that Chinese state-owned publications talk about human rights lawyers and activists and others.Aaron: Why do they care so much? If I'm in a repressive regime, everybody in my country is, reading and listening to and watching state-run media. I have a pretty strong hold on power. I know that murdering this random journalist or college professor or whatever they happen to be on foreign soil, it might not get me thrown out of power. The United States is not going to go in and like have regime change in Saudi Arabia because of this murder, but it's going to cause me trouble on the world stage. Why not just ignore these critics? If they fled the country, maybe they're not that much of a threat anyway.Annie: It's a great question. It's something that, so I've been in D.C. policy circles for 20 years, which, I don't know, does that mean I'm doing something right or doing something wrong? That's a whole other conversation for another day. If you were thinking logically as an authoritarian, and then this is where you start wildly speculating about just the dynamics of human psychology. If you're thinking logically, you just do only a little bit of repression, right? Not enough to catch international attention, not enough to outrage your population. Some of these really more dramatic acts, I think there are a variety of reasons.Certain regimes are very sensitive to their public image. Definitely, this is true in the case of the People's Republic of China. Sometimes I do really wonder if it is a function of some of these leaders just not having anyone brave enough to be a critical voice and tell, are you sure? You sure you want to do this? In some cases, it really has pushed public opinion too far. I think Saudi Arabia, they're obviously very engaged on the political stage, but it took a long time and this still comes up as an issue, as it should. There's still a lot more accountability that is needed there.Aaron: How do we get that accountability, especially given that often these repressive regimes, Saudi Arabia has a lot of oil and a lot of connections throughout, say, the US. China is an enormous market. It's a manufacturing powerhouse. There seem to be a lot of incentives to find excuses to look the other way on this behavior, especially among the people who are actually in a position to potentially do something about it. The Washington Post journalists can gripe all they want to, but they're not going to be able to depose the head of Saudi Arabia or impose sanctions.Annie: I think that is why education on this topic is so important, because it is a violation of sovereignty and it does directly impact the security of individuals in democracies. In the United States, we saw the Iranian regime try to kidnap a women's rights activist, and their plot was that they were going to kidnap her from her home in Brooklyn and stick her on a boat, take her to Venezuela, and then from Venezuela back to Iran. Then when that didn't work, they tried to assassinate her, I think twice now.A friend of mine is an activist from Hong Kong. He's at home in his apartment in LA, and heard a strange noise and looked outside, and there was a drone hovering outside his apartment trying to take pictures. Okay. He didn't run out and tackle the drone. How can we prove who's operating it? This is a real violation of U.S. law. It's a violation of the 91 countries where it has occurred. For us, how to get the accountability, you're right. It's not an easy answer. There will always be political realities at play, but education around this issue and then codification of a definition in law.Unfortunately, there's a mix of governments [that engage in transnational repression], so I don't want to paint the picture that only authoritarians are doing this, but it is certainly mostly countries that we rate as not free.What transnational oppression is, is the key first step because that definition, everything stems from that. Do you need additional criminal law? Do you need training for government officials? Do you need to adjust immigration law to allow quick, easy entry for people who may be targeted? We would certainly say yes. Do you need additional resources and support for people who have been targeted once they reach your shores? We would say yes, but all of that starts with a definition and then coordination among governments that want to address the issue, which we're starting to see.The G7 has talked about this issue and is continuing to work on it. There were some statements released alongside the Summit for Democracy and it's not only authoritarian regimes engaging in this. Unfortunately, there's a mix of governments, so I don't want to paint the picture that only authoritarians are doing this, but it is certainly mostly countries that we rate as not free. Democracies are really going to have to work together because we see the non-democracies working together, and so we don't want to be caught flat-footed on this one.Aaron: What would defining it clearly, narrowly within the scope of law accomplish if these are either lawless regimes or—I guess let me ask it this way. It seems like if I am one country and I assassinate someone within the territory of another country, I've committed murder. That's already illegal. I have potentially violated the sovereignty. That's defined in different ways. What do we gain from carving out a specific legal standard about this thing?Annie: There are actually two areas of law where I think you would want the definition. One would be Title 22, which is all the foreign affairs stuff, right, where you can have that broader, more expansive definition that really describes all the ways that transnational oppression manifests. Things we haven't talked about yet like coercion by proxy, where here I am in the US, I have family back home somewhere, they are getting threats and pressure and harassment from the government. Codifying it there will let you, as I mentioned, train government officials who might come in contact with it so that they're less susceptible to, for example, seeing an arrest warrant and picking someone up just based on the fact that it's an arrest warrant, whereas if they've gotten training and they know, aha, this is coming from a government that engages in transnational oppression, let's turn a more critical eye. Which in the US, I do think that there is already wide awareness and growing awareness at the federal level, a lot more to be done at state and local, so that's one whole basket. Then there's Title 18, which is criminal law, and I think there's plenty of robust discussion and good debate that could happen around should we, if we do criminalize, what should it look like?If you look at the cases that have been prosecuted already, Department of Justice is having to get really creative in what they are using. Murder is pretty straightforward, obviously, that is illegal, but in the case of some individuals who were surveilling and harassing folks here in the US, they had to use stalking charges or conspiracy to commit stalking. In the case of the Ryan Air flight that Belarus forced down so that they could apprehend a blogger, there were some Americans on that plane, and so the United States used a law that I, until that moment, did not know existed, which was conspiracy to commit air piracy.I think we have heard repeatedly, there's a real gap in law, and I think this is where you want to make sure you're protecting civil liberties, and where robust debate and discussion from lawyers is well warranted of, okay, if we are adding, what does it look like? There's also the advocacy value, telling the People's Republic of China, "These people are being convicted in the United States on conspiracy to commit stalking" does not have the same ring to it as saying they're being charged on engaging in transnational repression. There's real value in a democracy being able to say, "No, can't do that here. It's a crime here."“There's also the advocacy value, telling the People's Republic of China, ‘These people are being convicted in the United States on conspiracy to commit stalking,' does not have the same ring to it as saying they're being charged on engaging in transnational repression. There's real value in a democracy being able to say, ‘No, can't do that here. It's a crime here.'“We are, of course, not so naive as to think that fixing laws in different democracies will stop this from happening completely, but it's an important step. I think coordination of democracies over time will send a very clear message that this is not tolerable. You got to follow that up with other actions, which we could talk about all day long.Aaron: I was actually going to ask about those other actions.Because it seems like if I'm China and I hire some people to harass you because you've been criticizing China or I hire someone to take you out because I really want to escalate things, those people, it's not like I'm sending senior government officials or people of I guess consequence in the regime's eyes to go and do this stuff. It almost looks like the mob takes out a hit and so you throw the person who carried out the hit in jail but the mob boss doesn't really suffer any consequences. What meaningful kinds of consequences other than democracy saying, "No, we really mean it. You shouldn't do that."Annie: Yes, fair question. Listen, I actually think most folks would be really surprised about the level of officials who are directly engaging in this. I will say I was speaking to a journalist from a country in the Middle East, she's wanting to be under the radar for now so I won't name the country, not Saudi Arabia, different country, and is living in Germany. She was beaten up in Germany by a diplomat from the embassy in Germany. There is a level of hubris that goes into this and we have seen in some countries it really does seem like certain diplomats are traveling around with their portfolio almost being transnational oppression.I think this is a foreign policy issue. It is also a domestic policy issue and you really to be effective have to address it as both. On the foreign policy side of things, there are sanctions that should be imposed on individuals engaging in this but also on individuals directing transnational oppression. This should be an issue that is routinely raised publicly and privately with the government. It should be an issue at multilateral bodies as it is starting to be because you can't just get at this obviously with one simple law.We have talked a lot about the conditioning of foreign assistance which if we did it could be effective if we didn't allow loopholes. The GAO for your readers who want to dig in more actually released a very good report about a month ago that looks at some of the options within the US context. Say that they were talking about do you bring in arms control policy? Do you bring in other existing measures that have not been fully deployed? There is a lot more room on the targeted sanctions front quite frankly.Aaron: On the technology front because the technology is making this—It's either easier to find the people you want to find or easier to track them, or easier to harass them. Should we as liberal regimes be cracking down on the use of spyware and the sale of these tools? I ask about that again in this question of incentives because while the United States government might not be participating in targeted assassinations overseas, we do buy and use spyware. Other liberal regimes do as well. What do we do about that considering that the countries that might want to crack down are the same ones who are also good consumers of these products?Annie: It's a huge problem. I would say the short answer is yes, and. You already have companies like NSO Group which is the purveyor of the famous Pegasus [spyware software that allowed governments who bought it to hack the phones of dissidents, journalists and other critics] which actually Jamal Khashoggi had on his computer. Also, it's popped up with dozens of human rights defenders who we know. That's already on the entity list for exports. You can't buy that. There are plenty of purveyors of cheap spyware, and many of those companies are not in the United States. It used to be that just a handful of companies existed and now there is to your point a proliferation.If companies in democracies stop exporting, that can help in the sense that at least economically it can make it more expensive. Maybe somehow there you limit it. You also need to make sure and this goes to my earlier point about you want a definition so you can provide training. You need to make sure that people who may be targeted are receiving training in digital hygiene. How do you stay safe and secure online? When you see violations, you need to be able to prosecute it. In the US, we need a comprehensive privacy law. It's a very complex web and quite frankly, some of this is going to be very difficult to walk back.In that sense, a lot of the human rights defenders we work with, it is the informed risk on their end and people needing to do things these days like go out and have conversations in fields. Particularly with the government of China and the way that they're exporting some of these technologies to countries around the world. We just need to be very aware and have eyes open and raise these as issues if you're a policymaker. Back to my earlier point, when you see misuse, impose targeted sanctions and make sure that you are prohibiting export when you can.Aaron: You also mentioned immigration as a way to help this, to make it easier for people to get out of these repressive regimes and seek some degree of protection in other countries. How do we define regime critics for that purpose? If we're going to carve out special exceptions to immigration laws because I'm going to assume that we can't just radically liberalize immigration laws because that seems to be an uphill battle constantly. Probably made more complicated by the fact that the countries that Americans seem to be most skeptical about letting people in from are often the most repressive regimes. But if I come to you as an agent of the state and say, "I'm a regime critic, let me in." How do you know? What's the standard for regime criticism?Annie: Yes, great question. I am not an immigration lawyer, so we're going to rapidly be in territory that I have no business speaking in detail about. I would say, actually, there's legislation that was introduced by Senator Menendez that was a visa for human rights defenders. I think the way they got at that it was for human rights defenders at urgent risk. They were describing the risks faced and perhaps not the definition. There would certainly need to be vetting. You don't want someone to claim something inaccurately.We do think that we work with folks under threat all the time, and there are actually some European countries that have some interesting emergency visa options for folks. Obviously, in the EU context, it's easier. Some of the European countries have been welcoming folks not from the EU. We have talked with policymakers in the US about whether that can be educational and informative for what it can look like here in the US. Can we expand some of the existing categories?Aaron: This is very clearly a big problem, and one that will be challenging to address because of complexities, because of incentives, lots of reasons that we can't just wave a wand and fix it tomorrow. If there was one concrete step that we could take, we say, like the policy level, could take right now to make things better for people who are in real danger because they've been criticizing repressive regimes. What would be that one like, "Let's do this?"Annie: This is a great question. As a policy person, I'm going to be like, "No, don't make me pick one." In terms of like, what will save a life tomorrow, it would be, let's get an emergency visa. If you're talking about pick one thing that would be most effective, I would say, let's do the definition so that we can start mandating training and outreach. That is, to the great credit of the U.S. government, that is happening pretty extensively, at least as compared to other democratic countries. The FBI, for example, has a whole webpage dedicated to transnational oppression. You can call the FBI hotline and report it. They are trying to do outreach to potentially targeted communities.“In terms of like, what will save a life tomorrow, it would be, let's get an emergency visa. If you're talking about pick one thing that would be most effective, I would say, let's do the definition so that we can start mandating training and outreach. That is, to the great credit of the US government, that is happening pretty extensively, at least as compared to other democratic countries.”There are some good-faith efforts already happening there. I think it's going to take years of work. This, it's going to sound strange that I say, this is an issue that makes me feel hopeful in a way that 20 years of other work doesn't. That is for two reasons. Number one, as I mentioned earlier, this is an issue where it so clearly shows the link between human rights abuses abroad and security and rights in your own country. The interest in this and the work on this is so bipartisan. That is not a small thing in this environment, as you at The UnPopulist know well.The other thing about this that makes me so hopeful is the human rights defenders themselves. They have been through things we cannot fathom and they are still going. They have family members who have disappeared because of their work back in their home countries, or who are actively getting threats. They are actively getting threats and they are still going. To me, who am I to throw in the towel if they haven't? In that sense, it's going to take years, but here we are. We're ready to keep going.“The other thing about this that makes me so hopeful is the human rights defenders themselves. They have been through things we cannot fathom and they are still going. They have family members who have disappeared because of their work back in their home countries, or who are actively getting threats. They are actively getting threats and they are still going. To me, who am I to throw in the towel if they haven't? In that sense, it's going to take years, but here we are. We're ready to keep going.”Aaron: Thank you for listening to Zooming In at The UnPopulist. If you enjoy this show, please take a moment to review us and Apple Podcasts and also check out ReImagining Liberty, our sister podcast at The UnPopulist, where I explore the emancipatory and cosmopolitan case for radical social, political, and economic freedom. Zooming In is a project of The UnPopulist. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.theunpopulist.net

Listen to Zooming In at The UnPopulist in your favorite podcast app: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Google Podcasts | RSSAaron Ross Powell: Welcome to Zooming In from The UnPopulist. I'm Aaron Ross Powell. Joining me today is Berny Belvedere, the new senior editor at The UnPopulist. We're going to chat today about the state of politics and the defense of liberalism.A transcript of today's podcast appears below. It has been edited for flow and clarity.Aaron Ross Powell: Berny, let's maybe start with a bit about you.Berny Belvedere: Thanks, Aaron, for having me on. I'm really stoked to be here. So, I was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, which, just a funny thing about that: the literal translation of Buenos Aires is something like good air. But really, I think, the key idea that that name tries to get across is something like friendly skies. It's the capital of Argentina. I didn't get a chance to know it too well—we left when I was four and a half, five-ish. We had an opportunity to become citizens really quickly here in the United States, so my parents took that opportunity and we went from Buenos Aires to Kansas City, Kansas, on the Kansas side of things. We're one of the few on the Kansas side of the divide. Then, for my high school years, we moved to Miami, Florida. So those are the places where I've lived. It's an interesting mix of different types of arrangements and social configurations, but it's also colored my approach to the kinds of places that I feel like society can build well. I've taken my love for suburban America from Kansas City. Miami is an international metropolis, very big on sprawl in a way that I don't quite prefer as much. I like a more densely concentrated type of city. Buenos Aires is just sort of European in its flavor, but also combining South American aspects as well.Those are the places I've lived. Intellectually, I've pursued both theology and philosophy at a pretty high level. I didn't get a PhD, but I went for graduate degrees in philosophy and in theology. In the past, I guess if we were in medieval times, it would have just been one field of study, but with the specialization of knowledge, it forced me to get a degree in each. Even the theology that I did was very philosophical in nature. I guess that [philosophy] would be my overriding interest. That's a little bit about my background.Lots of other stuff we could also talk about, though not the focus of this show. I'm married, got three kids, love sports and music, but let's stick to the stuff that the people want to tune in and listen to us talk about.Aaron: Your academic background is theology and philosophy, but you're now working as senior editor for a political journal, and before that, you were working on another political outlet. What's the connection?Berny: I've always been drawn to political philosophy. Even when I studied theology, I looked into the different traditions and what they had to say about the different polities and how society should be arranged—that was always a really interesting avenue of thought for me. In terms of now working for a journalistic outfit as opposed to some think tank or something else, I decided toward the end of my graduate degree in philosophy that a career in academia wasn't for me. The reason is partly vain, I'll admit. It's also partly, I think, morally okay. The vain part is I wanted to be a part of a broader conversation. Unless you become a kind of academic rock star, your work isn't going to be read by many people, maybe your fellow faculty in the department where you work, but that's it.“We've got these structural features in place that complicate our ability to genuinely have good discussions and intellectually rich discussions. Same as it always was, but one hope, a techno-optimist hope early on, was that technology in the social media age would try to counteract that, but we're not seeing that at all.”I wanted to be part of a bigger conversation, so I pivoted to journalism where I've been privileged to be able to publish at some big venues and people interact with your work. They send you messages. Your thought becomes something that then someone else takes into consideration. Then that advances the conversation in a way where you're fortunate enough to be a part of an ongoing discourse about a topic.That always moved me, so I pivoted to that. I've been working in political journalism for a while. I founded my own venue, Arc Digital, in 2016, right before the election. Ever since then, I've been involved in online writing and editing.Aaron: Both of us then come from this background of academic ideas and enjoying those kinds of ideas, discussing them, communicating them and so on and both of us ended up leaning more into the popular audience's side of things than the strictly academic. When you look out at either the job as a political journalist or the state of political conversation, what role do you see for these kinds of ideas? Because we're in this weird time when it seems like on the one hand, ideological ideas are more dominant than it feels like they were 20 years ago.Particularly on the right, you're seeing the populist movement which has a much more ideological streak than the more bland Paul Ryan conservatism at least professed to have. On the left, you're seeing the rise of their own kinds of ideologies about the nature of power and privilege in society. These are the sorts of heavy ideas that we grapple with but on the other side of things, it feels like the interest in high-level conversation has declined. That politics has been taken over by id, that we have elevated politicians who don't just speak in soundbites but often speak in incoherent soundbites. How do we navigate that?Berny: I think that's a great question. From the beginning at Arc Digital, one of my goals was to take higher-level thinking, to take academic work—and I had reached out to members of faculties and different scholars—and distill some of this higher-level thinking into something that's more publicly digestible. Because that oftentimes represents really good argumentation that if you can just package in a way that is more palatable to the masses, it could influence thinking for the better.That's been, for a long time, a kind of holy grail for people with these sensitivities to stronger forms of arguments and intellectual discourse. This is the holy grail: Are you able to take some of the awesome stuff that's being published at the research level and show it to the masses in a way where they can be receptive to it and it can influence their thinking? I think that's a great approach that responsible publications ought to take. Some of their output should be scholarly stuff, again, made into digestible forms for the masses.I tried to do some of that at Arc. The UnPopulist does that really well where we work together with scholars and with editorial assistance and guidance we help the work come out in a publishable form where people can read it and get a lot from it. I think that's a burden of publications today that want to make a meaningful contribution to the discourse. We're up against it. You're right. We're up against a discourse culture now where the basest forms of political point-scoring have penetrated how you go about participating in it, and it has turned everything into an “own the libs” aesthetic or on the other side, on the flip side of that, whatever that might look like.Interspersed throughout all the attempts at high-level discussions and thinking, you get a whole lot of nonsense—so much of it, in fact, that it can feel like you're under a torrential downpour of it. You can't ever get to the good stuff because your feed [is dominated by this] and the people you follow [are drowned out by brasher voices]. You and I see this on the social media platforms that we're on. People are always complaining about the kind of deluge of crap that our feeds are now dominated by—and rightly so. It's partly a function of the way these spaces [are designed]—where tossing red meat to your followers is a way to increase engagement and increase your followership. Where not ceding a single inch to your opponents, even when you privately think that they've got something right, you know that if you do that, you're now subject to the blowback where people promptly unfollow you or they no longer see you as a reliable source for the position that they want championed.We've got these structural features in place that complicate our ability to genuinely have good discussions and intellectually rich discussions. Same as it always was, but one hope, a techno-optimist hope early on, was that technology in the social media age would try to counteract that, but we're not seeing that at all.Aaron: This sounds like a Marshall McLuhan, "the medium is the message" sort of argument. I'll just as an aside, I believe it was Ezra Klein who made this point on social media recently that the Marc Andreessen tech optimist manifesto, which didn't seem very optimistic but mostly just seemed very angry, was this interesting example of essentially the structure of Twitter colonizing the intellect and rhetoric of essay writing. That this essay was written in essentially a very long series of tweets, so not just short declarative statements, but also I think exactly the kind of thing that you're mentioning, which is rhetoric tuned to create engagement, anger, and that's spreading out.Some of it seems like this started with cable news though. I don't know that we can pin all the blame on social media, but this seems like a problem for us. The UnPopulist publishes long and thoughtful essays on a wide range of topics that demand careful engagement and focused attention. We're not writing super academic stuff, but this is not a series of tweets and it's not a series of rage-bait declarations. This is all happening in a digital space that seems to structurally further incentivize that. How do we get out of that from the political standpoint?Because we have to participate in it. The UnPopulist can't just be a print magazine that doesn't do anything digitally. We have to participate in this space. We have to communicate in ways that are to some extent native to the space if we want people to talk about it. This seems like a big problem for politics is that we have imposed structural limitations on the very discourse itself and then that's making things worse.Berny: Absolutely. It's a problem, again, that is not new. When cable news arose and operated under a different coverage model, it was incredibly attentive to viewership numbers in a way where past network news channels—when there were so few of them—didn't have to be. Because, after all, where else were people going to go for their news? But cable news had to very closely pay attention to what people would want to hear. I know there's a cartoonish quality to Aaron Sorkin's work at times. It can be extremely optimistic—but it's a kind of naive optimism. So his show, The Newsroom, illustrates that same struggle where you have a news anchor who is constitutionally bothered by the fact that the masses appear to want to tune into a bunch of garbage and a bunch of dumb argumentation and just theatrics and he wants to tell the news. The underlying thesis of that show, which is profoundly mistaken, is that if you just give people the right information, they will see the value of it and then they'll lead better lives, they'll form better thoughts. We can call it the naive information theory. That's been proven false because people time and again revert to wanting that sort of memefied, simplistic narrative that says, "My opponents are idiots and our side is so obviously correct," instead of an informative package that at times tells you, uncomfortably, "You're a bit wrong on this, the other side might be right, we're not totally victorious on this point." People just don't want that. There are neurological, psychological reasons for all of this, and reality is just structured that way. When you say we're up against it, we definitely are—and in a far deeper way than people realize.Algorithms are calibrated to exploit all of this—[because these algorithms secure] the results that the social media platform engineers and big shots want. They keep people engaged. In a sense, [our approach to journalism, by contrast] has this counter-cultural vibe to it. Sure, there are people who do want argumentation and a platforming of opposing views at times. They want things that are infused with the intellectual virtues as you and I know them to be—but that's not the majority. That's not what people consistently want, even the good ones.I don't want to make it seem like we're in a heroic quest of “us against the world,” but we do have the difficulty of belonging to an environment where the structural conditions frustrate our goals all the time. We are forced to model a better way within an ecosystem that doesn't really have time or patience for it. What else can we do? Like you said, we can't opt out. We'd be leaving the people who could be influenced by it without good quality stuff. We'd be leaving them to the wolves, as it were.We have to be there even if our message at times is unpopular, or too nuanced [for the recommendation engine]. Of course, we don't get things perfectly right. But there's a difference between an outfit that is pandering to the worst impulses of a particular voting bloc and an outlet that will get things wrong in a way where they strove so hard to not get them wrong and to be fair. I think there's a lot of value in being that way and in doing that work even if you're going to ultimately suffer a lot of frustration.Aarion: Do you see a relationship between the existing media and discourse landscape and the structural incentives that exist within it and so on and populism and the contemporary rise of populist movements?Berny: I do. One of the big engines of populism is an uncritical acceptance to what “the folk” want in a naive sense without trying to tame them or corral them or even steer them toward a different way. That's reflected in the way that partisan news works today—say I'm The Blaze and I have a small impulse in my head to say, "Let's just tell the truth on this one." You know that you've got five or six other outlets on your level of scale—outlets such as The Daily Wire and others—who won't tell the truth on this topic and you're thinking, "The viewers will gravitate toward them if we don't pander in the way that they are doing there."It crowds out any inkling of journalistic and objective integrity. Those are the partisan incentives that are there. Populism effectively takes a look at the vast swaths of the people that you're trying to win over and it says, "Let me reflect in my messaging to you the same values and urgings and promptings that you have in your heart without in any way challenging them to be better or corralling them into a more humane version of that.” It doesn't care about doing that enhancing work. In fact, it often degrades people—taking them from where they were and helping them get worse rather than elevating them or ennobling them at all.I think it's two sides of the same coin, absolutely.Aaron: It seems we're stuck in this effectively rage feedback loop where as you say, it's become the role of what used to be the commanding heights of culture and the media and so on. Their role is now just reflecting back the anger, which then exacerbates the anger. We've all had an experience like that. That relative who becomes a diehard Fox News or Newsmax person and they just seem like the right anger keeps seeming to ratchet up because they get angry and then they watch everything through that lens of more anger. At the same time, are being told, "Your anger is justified, and here are more things you ought to be angry about," and it just snowballs.This seems to be, not just psychologically bad for everyone. It's not good for you to live in a constant state of anger and hatred towards each other, but a real problem for liberalism as well, because we can talk about liberalism as a set of institutions or the rule of law, or a way of living in relationship to each other. One thing that liberalism is, I think because you can think of it as patience and equanimity towards each other.“We are forced to model a better way within an ecosystem that doesn't really have time or patience for it. What else can we do? Like you said, we can't opt out. We'd be leaving the people who could be influenced by it without good quality stuff. We'd be leaving them to the wolves, as it were.”That if liberalism is diverse, people going about their own conceptions of the good life in close proximity to each other and in cooperation with each other, in order for that to work, you can't be just enraged at every difference that you see and every person who's doing something that you wouldn't do. Especially if you have people on your television telling you, "Those people are trying to destroy America, they're evil, they're corrupting, they're sapping Western civilization of its precious bodily fluids," and so on, we need this patience and equanimity to simply get along with each other.Simply getting along with each other is what liberalism is, but everything is tuned to pushing against that. Now we both are with The UnPopulist, which is critiquing the populist right but is doing so as part of a broader defense of liberalism. How do we talk about and defend liberal values in an environment where people are being encouraged to not embody them? Also in a lot of cases, in particular, on the right where these very liberal virtues of patience, toleration, equanimity, getting along, acceptance are portrayed as weak, as themselves corrupt.That what you need is this stridency and anger and strength and toxicity and so on as a defense against the effete and civilization sapping and weakness of liberalism.Berny: That's a tall order. First and foremost, we can produce the kind of work that models a better way. As we noted, that work is going to have a kind of ceiling to it, in the sense that because we're not out there posting in the manner that generates a lot of engagement or scores a cheap political point … our way has a natural ceiling to it that we can't overcome. We're not going to be able to overcome the limitations of this kind of work—just won't reach the masses in a way that a meme just dunking on your opponent will. Still, the primary font of our output is the work that we come out with. In addition to that, I think we need to have ongoing discussions about what shape the liberalism that we expect to be resilient in our day and age should look like. Think, for example, of the discussions we've had in the past five years or so about Karl Popper's paradox of tolerance and the various ways that people landed on that—where if you are fully tolerant of all perspectives, some of those will be intolerant ones. It forces you to be intolerant, as someone who is advocating for tolerance, in order to get rid of the views that would complicate the social project. Perhaps you didn't want to be that aggressive, but you have to be because if you aren't, it could lead to the unraveling of the very framework that you're trying to set up. During the medieval era, heading into the modern era, you had various forms of governments that were trying to break free from the shackles of religion, and its dominance on the social arrangement … they saw some people being a little bit too committed to their religious ideals. They understood that that could potentially be a challenge when you have two allegiances, one to the social contract and everything that that requires, and one to God and what you perceive God to be telling you to do. When push comes to shove, which one are you going to prioritize? That led to a lot of people who wanted a thriving, vibrant social framework to be in place, looking on at these really committed and devoted religious types and saying, "We have to deal with you a little harsher than we would want, just simply because your presence within this sphere represents an existential challenge to our increasingly liberal project.”What does that look like today? We have dominant voices on the extremes, on both sides, but increasingly suffused throughout the entirety of the right, that are pushing for straightforwardly illiberal forms of society and forms of life. Should we move from a classical liberal, harm principle as our only guideline, where the negative liberty of—if you don't harm someone else, you can do whatever you want—mild procedural liberalism to a more muscular form of liberalism where you have to take more aggressive steps to counteract the tide of illiberal sentiment and proposals from people?I do think there is a conversation that we should have about that, where our liberalism takes on a more aggressive posture. Not because we would ideally want to veer into a authoritarian approach to establishing liberalism, but because the very possibility of liberalism in this more heightened atmosphere requires it. What does that look like? Maybe putting pressure on our [private] social platforms to not be as free speech absolutist, but to take a stronger stance toward obvious and flagrant misinformation. In an era where the challenges to liberalism might not have been so severe, we could take the free speech value and say, "This is the value to defend, and so let's have zero restrictions."In a time where all of that stuff is used toward the erosion of liberalism so that we could get something completely new and authoritarian and tyrannical, there are steps we can take, I think, to counteract that. Aaron: All of that raises a lot of, I think, really interesting and extraordinarily thorny issues, complicated issues. One of the things that came to mind as you were saying that is I am just constitutionally, in many senses of that term, very worried about state intervention into basically everything. One of the really interesting things that we've seen is, say, for misinformation, the platforms have frequently, voluntarily, of their own accord, without outside regulatory pressure, taken steps to limit the spread of misinformation or to community label things that are misinformation as such, and other ways to just slow down its proliferation on their platforms.They're doing it, partly because the leadership are people who don't want to see misinformation and can recognize the harms they can cause, and then partly because it turns out that platforms' customers like places that aren't just filled with conspiracy theories. Some customers do like that stuff, but it seems to be a minority. Your platform gets better traction if it's not full of trolls and misinformation. What's been interesting is how those sorts of voluntary and speech behaviors, it simply is an exercise of free speech to label a tweet as, this is not true about vaccines or whatever, gets framed often by people not just on the right but centrist as well as abridgments of speech.I'm thinking of there's recently something on the West—I think it was the Westminster Declaration that a bunch of people signed about free speech and the need for free speech. A lot of it was, it is censorship, it's a violation of speech norms for platforms to be labeling, for platforms to be undertaking this kind of stuff. There's this pushback not just on the prospects of state intervention but the prospects of just voluntary calling out, criticizing, and so on. It does raise these particularly complex issues within liberalism of what counts as the kind of stuff that crosses the line.“We need to craft this norm and hammer it home: everyone should be able to say what they want. But it's also important to hold that not everything they say is equally plausible. Those are two important things to hold in our heads at the same time. So when it comes to free speech, let's defend it to the hilt. But when it comes to building our institutions and platforms and wanting those to be a positive force in society, there is nothing wrong with the algorithm prioritizing views that meet certain criteria—views that are factual, that have a sensitivity to details and historical accuracy.”If what you're saying is there's a line where a certain set kind of views or a certain quantity of a certain kind of views becomes sufficiently dangerous to liberal foundations, that we need to do something about that. We can't just let it go because the risks are too high. We have to decide where to draw the line. In a large sense, that seems to be the crux of a lot of the most vitriolic arguments right now is which views, expressions, beliefs are so dangerous to our ordered society that we have to crack down on them.The right right now is basically thinks that LGBT identities cross that line, that the expression of or the promotion of these things, the mention of them in schools, whatever, will destroy our society and so ought to be prohibited. Critical race theory crosses the line for them, whatever it is they mean by critical race theory because that's a little ambiguous. On the left, you get certain traditional religious beliefs cross that line, non-acceptance of gay identities. Not the we need to stamp them out and exclude them from the public sphere but just like I don't personally want to be involved with it or I have expressed I don't think it's correct and so on.Certain views about race or gender or class cross that line and it's not clear how we solve that without, in a sense, reverting to a illiberalism, without saying like, "Okay, you, Berny, it's going to be what you decide. You determine where the line is and that's it." That wouldn't be liberalism as we understand it or we put me in charge or we put some small star chamber in charge. It feels like that's where the conversation is going forward is figuring that out, is recognizing that liberalism needs defending and can fall into illiberalism or authoritarianism or fascism but at the same time, we all pursue motivated reasoning in deciding what are those things that we can no longer tolerate as well.We're not all unbiased Adam Smithian, outside observers. We're embedded in this discourse and dialogue and political environment and social environment and religious environment and so on ourselves. Is the answer to that just then to go back to those liberal virtues? To say, "We can't get the answer right. We can't have perfect knowledge. We all have these incentives and biases," but lean into the very intellectual virtues that we were talking about earlier of humility, inquisitiveness, charity and understanding and so on.Berny: So I'm a philosophy instructor and one of the thing is teach my students when we're going over logic and critical thinking is informal fallacies where we go over them—their categories, their names, and I give a couple of examples of each.And when we get to equivocation, there's this interesting one that shows the kind of subtlety of how this might work.It's a short argument. See if you can spot the equivocation and let's talk about why it's an equivocation.And the argument is:(1) Everyone has a right to say what they want.(2) So everything that people say is right. And then I ask them what word is being equivocated over and of course they can detect that the word is “right.”In the premise, the word means something like a social allowance to be able to say what you want, the ability to say what you want without the state bearing down on you for saying something wrong. Everyone's got a right to say what they want.But then in the conclusion, without announcing itself, the word shifts to a different usage of “right,” it becomes something like: every view is equally plausible.When the premise goes, everyone's got a right to say what they want, and the conclusion says, so everything that people say is right, to the untrained ear, to the uncritical thinker, you'll end up swallowing an argument that tells you that in the end every argument should be equally acceptable and every view is equally plausible. When that's just manifestly false.So I think what we need to do as a society and to craft this norm and hammer it home: everyone should be able to say what they want. But it's also important to hold that not everything they say is equally plausible. Those are two important things to hold in our heads at the same time.So when it comes to free speech, let's defend it to the hilt.But when it comes to building our institutions and platforms and wanting those to be a positive force in society, there is nothing wrong with the algorithm prioritizing views that meet certain criteria—views that are factual, that have a sensitivity to details and historical accuracy. There's nothing censorious about taking a post that has these elements in it and then the algorithm pushing that one forward, getting it across more people's eyes, and overlooking a different kind of post and not promoting that one algorithmically that instead is just a whole bunch of nonsense. There's nothing censorious about that—if it's announced ahead of time, if it's part of the TOS of a platform.So that's, I think, one way to carry out a more muscular form of liberalism, where you're not at all compromising on free speech because you're allowing the bad speech to exist, but neither are you naively promoting it as if it should share a kind of equal, ‘hey, everyone, take a look at this, this is really helpful' kind of announcement or label to it.Aaron: Thank you for listening to Zooming In at The UnPopulist. If you enjoy this show please take a moment to review us in Apple podcasts and also check out Reimagining Liberty, our sister podcast of The Unpopulist. Where I explore the emancipatory and cosmopolitan case for radical social, political, and economic freedom. Zooming In is a project of The UnPopulist. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.theunpopulist.net

Listen to Zooming In at The UnPopulist in your favorite podcast app: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Google Podcasts | RSSAaron Ross Powell: Welcome to Zooming In, a project of The UnPopulist. I'm Aaron Ross Powell. My guest today is George Mason University law professor and B. Kenneth Simon Chair in Constitutional Studies at the Cato Institute, Ilya Somin. Ilya recently wrote an article for The UnPopulist about the state of the Supreme Court—whether it's become more politicized than it used to be, and why many of the proposals to fix it could be counterproductive, even dangerously so.A transcript of today's podcast appears below. It has been edited for flow and clarity.Aaron Ross Powell: Is the Supreme Court more politicized than it used to be?Ilya Somin: I think it depends on your definition of politicization. I think it is more politicized in the sense that there's more polarization between Republican-appointed justices and Democratic-appointed ones than there was say 30, 40, 50 years ago. On the other hand, I don't think it's more politicized in the sense that justices' political views play a bigger role in their decisions than they did in the past. I think there's little evidence to support that. While the justices are not now, nor have they ever been completely free of political bias, I think they are much less biased than other governmental institutions are. That enables them to play a more neutral role than we would have otherwise if we weaken judicial power.“I think it is more politicized in the sense that there's more polarization between Republican-appointed justices and Democratic-appointed ones than there was say 30, 40, 50 years ago. On the other hand, I don't think it's more politicized in the sense that justices' political views play a bigger role in their decisions than they did in the past.”Aaron Ross Powell: One of the things that frustrates me about the way that a lot of people talk about the Supreme Court and its decisions is there's this sense, I think from both sides, but you see it a lot from the left that justices make a decision on what they think the right answer or the best answer or the answer they'd prefer for a given case is based on their partisan political priors. Like, I'm a conservative, therefore I want to restrict immigration. Then when there's a case in front of them about immigration, they just reason backwards from that.It's like a disingenuous legal argument effectively when in fact, as we both know, these justices usually come in with a coherent and developed jurisprudential perspective and philosophy. They're originalists or textualists or living Constitution people, and they're often fairly upfront about what has political—it is more likely if you are a progressive that you're going to find living constitutional perspectives more persuasive than strict constructionist perspectives, but they're reasoning from that articulated theory.When you talk about them becoming more politicized in the first way—the politics of the justices are diverging, are we seeing a growing divergence in the underlying judicial philosophies? The living constitutionalists are becoming more extreme in their living constitutionalism—more hardcore—and the textualists are becoming more textualist in theirs?Ilya Somin: I don't think that's necessarily what's happening. I think it's simply that what we have is a greater divergence within the Supreme Court on both political ideology and also some issues of legal methodology as well. That translates into a bigger gap between the predicted votes of a Republican appointee versus a Democratic appointee than would have existed 40 or 50 years ago. Such a divergence is not completely unprecedented in American history, but it is different from what you saw in the immediate post-World War II era where, say, from the late 1940s until perhaps the 1970s or the '80s, differences between Democratic and Republican appointees were much more modest.It's not because the justices of that era were somehow less biased or more removed from politics. It's that within the legal elite of that era, with the possible exception of southern segregationists, there was much less disagreement over big major issues, either of interpretation or of political ideology than there is now, and also I think over time, as there's been more polarization between the political parties, there's also been more in the way of divergent litmus tests on—while both Democratic and Republican presidents, they want to appoint people who have strong professional credentials, they also have a series of litmus tests on how they want the people to vote on different issues.When they vet potential nominees, particularly for the Supreme Court, they will do what they can to make sure that they get somebody who's likely to vote the way they want on these issues. Not because that person is deliberately being political but in most cases because due to their jurisprudential and other views, they will tend to come out in that direction even if their motive is not to please the president that appointed them or the political party.Aaron Ross Powell: Can you talk about this in the context of the nomination and confirmation process? Your essay at The UnPopulist begins by looking at the changes there. Can you tell us how things used to look, how they look now?Ilya Somin: Sure. Nominations and confirmations have looked different ways, different periods of American history. If you look at that period, say from the 1940s to at least the late 1960s, and even later, most nominations with rare exceptions weren't particularly controversial. Many senators from the opposing party, usually a clear majority, would still vote for the most nominees. Often the questioning of nominees was pretty perfunctory. I mentioned the example of Byron White who was only questioned for about 40 or 50 minutes, and a lot of that time was spent on questions about his football career because he had been a professional football player before he was a judge.Obviously, if you look at recent years first, almost every recent nominee in the last 15 years or so, a majority of opposing party senators have voted against the nominee. The last nominee who got a majority of opposing party senators, I think, was Chief Justice Sean Roberts when he was nominated in 2005. Even with him, there was something, I think 22 Democratic senators devoted against him. Secondly, recent confirmation hearings have featured a lot of questioning and debate about controversial legal and political issues.Obviously, this next factor is less new, but some of them have featured issues of personal scandal like accusations against Kavanaugh, though there have been cases like that in previous history as well. Those kinds of things are more charged even than they would have been 50 or 60 years ago because the fear of Republicans with Kavanaugh was not just a Kavanaugh might be defeated, but the Democrats would somehow create a situation where they could string things out until the election and then maybe the Democrats would control the Senate in its aftermath, then therefore block Republican nominees.Just as in fairness, the Republicans in 2016 were able to block the Democratic nominee, Merrick Garland, for several months until the election happened. Then they were able to get their own nominee through instead. There has been an escalation of political conflict over nominations and also of senators voting against opposing party nominations, at least in most cases.Aaron Ross Powell: I want to get to the Merrick Garland move because that's obviously quite significant in the narratives about politicization. Before that, I want to ask if it's the case that politicians are now picking judges who are more removed from what used to be a consensus center than they used to be. They look more distinct from the guys that the other party might be picking if they were in charge.That's basically a demand-side change. Does that mean that we are getting less qualified nominees than we did before? Before, the selection criteria was, "I wanted to find the best possible justice" and now it is, "I want to find the best possible justice who aligns with my more extreme politics", that's going to narrow the pool of possible nominees.Ilya Somin: It's an interesting question. A lot depends obviously on what you consider a good qualification for a Supreme Court Justice and there's not a consensus on that. If you believe that what should be a good qualification is technical expertise on legal issues with an extensive background in those kinds of things, I think the nominees in the last 20 or 30 years are actually on average somewhat better than those from earlier eras because in addition to the greater polarization and vetting, there is also emerged the norm, which some people criticize of appointing people with extensive experience in legal theory and also in appellate court judging usually at the circuit court of appeals levels.“If you believe that what should be a good qualification is technical expertise on legal issues with an extensive background in those kinds of things, I think the nominees in the last 20 or 30 years are actually on average somewhat better than those from earlier eras.”We have almost completely eliminated the previous tradition of at least sometimes appointing professional politicians to the Supreme Court. Some the most important Supreme Court justice of the past, there is Earl Warren, Hugo Black, we can name other examples, had been professional politicians, not people whose main background was as judges or legal theorists. That's almost completely gone. It's hard to even remember the last time a career politician got nominated to the Supreme Court. Maybe the last Supreme Court justice who had experience in elected office, if I remember correctly, was Sandra Day O'Connor, who had briefly been a state legislator, but even that wasn't her main thing that she had done.If you look at the purely technical professional qualifications of Supreme Court justices, they actually look more impressive for the most part in recent decades than before. Though as I mentioned earlier, there is disagreement about whether appellate court judging experience is the thing we should most look for. Some people argue that there are other kinds of experience that are undervalued. I, myself, think it might be good to appoint people with experience as state Supreme Court judges and not rely as exclusively as we seem to on people with experience as federal judges.Aaron Ross Powell: Or a hobby horse that's of a lot of people in our circles is appointing more people with defense experience to the court versus former prosecutors.Ilya Somin: Yes. My Cato Institute colleague, Clark Neely, makes a big point. I think there's some merit to it. On the other hand, it's important to remember that people who have experience as government lawyers and prosecutors nonetheless sometimes have widely divergent views even on criminal justice issues, probably the most pro-prosecution justice right now, Sam Alito and one of the two most pro-defense justices, Sonia Sotomayor had experience as prosecutors, but obviously they clearly derive very different lessons from that experience or they just took in different viewpoints even before they took those jobs.I think it is true that it would be good to have some diversification beyond people who have experience as executive branch lawyers or federal appellate judges, which is the main pipeline that we see over the last several decades, but at least in terms of conventional metrics of qualifications, these people look very impressive. You might object to him on jurisprudential grounds or in Kavanaugh's case, the accusation of sexual assault or whatnot, but it's hard to say that these people lack technical legal qualifications. They have them actually on average more than justices from past eras of American history.I would note also, of course, that women and non-whites are in the pipeline for these nominations much more in the last several decades than any time before. We now have multiple justices who are not white at the same time, three of the nine, and we also of course have more women on the Supreme Court, than ever before.Aaron Ross Powell: Was the Supreme Court historically accused of being politicized? I guess what I mean by that is one of the pieces of evidence that people give, or one of the things, the main drivers of the narrative that the Supreme Court right now is more politicized than it used to be, is that it is making controversial decisions on issues that the electorate views is like very important in their own personal lives; Abortion decisions, religious practice decisions, and so on. We had the court in the '50s and '60s, the civil rights courts were making all kinds of decisions that were wildly controversial. Were they accused of being politicized in the same way that we see the current court today?Ilya Somin: Yes, absolutely. If you look in the 1950s and '60s, critics of the Supreme Court at that time, southern segregationists, but also tough on crime advocates, they certainly accused the Supreme Court of pursuing left wing ideology of various kinds at the expense of jurisprudential values. When Roe vs Wade was issued in 1973, that accusation was also made. You can also find past eras in American history where such accusations were made. Basically, any time when there's significant conflict or controversy over Supreme Court decisions, it is likely that at least some critics will accuse the court of being political in the sense of pushing their political values rather than jurisprudential values.“Any time when there's significant conflict or controversy over Supreme Court decisions, it is likely that at least some critics will accuse the court of being political in the sense of pushing their political values rather than jurisprudential values.”If there's a difference now compared to '50s and '60s is that those disagreements fall along more clearly partisan lines because in the '50s and '60s, the southern segregationist critics, many of them were also Democrats, even as more liberal northern Democrats had a different view, and at least for a time, the tough on crime issue also cut across party lines. Though eventually beginning in the late '60s and '70s, the Republicans became more the tough on crime party.Ironically, Richard Nixon ran for president in 1968 on the slogan that he was going to restore law and order and appoint judges to the courts who would be less sympathetic to criminal defendants. Ironic because of course, later he himself got into serious legal trouble as did members of his administration and some of those same judges ruled against him when he tried to hide the Watergate tapes.Aaron Ross Powell: Let's get back to Merrick Garland then.Ilya Somin: Sure.Aaron Ross Powell: That seems to be the catalyst or precipitating event of the current wave of accusations about the Supreme Court being politicized in an unfair, corrupt way. That's an instance where the accusations of politicization, which is a word I'm sure I'm going to stumble over a few times as I try to say it in this conversation, is not so much that the person who eventually got that spot was a partisan hack, but rather that the GOP effectively cheated in order to get a guy who represented more their views than a guy who didn't into office— not into office, onto the bench. That then delegitimizes. The politicization delegitimizes a lot of these decisions because it was a cheat.Is there any validity to that argument that maybe the justices themselves aren't hacks, but it's become increasingly common and particularly common with the GOP, starting with Garland to abuse the process in order to influence the court in their direction and therefore de-legitimize the resulting decisions?Ilya Somin: You can say they cheated in the sense that it was an escalation in the conflict over judicial nominations. On the other hand, it was not cheating in the sense that they violated the law or the constitution. The Senate has the power to refuse to hold confirmation hearings on nominees just it has the power to vote them down. I would also add that, what the Republicans did in 2016 did have important precursors and things that the Democrats did. I would point to two things in that regard.One is, in the early 2000s, the Democrats in the Senate pulled off a very similar move with respect to several George W. Bush nominees to the DC Circuit, which is usually seen as the second most powerful federal court in the land. They essentially sat on the nominations for years on end until the nominees withdrew, and each of those nominees, some of them were people who are seen as highly-qualified  potential future Supreme Court appointees.Granted, the DC Circuit is still not as important and powerful a court as the Supreme Court. Doing this at the Supreme Court level, you can say is a further escalation, but it's a difference in degree more than kind. In addition, when we had the 1992 and 2008 elections, when there was a Republican president in office whom it looked like, and indeed it did happen, that he was about to replace with it by a Democrat. A number of Senate Democrats including Chuck Schumer and then-Senator Joe Biden had made noises along the lines of that they would try to block a nomination to an open Supreme Court seat until after the election happened. Now, I certainly agree there's a difference between saying you might do this, and then they never actually did do it because no seats came open and actually doing it, but what you see with a gradual process of escalation is when one side escalates in one way, the other side tends to top it in other ways.I do think the underlying dynamic here is not that GOP senators were uniquely abusive of the rules, or for that matter, the Democratic senators were, but that both sides have temptation to use the procedural weapons more in an era when the stakes of nominations are seen as higher, given that there's a bigger gap between the rulings of a likely Republican nominee versus those of a Democratic nominee.“The underlying dynamic here is not that GOP senators were uniquely abusive of the rules, or for that matter, the Democratic senators were, but that both sides have temptation to use the procedural weapons more in an era when the stakes of nominations are seen as higher, given that there's a bigger gap between the rulings of a likely Republican nominee versus those of a Democratic nominee.”In the days of Byron White, as I mentioned earlier, Republicans, most of them, didn't feel like Byron White's rulings were going to be massively different from a person that might have been nominated by a Republican president, and therefore they felt little need to complain about White or to try to block him unless it was revealed there was some kind of scandal or something like that.Aaron Ross Powell: From your perspective as someone who obviously has a lot of legal expertise, but also pays a lot of attention to the conversations happening in the broader public and the media and the chattering classes and so on, about the Supreme Court and politicization of it and so on, what are some of the things that people—one thing we can say is there's less politicization than we might think there is, but are there examples of things that people tend to view as politicization or as evidence of a politicized court that in fact just aren't, like they're mistaken about how the court works or operates, and so reading it the wrong way.Ilya Somin: I think in recent years, and you could point to conservatives making similar mistakes in past there, but in recent years, I think one big mistake that left-wing critics of the court tend to make is that they either ignore or downplay the court's fairly significant rulings in favor of various liberal causes. We may not have time to go through them all, but I'll just mention a few. Just within the last term, the court issued a six-three decision ruling against the so-called independent state legislature doctrine, which would prevent Republican, but of course, also Democratic state legislatures from monkeying around electoral votes after the fact.“One big mistake that left-wing critics of the court tend to make is that they either ignore or downplay the court's fairly significant rulings in favor of various liberal causes.”The Supreme Court has several times, including this term, turned back major Republican challenges to Biden administration immigration policies this last term in an eight to one decision, US v. Texas, and some of those were very important immigration policies. In the recent Voting Rights Act decision, Allen v. Milligan, a five to four court with the support of two conservative justices gave the Democrats a big win in a voting rights case. The result of which is likely to be the Democrats getting several additional Congressional seats in the House of Representatives over the next couple of election cycles.Of course, they turned back Donald Trump's challenges to the 2020 election. There's a number of other examples like this that I could mention. I won't go through all of them. Sometimes, the reaction is, "Well, all of these cases were easy jurisprudential issues and obviously the liberal side was right.” In one or two cases, I think that was indeed true like in the Trump election challenges, but it's still significant that Wendy Wright has a really bad legal argument. The court rules against them because when you look at how politicians behave, they're happy supporting their own side no matter how bad the argument is most of the time.Second, I think in many of these cases, the right did have at least a reasonably plausible argument. They certainly did in the Voting Rights Act case even on independent state legislature. The court got it right, but the argument that the word legislature just means the legislature narrowly defined and that therefore all the power over electoral votes and other things rest in the hands just of the people in the legislative branch of state government, that's a plausible legal argument. It's wrong in various ways we could talk about, but it's not ridiculous and stupid. Ruling against it was not just something that any minimally competent jurist would always do.You can make similar points like this about other things including for instance that the Supreme Court has already signaled that it's likely to rule against the Texas and Florida social media laws, which require social media firms to host speech of various kinds they disapprove of, and which the left is not like because it prevents the social media firms from blocking what they see as disinformation and there are other examples like this. I think ignoring all of that or downplaying it as just this are just obvious cases, I think that's a mistake. I think also when you view cases like the affirmative action case and the abortion case and the like, in every era, there are some cases where there's just deep disagreement over them.It's reasonable to expect that when you have high profile issues where there's disagreement that different justices are going to rule different ways. I think when you look at both of these areas, it is simply not the case that Roe vs. Wade was so rock solid that you couldn't reasonably reject it. On the affirmative action side, I think when you look at the types of racial preferences that were being engaged in, it is simply implausible to say those were obviously constitutional.“It's reasonable to expect that when you have high profile issues where there's disagreement that different justices are going to rule different ways. I think when you look at both of these areas, it is simply not the case that Roe V. Wade was so rock solid that you couldn't reasonably reject it. On the affirmative action side, I think when you look at the types of racial preferences that were being engaged in, it is simply implausible to say those were obviously constitutional.”Even if you believe, which I do to some extent  grant, that the constitution doesn't call for 100% colorblindness in all instances, still the rationales that were being used and the policies being adopted were sufficiently problematic and flabby that if you were going to uphold them, you would have to have either a very severe double standard between different kinds of racial preferences or you would have to have a lot of deference to government agents when they discriminate on the basis of race of a kind that many on the left would not like in almost any other context like they certainly wouldn't say that should be acceptable in areas like racial profiling and law enforcement.Aaron Ross Powell: Is there also an aspect of misreading things when it comes to the court's decisions in what cases to take in the first place? Because one thing you'll hear is when a potentially controversial, like a case that could deal with existing rights or seems to be very, very relevant to people's individual lives, gets taken up by the court, there's a sense in which they took it up in order to overrule that or change things like they're basically shopping for cases in order to advance their conservative now, in the past, maybe liberal agenda.In a lot of cases, it seems like the court faces its own set of rules for when it needs to take up a case and that sometimes feels like it gets lost in the conversation. They couldn't reasonably have turned down this case.Ilya Somin: In most cases, the critics do have a reasonable point in that unlike virtually any other federal court, the Supreme Court has enormous discretion over what cases it takes. It is true if the Supreme Court rules, there are certain guidelines they have for what cases they take, but they're not actually required to follow those guidelines with rare exceptions that we can talk about having to do with the so-called original jurisdiction of the Supreme Court, where the Supreme Court is the court that hears the case in the first instance, and even that the Supreme Court has made discretionary.With the exception of that, the court has near total discretion over which cases they take. It's essentially any cases that four out of nine justices want to hear if there's a petition for certioari that's being filed, a petition to get the court to hear it. It is true that there are some cases that they take, not because they partake interest in the issue, but just because they feel this is an important disagreement in the lower courts and it has to be resolved. I think some cases in commercial or business law that they take are like that.I also think that there is a significant component of cases that they take because the Supreme Court justices themselves think the issue is important or because they see an opportunity to move the doctrine in a direction that they like. If you want to change that, the solution would be to give the Supreme Court less discretion over its jurisdiction, and there are ways Congress could potentially do that. For the last 100 years, ever since they passed a so-called “judges act” in the 1920s, which gave the court even greater control over its docket than it had before that, Congress has been unwilling to intervene in that area.That said, with these issues that people complain about, it's not easy to claim that these issues are so insignificant that the Supreme Court shouldn't have heard them. Abortion surely is an important issue and it's reasonable for the court to hear cases on that even if people don't like the results. I think the court may have over time overestimated the significance of the issue of affirmative action in higher education, which only affects selective universities, which are a minority of all universities in the country, and certainly a minority of where college students go.This may arise from the fact that the Supreme Court justices, most of them also graduated from various elite selective institutions. They travel in circles as you and I also do, where these things are considered to be very important. You could have a reasonable beef saying maybe they should have looked at more other kinds of cases. That said, the more general issue of race discrimination is certainly an important one in American society.It's not easy to argue that the Supreme Court should have just left racial discrimination issues alone, though I personally think it may be the court over the last several decades should have spent less time on affirmative action, higher education, and more on maybe some other racial or ethnic discrimination issues. I think here there's not so much an ideological bias, it's perhaps a class bias that relatively affluent, highly educated people are much more focused on what goes on in elite higher education institutions than the rest of the public may be.Aaron Ross Powell: The trendiest proposed solution to politicization is effectively court packing. There's no reason we have to only have nine justices, we can put more on there. If the court through reasonable means or through "cheating means" has become unbalanced in one direction, then the answer is the next time our guys are in control, we will simply confirm more justices to shift the balance back in the other direction. We'll add two or three or four more people to the bench. How reasonable is that?Ilya Somin: In fairness, most of the people who advocate court packing, the real problem in their mind is not so much that this will solve politicization but that this will solve, in their view, the fact that the court is making decisions in what they think is the wrong direction. If they change the balance of power and the court will make them in the right direction, it certainly will not end politicization in the sense of justices being appointed by ideology or justices voting in a polarized way because as Joe Biden, among others, has pointed out at various times, if one side packs the court, in this case in the near future more likely to Democrats, then of course the other side will do the same thing next time. They simultaneously control the presidency in both houses of Congress, and the end result will not only be further politicization but in the medium to long run, it would be the destruction of judicial review because a practical matter, the Supreme Court would then be unable to effectively make rulings that go against anything that the president and the majority party in Congress wants because, if they do do it, there'll be another round of court packing. The court either would be deterred from making such rulings or those rulings would swift we be overturned the next time there's an opportunity for court packing. If you look around the world, court packing is a standard tool of authoritarian regimes undermining democracy.You'll have cases like Turkey, Hungary, Venezuela and others where it has happened. Those who advocate it—I can understand if you just generally don't like judicial review and there are some legal scholars who have that view, then absolutely court packing then makes sense if you just want to destroy the institution of judicial review. If you're unhappy this is simply that you just don't like particular decisions that the court has made in recent years, then you should ask yourself is getting rid of those decisions really worth it if the price is destroying judicial review across the board, especially if you're talking about decisions that limit the political branches?“If you look around the world, court packing is a standard tool of authoritarian regimes undermining democracy. You'll have cases like Turkey, Hungary, Venezuela and others where it has happened.”If your goal is that you want to restore Roe v. Wade, for example, court packing is not going to do that. It might do it briefly but in the long run, it would simply destroy the ability of the judiciary to function as an effective check on the other branches of government whether it comes to abortion or anything else.I would finally add that there is a range of issues where because of polarization on things like abortion, guns, affirmative action, and some other stuff, there's a range of issues where judges do systematically check the other branches of government that is lost sight of. I mentioned before them ruling against Trump's dubious election challenges, than turning back attacks on freedom of speech including some from the right. There are other examples.If you lose that, the end result would be political branches, particularly the executive branch that is more out of control than before. Even if you, for instance, trust Joe Biden with that power, you should ask do you trust Donald Trump? Should he come back to office or whoever the next Republican president might be? Having an independent judiciary with a real power of judicial review does serve as a check on that even if the check isn't perfect. Even if obviously we wouldn't want to put all our eggs in that basket, we want to have other constraints as wellAaron Ross Powell: Then what are more reasonable, workable, advisable, solutions because we're not saying that the court hasn't become more politicized, you're saying it's not as bad as people make it out to be, but it still seems if we can have a less politicized court, that's better than having one that's more politicized both in terms of maybe the rulings that are coming out of it but also it matters a lot that the public accepts the court as legitimate and its decisions as legitimate and narratives of politicization corruption, et cetera, undermine that. Are there things that we could be doing to help right the course that don't open us up to these profound worries that you just articulated say in the instance of court packing?Ilya Somin: I don't think there's any short-term solution to the problem of, if it is a problem, of justices appointed by one party being very different from justices of the other and therefore there are being more conflict over judicial appointments. That can only be resolved if we reduce polarization in American society more generally which may be there are ways to do that. That could be a whole separate podcast but is not something that can be done quickly.“I don't think there's any short-term solution to the problem of, if it is a problem, of justices appointed by one party being very different from justices of the other and therefore there are being more conflict over judicial appointments. That can only be resolved if we reduce polarization in American society more generally.”There might be incremental reforms that can help some problems at the margin, though even those will not be easy to enact. One that is actually quite popular across the political spectrum with both experts and the general public, is term limits for Supreme Court justices. Instead of serving for life, they could serve for 18 years. That's the most common proposal but you can imagine other lengths of the term.This would reduce the extent to which the random events create opportunities for one president or another to have a lot of nominations in a short time, or on the other extreme, you end up with a president like Jimmy Carter who didn't get to make any nominations. It was kind of a bummer for him. Also, it would reduce the issue of justices staying on until senility or mental problems arise in their old age and the like.It would also regularize the process of Supreme Court appointment. Each president would get to make two appointments during their term and reduce the extent also to which a justice could enjoy vast power simply through longevity by staying on the court for 30 or 40 years. I think this reform would probably require a constitutional amendment. There are some people who think it would not but I think it likely would. We can talk about why if you're interested.In the short run, it would not change the balance of power on the court most likely. Therefore, if your main concern is simply that the current 6-3 majority is making conservative decisions or too many conservative decisions, this would not immediately fix it. It would take some time to address it. I think you could also potentially either through Congress or the justices themselves, enact some ethics code for the court to the extent that people are unhappy about things like Clarence Thomas taking a lot of expensive vacations at the expense of Harlan Crow, who's a big right of center billionaire, and you can enact limits on the gifts that they're allowed to take and other restrictions like that.I think that may be desirable to do, although Justice Alito recently said he thought Congress had no power to enact these rules, I think they do have the power. They could do it. I think it would be desirable to have some limitations there. I also, again, even if this was done and the rules were strictly enforced, it would not change the fact that the Supreme Court voted to overturn Roe v. Wade or made other decisions that many people don't like.I think also it's worth noting that while the Supreme Court's approval rating has declined somewhat, that is in parallel with declining approval ratings for other governmental institutions. Even at its worst, the Supreme Court's approval rating is still a little bit better than that of Joe Biden or Donald Trump, the likely presidential candidates.If you look at Congress's approval rating, Congress could only dream of the kind of lows that the Supreme Court has when the court bottoms out at maybe a 40% approval rating with Congress, which is down most of the time in the 20s or even lower than that for the last 15, 20 years or more. The increasing level of polarization in American society and political conflict leads to bad approval ratings. If you want to call it, problematic legitimacy for a lot of institutions. Again, if there's a way to fix that, it would have to do with reducing the overall level of polarization and political conflict in society, rather with a fixed specific to the structure of the Supreme Court.Aaron: Thank you for listening to Zooming In at The UnPopulist. If you enjoy this show, please take a moment to review us in Apple Podcasts. Also check out ReImagining Liberty, where I explore the emancipatory and cosmopolitan case for radical, social, political, and economic freedom. Zooming In is produced by Landry Ayres and is a project of The UnPopulist.© The UnPopulist 2023Follow The UnPopulist on Twitter (@UnPopulistMag), Facebook (The UnPopulist) and Threads (@UnPopulistMag). This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.theunpopulist.net

Listen to Zooming In at The UnPopulist in your favorite podcast app: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Google Podcasts | RSSAaron Ross Powell: Welcome to The UnPopulist Editor's Roundtable at Zooming In. I'm Aaron Ross Powell. It's our birthday. The UnPopulist is now in its terrible twos, and so today I'm joined by my colleagues Shikha Dalmia and Akiva Malamet to give a progress report on what we've accomplished in these last two years and where we see the current state of liberalism.A transcript of today's podcast appears below. It has been edited for flow and clarity. Also our five favorite posts of the last 12 months.Aaron Ross Powell: Shikha, why don't you take us away?Shikha Dalmia: Thank you, Aaron. And thanks to Akiva and both of you for being here. It's an important milestone in The UnPopulist's life. As you mentioned, we are beginning our terrible twos, but I'm hoping that instead of throwing tantrums, we are going to make the “right kind of trouble” in the immortal words of John Lewis. But to give our audience a bit of a progress report: Two years ago, The UnPopulist was founded with a singular mission, and that was to defend liberal democracy from the rise of the illiberal populist right. And it was going to do so by using classical liberal thought. Classical liberalism, in my view, and I think I can speak for the two of you, offers the richest intellectual resources to fight tyranny and authoritarianism in all its forms. And I felt like it was being completely underutilized, if not misused in many, many ways. And so the idea was to both defend liberal democracy and also kind of re-articulate classical liberalism itself to make it relevant for this new threat that we were confronting. It was also my very firm belief that just like socialism in some ways was the defining threat of our times after World War II, this liberal populism of the right was going to be the threat of our generation or well, I'm very old, but future generations. And why is that? In my view, populism in some ways, or illiberal populism, poses even a more fundamental threat to liberal democracy than socialism. And the reason is it kind of changes the relationship between the government and the governed. A liberal democratic framework is centered around the power of keeping political authority in check. And one crucial part of the check are the people. I mean, “throw the bums out” when they get too tyrannical. The premise over there is that people are going to guard their freedom. They are going to be a bulwark against authoritarianism and an authoritarian. But that changes in a populist framework where the people actually join forces with the strongman populist figure. And instead of guarding freedom, their motive becomes to use the levers of power to attack their political enemies. And so in a fundamental sense, the whole relationship in a populist polity between all the various checks and balances and institutions of liberal democracy kind of changes. And to me, there is therefore no greater threat to liberal democracy than populism. “The premise over there is that people are going to guard their freedom. They are going to be a bulwark against authoritarianism and an authoritarian. But that changes in a populist framework where the people actually join forces with the strongman populist figure. And instead of guarding freedom, their motive becomes to use the levers of power to attack their enemies, their political enemies.” — Shikha DalmiaAnd so with that understanding The UnPopulist, as the name suggests, was incubated at the Mercatus Center two years ago, and it was on a two-year grant. And after that, it needed a new home. And so I'm happy to report that even as our audience has grown, we started with 650 subscribers. We are nine times bigger now and growing rapidly every day. You guys have been an invaluable part of it. Aaron, you almost from the inception and Akiva, you a little bit later. And as we grew, we felt like we needed a new home and we've created one and it's called the Institute for the Study of Modern Authoritarianism — ISMA. It is no physical building, there's nothing bricks and mortar, but it's a platform which will give us an operational base to expand ourselves and our activities as we go forward. The UnPopulist, let me mention, is just going to be one element of this new center. We are going to do other things. We have a new editorial partnership with Persuasion which is an awesome sister Substack publication founded by Yascha Mounk, a Johns Hopkins professor. He comes from the progressive side of the spectrum and he's worried about some of the progressive excesses and threats to liberal democracy. So just as we, or at least I, see myself as an internal reformer on the right, he sees himself as an internal reformer on the progressive end of things. So we have a editorial partnership with Persuasion and we'll be promoting content and each other's work. Another element of ISMA, the Institute for the Study of Modern Authoritarianism is going to be a polling project that Tom Shull, our editor at large, is launching to study the appeal of strongman politics in the United States. That's something that isn't very well understood or tracked. And we feel we should be able to pick up trends when people are getting more attracted to strongmen figure. And another element is going to be a liberalism conference. So our readers will be familiar with the national conservative movement and other illiberal movements on the right. And they host their own conference every year. And we think we need a conference to make a strong and strenuous and vigorous case for liberalism. In the last two years since The UnPopulist was founded, I don't think our work [load] has diminished. I think it's actually increased because the state of the world has become, in my view, decidedly worse. Here in America, the Republican Party seems to reach new lows every few weeks. Jan. 6th was not a shocking enough event for the party and it didn't awaken it. After the event, Trump is still the favorite to win the nomination of the party. There are 91 indictments against him and instead of being embarrassed, the Republican Party seems to think that the problem is actually with the system that's trying to hold a rogue president accountable. You know, it's been the law and order party all this long except for when it applies to its own favorite politicians. Even if Trump were in jail, that would not necessarily be a barrier to his election. But if he were to somehow not be the nominee, the two people who are waiting in the wings are Florida Governor DeSantis and neophyte Vivek Ramaswamy. And both of them represent two different styles of populism within the GOP. De Santis has this nasty statist side where he wants to use the government to reign terror on his woke political opponents. And Vivek Ramaswamy has a different, what I call, paleo-libertarian style of populism where he wants to selectively withdraw agencies and curtail the federal governmentt so that that hurts his political opponents. Now, many of us are not opposed to reducing the size of the federal government, but the selective way in which he [Vivek] wants to do it to promote right-wing causes and diminish left-wing causes is very concerning. Add to that his kookiness and his conspiracy theory mindset, and his border hawkishness. And he is in my view and reincarnation of Ron Paul in many ways, who, the difference is that Ron Paul was an outlier when he ran in the Republican party, whereas Vivek Ramaswamy in fact speaks for the party. Meanwhile, if you look at, look around the world in India, my home, my native country. Modi, Narendra Modi, a Hindu nationalist and a strongman, populist figure, is a hands down favorite to win elections again for the third time next year. And then if you go around the rest of the world, things are not looking a whole lot better. In Turkey, Erdogan won again, even though the opposition put up a pretty valiant fight. He still prevailed and everybody now thinks Turkey is on sort of an irreversible path to certain kind of religious illiberalism. Gone are its secular commitments. And then if you go down the list, whether it is Italy, it is Hungary, Poland, the same thing is happening. In Germany, the Alternative to Germany which is a far right outfit, is the second largest party. It may well be in the governing coalition in the next elections. In France, even though Emmanuel Macron [who is considered a moderate] won, he's now in trouble and the National Rally and Eric Zemmour, two very far right figures, are gaining ground. In Italy, you have Giorgia Meloni. And to me, the most ominous sign that things are on a very bad track is that the European Union itself seems to be succumbing to far-right priorities and policies. Take its position on immigration. I mean, we care about immigration, but it's also sort of a bellwether issue.  And the European Commission, which used to be very opposed to stiff border controls around Europe, has now succumbed. Its [annual] border control budget, just to throw out one figure at you, has increased from $85 million to $754 million in less than a decade. Whereas earlier it used to talk about how we don't need to control Europe's border, now they are talking about “collective border security” and are doubling down on it. So given all these trends, I think The UnPopulist and ISMA have their work cut out for them. And so we are going to be doing this over the next few years and hopefully getting more support from our audience and our viewers and everyone else.Akiva Malamet: So I really appreciate what you said there, Shikha, and I think particularly the international focus that The UnPopulist takes is a unique emphasis in combining focus not just on America and on the West, but on the world in general. One country that wasn't discussed as much in your catalog of horrors is Israel. And I think of Israel as quite an important country because it serves as a kind of cultural social bridge between the West and the East. It has elements of both Eastern and Western culture within it. And geographically as being on the Mediterranean, it serves that function as well. The shift in Israel towards where very worrying judicial reforms in which the far right in Israel is essentially attempting to hobble the power of the Supreme Court and the Supreme Court's ability to protect its citizens from majoritarian rule and from authoritarian attempts to remove women's rights, remove LGBT rights, to install — a wish, I think, of a less likely but still consistent wish for part of Netanyahu's coalition — is to install a theocracy in Israel, although I see that as a little bit less likely. And all of those pieces are coming together to make Israel, which was historically considered a great American ally and a great sign of democracy in the Middle East, Israeli democracy is no longer looking quite as good and in fact may be crumbling in some very critical places. The installation of the first line of these judicial reforms, which was getting rid of the reasonableness clause, is now undergoing hearings by the Supreme Court. We will see whether the Supreme Court allows for and passes something to amend its own power, and whether they will consider that legally valid or not. I think the reasonableness clause is a fairly minor clause because it's an administrative declaration that says that you can't pass certain laws that don't take account of certain reasonable variables. So for example, the reasonableness clause was used to get rid of people from being ministers who had been indicted for corruption. So Aryeh Deri, the minister from the Shas party, which is the Sephardic ultra-Orthodox party in Israel was removed from his post and being minister because he had served time in jail. Those kinds of considerations that the reasonableness clause is meant to curtail to prevent corruption in government. And so while it's a relatively minor clause, there are other ways to prevent corruption in government. There are other powers that the Supreme Court has of judicial review. It represents a significant move towards curtailing the power of the Supreme Court, both to uphold good standards and best practices in government and prevent corruption. But also to be able to balance the power of the Knesset, the parliament, against the framework, against the protection of individual rights. It's important to remind people that Israel, which has no formal written constitution, is dependent on the Supreme Court to protect the liberties of citizens, which it does through its interpretation of the Basic Laws, which declare certain fundamental rights but are not themselves equivalent to a constitution. Absent these judicial review powers, there really is no block or check and balance to the power of the Knesset to enact all kinds of majoritarian tyrannies that severely violate the rights of Israeli citizens as well as Palestinians. And so the judicial reforms, as I see them, are a significant blow to one of the more important democracies in the world today.Shikha: Thank you for correcting my omission over here. Israel is obviously a super important country for both geopolitical reasons and as well as, as you mentioned, an important liberal democracy at least. Some of us think it's liberal enough that we should be worried about its more draconian turn. But one of the things I want to emphasize is that this is — sometimes when we talk about liberal democracy, it sounds arid. It sounds very abstract, but it has actually like real consequences on real people. And it's not simply about, in Israel, for instance, it's not simply about things like judicial review and curbing the power of the executive, all clinical terms. It has impact on the, you know, on human rights, right? I mean, the Palestinian fate to some extent depends upon what happens in Israel. The Muslim faith in India depends upon whether the Hindu nationalist government is able to run roughshod over them. And so when we talk about liberal democracy, it's not simply about maintaining a system, it is about maintaining a system that protects life and liberty of actual, breathing, living human beings. And that's kind of why to me it's such an important cause. You know, if liberal democracy fails, it's not just going to fail and be replaced by something else that's less good. There will be many lives destroyed, decimated, and major upheaval if we don't get things back in order.“When we talk about liberal democracy, it's not simply about maintaining a system, it is about maintaining a system that protects life and liberty of breathing, living human beings. And that's kind of why to me it's such an important cause. If liberal democracy fails, it's not just going to fail and be replaced by something else that's less good. There will be many lives destroyed, decimated, and major upheaval if we don't get things back in order.”— Shikha DalmiaAaron: Yes, that's absolutely critical. So I'll just quickly say it has been, it's been a real privilege and honor to get to be a part of this project for, for the last couple of years. And I think I agree with everything that's been said that the mission of The UnPopulist mattered a lot when it launched. It matters at least as much now in part, because I think that a lot of the threats to liberalism have become in many ways more subtle and easier to ignore, easier to dismiss. I think probably in my mind, and maybe I'm being naive about this, but I think that the immediate threat of Donald Trump himself has lessened a lot compared to where it was two years ago. I think the path to reelection for him is exceedingly narrow if not effectively gone, barring extraordinary circumstances. I just don't see a way that he wins back the suburban white voters who flipped to Biden after everything that's been happening in the indictments and all of that. And I think that a lot of what we've seen is electorally a lot of the really hardcore of Trumpism doesn't seem to do very well at the national level. DeSantis, even if he won the nomination, I don't think would would win the presidency because he's just not terribly popular. He can't even beat out the kind of rando Pharma bro who's running against him in the primaries. So at the national level, that kind of real Trumpism was, I mean, was never popular, it never got majorities. It seems to be less so now, especially as it becomes more shrill. But the threats, as I said, have become more subtle. And so one of the things that really worries me is threats to liberalism from within the liberal coalition. And a lot of that is the way that the pivot to the culture war being the dominant force in American politics, that we don't really argue so much over policy anymore, or policy is not centered in our political debates. to the extent that it used to be, it is now culture war issues dominate the conversation. And the real extreme versions of the right's views on the culture war are not, again, terribly popular. They don't have widespread purchase and that shifting as demographics and particularly age demographics change and so on, like which generations are ascendant and which are shrinking. One of the things that really worries me is the way that edge concerns in the culture war are getting used as justification for kind of broader reactionary attitudes that were present in the larger liberal coalition, but were kind of kept on the down low. And so we're seeing this in reactions to LGBT rights or trans rights where people will point to smaller issues, women's sports, or some kids getting certain kind of medical interventions, and use that as a way to broaden out a critique of essentially the dynamism of culture and privileged groups, underprivileged groups becoming more privileged, formerly heavily privileged groups maybe dropping in their privilege. Cancel culture concerns are also this way. We see a lot of, there are genuine instances of like cancel culture run amok. But often what you see is concerns about that providing cover for general concerns of like people with higher status not really liking it that kind of the lower status people are now challenging them, pushing back on their ideas, that they're not as they're not as centered in the conversation as they used to be. And what I think a lot of this has exposed is that even in the broader liberal coalition, there was there's always been a tension between conservative values and the social dynamism that is a necessary part of a liberal society or a necessary consequence of a liberal society. “Edge concerns in the culture war are getting used as justification for kind of broader reactionary attitudes that were present in the larger liberal coalition, but were kind of kept on the down low. And so we're seeing this in reactions to LGBT rights or trans rights where people will point to smaller issues, women's sports, or some kids getting certain kind of medical interventions, and use that as a way to broaden out a critique of essentially the dynamism of culture and privileged groups, underprivileged groups becoming more privileged, formerly heavily privileged groups maybe dropping in their privilege.”—- Aaron Ross PowellAnd so I think that's where we really need to maintain a check on taking concerns seriously, but not allowing them to provide cover for basically, I'm in favor of liberalism as long as it doesn't like destabilize my own position, my own status, my own prestige, my own preferences, because as you said, like these things, we can talk about them in this clinical sense of the function of various institutions and the laws that govern them or the laws by which they govern themselves, but ultimately this is about people. It's about their lives and the reason that liberalism matters. The reason that I think all three of us have dedicated our careers to defending and advancing it is because it is the best system that we have found yet for enabling diverse dynamic people to not just live together in peace but live together in mutually beneficial ways. ut that cuts against these natural tendencies for hierarchy and class. and categorizing people and then seeing their dignity as of differing values depending on where they fall into these categorizations. And, and that's, that's been the challenge liberalism has faced since it started, is liking it in the abstract, but then disliking it when the kind of the effects of freedom become real to us. And so that's where I think the tremendous value of The UnPopulist is in making those values clear and defending them and calling out where they're in retreat, especially as it moves into the less cartoony flamboyant threats of a Donald Trump and into what I see as these more subtle avenues for backsliding into particularly kind of social illiberalisms and then the inevitable political illiberalisms that follow.Shikha: Aaron, I couldn't agree with you more, and yet, I mean, in a very fundamental sense about the value of liberalism and what we are fighting for here, I couldn't agree with you more. But I would say that precisely because of some of what you said, I'm less sanguine about the threat that Donald Trump and the Republican Party pose even now. Part of what we are seeing right now with the rise of the illiberal populist right in the United States especially, is that the gains of the civil rights and the women's movement are only beginning to be felt now in the sense that these groups have now moved into positions of power. And they don't believe that the previous norms of patriarchy and a certain kind of white articulation of the world work for them anymore and they are demanding change. Now as they demand change, these things never happen neatly. There are going to be excesses, which is why I appreciate what Yascha Mounk is doing and Persuasion are doing. There will be excesses. But the backlash from the right is far bigger in my view than the excesses on the left. And that backlash is not going to be contained anytime soon. What's spooky to me is that the Republican party has not, like I said, woken up from its Trumpist stupor yet. That fever is still continuing to, if not grow, but retain its hold on the Republican brain. But look at the new populist figures that have emerged in the GOP. Vivek Ramaswamy, he's a double Ivy Leaguer and yet he issues purple condemnations of the elite and what have you. But he himself is the son of immigrants. He's a practicing Hindu and he's a son of immigrants. And yet, there is a certain political entrepreneurship that this Trumpist style of populist politics has opened, which is going to continue to play out in the Republican Party. And when you have a duopoly, when you have a country with only two parties, when one party is in such a bad place, it can continue to pull down liberalism in many ways. And I would have to say that, you know, Democrats, the rap against them is that they are too much in the pockets of progressives, right? And they're allowing the extreme progressives to set the agenda for the party. My opposite fear is, as is yours, is that in response to this backlash from Republicans, Democrats will actually succumb on their commitments to defending minority groups and what have you. I don't think that has happened yet and I think they are not doing it smartly. I think they do need to listen to concerns about the other side—and at least remove some of the obvious causes. on those grounds where the backlash is justified, they ought to keep that in mind, but they have to do it in a way that doesn't weaken their commitments to the little guy, to the underdog. And I think that's kind of, if Republicans continue to make political gains the way they are doing, I think Democrats may well follow suit just to keep themselves politically relevant.“My opposite fear, as is yours, is that in response to this backlash from Republicans, Democrats will actually succumb on their commitments to defending minority groups . I don't think that has happened yet and I think they are not doing it smartly. I think they do need to listen to concerns about the other side and at least remove some of the obvious causes. On those grounds where the backlash is justified, they ought to keep that in mind, but they have to do it in a way that doesn't weaken their commitments to the little guy, to the underdog.”— Shikha DalmiaAkiva: So I really appreciated, Shikha, what you said about this being, to some extent, the coming to fruition of certain liberation movements. And so we're seeing a backlash as a result of this dismantling of patriarchy, the dismantling of prejudice against LGBTQ people and so on. And I think this speaks to a fundamental impetus in liberalism, which is that nobody's free until everybody's free. And the move within liberalism to be continually looking for who are the edge groups, who are the groups that are not yet in our circle of equality, who are not yet in our circle of liberty, continues to create backlash. I always think it's interesting that you have periods of liberalization followed by a backlash. So you have, I think it's interesting that you have the Me Too movement and then you have Trump in a chronologically related section. Similarly, you have a lot of the accomplishments in the original classical age of fascism. You had all these feminist accomplishments of the 1920s that were then followed by the age of fascism. And you had a thriving gay scene in Berlin that was then followed by fascism, in the 1920s. And so, in a way, this illiberal populism is predictable because there's always a response to the status of some groups being disrupted in society because other groups are demanding their place at the table. But the fact that backlash is almost inevitable shouldn't give us cause for despair, rather it should give us reason to be aware of what will happen culturally and to find the resources to push back against it. “I think this speaks to a fundamental impetus in liberalism, which is that nobody's free until everybody's free. And the move within liberalism to be continually looking for who are the edge groups, who are the groups that are not yet in our circle of equality, who are not yet in our circle of liberty, continues to create backlash…illiberal populism is predictable because there's always a response to the status of some groups being disrupted in society because other groups are demanding their place at the table. But the fact that backlash is almost inevitable shouldn't give us cause for despair, rather it should give us reason to be aware of what will happen culturally and to find the resources to push back against it.”— Akiva MalametAaron: And that's where we can get back to, I think, the clinical, institutional side of things. I think liberalism at its core is a set of social values about how we view each other and our interactions with them and what it means to live together in beneficial peace. But if there's this baked in cycle of, some people are more committed to that vision than others, and some people are committed to it so long as it doesn't mean things get too weird for them, and then they have the backlash, or their status lowers, and then they have the backlash. That's where protecting these institutions, which has also been a big part of The UnPopulist's mission, because those liberal institutions exist to essentially defang those inevitable backlashes that people can get — they can get frustrated about changes in the world around them.They can not like it that their town looks different today than it did when they were kids or that popular music sounds funny or there's these people who speak foreign languages or the children are up to weird playing with their identities that makes me a little uncomfortable. We can't we can't undo that, but what we can do is ensure there are political institutions can't be co-opted by the people caught up in the backlash in order to advance actual political oppression in order to stop it. That instead they can kind of rage against it, or they can use their associational rights to find parts of the country that were better reflect their values or whatever. But what we saw with Trump and the ongoing threat is that backlash can if liberal institutions aren't strong, can grab the mechanisms of power, can grab the very heights of power. And then, fortunately, Trump turned out to be wildly inept in doing it, but can attempt to re-oppress the people who liberalism is freeing, re-marginalize the people that it has unmarginalized. And that's where I see, if we can't, that the link between social values and the institutions and the need to keep an eye on both.“What we saw with Trump and the ongoing threat is that the backlash can, if liberal institutions aren't strong, grab the mechanisms of power, can grab the very heights of power. And then, fortunately, Trump turned out to be wildly inept in doing it, but can attempt to re-oppress the people who liberalism is freeing, re-marginalize the people that it has unmarginalized. And that's where I see, if we can't, that the link between social values and the institutions and the need to keep an eye on both.”— Aaron Ross PowellShikha: Yeah, just to add to that, Aaron, you know, what spooks me about this backlash is precisely its attack on liberalism, right? The populist right understands that the impediment to its designs to roll back the clock is precisely liberalism, because groups that have now been empowered can fight back. You know, they can use those same institutions and those same rights to fight back and maintain their gains. So the reversal of those gains requires precisely attacking liberalism. It is not a coincidence that Trump called the press the enemy of the people and attacked the background of a Mexican judge who felt he wouldn't rule in his favor for his fake university or whatever it is that he was doing with that. And so that's why the backlash is so dangerous. A lot of my conservative friends who are not even sort of part of the Trumpist right, they've catastrophized, they have catastrophized the left so much. This argument that the left controls all the commanding heights of the culture and American society. And so, to take back those heights, we can't play by the normal liberal rules. you know, we've got to play by some other illiberal rules is very much part of the right. The only thing I would exhort the left to do is that as it pushes back against the right is… that part of the problem with the left is that in order to make more gains for people, you know, for marginalized groups, as you mentioned Aaron, was that they were claiming too many innocent victims, right? Or too many people who could be better reached by some kind of persuasive rather than coercive or punitive strategies. And they overplayed their hand in that respect. I've alluded to this piece in Vox before Trump came on the scene where this liberal professor wrote a piece anonymously about how his liberal students terrify him because you know, anything he says in class, no matter how innocuous, can and will be used against him, if it doesn't somehow advance their agenda or it ruffles some feathers. But there was already a corrective current in our politics against that. And we could have come to a pretty good place where we advanced more rights for more people while preventing innocent victims of that you know, of that particular cause. But the right came along the scene and it doesn't want to have anything to do with these corrective mechanisms. It doesn't want to, you know, have anything to do with using liberalism. It's in it for the power. And my fear is when one side becomes so wholly devoted to using the levers of power to advance its agenda, it's not inconceivable that the other side will also do the same at some point. I think for the center left side of the spectrum there are two dangers it has to worry about. One, it has to worry about imbibing too many of these sort of regressive right-wing policies and agenda and giving up on some of its progressive causes. On the other hand, it may also succumb to the twin temptation of just simply seeking power to advance its agenda and forgetting about liberalism. So all of that is kind of part of the mix in our very fluid tumultuous political world. And now The Unpopulist firmly believes that at this moment in time, the right is the far bigger threat than the left. The left is a mixed bag, it has some good causes, but its means are occasionally questionable. But liberalism could have handled that. But we will also occasionally keep an eye on that kind of stuff.“I think for the center-left side of the spectrum there are two dangers it has to worry about. One, it has to worry about imbibing too many regressive right-wing policies and agenda and giving up on some of its progressive causes. On the other hand, it may also succumb to the twin temptation of just simply seeking power to advance its agenda and forgetting about liberalism. So all of that is kind of part of the mix in our very fluid tumultuous political world.”— Shikha DalmiaAkiva: I really appreciated what you said there, Shikha, especially about the value of protecting liberalism as an institutional framework. Speaking to the mistakes made by the left as it tries to oppose the right, one of the things that gets underappreciated is the mistake of conflating democracy and liberalism with each other. And often there's this idea on the left that if we failed to protect our values, it's because the people weren't really speaking. Were misled and needed to be guided by us instead of by some other force. And what we really need to do is have is not have democratic fundamentalism and we also don't want to have a kind of protection of rights with or without any response or check and balance with respect to democratic accountability. But it's important to recognize that rights need to be protected independently of whether or not they're democratically sanctioned. And this is also a really important time for the left to double down on some of the things that maybe it's become a little softer on in comparison to how it's been historically, such as free speech when you decide that an institution can be manipulated for your own end…So for example, the expansion of let's say, different things to the category of hate speech or incitement, those same instruments can be used by the right to manipulate and then go after let's say, Disney's woke behavior becoming a problem for the discourse just as much as whatever the left may perceive to be a problem in terms of hate speech. And so there's an important need to not let whatever “the people” want become the equivalent of a liberal society. And there's also a need to defend liberal institutions because more often than not, someone that you don't like is going to then be in charge of them if you start to abandon those principles.“There's an important need to not let whatever “the people” want become the equivalent of a liberal society. And there's also a need to defend liberal institutions because more often than not, someone that you don't like is going to then be in charge of them if you start to abandon those principles.”— Akiva MalametShikha: I'm actually curious as to what, Aaron, you think about what Akiva just said. You feel passionately about trans rights, right? And so the question is, what are the legitimate means to advance those rights? What are the limits? Is using the power of the state to advance them acceptable? Are there means that trans activists have used to advance their rights that would give us pause from a liberal framework? What are the limits for advancing any crusade for anybody's rights?Aaron: There are always limits. We could certainly draw them at, “don't advance your rights in a way that violates the rights of others who aren't themselves violating yours.” So what I mean by that is say, in the abolitionist movement, anti-slavery, was clearly about advancing a set of rights that were being heavily violated, like absolutely violated. And that entailed often doing violence to slaveholders, taking away what they wrongfully imagined to be their property and so on. I don't see that as “don't violate others' rights when advancing your own” limits, clearly. But you can certainly, in trying to move yourself from the margins more towards the center of society in trying to undo oppression, it is possible to do that in ways that are rights violating to others. You know, appropriating their rightly held property, which is a fairly common thing of we're going to just, we've gotten our power back, now we're going to seize everything from everyone who's we see as wronging us. But I don't see that really playing that playing out much in the current situation.I mean, one of the interesting things about the trans rights concerns right now is this isn't actually an example of a group of people suddenly using the power of the state to rapidly advance their interests. Rather, most of the rights that we talk about now, that trans people are worried about losing are things that they've had for quite a long time, that the state has protected for quite a long time. And what's happening now is a rolling back, an attempt to roll back existing rights. They're not claiming a whole bunch of new ones. Rather, these were things that they had been doing forever. And suddenly it became, especially with the shift to the culture war, the victory of gay marriage. And so the need for it accelerated after changes in abortion and that becoming not the kind of driving thing that was motivating the right. The culture warriors on the right looked for a new thing to rile up, and we have Chris Rufo explicitly saying he's doing this. And then targeting this group that no one had really been concerned about. There hadn't been worries about any of this stuff until people decided it was a big problem. And now you see scaling back of it. “One of the interesting things about the trans rights concerns right now is this isn't actually an example of a group of people suddenly using the power of the state to rapidly advance their interests. Rather, most of the rights that we talk about now, that trans people are worried about losing are things that they've had for quite a long time, that the state has protected for quite a long time. And what's happening now is a rolling back, an attempt to roll back existing rights. They're not claiming a whole bunch of new ones. Rather, these were things that they had been doing forever.”— Aaron Ross PowellSo I don't see a lot of this as over-exertion in terms of claiming new rights and privileges, but rather, please stop taking away the ones that we have had and then being very vocal in demanding that they not be taken away. But I think, to Akiva's broader point. Yes, there is a need to distinguish democracy and liberalism. They are obviously very interrelated. Democracy is the best system that we have found for achieving and maintaining liberalism compared to institutional alternatives that we've seen in practice. Democracy also is a system that really puts at its core the equal dignity and participation of all citizens, except in those times when democracy tries to deny some citizens' democratic participation. But it is absolutely the case that majorities can be illiberal, and majorities can disrespect rights, and majorities can want to see underprivileged people remain at the margins of society. And so we need to be careful to not see majority rule, democracy as majority rule as synonymous with liberalism, but rather liberalism is a set of values that will inform what the majority sees as its goals in the political sphere. And so I think If we're gonna look forward to, how do we defend this thing we call liberalism, this thing that The UnPopulist has spent the first two years of its life defending and, and we'll spend the next many, many years continuing that fight. For me, a lot of it is, is keeping an eye on the ball when it comes to those values and keeping an eye on who is actually advancing them and who isn't and not allowing these subtle forms of illiberalism to gain purchase and respect and prominence within circles that ought to know better. But instead to call them out, even if it means, and this is, we've all been through this, even if it means calling out our friends and our allies, people that we have associated with. Because illiberalism is not concentrated among people who just wear hats that say, I am illiberal, but it's been a constant presence throughout the history of liberal democracies. It's always pushing back. It's always coming from every direction. Liberalism has been fighting against illiberalism as long as it's been around. And, so paying attention to that and asking ourselves, if I'm caught up in, oh, here's an instance where liberalism has gone too far, here's an instance where the behaviors become dangerous to it or corrosive of its values to really put effort into thinking about what's driving those motivations. And is it just cover for of reactionary preferences or is there something genuine there and then stand our ground when it comes to talking about those values and fighting for them.Aaron: Thank you for listening to Zooming In at The UnPopulist. If you enjoy this show, please take a moment to review us in Apple Podcasts. Also check out ReImagining Liberty, where I explore the emancipatory and cosmopolitan case for radical, social, political, and economic freedom. Zooming In is produced by Landry Ayres and is a project of The UnPopulist.Here are our favorite pieces from the past year. Tell us yours in the comments: “Jordan Peterson: Putin's Useless Idiot” by Tom Palmer“A Typology of the New Right” by Shikha Dalmia“Israel's Internal Divisions Are Its Mortal Enemy Now” by Akiva Malamet“Joe Biden and Walter Russell Mead Deserve an "F" on India” by Salil Tripathi“How to Defuse Nativism in America: An Interview with Justin Gest” by Aaron Ross Powell© The UnPopulist 2023Follow The UnPopulist on Twitter (@UnPopulistMag), Facebook (The UnPopulist) and Threads (@UnPopulistMag). This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.theunpopulist.net

Today on our editor's roundtable, host Aaron Ross Powell and colleague Akiva Malamet are joined by special guest Walter Olson, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute's Robert A. Levy Center for Constitutional Studies. He is not a lawyer, but we've invited him on anyway, to discuss the recent Trump indictment in Washington, DC. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.theunpopulist.net

Today we have our editor's round table where host Aaron Ross Powell is joined by Shikha Dalmia and Akiva Malamet to discuss the Supreme Court's recent Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard decision, which invalidated university affirmative action programs. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.theunpopulist.net

Academic freedom is under assault, but who is mounting that assault depends on who you ask. The right has long argued that universities are controlled by the left with free inquiry as the victim. The liberal right, it turns out, doesn't much care for liberal education. The result is a wave of right-populist assaults on the very academic freedom they've historically claimed to support. To explore these issues, host Aaron Ross Powel is joined by Jonathan Marks. He's a professor of politics at Ursinus College and author of Let's Be Reasonable: A Conservative Case for Liberal Education.  ­­­­­­­ This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.theunpopulist.net

Today, we have our editors' roundtable where host Aaron Ross Powell is joined by Shikha Dalmia and Akiva Malamet, to talk about liberalism and the left. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.theunpopulist.net

Today we have our editors' roundtable. Host Aaron Ross Powell is joined by Shikha Dalmia and Akiva Malamet to discuss Tucker Carlson and the state of the American right.  This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.theunpopulist.net

It's all too common to dismiss ideas without understanding them. Feminism suffers this affliction more than most, with many people quick to denounce it while advancing very little knowledge of what feminists argue or what evidence they muster to support their claims. To help address that unfortunate ignorance, host Aaron Ross Powell is joined today by Kat Murti, co-founder of Feminists for Liberty. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.theunpopulist.net

With this episode of Zooming In, The UnPopulist introduces a new monthly feature: a roundtable in which our editors discuss select issues of the day. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.theunpopulist.net

For a certain sort of social conservative, Viktor Orbán's Hungary is the North Star. The realization of fantasies about how social liberalism can be done away with and “trad living” elevated to primacy, if only the power of a committed executive were turned to that task. On today's episode, host Aaron Ross Powell is joined by Robert Tracinski. He's the editor of Symposium, a journal of liberalism, and writes additional commentary at The Tracinski Letter. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.theunpopulist.net

This is the concluding post in The UnPopulist's coverage of Black History Month.Politicians love to stress the need for “law and order,” and most Americans are on board with that. But the phrase rings rather differently in middle-class suburbia than it does in those communities most subject to the heavy hand—or fist—of the law. To explore what law and order looks like in African American communities, host Aaron Ross Powell is joined today by Stephen Henderson. He's the host of NPR's Detroit Today and Detroit Public Television's American Black Journal. Before working in TV and radio, Henderson won a Pulitzer Prize for commentary for his writing at the Detroit Free Press. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.theunpopulist.net

Note to listeners: This is the first of our Zooming In podcasts, which will feature in-depth conversations with The UnPopulist's contributing writers on the subjects they've explored in their essays.Today's guest is Eve Fairbanks, author of The Inheritors: An Intimate Portrait of South Africa's Racial Reckoning. Our conversation explores the complex history of post-apartheid race relations in South Africa, how it complicates simplistic narratives and what lessons Americans should draw as we seek to address our own country's racist history. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.theunpopulist.net

Welcome to the first episode of ReImagining Liberty at its new home with The UnPopulist. This is a show about the emancipatory and cosmopolitan case for radical social, political, and economic freedom. With every episode, host Aaron Ross Powell explores and defends liberalism by talking with scholars, activists, and others working to build a freer world.For this first episode at The UnPopulist, Aaron talks about why America's political culture seems so broken, and why this has led to rising illiberalism. He traces the problems to what he calls an “unskillful” approach to politics, and a widespread lack of the virtues necessary for citizens to be good liberal citizens.Join the ReImagining Liberty Discord community and book club: https://discord.com/servers/reimagining-liberty-945306941251522611ReImagining Liberty is a project of The UnPopulist and is produced by Landry Ayres. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.theunpopulist.net

Our guest today argues that a lot of America's social and economic problems, including the rise of populism and the affinity for authoritarian leaders, can be traced back to changing relationships and institutions in our neighborhoods. Dr. Seth D. Kaplan is a Professorial Lecturer in the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University, Senior Advisor for the Institute for Integrated Transitions, visiting Fellow with Mercatus Center's Program on Pluralism and Civil Exchange, and consultant to organizations such as the World Bank, USAID, the State Department, and OECD. He's the author of the forthcoming Fragile Neighborhoods: Repairing American Society, One Zip Code at a Time.Reactionary Minds is a project of The UnPopulist. Hosted by Aaron Ross Powell. Produced by Landry Ayres. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.theunpopulist.net

Our guest today is Greg Sargent. He's a columnist at The Washington Post and author of the book An Uncivil War: Taking Back Our Democracy in an Age of Trumpian Disinformation and Thunderdome Politics. Our discussion digs into the state of the American right, its conflicting constituencies, and its fringe and conspiratorial elements, as well as how the press has covered all of it.Reactionary Minds is a project of The UnPopulist. Hosted by Aaron Ross Powell. Produced by Landry Ayres. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.theunpopulist.net

We're recorded this on the afternoon of Wednesday, Nov. 9th, the day after the elections. The results were rather unexpected, especially in light of the dominant narrative these last several weeks that a red wave was nigh.To talk about the electoral outcomes, what we should make of them, and what they mean looking ahead, I'm joined by Andy Craig, director of election policy at the Rainey Center and adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute, and Shikha Dalmia, editor of The UnPopulist and fellow at the Mercatus Center's Program on Pluralism and Civil Exchange.Read a transcript of our conversation. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.theunpopulist.net

Christian Nationalism has long been a sub-movement on the American Right, but recently its profile has risen as an increasing number of conservative media personalities and politicians claim the label and call for America to be reoriented as an explicitly Christian nation.To help me explore just what Christian Nationalism entails as a movement and an ideology, as well as its history on the right, I'm joined today by Paul Matzko. He's a research fellow at the Cato Institute, a historian of the American Right, and author of The Radio Right: How a Band of Broadcasters Took on the Federal Government and Built the Modern Conservative Movement.Reactionary Minds is hosted by Aaron Ross Powell and produced by Landry Ayers. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.theunpopulist.net

While both sides today have rather less respect for genuine political liberalism than they ought to, the ascension of far-right populism to the presidency, its near-total takeover of one of the two major parties, and its continuing efforts to establish control of our institutions and culture make the American right the most severe and immediate threat to our republic and our freedoms.However, just what the right is and what it means to be a conservative, if those are even the same thing, can be a bit slippery. The history of the American right and American conservatism is quite a bit more complicated politically and ideologically than many are aware. To help me tease out just what it means to be of the right, as well as the evolution of conservatism and conservative ideas, I'm joined by Matthew Continetti.He's a resident fellow in social, cultural and constitutional studies at the American Enterprise Institute and author of the new and genuinely excellent book The Right: The Hundred-Year War For American Conservatism.Reactionary Minds is a project of The UnPopulist. Hosted by Aaron Ross Powell. Produced by Landry Ayres. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit theunpopulist.substack.com

Subscribe to Reactionary Minds: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Google Podcasts | YouTubeReactionary Minds is a project of The UnPopulist. Hosted by Aaron Ross Powell. Produced by Landry Ayres.The following is a transcript of Reactionary Minds’ interview with Virginia Postrel, author of many books, including The Future and Its Enemies. The transcript has been lightly edited for flow and clarity.Aaron Ross Powell: I’m Aaron Ross Powell, and this is Reactionary Minds, a project of The UnPopulist. We’re used to thinking about politics as a battle between left and right, progressive and conservative. But those sides can be somewhat protean, with their positions, preferences and policies shifting in ways that make it difficult to analyze the political landscape clearly.My guest today has a different way of framing politics—one she first set out 24 years ago, and one which looks more and more prescient with every passing day. Virginia Postrel is the author of many books, including The Future and Its Enemies. Her latest is the Fabric of Civilization. The core of Postrel’s framework for understanding politics isn’t left versus right, but dynamism versus stasis.Aaron Ross Powell: What does it mean to be a “stasist,” to use your term?Virginia Postrel: What I say in The Future and Its Enemies when I’m just laying out the basic distinctions is that dynamists, which is people like me, have a central value of learning. We can talk about that later, but the contrast is important, and stasists come in a couple of varieties, but their central value is stability or control.Then I divide them into what I call reactionaries, which are the people who are more into keeping things literally the same, not necessarily the status quo. It could be going back to some imagined past or creating some utopia, but the idea of a stable society. Then technocrats, who are much more common in liberal democratic societies, who say, well, we want progress—we want things to change—but it’s got to look exactly like this. Very much an early 20th-century idea of control and planning the future, so that progress becomes something not that evolves, but that is dictated.Aaron: When you say early 20th century and the rise of the technocratic position, is that because something new happened in the 20th century, or is it because prior to the 20th century, stasis won out because we weren’t moving very quickly anyway?Virginia: That’s a very good question—not one that I really thought about when I was writing this book many years ago. But I think what happened was the rise of large business enterprises, railroads and huge manufacturing corporations, vertically integrated enterprises where you had to have a range of control to operate the business. That all happened really beginning of the 19th century, where you had these much larger organizations than had existed before.They were very successful, and people developed new and genuinely innovative and efficient ways of doing things. And that led to an idea that if you can do this at U.S. Steel or General Motors, you should be able to do it for the whole society— that, in fact, because they were run by the profit motive, these enterprises maybe were a little inefficient and wasteful and duplicative (competition was seen as wasteful and duplicative). And so that you could do something about that [inefficiency] if you could plan the society in general. There are many forms of this in the early 20th century.Obviously, you have the full-blown state socialism, state ownership of the means of production, with extreme versions in places like the Soviet Union. But there were also much more democracy-friendly versions associated with Thorstein Veblen, who’s famous for The Theory of the Leisure Class, but who also wrote a book whose title escapes me at the moment where he contrasted the good engineers with the bad financiers. The idea was that if you could just set engineering principles loose on society, you could have a much more efficient and productive society. That idea was in the air, and it came out of real business innovation that just got applied in ways that didn’t work.One of the things that’s interesting about the history of liberalism is that before Friedrich Hayek’s writing on “the use of knowledge in society” and the whole socialist calculation debate—and I don't want to get into the weeds of that—what was wrong with that theory of control wasn’t obvious. A lot of people who were basically liberal became very attracted to socialism because it seemed like a way of improving the lot of people and extending the liberal contract in certain ways.The idea that it was replacing local knowledge and even the knowledge of individual preferences with some necessarily dictatorial—even if it was being done in a democratic way—process was not obvious in 1900. It was not well articulated. I think there were people who understood it intuitively, but it had not really been fully grasped.Aaron: That raises an interesting distinction, I think, within stasism, as opposed to dynamism. What you’ve just described is an awfully let’s call it ideological or philosophical argument for stasis. You had these arguments about the way a firm runs, and we can analogize that out, and we can manage progress and so on. That’s like an intellectual approach. But a lot of stasis seems to be more of almost an aesthetic approach. So you get people like Wendell Berry—or Josh Hawley in some of his earlier, pre-political career writings is almost making an argument that the ideal America is one that always and forever looks like a Thomas Kinkade painting. Or that modern architecture is bad and what we really need is the return of the aesthetics of the Catholic church to rule us. Are these distinct things, or do they bleed together?Virginia: They are distinct things, and historically they’re distinct things because they’re very different reactions to what’s called the second industrial revolution. That is the rise of these really large enterprises, railroads being that quintessential one. In the 19th century, you also have the arts-and-crafts movement around William Morris. You have the rise of neo-Gothic architecture, which is initially a very ideologically freighted thing. It is a rejection of industrialism.The irony is that it then just—I write about this in The Substance of Style— becomes a style. Therefore, you get to a point where you have Blair Hall at Princeton University built and named for a railroad magnate in the neo-Gothic style because it associates the university with the great universities of Britain. It takes on a different meaning over time, but there is definitely in reaction to industrialism not only this kind of technocratic argument, which also takes a Marxist form; there is a medievalist argument, as well, that we are losing handcraft. We’re losing beauty. The cities are ugly. They’re crowded—of course, cities were always crowded—but [there’s] coal smoke and factories, and it is a ugly transition in many ways. Therefore, we should go back to a pastoral, hierarchical, often Catholic ideal. That is a reactionary stasis, which is very prominent in a lot of the great literature of the period—not so much in novels, but in poetry. Yes, they are two distinct, very old—at this point we’re talking 150 years; I guess that’s not old by human history, but certainly old by American history—ideals, and they take different forms.The American ideal is different from the European ideal, the reactionary ideal. Also, one thing that’s different is while there is this Wendell Berry, farmer, slightly medievalist view, there is also in the U.S. a wilderness ideal. In Europe, the cultivated landscape is always, or almost always, the ideal, whereas in the U.S., you also have a notion that untouched by human hands is ideal. That’s less common on the right than on, I don't know, I hesitate to call [it] exactly the left, but in the environmental movement.Aaron: That raises my next question, which is, Does this technocratic versus reactionary (or traditionalist or natural) by and large map onto a left-right spectrum? It certainly seems like technocrats are the left and the center left, generally speaking, and the people calling for a return to the old ways tend to be on the right.Virginia: Well, part of the point of The Future and Its Enemies is that these things do not really map onto the left and the right. They cross those divisions. It’s just that what people want is somewhat different, and so conservative technocrats might be more inclined to regulate land use so that you have single-family suburban homes or regulate immigration in a technocratic way, so that you give priority to people who have a lot of college degrees and professional skills, because they’re going to be—a Brahman from India is better than a peasant from Guatemala, because we can anticipate that.I’m just using those as examples. I describe technocracy as an ideological ideal in the early 20th century, because there was an intellectual movement there, but I don’t think it is primarily ideological. I think, for many people, it is common sense. It is common sense that somebody ought to be in charge, and people ought to make rules, and we ought to control things. And if this is dangerous, we should prohibit it, and if it’s good, we should subsidize it. This is the norm in our politics, and that wasn’t new in the 20th century.Things were subsidized and prohibited forever, but it got this patina of efficiency and rationality and modernity in the early 20th century. It took on an ideological air, but it is the norm in our politics. That’s one reason I spend a lot of time in the book talking about it. But really what interests me is [that] I think of it as the norm: That it’s what most of our political discussions are, but both reactionaries and dynamists, therefore, have to make alliances with technocrats in order to get the world they want. They’re the polar opposites, but the question is—in some ways, the technocrats decide who wins.Aaron: How totalizing are these two—are the dynamic versus the static viewpoint? Because there are lots of vectors for change. There’s technological change; there’s social; there’s political. Like we right now refer to, say, the Trumpist movement as “conservative,” but populism is on the one hand, very stasist in culture shifting too quickly—I-don't-like-it-make-it-stop!—but it’s very politically radical in terms of [saying] the systems that we have in place need to be torn down and replaced.Virginia: I describe them as if they’re these silos, but that’s just a model; that’s not reality. That’s the map, not the landscape. First of all, most people have elements of all of these things in their thinking, in their intuitions, in their politics; as you say, it takes multiple dimensions. Somebody may think that we should, even within, say, economic regulation—somebody may think that we should let people build houses more freely, but the FDA should regulate really tightly, something like that.Talking about the radical institutional aspects of populists of various types brings up the issue of rules, which is one of the things that’s the trickiest to understand and to grapple with. How do you think about rules? Let’s say you want this kind of dynamism. You want this kind of learning, bottom-up order without design, trial and error, correction, economic progress, or social learning. What sort of rules give you that? There’s very much this idea that you need nested rules, and you need certain rules that are fundamental and don’t change very often.You could call that the constitutional order, and those need to be fairly simple, and they need to be broadly applicable, and they need to allow things like recombinations and people using their own knowledge to make decisions and plans. And there’s a chapter about that, which I then, in a completely different context, reinvented in The Substance of Style; honest to God, I did it from the bottom up. I didn’t refer, because it was all about neighborhoods, where [it’s a] fact that people care about what houses look like, but on the other hand, they care about their neighbor’s house, and they will pay money to live in a planned community—but on the other hand, people want freedom, and how do you think about that?One of the issues is that you need to be able to move when rules are very prescriptive; there need to be ways to exit. What you’re seeing in this populist upsurge is a notion that the rules that we think of as not changing very much—that stable institutions, the liberal institutions that govern societies—are barriers to what populists want, and so, therefore, they need to be taken down.That does become a radical move. One of the misperceptions that was in lots of reviews of the book was the idea that dynamism equals change, and that I’m saying all change is good. First of all, even in the process of dynamism—that is, bottom-up change—not all change is good. It’s an experimental process. Sometimes you do things—whether it’s you start a company or you change your living arrangements—and it’s a bad idea. It doesn’t work, and that’s why we need criticism and competition, and that’s part of the process.Aaron: Then the goal is we want a dynamic society because it produces all of these. The book is full of all the wonderful benefits that come out of a dynamic society. But at the same time, the people who are fans of stasis—yes, a lot of them take it way too far in a reactionary direction—but. … There is something fundamentally true to the notion of wanting things to be somewhat stable and familiar. I just three weeks ago moved my whole family from Washington, D.C., to Colorado.We all know moving is incredibly stressful, and it’s not just because of all the logistics you have to deal with. Uprooting yourself is deeply stressful, and [it] takes a long time to get re-established. More people move in a dynamic society than in the past, but the world around us is changing too, in a way that feels like the same stress that I have with moving. People want [to feel] like, “My life is settled and is going to look roughly tomorrow the way it did today.” There is something very human and understandable about that. How do you get the effects of dynamism without everyone constantly feeling like they’re being uprooted?Virginia: This is a really good question, a really hard question. Part of it goes back to this idea of nested rules and also nested commitments. One of the important aspects of dynamist rules is that they allow for commitments—that you can make contracts of various kinds (to use that term), but it could also be marriage; it could be, I'm going to live in this town, and I'm going to be involved in civic institutions and volunteer institutions, and I'm going to put down roots here.That said, one of the difficult things is that one person’s stability is an intrusion on another person’s plans often. For example, I write a lot about housing, and there’s some about housing in the book, but there’s not as much as I would probably put there if I were writing it today. One thing that we see in Los Angeles, where I live, is there are a lot of veto players whenever you want to build anything, and they are people who want their neighborhood to stay the same.One result of that is that people who have grown up in Los Angeles, the children of people who lived here, cannot live here anymore because it’s too expensive. That's this kind of, I want stability [laughs]—oh, but wait a minute; I’d also like to see my grandchildren, but now they live in Texas because they couldn’t afford to live here. There’s often trade-offs with issues of trying to make stability, but human life inherently changes. Generations come and go; we grow older; people have children, et cetera.There is a certain amount of change that always is going to happen, but there is a highly nonideological issue which comes up, in fact, in my most recent book, The Fabric of Civilization, in the context of the original Luddites. The original Luddites were not ideologues [chuckles]; they were not stasists who wanted to keep medieval ways because they liked what the Middle Ages represented to their intellect.They were hand weavers who had prospered from the invention of mechanical spinning, which gave them ample supplies of thread. So they had prospered because of the technological and economic upheavals of a generation earlier, and now they were losing their jobs to power looms, and so they were mad. They were stressed. At that time, losing your job was not like losing your job in 21st century America; losing your job meant your children might starve.There was a reason to be upset. They engaged in both nonviolent civic activity, petitioning Parliament and that sort of thing—and also violent riots and smashing looms and that sort of thing. The government said, “No, you don’t get to choose.” There was a technocratic aspect of that, which is, they said, "Look, this is going to be good for society. It’s going to create new jobs and new industries. It’s going to make Britain more prosperous against its rivals.” All of these kinds of things. And so power looms went ahead, and some of the Luddites got deported to Australia (the more violent ones).That is really important in the history of economic prosperity, and the people who were the children and grandchildren and great-great-great-grandchildren of those people are far better off in basically every respect than their ancestors, but it was a true, genuine, painful transition. I don’t know what my prescription would’ve been back then other than let this go forward. In a richer society, there are things that can be done with redistribution to ease those transitions.Another thing that I think we don't emphasize nearly enough in the U.S. today is the traditional American thing of moving to different parts of the country. There's considerable evidence that people are more locked into place than they used to be, and that makes certain things more difficult. Particularly, if you are somebody who is living in Detroit, say, it might be better if you could move to Colorado or North Carolina, but you don't have the money, because moving is not just disruptive; it's expensive to do so.There may be other barriers like licensing regulations or that sort of thing, but the main barrier, aside from the psychological barrier, is the financial one. I think that that's the sort of thing you need to think about from a policy point of view. But you're right. People like change; they like the benefits of change; but only up to a point.Aaron: There's another side to it, too, I think. As I was re-reading the book in prep for our conversation, I kept thinking there's a moral imperative of dynamism when you think about it in a social context, because the story you just told is an economic and a production one. The disruption that can come from changes in economics—and we see this all the time like a lot of the reactionary movement right now is—but we're losing the old lifestyle of working in the factory in the small town and supporting your family at a middle-class level on one salary. That's gone away.That's an economic story, but I think a lot of what we're seeing today from illiberal sides is about social change. The anti-trans backlash is in a lot of respects about this: “My conceptions of gender and gender roles are that there are people who are setting those aside, living in ways that are contrary to them, but we also see the traditional family is under attack.”It's not under attack in the sense of someone is coming and trying to just tear apart my traditional family, but that there are people who are living in nontraditional ways, and it makes me uncomfortable. In that case, it seems harder to justify the stasist worldview from a moral standpoint, because what you're saying is often that people who were traditionally marginalized or oppressed are now able to get outside of—are now centered in a way that they didn't used to be, are gaining privilege in a way that they didn't used to be, have status in a way that they didn't used to have.Or are able to express themselves and author their own identities in ways that they weren’t, and I don't like that; that makes me uncomfortable. We need to shut it down; we need to punish corporations that are too “woke” in what they're expressing or what they're putting in movies and television. That one seems harder to say yes, you've got a point [to], because telling other people they can't have dynamic self-identities isn't the kind of thing that we should necessarily correct for or compromise with.Virginia: Yes and no. The way you put it, sure, but it's also the case that a lot of these fights are between two sides each of which wants to force the other one to adopt its worldview and to pay obeisance to its worldview. So that it's not just that I have to tolerate someone who has [another worldview], whether they believe that everyone who doesn't believe in Jesus will go to hell, or whether they believe that someone with male genitalia can be considered a woman.Those are two worldviews that you can live with in a society, where people hold those views, and we just tolerate them, and it's like, I don't care if you believe Mercury is in retrograde and makes your computer go crazy. I think it's stupid, but okay, sure what the hell. We can treat them like that, or we can have fights where everybody has to get on the same page. And a lot of what we're negotiating now is what is it where everybody has to be on the same page.These are the great fights that led to liberalism in the first place—[these] were the religious wars, where there was an assumption that unless everybody agreed on that [question], unless everybody in the society was of the same faith, the society would not be strong. Obviously, this is potted history, but they kept fighting over that until they were exhausted and said, “Let's have liberalism instead.” That's oversimplifying much. A lot of these fights today are about, How do you accommodate when people have radically different worldviews, live in the same society, have to know about each other's worldviews?One of the differences today versus when I was growing up in the Bible Belt is that everybody sees everything. The people I went to college with at Princeton for the most part—I was raised a liberal Presbyterian, but the assumptions I made about the people around me—I might as well have been from Mars. I could understand Renaissance literature, because it's steeped in a religious society, in a way that most of the people that I went to school with couldn't, because they had never been in a place where everybody was religious—and really religious, not just nominally.Also, that affects jokes and stuff. Supposedly, my freshman roommate got mad, she told somebody, because I had said she was going to hell. Considering I didn't believe in hell, that was impossible, but I must have made some joke that anybody who knew me in high school would've understood. Anyway, this is a long way of saying that I think that you are right, and this goes to the issue of commitments and being able to carve out your own life. Some of these fights are about that.One of the things that happened since I wrote the Future and Its Enemies is [gay marriage]. When I wrote the Future and Its Enemies, I was for gay marriage, but that was way ahead of the curve. It advanced partly because of this desire to have a commitment. I see this as a constant negotiation, and I also see the economic ideals as not being completely disconnected from it.People talk about the good old days: Let's go back to the good old days, when you could work in a factory and have a union job and raise a family on one income and all of that. Well, first of all, I'm from South Carolina, and that wasn't the case then. Even if you were white, people were poor. Yes, you could do that—you could raise a family on one income—if you were an engineer, but not if you worked in a textile mill. You would have both parents working in a textile mill and probably the teenage kids as well—and that's, again, if you were white. If you were Black, you were even worse off. So there is a kind of centering, as you say, of a particular not only ethnically narrow experience, but also even regionally narrow experience in that kind of nostalgia. I think that remembering who's left out is an important part. It goes to this issue of the knowledge problem—of the idea that dynamism allows people to operate on their local knowledge. It allows people who might not be included in the big, top-down view to force themselves to be included, because they just go through life and do their thing.Aaron: I think part of that is not necessarily stasists, or not necessarily stasists versus dynamism or change, but about pace of change. This is the point that you made about we're all aware of what each other is doing in a way that we didn't used to be. There always are subcultures; a subculture adopts a handful of things and then innovates on them very quickly and becomes weird and pops up. Suddenly everyone's goth for a little while, and goth is very different. And this shows up in fashion frequently, or in me trying to keep up with my middle schoolers slang or so on. With the social media stuff in particular, we end up in these situations where you don't even think that your subculture is a subculture anymore. You think it is the dominant culture because you've cultivated your Twitter following, and everyone you know online knows to talk this way, or that these terms are passé or shouldn't be used anymore or whatever. Then you assume that's what everyone knows and everyone talks about. I don't even know that, in a lot of cases, it is you saying, “I want to force my subculture’s views on everyone else”; it's more just you assume that that's what all of the views are.Virginia: It's like my joke about you're going to hell. I assume that you know how I mean it—oh, wait a minute, you don't, because you don't come from that subculture. It used to be that these subcultures were [overlooked]. The mainstream media—The New York Times, Time Magazine—did not know, and even Gallup polling did not know, there was such a thing as “born-again Christians” until Jimmy Carter. And they were a huge percentage of the population. It's just that they weren't the people who worked at The New York Times; they weren't the people who lived in New York, for the most part.Partly because I have this weird background of having lived in a lot of different parts of the country, I'm more aware of how many subcultures there are, and my Facebook friends come from all of them, pretty much. I think you're absolutely right that part of what happens is people assume that their norms are universal, or should be universal, and that therefore people who violate them are bad people.And there are rewards for making those assumptions. There are rewards in terms of attention. There are rewards in terms of, “You go, girl,” or whatever, and that has been corrosive. I think that it's not new in human history, but as you say, there has been an acceleration of it, and the idea that you could know about these horrible other people who think differently from you is more likely. You don't just know about them, you probably get a distorted picture of them, because it's being filtered through people who are spinning it or selectively representing it in a way that maximizes not only its strangeness, but its “evil.”Aaron: Yes. I think we also, too, don't necessarily appreciate the pace at which things change and become accepted in our subcultures. You mentioned you wrote this book—this book was published in 1998, I think it was.Virginia: Yes. Right. So I was writing it in like 1996, '97.Aaron: I was in high school in the 90s. Thinking about gay marriage—you mentioned gay marriage—how dramatic the change on acceptance of gay relationships and gay marriage has been: When I was in high school, Ellen coming out on her sitcom was, like, We're going to have a gay character on television! This was national news; everyone was talking about it. Whereas now, 30 years later, it's just like, so what, there's a gay character.It happens very quickly, and this makes me think how much of this is about—and going back to the rules, too—ambiguity versus clarity; that people want to know how things are, and how they're going to be. And a lot of rapid change is not constant. It's not uniform. It is experimentation and competing views and figuring out which is the right one, or which is the acceptable one.All of that messiness means that things are ambiguous, and that what we want is clarity. We want to know, okay, this is the rule that I'm going to have to follow tomorrow. This is what's going to be acceptable. I'm not going to get called out for this. I'm willing to change, but I want to know what it's going to be. That dynamism is inherently ambiguous.Virginia: Well, I think that is part of it. I think people do want to be able to make their own plans and structure their own lives in a way that it is going to work for them. I would argue that you're better off in a world where people aren't constantly making new rules, from their plans, to run your plans. That's one of the big Dynamist ideas. But you were talking about people wanting clarity. One of the things that I've written about over the years is clothing sizes and problems of fit. Bear with me; this is relevant. People tend to think that it would be better if there were specific clothing sizes—that if you knew that every size eight dress was for a 35-inch bust and a 28-inch waist (I'm making these up) and 40-inch hips, or something like that, that would be great, because everything would be the same. You would know exactly what you were getting. It would actually be terrible. In the ‘40s, the catalog companies actually went to the government and said, Could you please establish some standard sizes? And they did. But almost as soon as they were established, different brands started not complying with them, because it wasn't required; it wasn't a regulation. The reason is that people's bodies come in different proportions—even two people who are the same height and weight. One will have longer legs, one will have shorter arms, one will have a bigger waist, the other will have bigger hips, et cetera. What happens is that brands develop their own fit models and their own sizes. The lack of clarity actually makes it more possible for people to find what fits. I think that is an analogy to one aspect of dynamism—that is, the fact that there isn't a single model that everyone must comply with makes it more likely that people can structure their own lives in meaningful ways. Now that said, this goes back to this issue of nested rules. Hammering down on people because they express views that were perfectly normal 10 minutes ago, or worse yet, because they use a term in a nonpejorative way (they think), and suddenly, it's turned out that it's now pejorative: This is not good. This is a kind of treating as fundamental rules things that should be flexible and adjustable and tolerant. There is this idea of tolerance when we talk about tolerance as a liberal value, a liberal virtue, but there's also mechanical tolerances. I think a society needs that kind of tolerance as well. That allows for a certain amount of differentiation and pliability; that allows things to work, and it allows people not to be constantly punished. Zero tolerance is a bad idea. Anytime people are having zero tolerance, you're almost always going to be running into trouble.Aaron: You published this book 24 years ago. As I said at the beginning, I think the framework and the thesis that you articulated in it is really powerful and helpful for understanding things. But the political landscape and the cultural landscape looks rather different now than it did in the ’90s. Looking at the threats to dynamism that we see today and the rise of illiberalism, what are the lessons that we should draw from the stasist-versus-dynamist framework for countering those threats, or at least understanding them in a way that may prove helpful to ameliorating them?Virginia: Well, there are different forms of illiberalism around the world, and there are different reasons that people back them. One of the things that is striking in the rise of Trump in the U.S. is that one component of the people who voted for him—I don't know whether this would be true if he runs again, because the whole January 6 thing alters it somewhat—were frustrated dynamists. They were people who are really sick of technocracy; they're really sick of being told what they can and cannot do. They're really sick of the fact that it's hard to build things—that it's hard to create, especially with atoms, rather than bits. Peter Thiel might be a a high-profile example, but there are lots of just little guys who own plumbing companies or whatever who are in that category. The notion that you need to knock over the table to effect change: I think some of that comes from this idea that technocracy has tied down ordinary people like Gulliver and the Lilliputians.I think one thing that needs to happen—again, I don't know that this applies in Hungary, but certainly I think it's applicable in the U.S.—is that technocrats need to get their act together, at least some of them, and need to get a little more dynamism in their heads. You're seeing some of this among intellectuals like Ezra Klein and Matt Yglesias on the center-left, and you definitely see it in the issues around housing. That's one thing, because dynamists can't do it alone, and we need allies; we need to peel off technocrats who will support us, many of whom are liberals or think of themselves as liberals, in the sense that they're not illiberal. As far as the people who really want to go back to the Middle Ages, part of this is that you need to tell different stories—and this is hard. Culture is hard. This is not a libertarian show, but one of the things that I say to libertarians and also to conservatives is that they always talk about culture the way leftists talk about markets: as if there's one giant lever. If I could just get my hands on that lever and pull, I could make everything the way I want it. That's a fallacy in markets, and it's a fallacy in culture as well. Whether you like it or not, it's a dynamic process. I hadn't really thought about this, but in a way, The Fabric of Civilization, my latest book, which is the story of world history through the story of textiles, says the world is always changing. Even in the periods where it changes slowly, it changes. There are always people who are pushing against the established order, whether it's economic or cultural or whatever.Another thing that it says quite explicitly in the discussion of traditional clothing—and if somebody goes to my Substack, you can see that I posted this—is that people don't generally want to make a choice between tradition/identity and modernity/progress: They want both. Given control over their lives, they will find ways to incorporate both, to hold onto what they value in terms of their identity and tradition, and to get the benefits of modernity and liberalism.I think many people who really like change don't fully appreciate that. It was definitely not appreciated at the beginning of the 20th century and the technocratic move that we talked about earlier, but the example I use is the way indigenous women in Guatemala dress. Now, they can buy jeans and t-shirts just like everybody else, but they choose to dress in traditional garments—except they're not really traditional. They've changed in a lot of different ways. The daily blouse is made in a factory. It's made out of polyester. It's not woven on a handloom, but it still looks Maya because that identity is important. I think there is a universalizing element of liberalism that wants everyone to be a rootless cosmopolitan. Even those of us who basically are rootless cosmopolitans aren't really. We actually do have roots. I am very dedicated to living in Los Angeles. I really am from the South; whether I like it or not, it shaped me in certain ways. I have certain ties.Liberalism needs to understand that that's how people are—that they care about where they come from. They care about things that are passed down in their families. They care about their community ties, and that is perfectly compatible with liberalism and dynamism. But the manifestations of that will change. This is why the great social success story of the past 25 years—this is from a liberal, social point of view—is the story of gay marriage, because it says, yes, gay people are different in certain ways, but they are embedded in families. They want to be embedded in families—not every single one—but in the sense that most people want to be embedded in families. The mere fact that you have a sexual orientation toward the same sex does not mean that you want to leave that all behind; it means you want to have Thanksgiving, and you want to get married, and you want to have kids. And all of that which is part of normal human life since time immemorial can take a slightly different turn and still be compatible with these very ancient, conservative institutions, which, by the way, have taken a zillion different forms over human history.Aaron: Thank you for listening to Reactionary Minds, a project of The UnPopulist. If you want to learn more about the rise of a liberalism and the need to defend a free society, check out theunpopulist.substack.com.Bonus Material: Virginia Postrel, The Future and its EnemiesVirginia Postrel, “Continuity and Change: The case of Maya trajes.” This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit theunpopulist.substack.com