Reactionary Minds with Aaron Ross Powell

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

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 writer Damon Linker, founder of Eyes on the Right, a Substack newsletter. 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. The mainstream of the American right, as well as the Republican Party, looks quite a bit different today than it did 10 years ago. Trumpism's rise and its near-total take over the GOP has fundamentally changed our political landscape.To talk through what's going on and to explore the best ways to approach understanding the evolution of the liberal right, I'm joined today by Damon Linker, author of the Substack Eyes on the Right. He's also a senior fellow with the Open Society Project at the Niskanen Center and a weekly participant on the Beg to Differ podcast at The Bulwark. Both of our projects, Eyes on the Right, and then this podcast Reactionary Minds, are about understanding the forces of illiberalism that appear to be more threatening today than they seem to have been in the recent past. What's your approach to getting at that deeper understanding?Damon Linker: First of all, thanks for having me on the podcast. I value quite a lot what you're trying to do and do think it's a shared project that we have here, and the more the merrier, the more the better for our politics. I guess what I try to bring to the discussion and analysis, it was something I talk about in my inaugural post for Eyes on the Right, which is a kind of empathy for what is driving people to embrace the populist right.Now, by that, I do not mean making the case for them. What I mean is trying to think our way into the minds of people who will find these messages appealing. What is it about the liberal order that has them feeling discontented? What has them receptive to these severe critiques of the liberal order? The method behind the madness, the goal of this approach is to construct a more effective response, to actually try to meet the populist right where it is and speak on the basis of its premises, rather than always begin from liberal premises where what you end up with is just talking past each other and rejecting each other's starting points without ever actually engaging with them directly.I guess the rationale would be, you have to move the two parties a little bit closer together before they can really duke it out over what's really at stake. That's, in abstract terms at least, what I'm trying to accomplish.Aaron: In that opening essay for Eyes on the Right, I had underlined that part about empathy because it sometimes feels hard for—I have a lot of friends who are deeply involved in gay rights and trans rights, for example, and to say to them, you should approach with empathy, understanding of people who are labeling you groomers and saying you can't have pictures of your same-sex spouse on your desk if you're a school teacher, or people who want to institute a Catholic theocracy over the country, these are really threatening things and really immediately dangerous things; Proud Boys showing up at pride events. It can be hard to say, if you're in that situation, just to think I should be trying to understand at an empathetic level, the people who are calling me groomers.Why Empathize With Extremists?Damon: Yes, I totally understand that, and it's a natural human response. In that respect, what I'm advocating is difficult. It's a challenge, and it works against the instincts that are provoked by our politics where both sides—I am guilty of often using the formulation "both sides", but I don't usually mean a kind of moral equivalency. It's a formal mirroring that tends to happen in partisan politics. What I mean is that both sides in our politics have an activist sensibility these days where the goal is not simply to really persuade the persuadable. It's also to provoke your enemy.You try to say the most outrageous, insulting thing, the most caricatured version of your opponent in the hopes that they will then lash out against what you are saying in an extreme way which will then help you in your own position. You see this a lot obviously in the entire right-wing media edifice that is out there constantly. Part of it involves something else I talked about in my inaugural post about the fallacy of composition, where the fallacy involves you take one part of a whole that is particularly provocative or outrageous or insulting, and you direct huge amounts of attention to that and treat it as if it is exemplary of the whole.Is it true that professors, especially in the humanities and social sciences on the whole lean to the left? Absolutely true, indisputably the case. Is it true that all professors or nearly all professors are left-wing activists who have contempt for conservatives and centrists and want to humiliate students who come from those ideological starting points in the classroom? No, not at all.Yet, we now have a whole infrastructure on the right where a series of websites are out there trolling, asking for young conservative students to send examples of particularly outrageous left-wing professorial, pedagogical transgressions, which then get promoted on those websites, that then get picked up by Tucker Carlson, who then runs a 15-minute segment on prime time for 4 million viewers on Fox News, the premise of which is, "Look at how terrible all these left-wing professors are. Don't send your kids to college because they're going to be brainwashed to be leftist authoritarians." That's the process in a nutshell.There is a way in which it also works in reverse where the left will fasten on to the most egregious, fascistic statement of someone on the right and then try to make it seem as if everyone from Liz Cheney on over to Trump and then past Trump to Proud Boy, neo-fascist like this guy Nick Fuentes. Everything between them is all equally terrible. Now, why would someone who's a Democrat or another kind of progressive want to say that? Well, because you want to win the election. You don't want anyone anywhere to vote for the other side. You try to collapse the distinctions and assimilate everyone who's your opponent in an election to the worst example of the other side. It's a temptation that I think does need to be resisted. Maybe not always at the level of political contestation where this can be a very effective tactic, but at the level of intellectual reflection. For understanding's sake, we need to try to not let ourselves be triggered in the way that our political opponents very much would like us to be for their own benefit.Trump’s Unique DangerousnessAaron: When we're approaching that task, should we be distinguishing—let's just stick to assessing the right, although I think this argument applies, as you said, to looking at ideologies more broadly, but should we be distinguishing, say, conservatism generally as a political ideology from the base of people who think of themselves or ordinary voters who think of themselves as conservatives, but may hold as we know from political science data, people's self-described labels often affixed to wildly diverse viewpoints that are often in direct conflict with other people affixing the same label to themselves, versus the people actually in power: the ones who are controlling or have access to the levers of the state and how it directs its coercive forces. Because it seems like one response to what you've just said is yes, of course, we shouldn't pick out the most extreme examples of bad stuff on the right and say that's representative of everyone, just like we shouldn't do that for the left or any other group, but it does seem like one thing that's happened in the last say six years is that the most extreme parts of the right have gained control of the levers of power. They're the ones who are setting the broader agenda for what happens when the right is in control, even if the base is much more moderate.Damon: Yes. I take the point and I'm glad you brought up the topic of distinction making because that's yet another thing that I’m impressing in the Substack and in my writing lately. I'd love to talk through that. I'm actually working right now on a relatively short post in response to an op-ed that the writer and columnist Max Boot published in the Washington Post today, which is Wednesday, July 6th, in which he says, in effect, looks like Trump might not be the nominee in 2024 after all. It could be Ron DeSantis, and actually, he's worse because he's more disciplined and smarter, and so forth. He's a bigger threat than Trump.I'm pushing back on that on the basis of distinction-making. Let's walk this through and it touches on a lot of what you raised in your question. I don't think there is anything written in stone that what conservatism or right of center politics in a liberal democracy, what its policy matrix has to be. From Ronald Reagan through, say, the Mitt Romney campaign in 2012 in the United States, what did conservatism mean?Well, it pretty much meant suspicion of big government, support for cutting taxes whenever possible, generally in favor of free trade, in favor of pretty much open immigration policy, a muscular foreign policy directed towards spreading democracy around the world, and opposing authoritarianism, and then finally, a principled moral traditionalism on social issues that ranged from appointing judges who would overturn Roe v. Wade, which has recently been a success after 49 years of trying, to opposition to the series of reforms that have come up on the progressive left from racial issues through to women's rights, gay rights, trans rights, and so forth.That's what it meant to be a conservative until pretty recently now with Trump—it became with Trump and is now becoming the broader consensus among conservatives, that actually what it means is, yes, cutting taxes in government, on the whole, is good, but if those things can be used to help working-class Americans, then maybe those things aren't so bad.For similar reasons, free trade is often not good because it hurts working-class people supposedly. Similarly, immigration isn't usually good because that's also not good for that economic consideration, but also for broader identity reasons. The ethnic and racial makeup of the country changes in ways a lot of Americans don't like, at least conservative Americans don't like, and then a much more—well, also suspicion on foreign policy using American power for moral goals is suspicious now.Finally, the moral traditionalist argument on social issues hasn't really changed, but it's more aggressive and it's metastasized, and touched more areas of policy. Is there anything illegitimate about that latter group of policies in and of itself? Should that not be permitted within liberal democratic politics to have the right side of the spectrum be defined that way?I actually don't think there is any principled reason to think that that should not be allowed to be the right-leaning contesting party's position. Now, the problem is that some of those positions brush up against moral commitments that put into question some of American principles, but those principles themselves evolve over time. So I would prefer that those policy questions get debated in the political arena as has always been the case. I do think it's okay for the right-leaning party to change what it cares about.Where things get really dicey is when those policy shifts get combined with what we see, actually, I think in the United States more acutely than any other country contending with this shift, is that the right-leaning party that has shifted in this way can barely win elections because those positions aren't that popular, and the way they are interacting with America's peculiar electoral system with multiple levers and all kinds of counter-majoritarian trip wires leads us to a situation in which we get January 6th and everything that led up to it.People talk about Viktor Orbán and Hungary a lot as an exemplar of how dangerous he's at the leading edge of where this is going. I don't like Orbán. I would never vote for him. I think he's pernicious, he's done all kinds of negative things, but I think Trump is actually much more dangerous than Orbán. Orbán actually, even if he puts his thumb on the scale a little bit in various ways to give him and his party, the Fidesz party, an edge in an electoral contest, he actually does, and his party does, win votes.His party won in 2010 before he became a full-on populist and made a lot of those reforms. His share of the vote and his party's share of the vote hasn't changed markedly between then and now. He doesn't win 90% of the vote like Saddam Hussein or another dictator or Soviet dictator would've in the old days or even Putin today. He wins a little more than half. Then there are all these jiggered things within the electoral system that then enhances that slight edge into a much stronger majority within the legislature, but that's common. It happens in the UK, where in the last election, the conservatives won a bit more than labor, but they won way more seats than labor because you get amplification.Whereas in this country, not only is the Trumpist populist impulse a little troubling because it does push the policy matrix a little bit away from the consensus liberalism that preceded it, but that is combined by the fact that Trump and the Republicans can barely win power given that their position isn't overwhelmingly popular and has a huge, very strong opposition. They then combine that marginal ability to win with contempt for the very institutions that would freeze them out of power if they lose.That institutional attack, I think, is more profound than what even someone like Victor Orbán is attempting in Hungary, and we need to distinguish between all of these things. The last point before I stop blathering, to go back to my original statement about the Max Boot column, I think Max is wrong on this, that actually as bad as DeSantis would be, and again, I would not vote for the guy, I would be a critic of his from beginning to end if he actually became president, but would he do what Trump did on January 6th? I doubt it. Maybe he would. I guess we don't have a huge track record on the guy, but in general, I don't fear that with him in the same way that I do with Trump.That means that Trump shows and displays a contempt for the rule of law and instinctual authoritarianism that is sui generis to him, and he's spreading it to his most devoted followers and supporters. But it is so far still relatively contained to that sub-segment of the right. If we could run various scenarios about 2024 in which the Democrats can't win again because of inflation and other problems, I would vastly prefer DeSantis, Tom Cotton, Nikki Haley, any number of the mini-Trumps that are out there on the right over Trump himself again. Trump himself again is a toxin to liberal democracy that makes him a unique threat. All of these distinctions, I think, are important to make between bad, worse, and worst of all.Aaron: Well, let me pick up on that then because it is the case that, at least as of right now, Trumpism is the dominant force on the right and within the GOP. There's this constant cycle of hopeful articles from centrist and left political commentators saying, "Ah, it looks like his hold on the party is slipping. This is a handful of candidates he picked out, didn't win, his hold is slipping," but they always seem more wishful thinking than reality.Going into 2024, it seems like Trumpism will be the dominant thing whether he's the candidate or not. Certainly, people like DeSantis continue to present themselves as Trumpists or inheritors of the Trumpist mantle, but there's long been this question of whether Trump discovered his audience or created it, discovered his base or created it.What I've wondered and I'm curious for your thoughts on is how much of Trumpism, however we define that, and it could be hard to pin down what the ideological characteristics of Trumpism are, but how much of Trumpism as a movement within the GOP is an ideological movement that can be inherited, say, by someone like DeSantis or that it is effectively a cult of personality, that it is just this fealty to this man, this investment in the Trumpists or whatever it is about Trump they really like, and it doesn't really matter what the ideas are behind it, it's more of just his personality such that if Trump disappears from the stage, so he chooses not to run again, he's indicted, whatever the case is, that this older style GOP, the Reaganite GOP that you talked about earlier, can reestablish itself. Does Trumpism disappear when Trump disappears or is this a fundamental ideological characteristic now of the right?Damon: Great, great question. There's so much in there, so much that could be said. It's obviously a very complicated [chuckles] situation. All right. At one level, clearly, if you know the history of the American right, you know that the general dispensation that Trump represents ideologically has been there for a long time. There's one story you can tell about the right that had been told for many decades by people in the National Review circle.I think an heir to that would be Matt Continetti's new book The Right which is a new history of the right in America. That version goes something like this, that the right prior to, say, World War II was paleocon. It was suspicious of alliances and trade and very knee-jerk traditionalists about morals and suspicious of Washington and government. It was a folk libertarianism to quote my former colleague Bonnie Kristian who is now writing as an independent author and had a Times op-ed about this recently. So that was the right.Then after the end of World War II with Buckley founding National Review, you have the attempt to found a more internationalist right. It ends up taking a side in the cold war very hawkishly in favor of the United States and democratic capitalism against Soviet communism.It sort of cosmopolitanized the right a little bit. Now, the original paleocon instinct remained there and it remained there all along. Buckley tried to police the margins of it, tried to excommunicate the Birchers and other small groups that were more rooted in that more conspiratorial folk libertarian attitude, the kind of people who thought that Eisenhower was a communist, the great general who won World War II in Europe, who was president and a Republican, he was a communist plant. This kind of an attitude.That Buckley-ite policing of the boundaries and then expanding what conservatism could appeal to and the electorate reached its greatest apotheosis in the victory of Ronald Reagan, and from Reagan, once again through, say, Mitt Romney's 2012 campaign, you have—conservatism is that. The paleocon stuff's still there, still showing up usually on election day to vote for the head of the party and to vote for local offices for the Republicans, but yet a little disgruntled, not very happy, going along. You get moments of populist rebellion, like 1992, Pat Buchanan challenges George H. W. Bush in his reelection campaign and gives this blood-thirsty speech at the Republican Convention.That's the narrative that leads to a conclusion that Trump didn't make this. He saw that establishment Republicanism that had governed the party and the country often starting with Reagan had weakened and was ripe for being toppled. He tapped into the increasingly angry rest of paleocons who had been there all along for about the last 90 years, grumbling in the background, and became their champion, and what we've seen over the last six years is a revolution in which that base of paleocons over through the Reaganite elites, and they're now in charge. A lot of that is tied up with the policy matrix that I mentioned earlier, the shift on trade and immigration and foreign policy, and all those things.There's another argument too, another tendency, which you also mentioned and talked about, which is just Trump as a person embodying a populist impulse, which is not limited to the American scene, but is a perpetual threat to liberal democracies everywhere. Which is a demagogue who comes up and gains power through deploying very hostile rhetoric against the establishment, against those people in power, whether they're allied with my enemies politically or my allies, whether they're in politics or business or entertainment, it doesn't matter. It's them, the elites, and I am the champion of the “true people” and want to overthrow them.Trump was, it turned out to be, one of the greatest demagogues in American history and maybe world history. We can't judge that yet, let's see how all of this works out, and I say greatest in the sense of incredibly talented, but execrable. The guy is a genius at fastening on to the thing that will make the crowds cheer and mixing in a kind of humor with it at the same time, that makes it sound like he's not taking himself too seriously, winking about how it's all an act at the very moment that he's doing the most vicious things possible with language, attacking the press, journalists, seeming like he's stirring up violence against them, while joking that like, "Well, of course, we're not going to let you attack the journalist, let her go." He's just very, very good at that.Now, your question to set this up was which is it? What is it that has infected the Republican party? The truth is it is a blend, I think, of the two. One of the problems I'd say that Tom Cotton has, Tom Cotton also would love to run for president in 2024. He has given speeches, including at the Reagan Library several months ago that I wrote about, that are very clearly Trumpian speeches on the side of the first category that I just ran through. Very conservatism inflected with paleocon themes on the "new correct side" on all of these issues of foreign policy and trade and immigration and social issues, very rabidly engaged in the culture war in a way that is redolent of Trump.In all those ways, he sounds like a Trumpist, but he's boring as hell and has no charisma. He sounds like a wet noodle standing up there and looks like a geek who tried to make the basketball team and was cut in the first round of cuts. That makes me very skeptical that he could succeed in this environment. DeSantis on the other hand has been shrewd enough and talented enough to combine or tried to combine both in a way that I haven't seen in another candidate. I think it's one reason why so many on the right like him.He stands abstractly in favor of a lot of the policy changes that Trump brought in, but as the governor of a state, he has more power than one of a hundred senators like Cotton to actually do certain things to show, "See? I'll use power to achieve these things." Then he also combines that with a really swaggering obnoxious populist demagogic rhetoric that includes him getting up on a stage in front of some high school kids wearing masks during the worst pandemic in a century and berating them in front of the cameras to "Take off your damn masks. Freedom."I don't know what your language rating is for this podcast, but I'll at least stoop to say, you can bleep me out if you need to, he's performatively an a*****e. That is part of his schtick. That I think makes him a more plausible successor to Trump because you do need both. You need that kind of anti-cosmopolitan issue conglomeration that Trump has now put at the center of the right, combined with a pure populist and demagogic attack on the people who would police us morally in positions of power, to basically stick a middle finger up at them and say, "I'm going to say anything I want. F you. I don't care."You need both, and Trump has both, and DeSantis among all the options out there I think comes closest to matching that. He might not have Trump's instinctual genius at it, but he clearly I think—he at least understands that he needs to include that in his message, not just the what, but the how in the message, and has enough talent at the latter that he can at least be a potential rival as the leader of that faction.The Global Rise of the Populist RightAaron: I want to pick up on another thing in your inaugural essay for Eyes on the Right because I liked it quite a lot as a statement of purpose for the broader project. One of the things you mentioned is a pushing back on what we might call American provincialism, which is to analyze all of this in the context of what is happening in America. You mentioned Orbán, who's an example of this populism in Europe, but this rise of far-right reactionary populism is not limited to the United States. It's not limited to Donald Trump.We have seen it happen in other countries in forms that look—they're distinguishable from Trumpism, but they share a lot of common features. What has happened in the last decade or so to lead to this renewed movement of right-wing reactionary populism on a more global scale?Damon: Well, another great question, and another big answer, which I will try to keep within reasonable limits. I mean, it's obviously very complicated because now, we're not only talking about a continent-wide liberal democracy of 330-odd [million] people, but now we're talking about the broader world with all the differences across countries and regions and histories and so forth.I do think there are certain commonalities that we can point to. Clearly, after the end of the cold war, there was kind of a consensus in countries across the free world that, if not full Francis Fukuyamaism, which I've also written about on the podcast, as an exemplification of a certain form of this, but at least that consensus that, well, obviously, far-right politics including fascism and totalitarianism on the far right, that is off-limits.Most countries, say, 30 years ago, thought that was like not even open for debate, but now with the fall of the Soviet Union, it appears that the leftward side of the spectrum has now been cut off as also legitimate. What we're dealing with is that politics going forward in free societies will take place within the 40-yard lines. There will be contestation, there will be elections, and they will be between a center-right party or parties and a center-left party or parties.They will be about whether to cut taxes or raise taxes a little bit, expand government, or cut government a little, whether to choose this or that battle with a revanchist authoritarian state somewhere, maybe in the Middle East or elsewhere, whether to get involved in this war or that war, whether we'll all get together in a coalition of the willing to do battle with them and show them they have to join the club, start taking loans from the World Bank and the IMF and so forth, and whether immigration should be completely open and free or somewhat limited, whether it's going to be for like Canada does for the sake of meeting certain demands for labor within a country for a certain period of time, or it's just going to be open to all comers.These will be our debates. Yes or no, little more, little less, again, within the 40-yard lines of the field, and that's about it. Now, this worked pretty well through the '90s and even into the 2000s, though in the United States because of 9/11 and then eventually Europe, when they had terrorist attacks, this was jolted, it was pushed, but it was pretty resilient, at least until after the financial crisis of 2008, which began in the United States, and then rippled throughout the global economy, caused loss of a lot of wealth.Of course, one of the big economic changes in the post-Cold War world has been the opening up of the finance sector to small-time investors in the form of retirement accounts, and then the companies that handle pensions abroad, investing in the stock market around the world, global markets, and all of that took a big hit in 2008. That bred resentment, then added to resentment about immigration in a lot of countries.It's a little different in Europe than it is in the United States. Here, there always has been more openness to a harder right-wing critique of some of these neoliberal trends. I'll use the term "neoliberal", which no one can seem to define to describe the Fukuyaman tendency of the 40-yard lines defining politics. In this country, there always have been people on the right, they were allowed to make a critique and say, "Maybe we should cut back on immigration. Maybe we should care more about rising crime rates. Maybe we should make certain other changes," but in Europe, Muslim immigration, for instance, in France has been much, much higher, much higher percentage of the population there than here, partly because of the colonial history of the country and allowing immigrants from, say, Algeria in over other countries and then some of it is a result of guilt over the legacy of this.For various reasons in different countries, Germany has a lot of Turkish immigrants for historic reasons because of labor. In the post-war decades, they brought in a lot of Turks to, again, like Canada to fill holes in the labor economy in the country. Because of the history of fascism on the continent and shame about colonialism and its moral legacy, there was more of a sense in Europe that you can't really object to having, say, high Muslim immigration because then you're evil, you're a racist, and that's not allowed.Maybe in Europe, it became not between the 40-yard lines. Even on the right, it became like the 45-yard line. You combine that kind of limiting of the margins with resentment over in this country about how the war on terror was waged and our inability to actually decisively win these battles around the world and wondering why we even did them in the first place and why the intelligence about weapons in Iraq was so terribly flawed, and then add in terrorist attacks in Europe after 9/11 in Spain and France and other places, and feeling like the elites here who are in charge defending those margins, the 40- or 45-yard lines, are inept. They won't actually allow us to debate these things. The anger about the lack of a justice-driven response to the aftermath of the financial crisis in 2008.You get the sense, looking back, it's clear there was a boiling pressure building up from the lower classes, from people who are not members of this neoliberal elite consensus of the government is not responding to our anger about these things. You have to listen to us and you have to listen to us and you have to listen to us, saying it over and over again.I do think that whether it's the rise of what Orbán has done in Hungary or the perpetual return of the same Le Pen challenge to the French center, the Brexit vote in the UK, the rise of Trump, the rise of the League in Italy, you go around the world, Bolsonaro in Brazil, what's ended up happening in Turkey with Erdogan where he's ended up versus where he started, Modi in India.In all of these contexts, you have variations on this same story of, "We let you neoliberals run the show for a couple of decades and we're not happy with the results, that you are illegitimately marginalizing the boundaries of political debate." I think one way of understanding what we've been living through is to see that those boundaries have to be fluid. They have to be permitted by the institutions of liberal democracy to shift leftward and rightward, even if they threaten to begin to touch up against something that looks a little like illiberal communism on the left or illiberal fascism on the right, because the attempt to forestall that, to prevent it, to say, "You can't have that opinion, it's illegitimate, it's racist, it's immoral," doesn't make it go away. All it does is increase resentment toward the very institutions that are preventing it. We need a more supple understanding of the fringes if it will, that if you don't let some of it in, you risk a more turbulent reaction against the rules that prevent it from getting in.The last thing I'll say is that an interesting case study, the German situation is a little sui generis both because of Germany's incredible power economically and politically within the EU structure and also because of their distinctive shame over national socialism, which is almost in its own category of awfulness, but it is interesting that the Alternative for Germany, the AfD party, cropped up in the same period, middle of the 2010s, really scared a lot of people, rightly so.It surged to around 15% nationally in Germany which was enough again to scare a lot of people and to throw the coalition government there into a little bit of unsettledness because 15% is enough to mess with coalition formation if all the parties refuse to make a deal with and govern with that party because it means that now your total set of potential coalition mates is a lot smaller because 15% of the votes are now off the table for negotiation.The interesting thing is that Germany did not ban the AfD party, they didn't allow it to sit in a government, but they did allow it to be the main opposition party to the Christian Democrat-led Merkel government at the end of her very long reign. The result is that the support for the AfD has come down. It's now getting 9%, 10%. Can a liberal democracy survive with a far-right party that gets around 10%? I think, yes. Maybe it's better to just allow it to be there, make its case, and then lose by the normal rules of democracy.Germany also has a 5% electoral threshold. If it sinks a lot more, it could even wink out of existence at the level of the Bundestag, which would be a very good thing. Because it could come back if it got more support, but it shows that the system is open to those who are angry on the margins. Again, that can be scary for those of us who would like the—we don't want the 40-yard lines to be enforced from the top. We would prefer, at least I speak for myself, I would prefer it to be roughly within the 40-yard lines but by free choice. [chuckles] I want the electorate to want politics to take place in those somewhat narrow terms. If there starts to be rebellion on those margins, you can't keep it within the 40-yard lines by imposing it from the top down.Aaron: Then bringing this back to the context of the US, our final question, I'll ask another that I fear might be a big one, as far as combating illliberalism in the US, one disadvantage that we have is we don't have a multiparty democracy, so we can't relegate it to a 10% or 15%. We have two parties, and that 10% or 15% can take over one of them and then effectively—and then achieve White House, achieve dominance in the legislature, and so on, be able to exercise power well beyond their 15% support within the electorate.The real worry, I think, is—one of the perennial questions about Trumpism is, does Trumpism represent a genuinely fascist movement? Fascism is another thing that it's awfully hard to come up with a single definition of it, but it does seem to have a lot of legitimately fascist characteristics, and there's a real concern that, say, if Trump wins again and has the control and is able to exercise more control, that he'll push things even in…I Trump would be an authoritarian if he were able to get away with it. Within the US context, how do we take those lessons that you just articulated on the international scene and apply them looking forward two years, 10 years, to try to make sure we don't slip into something that we can't easily recover from?Damon: Yes, again, another great question, and you're completely right that the US situation—I began in one of my first responses and talking about how we have to make distinctions and Trump is worse than DeSantis. There's a way in which the American situation is uniquely alarming in the international context precisely because of what you're saying. We are not a parliamentary system in which the executive sits in the legislature and really has no independent power apart from the multi-coalition government that is in charge at any given moment.That makes our president much more of a potential dictator if he can get away with it. Then we also have a two-party system where it's either one side or the other. If one side, namely the Republicans, becomes devoted to a fascistic leader, then it could potentially control the whole ballgame. Especially with the way upcoming Senate elections are looking, it is at least within the realm of possibility that in 2025, we could have a reelected Donald Trump as president with 61 Republicans in the Senate, which is a true horror show scenario, and it really does scare me.I don't have any great magic bullet response to this. My response is to give a version of the popularism argument that is often made about the Democrats because we haven't talked much about the Democrats in our conversation, but they are the other party. As commentator David Frum said in a very pithy tweet the other day, I won't be able to quote it from memory, but to paraphrase the point he was making in the single tweet, that because of the shape of the different electoral coalition, if the two parties in the US, and the way that those coalitions at the present moment are interacting with our uniquely, distinctively weird American systems, which are really not built for ideologically sorted parties in the way that we have them now. We're in a situation where the Republicans are able to run a politics that is geared toward placating its most radical, committed elements in a way that the Democrats cannot do and win.The Republicans can win by becoming ever more extreme, and that parenthetically, just so your listeners grasp why this might be, it has to do with the fact that both the Senate and the electoral college involve winning states, and Republicans are spread around many more states than the Democrats tend to with a majority. There are more people living in blue states, in states that vote for the Democrats, but there are fewer states that vote, so they get more electoral votes, but not enough to compensate for the fact that the Dakotas and Nebraska and Kansas and all these largely empty states vote for the Republicans, giving them an edge in both of those institutions.That's one-half of the equation that Frum talks about. The other half is that the Democrats, although they cannot placate their left-wing agitating base as much and win, their potential winning coalition is much larger. It's very unlikely that the Republican, say, presidential candidate in 2024 is going to win, say, 55% of the popular vote. That's almost impossible to imagine.It is possible to imagine that a Democratic candidate could do that. Now, I don't know if it would be Biden or Harris or who it could be, but in terms of potential, the Democratic message appeals to more Americans. To see how this interacts with their institutions, all you have to do is look at the results of the 2020 election. Biden won seven million more votes than Donald Trump, but if 50,000 of those votes flipped to Trump in three states, Trump would have won anyway.That is a horrifying prospect for the legitimacy and stability of American democracy because it means that—George W. Bush won the presidency in 2000 while losing the popular vote in one state by a very small number, like a few thousand votes. Trump won in 2016, winning the electoral college while losing the popular vote by almost three million. If Trump had managed to flip those 50,000 or 60,000 votes in three states, he would've been reelected president while losing seven million.These tendencies are increasing over time. It's conceivable that in 2024, you could have a Trump or DeSantis win the presidency while losing the popular vote by 8 million, 9 million, 10 million people, which is going to be very dangerous for American democracy because I do think there are limits to how much losing the Democrats are going to be willing to take if they're actually getting that many more votes in the aggregate.My medium answer to your very complex and important question is the Democrats need to do whatever it takes to prevail. If that means moderating on some social issues, that will alienate some of their more agitated activist base, they should do it for the promise of winning more votes away from the Republicans in the center. Because, really, that's the only thing that the Republicans are going to understand and that could moderate them over the future, which is to realize you can't actually win power saying and doing the things that you're doing.They need to learn that lesson. If they keep being able to squeak out victories doing this, they're going to keep doing it out of simple self-interest. Anyway, that's my unsatisfying answer. I'm never entirely satisfied with how I answer those kinds of questions, including in the post that went up today I made a version of this argument, and after I do it, I think, "Oh, no wonder nobody likes me." [chuckles] It's not very satisfying to say that we have to be the reasonable ones. We have to be the ones to say, "Sorry, you passionate supporters on my own side, you got to sit on it so that we can win later." I get why that pisses some people off.[music]Aaron: Thank you for listening to Reactionary Minds, a project of The UnPopulist. If you want to learn more about the rise of illiberalism and the need to defend a free society, check out theunpopulist.substack.com.Accompanying Reading:Damon Linker, Eyes on the Right’s inaugural post From The UnPopulist: Shikha Dalmia, Populism Sans the Popular Vote: A Dangerous Formula H. David Baer, CPAC Is Going to Hungary, Never Mind Viktor Orban’s Attacks on ChurchesGarvan Walshe, Angela Merkel Helped Defeat Germany’s Populist Far Right Without AppeasementAndy Craig, Trump’s Next Presidential Run Could End the Peaceful Transfer of Power 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 | SpotifyThe following is a transcript of Reactionary Minds’ interview with Stephanie Muravchik and Jon A. Shields, authors of the book Trump’s Democrats. The transcript has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.Aaron Ross Powell: I’m Aaron Ross Powell, and this is Reactionary Minds, a project of The UnPopulist. A good way to understand the appeal of Donald Trump is to talk to the people who voted for him. One of the most interesting ways to approach that is to talk to voters and counties that flipped, long voting for Democratic Party candidates until suddenly in 2016, they didn’t. That’s the background for Trump's Democrats, a book that looks at three communities that turned to Trumpism after having been solidly blue basically forever.I’m joined today by its authors, Professors Stephanie Muravchik and Jon A. Shields of Claremont McKenna College. Their fascinating book explores why Trump clicked with these voters and why many of the very things that turned so many of us off about him were the very things they found so appealing. We’ll discuss machine politics, political bosses, honor cultures, localism and what it means to identify strongly with a narrowly circumscribed place. The story that emerges is a good deal more complex and nuanced than the easy tales we sometimes tell ourselves about us and them.Stephanie, Jon, your book is part of a genre we have seen come out of the Trump years, with academics and journalists going to small towns that voted for Trump, sitting in diners and asking Trump voters why they believe what they believe. I think your book is the best example of that I have come across, the one that I certainly have learned the most from and the one that puts the most work into really getting at the ideas motivating Trump supporters. Can you tell us a bit about what prompted this and how you approached this project?Jon A. Shields: Yes. Thanks, Aaron, for having us, and thanks for the compliment. This is a book that really started on election night in 2016. Like lots of Americans, and, I’m sure, like yourself, we were up late that night watching the returns come in. It was really the most astonishing and surprising election in our lifetime, in our living memory. Immediately, we were eager to get outside of our little academic town and get a feel for what happened.In the weeks that followed, our sense of surprise really deepened. First, we discovered that there were all these Obama-Trump counties. There were all these places that had voted for Obama on two occasions—in fact, there were over 200-some counties that did this—and then flipped for Trump. That itself is very surprising and unusual, especially in this age of polarization, where partisan IDs and loyalties are especially sticky. But then, quickly, we not only discovered that there were all these Obama places that flipped for Trump; we also discovered that a lot of these places had voted Democratic for a very long time. Many of these places had a pretty unbroken record of voting for Democratic presidents, some stretching back to Reagan, some to Nixon, some much further back. In fact, one of the counties we ended up studying was a place that had never voted for a Republican president in its history. This is a county formed in the 19th century and—it’s really astonishing—had never voted for a Republican. In the Western world, that’s probably the longest streak of any polity voting for just one party.That was interesting. Of course, we’re accustomed to thinking and talking about the Nixon Democrats in ’72 or the Reagan Democrats in ’84. In some ways—in lots of ways, actually—the Trump Democrats were much more interesting. Nixon won in a huge landslide in ’72, as did Reagan in ’84, so it’s not so surprising that in those years, you get lots of Democratic places that flip. That’s not weird. In 2016, Trump lost the popular vote, and yet he managed to win some of the most loyal Democratic communities in the country despite that.So we got really interested in not just the red-blue divide, but a divide that had opened up in blue America. We were curious. We wanted to make sense of what had happened. In our college community, Trump is a loathed figure, a sort of proto-authoritarian, a dangerous person. We more or less agree with that point of view. I think there’s a lot to that, but then there are all these other Democratic communities that see him in a radically different way.They see him as one of the greatest presidents in American history, and so we were really deeply interested in that question. Then all these places we studied in 2016, I should add, remain loyal to Trump in 2020. These are places that are really drifting into the Republican Party. Trump is the character who shepherded all these communities into the Republican column, and so that’s quite interesting. That’s how we got interested in the project.Not Your Tea Party TypesAaron: You mentioned Nixon and Reagan and so on, and we have seen that Trumpism represents a populist movement. We have seen prior waves of things that look like populism, the most recent probably being the Tea Party movement. As you point out, the three communities that you looked at, they didn’t go Republican. They didn’t vote Tea Party candidates. What was different? Was it something that had happened to them—i.e., economic changes that hurt these communities and they said, “Now, it’s time to vote for a Republican”? Was it something about the community, or was there something that really set Trump apart from past populist candidates or waves?Stephanie Muravchik: Well, I think one piece of it is just how deeply blue these communities were. The Tea Party really emerged out of places that had some significant Republican organization movement identification, and there simply weren’t enough Republicans on the ground to get attention for that in most of the places—Iowa might have been a little different, but certainly in Rhode Island and Kentucky. We had one Democratic local-level party leader in Rhode Island—we were asking him about his relationship with Republicans—and he said: “I don’t know any Republicans in this town. I don’t think there are any.” There just weren’t enough even for the most knowledgeable Democratic leadership to know them. So I think part of it was that it would have been hard to get the attention of the local Democrats.Then the other piece that I think stands out is that there was a lot of libertarian rhetoric out of the Tea Party. There’s some controversy about how top-down that was, how “astroturf” that was, et cetera, but that libertarian rhetoric is really not at all resonant with the Democrats that we talked to. That was not the piece of the populism that appealed to them. I think that’s another piece of the answer. Jon?Jon: Well, I would just simply add—I guess this is really echoing what Stephanie said— you have to keep in mind that these are really one-party towns. The party, locally, for these folks is really the individuals who lead the party: the county-level or town-level elected officials. So these are mayors, city council people, county commissioners, and they’re really the face of the party. The other thing to add is that they really insulated these local communities from national politics in some ways. In a lot of ways, these places were pretty provincial. When they thought about the Democratic Party, they didn’t think about national leaders for the most part. They thought about people in their own community, and so Trump really shook these communities. It was a shock to them and really got them thinking about national politics and questions and controversies. It really took someone like a Trump to do that. The Tea Party was something that just didn't—it was a movement that was pretty remote from a lot of these places.Boss Politics and Honor CultureAaron: One of the really interesting parts of this book is when you’re talking about how politics worked or works in these small towns, and I’m reading it sitting inside the Beltway, having that as my frame of reference for politics. I’ve mostly lived in big cities and so on, where national politics is about—during the Trump years, he’s pushing against the guardrails, if not leaping right over them.We have our norms and institutions, and that’s the way that we tend to talk about these things. It was fascinating, the stories that the two of you tell about how different politics is in these small communities. Can you talk a bit about that? That also, you say, plays into a part of Trump's appeal.Jon: Yes, sure. One of the things that really struck us, Aaron, is that in these communities, politics is much more Trumpian in all kinds of ways. It was Trumpian before Trump, right? The local public officials reminded us of Trump in various ways. They were thin-skinned. They were brazen. They were tough. They were macho. They were the local daddies of their communities. They were there to take care of their flock—that is to say, they weren’t particularly ideological; rather, it was a sort of friends-and-neighbors politics. They were going to do particular favors or provide for particular constituents. It echoed back to a sort of machine politics, which has deep roots in the Democratic Party. Politics in these places weren’t very ideological really. They were much more boss-centered. They were really about providing for and taking care of local constituents. Political leaders were expected to do favors for their constituents. We saw all of this in all kinds of ways. Maybe Steph wants to jump in and give some examples, give some flavor and feel for some of these characters.Stephanie: In all three of the places in this town in Rhode Island, in this city in Iowa, in this county in Eastern Kentucky, there had been a strong-boss politics—perhaps most strong in Kentucky. These little rural counties are often dominated by these people called judges. They’re not judicial figures. They’re county executives essentially. There was a man in the county that I was looking at who had held office almost continually for about 30 years.When I arrived there during the Trump administration, he had been out of office due to the fact that he had been brought up on federal charges in a votes-for-gravel scheme. This was after about some 30 years in office. The county had fallen on hard times. The main way that he was able to show his friendship to voters was by providing loads of gravel to them at county expense. A lot of these people live on little far-flung farms in this rural district. They need to have little roads that connect their farmsteads to the main public arteries.The roads need to be constantly refreshed with gravel, and he was dumping loads of gravel in the months leading up to an election. The Feds came after him, and he pled. He had to deal with them basically so he would be free, but he pledged never again to run for office. The county’s political imagination had been very much shaped by this man’s long reign. He remained a very popular—although controversial—figure in the county when I was there.Jon: There were echoes of this, too, in another town we studied, which is Johnston, Rhode Island. On the surface, you might think it would be a place with a radically different politics than Appalachia, right? It’s in New England. It’s a suburb of Providence, but in many ways, actually, the politics was really similar. It’s a very Italian-American community, and they still practice old-style machine politics.The mayor there is Joe Polisena. He rules with an iron fist. Again, he’s like everyone’s daddy, right? People go to Joe. They need something done. They need a favor. Sometimes they ask for things he can’t deliver. When we asked Joe about this, he said, “Yes, sometimes they’ll come in, my constituents, and they’ll ask for something off the wall.” Joe would have to tell them, “Gee, I can’t do that. That’s illegal, but I can do something else.”Likewise, people in that community feel like if they don’t support the machine, if they don’t support Joe Polisena and other Democratic candidates, they’ll be basically shut out. They won’t be able to get any goods from the city, because they’ll be punished by the mayor, who can be very vindictive. Again, very different, seemingly, kinds of communities. They’re regionally different. One’s rural, one’s suburban, et cetera, but a very different style of politics. It’s a kind of politics that used to dominate the Democratic Party.We forget about it in college towns and big urban cities because we’ve cleaned up this kind of politics, right? We want a politics that’s more policy-oriented—politics without nepotism, without wheeling and dealing in this sort of favoritism—but it’s a kind of politics that survived in a lot of these Democratic communities. It survived in those places because there are fewer college-educated, good-government types who wanted to clean up this kind of politics and get rid of it. That’s one way in which the politics of these places was distinctive, but they also had a particular political culture, and we could talk about that if you like, Aaron.Aaron: Just briefly before we turn to that: I’m curious, do the people in those towns view this as a kind of politics that needs to be cleaned up but just can’t for various reasons, or do they think this is the right way to do politics, even if it sometimes is a little messy and looks corrupt?Stephanie: Yes, I think there’s definitely a view among some voters—and they’re all men; these men are all somewhat controversial and have their detractors—who don’t like how personalized the politics are. I spoke to one. Mayor Polisena in Johnston, Rhode Island, is very widely popular. He gets very high margins in elections, and lots of people had lots of good things to say about him, but he did have his detractors.I was trying to talk to one of them, and he was quite anxious about talking to me and said, “Well, you know how things are in this town.” Then he paused a beat, and then he said: “Well, you’re not from here. Maybe you don’t.” There was this sense that there were critics, and they would often say: “This is too personalized. There’s too much retribution for disloyalty. This is America. We should be able to express alternate opinions and not be personally penalized by the powers that be in our locality for this.”One colorful example from Elliott County was an executive who was no longer in office because of this federal deal and had one very outspoken opponent in the community. When they would be paving roads, like county roads, the new asphalt would stop at this man’s property line and then start up again at the next property line. Only in front of his farm would there be no paving. That kind of stuff rubbed some people the wrong way for sure.Jon: I would just echo that. I think it was somewhat mixed, but I think there was also a sort of sense in these places that this is just how one does politics. These are the main models of politics. It wasn’t clear to many, I think, what the alternative to this might look like. In many ways, it’s a sort of model that grows up out of their own community. It’s the kind of politics that grows out of a traditional family in some ways. It’s the sense that, “Well, there’s a patriarch who’s the head of the household but also the head of the community.” They should provide and take care of their community. In exchange, they should get the loyalty of their constituents and their supporters.There’s also a sense that their loyalty is the main way that they pay back their benefactors, those who have supported them. Even if they have some misgivings or grumblings, or they think the mayor can be a little too iron-fisted or whatever, there’s also a sense that they should be loyal to that person because they owe them something.Aaron: Given all of that, and given the personal and transactional nature of the politics and the politics as extended family, as you describe it, the initial motivation of this book and the ethnographies that you conducted was that there was something new about Trump or Trumpism, or Trump as a candidate. It attracted what had been historically very, very exclusively blue communities. These were Democratic strongholds.Given all of this, within this context, what does it mean for them to have been Democrat? You said this wasn’t really about policy per se, so were they meaningfully Democratic in the way that we would think about it, from the perspective of looking broadly in American politics? Democrats represent a set of policy preferences and a certain coalition. Do they even fit within that? Or was it more just that this was a label, but they could have had a different one slapped on, and it wouldn’t have been meaningfully distinct?Stephanie: Yes, I think one thing that became very clear was that because of the relationships with these party elites in their local community, what the party meant, meant relationships with these local party leaders. What they understood “Democrat” to mean had been very much reflected or filtered through these local party leaders. A lot of their, I would say, social-cultural ideas were quite conservative.Some of them made a point of saying, “I’m a Democrat and I’m a conservative.” For example, we met a woman in Rhode Island who was from a deeply political family herself and had been a low local-level political leader—so not someone who was out of touch or disengaged at all. She talked about the revelation that Democrats were pro-choice. For her, this was a shock.She had to wake up to this fact because she herself and her family were fierce Democrats. She had been told since she was a child that if the Republicans get into power, we’ll all starve. It was that kind of rhetoric we've heard from a lot of people. But she was also from this deeply Catholic, church-going, mass-going family. She said she would go to mass and see her elected local leaders also taking communion.It never crossed her mind that these people would not be pro-life. On a lot of the social-cultural issues in Elliott County, which was very rural, one big issue had to do, of course, with guns and the Second Amendment. All the Democrats were very pro-Second Amendment in Elliott County. They didn’t feel a sense of cognitive dissonance because their understanding was so local.Jon: And as Stephanie suggested, too, in some ways, they do have a sense that Republicans are the party of the rich. That resonates with what a lot of Democrats might say about the Republican Party and have said for a long time, but it’s a very class-bound, New Deal, Democratic sense of the parties. Indeed, in some of the restaurants in these towns, it’s not uncommon to find pictures of JFK or FDR.They had a sense that those were the patron saints of the party. They did have a sense that they were part of something larger than their own local, particular community. It’s like the culture wars were this thing that was blowing beyond their own local lives, and they didn’t have a sense of where the parties landed on guns or abortion or those kinds of questions. That surprised us. That was interesting.In lots of ways, of course, these people, on a lot of these issues, they’re kind of conservative. They’re pretty pro-Second Amendment. They’re fairly pro-life. Although on economic questions, they’re more moderate or even left-leaning. Ottumwa, Iowa, for example: It’s a place with a meat-packing plant. There’s a strong tradition of unionism there. Basically, it’s as if you froze the Democratic Party in the North in 1960 and took a peek at it; that’s more what these places are like. It almost felt like going back in time a little bit. We got to peer at the old Democratic Party, as it used to be. We were reminded that it didn’t all change overnight—that there are still these vestiges of this old party that have endured partly because they’re isolated and they have this strong localism. The local leads buffer them from some of the big changes that are happening at the national level.Indeed if you talk to local people, one of the major things they’re trying to do is create their own brand, because they know that there’s a big ideological divide between them and the national party. They want to keep the Democratic Party as localized as they can. Trump has made that a lot harder for them in all kinds of ways, because a lot of these folks are starting to become more aware of the national party and the ways in which it’s different from their local party.Localism versus CosmopolitanismAaron: One of the broad theses of your book is that Trump appealed to these communities in part because the very things that those of us in our coastal, rootless, cosmopolitan enclaves were often dramatically, viscerally turned off by about him were the very things that felt the most familiar about him to the voters in these communities. As just discussed, he looked like the politicians that they’re used to. What we saw as wild corruption and nepotism and so on was just business as usual—that’s of course how politicians operate.I want to move to another one that you discuss, which is honor cultures, because Trump for many of us was this famously belligerent but thin-skinned bully who couldn’t back down. Constantly, anytime anyone said anything, he needed to come back at them, even if he looked ridiculous doing it. It seemed very off-putting to all of us. As you point out, this is like a quintessential “honor culture.” What is an honor culture, and why do we see it in communities like this?Stephanie: Well, an honor culture is a way of understanding reputation and conflict that makes it imperative that a person, particularly a man, demonstrate his toughness, his willingness to meet any insult—or certainly an assault—but even just an insult with a kind of fierceness and a willingness to use violence to avenge his reputation, to reestablish his reputation.Men in all these communities have all kinds of personalities, just like in any other community, but they understand that they’re expected to do this. If they don’t, they risk really losing status in their communities, and they also risk inviting further insult and even violence. I think it was pervasive in all three communities. I think some of the most colorful examples probably come from Ottumwa, from Iowa. Jon: Well, there’s a lot of examples. I would just say by way of defining honor culture that on the one hand, it’s unfamiliar to a lot of folks who live in highly educated bubbles like college towns and blue urban centers, but it’s the default culture in a way, right? It exists around the world. It still exists in lots of places in the United States. It’s a much more common mode of conflict resolution than we often imagine.The play Hamilton reminds us that it used to exist in our national political culture, because, after all, Hamilton died in a duel defending his honor. But that play misleads us, too, because it suggests that this honor culture is some ancient, barbaric, strange cultural thing that existed in the past and that we’ve done away with it. In fact, as Steph said, it existed in all these communities.I guess we should give some examples. I guess before I get to Iowa, I would start with Rhode Island. The mayor, Polisena, very much practiced this honor culture. We really first saw this in action during a town council meeting, because every month or so, Joe Polisena holds court and various citizens come. They have various complaints and they want to give the mayor a hard time.Mayor Polisena doesn’t do what politicians might do in, say, a college town when they hear a complaint. When people come to complain to Polisena, he gives them hell. He starts calling them names, and it doesn’t matter who they are. In fact, this one old woman used to consistently go and complain to him, and he would just let her have it. Polisena would say, “You’re a malcontent.”Later, as the meeting spilled out into the parking lot, he even audibly called her a douchebag. He doesn’t mince words, and we asked him about this. We said, “Joe, what are you doing? Why are you so rough with these constituents? Why can’t you do what Michelle Obama suggests? She said, ‘When they go low, we go high.’ Why can’t you take the high road?” His response was very telling. He said, “No, I can’t do that. If I do that, they’re just going to roll over me. I’m just going to show my weakness. They’re going to take advantage of me.” He said, “Look, I have to be a street fighter when it comes to politics. I have to be tough, because that’s the only thing that people understand, is strength.” We saw this again, as Steph suggested, in Ottumwa. There, a fight nearly broke out at a local Democratic county meeting. This is back in 2016 during the primaries. The county commissioner was a guy named Jerry Parker. He supported Hillary Clinton. There was a guy named Alex Stroda, who was on the other side. They were fighting over who to endorse. It nearly came to blows. There was a belly bump, but not an actual fight. Again, those were two guys who couldn’t just talk it out. There was a sense that an insult had to be forcefully confronted. That was normal in these places and that’s also how Trump operates, right?For Trump, you’re either a strong person or you’re a weak person, and that’s how he divides the world. Nationally speaking, some of the candidates that gravitated toward Trump early also shared some of that honor culture. You think about guys like Rudy Giuliani or Chris Christie. They too have some of that in them. That’s a flavor for this culture. To sum up, I guess the final thing I would say is that Trump—I think you said this well, Aaron—but Trump to us, to people in our community, seems like he’s pathologically thin-skinned. And maybe he is, right? I’m sure Trump has all kinds of personality disorders, but that’s not how it’s necessarily read in the communities we studied. To them, his behavior is totally normal. Of course you punch back. Of course you don’t let things roll off your back. That’s not how politicians behave in their communities. He doesn’t seem weird even if he does have all kinds of personality disorders, which I’m sure he does. He doesn’t read quite that way in these places.Aaron: You’re conducting these interviews after Trump has been in office for a bit, so they’ve gotten to see him not just with the bluster of a candidate, but actually as the leader of the free world. Was there a sense of the disconnect between how they perceive him and how he is perceived elsewhere? For example, you quote a handful of people about this. One guy, and I’ll just read the quote, he says, “I think other countries are afraid of him, which I think is a good thing. I hate to say it, but with Bush and Obama, they were pushovers. With Trump, he’s not a pushover. You’re going to have to deal with him. There’s no playing games with him.” This is really striking because it became very clear in Trump’s presidency that other world leaders were just constantly playing games with him. They saw his thin skin, his reactivity, his susceptibility to flattery, and they just manipulated the hell out of him. They were maybe afraid of him in the sense that he was a loose cannon, but they weren’t afraid of him as a tough guy that they had to take seriously. Were the communities aware of that disconnect, of how he was perceived on a world stage?Stephanie: No, I think that the idea of a leader that might speak quietly and carry a big stick just doesn’t make a lot of sense to them. In their own sphere of understanding, the way that you make people understand that you will not be messed with is through this thin-skinned response. It’s this kind of machismo. I think that that was how they understood. I was at a church service in Kentucky and the minister there was trying to get the churchgoers to be more assertive in their faith.He said, “Growing up, my big brother always taught me”—basically, he meant in the context of working at a job site like a construction site—“don't back up. Never back up.” That was seen as a deep truth that had application in all realms of life. They heard Trump making those sounds. It’s a pretty policy-wonkish person who could then read and trace actually what the consequences might have been, which you were just alluding to. Jon: I think it’s important to bear in mind that what’s happening here is a kind of identity politics. When they see a candidate like Trump who behaves in ways that are familiar to them, in ways that they might behave, in ways that their leaders might behave, it signals to them that this candidate is one of them. That’s how most voters behave, right? They don’t think very systematically, for the most part, about politics or ideology. Really, they’re interested in candidates and the extent to which they feel some sort of a social proximity to them. The closer they feel to them, the more they feel like they can trust them. I think the people we talked to just have a sense that Trump, because he seems familiar, because he seems trustworthy, will do the right thing on the international stage in these contexts that are removed from their knowledge or expertise. In that way, they’re really different from the wonky people one might meet in Washington, D.C., who are pulling their hair out because Trump is getting rolled by China and Putin, et cetera.Class, Not RaceAaron: One of the other things that is characteristic of Trumpism—and it was certainly present throughout Trump’s campaign—was nationalism, and then what often looked like racist dog whistles, if not just quite audible whistles. What has seemed to be characteristic is that Trumpism and Trump’s supporters are intensely nationalistic and often have—let’s call them racially charged views. What you found pushes back on that, at least in some ways, and you argued that it has more to do with the sense of place. Can you talk about how sense of place plays out and what that says about nationalism as a Trumpist phenomenon?Stephanie: All three of these were places we chose precisely because they represented a larger group of counties mostly that had voted twice for Obama and then flipped. We were interested in part because that seemed to be complicating what seemed like a clear-cut story of the kind of bigoted appeal, the appeal of bigotry that the Trump campaign represented. Then spending time there, what really stuck out in all three of the places was the localism and we've talked about some facets of that.These were all places where the people who lived there felt deeply, deeply connected to their hometowns and even so much that in the Johnston Rhode Island community that we were in, they had long had a phrase that was Johnston First—long before Trump was on the political landscape, that there was a sense of belonging to each other and needing to help each other and work for the community. This sometimes then resonated out to a nationalistic commitment. For example, in Ottumwa, Iowa where there were these strong unions, where there had been the car industry, it was difficult to buy a non-American made car in Ottumwa.They linked Ottumwa to the nation in a sense. In all of these places, there was that intense localism. For example, I was asking some women in Elliott County, Kentucky early on. One of them mentioned that they had read Hillbilly Elegy by J.D. Vance and there was some other women at the conversation that I was having and the other women hadn't heard of the book, but they said, "Oh, was he from Elliot?" Then the response was, "No, because he's actually from another county that's an hour or two away, also part of Eastern Appalachia." Fairly indistinguishable from my eyes, but when they were told, "No, not from Elliot county, from this other county," they all laughed like, "Oh, okay, well that's a different county, we don't know about that county." Even the county boundaries of this tiny rural county really mattered to the civic imagination of the residents there.Jon: The other thing I'd say along these same lines is these are all places that are struggling to varying degrees and have been for quite some time. When Trump came around and said he was going to Make America Great Again, what they heard is not so much that he was going to make the nation writ large great again in some general way, what they heard rather is that he was going to make Ottumwa Great Again and Elliot Great Again and Johnston Great Again. That very nationalistic rhetoric, they heard in this very localized way. The fate of those communities matter to them partly because their social identities are so connected to those places.In these communities is where they're really socially known, where they really have reputations, where all their kin are, where all their kin are buried, and so to leave those places because they can't find the jobs or that they might need, for example, is a social death. Here it's a really a class-based difference. If Steph and I get offered a job at, say, Harvard and we go, our social reputation actually enhances because the nature of our communities is really different. It's not neighborhood-based, it's not especially place-based. Our communities are much more based in our professions. We're having this conversation with you across thousands of miles and that's the nature of our community.We don't know our neighbors all that well and it's certainly not the center, it's not really where our social identities are fundamentally based. The fate of these communities matters in a existential way to them in a way that I think it's sometimes hard for those of us who are part of the professional class to notice and to see. The other thing I'd say about race is, as we mentioned, these are places that voted for Obama twice. In that way, they're also different from places that were touched by the Tea Party. As soon as Obama's elected, you get the tea party, and I'm sure some of that was racially driven. He's our first black president but notably, it wasn't these communities. Obama really didn't create some massive counter mobilization in these places. These are places that voted for him twice, Obama was their president for eight years. Some of these places did grow disenchanted with him in the second term, and particularly in Elliot county where the policies of the Biden administration was particularly hard on the coal industry there. But for the most place, these weren't places that had some allergy to Obama. These were places that, in fact, voted for him and supported him.In general, I think we would say that to those studying Trump is that I think it is true on the one hand that these folks, they do think of Trump as a patron of the white working class in some ways. I think that's true. I do think, especially today, things have become more racialized. I'm sure if we went back into these communities in the wake of BLM and everything else, the racial politics has changed. Perhaps they think of themselves more fundamentally as white citizens and that's probably likely. But when we arrived there, I guess we were struck by the fact that they didn't particularly think in those terms and their social identities were much more class-based, they were much more place-based. I think we have to keep in mind that however much race plays a role, their politics aren't reducible to race either, that they have other social identities. I think that's hopeful in some ways.Stephanie: Just to put a point on the comment with one example that comes to mind in terms of Elliott County. Elliott county, Kentucky, is a particularly white area. There's very few people that are non-white.Jon: In fact, if I could just add, I think it's the whitest county that voted for Obama, which makes it interesting.Stephanie: All the political conflict there that sometimes can be racially charged in other places all happens within whites. For instance, when there's lots of grumbling about welfare and they're all looking at their white neighbors who are ethnically, religiously identical, racially identical to them. One thing I discovered among some of the older, this is not common among the younger, but the older people in Elliott County will sometimes complain about foreigners. When they talk about foreigners, they mean people from Ohio who are coming across the border or other counties, other white people.When there's lots of talk about invidious distinctions between us and them or between “othering” someone in the jargon of the academy, but in this case, they're “othering” white Ohioans, so the racial divisions aren't always the most important divisions to them.Jon: Just a quick footnote to that. It should remind us that, in some ways, their identities are much more provincial than whiteness. White America, that's a pretty big group of people. For the most part, it didn't seem like that was a community they felt especially close to. As Steph said, they feel like they're white neighbors and a neighboring county are, in some ways, outsiders and not part of their community.Aaron: The main issue of Trump's campaign, the thing that he ran on and drove home from early on his presidency was anti-immigration. That was his hobby horse. Is it then the case that for these communities, an anti-immigration view is less about race, ethnicity, nationality, immigrants with their weird languages and weird foods and more that if your community is intensely socially interconnected in a way that makes it look more like an extended family, then the immigrants look like the person who marries into that family and has a hard time fitting in because they didn't grow up in it, then they physically look different from us?Jon: Yes, you could see this in, I think, most notably actually in Ottumwa, Iowa, which of the three communities we studied has the highest level of immigration and they've come there really to work the meat packing plant. I do think there's something to what you're saying. There's a sense that these folks are outsiders who don't quite share our norms, and therefore, it's harder to have the tightly knit homogeneous community. We know from research on social capital that ethnic diversity, at least in the short and median term, undermines community and feelings of trust and belonging, and so diversity is a challenge to community.If your community is fundamentally neighborhood-based, then immigration can be a cost to those communities. Again, it's really quite a contrast from our college town. Here, we benefit from immigration on all kinds of ways. We pay immigrants in California, some in California, they cut our lawns, they clean our houses, they care for our children, they allow us to neglect our neighborhoods and tend to the communities that we care about, which is really our broader, professional, more diffuse, virtual kinds of communities. But in places like Ottumwa, those communities, again, are much more neighborhood-based.There is signs though that does sort of change over time as immigrants become part of the community. This is why I think it has more to do with culture than race. One Ottumwan, for example, told us about one of his neighbors, really about the Latinos in the community. Generally, he said, well, they're not even Mexican anymore because they don't speak Spanish. It was an interesting way of saying this was fundamentally about race. They may look a little different, but what matters is that they've socially and culturally integrated into the community.Policy Is Not the AnswerAaron: Looking forward then for those of us who are deeply worried about what Trumpism represents on the national stage, look back at the four years that he was in office and the real damage it did to American institutions and so on, and are worried about the continuing prevalence of this fundamentally illiberal views in the American electorate, what lessons should we draw from this? These people are speaking to genuine interests in cultural needs and affiliations. The book is very good at pointing out how much those of us in the cosmopolitan cities don't understand the way that class really works.There's a very nice line in it where you mention how much in colleges the future generations of progressive leaders are taught lots of courses in gender and race, but very little, if anything at all, in class and how important class is to this conversation. What lesson should we draw from what you've learned in these communities as far as understanding and preventing some of this from turning into the really dangerous illliberalism that we all fear?Jon: I think it is certainly heading that way. When we were in these communities at the time, it was still relatively early in their romance with Donald Trump, so they were not talking a lot of crazy conspiracy theory. Now we're really at a different place and I think partly what it highlights is the dangers of identity politics in some ways. There's a sort of cultishness that has really grown around Trump. Again, we were there and saw the beginnings of that, but we were just, in fact, at a rally in Wyoming, and Trump was there to officially nominate Harriet Hageman who's taking on Liz Chaney. It was everyone was in their Trump gear. Everyone had Trump T-shirts, lots of folks had Trump flags.If you've been to an NFL game, it had that feel to it like everyone's on the same team rooting together. Maybe that would be okay if Trump was less reckless. I think in many ways, we're in this moment because of Trump's bad character. Not so much that he appealed to people's place-based or class-based identities and mobilized this group of folks, but the power of that social connection has been so badly abused by him and so recklessly done, exploited. In a way, I think there'll be more responsible people. I hope there'll be more responsible people who will follow some of his example and leave other parts of it behind.I think there's responsible ways to appeal to these folks. I think it's important to remember, there's a decent part of this world. There's a decent morality there. Not all of it exports well up to the national level. I think honor culture, for example, for reasons we can explain, we think that maybe it's not great anywhere, but it works much better locally, and when it's exported up to the national level, it doesn't play out well. There are folks who I think are trying to take some of the Trump's playbook. One good example is this candidate for governor in Pennsylvania, Fetterman, who's a Democrat, and very Trumpy in all kinds of ways.If you haven't bothered to look, on one of his forearms, he has a huge tattoo of a ZIP code of his hometown. Talk about appealing to place-based identities. This guy's really figured it out. On his other arm, he has the names of all those who died in his community while he was mayor. Very personal concern about his own hometown and community. Look, I don't know what kind of governor he would be if he makes it that far, but it strikes me that's, particularly for Democrats or even really Republicans, who are thinking about how do you mobilize some of these social identities in a way that's less reckless than Trump, I think it can be done.Again, I think it'd be done responsibly and that's partly because there's something admirable and something to like about the localism of these folks.Stephanie: Yes, I think a lot of the things that we found that we highlight in our book, the moral vision behind them has to be understood. Even something like the boss nature of politics, which is often something that's considered very sleazy in the kind of communities that John and I have lived really has a lot to do with this ethic of friendship and loyalty. It's a way that voters understand friendship and loyalty more than any policy-minded way of assessing candidates. I had one woman tell me, actually, a few people say things like this, but one woman comes to mind in Kentucky who was a very disengaged voter and worked a minimum wage, a pretty crappy job.She was one of the defenders of this disgraced county executive and she said: "At least when David was in office, you could get a load of gravel when you needed one." It was her sense of this was a true mark of friendship. I think that certainly the boss style politics, which has to do with personal loyalty, which, of course, resonates very large with the unusually intense following that Trump has at the national level, the localism, again, is about community and loyalty. I think candidates that can speak that cultural jargon can signal that it's more important to signal that than it is to have policies. The policies aren't the draw I guess. I saw some Trump voters who said to me Trump Democrats in Kentucky who said, "Oh, we have great internet. We got that under the Obama administration," but there was no sense that they gave credit to the Obama administration for this policy that clearly helped them. They giggled about. Or the same with Obamacare. We saw people in Rhode Island say, "Oh, well, yes, I am dependent on Obamacare," but didn't give much credit. I think what they want is a feeling of being represented by someone they can identify with and trust and they're much more attuned to social-cultural clues, maybe all of us are, when picking candidates. 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 | SpotifyWelcome to the inaugural episode of Reactionary Minds, a podcast from The UnPopulist that I’ll be hosting every month. This is a show about why some people reject liberalism and what the rest of us can do about it. This first episode is all about introducing the problem Reactionary Minds exists to address. In it, Shikha Dalmia, the editor of The UnPopulist and fellow at the Mercatus Center's Program on Pluralism and Civil Exchange, discusses the biggest challenge of our times: The resurgent threat of populist authoritarianism here and abroad. Every regime has its pathologies and populist demagoguery is the pathology of democracies. The “liberal” in liberal democracies is supposed to keep this genie in the bottle, but now that it is out, can we put it back in?This transcript has been lightly edited and condensed for clarityAaron Ross Powell: Welcome to the show.Shikha Dalmia: Thanks for having me, Aaron.Aaron: What is populism?Shikha: It's a good question, and as you've noticed, the name of my newsletter is The UnPopulist, and its addressed at the authoritarian currents we are seeing around the world. Then the question arises why am I calling it The UnPopulist and not the anti-authoritarian or something like that? Partly, because it's cuter, but the more serious reason is that the kind of illiberalism and the kind of authoritarianism we are seeing around the world has what is essentially a populist element.Now there's a lot of confusion around the word populism, and there is actually a great deal of effort on the left to try and take back this word which it thinks has been unfairly characterized in the last six years with the rise of the Trump era and the MAGA era. I, in some ways, feel for some of the left-wing writers, like Thomas Frank who's a public intellectual and an author and something of a Bernie Sanders progressive. He wrote a book not too long ago defending the term populism because he sees populism as essentially a movement of the people. Roger Cohen, a New York Times columnist, similarly wrote in 2018, shortly after Trump, where he also was lamenting the fact that the term populism has acquired this negative connotation.Now, I actually feel for some of these liberals because, as you and I know, we are still grieving the loss of the term liberal. However, I think they fundamentally misunderstand what populism really means and why it has a bad connotation.To some extent, it's a semantic issue, you can give any phenomenon any name, but populism, for the longest time has had a bad odor. They [Frank et al] see populism as essentially a popular movement that is supposed to do the most good for the most people, and those most people are not the rich people. They are generally lower or middle-income people who are the vast majority of the population.But that's not what populism really is. It's not a popular movement. A populist movement, if you read the literature on it, which admittedly is murky, it's about pitting the “real” people against some other entity, and that entity is the elites. The elites are considered to be these corrupt oligarchs, and the people are supposed to be something pure, representing something good.There is instantly this division between the elite, which controls “the establishment,” and the pure people whose interests are being avoided. Now, even that exactly doesn't capture the problem with the term populism. The term populism gets its bad odor from the fact that it's not just that the real people are trying to get their way and have their preferred policies enacted, it is more that they want to flatten certain elements of liberalism, the deliberative process, the representative process, because they believe it's been captured by some bad people, by The Establishment which is not representing them.It's an effort to flatten certain institutions of liberalism, not improve them, not reform them, but simply to either side step them or do an end-run around them, or even just get rid of them so that the real people can have their will.Now, obviously, the real people can't govern. There are too many of them, somebody has to govern for them. So in some senses populist and authoritarian seem like anti-poles. But inevitably they come together because whenever you have a populist movement some authoritarian figure or demagogue arises who will say they're representing the people. And we saw very clearly with Trump, we the people became me the people…they are not representing the people, they are the people. Populism inevitably goes hand-in-hand with a certain kind of authoritarianism, and so therefore, the term unpopulist and therefore why populism is something to be worried about.Aaron: I think that's one of the interesting things about watching the rise of populism in the U.S over the last five or six or seven years, has been that it's framed as an anti-elite movement and “drain the swamp” is an anti-elite thing. We're constantly hearing about these coastal cities where these out-of-touch elites who don't understand the real people are. The real Americans in this context really just means rural working class whites. But then you look at their leadership and it is fantastically wealthy, though we don't know quite how wealthy [in Trump’s case], because his finances are a little sketchy, but a fantastically wealthy businessman.Then in Congress the figureheads for this movement, or at least people trying to claim that mantle, tend to be Ivy league law school educated, pretenders to the common-man identity. You're right, it is this odd thing what begins as a movement framing itself as of the people turns into a personality cult that's no longer about the people's identity, it’s about the people building their identity through fealty to this strong-man leader, which is then how it can very quickly turn into an authoritarian movement, because either that leader's power when he has to do something is seen as absolute, because he's the embodiment of our hopes and dreams and cultural identity, or when that leader's position is threatened, as we saw when Trump lost the election, it can morph quickly into violence in defense of that leader's status. Not so much the working class or the common man status, but defending that leader from perceived failure.Shikha: That's right. Now, populism can be of both the left wing and the right wing varieties, and we have seen them throughout history. Latin America has had populism of every strain. In every instance it has led to the cult of the personality, but there are two things in populism. There is a cult of personality, which is the leader, and then there is a cult of the people too. There is a certain deification of the people that they are true owners of the society, their will needs to be respected.The two, the cult of the leader and the cult of the people, build on each other, they both deify each other. Whether it is Hugo Chavez, whether it is Bolsonaro right now. The Bolsonaro is interesting and he's losing some of his popularity, but Trump is a classic phenomenon of a cult leader, of a demagogue who is leading in the name of the real people, and then the real people deify him. He really was a deity in certain MAGA circles, and he in turn deifies them in his rallies.If you watched some of his rallies, which I tried to avoid as much as possible, but he was constantly flattering the people there. It was, "You people are great, and you are being ignored." Yes, there is this mutual cult of the leader and the cult of the people that goes hand-in-hand in a populist movement.Nomenclature and TaxonomyAaron: I want to stay for a moment on our terms and taxonomies, because the purpose of this show, ultimately, is not just to critique illiberal and populist ideas, but to try to understand them, to try to understand where these people are coming from, what the philosophies and personality traits and historical perspectives that inform them because it's hard to challenge ideas without understanding them deeply and, to the extent you can, fairly.We've talked about what populism is, but this show is not called the authoritarian mind, it's not called the populist mind, it is called Reactionary Minds. Where does the term reactionary fit into all this?Shikha: Aaron, this is your show! You and I both talked about why we like Reactionary Minds. I'll give you my side and perhaps you can say something about why you like it. The textbook definition of reactionary is a person or a sensibility that is opposed to economic or political liberalization of any kind. Usually, it goes along with a certain conservative mentality.I think there's another element to the reactionary sensibility, and that is, it is also anti-ideas, and it's anti-intellectual. The reason is ideas and intellectual theories can lead to change. They require a certain amount of openness to the world and to knowledge, and those can be intensely threatening to existing cultural orders. In that sense, reactionary minds, I think, is a good way to describe the show because you and I are both quite troubled and perturbed by the last six years.Things are happening in America that we never thought would be possible. We think that there needs to be some kind of a response to this, but we can't really fight these ideologies unless we understand them. We do want to understand the reactionary movement that's brewing in America on its own terms. That's the reason I like the term reactionary minds.Aaron: Yes, I agree with all that. What I would add is, I think that you can make the case that political ideology, moral ideology, and so on is, to some extent, downstream of personality, that we tend to have different personal and personality preferences, and then we sometimes look around for theories or intellectual edifices that provide structure to them or support them or don't really challenge them.In that regard, reactionary it is a personality type that says I am turned off by, sometimes threatened by diversity, by change, by things being different than the way that I'm used to, or people who aren't like me being more prominent than they used to be, or higher status than they used to be, or the way we talk about language is changing and that bugs me, and I don't like these kids asking me to use different pronouns or different terminology. There is this set-in-my-ways-ness that drives a lot of this.It's not an accident that Trump when he was first running for president, he led with anti-immigration, with a xenophobic perspective and a nationalism that was the corollary of that, because for a lot of his most faithful followers, it's “America is looking different than either the way I was used to it being, or the way that I imagined it being, or the way that I would like it to look demographic.”On the far fringes of the populace, we get the Great Replacement Theory about they're trying to change the demographics of the country to make it less white than it used to be. There is this very “I don't like difference” and then reacting strongly against that, then that feeds into political preferences, which is, "I'm going to vote for the person who will stop the change, whether that's preventing immigrants who don't look and talk like me from coming into the country, or will elevate the status of the people who have the same preferences I do against the people with the diverse preferences that I dislike."That's another thing that I want to dig into on the show is the way that there is such a thing, I think, as a populist or an authoritarian or reactionary psychology as well. There are ideas that inform it, but there's also just beliefs and values and attitudes and they end up mixing together into this very toxic political outcome. That was the attraction to me of the reactionary minds, because it gets both the notion that this is an ideological perspective, but also that this is just an attitudinal perspective.Shikha: Right. That's very well stated, Aaron. I would, however, push back just slightly in that we do want to make a distinction between the conservative mind and the reactionary mind. Bill Buckley's very famous statement when he launched the National Review was he wants to stand athwart history screaming or yelling stop. There is a way in which, even though I am not a conservative, never have been, never will be, I can understand the urge to be careful about change and reform, and to be a little deliberative. You don't want to simply throw out existing social arrangements just because some fad has taken hold of the land.There is a way in which the conservatives, even though I'm not a conservative, they can be incrementalists, but not completely opposed to reform. Reactionaries, I think, is conservatism on steroids in that sense. Reactionaries simply don't want change because they don't like change. Usually, reactionariness is a phenomenon that's associated with conservatism, but to the extent that it's not just any change that reactionaries are opposed to, it's actually liberalism that they are opposed to. To the extent its liberalization they are opposed to, they can even come from the progressive side.Like communists when China liberalized its economy, there were reactionaries in China who wanted the communist order to hold and they didn't want liberalization. In that sense, I like the term reactionary because potentially, it will even capture the leftist reactionaries.Leftist ExcessesAaron: I think that often manifests in the contemporary American left as an intolerance of difference. That is, it's not the same as the intolerance of difference that we see from the right, which is obviously very much there, but rather, the left thinks we have advanced, we have liberalized, so certain behaviors that used to be socially unacceptable are now considered normal, or certain underprivileged groups that used to be underprivileged are now considered no different than everyone else.That liberalization is good. That's the kind of liberalization we want, but there is a tendency among some people on the left to then to be incredibly intolerant not of difference in the political realm. It's one thing to say yes, we should — people who want to re-criminalize gay marriage or gay relationships that's bad, but it's people who themselves in their own lives are not affirmatively supportive of these things need to be stamped out, need to be punished.This often can manifest in the lefts wanting to punish businesses that weren't supportive of gay weddings, baking cakes for gay weddings. The small conservative baker says, "That's against my conscience. I don't want to bake a cake for your wedding." In a genuinely liberal society the answer to that is, "Okay." Like, "I will go somewhere else and get a cake from somewhere else and no harm, no foul."The liberalism that manifests on the left is like, "No." It's not enough that you are just saying, "Hey, I don't want to participate." You have to participate and embrace, or we are going to, in this case, try to use the state to punish you, to destroy your business, to find you, to drive you out, because you're not one of us. That ends up with this ratcheting up of the reactionariness because then what that says to the people who are more culturally conservative is, "I need to dig in even deeper because if the culture drifts in a more liberal direction, that's even more ground for me to be punished often with state force. I need to fight even harder because  I won't be tolerated.Shikha: That's exactly the dynamic we are in right now. The problem with the left is that it's too impatient and, to some extent, one can understand its impatience. I think systemic injustices are prevalent, systemic racism is a thing! We all do need to grapple with legacies of slavery, Jim Crow, all of that is correct. But the left doesn't want to do the real hard work of changing hearts and minds. It wants to grab power nodes and exercise and push on them to engineer change.It's not just the levers of the state that they are using, it's also the levers of corporate power and what have you. Not all of [these tactics] are illicit. Some of them are perfectly acceptable. Certain kinds of boycotts against views clearly beyond the pale are probably acceptable. But they have lost the capacity of making distinctions between good-natured fear of what they are asking for — and a reactionary fear, I guess.It's this lack of calibration and this lack of finesse in their techniques, which is a big problem. This, in some ways, is driving a more reactionary attitude on the part of the conservatives, bringing out their worst tendencies.But I actually don't want to simply blame the left . I think the conservatives always wanted — there was a certain kind of conservative mind that was always uncomfortable with certain social changes, gay marriage, what have you. They've also been looking for a pretext to dig in. I think to some extent, the left is giving them a pretext [by its excesses]. It's not a reason, it's a pretext for their reactionariness. It's hard to untangle all of this, I admit, but all these currents are right now with us.Aaron: At their core they're all ultimately a rejection of genuine liberalism, which is if nothing else, it is a belief in a social tolerance and social pluralism. If we're going to live together in a big society, commonly governed, we have to get along with each other. The way that you get along with each other given our diversity of viewpoints and values and preferences and backgrounds and so on is to tolerate difference. To say: "I'm going to let you live the way that you want to live and I'm going to live the way that I want to live. Even if I'm not celebrating the choices that you make, I'm accepting them as part of this liberal consensus."So much of what we're seeing now seems to be a rejection of that liberal consensus of saying, "No, it's not just that I think I am right in… All of us think we're right in our own preferences and values or we wouldn't hold them. It's not just that, it's saying, Therefore, anyone who differs from my preferences and values is wrong and is wrong to an extent that they are dangerous or a threat or impure, or in some other way, need to be, whether it's with the state or other mechanisms, need to be shut down, excluded, punished so that we can have a higher degree of uniformity that happens to align with my preferences.Shikha: When Obama became president he was against gay marriage. He was against all kinds of pro-gay policies, and then, of course, during the course of his presidency he changed his mind. I wonder if there is any room for Obama in the current left. Room for evolution of thinking.Now I think Obama was always there and he was holding back for strategic reasons, which turned out to actually be not bad reasons. You can see the growing intolerance of the left in that it's not just being censorious against the right, but it's also being censorious toward its own. That’s why, in a way, I'm a little less worried about the left, because the left, in its demand for purity and consistency, in a way is becoming less united and is at that stage of devouring its own.The left is now generating healthy pushback. I actually think if Trump had not arrived on the horizon, there was so much concern within the left about the left that right now we would be in a much better position with respect to the left. But with Trump arriving on the scene, I feel myself pivoting. I think there is no bigger threat in this country than the right because it has become so completely not just reactionary, but authoritarian and illiberal in 30 different ways that I've had to drop my attention on the left and now right is the big problem.Before Trump arrived, I remember Vox, very much a progressive publication, had published a piece by a liberal professor saying something to the effect, "My liberal students terrify me." This piece went on to say that conservative students his class, this was a professor who's in a liberal arts college, who said the conservative students in his class will push back, might not like his ideas, but are still willing to discuss them. Liberal students were not willing to do that.Now what we are seeing on the other hand is that the right is no longer simply pushing back against what were legitimately called left-wing excesses. It wants to just crush them. Now you are seeing bills banning the teaching of critical race theory. That's where the reactionariness comes in. This is no longer now about calibrating the pace of the change, it's not about that. Now we are only going to impose our vision from like 200 years ago. Now it’s in a completely different orbit.The Roots of Modern Day Right-Wing PopulistsAaron: We talked about Trumpism as exemplary of the kind of populism that we are concerned about, but is Trump the major figure, or who are the other figures that are important to understand when looking at the lay of the land on American populism, left or right, the main, I guess, influencers, as the kids say?Shikha: Well, populism in America, depending upon how you use the term, has a long history. The first populist movement was the People's Party in 1890, which was a third party. It was this agrarian movement and labor movement against the industrialization that was happening. In the building of the railroads, lots of people were dispossessed; traditional livelihoods were lost. That is generally regarded as the first populist movement in this country. It got co-opted by the Democratic Party, which became the labor union party. The People's Party put it's a lot behind William Bryan Jennings. When he lost the election that year, it spelled the end of that party, but it got co-opted by Democrats.You've seen certain other populist movements arguably whether George Wallace, he was a populist phenomenon, very much appealing to the same kinds of anxieties that Trump now appeals to. In between, you had The Tea Party movement, you also had the Occupy Wall Street movement.The difference is that the Tea Party, I think, was the beginning of the turn towards MAGAism. Although interestingly, the Tea Party movement was very much pitching itself as this constitutional movement. It wanted to return to the Founders. It wanted to limit the scope of the government, all of which went out of the window when Trump came along.I think Trump is not sui generis. Partly, the Tea Party is behind him but partly, I think we had the phenomenon of right-wing radio with the advent of Rush Limbaugh who started pushing all kinds of populist tropes. He was a nativist. He was anti-left. The preoccupation with the leftist enemy is a huge, huge part of the right, right now. I think that's the single biggest motivating force. Even the anti-immigration and the anti-immigrant animus is not quite as powerful a force as the fear and anger and the hatred of the left, actually.I think Rush Limbaugh started stoking that, and then you had a whole slew of copycats on the right. That paved the way for Trump. The right was primed for a populist takeover, and then Trump came along with his MAGA message and at that stage, all the right wanted to do was use the levers of the state to smash the left and impose its vision of a insular, insulated, closed America polity.Aaron: This isn't new, even with Trump, even with Rush Limbaugh, this is what we watched in the '50s and '60s with anti-communism, was the Soviet Union was a legitimate threat, although maybe in retrospect, not as big of a threat as we thought it was at the time. There were communists in the country, although they weren't going to win out. America was not going to turn communist, but they did exist, and communism was very bad.The American right used that as a way to exert the power of the federal government to punish particularly culturally left people or people who were calling for liberalization of the positions of Blacks or gays or women and so on. That the urge to define an enemy and then use a potentially an inflated threat of that enemy — or mischaracterizations of that enemy or strawman version of that enemy — to justify a reactionary turn is very strong.A moment ago we were talking about Trump and you said had Trump not come along the left would have fractured more than it did. What's interesting about Trump is that he unified both the right and the left into these deeply tribally opposed camps. For decades, the conservative movement was split between — there was the base that looked very much like Trumpism does now. The conservative right’s reactionary base has been around as long as there has been a right. But you had the elites, the Bill Buckley types or the Ronald Reagan or the Paul Ryan who controlled the GOP and pushed it in a more, if not liberal, at least more liberal-adjacent on its best days direction.That went away with Trump and suddenly the elites all either swore fealty, or at least shut up about their criticisms of the really reactionary right. And then on the left, you had exactly that, that the left, those fault lines went away because we had a unified enemy. Trump won't be around forever, and so there's a sense in which that potentially gives a way out when that enemy has gone away.There are other people like what DeSantis is doing in Florida right now, he's clearly trying to tee himself up as the inheritor of the Trump mantel. But it's questionable whether any of the people trying to do that have Trump's — I'm going to call it — charisma, but a lot of people think of it as such, but Trump's showmanship. There's something about him and his celebrity and all of that that made him successful in the way that someone who had just spouted the same views probably would not have been. Is there cause for hope there that if the populist leader goes away, then the sides will become more pluralistic than they are now?MAGA’s Ugly Progeny: Integralists and NationalistsShikha: It's a good question. No, I'm actually not optimistic about that. Look, what Trump did was he didn't really unite the Republican Party, what he did was he united a certain element within the Republican Party, and the rest of those who didn't agree with him were either purged — Paul Ryan didn't last a year after Trump came on the scene — or became persona non grata within the party.That's actually a classic populist move. It's not just that they don't respect parliamentary institutions and they don't respect the opposition, they actually turn their own party into an embodiment of themselves, and you've seen that with Trump. It's literally classic populism. In that sense, I think he's been hugely damaging to the Republican Party in a way that I'm not sure the Republican Party can recover from it for a very long time. Or at least I think it has to be in the political wilderness for a very long time. It has to be punished at the polls repeatedly before it will give up this populist formula.I think even though there may not be a charismatic figure like Trump, and the reason I was laughing when you said charismatic, because I know to you and me, he's just so utterly not charismatic. It's hard for us to see his appeal, but there'll be other populists who will try and copy him. They may not be successful, but their very presence is going to be damaging. That's one.The bigger danger of Trump is not Trump but Trumpism. Trumpism is essentially an illiberal mindset that doesn't respect the checks on executive power. It gives various factions within the conservative right, therefore, the permission to use the levers of the state to promote their own vision. You've written about this, the integralist movement. Why is that emerging now? The national conservative movement, why is that emerging now?He's actually fractured whatever little uneasy fusion/consensus there was in the right and allowed these illiberal monster children of MAGAism now to assert themselves. I actually think things are going to get much worse before they get better.Aaron: Let's turn briefly to the integralist movement and the national conservatism movement which somehow overlap but are distinct in other ways because they represent an interesting move on the part of the conservative elite to try to take on the energy of Trump's populism, but intellectualize it too because, Trumpism is basically all id.There's not an intellectual philosophical through-line there, but the national conservatives and the integralist are saying, "No, there is a philosophical case against liberalism, that liberalism has failed for reasons inherent to it, and that we need to embrace non-liberal, well thought out philosophical positions." If Trump is spouting id, the integralists and the national conservatives have legitimately thoughtful and often interesting thinkers articulating these views in ways that are I think they're wrong and I think they're often dangerously wrong, but they're not stupid and they're worth wrestling with.It is interesting watching these very elites. These are law professors and philosophy professors and theologians trying to take this energy and reapply the intellectual veneer that used to exist with Buckley, the National Review but was shed under Trump.Shikha: The difference between Buckley and the [Adrian] Vermeules of the day is that Buckley was still trying to promote a certain conservatism within a broadly liberal framework and a broadly liberal understanding. He agreed that checks and balances were a good thing, checks on executive power were a good thing. All of that is now out of the window with these new movements.Discontents with liberalism are always there because liberalism is an uneasy equilibrium between all kinds of different interests that don't comfortably fit together. Minorities are not happy with liberalism because liberalism doesn't give them the levers of power to instantly correct all the injustices against them. They are always unhappy. Of course, the majority is unhappy because, especially in a liberal democratic society, if pure majoritarian rule were to exist, it would get its way far more frequently.Everybody is always unhappy with liberalism. But there has always been this understanding there that life on the other side of liberalism is nasty, brutish, and short, so we better stick with liberalism. That consensus that liberalism may be wanting, but there is no other real alternative, that understanding is completely gone because some people have come to believe, thanks to Trump's assault on liberalism, that they can have the whole cake.The integralists, and you wrote great stuff about this — integralists, as you've pointed out, are a really weird movement because they're Catholics, they are actually a minority, and integralists within Catholicism are a really small minority, so why would you want to give up liberalism? The answer is that they think that any conservative state will give them more of what they want than they'll get from a liberal state.Ultimately, even a reactionary like Trump will give them more than anybody else will. Hence they have turned on liberalism because they feel they're getting less out of it. Every faction within conservatism I think is making a similar bet. You have national conservatism, which is a very, very diverse movement. You have Yoram Hazony who's an Israeli intellectual, who's the godfather of this movement, weirdly enough. You also have standard nationalists who just feel like there should be more flag-waving in the United States. You have somebody like Rich Lowry, who was actually [initially] a Never Trumper, and now feels that there needs to be some kind of America First-ism in America. He's flirting with something like blood and soil nationalism based on geography and ancestry. That will rule me out as a robust American citizen, I'm not sure about you. Geography it means Americans need to love the landscape of this country. The Shenandoah Valley is something that every American should do a pilgrimage to. It's all goofy stuff. They all feel whatever was missing in the liberal arrangement in America now they feel it's up for grabs, and they're all trying to make a bid for it very quickly to get what they can.Aaron: In the time that we have left, I want to turn to the future of this podcast. This is the inaugural episode of Reactionary Minds, we plan to do a lot more of these. Our goals, why we created this show, and what we're hoping to get out of it. I can start on this one. I touched on this a bit earlier, but I think my goal is this rise of liberalism is really troubling. As someone who has dedicated his career to advancing a quite radical conception of individual and economic liberty and individual autonomy and self-authorship, this is a direct assault on the values that not only I hold, but I think are the ones that lead to the best world for everyone.This has always been with us, but it has ramped up considerably. We're seeing some of it on the left, we are seeing one of the two major parties, more or less, entirely overtaken by it. We have seen it embodied in a president, we are seeing an increasing number of intellectuals come out in support of it in one form or another. This is a real threat. The value of a show like this is in trying to understand where that's all coming from, and what it is the people who hold these views actually want, why they want it? What are the ideas that are leading them to it or providing support for it?I don't want this to be a superficial understanding or a dismissive or they're all just evil kind of way because that's easy and ultimately uninteresting. My goal is to really try to understand them on their own terms and then to critique it from the perspective of the value of radical liberty.Shikha: That's exactly right, Aaron. That's why I'm excited that you are doing this. I think this is going to be a great podcast. As you've said, the plan is to understand this illiberalism and its appeal at every level, psychological, social, political. I'm sure you will be having guests that address all of it. Marxism makes this distinction between theory and praxis. You and I, we both have a penchant for an intellectual understanding of things. We like to understand things at a theoretical level, it's almost an end in itself. But in this case, we cannot fight this phenomenon without actually understanding it. [On the praxis side], The UnPopulist is not going to shy away calling the right reactionary and taking on specific political figures who are behaving in an illiberal fashion. It’s not going to shy away from taking sides. We know what we are opposing. But to me the theory of Reactionary Minds is going to inform the praxis of The UnPopulist. So there is a yin and yang here that I’m super excited about. I really look forward to this. 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

I am very excited to announce that on May 6, Friday, The UnPopulist will roll out a new feature, a monthly podcast hosted by Aaron Ross Powell called Reactionary Minds.The series will open with a wide-ranging conversation between Aaron and yours truly that takes stock of the world as it is right now — and how this podcast will advance the mission of The UnPopulist, defending liberal principles — pluralism, toleration, freedom — from the resurgent threat of populist authoritarianism here and abroad. Neutralizing this threat requires the readiness to call out its protagonists whether Viktor Orban in Hungary, Narendra Modi in India or Donald Trump in the United States. But it also requires understanding the allure of their illiberal ideologies on their own terms. Why are people so ready to throw in their lot with them despite the extraordinary success of liberal and open polities to deliver peace and prosperity? That is the task Reactionary Minds will take on.There is no better person for the job than Aaron Ross Powell. A classical liberal and a veteran podcaster, he is the founder of Libertarianism.org. He also hosts his own podcast (Re)Imagining Liberty. He will conduct in-depth conversations with psychologists, sociologists, economists, political scientists and more who’ve been studying the rise of the illiberal ideologies and ideologues. In the spirit of open debate and discussion, he might occasionally invite the ideologues themselves.Stay tuned but sign up today for this exciting new podcast.Shikha Dalmia 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