On this episode of The Permanent Problem podcast, Brink Lindsey welcomes Damon Linker, author of the “Notes from the Middleground” Substack and a Niskanen Center senior fellow, to discuss the challenge of right-wing populism and how liberals should respond to it. After exploring the twists and turns of Linker’s intellectual development, the two examine the rise of the populist right, debate the causes of its rise, and evaluate its intellectual defenders. They also address the cleavage within liberalism exposed by the populist uprising: the conflict between “brokenists” and “non-brokenists.” The former see populism as a misguided response to real and serious problems in contemporary liberal societies, whereas non-brokenists respond that conceding the existence of serious problems is uncalled for and lends undeserved credibility to populism. Linker and Lindsey side with the brokenists, arguing that liberal democracy is undergoing a legitimacy crisis that can be defused only if we first recognize the scale of public disaffection and identify its sources.
Transcript
Brink Lindsey: Hello everybody. Welcome back to The Permanent Problem podcast. This podcast has been on hiatus for a number of months as I was putting my book to bed and getting ready for its publication. But now that it’s out, I’m revving up the podcasting again and I’m delighted to have on as my first guest back, Damon Linker, who writes the Substack Notes from the Middleground. He’s also a senior lecturer in political science at the University of Pennsylvania. And last but not least, he’s a senior fellow at my employer, the Niskanen Center.
Brink Lindsey: So Damon, welcome to The Permanent Problem.
Damon Linker: Thanks for having me Brink. It’s great to be here and to know that I helped the latest phase of the podcast relaunching. I’m honored.
Lindsey: Good, good, good. So I’d like to start off just a little bit with some biographical details. I like my listeners and viewers to know a little bit about the person I’m conversing with.
So like me, you’re an intellectual wanderer. You’ve migrated around the ideological map, you’ve migrated around in faith traditions. I’m a geographical wanderer too. I’ve wound up on the opposite side of the planet from where I was born. But like you, I’ve done some journeying in the way I think about the world and have changed my mind as events… I’ve found that events keep changing my mind for me, but tell me a little bit about your path.
Linker: Sure. Well, I was raised to be sort of default secular liberal without much reflection on it, and even went through a brief period – I had occasion to mention this on Twitter/X the other day when Jesse Jackson died – I noted that actually I cast my very first ballot for Jesse Jackson in the Democratic primary in 1988, marking the brief nine-month window where I was on the harder left. Not the hardest of lefts, but definitely to the left of the mainstream of the Democrats.
Lindsey: As far as you got. Yeah.
Linker: Yeah. That’s about as far as I got. Pretty quickly I moderated. I was very influenced by Alan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind when I was an undergraduate. It piqued a kind of longing for deep thoughts by reading philosophers and trying to discover kind of capital T truth about morality and all kinds of big questions. So I began studying in graduate school with students of Leo Strauss, and that had me coming out of graduate school on the default center right, which is what most Straussians were back then.
I was never entirely a Straussian. I was influenced by them, but also tried to remain at arm’s length because they seemed a little, I don’t know, inbred in a way that led me to be a little skeptical. I guess you could say, I’ve all along had a deep strand of skepticism in my thinking. And so even as I approach various more dogmatic positions, whether it’s political or spiritual, I always try to keep them a little bit distanced, apply a little bit of ironic, skeptical thinking to them to keep myself from being sucked into the undertow of a holistic system.
Linker: So it’s a long story, but basically for complicated career reasons, I actually made a career for a while on the neoconservative religious right of the early 2000s.
Lindsey: You were with the magazine First Things.
Linker: Yes, I worked for them for three and a half years. Probably not a great idea that I ever went to work for them given, again, the skepticism. That was not popular at First Things. And then 9/11 happened and that sort of radicalized the place, radicalized me for a short period where I was all… the whole American right went kind of nuts in that year or two after the 9/11 attacks.
But as soon as the drumbeat for the Iraq war began, I made very clear to the staff that I thought this was a terrible mistake, that Bush should not do this. There was no support for me making that case in the pages of the magazine. We were supposed to be loyal, we had to show we were team players. And that led over the next year or two to a kind of slow falling away from even my ability to affirm what the magazine stood for, even in a skeptical manner. So I ended up leaving, writing a book called The Theocons that was very critical of the magazine and the influence I thought it was having on the right at that time in the Bush administration. And I remade myself as a center left kind of New Republic guy from that era, not the current New Republic, but the old New Republic of Marty Peretz and Leon Wieseltier…
Lindsey: Skeptical liberal.
Linker: Yeah, skeptical liberalism. Although even there, I never… I mean they were big champions of the war too, and I never supported that and that kind of foreign policy vision. So even there it was selectively, like, “All right, on domestic policy, I fit with them.” I know that when you underwent your first slight metamorphosis toward becoming what was called, for a brief period, a liberaltarian, you wrote about this in the pages of the New Republic, which was very much I think a congenial place for that kind of deep thinking about what politics could and should be down through the years. And it’s a real loss to me that it ceased to serve that role in the ecosystem.
So that’s sort of the story. That’s where I’ve been ever since, sort of a very moderately liberal centrist basically. Like centrist but depending on the issue and the philosophical question, I might actually tilt slightly more center right, a little more center left, and just try to be as empirical and pragmatic as possible. I think there aren’t as many pragmatists around as people say, like genuine pragmatists who are willing to be open-minded in the best sense.
Lindsey: How did your political zigs and zags line up with your religious faith zigs and zags?
Linker: Well, that’s obviously, as you would expect, a pretty complicated question. I mean, clearly what drew me to the Straussians when I was young was similar to what drew me to the Catholic church.
I told you I was raised kind of as a secular liberal. But I went through a period in my late 20s when I began to long for, not in politics, but in the broader human sense, for some sort of fixed standard out there that would enable me to have a pattern on the wall over here all the time that I could look for to judge the failings of the real existing moral and political tenets of the moment. And for complicated reasons, having to do with my biography and my marriage and other things, Catholicism seemed to make the most sense for this, even though I was raised… And when I say secular liberal, it was actually secular Judaism. But I knew much more by then because of my education about the Christian tradition than I did about Judaism. I had never been bar mitzvahed, I didn’t know Hebrew.
So again, for those complicated idiosyncratic reasons, I decided, “All right. I’ll become a Catholic. And yeah, I don’t really believe the dogmas and doctrines, but maybe if I follow what Augustine says and take the leap, that I could learn, talk myself into belief along the way.”
It didn’t really work. My falling out with First Things, that happened shortly after my conversion, which was another factor in that, was that the first wave of several waves of the Catholic priest sexual abuse scandal was unfolding while I worked for a priest who was the editor-in-chief at First Things, Richard John Neuhaus, who wasn’t the worst in reflecting on the sins of the church. But after the story lingered for months and months, he fell into a position of saying that the problem was that the Catholics were insufficiently Catholic, which was tautological and defensive in a way that I found irksome. It didn’t help in my own spiritual turbulence of the time.
So I eventually just… I did do a kind of conversion to the church in a practical sense, but it never really took. and before long, I ended up being a lapsed convert and I’m back where I started as like, “Yeah, nominally Jewish because that’s how I was raised and I care more about the fate of the Jews than I do for some other random group of people on the face of the planet Earth.” And so I say, “Yeah, I’m secular Jewish,” but it doesn’t really shape much more about how I think and maneuver through the world at this point.
Lindsey: You’re a searcher, you’re looking for truth with a capital T, but at the same time you’re just unbudgeably skeptical and have a kind of tragic sense of things where you’re not really looking for or expecting happy endings.
Linker: Exactly. Yeah, that’s a good way to put it.
Lindsey: You’re not looking for the truth with a capital T that answers all questions satisfactorily. It’s more of a tortured search.
So I’m different. I have the constitution of a believer, so I, in my teenage years, fell hook, line, and sinker for Ayn Rand and was a diehard libertarian in my college years. I think what I’m good at is seeing big picture patterns, but sometimes I see big picture patterns that don’t exist. So right after 9/11, I was convinced that this was a world historical turn and that civilization was newly and horribly vulnerable to nihilistic terrorism, and that we were sitting ducks for it and it was going to be a new twilight struggle. And so in that frame of mind, I supported the Iraq war. And that’s the dumbest public mistake I’ve made in intellectual life.
I know how my frame of mind can lead me astray. Do you have a sense of how your frame of mind can create blind spots or lead you to miss out on things?
Linker: Well, yes, absolutely. I reflect on that all the time. And having been a columnist at The Week for about eight and a half years before I started the Substack, and I’ve now been there for, I guess, coming up on four years in June, so for about 12 years now, I’ve been writing at least twice a week about the news. And it’s been, as you may have heard, an extremely eventful decade of news. That has been a very effective way of checking myself because I’m constantly analyzing, saying what I think it all means, predicting little things about the near-term, medium-term, and long-term future, and then seeing how it stacks up.
And I think in general, the way you described my approach is quite accurate, kind of suspicious of happy endings, tragic sensibility. I’m very influenced by Isaiah Berlin’s tragic moral pluralism. And then my own reading even of Strauss’s work inclines in that direction, toward an aporetic character of reflections on morality and meaning, that the deeper you think about problems, the more they end in riddles and mysteries rather than the capital T truth that I think for me ultimately drives the search at a certain level, even though I know intellectually there is no way to get that capital T, truth.
But I guess to answer what you asked, specifically if there’s a kind of blind spot in that worldview, it is a tendency to sort of expect the worst, which is the perennial danger of a pessimist, which is the upside of…
Lindsey: You’ve found your moment.
Linker: I did find my moment, but George Will used to say like, “It’s great to be a pessimist because you’re either pleasantly surprised or confirmed in your convictions.”
So I do tend to be dark. I joke that my nickname is Damon the Downer or something like this. But given the dispositional character of American public life, I think it’s an advantage overall because Americans do tend to, I think… Maybe less in the Trump era where you have almost professional resistance types who are screaming fascism at the top of their lungs every day, but the general longer-term trajectory I think of Europe, of American public life tends toward a kind of conviction that everything works out in the end, the arc of history bends toward justice. In the end, democracy and liberalism will triumph everywhere. No other system of government can really justify itself adequately.
And so having someone like myself around being a gadfly and raising objections, poking at those theories, I’m comfortable in that role. And over these 12 years of following the news and pronouncing on it regularly, I think it’s served me pretty well as a guide.
Yeah, I’m pretty content with it, while trying to always be on guard. And I’ve developed ways of writing that guard against it by, for instance, when I do make a prediction, I always try to make it clear this is a conditional. Like, if the following things happen, then these things could happen. Always acknowledging that the conditionals could go the other way and then we’re on another path. Or even if they do go the way I’m speculating about, there are other paths. I mean, even my own darkest scenarios, I try to make clear, “These are probably the tail end in the scheme of all the probable outcomes.” And yet we should be aware that there is this tail end scenario that has certain tendencies that could unfold and we should be on guard against them to try to prevent them from happening.
Lindsey: So let me just ask one process question one writer to another, as you’ve been churning out prose, publishable prose at volume for over a decade, and that fills me with wonder and awe and rank jealousy. I am not a glib or facile writer. It’s an effort.
So how do you do it? How do you churn out three columns a week or however many Substack posts a week you generate now?
Linker: Most weeks I do two, but they tend to be long. And I’m not the kind of writer, you know the old line about journalists, “I didn’t have the time to write short” like as…
Lindsey: No, I believe that. I could make my essays shorter, but…
Linker: Yeah. I mean, when I was a columnist, even though it was online, so there wasn’t any 850 words strict deadline, most of the time my editors wanted it, say, under 1,200 words or something. Occasionally it could go a little more, or below that.
Linker: On the Substack, I’ve learned that my natural length is 1,500 to 2,000 words. And so almost every post is around that length except when they go longer. And I do regularly churn out a 3,000 word piece. I don’t know, I guess it feels to me like it’s training for a marathon. Like you never knew you could run 26 miles until you ran a 5K and then-
Lindsey: Do you have firm habits? Do you write at the same time every day?
Linker: Not every day, but I do have a schedule. So I do write twice a week. And it depends on when I’m teaching and if I’m teaching. So for instance, this semester I’m teaching Monday and Wednesday. So I write a post on Sunday, that goes up on Monday. And then on Thursday, that goes up on Friday. Sometimes if it’s a longer more involved piece, I’ll work on it for a few days here and there when I have time leading up to then Thursday being a day largely devoted to writing that post. So what that means is I have to give up a weekend day to write for a Monday post, and then a weekday Thursday to write for Friday.
And I am to the point that unless it’s a really long involved piece that requires more research or deeper analysis, I can usually sit down right after breakfast and start writing. And then before I go to bed, I have something that’s been written, revised, has display copy, written headlines, sub headline, art. And I can do that in a single work day.
Now it’s a full work day. It’s like 9:00 to 5:00 plus a couple hours after dinner, so probably seven to nine hours of labor to do that. But as I was saying about the analogy to running a marathon, I have been doing this so long that I can do it.
The great thing about writing for Substack as opposed to for a publication with an editor where my paycheck is contingent on doing my work, if it isn’t working out, if I don’t think it’s good, if I need another day to go over it again, no one’s going to fire me. No one’s going to stop subscribing to my Substack if I post it on Saturday instead of Friday. So that is a nice way of making it manageable with this pressure.
Although I have to say, the fact that you wrote the bulk of your current book, The Permanent Problem, as Substack posts and regularly putting them out, and they were pretty elaborate, basically large chunks of what became chapters in the book, that was pretty impressive. They were pretty polished. And so you can do it when you have something you’d want to say.
Lindsey: It was especially the essay format that I found completely liberating. Rather than presenting this bulletproof argument, “Here’s what I think. I’ve anticipated all objections. Ram it down your throat,” it’s more like just thinking out loud. “I used to think this and then this happened, and so it pushed me that way, but then here’s this countervailing consideration.” It was just much easier to get the prose out when you’re not trying to make it bulletproof.
So yeah, I wrote what turned out to be the bulk of the book over about a year and three months in 40 something essays, and I would write one a week and then I take a month off. After every 10 weeks I would take a little time off. But yeah, I’ve never approached anything like that level of words per week in my life, but I credit the format.
Linker: Yeah, it does work. And I’m glad it worked for you. I hope in whatever your next project turns out to be, you try doing it the same way because I think it was great.
Lindsey: So I’m having you on the show right now because I just wrote a book and you just wrote a review of it for your Substack. But more precisely, you wrote a review of two critical reviews of my book, and we’ll get to that in a bit. But in particular, these two reviewers, one affiliated with the Brookings Institution, the center-left august institution, and one affiliated with the center right American Enterprise Institute, both characterized my analysis of contemporary capitalism’s problems as post-liberal in nature. They lumped me in with the post-liberals of the populist right.
So before we get to me and the post-liberals, let’s talk about post-liberals and who they are. And this is your beat, the Substack Notes from the Middleground. It’s got three elements, but your main activity, because of the nature of the news and the world we’ve been living in recent years, is craziness going on the right and particularly the emergence of a new kind of right that’s very different in many ways from the old Reaganite conservatism.
So to me, in part, we’re seeing a recrudescence of old right-wing instincts that have been part of the European right as well as the American right for a long time. On the other hand, we’re seeing kind of a frenzied improvisation to the completely unexpected 2016 victory of Trump. So there was this brute fact that happened, this crazy guy that no one thought was going to win has won. And so a lot of people who saw opportunity in that, then intellectual types who saw opportunity in that, wanted to rationalize and put Trump into their boxes.
So it seems to me we’ve got… How do you see it? Do you see this kind of, on the one hand, is this on the fly improvisation to this unexpected behavior, but also that improvisation has let creepy crawlies out from under the log that have been hiding under there for a long time?
Linker: Yeah, I mean it is a blend of both, I think. Someone like Patrick Deneen who is among the most prominent of the post-liberals, he always was sort of offside on the American right. I mean, his work… I’ve known him for a long time. I think I published his first essay of journalism in First Things back in 2003 or ’04. He wrote a piece about Christopher Lasch that we published, and he pitched it to me at an American Political Science Association conference, and I saw it through the editorial process. And already there he was… Father Neuhaus, the editor in chief, wasn’t entirely comfortable with publishing the piece because it didn’t really fit with Bush era Republicanism, following Lasch. It was critical of the right on economic matters, like in more left leaning, at least as far as the general outlook of the role of the government in regulating markets and in providing a social safety net. It rhymed with the left.
And then on the right, it was very much on sides with First Things, but the whole Laschian framework was just far more communitarian than First Things tended to be. And so he’s always been sort of an anti-federalist type in his work, which I always found very intellectually interesting.
So when Trump won, he interpreted this as vindication that those offside with the Reaganite dispensation that ran from 1980 to 2016, who say “I’m not comfortable with that entirely.” And Trump was like this moment of, “Whoa, everything is scrambled. He seems to be tapping into stuff that meshes with my presumptions, so I’m going to start writing.” And he wrote in the next year or two, he wrote his first big book. He had a few academic books earlier, but the one that got tons of attention titled Why Liberalism Failed, which was-
Lindsey: Recommended by Barack Obama.
Linker: Recommended by Obama. And I actually think it’s a pretty good book. I was not a big hostile critic of that one. I am a hostile critic of the book that followed, Regime Change.
Which I think is much less impressive and much more of a, I don’t know, an attempt to more explicitly make it so that his old assumptions that he was working on for a long time, to make it come out with Donald Trump as the logical consequence of it, which it takes much more of a stretch and I think magical thinking and just doesn’t… And it ends up sounding in certain parts of the latter book as if he’s trying to justify January 6th in the name of what he calls aristo-populism.
It was very ad hoc, very much I feel like trying to come up with a theory. As you were describing, it’s sort of running along behind Trump and retrofitting an ideology that makes him make sense when he’s actually much more mercurial and impulsive and it’s like a kind of Trump psychodrama as much as anything else.
And then the other figures on the post-liberal right, I think Adrian Vermeule of Harvard Law School is a genuinely brilliant guy. I think he’s also probably the most dangerous of these people because he’s the smartest. And he has a lot of… I don’t know. When he’s in certain forums, he’ll do things like co-author a book with Cass Sunstein, which surprised me that Sunstein would do such a thing. I mean, I wouldn’t write a book with Adrian Vermeule. But then he also writes things for Catholic audiences that are very right-wing. And he very clearly is an acolyte and admirer of Carl Schmitt, who’s the famous Nazi jurist or Nazi-admiring jurist from the Weimar Republic.
Lindsey: Kind of unlike everybody else in that crowd, he has the technical legal chops to actually push forward an affirmative, basically, authoritarian agenda. Whereas most of the other folks, they’re very good at criticizing what’s going on now, and sometimes they pick themes and take angles that I sympathize with. But then when they switch to, “Well, what is to be done?”, they go over into just wildly unrealistic kind of thinking and then just utter credulity about the Trump administration as a force for cultural regeneration, which I just can’t even wrap my mind around how anyone could really think that seriously, but…
Linker: Right. Yeah. I mean there is a logic to reactionary thinking as a tradition that… And I don’t mean reactionary in a polemical sense, that a lot of progressives say like, “Well, we, progressives, are where history is going. And if you oppose us in anything, you’re reacting to that and you’re a reactionary, which means you’re going to die out and lose and just give up already.”
I don’t mean it that way. I mean an actual traditional thought that is not conservative, that is not liberal, that is something distinct on the right, it’s further out on the right, and it despises the present. And then either in one mode, it tries to restore something about the past. And then in another even more radical mode, it is a kind of redemptive tendency to basically say, like accelerationism as it’s sometimes called, that the contemporary world is so bad and we’re so cut off from what used to be good from the golden age that we’ve lost. The only alternative is to accelerate the decline of the present so that the whole world essentially collapses. And then on the ruins of that, we might build anew. That obviously feeds into fascism and very extreme political movements of the far right.
And certainly Vermeule has written some things, and some of these other people at least flirt with some of that sometimes, this notion that either we can restore something that was good about the American past, Western civilization’s past, the past of a Christian tradition, the Catholic church. Or then if we can’t do that, if that bridge has been blown up and there’s no path back, then we have no alternative but to just ride the roller coaster all the way down and then we’ll start anew.
And that can be really scary stuff. But you can see that logic play itself out in some of these figures. And they play with it because it’s rhetorically very effective to sound that uncompromising. But when put in action, there are some people in the administration right now, the Trump administration, that I think look at it that way.
And the reason why I brought this up in the first place in the context of Vermeule is there… You said how you could think Trump would contribute to any kind of cultural renewal, and I totally agree with you. But if your goal is to see Trump as a wrecking ball-
Lindsey: Sure.
Linker: … then okay, then it makes sense because you have Trump out there destroying the liberal state, destroying the administrative state, regulatory capacity, state capacity. And then out of the chaos that that will cause, something better will emerge. Maybe that’ll be Vance, maybe that’ll be somebody else.
Lindsey: That makes sense from the logic of radicalism. So it’s not just reactionary radicals. Anybody who’s really out of joint with the status quo, their only hope is some kind of extreme event, some kind of extreme historical discontinuity is going to happen. Collapse is going to happen, revolution is going to happen, a war is going to happen, something’s going to happen to clear the ground for change that’s going in a very different direction from where we are now.
So I saw a lot of that in libertarian land, people with “the worse, the better” kind of thinking, which I’ve always been repelled by. And it was interesting to me, I just learned recently that Deneen back in the mid-2000s, he was a peak oil guy. So he was, back then, hoping for decline and disaster that would usher in this hypothetical brighter day post-chaos.
Linker: Yes, he definitely was. And also my old friend, Rod Dreher, who was profiled in the Atlantic recently, Robert Worth wrote a very good profile, fair-minded, empathetic. I liked it a lot. And he says at one point that Dreher is always predicting some kind of cataclysm, like the decline of the West, the immigration, Muslims, and warning about this terrible thing, civil war, dictatorship, fascism. He is currently working on a book about the Weimar Republic, saying we’re basically in the Weimar Republic now.
And Worth, I think, very shrewdly points out that you can’t read Rod regularly without sensing that although he is always kind of ringing the alarm bell about this, that deep down he longs for it. He wants this to happen because exactly in that reactionary way I was talking about, he hopes that it will be a kind of cleansing fire that will enable something better to crop up on the far side of the cataclysm, whatever form it takes.
And peak oil was a kind of, in retrospect, a pretty comical version of that. And we have versions of that in the present moment about AI too, both in the way that I’m more open to talking about what AI might mean for white collar work, knowledge workers, and really worrying that if it truly is as disruptive as some predict it will be, like this is going to be majorly turbulent for our societies. But then there are the others who are like, “AI is going to be super intelligent, it’s going to wipe out humanity.” That’s more of peak oil stuff where you’re just extrapolating from your nightmares.
Lindsey: So in my book I talk about contemporary capitalism being in crisis. I talk about the central crisis as a crisis of inclusion, where there’s a weakening connection between economic growth and actual overall well-being. And I discussed that in a number of different dimensions. Beyond that, there’s a subsidiary crisis of dynamism – that the actual capacity of the system to keep pushing growth itself is bogging down. And then finally a crisis of politics where we might deal with these urgent and serious problems through collective action, but alas, the political realm is not upstream of the things that are messing up our social and economic conditions. So we’ve got a deranged politics as well.
So in not downplaying contemporary problems and saying that they amount to a crisis, by which I mean a kind of, we’re in a period that’s decades-long, a crisis suggests something imminent, but I think it’s a rolling decades-long crisis where things are going to go one way or another. They can either get appreciably, dramatically better or they could get appreciably worse. So it feels to me that we’re in a time where we’re playing for pretty high stakes.
But that led these two reviewers, Jonathan Rauch and Michael Strain, the darkness or bleakness of my assessment of what’s going on right now led them to lump me in with post-liberals, which I thought was over the top because I don’t think anything like them. So first, everybody who says something has gone wrong has “the Fall,” right? They have a moment in history where things went wrong. So for me, it’s reactions to the advent of mass affluence. So particularly the changing structure of the economy, the shift out of the industrial economy to a post-industrial information age economy with a large professional and managerial elite, that’s a new social formation, and a class divide along educational lines, that’s a major component of what has changed.
We’ve also had cultural responses to becoming rich. Some of those are the shift from what are called survival values to self-expression values that occurred as we climbed up Maslow’s pyramid and got to mass affluence. We felt much less constrained. We had much more breathing room. We felt that we could focus much more on… so we’ve got physical survival, more or less taken for granted. Now we can focus on higher needs, and particularly realizing our self-potential. That got infected, I think, particularly with a kind of romantic belief in the purity of individual impulse and in the oppressiveness of all forms of authority, which I think has led us astray in a bunch of different ways.
So things have gone off course, but in the midst of the greatest triumph in history. We’ve achieved humanity’s age-old dream of marginalizing poverty – making it, instead of being the central factor of human existence, it’s now a tragic, marginal side-problem in the shadows of human life. And this great achievement sets us up for an even greater achievement, which is to translate material plenty into actual, what I call, mass flourishing, widespread access to challenging, fulfilling, satisfying lives. But we’re stuck there in this kind of no man’s land between material plenty and mass flourishing.
That’s the frame I use to explain a number of the problems we’re going through, including our messed up politics. So “the Fall” for the post-liberals is very different. It goes back to the Enlightenment or maybe all the way back to William of Ockham and nominalism, displacing Platonic forms.
So we see some of the same symptoms that we’re both worried about. We see the dysfunctional aspects of romantic self-expression, individualism run amok. We see the kind of suffocating oppressiveness of managerialism run amok, but from completely different frameworks, completely different moral frameworks, completely different hopes for what happens next. And so I thought it was an unilluminating comparison to lump me in with those guys.
Linker: Yeah, I really was appalled, frankly, to read those two. And the reason why is aside from my admiration for you and the book and what you and the book stand for, which is a smart liberal attempt to make sense of how we got here and why. As I said in my review of the reviews, there is abundant public opinion data in this country and in other OECD countries about declining rates of trust in government, belief in the effectiveness of government, trust in public institutions, happiness about hopes for the future. Are we on the right track or wrong track? All these different ways pollsters over many years and often decades of polling data, you can see downward trajectory on all these measures.
And there’s something happening. I don’t like it when intellectuals bandwagon for ideological purposes and say, “We can’t talk about that because that would be conceding too much to our critics.” I think it’s unpersuasive, it’s intellectually dishonest in a way that I really don’t like. I would say I didn’t spend much time talking about Strain in the review that I wrote because his position is, I think a little different than Rauch’s. I think Strain’s view is he legitimately thinks there’s nothing wrong. And the people who are answering negatively to the pollsters, which is tens of millions of people here and around the world, are just ignorant. That for whatever reason, they haven’t looked at the data. They don’t realize that the macro level economic data shows everything’s great, wages are up, your life expectancy is so high compared to historical norms. You could just tick off data to show that if you would just read the facts, you would realize this is actually the greatest of all possible worlds.
That is so non-responsive to the reality of the world and a dead end intellectually and politically that I didn’t even know what to say about it exactly. Whereas the Rauch position did seem more like, “Oh, come on, it’s not so bad. Yes, some of these things are a problem, but we have to just buck up and just keep doing what we were doing” and not freak out about what he admits are some distressing trends.”
And that position, I think, is one that more needs to be engaged with and try to push back on it. Yeah, I mean, you told me that you’ve continued the conversation with him a little bit off site, so maybe some of that is off limits for discussion in public, but what do you sense his-
Lindsey: I mean, that’s private, but first I’ll just say generally in normal times, internal critics on the team are often not popular and are often accused of having uncertain loyalties. You really belong on the other team. So in the current environment where we’re incredibly polarized and people not on the right have very good reason to think that the current right is an existential threat to fundamental liberal democratic institutions, then the defensiveness and the suspicion of internal critics understandably goes up. It’s just — it’s going to happen, right? So I think that’s going on.
So there’s a division that I allude to, in a recent post talking about these reviews, between what I call brokenist and non-brokenist liberals. So we’re all on Team Liberal, we’re all freaked out about the threat of authoritarian populism. We’re also all highly displeased with the lunacy of the far left. But some people, the brokenists – there was an article in Tablet by Alyssa Newhouse, I’m not sure if I got her name correctly…
Linker: Yes.
Lindsey: “Everything is broken,” and it came out five, six years ago. And this sense that there’s some people who think things have gotten really off course and we have deep-seated problems and we’re going to have to deal with them at a fairly profound level to get back on course versus people who say, “We’ve always got problems. This is the same as times past. You’re catastrophizing, you’re over dramatizing. Just stick with sensible incrementalism and don’t go getting ahead of yourself like that.”
And I think Jonathan Rauch is very much of just an instinctive, moderate incrementalist. He doesn’t like the idea of big profound problems that can only be solved at profound levels. So I think there’s just that temperamentally, he’s not disposed to arguments like mine.
Linker: Well, yeah, that’s true. Although I have to say I admire a lot of what Rauch has written down through the years. I see him as pretty close ideologically to myself, obviously as a fellow liberal centrist, but…
Lindsey: Yeah, there’s a basic strategic question. So we’re all on Team Liberal, we have the same enemies or we see the same threats. And we know that the status quo is not perfect and we want to change it in a bunch of different ways. But the issue is that anti-brokenists think that I am conceding way too much to the other side and lending credence to the radical critiques of liberal capitalism being made by the authoritarian.
Whereas my sense is that table stakes in the game right now is to admit that there are serious problems. We have to recognize that liberal democracy is in a legitimacy crisis. Large chunks of the electorate no longer have faith in established institutions or governing elites. That’s why people like Donald Trump get elected, because of this. And so if we don’t face up to that fact that a big chunk of the public has lost faith, and rather than just telling they’re stupid or they need to read some AEI white papers, we should be recognizing and sensing why they have come to that conclusion and then trying to make sense of it and deal with it. So we both have good faith reasons for thinking that the other side of Team Liberal is messing things up badly.
Linker: Yeah. But as I started to say earlier, I just find, first of all, it’s too American-centric to take the position that I see Rauch taking. I mean, we are potentially around two years away from the UK being governed by Reform, a further right anti-immigrant party that was behind the Brexit vote. And then we have National Rally, the Le Pen-oriented far right party that used to be called the National Front, that could well win the presidency in France in a couple of years. And we have the AFD in Germany that could well be so large now that there’s no way to form a coherent governing coalition without including them as perhaps the lead party in that governing coalition in Germany. All of this could happen in the next two years.
I mean, it strikes me, the reason I bring that up now is that the Rauch position that, “Oh, it’s really not that big of a deal, don’t lend credence to what the right is saying. You’re only going to help them,” is a view that requires that one also take as kind of its corollary, that the only reason that people vote for Trump is that they’ve been propagandized and brainwashed by Fox News. But that doesn’t work unless you want to really go conspiratorial and say that Putin’s disinformation campaign is making Reform the lead party in opinion polls above the Labour Party and the Tories. Within just one year, it’s zoomed up to 30% approval. That’s all Putin and Russian disinformation? I think that’s implausible. So something is happening,
Lindsey: Right. Right. Yeah. Usually it’s just that the public has gotten into this surly mood. They’ve been deranged by social media and Fox, but-
Linker: Well, there is… Part of the story is social media and its network effects…
Lindsey: That’s what it is, but it’s then taking that bad mood and sort of treating it like it’s acausal, it just sort of happened, and it’s just going to blow over and we’re going to go back to the way things were sort of. Whereas for the public to have gotten in such a foul mood, there has to be important reasons for that, right?
Linker: Right.
Lindsey: And so-
Linker: Can I actually ask you a question based on where I’m coming from on some of this? This is not a global explanation in the sense that I do think there are more substantive new novel things going on, the problems you discussed very smartly in your book. But I want to talk briefly about the social media network effect dimension of this. Because I don’t recall having read anybody else who’s put it exactly the way that is my pet theory of this, which is that James Madison in the Federalist Papers, most famously in the most read of those papers, the 10th and the 51st, I guess there was some debate over whether that one was written by Hamilton or Madison, but whatever the case, in the Federalist Papers, the idea of factions, that politics is about competing factions and factions are rooted ultimately for the Founders in interests, political interests that are formed in the physical world, in physical space. So like the different states have different interests economically, and then regions within states have different factions.
And so the idea of liberal self-government for the Federalists was that you have to proliferate the number of factions so that they check each other and each will get, if not half a loaf, then at least a slice. And they’ll sort of cancel each other out. You won’t have them cohering into large blocks that use government power to oppress other factions that can’t quite get to the breakout threshold to get majority party support in representative institutions.
And I think that’s very smart, and I’ve always believed that it worked remarkably well – for most of my life, I’ve thought that. But I wonder if… We talk a lot about the problems of social media and technology, we pundits, but this particular dimension of them I think is under-theorized.
The fact is that the general arc of modern liberal progress in capitalism, the economy, the liberation of individuals to kind of pursue experiments in living in a million senses, that tends to over time to repeatedly benefit some areas more than others. It tends to benefit urban areas more than rural areas. The urban areas are always growing at a faster rate. They have more innovation, more diversity, more immigration, hubs there. That’s where innovation and business takes place and greater growth.
Whereas the rural areas tend to be always lagging behind. They’re in always a state of population decline. The move from industrial to post-industrial harms those areas more…
Lindsey: We can all work together and mass up in cyberspace, right?
Linker: Right. Exactly. So the argument is that what if we’re in… Because of social media and smartphones, we now have the possibility of network effects forming virtual or forming factions in virtual space so that the losers in the ongoing unfolding of democratic capitalism now for the very first time in history, are able to form a faction politically that they couldn’t before, because their areas of the world are low population density. You can’t just set up a milk crate with a megaphone and start a labor protest that you take to city hall to demand this or that regulation, which the left always is advantaged by because the left tends to crop up in cities with higher population density.
And so could it be that the reason why this is happening in so many countries at once is that we are now a decade or more downstream of technology enabling this kind of, again, networking of a kind of right populist factionalism through the ability of those to organize in virtual space so that the perceived interests of people in rural Oregon, rural Alabama, rural Arizona, rural New England can find each other and form a faction that’s in physical space very far-flung, but in virtual space, they’re right next to each other and they get to mobilize.
And then if we’re also living through a time with more dislocation than you get in some other eras, so it’s an era of transition, it’s going to get worse with AI and so forth, is that really what we’re talking about? Is that a causal variable that we are seeing everywhere? And that can explain why we have Modi and Orban and the Le Pens and Reform and AFD and Trump and Bolsonaro when he was in power in Brazil and so forth.
Lindsey: So I believe that our new media information environment is an important factor in explaining our current politics. That causal mechanism is not one that I have noodled through and thought through, but it immediately strikes me as interesting and plausible. I’ll tell you that the two ways I’ve thought about the influence of social media and the broader media environment.
First, along the lines of Martin Gurri’s Revolt of the Public, we’ve got this age of information abundance, and that’s bad generally for people in authority. People in authority once were able to manufacture consensus and keep on top of things by controlling information flows, they controlled the official story, they controlled the data that leaked out to the public. Now it’s completely out of their hands. And so we’re in a considerably more anti-authoritarian, chaotic, populist kind of information environment. And it enables people to organize frictionlessly. You can assemble flash mobs very easily. But when you assemble frictionlessly, you don’t build up the connective tissue of a real flesh and blood political movement. All you can do is react and basically negate. You can’t have an affirmative agenda. All you can do is just say no.
So in the early days, social media’s impact on politics looked awesome. It was all these color revolutions where people just saying no, going out into the street and saying, “No, we don’t recognize the legitimacy of this authoritarian government,” which was enough to convince the people with guns that they shouldn’t fire them on the populace right now. But then we came to see this general anti-authoritarian bent turn around and turn its guns on democracy, and it hasn’t been as pleasant. So that’s one thing that’s going on, I think.
Another thing I’ve become much more convinced by the whole the-medium-is-the-message, Marshall McLuhan, Neil Postman, media ecology thinking, which is that the new style of media produces a new style of political discourse, and particularly a much dumber, reactive, impulsive, id-dominated discourse, post-literate. So we’ve gone from hours and hours of Lincoln-Douglas debates where they would break for dinner and then people would come back and finish up…
And so that from level of attention span to very flowery, ornate oratory, to then in our adulthood, we’d gotten down to the 30 second TV spot. We thought that was the reductio ad absurdum of how mindless politics could get, and yet, boy, that now looks like Plato’s dialogues compared to social media memes.
So I think the style of discourse is one that favors anti-intellectual, reactive, emotions-over-reason style of politics, which is very bad for the deliberative government-through-persuasion that vital flourishing democracies rely on. So I think when you throw in the fact that there’s a constituency that’s been historically ignored and underpowered because they’re spread out and can’t organize, and now they can all get together and find their champions, I think that’s a very interesting component to add. But I would stand by the other two things that I’ve mentioned as parts of the story as well.
Linker: Yeah, yeah, I agree. That’s all part of it. It’s always multi-causal. And those I think are all playing a role. So I agree.
Lindsey: So we’ve gone over an hour now, so I’m going to wrap up even though there’s a whole bunch of other things I’d love to talk about. But I just want to end up with mentioning the fact that both you and I are affiliated with the Niskanen Center. And the Niskanen Center has… It’s operating at the policy shop level. It’s coming up with public policies that are trying to make a better United States.
So in my book, I’m looking at a much deeper level at things that are going wrong and much longer time horizons of how we might arrive at a more hopeful future. I think my perspective at my day job lines up with my perspective as a book author. We’ve never been very good at labeling ourselves at the Niskanen Center because we don’t fit into the current Team Red or Team Blue, but one way to label us is anti-status quo liberals. So we’re liberals in the classical sense. We’re for market economies and the rule of law and popular self-government, and we recognize that this is a time in which basic institutions are under assault. And so we defend those institutions in principle as our best hope. But at the same time, our whole MO is recognizing that those institutions have wandered off course and are in need of some fairly aggressive reforms to put things right again.
Lindsey: And so that’s the dance we play, it’s that, “Yes, populists, you have a point…” So this goes back to when Steve Teles and I wrote The Captured Economy, back in 2017, about upward redistribution, policies that simultaneously slow down economic growth and make inequality worse, so that you can have reforms such as liberalizing the construction of new housing that is pro-economic dynamism on the one hand, but also pro-equity by increasing home affordability and defusing one of the major engines of wealth inequality today.
And our first chapter was called “Rigged,” and this came out right in 2017. And so we’re saying that there’s this populist uprising and there’s this sense on the left and the right – Bernie Sanders was fresh in our minds at that time on the populist left – there’s this deep discontent that the system is rigged. We understand where that sentiment is coming from, and yet we think that the solutions being posed by the populist left and right are terrible and worse than the disease, and here’s what’s really going on.
That’s the general sort of Niskanen schtick in issue after issue, is to recognize the level of discontent, but to see how that discontent is being manipulated to push things in a very unhealthy direction. And what falls on us to do is propose actual constructive changes that can make things better and therefore defuse that discontent and maybe get us out of this vicious circle.
Linker: Well, that’s certainly why I feel very much at home at Niskanen because… I wrote an op-ed for the New York Times about a year ago. I guess it was probably in 2023 in the fall, or maybe it was early in 2024. But I was trying to give advice to Biden. It didn’t work by the way. But leaving aside the fact that I thought he was too old and so forth, I also thought if he was going to run, he needed to run as a liberal reformer, concede some things to the populist upsurge and come up with an agenda that like, “No, I’m not going to propose to greatly expand healthcare access. I want to fix the institutions we already have that aren’t working as well as they should.”
And that message for the center left, I think, could be a real winning one. It would be a way to try to speak to the populist discontents on both the left and the right without conceding the need for it to be some kind of revolutionary transformation. And that balance to be a kind of populist of the center in a way strikes me as being a potentially winning one if you had the right people bringing the message. And I very much appreciate Niskanen’s work in trying to come up with what that agenda would look like, what it should consist of.
Lindsey: Well, I’m on board for sure. So anyway, Damon, great having you on. Great talking with you. Wish we could keep on going, but we’re going to give our listeners and viewers a break and wind it up here.
Linker: All right then. Invite me back in a little while. We’ll continue.
Lindsey: Okay, very good.
Linker: Take care. Bye-bye.
