In this episode of The Permanent Problem podcast, Laura Field joins host Brink Lindsey to discuss their new books. The first half of the conversation focuses on Field’s Furious Minds: The Making of the New Right, an examination of the intellectuals of American right-wing populism. They review the origins of the right’s turn toward populism, the resurrection of old ideas combined with some new improvisations, and the MAGA intellectual right’s strange combination of profound cultural despair with wide-eyed naivete about the possibility of renewal under populism. Field and Lindsey then switch gears and discuss the overlaps and profound differences between Lindsey’s criticisms of contemporary capitalism in The Permanent Problem and the “post-liberal” bill of indictment against liberal modernity. While intellectuals of the MAGA right dismiss post-Enlightenment liberalism as profoundly misconceived and doomed to failure, Lindsey argues that liberal societies today are currently struggling with the consequences of one world-historical triumph — the marginalization of material poverty — and how to move on to the next great triumph: translating material plenty into mass flourishing.
Transcript
Brink Lindsey: Hello, everybody. Welcome to The Permanent Problem Podcast. I’m delighted to have as my guest today Laura Field. We’re actually going to be interviewing each other about each other’s books. Laura is the author of the excellent new book Furious Minds about the intellectuals of the MAGA right. She’s also a non-resident fellow at the Brookings Institution, has affiliations with George Washington University and American University as well. And sadly, a former senior fellow at the Niskanen Center where I work. But lovely to have you here with me today and to talk about our books.
Laura Field: Thank you. Thank you so much for having me, Brink.
Lindsey: So, we’re going to start off, I’m going to ask you questions and then we’ll turn the tables about halfway through.
Field: Reading your book, so much overlap thematically, even though they’re very different books, obviously.
Lindsey: Yeah. So, your book, I think, has a tighter focus and so it makes sense I think to start with you and then we can talk about how my book fits in with those themes. So, your book is about the intellectuals of the new populist right. Which is an interesting thing: to be an intellectual of a profoundly anti-intellectual movement, a revolt against elites and especially credentialed experts.
So, it seems to me that this phenomenon of the intellectual new right is an interesting combination of deep-seated old ideas coming back that had been kind of buried under a log for a while, but resurfacing. But then also a kind of mad improvisation to take advantage of the utterly unexpected 2016 election of Donald Trump, and then the ongoing radically unpredictable zigs and zags of his time in office. So, you have people trying to shoehorn some old ideas into some novel and fairly chaotic circumstances. So, how do you see that characterization? And do you see this as more of the recrudescence of old ideas or something new and weird?
Field: Oh, I think that’s a wonderful way to characterize it as this mishmash and the deep, old, crusty things that have sort of been there the whole time and festering really. And then, but also just this insane moment that they were able to take advantage of. And I think overall, there’s a little more systemic consistency in the intellectuals on the intellectual side of things than I really expected when I first started researching and writing about these guys, insofar as there is this thread from the old, old right in the early part of the 20th century through to Goldwater, Buchanan, the Tea Party and all of this. So, there is this deep sort of consistency that I think they recognized in Trump.
But there is just a strange mishmash of all kinds of the new, the kind of energetic tech stuff, the highbrow, the low, and just a totally different remix of all these old things. And I say in the book that there are three things that distinguish this new right from the old iterations of this same sort of fringe phenomenon. So, overall, the book is telling the story of the takeover of the GOP – essentially, the old Reagan-Buckley establishment, fusionism, whatever – by the fringe forces of the old right and the paleos. So, that’s the overall story. It was just taking it over by the fringe and it’s a story of intellectual radicalization.
And I say there are three things that distinguish this new iteration from the old. And one is just an increased misogyny because I think that where there was anti-feminism…
Lindsey: And by old, you mean distinguished from old Reagan-Buckley conservatism?
Field: No, this is sort of in the weeds already.
Lindsey: Just the old right?
Field: More from the distinction from the older, old right. Okay. So, there’s this consistency and there’s this distinction. And I can say more about those distinctions, but the old paleo fringe stuff, that this is distinct from that because it’s more misogynist, it’s more tech-savvy and youthful, and there’s this youthful energy, and they’re just way more successful, right? So, they see this happening with Trump and they succeed. But I think the other thing I’d say is this blending of highbrow and low and this kind of bizarro mishmash feature of it that I think your characterization captured. So, I love that way you captured it, but there is a lot of consistency too to this sort of…
Lindsey: The misogyny, part of that’s just a reflection of we’re in new times, right? So, once upon a time when the old right was really old, women were in their place in the home, right? They didn’t complain about that, right?
Field: So, they didn’t need to.
Lindsey: So, now then we had of course conservatism and conservative anti-feminism during the ’60s, ’70s, and ’80s. But now we have women ascendant in many quarters of society – 60% of college students and taking over a number of professional fields that were once all-male preserves, an increasing percentage of women as the prime earner in their household. So, there’s a sense of male displacement.
Field: Absolutely.
Lindsey: And therefore, a kind of freakout associated with that.
Field: Yeah. There’s much more fuel now for a backlash.
Lindsey: It just wasn’t on the map decades ago, right?
Field: Oh yeah, certainly, certainly. But it does actually make for quite a different flavor of reaction.
Lindsey: Go into a little more detail on that.
Field: Well, I mean maybe just for listeners — and maybe your audience is familiar with all this history, right? — but I mean, there’s the distinction between basically what the establishment right and the fusionist Reagan-Buckley right stood for versus what these new guys stand for and how that works.
Lindsey: Sure. That’d be good.
Field: So, I just call it the new right — there’s every generation a new right, so I just called…
Lindsey: The establishment right was the new right once upon a time, right?
Field: Yeah, new right, old right doesn’t… I mean, it’s a mess, but I just use the phrase Reagan-Buckley establishment to describe the old coalition. And that basically is this combination of — I don’t need to tell you this, but anyway — it’s a combination of liberal economics, free trade, free market economics, social conservatism, and sort of the social values of the Christian right, forged together through anti-communism and a kind of liberal internationalism or interventionism. And so that lasted basically till the end of the Cold War and then these other… But that was an uneasy settlement among conservatives and in American history politically.
At the end of the Cold War, you have these other strains of conservatism that were always there, but continued to fester, which are more populist. The phrase that was used in the ’90s is the paleoconservatives against the neocons, a reflection of that distinction and…
Lindsey: And the paleocons had been famously marginalized during the Reagan administration and were quite out of sorts about it. When William Bennett became Education Secretary, I think, or no, he was head of National Endowment for the Humanities, they pegged him for that first, as opposed to some old right person who…
Field: Huge uproar over that, right? Yeah.
Lindsey: Yes, yes. So, they’ve been nursing grievances for decades.
Field: Yeah. And these are a lot of people who were ousted quite formally, because of things like antisemitism or racism from some of these intellectuals.
Lindsey: Sam Francis, who now you look back on as a sort of progenitor of the MAGA right?
Field: Exactly.
Lindsey: He was a very marginal kind of guy and he finally got booted from National Review and from establishment conservatism for being too overtly racist in his writing.
Field: Yeah. Yeah. And Pat Buchanan being the main political figure representing this.
Lindsey: A guy with ugly ideas and great charisma, right? Incredibly likable and personable, which made it easy to sort of not focus on substance.
Field: Yeah. So, you have all that in the background and then coming back into play in the ’90s and then continuing obviously through our time. And there’s a more nativist dimension to it, more small-government localism kind of flavor and definitel isolationism built into all of that. And so, I think that what happened — which was a surprising part to me — is that when Trump came on the scene, a lot of the intellectuals like Michael Anton and some of those figures who were really the earliest sort of vanguard of the intellectual defense of Trumpism, they saw Trump and they thought not only was he this great vehicle for destruction — and the religious right, they talk about sometimes God anoints a wrecking ball — there’s some of that in Anton, but I think they also saw that he very clearly instinctively represented a lot of that paleocon stuff and they were steeped in Sam Francis, right? At one point, Anton calls himself a paleo-Straussian. That was surprising to me. I didn’t expect them to be so immersed in that stuff. And so, I think there was a real intellectual consistency there. They saw what he was. They thought that’s our guy. It wasn’t just a marriage of convenience. It’s like, oh, this guy actually stands for this stuff.
Lindsey: It seems to me that the end of the Cold War is critical in figuring out how the right has developed since then, because it was the international, global dimension, the geopolitical conflict with the Soviets that acted, I think, as a huge disciplining force on the creepy-crawly right. There was a need to have bipartisan consensus with Democrats to maintain the Cold War and maintain a solid front against the Soviets. That put a lid on how wacky things could be allowed to go. So, in the founding of conservative fusionism by William F. Buckley in the ’50s, he’s completely in bed with proto-MAGAism. So, McCarthyism and massive resistance to segregation, he’s on board with and making excuses for both of them, but still the trump card ultimately is prevailing against the Soviets in the long twilight struggle, and that forced upon him — in addition to just his upbringing and kind of patrician orientation — that foreign policy priority forced upon conservatism a need to do business with Cold War liberals.
Field: Right. I mean, in doing some of this research that’s quite explicit — when they say, they talk about how, okay, well, we can even tolerate big government if it means for the sake of the security apparatus, right? We’ll get on board with this, even though it makes us uncomfortable. I think it was Buckley who said, he’s like, “I can do this because it’s…”
Lindsey: Right. If welfare spending is the price we have to pay for a big Pentagon budget, we’ll do it.
Field: Exactly, we’ll do it. Yeah.
Lindsey: So, when the Cold War ends, then the enemy with a capital E is gone. Politics generally thrives on hatred and enemies. So, there’s a vacuum there to fill on the right, and it’s very easy to slot liberalism, domestic liberalism, in as the enemy with a capital E. So, there was always that kind of connection drawn — there were the reds abroad and the pinkos at home, right?
Field: Yeah, yeah, yeah. And they really do think that liberalism trends towards Marxism in a very kind of clear, slippery-slope way.
Lindsey: Yes, that there’s a slippery slope and that they can’t control it. And so, once the far enemy was gone, domestic liberalism or progressivism became the existential threat, and that sort of the despair that many Cold War hawks felt about being on the losing side of the international struggle… When Whittaker Chambers famously flipped from being a communist to being one of the great anti-communists and a witness against Alger Hiss and all the rest, he said, “I think I’m moving to the losing side.” So, it’s in the nature of people of conservative right-wing disposition to be a little gloomy, a little pessimistic about the future.
And so, all of that gloom then got invested not in a foreign enemy, but in fellow citizens – this cultural despair…
Field: Yeah. I mean, I hadn’t thought of connecting that part of the story to the end of the Cold War. I just hadn’t thought of it that way, but I think you’re right. I’ve been thinking more in terms of: you have the end of the Cold War, you have 9/11, you have the wars in the Middle East, you have the financial crisis, you’ve got all this stuff brewing, right? There’s tons of discontent. And then Trump comes out and says the wars were a mistake. But you’re right, it’s bundled up with this very persistent anti-liberalism and the domestic enemy especially.
Lindsey: And it goes both ways. That is, I think the end of the Cold War is not just important in explaining the rise of the MAGA right, but also in explaining polarization in general. I think it’s noteworthy that the last time a president was elected and the losing side didn’t like it one bit, but was completely clear that they had lost and didn’t make any bones about it and didn’t cry foul and just accepted it like good democrats are supposed to accept being out of power now and again, was 1988, the last Cold War presidential election. So, George H. W. Bush won, Democrats were not at all happy about a third Republican term in a row, but they knew they had lost and there was no arguing about it.
But then along came Clinton in ’92 and there was Whitewater and Gennifer Flowers and he wasn’t really legitimate, plus it was this weird Ross Perot third-party thing. So, Republicans never really accepted him as the legitimate occupant of the White House. Then Bush comes in 2000 with Bush v. Gore and Democrats thought he wasn’t a legitimate president right out of the box. And then Obama comes in and you’ve got the whole birtherism and the conspiracy that he’s not really a citizen and therefore not a president. Then Trump comes in and he was installed by the Russians.
And of course, he violated norms in all kinds of ways to make people freak out, but still there was a lot of crazy conspiracy theories as well that weren’t really rooted in facts. And of course, Biden wins in 2020 and they just straight out deny it. So, the Cold War…
Field: This is depressing. You’re right…
Lindsey: The Cold War kept a lid on things… And you look back at the history of American democracy, as I have since things came unwound in 2016 while trying to figure out what’s going on. I did a lot of reading of American political history. And really, it’s been kind of a dumpster fire a lot over the years. And so, it’s kind of like we’re reverting to form in some ways.
Field: Mm-hmm. That’s right.
Lindsey: And it’s grim that it takes having 10,000 nuclear warheads aimed at you to make Republicans and Democrats get along with each other in a minimally acceptable civil way, but…
Field: Yeah. But it is good to keep the long history in mind because there are realignments, there are major shifts. I mean, it’s so complex too. Anyway, we’ll get to the hopeful stuff later.
Lindsey: So, also there’s not just illiberal extremism on the right, there’s a species of illiberal extremism that has risen on the left, certainly a species of a break from Obama-style liberalism in important ways, also I think born out of despair. I don’t know that I see their origin stories as linked, but I see them feeding off each other. How do you see the relationship between the two?
Field: Yeah. I mean, I think there’s a feeding off each other and a sort of iterative push-pull dynamic that certainly is part of it. I think the right’s quite a bit worse and more dangerous and less justified.
Lindsey: They’re in power, right? Yes.
Field: I think you agree. But yeah, it’s certainly there and there’s certainly problems in both directions.
Lindsey: Yeah. My own formulation — you may not agree with this. I suspect I’m a little to the right of you on some issues…
Field: Sure.
Lindsey: …and that may color my judgments.
So, I think the populist right is a threat because it’s a threat to the fundamental integrity of liberal democratic governance. I see the social justice radicalism, “woke” socialist left as a threat because it convinces swing voters to vote Republican. So, it enables the right. I think it’s utterly remarkable that Donald Trump has run for president three times and each time he gets more votes. So, something is turning off a lot of people on the left and driving them towards Trump, even if they’re not enthusiastic about him at all, even if they see that his character is lousy and he’s erratic, and there are a lot of reluctant Trump voters.
And so, that’s what I see as my deep frustration with what’s going on in the left — it’s not that it’s a direct threat to civil liberties or to freedom, which is just, I think, orders of magnitude less in the here and now.
Field: Well, they’re much further from power…
Lindsey: To me, its primary problem is how it empowers the right.
Field: Yeah. I mean, I think that’s true in how it pans out. I think — and I’ll come back to your question about the origins of these things maybe — but I mean, my honest view is that partly what’s happened is the centrists and everybody falls into this hype about the threat of the left that it’s a bit of hype. And there’s no analogy between the nastiness on the far right and AOC, right? I mean, even on the antisemitism question, it’s so disanalogous and…
Lindsey: No, because it’s not politicians on the left. It’s a much more diffuse… it’s the schools being shut down for a second year.
Field: No, that stuff I’m with you. So, that’s right. I’d say there’s a cultural threat on the left that I’ve been a little too probably soft on in terms of just what that means and how that affects people, because I’m sympathetic to individual claims about history and I want a free society where people can make their woke arguments. I mean, I think you learn a lot, and I’m not against postmodern philosophy, but there is a kind of skew — that’s an understatement. There is a systemic problem there. There’s a lot of cultural stuff that I think needs some sort of reconfiguration.
So, anyway, we could go on forever about this, but I think let me say that I think that there is a kind of consistency between the extremisms… If we’re just talking about the Bernie side and the new right, in terms of their critique of liberalism and the deeper problems — I think you share some of that diagnosis — in terms of how part of what has happened is: if we think about the new right intellectuals, when Trump got elected, they also had some explanations at the ready for how this had happened and why this strongman had emerged.
And it has to do with the kind of disintegrative effects of liberalism and liberal economics and liberal philosophy, the sort of failure of our civic institutions and our associative institutions, right? If you think of Patrick Deneen’s analysis, his idea is that liberalism…
Lindsey: His book Why Liberalism Failed…
Field: Why Liberalism Failed — the idea is that liberalism acts as… And you use this word too, an acid on the social fabric, and that the result then is because of the emphasis on individuals. And he also says the emphasis on the conquest of nature, that these two things are a departure from the order of things and ultimately just have such a devastating effect on human life that the very foundations of modern liberalism are just sort of rotten and doomed to fail. And then he says, so what’s going to happen here is… And he says it’s already happened because it’s already in the past — liberalism has failed.
And he says, when the social fabric, the political fabric all… And he goes through every institution you can imagine — when liberalism takes hold, all of the ties that bind are gone. And so, people start yearning for a strongman and they yearn for authority figures to fix the problems and to reorder their lives. And so, I think there’s something very compelling there. I mean, just intuitively, because it’s such a simple explanation. And he came along in 2018 and said, look, this explains Trump, this explains so much. And I think that at least on the economic front, the far left agrees with that completely.
Sam Moyn wrote a review of that book. And he said, it’s neoliberalism that’s the problem, not liberalism per se.
Lindsey: Right. So, cultural pessimism has been constitutive of modern conservatism from the get-go, and especially post-’60s. So, pessimism leading to sort of outright despair, I think, in the ’00s and early teens as it just looked like social conservatives were just getting rolled on one issue after another. And so, there was this sense that theirs was a completely lost cause, that they no longer called themselves the moral majority. People were coming to see themselves as an embattled minority and starting to talk… Rod Dreher wrote the book The Benedict Option, that we’ve lost. Our best option is just retreat and quietism, right?
Field: Yeah. And there’s nothing left to conserve is how they’re talking now. Yeah.
Lindsey: And then this shock happened, Trump won, right? And so, that changed their mentality a lot. Anton was an early person who saw the potential in Trump from his perspective, but some of them, they didn’t like him at the outset and they weren’t too thrilled about him at the beginning, but just the fact that he won, and then the fact that he was so good at outraging the people that outraged them, just ultimately won them all over.
And in your book, you tell the story about how they just get… A lot of these folks are getting progressively radicalized over time, becoming more and more just overtly “Trump is great,” and then also becoming more and more okay with letting in the overt white nationalists and neo-Nazis and having a “no enemies to the right” kind of mentality. You’ve seen a real sort of intellectual and moral degeneration over time as the standards have lowered because of the opportunities of proximity to power.
Field: Yeah, absolutely. And the sincere radicalization in terms of, okay, we didn’t think it was… I think Deneen’s the clearest example of this, where he writes this book — it’s a kind of Why Liberalism Failed book — the solution…
Lindsey: Came out in 2018, right?
Field: 2018, yeah.
Lindsey: So, during Trump’s first term. And Barack Obama plugged it.
Field: Yeah. And it’s a clear articulation of all of these ideas that are very common on the right. And he has a pretty sort of quiet conclusion that’s kind of like, “Well, the time for big ambition is not here yet.” He talks about how now’s the time to kind of huddle, preserve ourselves. It’s almost the Benedict option, right? And he’s like, “Let’s just take our time, bide our time, see what’s next.” But then within a couple years…
Lindsey: He was writing that with Trump already in power and he wasn’t yet sold, right?
Field: No, he wasn’t sold. And then Adrian Vermeule wrote a review of the book that called him out on that and said, “This is way too weak-kneed. This could have been a masterpiece, but your solutions are still too submissive and subject to the liberal framework. You need something much more radical, much more robust because you need to sear the liberal faith with hot irons and just own it — own it that you actually want something bigger” and basically like “our time has arrived. Let’s do this thing.” And when Deneen writes a new intro to the paperback edition, he’s like, “Okay, let’s go.”
Lindsey: Yeah, yeah. And then the next book is Regime Change.
Field: Yeah, the next book is Regime Change. And he’s still a little shy and they’re all pretty shy and cagey in different contexts, but he’s talking about replacing the elites, winning the culture and so forth.
Lindsey: And so, you go from the Benedict option to integralism, from declaring you’ve lost and retreating to imagining that you can actually take over America and run it according to Roman Catholic principles.
Field: Yeah, it’s incredible.
Lindsey: There’s an astonishing leap in ambition in a few years, right?
Field: Yeah. And it’s partly like, well, Trump is proof of concept. You can do crazy things, I think is what a lot of them have taken away from this. And they’ve gotten remarkably far with it because JD Vance is the vice president and potential future…
Lindsey: And so, yeah, talk about him just a little bit as the kind of carrier. So, Trump is just a wild card. He’s just an id, living his impulses from moment to moment and they’re aligned in some sort of gestalt way with the mood of the most illiberal right, but he’s not a thinker. He’s not an intellectual.
Field: No, he’s not paying much attention. Vance was converted to Catholicism the same time he converted to Trumpism, right? It was kind of this dual move. I mean, I don’t mean that in the sense that it’s insincere — seems to be sincere and clearly opportunistic, but also I think sincere. And so, in terms of just really believing that this is their moment, that this is for the good of the country, I think he probably believes that this is all necessary for the future and the future of flourishing, right? I mean, thinking about how you talk about some of this.
And so, Vance was cultivated in the petri dish of the first administration and he had come out with his Hillbilly Elegy book. He was close to people like Rod Dreher and then I think introduced to people like Patrick Deneen and some of these others. And so, he ran for Senate, he was backed by Thiel, but then he’s also being groomed by people like the Claremont Institute — that language is probably not quite right, but you know what I mean? He’s close with the people at the Claremont Institute, doing interviews with them, going to the National Conservatism conferences. So, he’s really in the thick of this pretty narrow slice of the Republican world.
I mean, the people in the book, they didn’t think they’d become very important, but it’s not like this is a… it’s a pretty niche crowd. And so, Vance is right at the forefront.
Lindsey: I mean, the entirety of the conservative intellectual apparatus that didn’t go along with Trump is now just in Siberia, right?
Field: Yeah, exactly. So, they’re ousted. So, there’s Hawley, Rubio, Vance, a few others who are glomming onto this stuff, but he really is their guy. He’s their creation. I was joking at some point that he’s their Frankenstein monster, but I don’t think he’s going to turn against them, right?
Lindsey: Right.
Field: And so, he’s really in it all across the whole… He’s got ties to all of these guys, and he’s kind of like Kevin Roberts. He’s in this difficult position right now, because there’s all these cleavages and there’s all this upset over antisemitism and basically all the stuff they’ve let in quite happily. And so, Kevin Roberts is like the canary in the coal mine.
Lindsey: He’s the Heritage president, who famously wouldn’t scold Tucker Carlson for interviewing…
Field: Platforming Nick Fuentes. And then kind of did and everybody’s angry at him.
Lindsey: A big exodus from Heritage.
Field: Yeah. So, he shows us how difficult the positioning is now that they’ve created this situation. I mean, Vance has been very withholding, I would say. He’s not going after Fuentes.
Lindsey: He doesn’t show any interest in exerting any kind of discipline.
Field: No, or any kind of moral principle, right? And I think that’s because he’s tied himself to Trump. And so, he knows that he can’t really get away with alienating people like Carlson. Anyway, so Vance is very much the figurehead to carry this forward after Trump.
Lindsey: We’re about halfway through our hour. So, let’s segue. Your book is about the intellectuals of the new populist right. My book, The Permanent Problem, was in large part motivated by the rise of the populist right. My book starts with an analysis of the serious problems facing contemporary rich capitalist societies, the US in particular, but not only the US. And it was really the shock of the 2016 election that triggered it.
My sense that America’s problems were much deeper than I had thought before, that for our country to have done this, for faith in established institutions and elites to have been so shaken that you can get plurality support for someone as extravagantly unfit and out of bounds as Donald Trump, seemed to me to indicate there’s something deeper going on than just fluky political factors. And plus, this is happening all over the world right now. This populist right is ascendant everywhere. So, this seems to me something that’s a lot deeper. And there are economic, social, cultural factors underneath the partisan warfare and polarization that are grabbing the headlines.
And so, I wanted to get a hold on those. And so, it was motivated by trying to figure out how we had gotten to where we are that occasioned this book, first a Substack, and then the book. So, I had written a book, a fairly upbeat, optimistic political and cultural history of post-war America called The Age of Abundance, about how mass affluence had triggered this cultural upheaval and had given birth to both the new left of the ’60s and the new evangelical right of the ’60s. But by the time I conceived this book in the late ’90s and wrote it in the early 2000s, it seemed like the storm and strife of the cultural upheavals created by mass affluence were in our rearview mirror.
So, I was presenting abundance as a relatively unproblematic opening of opportunities rather than opening Pandora’s box of troubles and threats. I saw troubles and threats. They didn’t seem to be panning out. And so, I thought that at that time, from that perspective, I was telling a happy story. So, when I was researching how we got into electing Trump, the working title for my project was The Age of Abundance: What the Hell Happened? I’ve come around to the idea that the electorates that are falling for populism are responding to real social problems but they are, alas, elevating demagogues who are not going to be doing anything constructive to solve those problems.
They’re going to use those problems to gain power and wealth, but it’s not just a crazy bad mood, right? There’s something real going on. And so, I would say that in common with the post-liberal MAGA intellectuals — not all of them call themselves post-liberals, but I’ll just use that as the term — that when looking at what’s wrong with American life today, we identify some of the same symptoms, not all by any means, but some of the same symptoms. The difference is that we, I think, differ fundamentally in diagnosis and then in prescriptions.
Field: Can I say a little bit about how I thought of your book in connection with some of the things we just talked about?
Lindsey: Yeah.
Field: So, I mean, I think as you saw in my book, there’s a kind of theme of the vulnerabilities of liberalism, right? And your subtitle to your book — well, the book — The Permanent Problem: The Uncertain Transition From Mass Plenty to Mass Flourishing. And in a very direct way, I think you’re talking about how we’ve got mass material plenty, or we could, but we still have this permanent problem of a kind of spiritual malaise and discontent, and we don’t know what to do with ourselves. And I think in my broad historical thinking about this, it does seem like liberalism has this massive vulnerability in terms of formation of the self, where liberalism says, “We’re not going to tell you how to live your life.”
You get autonomy, you get freedom. And the right wing would say — and I think somewhat correctly — that for generations, we’ve been coasting on the fumes of our old traditions, and that now that those traditions are becoming less secure and challenged mainly by pluralism, that liberal people especially have just nothing to say to that. And so, there’s this massive vacuum of cultural sustenance. And I think there’s some real truth to that. And so, when I think about the future of liberalism, I think about — and this is the book I would maybe write next or whatever — there are parts of this in your book and in other things that are happening, but there’s a kind of need to become much more deliberate about our lives and hold onto pluralism, but to find ways to cultivate community, cultivate a liberal way of life that also borrows from these other inheritances. But it’s got to be… we’ve taken so much for granted. It’s become so stagnant that there’s this sort of crisis of meaning. And your book — I think you’re in the weeds of policy, and in the best sense, you’re thinking this through on a broad platform. I don’t know, it’s a very ambitious book. It’s very rich and there’s so much exciting… I mean, it’s very depressing, I’d say. The first eight chapters are like, whoa. And I think you’re more dour than me. I mean, the flavor of it is more Deneen-like than I would be comfortable with. And I think that’s interesting and you may be right.
Lindsey: And that’s led to a couple of critical reviews that have lumped me in with post-liberals, right?
Field: Well, it’s very interesting because it’s also… It’s so interesting, but I mean, that’s just also maybe a matter of what you’re thinking about while you’re writing. You’re looking, I think, in a hard-headed way at some very real problems, and it’s very educative to read through that stuff.
Lindsey: So, I think there’s a lot to be gloomy about. There’s a lot to be excited about too. I really do feel like we’re in a best of times, worst of times, Dickensian world these days. And it’s very difficult for people to keep both of those ideas in their head at the one time.
Field: No, I agree.
Lindsey: If they’re focused on optimistic things, they don’t want to hear about the bad stuff. And if they’re focused on the bad stuff, they want to just completely write off the good stuff. But I really think we’re in a confusing, critical time, a crisis where things can go one way or the other and diverge sharply. So, there’s a lot of promising, exciting things going on, and then there’s a lot of things to be gloomy about. The radical difference, I think, that separates me from the post-liberal types is they think liberalism is fundamentally rotten, right? That it was misconceived from the Enlightenment forward.
Whereas I think that we are dealing with the messy aftermath of liberalism’s greatest triumph, which is the conquest of poverty or the marginalization of poverty. And that has opened the possibility then of not just reducing suffering, but of actually inculcating affirmative wellbeing on a mass scale. And the irony is that having made this leap, it’s brought problems of its own. And some of those problems are then complicating this transition from one great world-historical achievement — the eradication of mass poverty — to the next great world-historical achievement, which is the achievement of mass flourishing. So, for me, I see liberalism as stumbling into problems, but I’m on its side. I celebrate its triumphs and I want it to triumph in the future, right?
Field: Yeah. And I think — I mean, in a way you’re thinking very deeply and seriously about, I mean, the permanent problem, which I love that, I love how you used that idea. And just in a similar way to the post-liberals — and this is where I’m perfectly comfortable with them — they’re thinking about deep questions about what it means to be alive and about the common good. You’re doing a much better job though, I mean, because you’re using fresh language. So, for me, the concept of flourishing or eudaimonia comes ultimately from Aristotle. It’s this idea that we need to think about how to live well, that that’s what’s distinctive about human politics.
And I just think you’re using fresh language that is something that is very… it’s just so refreshing because most people don’t do that. They use the old versions of it and they’re not creative. Maybe you’re borrowing this, but the relationships, what constitutes flourishing for people — relationships, projects, experiences — I mean, I love that. That’s something I think everybody can say, yeah, there’s something to that. Maybe I would add a couple other things, but this is a rich characterization, a philosophical formulation for what people need in life to be very happy.
Lindsey: So, you mentioned before this key component of the post-liberal case against liberalism, which is that it is parasitic upon pre-liberal culture and values for social coherence and cohesion and for meaning, and that it has systematically ripped through that inheritance and now we’re bone dry and now the crisis is upon us. That’s the story. So, first, as a story about liberalism generally, I just don’t think that’s correct. I think there have been plenty of times of remoralization during the liberal era, right? We had the Second Great Awakening in the United States with a huge drop in alcohol consumption and the birth of both the abolitionist and women’s suffrage movements and an enormous increase in church-going. So, we were not a very churchy people at the beginning of the 19th century. We became much more church-going over the course of the 19th century. The Victorian era of remoralization in Great Britain was a conscious effort to sort of raise standards again. So, these things happen. In the United States, we’ve seen it split along class lines, but in the ’60s and ’70s, we had a general sort of breakdown of marital stability. But in the college-educated class, that has been reconstructed.
So, now marriages are just about as stable as they ever were. They’ve fallen apart for the majority below. So, that’s a real problem. But the idea that liberal societies can summon up resources for revitalization and rejuvenation is clearly true.
Field: Of course, yeah.
Lindsey: But that’s useful. But it is the fact that actually existing liberal societies — and I don’t blame the political principles of liberalism, I blame more the social practices of consumerism and bureaucratic managerialism — liberal societies have liberated us. They’ve liberated us from a whole bunch of traditional values and connections, many of which had a dark side and an oppressive side, and it’s good to be done with them, but they’ve liberated us from pretty much everything except consumerism and bureaucracy. And that’s not the stuff out of which you make a rich fulfilling life.
So, we don’t have anything currently acting as a kind of unifying cultural counterweight to the “just outsource everything” comfort-and-convenience-ueber-alles of consumerism and “infantilize everyone because the experts know best” of managerialism — we don’t have anything pushing back against that. So, I think we are in a kind of cultural crisis, and it is the great challenge of liberal societies today to do social reconstruction, to rebuild, to reweave a fabric of connectedness and meaning. But I don’t think it’s innate in liberalism that it can’t do it, because it’s done it plenty of times.
Field: Yes, I totally agree. And I mean, it can be more deliberate. And maybe deliberate’s not the right word, but it can be done again. I think that there’s a lot of thirst for this in all kinds of different ways, but I’m thinking about different parts of civil society probably than you. But I think that’s very helpful. And see, you could have put more of that hopeful stuff in the book about the previous iterations…
Lindsey: The usual policy wonk book is nine chapters of what’s wrong and one chapter of what is to be done.
Field: Okay, okay. I got it.
Lindsey: I had three whole chapters about what is to be done.
Field: You did. Yeah. No, and I’m not one to speak. My book has one little paragraph about the future. But I wanted you to say a little bit more about the managerialism thing, because this is sort of a new… I mean, to me, when you’re talking about this stuff, so parts of the book reminded me of Deneen, and then this part, I’m sorry to say, reminded me of Bronze Age Pervert, right? Costin Alamariu.
Lindsey: I have not read him.
Field: It’s okay. It’s okay.
Lindsey: I have read James Burnham.
Field: I mean, Bronze Age Pervert, it is funny. And I think that he’s tapping into something real and there’s something there that’s undeniable. It’s super gendered for him. It’s like the longhouse of the matriarchs and it’s awful. I mean, I can’t help but laugh at BAP, and I’ve never had an issue with the bureaucracy before. It doesn’t really bother me for whatever reason. I feel like, okay, but there is something where you can still see it, and the kind of COVID… And I think having young kids — I have two young boys in school — and I’m much more sympathetic to public schools and stuff. I have no problem with any of that.
I think it’s a center for community. But the bureaucratic managerialism problem I think is absolutely real and I liked reading about it from you. So, much more than Bronze Age Pervert. So, can you characterize the problem a little bit?
Lindsey: Yeah, sure.
Field: Or explain it again.
Lindsey: Yeah. So, first, I think we see it in both the public and private sectors, and pro-market people tend to focus on the downsides of public-sector bureaucracy. So, in my book, I think the central problem I identify with contemporary capitalism is this sort of social disintegration, the breakdown of vital social connections, the reopening of a class war, political polarization, decreasing number of friends, increasing loneliness, decreasing marriage, decreasing childbirth. So, all of that is going on. In other words, the connection between economic growth and wellbeing has gotten weakened. But meanwhile, there’s a subsidiary problem, so I call that main problem the crisis of inclusion.
The crisis of dynamism, meanwhile, is that the system’s capacity to actually continue producing economic growth is sputtering as well. And there, I think it’s easy to identify bureaucracy run amok as a bad guy. That’s at the center of the contemporary abundance movement, which I and Niskanen colleagues had some hand in coming up with some of the policy analyses and ideas that got woven by Derek Thompson and Ezra Klein into their book Abundance. The emergence of a vetocracy that makes it very difficult to accomplish anything in the world of atoms — that’s something that’s now widely seen on the center left as well as the center right.
As far as in the private sector, though, I think we can see this kind of managerial ethos, and so it’s born out of the fact that we went from an industrial economy to a post-industrial information age economy, and we needed a whole bunch more white-collar office workers to manage and coordinate things rather than to just use their brawn. So, our workforce has changed and we have created this new class, which is the leadership class. It’s the dominant class in American life, and they’re college educated, and they’re managers and professionals, right? So, that’s how they think. And so, in their professional lives, they manage.
And when you’ve got a hammer, everything looks like a nail. So, we see this not just in bureaucracy and government, we see it in the proliferation of administrative offices on campus, the bureaucratization of campus life. We see the HR-ization of corporate life. We see surveillance capitalism with employers checking on employees’ every keystroke and bathroom break. We see it, I think, in the rise of helicopter parenting and this sort of grim desire to squeeze every drop of spontaneity out of childhood in the name of safety.
So, I think this impulse — which is that the experts know better, and we can organize and rationalize things, and that will be more efficient and more effective than just leaving it to spontaneous, bottom-up winging it — this faith in expertise has carried on to excess. Meanwhile, the people doing the managing are the same kind of people who hold all the power, the levers of economic power in the country as well, and their cultural values are quite distinct in many important ways from the non-college-educated majority.
So, to me, my fundamental read on the populist uprising is that it is a rebellion of the majority against the professional and managerial elite. And it’s not surprising then that the populist right would put its particular right-wing and often misogynistic spin on this phenomenon, but I do think it’s a real phenomenon. And it’s the kind of thing that Tocqueville warned about 180 years ago.
Field: I mean, I think one thing to say — my sense is it’s kind of this groupthink that also stunts the managerial class… They’re sort of stunted by it too. Is that fair to say that there’s a kind of…
Lindsey: Yeah, it’s a group thing and conformism and…
Field: Yeah. And an unwillingness to just live in the free ways that are appropriate to people and to allow other people to participate in freedom. There’s a kind of cloying control psychology.
Lindsey: You know, as a parent, when you see your kid fumbling with tying their shoes or fumbling with something and you’re late and you know I can just do this immediately and get it done and we can effectively accomplish the day’s chores faster if I just do it for them right now. But you know they’ve got to learn and you sit there and you’re patient and you let them do it. And even though they can’t do it as well as you, it’s their life. So, we have managers now looking at the populace like parents looking at kids and saying, “Oh, I could do things so much better than them,” but that’s just not the way a free society is supposed to work.
Field: No, no, and it sort of inhibits both sides of… Everybody’s stunted by that, I think. I mean, I’ve found it pretty compelling that… Okay, can we move on to your solutions here because there’s, again, pretty depressing but very useful eight chapters. And then you end in, and it’s sort of in the abundance line of things energy-wise. There’s a lot of that stuff that I used to think… When I first heard about abundance, I mean, I guess I had heard a little bit about it from you guys, but finally I got the book, the Ezra Klein book or whatever, and I read it and I thought I was going to hate it and I really didn’t.
I felt pretty hopeful reading that book. I wouldn’t say I loved it because I still got questions, but whatever.
Lindsey: I think the interest in these ideas is one of the few hopeful things going on in politics these days.
Field: It is. It is exciting. I expected it to be this shallow consumer something, and it’s not at all. And I think that’s also true of your stuff, but you’re doing something I find more deeply resonant with me, but not for the reasons I think you would like, because I’m very sympathetic to the Benedict option, Deneen, and the eco-Wendell Berry world, right? In my soul. I know that it’s a little nutty and degrowth, right? I think I haven’t done any real reading in that, but I’m like, “Yeah, I get that impulse.” I mean, you reject that, but you’re also, I think, still using…
Lindsey: A high-tech version of it, right?
Field: You’re doing a high-tech world-building version of it that I love. And I think that I deeply love, because there’s even something Heideggerian in what you’re doing, or Matt Crawford, that kind of recrafting a world that I… Again, it’s not something I’ve thought too much about, but I know it resonates with me.
And so, it’s kind of like you’re writing the Benedict option for the secular crowd or for the abundance crowd, and there’s a real emphasis on decentralization and on community building and just thinking through new possibilities for everybody that I find very compelling.
But anyway, you’re more resistant to some of the institutions that we have in our world. So, I have some disagreements. But why don’t you tell us a little bit about your vision here?
Lindsey: Yeah. So, I don’t think we need to invent a new social system. I think that there isn’t a new good one to invent, and the search for that just leads to grief. What we need is — capitalism is the greatest social technology for enrichment and material improvement ever invented, and we’re going to be able to make good use of it for a long time. And I think what we need to do is, on the one hand, refocus capitalism and sort of clear some of these barnacles and vetocracy out of the way so that it can be more effective at advancing the technological frontier and raising material living standards, and particularly reducing the cost of living and making us richer that way.
But at the same time, I think we can recognize that technological progress is no longer a mass mobilization project. And that’s at the heart of a lot of our class divide these days — that the old class divide was based on the dependence of capitalist progress on huge inputs of brute physical labor. And so, the only way to have progress was to enlist all these people into doing this dirty, dangerous work. And so, there was a heavy blood price to be paid that engendered all kinds of conflict, right? It produced conflict at the workplace, it produced class consciousness in the working class, it produced the socialist movement, it produced totalitarian communism, that produced the Cold War and the threat of nuclear annihilation. There was some serious social instability growing out of the dependence of capitalist progress on physical labor. As we’ve gotten richer and moved into a post-industrial information age economy, technological progress — the progress of the system — is ever less dependent on the inputs of ordinary workers. It’s becoming more and more something that highly trained specialists do.
In the rich countries, we’ve either automated everything or what we haven’t automated yet, we’ve outsourced to poorer countries. But in general, once upon a time, ordinary workers and their bosses were side by side on the technological frontier. Now, the technological frontier is occupied by elites and ordinary workers are shunted to the backwaters. On the one hand, that’s a humanitarian triumph, right? Progress is no longer dependent upon terrible physical suffering, and the workplace is just much cleaner and safer than it used to be, and wages are much higher than they used to be.
But on the spiritual side, I think something serious has been lost, that ordinary people’s contribution to the great commonweal is just less important than it used to be, because once upon a time they were essential to progress and now they’re not anymore. So, I think that sense of being superfluous and therefore being kind of despised by the elites is a real component of the resentments that drive populist anger. But the good news then is if technological progress isn’t dependent upon mass inputs of ordinary, less-skilled labor, then maybe we don’t have to have mass mobilization anymore. Maybe we can focus on getting richer and richer so that more and more people don’t have to work all the time.
They can either retire early or they can work 15 hours a week, which was what Keynes predicted when he was thinking about the permanent problem a hundred years ago, or maybe they could work episodically as circumstances changed. You would have highly trained knowledge workers who have interesting, challenging, high-status, high-remuneration jobs. They’re working harder, they’re working longer hours than their parents and grandparents worked, and that’s okay. I mean, there’s downsides to that, but there’s not a social crisis in that. But for everyone else, I think that we have been liberated from the need to have everybody working for solely external rewards all the time.
And so, the central crisis of flourishing today is this lack of social connection, is the lack of deep and abiding and durable social bonds with flesh-and-blood people on a face-to-face basis. And to my way of thinking, one of the main reasons why this has happened is we’re victims of our own success, that once upon a time, face-to-face relationships fulfilled vital practical functions. Your spouse was your partner in economic production. Your kids helped out on the farm when they were young and they took care of you when you were old. Your neighbors were collective security on the frontier. They were a collective insurance policy when times were bad.
They were also your only source of entertainment other than listening to the crickets at night. But all of these things we’ve either outsourced to the market or to the welfare state, so we don’t need flesh-and-blood people for material survival anymore, but we do need them for flourishing because we’re a hypersocial species that is utterly dependent upon deep and abiding contact with others. We need them for our quality of life, and we have been lured into deprioritizing human relationships. So, I think the goal of getting richer is to rebuild face-to-face communities that then have practical functions.
Those practical functions — as technology stands right now, they’re mostly what’s technologically the lowest-hanging fruit, which is just caregiving. Caregiving for kids, homeschooling for children, and caregiving for our parents and grandparents. Over time, as technology develops, you can picture communities becoming more and more self-sufficient through vertical farming or through small modular nukes. They can have their own food and energy. I see the goal of economic growth as: what are we pushing towards? Not just more bells and whistles. We’re trying to push towards a better life.
And a better life to me looks like a much more decentralized life where a lot of people are focused more on building their own homes and communities and taking care of each other and living their lives shared in common rather than working for the purely external rewards of a paycheck. So, to me, that’s what progress looks like — a revitalization of human bonds through opportunities created by continued technological progress.
Field: Yeah. I mean, I think there’s something sort of deeply attractive about that, especially when you think about… There’s also an off-grid element. It’s like a Benedict option for preppers too. I mean, I’m joking, but there’s something I think deeply appealing about that…
Lindsey: Yeah, I’m deeply committed to pluralism, and that means forms of pluralism I’m not going to really cotton to. I’ll bite that bullet.
Field: Yeah. I think there’s something really exciting here. I’ve got one last question. I’ve spent the last week or two reading Oren Cass. We hosted an event with him at the liberalism studies program. So, I’ve reading that alongside your book. This is all much more wonky than I usually do, but it couldn’t be helped. So, he’s really trying to revitalize and revalue work in a way that I think your approach, including physical labor, right? I mean, there’s this re-industrialization stuff and this idea — I think he would say that your approach removes… You’ve, I think, made peace with automation and the implications of that in a way that he maybe hasn’t.
And he sees that the psychological need for a different kind of work, especially for men, is so vital that it must be subsidized and we must find a way to recreate that. And I mean, I’m sort of sympathetic to his way of thinking in terms of just maybe big projects that can be built. And there does seem to be a lot of work that could be done that is still physical, that’s still going to need to happen and could be maybe generated. And also farming… And partly I’m resistant to this idea of caregiving being the primary thing just for gendered reasons — it seems like I don’t want to do that. I mean, I love my kids. There’s a lot of caregiving that is going on. And I’m sure you’ve heard that. I’m just a little skeptical, but I’m also extremely sympathetic and so I sort of want all of this together.
Lindsey: Yeah, I want more women back in the home, but I want more men back in the home too.
Field: Of course. Yeah. Yeah, no. I do too.
Lindsey: And I want them both back equally, right?
Field: I do too. I’m more skeptical about how that’s going to actually shake out. But what do you think about Cass and his work? Because you’re saying we need to make our peace with the fact that we’re going to have fewer people doing market labor, what you call market labor, I think, right? And that we’re going to have different forms of activity. And I guess the deeper thing here is that — I want to tie this back to Aristotle — Aristotle, for him, activity and happiness and flourishing is an activity. And I think that you do believe this and that your articulation, it’s not just social connection, it’s projects, right?
And so, I think that that’s something maybe that… Anyway, but yeah, tell me what you think of all that.
Lindsey: Yeah. So, I think he’s fighting a lost cause. So, he’s looking to revitalize male-flourishing-friendly work within a post-industrial economy. And I don’t think we can wind back the clock. There’s just no way to create blue-collar manufacturing jobs. And those jobs were horrible.
Field: There’s a real romanticization there, right? Yeah.
Lindsey: So, I think we’re going to recreate flourishing-friendly work outside of the system. So, the system should focus on being an effective system, which means generating technological progress. So, we shouldn’t be introducing a lot of inefficiency into the system, just gumming up the works. The system should work as well as it can to enrich enough of us to live more and more of our lives outside the system, where we can reserve for ourselves meaningful work.
And now we’re in one of the hype cycles of AI. We just had stock market bloodbaths with software firms getting dinged because of new AI releases and this occasioned a round of speculation about whether we’re going to have mass elimination of white-collar work. So, ultimately, this idea that it may not be in the far distant future that we don’t have to do anything. So, then that’s the real question for human flourishing: what are humans supposed to do when they don’t have to do anything? But not having to do anything, that means you’re free. So, this means how do we live free lives, free from material necessity?
And a lot of that is self-imposed difficulty. So, tennis isn’t fun without a net. You need… for a project to be fulfilling, it has to be challenging. So, we’re going to end up reserving some work for ourselves because we’re going to prefer human services or human-made goods to machine-made goods. I think that’s almost inevitable, but it will be a form of play because we don’t have to do it that way. We’ll do it because it’s enjoyable and good for us, not because it’s the most efficient and effective thing from an economic perspective.
Field: Mm-hmm. Okay. Well, let’s end it on that. I think that was really fun.
Lindsey: Okay. So, yeah, we’ve run over the hour and we could go another hour easily, but hey, this was great chatting with you and congratulations…
Field: Yes, thank you.
Lindsey: …congratulations on your book. It’s doing wonderfully. It’s gotten lots of glowing reviews, and so all the best to you and good work.
Field: Thank you, Brink, and congratulations on yours too. It’s very exciting and brave stuff, I think, to be thinking in that constructive way.
Lindsey: Thanks so much, Laura.
