Liberal values and institutions now face aggressive challenges from both right and left extremism, so how should defenders of the embattled liberal center respond? It’s become clear now that the question exposes an important fault line running through today’s contemporary center-left and center-right. On one side are those convinced that the rise of extremism represents a misguided response to serious and neglected problems afflicting contemporary society, and thus that it is now imperative for liberals to move boldly to identify and address those ills. On the other side are liberals who think that their side is losing ground largely because of a failure of nerve — a lack of confidence in their own ideals and an insufficient supply of fighting spirit. Each side thus has reasons to think the other is making matters worse: the latter fear that conceding that the extremists have a point will only add fuel to the fire, while the former believe that complacent denialism brought us to this point by creating a vacuum for extremists to fill. In today’s episode of The Permanent Problem podcast, Jonathan Rauch joins host Brink Lindsey to explore this internal division within liberalism and look for ways to bridge it. Their starting point is on opposite sides of the divide — Lindsey’s book The Permanent Problem offers an unsparing diagnosis of deep problems within contemporary liberal societies, while Rauch has written repeatedly on the dangers of excessive liberal self-criticism — but throughout the conversation they probe for common ground while clarifying where they disagree.
Transcript
Brink Lindsey: Hello everybody, and welcome to The Permanent Problem Podcast. I’m delighted to have as my guest today Jonathan Rauch, who’s back for his second time on the show. Jonathan is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, a writer at The Atlantic, and the author of a number of fine books going all the way back to Kindly Inquisitors, and then most recently, Cross Purposes. Jonathan, great to have you on the show.
Jonathan Rauch: Nice to be with you, Brink.
Lindsey: So Jonathan and I agree about a lot of things, but on today’s show, we’re going to talk about things that we apparently disagree about. So we’re both liberals, small-l liberals in the classic sense of that term. We believe in the moral equality of all individuals, popular self-government under the rule of law, the market economy, what Jonathan calls liberal science. We also both believe that liberalism is on its heels in the 21st century, facing aggressive and self-assured challenges from both the extreme left and extreme right. Where we seem to disagree is on how liberals ought to be reacting to this contemporary challenge.
There’s a whole shelf of books now that have been written in recent years on what’s ailing the House of Liberalism in the 21st century. I wrote one of them, and you’ve reviewed several of them, including mine, and you’ve developed a consistent critique throughout those reviews. Here’s how I put it, and then I’ll let you clean it up. In general, liberalism’s capacity for self-correction is one of its greatest strengths. So of course, self-criticism is an essential part of healthy liberalism. But in the current political crisis, you argue that some liberals have been going too far, going past responsible liberal self-criticism to wallow in over the top liberal self-flagellation. You’ve called this a failure of nerve, making unnecessary concessions to our enemies that only serve to add further momentum to their attacks. So we’ll dive very deeply into all of this, but does that sound about right? How would you put it?
Rauch: Well, it’s in the ballpark. The quotations at the end I don’t recognize as words that I wrote, but the general ballpark is correct.
Lindsey: Failure of nerve was a quote.
Rauch: Oh, I’m sorry?
Lindsey: Failure of nerve was a quote.
Rauch: Yeah. Well, that sounds right. If I said enemies, I’m disappointed in myself. I may have, but I try not to use that kind of intense…
Lindsey: Let’s say opponents. That’s better.
Rauch: But yeah, that’s the ballpark. And that’s not to negate the importance of criticism and the importance of recognizing failure. And there have certainly been plenty of those. And I bear my share of responsibility for missing any number of turning points. So I don’t think we’re fundamentally disagreeing that there are some important flaws that it’s just very important to fix, and that if we don’t, we’re in trouble. I think I’m not even sure the extent to which we actually disagree on these things as opposed to weighting them differently. But one thing I think that’s going on is almost an eagerness on the part of many liberals to support and sometimes exaggerate criticisms that are not all that well-founded. Another tendency I see is a tendency to underrate the strengths of liberalism and to fail to go out and tell people about those strengths. If we don’t tell our story, no one else will. And then a third thing that I’ve emphasized increasingly recently is my concern that we’re naive, that we’re playing a different game from our political opponents. They are using methods of psychological warfare in what they see as a relentless contest of wills. They’re using powerful propaganda techniques. Those includes lies, distortions, half-truths, exaggerations, and they’re quite ruthless about it. And I think we tend to be naive about what we’re up against, internalize the criticisms as if they were well-intentioned without understanding the nature of the conflict that we face. So those, I don’t know if we disagree on those things in particular, simply weight them differently. I don’t know. What do you think?
Lindsey: It could be. So here, I’ll put my opposing position that the political crisis that’s gripping the United States is not just gripping the United States, it’s gripping basically all liberal democracies, or many liberal democracies around the world and some less advanced countries as well. So I see this as something that’s not America-specific. There’s something deep and global going on. I see the political problem as both a product of and a misguided reaction to some real and serious failings in contemporary liberal society, not deep-seated problems with the principles of liberalism, but failures in how liberalism is being applied in contemporary liberal society.
I would say that you could call our political situation a legitimacy crisis for governing elites and established institutions, that a critical mass of the public has simply lost faith in those elites and those institutions and thus is vulnerable to or interested in what you might bloodlessly call anti-system politicians and more colorfully call demagogues. So in this situation of a legitimacy crisis, I think the first step is to recognize publicly that it exists, to declare that you understand that there has been a loss of trust and that trust needs to be rebuilt. From my perspective, scolding liberals for being too willing to interrogate and face up to their problems is really just to perpetuate the complacency that has allowed issues to fester until this backlash exploded in our faces. So put our positions in the starkest terms. I’m giving aid and comfort to the bad guys from your perspective. And from my perspective, you’re stuck in Alfred E. Neuman “What, me worry?” complacency, which is what got us to this pass in the first place.
Let me say that our positions are not idiosyncratic. That is, I think that we personify two sides of a split within Team Liberal these days. There have been a number of people who’ve written about this. Back a few years ago, Alana Newhouse wrote a piece in Tablet called “Everything Is Broken,” talking about the people who see institutions as fundamentally broken versus fundamentally good and sound. Aaron Renn wrote a piece about Old Orderists versus New Orderists, people who basically are conservative, small-c conservative, who want to preserve existing institutions, versus others who think that there’s some real ground-up institutional rebuilding that needs to be done. They would be the new orderists. Most recently, Marlene Laruelle, if I’m pronouncing her name correctly, did something on the distinction between liberal reconstruction and liberal restoration. Reconstruction is rebuilding to make us ready for the 21st century versus restoration, getting back what’s rightly ours after the usurpation of the past decade. And so do any of those dichotomies resonate with you at all or not really?
Rauch: The dichotomies don’t because they’re dichotomous and it’s just not the way I think. I’m very much a, what is it? Fox, not hedgehog. Is that the distinction?
Lindsey: Yep.
Rauch: I’m trained as a journalist. I came up through National Journal, a policy magazine. I work at a place called Brookings, which is a policy institution. And the way I think about the world is a big bundle of problems and challenges and no two are quite alike and they all require responses and some of them are very urgent right now. But I don’t really know how to generalize it to these grand narratives about the world. That just doesn’t make a lot of sense to me. The interesting thing about your summary of your worldview is until you got to the very end, the summary, which as you said, was intended to heighten the differences. I agreed with every word of it. I literally could have written every word of that myself. There is a legitimacy crisis. It is global. Voters are unhappy everywhere. We may differ in that I place the source, the venue of those dissatisfactions primarily in the political realm. I think that’s where most of it is coming from, but there’s simply no doubt that we face that kind of problem. And in fact, just yesterday, I was planning out with a friend what I hope will become a podcast series looking at the global sources of this dyspepsia and unhappiness because it’s rocking every country in the world. Britain just went, what? Seven prime ministers in 10 years?
Lindsey: Yes. Yeah.
Rauch: France Macron is a perfectly competent president of France. His approvals are in the teens. We’re seeing the authoritarian populist trend everywhere. Pretty much weirdly, only Italy in Europe seems stable.
Lindsey: Well, they elected a populist, but then she moderated in power.
Rauch: Yeah, and she’s popular and Japan seems to be doing okay for the moment. They went through a period of instability. Anyway, you probably don’t want to get into all the global stuff, but the point is that there is a crisis and it is global, and denying it would be unrealistic and silly. So at that level, it’s a little unclear to me what we’re arguing about, except that I do think a lot of people go first to, well, let’s call it blame liberalism first. Say it’s got to be all our fault. I think they’re ignoring the malevolence of authoritarian populists and others who are using very powerful methods of propaganda, political organizing, deliberate nihilism, the way they use media and social media. That’s not something we’re doing. And I worry that if all we focus on are yes, the real problems that we have to solve first, if we globalize those not in the sense of worldwide, but in the sense of it’s one big story. And two, if that big story is all our fault, then I think we will fail to address what we’re really up against.
Lindsey: Yeah. So I certainly don’t think our problems are all our fault, but they don’t have to be our fault to be our problem. So there are two separate questions and I hope we’ll have time to get to both time horizons. But first, and the one that’s more acute and gets temperatures more elevated is how should liberals react to this current political crisis, the backlash from left and right extremes? There’s a second question, which really my book was more aimed at, which is how is liberal society doing more broadly and where does liberal society go from here? What is the path of liberal progress and growth?
Issue one is about how to beat the bad guys and keep liberalism going. The second time horizon, the broader, the longer view is about the direction liberal society ought to be going in. What I call the permanent problem is going to stay here even if we solve the current political distempers, what I call the crises of inclusion and dynamism will still be with us. The challenge of translating mass prosperity into mass flourishing will still be with us. So I see in that second bigger view, I see the crisis of politics that we’re through now is just one element that is embellishing and making more difficult, deeper underlying issues.
And you said you’re a fox and you’re a journalist by training and you see details. And so I don’t know what I am by training, but what I’ve wound up figuring out is that I specialize in generalizing. So all my books are big picture narratives where I try to see some pattern in events that isn’t what everybody else is saying and try to help us understand the details through presenting them in a new frame. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve become more and more convinced that our ideological knee jerks have a lot to do with our personality. What we think is very carefully thought intellection, a lot of it is just who we are being expressed on political questions. And so it could be that some of our differences here are just personality differences, that my sweeping, broad statements rub you the wrong way as under-sourced. And perhaps I am frustrated at your lack of being able to see the same big picture I see. So it could be that rather than substantive disagreements about specifics X, Y, and Z, we just have different ways of looking at things that have different strengths and have their different weaknesses.
Rauch: I think there’s certainly something to that. I guess I’d use the phrase intellectual style.
Lindsey: Yes sir.
Rauch: Ours do rub up against each other. That said, over the years, I think we’ve known each other 20 plus years. And I’ve learned a lot from your style without being able to take it on board as my own. And let me try something that might be helpful, which is to try to explain what I think I’m learning from the work that you and others are doing as it gradually evolves. I, like a lot of us, am very much on a journey in what I think are uncharted waters. And my starting point for that journey was, past tense, also still is to some extent. But my starting point was the voters in America and the world don’t know how good they’ve got it. They enjoy a level of peace, freedom, prosperity, and knowledge, which is unparalleled in human affairs. And that’s especially true of the United States of America, which has never been more prosperous, more secure. Life spans have never been longer, two-year dip recently. And you know you can recite all those things as well as I can. And so aren’t they being more than a bit spoiled to think that now is one of the worst times in American history? Isn’t there just at some level a fundamental failure of perception here and maybe also a failure on the part of liberals to tell our story in the way that Ronald Reagan so effectively did tell stories about peace and freedom and the shining city on the hill? And so that’s where my priors were, sense that there’s almost a kind of immorality in people’s not understanding and appreciating how fortunate they are to be Americans and how fortunate they are to be alive right now.
Okay, that’s the starting point. The second thing that happens is what you said so well earlier that I might’ve written it and wish I had, which is it’s clear people are angry and dissatisfied with the system, especially not only the political system, and it’s worldwide. So are they unhappy about nothing? Are they simply deluded? So my first step in my journey is there must be something there that I’m not seeing. What is it? So then comes a series of things that I think are happening. They include a global migration crisis, which is very unsettling, the rise of social media, algorithms that are antisocial, all of that stuff. Bifurcation – this is something you’ve written about eloquently. The very different economic and social pathways that people with college educations and people living in urban environments are taking from people without those things. If you look under the gross numbers, you see this strong divergence and more. I could go on, and those things are real. And then the next thing that happens is a series of books of which yours is one of the first and one of the most ambitious, but all of them grappling with aspects of these problems and telling bigger stories than I’m used to hearing. And collectively, I think they begin to gravitate toward a story about meaning and fulfillment, that their fundamental human needs, which can’t be measured in terms of the things I’m used to measuring, which need to be filled, which are not getting filled, and which is one of the factors, not the only one, but one of the factors that’s driving this deep dissatisfaction. And you and Adrian Wooldridge and Alex Zakaras and James Davison Hunter and others are circling around this and beginning to define it. And I’m struggling with it trying to understand it, but I am coming to see that what you call mass flourishing and what others might call the pursuit of happiness, that that seems to be where a core locus of problems lies. And that’s a place that I need to get more centered on. Does any of that make sense?
Lindsey: Absolutely. So let me start at your initial reaction because I share it at least partially, which is that of course, the United States and other advanced democracies are quite simply the richest, healthiest, the best educated, most humanely governed societies in human history. Just without question. The amount of physical suffering that was par for the course a generation or two ago, it’s just utterly unbearable to contemporary psychologies to think that people would have to endure that kind of loss on the regular, but this is a story of liberalism not doing anything wrong, but nonetheless producing circumstances that then are unfavorable to its sustainability.
So liberalism … this is an old cyclical history story. Liberalism makes people rich. Being rich makes you spoiled and taking things for granted and don’t know how good you have it and you’re willing to blow it all up on the chance that something could be better on the other side of the explosion and then you end up in ruin. So that is a story in which there’s no failure of liberal principle. It’s simply history as irony in motion. I don’t know who said that, but I have to look it up, but it’s a wonderful saying. But again and again, terrible things produce in the end beneficent consequences and wonderful historical breakthroughs end up having a terrible dark side. That’s just the way history works. So we have conquered poverty in the advanced economies, which is something that absolutely was beyond human imagination that we were actually capable of doing this. And yet we have made poverty a marginal tragedy, not the normal lot of human life. And yet, so by solving that enormous problem, we’ve created a host of new problems and we’re floundering in dealing with those.
So I agree with you. I do think that there is an element of degraded civic virtue. All of our Founding Fathers believed that free government, republican government, government without hereditary rulers, relied on a considerable amount of self-control, a self-mastery within the populace. So if you’re not going to rule yourself, you’re going to be ruled by your betters. The theory of republican government is that people can rule themselves. So that imposes high moral expectations. So they all thought that a virtuous people was a precondition for a successful republic, and they looked to organize religion to supply that virtue, even those who weren’t particularly orthodox Christian. So the threat of declining civic virtue for the future of liberalism is an old worry, and it seems to me relevant to our current situation.
I would say that my potted history of the political crisis, more narrowly, is about two things. First, this deepening class divide along educational line,s where the non-college educated jobs are higher paying and much cleaner and safer than the jobs of the past and yet the status of ordinary workers today, the importance of what ordinary workers can contribute to the commonweal is simply less than it was when we were poor. During industrialization, progress, economic progress, industrial might all depended upon mass inputs of brute physical labor and mindless clerical labor. And that dependence that created the class conflict that defined industrial capitalism. And that was a big deal. That was a huge source of instability. It gave rise to the socialist movement, which gave rise to totalitarian communism, which gave rise to the Cold War and the threat of nuclear Holocaust. You don’t get more unstable than that. So our old style industrial class conflict was a big deal and it all hinged on dependence of progress on dirty, dangerous work.
Our current class divide, I think is the mirror image of that. It’s based on the increasing independence of progress from the contributions of ordinary people. That more and more technological progress is something that is a game for highly trained specialists. And everything else we’ve either automated or outsourced to poor countries for the time being as a way station to automation. But the actual pushing the whole system forward, which ordinary workers, factory workers used to do, they used to be deployed on the technological frontier along with their managers and bosses in the auto and steel industry. They were clearly integral to the building of American riches in a way that… Service labor is nice to have, it gives you luxuries, it gives you fripperies and things that are nice, but it just isn’t as existentially as important as it was back in the day. Back in the day when you had organized labor and they could go on strike and the steel industry went on strike, it was a national security crisis. It was a global security crisis because if the American economy is in a jam, then world freedom is in peril. So there was enormous importance in what ordinary workers did and it was widely recognized. The socialist movement saw the ordinary worker, the proletarian, as the protagonist of world history. And liberal countries were sufficiently freaked out by the socialist challenge that they had to do a good game of saying similar things. So we got all that lovely Art Deco artwork glorifying factory workers.
There’s no analog glorifying Walmart greeters or call center workers. So there has been, I think, beyond what we call bloodlessly skilled biased technological change, where over time, highly skilled workers have been pulling away in income terms from less skilled workers. So in addition to getting farther and farther relatively behind in income and living standards over time, you’ve had this status diminution where the work you do just isn’t as important as it was in the past and everybody knows it. The standards for avoiding being a loser are much higher than they used to be. Used to be back in antebellum America, you come off the boat as a poor immigrant, you’ve got nothing except a strong back and a willingness to work hard. There’s free land free if you can steal it from Indians, and there’s no qualifications you need to go as high as anybody can go in American society. Whereas now, if you don’t graduate high school, then you’re a stone-cold loser. And really, if you don’t get a four-year degree, you’re pretty much excluded from a good shot at a job in the meritocracy and therefore you will consider yourself outside the elite, out on the outside looking in.
So I think there’s been a whole lot of marginalization of the status of ordinary workers. On top of that, then you’ve had the political marginalization of ordinary people as participants in politics. Once upon a time you had all these mass organizations, you had unions and you had other big mass organizations, The Grange for farmers, things like that, where you had local units and they had local leaders and you build up to national leadership and those big mass organizations would train leaders from the ranks. Over the course of the 1970s, all those mass organizations got outcompeted by special interest, single-issue professional nonprofits where the only membership is writing a check. They’re all staffed by highly educated, college educated professionals. So the capacity of ordinary people to participate directly in political life and have their people from their ranks in Congress or in the administration and people in their ranks being paid attention to is just much, much, much less than it was back in the day.
I would say all of that, that economic and social and political marginalization has produced great gobs of angst and resentment amongst the people who are on the outside looking in. And it has manifested in the populist right and they are looking for candidates who inspire the fear and contempt of those elites and who threaten to burn it all down. So I think that’s step one or part one of my potted history of this political crisis is the changing structure of the American economy produced this class cleavage. That class cleavage, the way it’s played out over time has produced a real sense of us against them by ordinary folks, the majority versus the professional and managerial elite.
Then I would say all of this is occurring against a worsening information environment. I have grown persuaded by the kind of media analysis of people like Marshall McLuhan and Neil Postman that the medium of communication has a great effect beyond what’s the actual content of any medium. The actual medium itself has a big effect on how we think and how we interact. And I’ve grown convinced that our conversion from a political print culture to a political video culture is a dumbing down. The level of political debate is lower than it was. Print culture is logical and rigorous and analytical and deliberative. Video culture is emotional and spontaneous and reactive and simplistic. And I think you see all of that. You see those cognitive traits of a simpler way of apprehending the world in populist politics. So here again, this is a byproduct of affluence, our current media technologies and the media culture in which we live. The richer we get, the more important entertainment becomes as far as how we spend our days. And we’ve decided to fuse politics and entertainment in a really corrupt amalgam with now a reality TV star as president who’s basically running the White House as a TV show. So those are my two elements. Class conflict against the backdrop of a media information environment that’s making liberal democracy harder.
Rauch: Well, this goes to the very first thing you said, which so I think adroitly framed the conversation, a difference in intellectual style. Those are important things about I would say that there are far too few of them, that there’s a lot more happening than those things, but those are important things. I’ll enter as a footnote, because I’m pretty sure you don’t disagree with it, that when we talk about the declining status of the working man, we’re talking about white, less than high school educated working men, blue collar.
Lindsey: Less than college, not less than high school?
Rauch: Well, for a long time it was less than high school. More recent now, less than college, not now. Correct. Less than college. Less than four year degree is what we’re really talking about now. But then in most of this period, you wouldn’t have wanted to be a woman, African American, and so forth. And so what we seem to be talking about there is a status decline of not everybody, but of a particular group for whom a narrative of cultural dominance was important. My colleague at Brookings, Carol Graham, studies optimism and hope. And she finds that one group in America has consistently less of it than others, and that’s white working class men. Even though objectively they’re doing better than black working class men. And she thinks the evidence doesn’t pop out of the numbers, but she thinks that’s because the life story of black working class men in living memory is one of improvement in status, and that’s not true of white working class men.
This all begs a question, which we don’t need to get into, of how sympathetic should we be to people whose narrative is that they think that they should be the social template that dominates the country and they no longer have that privilege. Those of us who are members of marginalized communities would say it serves some right. But as a factual matter, the story that you tell is true and the media story is also true. The way I hear these things or maybe contextualize them is different though, or maybe different, which is that those are among the things in a big bundle of vectors in a complicated society, which is pointing in a negative direction. And that our job is to figure out what the vectors are that can be changed and try to turn them around. I tend to point to other vectors ahead of those.
I think status is important and social media important, absolutely. But I look at broken political systems, for example. I look at in the United States, the primary system in France, Britain, they made similar mistakes, they over-democratized. And I see stuff that can and should be repaired, for example. I see bad choices that were made along the way that were not necessarily the inevitable effects of technology. We didn’t have to do the McCain-Feingold law. People at the time predicted what would happen and it did. We didn’t have to fail to do the adjustment part of trade adjustment. That was a bad choice that was made in the ’90s on and on. So the way I tend to look at all this is not some historical discontinuity in which the whole system reaches a breaking point that requires some kind of radical or revolutionary reboot. I look at it as a rolling series of problems of types that we’re not unfamiliar with. Let’s not forget the status decline of farmers who dominated the economy, how long ago would that be? I guess 200 years ago, and virtually disappeared. So I guess my analysis is more like let’s figure out the things that can be improved in this big bundle of rolling stuff and work on them.
And then I’d add one more thing, which is I’m going to advertise my most recent book. It’s called Cross Purposes: Christianity’s Broken Bargain with Democracy. I think in the conversation that you and I and Adrian and James and Bill Galston and others are having, and at the liberal LibCon 2026, the thing that Shikha Dalmia just did. In all of this conversation, there’s circling through it a question of who’s responsible.
So the question you ask in your book, it’s about flourishing. Let’s substitute happiness and let’s say pursuit of happiness. Let’s say that people in America are very fortunate in many ways, but they’re not very happy. So whose responsibility is it to make people happy? I define liberalism in a particular way. I define it as the concept that all humans are born free and equal. Not everyone believes that. As instantiated through three core institutions, science, liberal democracy, and market economies. And those three things, they rest on values, they transmit values, but they’re not complete and they never have been. And we know that because ever since John Locke, liberals have been telling us, you need to go outside the system to get the values that you will need to participate and thrive within it. All the founders said that, and you know this story and you’ve told this story. In fact, I think you told it half an hour ago. So then there’s a kind of implicit question of responsibility. Whose job is it to help people, not make people, help people feel fulfilled in life? I don’t think that’s the job of the scientific establishment. I don’t think it’s the job of the corporations and securities markets that structure our economy. And God help me, I certainly don’t think it’s the function of Republican and Democratic elected politicians. God, help us if it is.
Lindsey: Yeah. I agree.
Rauch: I think it’s the responsibility of social institutions, which are in some sense pre-political, maybe pre- liberal. And that the most important of those are religious institutions and that the most important of those in America and the Western world, but let’s focus on the US for the time being, is Christianity. And I argue in the book that Christianity has made some tragic mistakes over the past 50 years. First, the mainline churches and then the evangelical churches. We don’t need to get into the details, but that those were actual bad choices that have had bad consequences and that we-
Lindsey: So those include mistakes by religious liberals, right? Religious liberalism screwed up.
Rauch: First by religious liberals, then by religious conservatives. The first well-intentioned, the second maybe not so well-intentioned. We can get into what that means, but the point isn’t here to point fingers. The point is to say we can’t fix that. I’m an atheist homosexual Jew. But what I can do is go to my friends in the religious world and say, “Guys, we need your help. We cannot straighten this out within those core liberal institutions. Can we help you guys straighten yourselves out so that you can help us?” I look with hope to figures like the Pope, who I think has provided a clear moral voice. I am very enthusiastic about the initiatives that the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints are taking. I’ve been talking to Episcopalians. They are looking for their voice, and to some extent they found it in Minneapolis in January. So there is a growing awakening in the religious world that they need to step up, but the point I’m making is you and I can’t fix that. That’s not a crisis of liberalism per se. That’s a crisis in the surrounding context.
Lindsey: Well, you and I can’t fix anything, Jonathan. If we thought all our problems could be solved by pure policy wonkery, still you and I couldn’t fix them. All we can do is talk about them. All we can do is talk about what’s wrong and how things might get better.
Rauch: Well, but there’s a lot you can do in Congress, right? There’s a lot you can do if you’re just in the party structures, you don’t need a lot of change the way parties choose their nominees. But at the level of policy, the world you and I live, there’s not much you and I can do about the politicization of Sunday morning services.
Lindsey: Right. So if we shift to this window of liberalism over the longer term, what’s the next stage of liberal progress? I think the challenges are overwhelmingly cultural. So what I call that, we’re stuck in this no man’s land between mass prosperity and mass flourishing. We’ve raised our sights. We’re no longer simply satisfied with full stomachs. We want meaning, we want fulfillment, we want purpose and belonging, but at least many of us are living under conditions that don’t seem very favorable to give us those things. So I have a couple of thoughts. So first on the structural side, the people who are flourishing today are the college educated by and large. They have interesting, challenging work, which gives their whole life an arc through a career path. They have a lot of autonomy in their job so that they can feel creative and like their own boss. And so there’s a lot of scope in work life for college educated professionals to develop and realize capacities and derive enjoyment therefrom, which is basically what happiness or flourishing is in the eudaimonistic conception.
But working people don’t have that. They get the external reward of the paycheck. They get some rewards from hanging out with people they like and enjoying some interactions with customers, but by and large, it’s a slog. It’s a lot of tedium. It’s a lot of precarity. Sometimes it’s a lot of abuse you have to put up with. Over the longer term, I don’t see the prospect as very realistic that someday everybody’s going to have a really cool, interesting, fulfilling job.
So the way I have come down is looking at the longer term, what we ought to aim for is, at least for most people who don’t have the opportunity for intrinsically fulfilling work, we ought to try to move to a world where we’re rich enough that participation in work for pay becomes much more discretionary than it is today. That it becomes a phase you go through in life on the way to early retirement, kind of like schooling is for college educated professionals. It’s a phase, but it’s not your whole life. So I see moving beyond mass employment to a world where people are well enough off to live off their savings as the goal towards which economic progress should aim. But then what do you do with that extra free time? Basically, if you average out over 365 days a year, people who don’t work have five extra hours every day. How do you spend them? These days, the chronically jobless tend to spend them sleeping and watching television. So that’s not very good. And that’s why the prospect of AI, a productivity revolution that gets rid of all our jobs makes people horrified because they have no idea what to do.
We need to answer that question. What are humans for when they don’t have to be doing something? I think the most obvious thing humans for is making and taking care of and hanging out with other humans in community. And that a major part of our sadness today is the breakdown and disintegration of our face-to-face relationships, which are the foundation for happiness for most of us. And the reason that has happened is that back when we were poor, face-to-face relationships fulfilled vital practical functions. So you had to have them. Your kids, first, they were an act of God that just showed up. Second, they helped out on the farm. They took care of you when you were older. Your spouse was your partner in economic production. Your neighbors were an insurance policy against bad times. And also the only alternative to listening to the crickets for evening entertainment was hanging out with them. So your face-to-face relationships had obvious urgent practical functions.
Most of those practical functions over time we have outsourced either to the marketplace or to the welfare state so that now our face-to-face relationships have basically become consumption options, things we do because they’re fun. But consumption options amidst a sea of expertly marketed commercial consumption alternatives. And I think the marketing is winning out at the margins all too often. So I hope to see a cultural turn recognizing what’s really important in life, which at basis is other people. Recognizing that more cohesive, more intensive, more demanding community life is the recipe for happiness for most of us and encouraging patterns of institutional development that push in that direction.
More broadly, becoming rich has vastly increased our ceiling for what we are capable of. It has made possible development of capacities and exercise of capacities that were unthinkable for people when they were locked in poverty as subsistence farmers. So our ceiling, our capacity to flourish has never been greater. But I think our floor has gotten lower than ever before because we have all this insurance of wealth, so that we can be incredibly dysfunctional and self-destructive and get away with it to a degree that people couldn’t in the past. How do we manage that freedom? How do we figure out how to rule ourselves, exert real autonomy to aim for those higher things and indulge in the lower guilty pleasures, but not be overwhelmed by them? We need cultural supports that help us identify and choose higher order goods over lower and possibly addictive pleasures. And the most obvious one of those cultural supports is organized religion. So even though I’m not a believer, it’s hard for me to see a real cultural turnaround without it having a religious component.
Rauch: So question for you. A lot there. And I don’t think we’re as far apart as we sometimes seem to think we are. When you think about the category of everything you just said, and admittedly there’s a lot in it, it doesn’t fit in any one box. Do you see the failing that you’re talking about there? The failing to meet needs beyond material needs? I guess they’ve been called post-materialist.
Lindsey: Yes.
Rauch: Who’s that guy? Anyway, do you locate that failing conceptually as a failing of liberal institutions? Or do you locate that as a problem in the environment in which those institutions are struggling to function? Is that a meaningful question even?
Lindsey: The effect of the operation of liberal institutions over time has been to ramp up the importance of markets and bureaucracy in our life and over time reduce the functions of and therefore the place in our lives of intermediate institutions. And those intermediate institutions give us a lot of social stability and also give us a lot of that meaning-making function. So when you’re left with nothing but managerialism and consumerism, that’s pretty thin gruel for a culture of human flourishing to be made out of. You need other components. As you said, liberalism never promised to provide those. Those existed already. Those meaning-making intermediate institutions existed already when liberalism arose. But over time, the operation of liberal institutions has served to erode those. So I don’t think anybody did anything wrong. And I don’t think any of that erosion was necessarily a mistake, but this is the position we have found ourselves in.
I wrote an essay about the advance of the capitalist monoculture. And I talked about how when I was a kid, just consumerism and the expressive individualism of consumerism and the kind of narcissism of consumerism – those are things we see in the culture more broadly, but they were balanced by a lot of other forces in the culture. Many of them hidebound and backwards and we’re glad they’re gone, but still. So we had the sexual division of labor. We had the whole woman’s world, which wasn’t the reign of commerce, wasn’t the reign of economic rationality. It was the reign of sentiment and love and care. We had the learned professions, law and medicine, which set themselves in opposition to commerce. They were supposed to represent the interests of their clients and guard against conflicts of interest. Over time, law and medicine had been completely commercialized. The university set apart the life of the mind as something different from getting and spending. Universities became a mass institution and then became a certifying institution for entrance to the meritocracy, and they have become commercialized, The university has basically become, instead of something totally separate and apart from the world of getting and spending, it is a training school for maximizing your ability to get and spend. The church obviously stands as an alternative viewpoint from Mammon, but it has declined dramatically in our lifetime.
So in one of these areas after another that had other values being injected into the culture besides bureaucratic control and moneymaking, a lot of them had problems and we don’t mourn their passing, but they’ve left a hole in the culture that we have not figured out how to rebuild. And so I think that is the great challenge of rich societies is to figure out how to build those intermediate institutions that help people control themselves and be responsible for their own lives and live their own lives well. So we have in our class, the highly educated, we have the brass ring of the great job in the meritocracy, or getting into the good school and then getting the good job. All of that is an incentive structure which gives good, solid, careerist, external reward motives for a culture of self-denial and long-term planning and real autonomy. People outside of that world aren’t developing those traits. And so in our current sort of cultural free-for-all, they’re getting lost. This crisis of disconnection, this crisis of meaning, it’s much worse on the other side of the class divide than it is on our side. And I think it’s there especially that I find it very difficult to figure out how culturally ordinary people are going to find their way back to lives of self-mastery without religion. It’s hard for me to see it happening purely secularly.
Rauch: So I’m going to try to summarize what I think I just heard to see if I understand, and then maybe make a few comments. And there’s so much there, I’ll only be able to respond to parts. I think the story I just heard is that liberalism by itself was not the cause of the excesses of commercialization, consumerism, and individualism that we’ve seen over the past several decades, but it either accelerated those things or at a bare minimum did nothing to slow them down.
Lindsey: Yeah. Just to interrupt briefly, my bad guy is mass affluence. We have problems of mass affluence. Mass affluence isn’t a bad guy. It’s the greatest thing that’s ever happened, but it has brought problems in its train.
Rauch: And maybe liberalism?
Lindsey: Liberalism gave us mass affluence, right? Sorry.
Rauch: … that there were aspects of liberalism that are pretty fundamental to liberalism, not just incidental, which accelerated some of those bad things. And you and Adrian talked about that on a previous episode, for example. So if that’s what I just heard, there’s a lot to it. There are some things, although I certainly disagree with post-liberals about their prescription, they’ve identified some true things. Now, I don’t give them a lot of credit for that because the reason we know that liberalism is not all that good at supplying meaning in life is because we’ve been saying so. We told them that, and we’ve been telling them that for 250 years. So they did not discover this.
Lindsey: Adrian Wooldridge said it very nicely that everything good and insightful and incisive you read in a post- liberal has been said better 50, 100, 200 years ago by a liberal.
Rauch: And they all rehash Nietzsche. That said, what they’re saying is not wrong.
Lindsey: I agree. They have identified symptoms that are real.
Rauch: Well, yeah, they’ve co-opted things that we identified that were…
Lindsey: Okay, that’s right.
Rauch: … I love to quote Hillary Clinton’s 1993 speech on the politics of meaning in which she says all the things we’re saying, and she was mocked for it. But she was not wrong to say people feel an absence of meaning in their lives. So that’s true and it’s a problem. We may differ in that I hear, again, I may be mischaracterizing or misunderstanding, but I hear more economism in your diagnosis than I feel is right. I’m not sure this has all that much to do with the nature of jobs and occupations and the sense of status that went with factory work. I think it’s easy to forget that most of those jobs were always miserable. People hated them. We all remember what happened to labor relations. We all remember the very low status of the working man. So that may be a factor. I would put much less emphasis on the economy. I would put more emphasis on politics. I would put even more emphasis on our cultural institutions, which as I said, are pre-liberal, their failure to step up, their consumerization. So Christianity is a countercultural faith and it does best when it stands not in opposition to, but in contrast to the culture of individualism and consumerism. Well, if you’re in an environment where people are shopping for churches and bouncing from one to the next and churches are competing to see which can offer the lowest barriers to entry so you don’t have to do anything… In fact, one retired Presbyterian minister said it got to the point where there were whole church meetings in which the word God was never used. That’s a choice, right? That’s not something that was imposed by McDonald’s franchises.
Lindsey: Right.
Rauch: And so I tend to look at these things outside of the domain of the structures of our economic system. I look more to the political system where we have some very serious problems, but in principle, problems that can be addressed. But maybe the main difference in all of that is the one I mentioned earlier. It’s a problem, but I don’t think we can solve it by blaming primarily ourselves. I think liberals need to, of course, we need to diagnose, we need to understand the problems in the system, we need to fix them. But at the same time, it is as important or even more important for us to address the other institutions that are not doing their job, some of which have, I put the post-liberals in this camp, some of which have done a brilliant job of blaming us for their failures. I tell my Christian friends, if you want to know why the percentage of Americans affiliated with the church was 70 percent right through polling in the 20th century and is now below half, maybe you should look in the mirror. Maybe that’s not my fault. So I realize it’s not constructive to point fingers and call people out. That’s not what I’m suggesting, but I am suggesting it’s important for people like you and me as we self-criticize to hold others to account as well and to remind the American public and maybe the world public that we cannot simply, we liberals, liberalism, we cannot simply gift them a system that meets all their needs, that there are other responsibilities held by other institutions and by individuals. I don’t think you disagree with any of that in principle. I think maybe we’re talking about emphasis.
Lindsey: Yeah. So going back to the economics, I would say I do think the class divide is really important to understanding the political crisis and the larger social malaise. First, there’s just a genuine divergence in chances for a happy life based on educational qualifications now. The odds of getting married, the odds of growing up in a two-parent family, the odds of owning a home, life expectancy, all of these are diverging now. So during the industrial era when jobs were much worse and people were much poor, ordinary working stiffs, their physical lives were much worse, but I feel their spiritual lives were richer in many ways. First, they had this experience of just almost like time-lapse photography of seeing their living standards rise. They were on this one-time journey from poverty to affluence and they rode it and it was exhilarating. And it took a lot of the sting out of the terrible work they had to do from 9 to 5. Plus they were enmeshed in deep, cohesive communities, which were sometime oppressive and awful, but also gave roots and gave a sense of meaning and belonging. And so now you have people whose jobs are not as physically demanding or difficult and that pay better, but the experience of climbing through the ranks and gaining on the rich, that’s gone. You’re falling behind more and more. And in all these different dimensions, outside of dollars, of your chances for having a good life, we’re seeing the prospects for flourishing diverging between the people at the top and everybody else. And that’s something different from the first three quarters of the 20th century and it’s bad. So I do think figuring out how to employ people and figuring out how people will spend their time if they’re not employed, those are big challenges over the next 50 to 100 years. They don’t necessarily play directly into the current crisis of liberal democracy, but that wasn’t the main thing I was thinking about when I was writing my book.
But beyond that, the failures of broader institutions, I agree. Again, I’ve never said that. I never wrote a word say of criticism of principles of liberalism. Liberalism certainly has characteristic vices. It has a kind of universalism that can be preachy and it’s got a thinness that can miss the woolly, undefinable, unquantifiable things that actually matter to people. So it does have some of those weaknesses. But the real problems that I think are threatening liberal democracy, and the real problems that are making liberal society feel stuck and not really progressing, those are simply the as yet unsolved problems created by prior successes. We are in the wake of the greatest success in human history, which is the marginalization of poverty. We have overthrown mass poverty, we have overthrown mass ignorance, and therefore we have given people the chance to have fully developed lives in a way that was utterly unthinkable before. Now we’ve got to figure out how to create institutions that realize that potential more effectively than we’re doing now. And I think we built institutions to get rich and that happened. And in the process, that changed our culture in a lot of ways that degraded a lot of these intermediate institutions. So now for the next phase of progress towards real mass flourishing, we need cultural reconstruction and institutional reconstruction to build a life proper for mass affluence, proper for being able now to concentrate on the really important things.
Rauch: Well, that sounds right to me. So the part that sounds especially right maybe, or maybe I’m phrasing this or seeing this a slightly different way, you tell me. There is nothing new about disruptive economic change. We may be about to see the biggest yet. I don’t know.
Lindsey: Right. Somehow we’ve gotten through this whole hour plus without talking about AI, but that’s another can of worms.
Rauch: Yeah. Well, you mentioned it and you were right to do so because some people say that there’ve been disruptions, but never this big and this fast. So we’ll see. And all those people who we thought were at the top of the status hierarchy may be looking for work in three years. I’m already hearing reports of consultancies. A friend of mine is a consultant. He fired all but one of his junior analysts because the machine could do it better. And I said, “Well, what about the guy who supervises the junior analysts? How are you going to train him?” And he said, “Well, I worry about that, but that’s a problem I can’t afford to deal with right now.”
So these disruptions are not new in nature. Each one is different. And I think what I heard you saying, or maybe I’m reading this in, but I think a lot of what’s happening here is that we’ve always relied on institutions of civil society to help buffer those shocks. And that those buffers, those outside institutions, that’s your friends, your family, your community, your church, it’s the local Elks Club, it’s the Boy Scouts, it’s the fact that you’re volunteering at the soup kitchen or you’re teaching Sunday school. Those other sources of meanings which help stabilize people and communities when they’re going through times of intense change, which face it, is always more or less, that those have thinned out. And if that’s the case, and if that’s where we, social critics collectively need to focus primarily, then we’re outside the classic domain of federal programs and market structures and scientific inquiry. We’re in the domain of a lot of people, individually and collectively, figuring out ways to rebuild their communities and sense of communities. And I don’t think that of its nature can be a top-down prescriptive exercise.
Lindsey: I agree.
Rauch: One of the things that…
Lindsey: My last podcast guest was a guy, Phil Levin, whose business is helping people buy or build homes together with family and friends. So creating compounds with common living facilities, and aiming towards having cohesive face-to-face communities with people you know. So those kinds of things, people discovering… We’re seeing a lot of this kind of backlash against excessive life online and this sense that we need to touch grass. Board games and vinyl records are becoming popular again. There’s a general dawning cultural sense that we need to reconnect with the real and the physical, and I think also with the social. And so that’s a lot of what I’m hoping to do over the coming years is look for those green shoots of people who are engaged in these acts of nascent social reconstruction and highlight them.
Rauch: So I think that’s right though. I would put even more emphasis on collective activities by institutions like churches, which are still at the top of my list. But yeah, I am like you, I’m seeing a renaissance of interest in rebuilding civil society. I’m part of that. I’m helping a guy named David Blankenhorn found a new nonprofit, it’s called Civic Life, and we’re going to try to bring conversations about core American ideas and songs, documents to living rooms and Starbucks and church basements and local civic groups, libraries, we hope maybe women’s prisons. We are not going to do this. We’re going to try to create means to catalyze it because I feel like… So there are two big crises that worry me most. I’m going to really try not to drone on, but this might interest you. Should I do this? It’s going to take a minute and a half.
Lindsey: Okay.
Rauch: Both of them transcend Donald Trump. Both of them are probably global, but I’ll focus on America. The first is the disconnection of people, especially younger people from our civic traditions. A sense of nihilism and cynicism about the possibilities for ordinary people to contribute in meaningful ways to institutions of democracy. And a sense among many, burn, baby, burn, it’s not working, burn it all down. I meet young people all the time. I talk to them about this. They can’t typically name even one institution other than their family that they believe in. They’re still idealistic, but they don’t see how to invest that. And I tell them, “Look, the challenge for your generation, I’m checking out. I’m a baby boomer. We caused this mess. Sorry. You guys have to figure out how to rebuild institutions that you can have some confidence in. I can’t do that. And politics can’t do that.” I don’t know if they can, and that worries me.
So those two things worry me. Those are two things. One is disconnection from our civic heritage, our traditions, the American story, and the other is disconnection from institutional life. Both of those things, to the extent that they’re real, I keep coming back to this, but I think to address them, we need to refocus more attention away from the real and alleged failings of our market economy and consumerism and all that. And we need to push that attention outward and ask people, what are you doing in your community that you think could actually help? Let’s sit down and try to figure out what can we do as Americans to try to improve the situation wherever we have leverage.
Lindsey: So it’s disconcerting for a couple of DC policy walks to not have a policy to-do list to solve our problems. But I am convinced with you that this is ultimately a cultural problem. And cultural problems are the biggest collective action problems. They ultimately are, what do we all think and believe and how do we act on the basis of those beliefs? And so that’s the ultimate bottom-up enterprise. And we can do our part in our area to improve our locality. And with our voices that reach other people, we can point people in the right direction or highlight people who are doing good things. But this is humanity’s story. They’re the actors and also the writers and directors. And so I am hopeful, I have reasons for hope that we can rise to the challenges.
Rauch: Well, I realize you’re closing out the show, but I just want to take a stab at something on the way out the door, hopefully in a way that wraps up rather than provokes.
Lindsey: Okay.
Rauch: So in organizing this conversation, you asked the question something like, I’ll paraphrase, how much criticism by liberalism of liberalism, of these institutions, is justified, and how much is too much? May not be exactly what you said, but where do we draw that line? And I think my answer to that is the right amount is the amount that calls attention to things that we should and can fix within markets, democracies and science, liberal democracy and science, but the too much is when we redirect attention that belongs elsewhere to ourselves. And that’s why I feel the criticism has gotten out of hand or was getting out of hand. I think one advantage of the work that you and Adrian and Ryan Avent and all the others that we’ve mentioned and others that I don’t know about and others to come is I think this work is adding up to a collective body, which is advancing the conversation substantively as people listen to these critiques, as they refine them, as they increasingly see where these problems are located. And that to me is also a source of encouragement because that’s what liberal intellectuals should be doing, right? It’s what I’m trying to do. I’m still groping as you can tell, but I think we’re getting somewhere.
Lindsey: Yeah, that’s the thing about modernity. We’re always on completely unexplored territory. We’re always at the frontier and nobody’s ever done this before. So we’re all blind men trying to feel the elephant. And if you feel that … So as far as the scope of critique, since I think the biggest problems facing liberalism these days are cultural and culture involves everybody, it’s hard for me to figure out how to … Well, culture is everybody’s responsibility. It’s the responsibility of writers and thinkers to talk about it and raise the issues. It’s the responsibility of everybody to live up to the best within themselves. So I’m not sure that I buy into the idea that there’s some stuff that liberals ought not to talk about because that’s somebody else’s problem. But I certainly agree that we’re all in an enterprise of trying to figure things out and we’re in the dark, we’re in the gloom, we’re doing the best we can. I know to have gotten to this point, I’ve made a lot of mistakes in my analysis of public affairs over the years, and so I’m sure I’m making some now. But in the great spirit of liberal self-correction, we keep talking and we keep trying and that therein lies progress.
Rauch: Amen.
Lindsey: So thank you, Jonathan, for helping me to feel the elephant here and try to make sense of what’s going on in this vexatious political moment. Great having you on the show.
