Ross Douthat

Mr. Vice President, welcome to Interesting Times. Thank you, Ross. Try and contain your laughter. Wait, is that actually the name of your podcast? That is the name of our show, yes. Do we not live in interesting times? We do live in interesting times. So we're here in Rome. This is the day after the papal inauguration. But now it's the next day. It is. And you just met with Pope Leo XIV. I did.

I mean, just to pause there, one of the most, I would say... hardcore critical of illegal immigration think tanks, when I looked into this, had its estimate, I think, in the 10 to 12 million range, right?

How does being either a Catholic or just a Christian shape your politics? In the sense of, just to be specific, what are things that you feel like you believe or care about in politics that are specific to Christianity rather than conservatism, the Republican Party, and so on? How would your worldview be different if you weren't a Catholic Christian?

But the due process— Under a legislative standard. To be clear, this is based on legislation. Like, the judges who are making these decisions are not inventing this standard. It is a legislative standard. Right.

Right. But it seems like the stable way to get there, where you are creating a settlement that would outlast your own administration would involve a combination of Supreme Court rulings, and I think it's fair to say that there is a majority on the Supreme Court that is likely to be sympathetic to something other than a left NGO reading of immigration law. I hope that's right. Okay.

I hope that's right. I think that's likely, combined with perhaps a recognition that maybe the legislative setup around this issue is out of date. you know, that the asylum system assumed by legislation written in the 1950s doesn't make sense and so on, right? So there you have two tracks.

You have trying to get Supreme Court rulings that vindicate your interpretation of the law, and then you have potentially legislative efforts where the existing law needs to be revised.

And this is what I'm asking about. The legal authorities that you guys have tried to use have been— The particular one is the Alien Enemies Act, right, which is an extremely aggressive claim about wartime powers that, as far as I can tell, even under the most aggressive interpretation, is likely to apply only to an incredibly small number of migrants, right?

The claim is not actually that 5 million migrants here illegally are in a state of war against the United States, or is that the claim?

We'll talk about that question in a minute.

Shouldn't this sort of barbaric medieval landscape that you're describing show up in violent crime statistics?

So to get quickly to my idea of a zone of temptation here for you. Well, so what you're describing is, again, you and I both lived through the Bush presidency, right?

And there are elements of what you might call a kind of war on terror mentality that you're taking vis-a-vis the cartels or people associated with the cartels or people allegedly associated with gangs and cartels that seems to me similar to the approach taken to anyone associated with Islamic terrorism and so on in the aftermath of September 11th. And again, you remember and I remember that

In more than a few cases, right, this ended up with situations where the U.S. was taking people into custody and remanding them to black sites and so on, who turned out, unsurprisingly, not to be number one al-Qaeda terrorists, right? And to the extent that it is possible, and it is somewhat difficult for the media to do this, but to the extent that it's possible for the media to examine this,

the kind of figures and individuals that you guys have been trying to essentially remand to prison in El Salvador, right? Without, you know, extensive legal process. It just seems like this system is ripe for war on terror style abuses where you are going to be sending people to prison in El Salvador that advertises itself as a terrible place

And one, some of those people are probably going to be innocent. Two, some of them are going to be people who have committed a crime, who have some kind of gang affiliation, but who under normal American law, non-wartime law, would end up going to jail for six months or a year or something. And again, they're going to disappear potentially into a system for a decade or more or something like that.

And that just seems like you are creating a context where injustice is – inevitable, even if your intentions are just to bring peace and order to communities along the border or anything else?

I don't think I have. No, I'm not. All right. Let me let me be perfectly honest. I'm not interested in having you trapped. We're having a conversation in Rome as a journalist and a vice president, but also as two Catholics. And I'm giving you shit, Ross. Trust me.

After that pitch to yourself. And American law.

The other thing that the president of the United States said was that he hoped or aspired to a situation where he could potentially send American citizens to El Salvador's prison.

I think that you should be able to see, though, why in the context of sending illegal immigrants to an El Salvadoran prison and claiming to be unable for diplomatic reasons to bring them back, The prospect of then saying, and we'd like to send U.S.

citizens to that prison, would raise some concerns about how the administration uses the immigration powers that you think it should have under arguable wartime conditions. Again, right? Regardless of the particulars of a case, it just seems like you are setting up a machinery –

that people of good faith who are not hostile to your policies would reasonably regard as dangerous to particular people who are caught up in the system. That's all, right?

That's my understanding of the American people. In a context where the administration is saying, Notwithstanding the Supreme Court's desire that we facilitate the return of someone who was sent there in error, we can't do it.

All right, let's pull back to another issue, trade. And I'm going to ask the same question about what does success look like? So we've ended up in a place where we had Liberation Day, we had a period of, let's say, market difficulty and chaos. It seems like we're in a zone of partial stability where we're setting tariffs around 10%, we're negotiating new trade deals

So you have a policy set in motion that is trying to produce some kind of results. What results do you want? And specifically, at the end of four years, are you looking at as indexes of success? Is it the number of manufacturing jobs? Is it the number of new factories open? Is it particular industries that... are currently overseas that have national security implications that you want back home?

Is it tariff revenue to help with the deficit? What do you want from this policy that we can actually measure and say in three years it succeeded or it failed? Okay.

Do you want to say something? No, I mean, I don't. I'm trying to avoid having a long argument about the wisdom of the specific tariffs that were announced on Liberation Day, which...

I found it, as someone who hosts a podcast and tries to talk to people, I found it very difficult to get anyone inside the administration or sympathetic voices outside to sort of straightforwardly say, this is why this set of policies are good and defensible, the nation by nation tariffs. However, the place we're in now with a global minimum tariff, I can find people who will defend that policy.

Rather than litigating it, I want to start where we are, and I want you to tell me, let's say the economics profession is wrong in some way, and the U.S. economy can absorb these tariffs without dramatic impacts on prices and jobs and so on. Let's say that's the case. Still, you're doing these tariffs not to just have them absorbed by the economy, but to achieve something. Yes.

And then how should a Catholic politician like yourself think about issues where Either the hierarchy of the church or the pope himself seems to be critical of the stances you're taking. And I just want to preface this right. This is going to lead us into a conversation about immigration.

So tell me what you want to achieve. That's right.

I have 30 more questions.

Which is why the numbers were randomly selected by a magic eight ball. And it didn't really matter what the numbers were.

Tell me about success. Tell me about success.

But, you know, you mentioned migration as one of the political issues that the Holy Father wanted to talk about. It's too easy. Well, I think it's useful to have context. Historically, American presidents have tended to almost always have some set of issues where they're not in tune with the Vatican. And for Ronald Reagan, it could be the nuclear issue.

Okay. So if that's the case, isn't there then a big missing piece of this agenda, which is China has major industrial policy, right? And again, if you talk to a lot of the people who are most supportive of some kind of

you know, economic change along the lines you're describing, they will say, look, tariffs and trade barriers are part of it, but you also need to increase manufacturing and domestic industry, and the government has a big role to play in that. So, one, is that true? Two, to the extent that it is true, when I look at things that Doge has done in terms of cuts it's made.

When I look at the big, beautiful bill working its way through the House and Senate, I see very conventional sort of small government Republican policymaking, certainly not a kind of new industrial policy for the 21st century. So is that out there as a possibility for the administration?

Is there a legislative vision after the tax bill passes?

There was conflict, at least between the Reagan administration and elements of the church on nuclear nonproliferation. There was also conflict over Reagan era policy in Central America. Obviously, liberal and democratic administration, it tends to be around abortion and issues related to that.

Okay. Speaking of the economy and industrial policy and everything else, and the Pope, bring it all together, right? No. We've come full circle. Pope Leo took the name Leo XIV for reference to Leo XIII. Of course. Who was sort of engaged in figuring out the Catholic response to the industrial era.

And the new Pope has said explicitly that he's thinking about the Catholic response to the age of information technology and AI. You have been a point person for the administration on AI issues. Yes. And I'm both curious. One, there are people who think that we are essentially getting a profound economic revolution driven by AI while you guys are in office in the Trump-Vance administration.

So I'm first curious how likely you think that is. And then second, because the last guest on this podcast was making prophecies of imminent AI-driven doom, how much do you worry— about the potential downsides of AI, not even on the apocalyptic scale, but on the cultural scale, the way human beings respond to a sense of their own obsolescence, these kind of things?

You know, AI... But that is then, just to be clear, that is a prediction of... by the standards of the predictions people are making, a relatively slow pace of change, I think, right?

But then even George W. Bush, as much as some conservative Catholics wanted to downplay the fact that Pope John Paul II was against the Iraq War, the Vatican was against the Iraq War. Yes. Right? And so that was a point of tension. And they were right. And they were right. You and I agree. So...

If you read the paper, you got the gist. Last question on this. Do you think that the U.S. government is capable in a scenario, again, not like the ultimate Skynet scenario, but just a scenario where AI seems to be getting out of control in some way of taking a pause?

When you have, and clearly there is some tension between Trump administration policy and things that the Pope thinks or the Vatican thinks, how do you as a Catholic think about that tension?

So a couple times in this interview, you've said something to me to the effect of, You know, I know New York Times readers hate me or I know New York Times readers don't like me and so on. But here's the reality of the last couple of years as I experienced it as a New York Times conservative.

The Trump-Vance ticket won a constituency that you didn't have before, that Trump didn't have before in 2016 that included – Some of the kind of people who read the New York Times. Yes. People who were exhausted by wokeness.

You still love them, but I'm just trying to acknowledge the point that I make may not land particularly well, but go ahead. I'm interested in this constituency because I talk to these kind of people all the time. So I may have an outsized sense of their importance. So do I do. They all live in Washington. They all live – they live around the country, right?

But there's a group of people who – it's not millions and millions of people but it's a real and substantial constituency that voted for you guys maybe to their own surprise or even if they didn't vote for you, woke up the day after the election. I heard a lot of people say this and said, you know, in the end, I was glad they won.

And then a lot of those people have experienced the first few months of the administration as a series of unpleasant shocks, where it's not one big issue, but it'll be something that they care about in particular that Doge has cut, or it's, you know, the issue we were arguing about before with renditions to El Salvador, where they're like, well, I voted for this administration, but I didn't expect them to go this far or push this hard.

And so... I want to know what you say to them in general, but I have two examples of that that I think are close to your own interests that I hear a lot about from people. One is how we handle addiction in the U.S. The Trump administration has cut staff to the health administration that handles addiction addiction and mental health. It's being reorganized inside RFK Jr. 's HHS department.

But people I know in addiction medicine around, you know, people who are working with people addicted to fentanyl and other drugs are incredibly anxious and distressed about some of these changes. Another case where it's people who you know who are evangelical and Catholic who are concerned about is foreign aid. The Trump administration came in and said, look, we're reorganizing foreign aid.

We're not getting rid of it entirely, but we're looking at it anew. But right now, foreign aid has been dramatically cut. So on those two issues, is your expectation at the end of four years that in the end, the Trump administration is just we're just going to spend less on drug addiction treatment and foreign aid?

Or do you think at the end of four years, people who have those kind of anxieties will feel like, no, in the end, the administration, you know, took our concerns seriously and took our concerns about life-saving treatments in Africa seriously, took our concerns about fentanyl addiction treatment seriously here.

He's the archivist.

This is really the last question. Frame it as a question. So then generally, you're going to face the voters by proxy in the midterm. Sure. You may face the voters personally in some future, right? But to this constituency that was pro-Trump, again, maybe it's to its own surprise, but has found itself sort of shocked at various points in the first few months. What is your pitch to them right now?

All right. Well, hopefully we can talk again around when they make that judgment, perhaps in Jerusalem. Okay. Next time, Athens. Probably not Moscow, but Mr. Vice President, thank you so much. Good to see you, Ross. It's a pleasure. Thank you. As always, thank you so much for listening. And as a reminder, you can watch this as a video podcast on YouTube.

You can find the channel under Interesting Times with Ross Douthat. Interesting Times is produced by Sophia Alvarez-Boyd, Andrea Batanzos, Elisa Gutierrez, and Catherine Sullivan. It's edited by Jordana Hochman. Our fact check team is Kate Sinclair, Mary Marge Locker, and Michelle Harris. Original music by Isaac Jones, Sonia Herrero, Amin Sahota, and Pat McCusker. Mixing by Pat McCusker.

Is there – Is there actually a rule that says you as vice president should not kiss the papal ring?

The first American pope. Yeah. So what did you talk about?

Some people were worried about that with John F. Kennedy, as I recall.

Let me propose a theory of

sort of papal interventions in politics, which is that it might be useful to think of issues where presidents end up in some kind of tension with the papacy as zones of temptation for people like yourself, meaning that it's not that when the pope says, you know, I think you're wrong about this, that that automatically means that you say, oh, you know, absolutely, Your Holiness, we're going to change our policy tomorrow.

but it might mean that you're operating in an area where you're going to be exposed to certain kinds of temptations and get into zones of danger. So for instance, to take the Iraq war example, right? Like while George W. Bush was getting ready to go to war, People who defended the decision to go to war in Iraq would say, look, even if the pope is against it, this is a prudential judgment.

It's a judgment that a statesman has to make. It's not the judgment the pope has to make. And I think they were right. Nonetheless, it would have been useful perhaps for more people in the Bush administration to say, okay, as we're thinking about this war –

the fact that the Pope is against it should, you know, make us think, let's say 10% more carefully, take 10% more moral care around, you know, what's going to happen to Christian minorities in the Middle East, for instance, if we invade Iraq, something like that, right? Or to take a case like Joe Biden, the former president of the United States. I look at his career as

and his relationship to the church on issues like abortion. And I see a kind of tragic story where Biden starts out as a pro-life Catholic, pro-life politician. Biden, by the end of his career, because of the nature of partisan politics, has just ended up with a position on abortion indistinguishable from the secular left.

And sort of step by step, piece by piece, he ended up alienated from his faith. So when I, I feel like for someone in your position, Whatever the pope says about immigration, yes, it doesn't imply that you need to change, you know, your general policy overnight, but it means that you need to be aware that this is a zone where you're exposed to a certain kind of partisan temptation.

What do you think about that?

I think that's probably fair to say. And yeah, I would I would join you in expressing sympathy and solidarity with the former president on his cancer diagnosis. All right, but I'm going to come back to that zone of temptation idea as we get a little bit deeper into the actual policy debate.

So we're going to talk about immigration and trade with a similar sort of big picture question in both cases, right? So start with immigration. The Trump administration, when you were running for president, basically made two promises. We're going to secure the border and we're going to deport a substantial number of the people who entered illegally under the previous administration.

So that's the Vatican seal on polka dots.

I would say that you have been honestly more successful than I expected at swiftly securing the border. Sure. On deportations, it seems like the actual process is not moving that quickly. And there's a lot of debates in the courts and elsewhere about relatively small numbers of potential deportees. Sure.

So looking ahead four years from now, what would constitute success in immigration policy at the end of this term?

That's completely fair. But at the current pace of deportations, you would be deporting numbers commensurate with prior presidents and not commensurate with the numbers that entered.

Right wing publisher, yep.

I mean, yeah, I think, I think that that, that is the, the view of many, if not most people who work in the arts that I've had sort of sustained conversations with about, um,

politics why art tends to be liberal or progressive coded and so on i think just you know just to speak up on behalf of the conservative critique i think you would say a couple things right one is that liberalism and progressivism itself is in 21st century america is a power structure a set of assumptions views about who's good who's bad it passes a certain kind of judgment on the past

So you've been frank in the past about not having been an intense Star Wars guy before you got pulled into... this universe and into this work and this project. And I'm wondering if you could talk a little bit about what that's like, what it's like to come into a story, a franchise. Were you saying to yourself, I'm going to do something inside a franchise that no one has done before?

I think, that can be antithetical to serious art, that you get a lot of progressivism where it's like, you know, the moral arc of the universe is always bending in a particular direction and everyone in the past who had different views is benighted and wrong and so on. And that is its own failure of empathy and understanding, I think, and one that progressives are particularly prone to.

No, the empathy for... people who existed who had views that contemporary progressives now consider benighted, for instance. I'm trying to make a deeper point.

Right, and I guess what I'm just trying to suggest is that some people do it better than others, right? Some artists do it better than others, but there is also a pattern where art that is made in an environment where people share a particular worldview, where it fails the test you're setting it, right?

The test of empathy is often when it's confronting people who hold views or represent ideas or institutions or anything else

that contemporary progressives don't favor so just to give you an example right and again you don't have to agree with this because you know you don't have to criticize any of your colleagues in the business right but if you go back and watch a movie like the shape of water guillermo del toro's movie that won best picture sort of at the beginning of sort of what we now think of as the great awokening right in a way it's a very empathetic movie it's a movie about how a band of

outsiders, minorities, non-humans, and so on, band together to defeat an evil authoritarian figure. But the evil authoritarian figure is supposed to be like the evil representative of white Christian McCarthyite masculinity. And Michael Shannon does, in a way, a very good job portraying the role. But as I sit there watching the movie, it's a movie that absolutely has no empathy.

for anyone outside its circle of sort of virtuous outsiders. It has no sense of what it would, you know, what would it actually be like to be, you know, a sort of patriotic. I don't want to defend that picture. Okay, good.

I don't know. Well, let me give—I agree with you completely about In the Heat of the Night. Let me give you an example from your own work, right, which is, I think, the best movie that you made. You've only actually—you've directed three movies? How many movies have you directed so far?

Or were you saying, look, there are other models here of how, you know, like Christopher Nolan's Batman or something like that?

Three movies, right. So they're all good, to be clear, but the best of them, I think, by general consensus, is Michael Clayton, which is a movie that stars George Clooney as a lawyer who's a fixer who ends up dealing with a case of corporate malfeasance where a company essentially – poison to town, poison kids, right?

And one of his colleagues has a crisis of conscience played by, or essentially has a mental breakdown driven by a crisis of conscience, right? And this is, again, I would describe, this is a movie I love. I love Michael Clayton. I would, again, describe it as kind of a left-wing movie. It's a movie about how they're evil. Why? Why is that?

Because the foundation of the movie, and I would say this, like, if you make a movie, if you make a movie that's about how, where the moral foundation of the movie is that the American military is, you know, awesome and kicks ass, I might love that movie or I might dislike it, but I would call that a kind of right-leading movie.

And if you make a movie about how evil corporations are poisoning your children, I'd call that a left-wing movie, right? But what I want to get to is the villain in that movie is played by Tilda Swinton, terrific performance. And To me, you create her, and she creates the character too, right?

In a way that is, again, sort of fulfills the goal of creating a character who you're rooting against, who's obviously the bad guy, but who is deeply human, fascinating, sort of bizarre, totally relatable in various ways. Again, in a way that I think lots of movies that have a political perspective fail at. And that's all I'm getting at, right?

I think that there is a way in which you can make a movie that has a political point of view that captures the fullness of reality. And it's hard to do. And you do it well. And not everyone does. This isn't even a question.

Well, it's just that this is the last thing I'll say, because I want to ask you a different question about Michael Clayton. The last thing I'll say is just, of course, of course, of course, you don't identify with the corporation that's using pesticides to poison the children, right? But if I made a movie, let's say I made a movie, right? And it was about a English department faculty member.

That was led by a, you know, African-American lesbian professor that, you know, persecuted a virtuous Catholic conservative academic and got him fired. Right. Right. I would feel like I'd made kind of a right wing movie. And but then I could say, oh, well, what are you on the side of persecuting Catholic intellectuals? No, no one's on that side. Well, no.

But who you choose as your villains does have political implications. That's all I'm saying. Right. Right. So let me ask you a different question about Michael Clayton. Okay, go ahead. So why didn't you make more movies like Michael Clayton? It's been 18 years. Duplicity came out after that, and then you did a Bourne movie, and then you got sucked into the Star Wars universe.

But I watched that movie. I was like, I could watch five more movies, ten more movies like that from Tony Gilroy.

And that is... It's the story of the... For listeners and viewers who are not huge Star Wars fans, right? This is the story that Andor tells is the story of the rise of the Rebel Alliance. How you get to the point in the original Star Wars where Luke Skywalker comes in and there's already this rebellion ongoing against the Empire. And... You're telling a very, very political story.

So I grew up younger than you I grew up in the 1990s which meant that you know for me as a teenager someone who was not as crazed about the movies maybe as you were but who liked them a lot and they were a big part of my life hanging out going to the movies on weekends right I sort of took it for granted then that you would have serious movies for grownups, fun, original movies.

A movie, you worked on Devil's Advocate, right? The Al Pacino, right? Keanu. So that was the kind of movie that going to the movies meant. You were going to see a big movie star giving you a big speech, playing Satan in a Manhattan skyrise. It was great stuff, right? And to me, the big change in American pop culture in the last 20 years is that the world that

made movies like Michael Clay, movies like Devil's Advocate possible has just sort of gone away. And I'm wondering if you agree with that, right? It just seems incredibly hard.

No, I take that personally because I do have a lot of kids and I don't get to the movie theater. You don't. So it is my fault personally.

Well, there aren't movie stars anymore, right? Yeah.

From New York Times Opinion, I'm Ross Douthat, and this is Interesting Times. American popular culture is in trouble. The Hollywood dream factory has gone stagnant, recycling the same stories time and time again. Giants like Marvel feel too big to fail, but they've lost the ability to tell us new and surprising stories. But there is one notable exception.

What gives you hope right now? Like, do you think that we're just stuck in a world where you can maybe make something great inside a franchise? but mostly movies for grownups are over? Or do you think things are going to get better?

I get those notes. I get those notes from my producers every week.

I didn't fully believe it. That's the truth. I don't think the world's ending in 2027. I think with the movies, it's a question about... I hope I'm right, too. I hope you're right, man. To me, the question with AI, the great question, is an audience question, right, for your business.

If you get an AI that can generate, you know, 1,500 simulated versions of Michael Clayton or Andor, and let's be honest, there'll be 1,500 simulated versions of a Marvel movie or a Star Wars show, right? And the actors aren't real, and there's no actual screenwriter behind it. Do people want that? And I sort of think that they don't in the end.

That, like, even if most people watch Andor don't know who Tony Gilroy is, in the end, they want to think that there is a mind and a human being behind the story, just as they definitely want to think that, you know, you're talking about the work your actors do, right? That it's like, it's Tilda Swinton and George Clooney playing those characters.

Even in an age when movie stars have declined, people want to think they don't want a... AI simulacrum playing a fictional character. And this may be my total naivete, but I do think that's what it comes down to for Hollywood with AI. It's does the audience accept the substitution of whatever AI can do for what you can do? And I'm hopeful that they don't.

So that's a dark place, Tony. So give me some light. Give me some advice right now. Set aside AI, just the movie industry without the total transformation, just the movie and TV industry that you're in right now. Give me advice for the young Tony Gilroy or the would-be Tony Gilroy, the would-be screenwriter, director, whatever else of 2025. What would you tell them

The young, they're eager to learn.

We tell ourselves stories in order to live.

Good. Well, then we'll, if the AI 2027 scenario is real, we'll agree to meet up around the campfire in the post-apocalyptic ruins. And you can tell me a story, Tony.

Thank you so much.

I think this is a good place to pivot more to a discussion of politics and art. Because Andor is, it's telling a political story in a way that goes beyond anything Star Wars has done before. It's not just the world of Skywalker family and the Jedi Knights. It's a world of bureaucrats and senators, politicians, and so on, right? So talk a little bit about what is this world that you're showing?

As always, thank you so much for listening. And as a reminder, you can watch this as a video podcast on YouTube. You can find the channel under Interesting Times with Ross Douthat. Interesting Times is produced by Sophia Alvarez-Boyd, Andrea Batanzos, Elisa Gutierrez, and Catherine Sullivan. It's edited by Jordana Hochman.

What is the political world that you're depicting in this show?

Fronting for what? A weapon.

I believe we are in crisis.

So is Andor a left-wing show? Because this is something that I've said a couple times in my writing about it, using it literally as an example as a conservative columnist of a work of art that I think of as having different politics from my own that I really, really like. And I've had friends...

especially on the right, come back to me and say, oh, you know, it's not it's not left wing or right wing. It's just a TV show about resistance to tyranny. But I think you've made a left wing work of art. What do you think?

I don't... But it's a story, but it's a political story about revolutionary... Do you identify with the empire?

The Star Wars serial Andor has somehow managed to pull off originality within the constraints of a familiar franchise. And part of its originality is that it has an explicitly political and, to my mind, left-wing perspective on its world without feeling at all like tedious propaganda. My guest today is the showrunner behind Andor, Tony Gilroy.

No, I don't. But I don't think that you have to be left-wing to resist authoritarianism, right? But I see the empire as you just described it, right? It's a fascist... It's presented as a fascist institution that doesn't have any sort of, you know, communist pretense to solidarity or anything like that. It's it's fascist and authoritarian.

And you're meditating on what revolutionary politics looks like in the shadow of that. Right. I mean, who. So you talked about all this history that you brought in.

Talk about that history a little bit.

Oh, yeah. It's a terrific book.

But in the end, I mean, in the end, you're rooting. I guess here's how I think about it.

Right, so this is a show, it's a story, where you are rooting for... against a fascist regime, right? Okay. As you said, you're not rooting for the empire in the end, right? No. So that to me is sort of the political foundation of the work, right?

And that's why I use the term left-wing, not because you have a 10-point list of revolutionary demands that you, Tony Gilroy, support, but you're telling a story in which basically you're on the side of the radicals and the revolutionaries, but then at the same time, and this is why I think it is effective art

what i think you've been able to do maybe coming out of all of this autodidactic reading right is give people a window into why the radicals even if you're rooting for them you can see how things can go wrong right But that is what I really like about the show's approach to politics, right?

We're going to talk about how art and politics interact in a show about radicals trying to defeat fascism and whether Hollywood can ever tell stories for grownups again. So, Tony Gilroy, welcome to Interesting Times. Thank you for having me.

No, that's fair. And that is, in fact, literally the argument that some of my more libertarian friends who love the show have made to me, saying, oh, you know, this is ultimately a show about localism and, you know, leaving us alone against the depredations of tyranny. But talk a little bit about how you portray the people who serve the empire, though.

I mean... And these are just, again, these are the characters who are imperial in various ways. Gestapo.

I mean, to me, what you've just described, the sort of mentality of always trying to see the world through your character's eyes, through each character's eyes, right? Even when they're on opposing sides, even when they represent a community-destroying perspective that, you know, you yourself are against, that is the key to doing successful art about politics, right?

So I want to start by congratulating you on what I personally think a large number of critics and a sizable fraction of the viewing public consider the most successful Star Wars production maybe since the original trilogy.

But it seems tremendously hard, right?

I think, for people to do in the sense that, like, when I think about most art that tries to capture American politics, certainly, but, you know, any kind of politics that gets close to the present moment, certainly, there's just a failure of... a conspicuous failure of empathy for anyone who's not on the same side as the screenwriter, the novelist, the filmmaker, and so on.

That's my sense of things. And again, it's one reason that I appreciate... and or, I think. Do you think that there, like, in terms of cinema, modern cinema, or modern TV, do you think there are other shows and movies that tackle politics that you admire, that you think pull this off, this kind of cross-political empathy?

That's even better. Please push deeper.

It's a very serious podcast.

From New York Times Opinion, I'm Ross Douthat, and this is Interesting Times. It's a difficult time for the Democratic Party. Donald Trump's approval ratings have dropped sharply, but the Democrats remain incredibly unpopular. Liberalism is searching not just for a clear agenda, but also a clear idea of why it lost, why the country turned right, and where the left might go from here.

In Wethersfield, just south of Hartford, which for those who don't know Connecticut geography intimately is a beautiful colonial era town with all these houses from the 1700s. If you've read the children's novel, The Witch of Blackbird Pond, right? Isn't that set in Wethersfield? It's the kind of place where you can go and, you know, do...

drawings of gravestones from the 1680s and all these kind of things.

If you drive through it, you will believe it. So I like Wethersfield. I like Connecticut. It's a beautiful state. But it does often seem to me like the perfect embodiment of a kind of liberal or left-of-center politics That you personally seem to be saying is part of what's wrong with the Democratic Party. Right. In the sense that just in my lifetime. Right.

So I grew up in Connecticut in the 1980s. And at that point, there was still a kind of residual Rockefeller Republican, upper class Republican mentality. base in the state. If you went down to the richest towns closest to New York, you found a lot of Republicans. And if you went to sort of the more middle class areas, you found a lot of Democrats.

Since then, the state has generally moved to the left. But the way the Democratic Party works in Connecticut is you have rich people who've become more Democratic close to New York in finance and industries connected to finance. You have university towns like New Haven, where I live, which have a lot of academic liberals. And then you have some very poor cities, Bridgeport and Hartford, notably.

What you don't have is a big middle to working class Democratic constituency. The rural parts of the state are quite Trumpy. And just in like the towns near me, the sort of lower middle class, working class towns, at the very least, they're purple. They're not blue. Right. So this is the coalition. This Connecticut is in a way the sort of the modern Democratic coalition.

So I guess the straightforward question is, are you saying that the Democrats need to reject the Connecticut model of Democratic politics? Tread carefully with your re-election.

All right. Terrific. That will give us some real urgency behind this conversation. So I want to jump right in and talk about your party and the state of the Democrats, because we just marked 100 days of the second Trump administration. The media was full of takes on those 100 days, how Trump was doing, how the White House is governing. And I want to ask you about the Democrats' first 100 days.

So I agree that a bigger Democratic tent probably would not lose, let's say. sort of left-leaning voters in academic towns who have social issues litmus tests. We'll get into in a minute sort of some of the issues for Democrats around that kind of movement. But what about people who have moved into the Democratic coalition who themselves represent the upper class, right?

Some version of the American oligarchy. And again, we don't have to personalize it. We won't say that they're living in Greenwich or Darien or any particular town that you might have to fundraise in. But aren't you imagining that there are voters who would be comfortable voting for the Democrats?

Under conditions where they aren't seen as a party fighting plutocracy, let's say, who might be alienated. Right. There has to be some interest group in the current Democratic coalition who would be alienated by the shifts you have in mind.

But or some of those voters and I know some of these voters were with you precisely because of the issue with which you started this conversation. Right. the dangers posed by Trump's authoritarian tendencies right and it seems like one reason that the Democrats maybe have shied away from some forms of economic populism is that they felt like they were building a coalition around

issues of, you know, protecting democracy, protecting Republican norms. That is certainly that's part of how you end up with figures like Liz Cheney involved in Democratic campaigns and so on. Right. So do you think there's any tension between you're trying to put together the populist anti-oligarchy message and the it's an emergency for our democracy message? Can you make those two fit together?

What do you think of your party's performance since Donald Trump was inaugurated?

Okay, let's pause there. When we come back, we'll talk about the more spiritual crisis unspooling in America. I want to come back to some of those questions about democratic strategy, but let's talk now about some of the voters who you think Democrats need to win. I think clearly Democrats do need to be able to win Senate races in states that right now are red tilting and so on, right?

Certainly that's the case if Democrats are going to win back elections. Senate in 2026. And one of the arguments that you've made, and you made it especially before the last election, is that part of what has alienated working class, lower middle class American voters at the moment isn't just sort of class issues alone. It's not just economic policy in and of itself.

You've also talked about the idea of a social cultural crisis in American life. You've described the crisis as a spiritual unspooling kind of loneliness and disconnection and uncertainty that's pervasive in American life. I have thoughts on that, but I want you to give me more thoughts. Tell me more about what you see as the spiritual crisis in American life right now.

What role does government play in that? In that question specifically, I'll get to some distinct questions about spiritual crisis in a minute. But just on the question of how people experience the internet, which I completely agree is responsible for at least a certain degree of unhappiness and even derangement in American life right now.

It seems like Democrats have a narrative that you gestured at earlier in this conversation, right, where the problem with big tech is that it's so big, it's monopolies, corrupting the government in various ways, right? But the problem with like doom scrolling on social media is not a problem of monopoly power. If you split up TikTok into 15 tiny little TikToks,

That would not necessarily improve the mental well-being. And if anything, like they would be in fierce competition with each other to hook your children's eyeballs more intently. So I'm curious what you think is sort of the distinctive political response to let's call it a problem of technological addiction in American life. Like what is government actually supposed to do about that?

Yeah, I mean, I think that that is a set of issues and ideas that already has a certain degree of bipartisan purchase. It does. You know, you see Glenn Youngkin in Virginia signing bills about cell phones in schools and these kind of things. I do think, though, it is... kind of an upper middle class to upper class fixation or source of interest right now.

And when I look at sort of the wider landscape of American life, yes, of course, there are parents who are anxious about how much time their kids are spending on phones. But there's also a lot of parents and communities where the phone is kind of a tether. It's like you, you know, don't have strong institutions like churches and local associations and so on. You don't have, you know,

You don't have as many two-parent families. You have a lot of parents raising kids as single parents, raising kids in difficult situations. And especially in those environments, I think people see the benefits of the phone. It's like, okay, I know where my kid is. I'm connected to my kid, all of these things.

So I both wonder how much appetite there is for this kind of regulation in that population, which is, by the way, again, part of the population you think Democrats need to win. But I also think it's connected to issues that are also connected to any kind of spiritual and cultural crisis that Democrats also are challenged to figure out exactly how to talk about. Right.

Like if you think there's a spiritual crisis in America, well, guess what? Religion and churchgoing and church attendance have been in decline for a substantial period of time. Those are issues, again, where one, it's hard to know what the policy response is. But there are also issues where Democrats are not at all perceived as the party of the two-parent family, the party of religion and so on.

There are plenty of religious Democrats, but it's not the party's brand, right? So I'm curious if there's anything you think Democrats can do differently now. or way they can talk differently that is responsive to family and religion, the sense that family and religion are declining.

But also it's just because a lot of Democrats are less likely to be

Again, there are many, many religious Democrats, but at the elite level of American politics, if you're talking about people who run campaigns and increasingly, to some degree, people who hold elective office, one reason Democrats are less comfortable talking about religion is it's hard to talk about religion effectively when you're not especially religious.

I certainly think there was an element of this in Kamala Harris's campaign, and that seems like a real problem. hurdle and difficulty for Democrats to overcome. I'm curious just in your own life, like, do you feel a sense of spiritual crisis or malaise or disconnection personally?

Why has that been unsuccessful? I'm really curious.

Maybe, but I mean, I think, I mean, certainly you can to some degree, right? But so if we're talking about like, why do voters in Missouri or Tennessee or Nebraska or any state where you're imagining the Democratic Party winning more elections, why do they feel a certain kind of cultural and spiritual connection to the Republican Party, right?

And certainly you can say, oh, the Republican Party is failing to be Christian in all kinds of ways. I will concede that there are ways that the Republican Party is failing to be Christian, right? But voters identify with people and with parties and with institutions.

And I think there is just an inherent and inevitable identification that someone who gets themselves to church on Sunday morning because they're afraid that God might be disappointed in them otherwise feels for a party that sort of speaks that language. That's I don't know. I just imagine. And again, you're not running for Senate, obviously, in the states that you just said Democrats need to win.

So just as an outsider to Democratic Party debates, it doesn't seem to me like the party went easy on the argument that Donald Trump is a threat to democracy in 2024. This was obviously a centerpiece of Joe Biden's arguments in the midterms and before he ultimately dropped out of the race.

But it just seems like Democratic leaders, they need a religious language that's somewhat different from the language you just gave me. Right. The language you just gave me, again, is very Connecticut. Right. I hear that language all the time. Oh, you know, I would like to go to church because I get a lot from it socially. OK.

But when Barack Obama ran for president, he said, we worship an awesome God in the blue states. Can you say that for me?

Could you say could you say we worship an awesome God in the blue states? Would you say that?

in your right that we should talk about it in your case right like you would be uncomfortable standing up in front of a crowd and saying brothers and sisters the God of Abraham Isaac and Jacob who is real and who will judge you after you die commands you to love your neighbor in a way that means you should support Medicaid Right. It sounds like you would be uncomfortable with that. That spiel.

Right. Sure. I don't know that I'd say it the way you just said it, but I. Right. But the way I would say it is the way I think that like if Democrats were serious about making the religious arguments you want them to make, they wouldn't just say, you know, in the story of Jesus. were taught to care for the needy. They would frame it as a divine imperative.

And you need some kind of belief to do that, I think. I think that I'm just trying to get at what I think is a limit that Democrats hit in these kind of debates.

And while there were various different, you know, Harris Waltz messages over the course of the campaign, democracy ended up being a big part of the closing argument. So one, what makes you say that Democrats weren't ready for a thing that Your standard bearers were campaigning on. And two, just as a political matter, Democrats did lose with a version of that message just four to six months ago.

All right, that's enough talk about Almighty God. When we come back, we'll talk a little bit more about how Democrats should integrate cultural and economic issues. I have three more challenging questions for you. I'll leave the metaphysical behind for a minute and go back to the practical and political. So first, on this question of what's wrong with the Trump administration,

You're putting together a couple of different arguments. You're saying there's a threat to democracy from Trump, a threat to the American Republic. There's also that is connected to Trump pursuing oligarchic policies and enriching his billionaire friends, a line that's come up a lot, not just in your rhetoric, but in democratic rhetoric writ large.

On that second point, is oligarchy really the right way to describe Trumpism as we see it right now? Like, just to go through some of the issues that Trump is pushing, certainly it's clear that most American business leaders do not support Trump's approach to tariffs, right? His FTC and people associated with it, they have their own critique of Silicon Valley, right?

The Republicans are not fully on board with Silicon Valley. Doge has made all kinds of cuts to government headcount and government programs, but not in a way that sort of tracks, I think, directly with what corporate America wants. Big Pharma, who you've mentioned, they clearly don't like RFK. Corporate America likes immigration, which Trump is cutting and so on.

I guess, is this really an oligarchic administration? Like, is it doing what the rich actually want?

OK. And so I think that's a reasonable answer. But that is somewhat distinct then from a general sort of the traditional Democratic message about Republicans is Republicans are the party of the rich. They're the party of the country club, party of the upper class and so on. So oligarchy is a refinement of that.

However, however long it was, time time has changed a bit. So on on both fronts, why didn't that message land and why would it be the right message for Democrats right now?

You're saying the Republicans right now are a party of Trump and a gang of his friends as distinct from being a general party that defends upper class interests.

Right. But there are also groups in biotechnology and research and so on that are quite unhappy with, for instance, the cuts to scientific research.

And again, this may not be that different from your point, but there's a way in which a lot of powerful groups, it seems like less that they are getting what they want from Trump and more that they are nervous about what he might try to do to them and are trying to be on side.

Right. Okay. Now that seems like a plausible argument. So let's turn then to something you've gestured at a few times in this conversation, which is cultural and social issues and the idea that the Democratic Party has to be a bigger tent on those issues. And I was gratified to hear you making that argument because I do feel like often you will hear Democrats talk about Thank you for having me.

to whether transgender athletes should compete in sports of the opposite natal sex and so on. So you think the Democratic Party needs to be a bigger tent on cultural issues. But what does that mean in actual policy terms? Does it go beyond just you saying, well, of course, people who are skeptical about immigration or skeptical about transgender issues are welcome in the party?

Does it get beyond that to actually being open to Democrats taking conservative stances on those issues? How far does it go?

Well, no, wait, just so you... You don't have any fear of it. Do you think it's – if you had a daughter competing against a biological male, would you find it unfair?

Have some empathy, right, for those of us who do. Right. So would you find it unfair? No.

I think everybody can come to their own conclusion, but all I'm saying is that— Right, but your conclusion is the official line of liberalism right now.

How should the U.S. government be focusing its resources in terms of removing people who are here illegally right now?

Okay.

Going back to where we started and the arguable threat that Donald Trump poses to Democratic norms and the Democratic Party's response. So my general perspective on where things stand now is that Donald Trump has made a large number of extreme claims about executive power, pushed executive power to the limits in various ways.

And many, if not all of these efforts have been met by pushback in the judiciary from the courts, including from Republican appointed judges. Right. As long as that remains the case,

I personally am skeptical that most Americans are going to see Trump the way you portrayed him at the beginning as a definite threat to democracy if he is seen as ultimately deferring to the Supreme Court, even if he's criticizing individual judges and so on. If he's deferring to six to three, seven to two rulings from the Supreme Court, I just don't think Democrats are going to win this.

campaigns with that issue at the center. So I'm curious, both if you think that's wrong, and then to finish on a note of prophecy, is your expectation that the Trump administration is going to end up in some kind of collision with the Supreme Court? You mentioned people taking to the streets earlier.

Or are you imagining a kind of constitutional crisis in America as something that Democrats should be prepared for in the next two years?

I'm not—I mean, as someone who follows— the progressive left and, you know, the center left and what people are saying on social media and so on. I think there's plenty of people ready to talk about a constitutional crisis long before you get to a direct Trump-Roberts clash. I think the question is,

Do most Americans buy into a narrative where the United States, in all its diversity and complexity, is likely to go the way of Erdogan's Turkey? And I will say I am personally skeptical of that narrative as well. But I think we'll just have to have this conversation again in 2026 after the election and see how things turned out.

Yeah, well, then let's end on a note of relative agreement, because I do agree that most voters went to the polls with a narrative like the one you had in mind, and that the performance of the Trump economy will determine a lot about every other question as well. So, Senator Chris Murphy, thank you so much for joining me. Thanks. Take care. Thanks for listening, and we'll be back next week.

And as a reminder, you can watch this episode and others as a video podcast on YouTube. And see my handsome face. The channel is Interesting Times with Ross Douthat. Interesting Times is produced by Sophia Alvarez-Boyd, Andrea Batanzos, Elisa Gutierrez, and Catherine Sullivan. It's edited by Jordana Hochman. Our fact-check team is Kate Sinclair, Mary Marge Locker, and Michelle Harris.

Original music by Isaac Jones, Sonia Herrero, Aman Sahota, and Pat McCusker, with engineering by Isaac Jones, Efim Shapiro, and Sonia Herrero, and mixing by Sonia Herrero. Audience Strategy by Shannon Busta and Christina Samuluski. And our Director of Opinion Audio is Annie Rose Strasser.

So what is it that you think Democrats should be doing then? What is the strategy, given that obviously Democrats don't have a majority in the House, don't have a majority in the Senate? You already mentioned the idea of it sounds like, of slowing down Trump's nominations to various cabinet agencies.

You've obviously had figures like Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez doing a kind of politics of rallying, basically, sort of around the country. But what more is there that a engaged Democratic Party sort of focused on the threat to democracy in Washington, D.C. would be doing right now?

One notable searcher is Democratic Senator Chris Murphy, who happens to represent my own home state of Connecticut, the green suburban heart of blue America. Murphy has been front and center lately as an advocate of renewed capital R resistance to the Trump administration. But he's also been a would-be theorist of the rise of populism.

But so are any of those issues actually top one or top two or top three for voters?

Because it seems to me that if you look at Trump's relative unpopularity at the moment, it's heavily driven by pocketbook concerns, by anxieties over tariffs and trade wars and their effect on people's incomes to the extent that a lot of the cuts that Elon Musk and Doge have done or tried to do, to the extent that those have been unpopular, it's because they've been touching on

Places like Social Security that obviously are sort of crucial to American sense of their own economic security. Whereas talking about insider trading by members of Congress, talking about campaign finance reform, those aren't kind of bread and butter issues. economic issues. They may be part of a plausible narrative about what's gone wrong in our democracy.

But if I look at the polls right now, Donald Trump has become substantially more unpopular since he took office. Democrats have not become substantially more popular. So it seems like there has to be some other missing element to a democratic narrative beyond just attacking insider trading and self-dealing and corruption.

He's argued, in language that, let's just say, doesn't always come easily to Democratic politicians, that the Trump era should be understood in terms of cultural, even spiritual, crisis. Can this theory fit with the practice of Democratic Party politics? Can you resist Trump while understanding and adapting to Trumpism? Let's find out. Senator Murphy, welcome to Interesting Times.

How do you unrig the economy from the point of view of the Democratic Party?

Do you think that there's some overlap here between the way that certain kinds of right-wing populists talk about the economy? Because it's striking to me that when I hear – What, you know, try to be the more sophisticated arguments for something like the tariff regime that Donald Trump has been pushing and trying to impose. Right.

They don't sound exactly like the case you made, but they are somewhat similar. There's a kind of argument that the economy is structurally unfair because under the influence of big corporations. We, you know, entered into global arrangements with countries like China that have worked out well for the plutocrats, maybe pretty well for the upper class, badly for the working class.

And I think a lot of right wing populists would also say it's not enough to just write checks. Right. If you've hollowed out the industrial heartland, people don't want to check. Right. They want a job. They want their industries back and so on. So is there a kind of parallel? Obviously, you think that the substance is different, but is there a parallel there between

the Chris Murphy agenda and let's say the Steve Bannon agenda on particularly on this idea that the structure of the economy is unfair to the working class.

They are interesting times. Thanks for having me. That's right. Well, we paid you extra to confirm that for us. You're joining me from the bowels of the Capitol in Washington, D.C.

Well, yeah, let's get into your personal responsibility for everything that's gone wrong with the Democratic Party or not your personal responsibility, but let's call it your geographical responsibility, because you and I were both from Connecticut. Where did you grow up?

Women without a college degree, the marriage rate is way down.

And so one way to look at this is that, you know, men are losing a certain kind of status. They care about status. When they lose status, they become more sexist, more hostile to women, become less attractive to women by virtue of being hostile. That's one way to look at it, right?

And what do you think a man is supposed to do in this kind of situation, right? Because on the one hand, there clearly is a male reaction to this sort of economic landscape that's very toxic, sort of anti-female misogynist lashing out. At the same time, There's a cultural script that says it's really good for women to be independent. You don't need a man, right? And...

women still like male status, right? It's not just men who want status. Women like it. Like, there's a lot of data on women like the idea of having a man who can potentially earn more than them, who can be a breadwinner, maybe not all the time, right? But if you're going to have kids, it's nice to have a man around, right, who can be the primary earner for a period of time. So it's not that...

women are really excited to enter into relationships with men who have less education than they do or who earn less than they do. So those men are in a kind of trap that isn't just created by their own sort of sense of masculine identity. It's also created by women's preferences.

But before we dive into why population decline is happening. I'd like to try and sort of quantify the issue a little bit and maybe help sound the alarm for some of our listeners who, unlike myself, haven't been obsessed with this issue for years or decades and may still assume that we're living in a world where the biggest problem is likely to be overpopulation. So let's start out.

Thank you.

Open-ended question, what can bring the sexes back together?

Right. This is what strikes me about his ideas, right, is that it's very easy. I shouldn't say it's very easy, but it's relatively easy in a liberal individualist society to say, OK, we need to make a certain set of social changes that impose restrictions on kids because kids are the great the great exception that doesn't quite fit within liberal liberal social.

They're not really part of the social contract and so on. Right. And he's he's gotten a lot of traction. I think there will be there already is, but there will increasingly be an attempt to sort of master. The sort of lure of the virtual as it applies, especially to younger kids.

It's harder for me to see that once you get further into adolescence where so much of the adult life you're trying to get kids to join is online. And then it's really hard for me to see how certainly any kind of sort of political restriction could – like adults just seem very, very unlikely to accept it.

Now, maybe there will be cases where people say, ah, in the U.S., this sports betting experiment that we've done, bit of a mistake, right? Maybe – Maybe it wasn't the best idea to put ads for sports gambling on every TV network that, you know, airs a baseball game or something. Maybe that gets walked back.

But it does seem harder to see how you get any kind of social restrictions on adult distraction. What do you think?

When we talk about declining fertility and population decline, what do we mean by

Then what about culture, apart from politics? Because while it is the case that culture is determined to some degree by tech, the smartphone creates culture in its own way, it's also the case that the issue of declining birth rates is not one that much of elite Western culture has taken seriously.

It's not something that's entered into sort of the mainstream cultural mind the way that, say, the threat of climate change has done. So you could imagine... if it became a more important part of the cultural imaginary, some kind of self-conscious attempt to like treat this as an important issue, right? So like, let's say, you know, right now, people in Hollywood would feel bad, right?

If they were perceived to be not doing something. To, you know, fight climate change or something like Hollywood used to make a lot of romantic comedies doesn't really anymore. There's still a few. Right. But like, are there cultural scripts that could be written, whether in, you know, movies or TV or elsewhere that you think could actually make a difference?

Right. Well, let's talk about that for a minute, right? Because that's sort of where people have naturally gone for a long time, people on the left, as I mentioned earlier, but also some people on the right. You have models in Eastern Europe, Poland and Hungary of sort of conservative or traditionalist governments trying to boost the birth rate or boost the marriage rate through incentives.

Do those work?

But yeah, I mean, my impression is, as you say, right, in part, it's these policies can work, but you have to spend incredibly large sums to do it, which gets harder when your country is experiencing economic decline caused by falling birth rates, right? Yeah, yeah. And then also your gains are... Like they get swamped by larger effects. Right.

So Hungary seemed to have some success pushing its birth rate, I think, from like one point three to one point six. So you're making your investment is reaping marginal gains, which I think are worth it. It could mean, you know, hundreds of thousands of lives potentially, but it's not actually a fix. What about religion?

Overall, it's the case that religious people tend to have more kids than secular people. Do those differential birth rates mean that, for instance, eventually the secular Western world will just become more religious because only religious people will be having kids? Like what role does religion play?

But don't you need a certain kind of separatism to have big effects, right? So the ultra-Orthodox in Israel are a fairly separate religious community, right? And my reading of the literature for Muslims in the UK and in Europe is the more those communities integrate, the more their birth rates converge with the European norm. And the same goes in the US. I don't know. I tend to be skeptical of...

prophecies of massive religious revival, although I will say that if birth rates are falling this fast, then suddenly the religious advantage looks more important. And then maybe at the opposite end of the spectrum of possibilities from traditional religion, right, you have reproductive technology offered as a kind of response.

So there was a big pronatalism conference that was held recently in the U.S. that attracted a lot of media attention because, of course, it was filled with a lot of very curious characters, you know, some of whom are my friends, some of whom are not.

But what everyone who was there said is that it's this really weird mixture of sort of serious conservative religious people and Silicon Valley people who are convinced that there's going to be a technological solution, and maybe the solution is artificial wombs. Maybe it's a cure for menopause that extends female reproductive life deeper into middle age or something.

What effect has reproductive technology had so far? Has IVF mitigated the trend, do you think?

But IVF right now is very costly, difficult, and obviously does not deliver guarantees of success. Unreliable, yeah. a reason why it's safe to postpone marriage and fertility. You know, you have the companies offering egg freezing services, right, that are unreliable guarantors of fertility, right?

So when I look at that landscape right now, I wonder if for every benefit to fertility you get from assisted reproduction, if there isn't a sort of cultural sense that like, okay, I can put this off that then ends in disappointment when it turns out that the tech is not all that people expect it to be.

Right. But then by that logic, let's say you could extend, you could reliably extend female fertility by 10 years. That doesn't actually solve... the coupling crisis, right? If maybe it ends up meaning you have more, at least some more women who don't pair off, don't partner up, but end up having maybe one child.

From New York Times Opinion, I'm Ross Douthat, and this is Interesting Times. 50 years ago, the world feared a population bomb, an explosion of population growth that would yield famine, war, and disaster. But for most of my career, I've been trying to persuade people that actually population decline is now the greater peril.

But I mean, that's part of the reality here is that, in fact, it's just harder to raise children on your own, right? So even people who want children outside of a coupled situation are going, even if they have a kid, they'll probably have fewer kids. And it just seems like you're still stuck in the same general trap, even if you can add a little bit to the reproductive life cycle.

Right. But to the extent that you can tie all of that together. So you wrote a fascinating paper recently about the Islamic religious revival.

So this is the broad trend across the Muslim world towards increasing piety and religious practice that helped define the late 20th century and was not entirely expected. Yes.

One of the arguments you make in the paper is that there is just an element of prestige at work here, that a lot of Islamic schools and preachers and so on and revivalists, if you will, did a really good job of making Islam seem prestigious, like it was something you wanted to be part of, right? And so, in a way, we're talking about a similar problem here, right?

In the end, you're trying to make both... Coupling and kids, I think those things together, prestigious in a way that they aren't right now.

But can you do that?

Right. Do you have I mean, do you have totalitarian aspirations?

No, I mean, no. I mean, this is well, but this this is the I guess this is one one more interesting question. Right. Is that we're talking about this in the context of primarily of liberal democracies. But all of the trends that you describe apply to places like the People's Republic of China. China's birth rate is headed towards South Korean levels.

But China is, I mean, you can argue about how totalitarian it is. It certainly is an authoritarian society with a state and a leadership class that that, you know, thinks naturally in terms of five-year plans and thinks naturally in terms of social engineering. And they are, I mean, they take the fertility crisis seriously.

Do you imagine that China is going to sort of succeed in social engineering their way? out of this?

And when did you become interested in the fertility crisis? You started out working on gender equality, the socioeconomic status of women in developing countries. How did this issue, which I should say it has long been the province of, you know, to be kind to ourselves, right wing cranks, right? How did this issue become a big part of your focus?

All right, let's take a break there. And when we come back, we'll try and figure out what could bring men and women back together. I want to stay on that idea of the pain of pregnancy and childbirth, because this is more speculative, right? But we've been talking about virtual life as a distraction, right?

from reality, from physical reality, a distraction from going out to a bar and meeting someone or just hanging out with friends and getting introduced to someone. But isn't there also a way in which... I mean, it is true that sex is dangerous, right? It's high risk. Pregnancy is dangerous. Having kids is obviously more dangerous for women than for men, for obvious reasons.

Do you think there's a way in which virtual life... makes physical, carnal, painful human life seem more dangerous than it would have? Just by virtue of like, you're living in a phone, right? You're detached from, you're abstracted from your own body in a more profound way than usual. I just wonder if this kind of propaganda about

what reproduction does and how dangerous it is fastens more easily in minds that are already a little bit detached from their own embodiment.

But maybe not pain, right? OK, so maybe there it's more a kind of idealized fantasy of youth. Because yes, people are willing to go through painful processes of calisthenic activity and facial surgery and so on. But both of those things for men and women are attempts to sort of retain a kind of eternal youth, right?

And in that sense, sorry, I'm just trying to push us a tiny bit, tiny bit into the philosophical, right? But like the act of You know, I mean, I had hair before I started having kids, right? Like the entering into parenthood is inherently a confrontation with your own mortality. Maybe.

Right. We've been talking about solutions and responses. But overall, we're describing a problem to which there is not a single solution. There might be a large number of sort of small bore responses that make some kind of difference. But basically, the low fertility future, the population crash is going to happen in most places. Yes.

Almost certainly there is not going to be a worldwide pro-fertility mobilization that suddenly reverses birth rates and takes these trends off the table. So I just want to speculate at the end, right? Like, what does that future look like? Like, what do you think the world looks like in 2080 if these trends continue?

I want to be clear. These are imaginative speculations.

This is what I say to my colleagues, too. So it's, you know, it's not just Zambia.

Just say a little more about the politics. What does it mean when you say more conservative?

So there it's just sort of replacement. Conservatives have more kids. Liberals have fewer. Conservatives own the future. Yes. I guess I'm wondering, though, what like surely there are also kind of political adaptations. You can see in Europe already with some of the kind of some of the populist parties. Right.

This sense of like we're trying to sort of protect Europe. the aging society and you know we want to keep out immigrants because immigrants threaten a culture that is disappearing but the culture is disappearing because we ourselves haven't had enough kids i don't know but it's people worry about the authoritarianism of that kind of politics and i

I think there is a pull towards authoritarianism, but it seems like in a weird way the opposite of like an aggressive, you know, 20th century fascism that wants to, you know, make Hungary or Germany or Austria great. It's more this kind of like cocooned authoritarianism. I don't know. It just seems like you will get novel forms of politics in this environment.

No, it seems like a very dark future. And this is sort of the problem of a low fertility trap, right? Is that once a society gets old enough and it's democracy, the older voters are just going to keep voting for benefits for older people. Yes, exactly. And it's still going to be difficult.

It's going to be increasingly difficult to get the government to spend money on the young people, even if you need the young people, right? So

Right. But then finally, just to keep being speculative, the world in this future will have a lot more empty spaces, though, too, right? Like China has spent 20 years building all of these huge cities. And if China's population falls by half, those cities will be empty. Like big regions, big rural regions of Latin America will be empty and so on. Yes.

Right. And a country like South Korea has a fertility rate of 0.7. That means that over the course of two generations, the population goes from 50 million to, what, 20-odd million, let's say, 15 to 20 million. Does that sound right? I'm just trying to give people a sense that when we talk about in these – with the numbers we have now, when we talk about –

So sometimes when I'm trying to be optimistic and I want to... I don't want to end on a super optimistic note because the point of this show is that people should be alarmed and concerned by this. But there are ways in which like a young person could look at that world and say, okay, you know, the mega cities of Western Europe and North America are actually bad places to be young.

But there's a kind of reopened frontier in Uruguay or Eastern Europe or the hinterlands of China or something. Right.

I guess I'm thinking more like imagine that you wanted to be like a pirate. Like imagine that you, you know, were like a 19th century would be desperado. I'm more imagining a world of like groups with high intentionality, right?

Like this new world is going to reward people who are unusually intentional about things like getting married and having kids, but also maybe about building a community and trying to sort of set yourself up in one of the spaces created by the retreat of the human race.

Yeah. You have kids? Yes.

No. Okay. So I have kids and my kids are maybe tired of hearing their father mentioned to them just occasionally that global population is going to collapse over the course of their lifetime. Normal children of New York Times employees are worried about climate change. My children are worried about the demographic cliff.

I know I keep trying to prod you towards optimism, but what would you say to the children of this future? Because when I talk to my kids about it, I do try to frame it as an opportunity. It's like, yes, the world is going to grow old, but you will be young.

And you will have agency and you will have opportunities to shape a world in which there are fewer young people to compete with and maybe your horizons will widen. So how do you think young people should think about this future? Apart from, you know, they should probably have some kids.

The reason you use a term like population collapse is we aren't talking about a kind of gentle slide from above replacement fertility to slightly below replacement fertility where you need to adjust the retirement age so that people stay in the workforce five years longer.

Okay, so we're ending on an agreement of a massive government program to subsidize a new revival of Jane Austen adaptations for the 21st century.

On that note, Alice Evans, thank you so much for joining me.

As always, thank you so much for listening. And as a reminder, you can watch this as a video podcast on YouTube. You can find the channel under Interesting Times with Ross Douthat. Interesting Times is produced by Sophia Alvarez-Boyd, Andrea Batanzos, Elisa Gutierrez, and Catherine Sullivan. It's edited by Jordana Hochman.

Our fact-check team is Kate Sinclair, Mary Marge Locker, and Michelle Harris. Original music by Isaac Jones, Sonia Herrero, Amin Sahota, and Pat McCusker. Mixing by Pat McCusker. Audience strategy by Shannon Busta and Christina Samulowski. And our director of opinion audio is Annie Rose Strasser.

You're talking about cities being empty, buildings standing empty, economies grinding to a halt, and just seeing a country that has gone furthest Yes, absolutely.

No, we took our family to Rome and we're trying to find a children's store. And it turned out that there was an important children's chain that had closed a bunch of its stores. of its places. But also, I mean, when I traveled around Italy, the hill towns are empty, right? The rural areas are aging and emptying. The big cities, people move there.

And so they stay densely populated, even if they're having fewer kids. And so this can actually end up being kind of invisible in an interesting way, because if you're in the big city, there are more people there than ever, right? And so you think to yourself, well, how can there be a population crisis?

So, okay, why is this happening? And just before you tell us, I think it's safe to say everyone has a sort of particular pet theory, right? So if you talk to people on the political left for a long time, they would insist that it's just a problem of the provision of public services, right?

And they would say, you know, the developed world just needs to become more like Scandinavia in terms of paid leave and parental support and People on the right, conservatives, are more likely to talk about the decline of religion and a sense of moral obligation to the future.

And in the last few years, the world has finally caught up with my once eccentric anxieties. We're undeniably headed towards a period of global population collapse, one that threatens to maroon today's children, mine and yours if you have them, which, by the way, you should, in a world of emptying cities and slowing economies.

You have people who focus right now, especially in developed countries, on climate change and say, oh, you know, the young people don't want to have kids because they're afraid of the human future. And you'll have people who say, look, this is just about women's choices. This is just once you have a more egalitarian society, women understandably are less likely to choose to have kids.

And this is where we end up. And all of these arguments have problems and as you know it's hard to fit them all to the general trend and especially since even places like scandinavia have sort of headed towards the cliff in recent years generous benefits and all so what is your master theory of all of this

So this rise in singles, you frame it as a kind of crisis of coupling. Can you define that crisis for me and why it's, in your view, the leading explanation for the larger trends we've been talking about?

So the coupling crisis writ large seems to be linked somehow to technology, right?

Podcasting, you know. Yeah, all these charismatic podcasters. That's right.

This is a new podcast. It's played no role at all yet. Oh, okay. You protest your innocence. In distracting the young people of America.

Our guest today has literally traveled the world studying this issue, trying to answer the hardest question. Not just why birth rates have declined, but why they've declined so far and so fast in so many different places. So, Alice Evans, welcome to Interesting Times.

And that holds then as a global explanation because even though there's tons of variation in Internet access and so on, smartphone penetration is a global phenomenon, right? You know, you go to India and Africa and you find people with smartphones.

Right. So as the iPhone moves across sub-Saharan Africa, you would expect fertility rates to fall. So how much of this, so you've just been talking about distraction, entertainment, right? That it's easier to play a video game than go to a bar. It's easier to do sports gambling at home than, you know, meet a nice lady in a broad-brimmed hat at the racetrack. as one does.

But how much of it is distraction per se in your view? And how much of it is a sort of, you might say, like digital segregation of men and women, where men and women aren't just going online, but they're going online in sort of distinct ways and not interacting with each other?

Right. Well, no. And that's one of the distinctive features of current politics around the developed world, certainly, is some kind of polarization of the sexes. And it was, I think, less extreme in the end in the most recent U.S. election than some people had anticipated. But I wonder, too, if... there's sort of a feedback loop here, right?

Where the sexes don't interact and therefore are more likely to sort of, like marriage and relationships are themselves a moderating influence.

And so people don't have that influence and then they go online and like if you're on social media where people are always sort of performing their politics and you see a lot of liberal women or a lot of conservative men sort of performing their politics and those aren't your politics, right? And you have no relationship to those people. It just seems a lot easier to...

create a kind of hostile generalization about right-wing men or left-wing feminists than if you're having any kind of interpersonal face-to-face interaction.

So you're a sociologist at King's College London, is that correct? Yes. And you write a lot about, and I think you're working on a book, about the key social forces shaping the decline in fertility around the world. And those include, in particular... The failure of men and women to relate to one another and pair off. And those issues are part of why I'm especially interested in talking to you.

And so what about economic forces besides the smartphone? So digital life has entered into a world where young men are falling behind young women in education. Men with lower levels of education are having, I think, a particularly hard time finding a mate or pairing off. If you look at trends, at least in the U.S., for marriage rates, college-educated women, marriage rate is down a bit.

And the pretty stringent line on sexual ethics that has been part of Christian teaching from the beginning. And one of the frustrations that, to be honest, conservatives, whatever, however I define myself, some kind of conservative like me, sometimes have, is that there's this sense that the liberal argument is always sort of open-ended.

It's always saying, we're not saying exactly what church teaching would be. We just want to start a conversation. But then it seems clear to the conservatives that in the end, the conversation only ends when the liberal perspective carries the day, which is sort of what has happened in a certain number of more liberal Protestant denominations. So I want to push you to be a little bit concrete.

I'm going to frame the question in a different way from your perspective. on issues related to sex, marriage, sex and marriage in particular. What is the thing that Christianity teaches, that Jesus Christ teaches, that has to be held onto, that is different from what a nice, well-meaning, secular liberal listener of this show might believe about sex?

What is the Christian difference that needs to remain no matter what kind of conversations and evolutions we have?

You are a Jesuit. You are a priest. You are, you know, a man. I think you're eminently qualified to answer the question.

Positive. He's pro that marriage, at least.

So, we're speaking, I think, 72 hours after the death of Pope Francis, and... I feel like I've already heard at least 117 interviews that start with a big question about the pope's legacy. So I want to start smaller by talking about Francis as you personally experienced his pontificate and also as you experienced him. He was the first Jesuit pope. You are a Jesuit.

It's not. It's accepted by a lot of, I mean, I think the secular liberal narrative of sex that I certainly hear would say they might not use terms like reverence and sacred, but they would use terms like consent and respect and so on. And at least when I read the New Testament, right? And again, I quite agree. Jesus says much more about the sins of rich people than about sexual sins.

That's absolutely true. But the things he says about sex are quite stringent, right? He doesn't say anything in particular about homosexuality, but he speaks very strongly about homosexuality. marriage as lifelong, permanent, as divorce, as remarriage after divorce, as a form of adultery. And I would say, you know, I became a Catholic in my teens after some time in different Protestant churches.

And one of the things that always struck me about Catholicism in its sort of weirdnesses, including the things it says about sex, including like saying, you is that it seemed very biblical in that way. That, like, the Catholic Church is the only major Christian church, in the West at least, that still seems to say something about what's wrong with divorce.

And there are a lot of divorces in my family tree. And I have a pretty good sense, I think, of what is wrong with divorce and why it's good for a church to say something about that. And so I think conservatives... in these intra-Catholic debates are often framed as, you know, trying to hold on to some sort of rigid understanding of human beings. And I think that sometimes can be true.

But again, just in this conversation, I feel like I can see why I am worried that the more liberalized church of an imagined successor to Pope Francis, that some of those things would slip away. To me, it's just not enough to say Christianity teaches some kind of generic reverence.

I think it's important that Christianity teaches something like marriage is an indissoluble one flesh union that you, you know, can't easily get out of. Do you agree with that? Which part? The part that there has to be something more than just a general statement. That there is sort of a specific concreteness to the way Jesus talks about sex as the way he talks about wealth and poverty.

From New York Times Opinion, I'm Ross Douthat, and this is Interesting Times. So interesting, in fact, that God, in his wisdom, has decided to call one pope home and let the cardinals of the Roman Catholic Church choose another. The death of Pope Francis ends, or at least temporarily suspends, a tumultuous period in the life of the world's largest religious institution.

You met on a number of occasions. You interacted. He wrote the introduction of your latest book. So I wondered if you could just talk about Pope Francis as a priest, which is something that he very self-consciously aspired to be, not just the pope of the Catholic Church, but a priest of Catholicism.

Do you think that's a stable equilibrium, though? I guess it's my question. Like, say, 100 years goes by. And that becomes the equilibrium of the Catholic Church. The church has a very pastoral case-by-case approach to issues around sex and sexuality. But nothing ever changes in the formal teaching of the church.

The church never sort of recognizes same-sex unions the way it recognizes heterosexual unions. It just sort of remains in this place. Are you personally content with that kind of...

Yeah, yeah. So would you be comfortable if in 100 years it seems like the church has to be more oppositional to the modern world than it did in the 1960s?

All right, let's take a quick break. And when we come back, I'm going to offer a more conservative interpretation of Francis's record and legacy. Thank you. Let's talk about the lived experience of more conservative Catholics during this pontificate.

From your point of view and from the point of view of a lot of Catholics, the Francis pontificate was experienced as just a period of greater freedom. Like you're a priest, you have vows, you're part of an order, you're under certain kinds of obedience. And it was clear to me, certainly, that the pontificate was a period of greater freedom.

That there were lots and lots of people inside the church who had opinions that they didn't feel comfortable expressing under John Paul II and Benedict, who felt comfortable expressing them under Francis, right? Is that a fair description?

Do you worry in a different pontificate that you will feel less freedom? Oh, sure. Are you sitting here in this podcast worrying that things you say could be held against you under a future pope? I'm just curious.

Well, no, that's a good place to take it, right?

Because I'm curious what stabilization looks like, because the flip side of what I just described, the phenomenon where some, maybe many Catholics felt more comfortable, more free to speak freely under Francis, was the experience of a lot of conservatives and traditionalists, I knew, which was kind of a mirror image of the liberal experience under John Paul II, right?

Which was that, you know, you mentioned at the outset that there were a lot of Jesuits in Argentina, right? who felt that Francis's leadership as a young man was authoritarian and rigid. The reality is that a lot of conservative Catholics felt that his pontificate was not sort of open and free-flowing, that it was authoritarian in his own way. It used to be that

The papacy would investigate more liberal religious orders, and suddenly it was conservative and traditional orders being investigated. And then especially you had a very explicit crackdown on the traditional Latin mass, which is something that is attended by a very small number of Catholics, but it's very meaningful to that number of Catholics. And Francis was not an admirer of traditionalists.

I would say he spoke very harshly at times about conservatives and traditionalists, like a kind of paternal but scolding in certain ways.

So I'm curious both what you think about that perspective, having been talking about the pope as a figure of openness and dialogue, but also whether you think, like, should it be possible for a pope to be pope without either liberals or conservatives feeling persecuted?

So my sense was that he was pretty— The czar was very patient with his subjects.

I think it's less – I mean, from my perspective, right, it's less about sort of – the general idea as sort of, to me, a kind of concrete lack of pastoral care in the sense that my impression, again, observing Rome from far away, is that Francis has a lot of critics and he had a lot of American critics. Very vocal. Very vocal. Sometimes even in the hierarchy. Sometimes even in the hierarchy.

I was such a critic. I think probably the most, you know, the most challenging emails we ever exchanged. when I was writing some very pointed criticisms of the Holy Father. But most of the people who attend Latin Masses, in my experience, they're in the position of looking, as so many people are in this 21st century world of ours, for a tangible connection to the divine. And I

Some people find that connection more fully in an ancient liturgy, right? And so it seemed to me that there was just a sense in which that there was a failure to, again, to use the language that you've been using in this conversation, meet the conservative or really the traditionalist part of the church where those people are.

And it made me worry, and this is a larger question, right, about the question of unity and how a church that has these divisions holds together.

Yeah. I mean, one interesting question connected to that, right, is this question of what draws people together. to Christianity and what draws people to church right now.

Because I think one of the interesting questions hanging over the church right now is that in certain ways, the liberal conservative splits are generational, but not in the way that people usually expect, certainly among priests. If you look at surveys of Priests in the United States, for instance, I think this is true maybe not to the same degree elsewhere in the world.

Younger priests, while not necessarily politically conservative, tend to be more theologically conservative than older priests. And so as someone who is seen as more on sort of the liberal side of the spectrum, first, what do you make of that trend? But also – What does it say to you about sources of zeal, sources of intensity in the future?

Or you're not a good Catholic because you're a convert. There's a whole discourse where, I mean, there are phenomena certainly where people convert to Catholicism and within six months have decided that they know absolutely everything about the faith. It can become very annoying. But there is also a... I think, a weird anti-convert tendency and discourse.

All right, let's take a quick break. And when we come back, we'll dig a bit more into some of the ideological divisions of the Francis era. So then how does it all hold together? What keeps – so you've described something that is real, right? The vast diversity of the Catholic Church. But you do have this set of issues that have –

led to outright schism in many of our fellow Christian churches, Anglicans, Methodists, and so on. And you do have a landscape where, as you said at the outset, the Pope pushed a certain distance on hot-button issues and then said, okay, if we're keeping the Germans and the Africans in the same church, we can't push any further. But what does hold the church together in the end?

We have had a great schism where we lost the Orthodox or they lost us. We had the Protestant Reformation, an unfortunate period of trouble that we're still recovering from, right? So the Holy Spirit holds the church together in some form. But in this form, the church of you and I in the 21st century, what makes people of these different perspectives want to stay together?

Now, a cynic, and I don't think... I don't think this is entirely unfair, right? But a cynic might say it is the pope that holds the church together. It's the papacy that holds the church together. But it does because it offers this point of influence and shaping power that everybody wants a chance to to ultimately control, right?

So no one in the end wants to leave the Roman Catholic Church and just become the German Catholic Church or the Sub-Saharan African Catholic Church because Rome itself offers this place of influence over the world that you would be foolish to give up. And I don't mean – I think the cynical perspective has some of the truth.

Like I'm very interested as someone who was a Protestant, who watched how quickly

You guys are stuck. Let's be clear about that. I also wonder, though. in this landscape, right? Like, how much influence can a pope or the hierarchy have over Catholics, lay Catholics, not priests and religious, but lay Catholics who disagree with them, right? Because you said, you know, well, hopefully the hierarchy unites us. Hopefully the pope unites us.

I think the pope is unifying, but since the sex abuse crisis, I think... You know, when I think about like how ordinary Catholics think about the hierarchy, just in my own lifetime, I think it's changed dramatically and people have just less respect for the bishops than they did. And just in terms of Catholic politics, right, that cashes out in this world where, you know,

It just doesn't seem like the bishops have very much authority over Catholic politicians, for instance. So for a long time, you had pro-choice Catholic politicians who, you know, favored abortion rights and the bishops would criticize them. And that didn't seem to go anywhere.

And now you'll have sort of politicians on the right who take anti-immigration stances and the bishops will criticize them. And that doesn't go anywhere either, right? So... Do you think that the hierarchy has real influence? Can it regain real influence of that kind? Or is it just stuck sort of presiding in this way that... doesn't matter that much to a lot of ordinary Catholics?

No, I think they can. But I think certainly bishops bureaucracies, the National Councils of bishops and so on. I feel like imagine themselves having a kind of authority that has completely evaporated.

And personally, I would like to live in a world where Catholic politicians of both the left and right, not a world where they changed their position entirely because of something a bishop said, but a world where they felt like they had to address a bishop's critique. And I just don't know how we get... back to that world, right?

I feel like, and I'm curious for your reaction to this, but I've been writing about this a little bit lately. I feel like there is a renewed interest in religion in the Western world right now, definitely. But I think it's happening very much at a kind of ground level, and maybe that's where renewal always happens, right?

But it's people reacting, as you said, to sort of what's going on in the world, things in their own lives, but it's not about... Suddenly having the debate about gay marriage settled or anything like that.

But it's almost if I'm being optimistic, I would say it's almost people moving past some of the culture war arguments that you and I have been having for a long time and just sort of saying, well, you know, these are not fully resolved, but I'm going to go back to church anyway. But there's also a way in which it feels like it's happening now.

And it has nothing to do with the hierarchy of the church. The hierarchy is just sort of not not in the action.

All right. So last two questions for you. Looking beyond some of the culture war issues and church debates we've been talking about, what would you like to see the next pope do?

Give me somewhere he should go. Oh, gosh. Somewhere he should go.

They've gone everywhere, but you're his traveling secretary and you get to pick the first destination. A refugee camp, I think.

Pick it this way. How about a place, you mentioned Lourdes, a place associated with the supernatural in Catholicism? Where should, which, a shrine, a site of a visitation?

All right.

I like the idea of lords and the Sea of Galilee somewhere associated with Our Lady of Guadalupe. But I do. I like the idea. I think I suspect that we are headed into an era where sort of secular. I mean, the church has been consumed with issues about sexual behavior and its relationship to secular politics and so on.

And one of my sort of prevailing views is that we're entering a much weirder time. when it might be just really good for the pope to be at the Sea of Galilee, in places associated with the moments when Christianity claims that God has actually reached down and touched the things of earth. So something in that zone is appealing to me. Last question, who is going to be the next pope?

Yeah. I mean, I think people talk about a moderate choice and that could just sort of mean a boring choice, right? In the sense that you could pick someone who is a Vatican bureaucrat or a diplomat who doesn't have an incredibly strong public presence. That would be my impression of Cardinal Parolin, maybe unfairly, but who is sort of the insider candidate.

But my assumption is it's either going to be that very quickly or

It's either going to be a situation where you have all these cardinals. They don't know each other as well as as normally they might. And so there's a very quickly a couple of front runners and consolidates very quickly.

But then if that doesn't happen, then it seems like you get into territory where you should just scratch off all of the leading contenders because almost almost anything can happen.

All right. Well, on that note, and speaking in agreement in favor of openness to the Holy Spirit, Father James Martin, thank you so much for joining me. My pleasure. God bless you. Thank you. And thanks to all of you for listening again. We'll be back next week with another episode. Please follow us wherever you get your podcasts, and you can also watch the show on YouTube.

And if you enjoyed the conversation, please recommend us to your friends and leave a review. Interesting Times is produced by Sophia Alvarez-Boyd, Andrea Batanzos, Elisa Gutierrez, and Catherine Sullivan. It's edited by Jordana Hochman. Our fact-check team is Kate Sinclair, Mary Marge Locker, and Michelle Harris.

Thanks to Google Translate. I was always struck and thinking about his legacy now, I'm struck by it even more by what you might call the visual element of his papacy. After he died, a lot of people on social media were sharing the photograph of him in the empty St. Peter's Square holding the monstrance, which holds the Eucharist, the host that Catholics believe is the body of Christ.

Again, in this sort of empty, darkened square in the midst of the worst pandemic in 100 years. And I feel like at the beginning of his pontificate, there were a lot of those kind of moments. The one that I remember most is him embracing Christ. a man who had boils, I believe, or was disfigured in some way. And I feel like he had a certain kind of genius for

in effect, creating Christian iconography in his sort of public moments that I think will be one of the more lasting elements of his papacy.

Yeah. So let's talk about the doing, though, as well as the showing. This was a dramatic pontificate in a lot of different ways. But from my perspective, I'd say the great drama of the pontificate was, you could call it a push to change church teaching or practice on a host of difficult and controversial post-1960s issues.

I would say that that sort of went on as a thread throughout the, you know, was it 12 years? 12 years, right? Where you had...

controversies that conservative Catholics regarded as having been sort of addressed and settled under prior popes over whether divorced and remarried Catholics should take communion without getting an annulment, over the possibility of female deacons, if not female priests, the possibility of allowing blessings for same-sex couples. All of these were suddenly sort of in the air.

And that mattered a great deal to you because as you just mentioned, right, one of the One of the forms of work that you took up under Francis was writing and arguing about gay Catholics and their place in the church. So from your perspective as a sympathizer, I would say, with that kind of push and that kind of opening of debate. How far do you think it went?

How far did Francis go on those issues?

A period that saw the pope often pitted against his own bishops and cardinals in arguments about how much and in what direction Roman Catholicism should change. My guest today and I were often on the opposite side of those debates.

I want to talk about that question of sort of breakage and conflict. But then what were the concrete changes? Because the point you make about sort of disturbing or disappointing people runs both ways. So you had a certain kind of disturbance from conservative Catholics to the way the pope talked about these issues, the debates he wanted to open up.

And so I'm hoping that our conversation can help illuminate the stakes in Roman Catholicism's conflicts, the prospects for the church's continued unity, and the implications of these debates for the future of religion in the modern world. Fr.

But then, especially by the end of his pontificate, There was a certain kind of disappointment from more liberal Catholics, right, saying, well, he sort of left us in a place of ambiguity where he talks about, you know, the individual soul and discernment and so on and issues statements and teachings that can be, let's say, read in somewhat different ways, depending on depending on where you are.

But there isn't like a concrete change to the catechism in what it says about the immorality of same-sex relations. He opened the debate about possibly ordaining women to the diaconate, but it didn't really go anywhere. So first of all, what concretely changed do you think under Francis? And then I'll ask you about where the different sides would want to push things beyond him.

James Martin is one of the most famous Catholic priests in the United States, I think the only Jesuit to ever appear on Stephen Colbert's late-night TV program, and the author of many, many books most recently come forth, a meditation on the New Testament story of Jesus' raising of Lazarus from the dead. So, Father James Martin, welcome to Interesting Times. Good to be with you, Ross.

So, you know- But is that the hard limit from your perspective, right? So let's say that we elect Pope Francis II or Pope John XXIV, someone who's seen as sort of a successor to Francis in terms of being open to liberalization. And you were named head of the Inquisition. I mean, sorry, you were named head of the head of the Office of Doctrine.

Would you see the limits on changes to church teaching as being primarily about church politics? Right. You need to keep conservative Africans and more liberal Germans together in the same church. Or is there just a limit? And here I'm speaking as someone who obviously thinks there is on just how much the church can change what it says about sex. period, no matter what changes in modern culture.

So for listeners who are not intimately familiar with sort of the endless wrangling within the Catholic Church about some of these questions, which...

It's a wrangling that has been going on in every religious tradition, certainly every Christian church, but also non-Christian churches as well, that there is just sort of this running tension between where late modern life has ended up in terms of people's lived experiences, who people sleep with, who people get married to, when people get divorced, all of these kinds of things.

From New York Times Opinion, I'm Ross Douthat, and this is Interesting Times. One of the defining features of the second Trump administration has been the aggressive use of executive power over the administrative state, over the global economy, and potentially over and against the other branches of government.

Right. I want to pull back from this just for a second and talk about the larger... Well, it's...

There's a moral question here, and I'm curious how much of a legal and constitutional question it is, which is that a big part of why these deportations have become so understandably controversial is not just about whether they are following the precise procedures involved, whether there have been mistakes made, all of these things, right? It's because we're deporting people to a prison. Yeah.

And a bad prison. And a prison that advertises itself as a bad prison. And the Trump administration has explicitly said, we are glad we're sending bad people to this tough, tough prison.

Right. Right. So, one, I mean, to me, politically, in the realm that I mostly write about and talk about, I think clearly the Trump administration came in with a political mandate to increase deportations. The Biden administration's immigration policy was, I think, widely acknowledged to be at least somewhat disastrous. I would say generally disastrous. The Trump administration, I think, is...

understandably impatient with realities like in the case of Garcia, where you have someone who he's been in the United States illegally for many years, and yet you can't deport him to his home country because of a judicial order, right?

When I've talked to people who are sympathetic to the administration's position, they've said, look, if you're doing this for every illegal alien, we're never going to be able to achieve anything. And my response generally is, That's fine to say, but you're sending people to prison, right? How much does that enter into the legal and or constitutional side of this debate? Maybe it doesn't, right?

Maybe we're just saying, well, we deported them to El Salvador. That's a sovereign country. And by coincidence, the government of El Salvador put them in prison, right? I mean, what's the legal...

Right. A shortcut, though, for a pretty, I mean, even if the Supreme Court blesses it, right? It's narrow. It's still just talking about a particular gang from Venezuela.

So are you asking me, does the moral argument... I'm asking you, are there any particular legal issues raised by deporting people to foreign prisons that would not obtain if you were just deporting them and, you know, leaving them at the border of El Salvador and waving goodbye?

How about the citizen-noncitizen distinction here? Let's say that after this podcast airs, you know, someone comes up and puts us into custody and we get sent to El Salvador together. Hopefully we share a cell. Yeah. And and the government says, oh, we're very sorry. We meant to remove two illegal aliens who are also in the New York Times building at that time.

We accidentally took Jack Goldsmith and Ross Douthat. Unfortunately, they are in custody. a foreign country under the government of El Salvador sovereignty. And, you know, we can negotiate, but we can't guarantee we'll get them back. Is that a different legal issue than the one the Garcia case presents?

And obviously, this is a... That seems like a problematic argument.

Would there be any distinction in, let's say, the legal exposure of, you know, the agency that did the deportation? I'm just, you know, my lawyer, I'm talking to my lawyer from El Salvador, right? And I'm saying, who are you- Can you sue the government? Yeah. Who are you going to go after? Right.

That sounds good. I'd like to sue for that. Yes.

Okay. So it seems like the Supreme Court has a very, very strong interest in figuring out how to get the Trump administration to get Garcia back to the U.S.

Who would the sanctions be on?

Are you familiar with Gödel's loophole? No. Okay, so this is the idea that the famous Austrian mathematician Kurt Gödel. Oh, yeah, okay. Right, who supposedly told friends that he had studied the U.S. Constitution and discovered the loophole whereby a president could become a dictator. And the story goes that, you know, he found it, but essentially...

He knew what it was, but no one else knew what it was, and the secret died with him. And listening to you describe these scenarios, it does sound a little bit like Gödel's loophole, right, where essentially the president can do whatever he wants as long as he manages to remove his enemies to foreign soil, right? Yep.

To the extent that this is a suddenly discovered loophole, what would be the remedy for it? So let me back up.

So this would be a case where if this practice continued, you would need congressional legislation basically saying, You know, we are imposing penalties for removing American citizens from the country without trial.

All right. I'm going to leave our hypothetical selves in Central America then for the moment. And when we come back, we'll talk about Trump's assertions of executive power over other areas of government, in particular over federal spending.

Now I want to turn to a different area, which we've already previewed a little bit, which is President Trump's claims of power over the administrative state, but then beyond that over federal spending as a whole. So these categories include all of the attempted firings of federal employees, the restructuring of agencies like USAID and others.

At the baseline, this to me seems like both the place where a conservative-leaning Supreme Court is most likely to be sympathetic to the president, and also the area where at a baseline, I think the administration just has the strongest case. You mentioned already the unitary executive theory, which is a sort of right-leaning theory of constitutional power.

Why don't you just talk for a minute about that theory and how it shapes this debate? Sure.

In practice, though, they have been trying to fire within administrative law. Right. Like they've this is why they've tried to fire people who are provisional or people who've been newly hired or I think, you know, idiotically, but people who are on track for a promotion. Right. And therefore fall into this category that is legally vulnerable to firing.

And then the end game here, it's not just the place where they seem to have the strongest constitutional argument. It's also the place to me as an observer of American politics where they seem to have the strongest political argument. And I just spent the weekend reading in our own newspaper.

accounts from the Biden administration of how impossible it is for the executive, the actual executive, the president of the United States to effectuate policy through the system of government that we have built up. And the roadblocks are not obviously all just within the administrative state. There's lots of different roadblocks. But it does seem to me that the system as we have it is one

where we elect a president, the president has incredibly broad powers in theory, and then in practice, the inability to exert control over the government is a big problem for American governance. And I can certainly see why Liberals and Democrats would not want the Trump administration in particular to exert that kind of control.

But it also seems to me like an endgame where there's a bunch of Supreme Court decisions favorable to executive power and presidents just have a little more direct control over who is hired and fired. in their agencies and administrations is something that in the long run could be good for the workings of American government.

And I know this is a political question and not a legal question, but I'm curious.

Well, then let's talk about sort of what seems to me like the furthest extent of this argument and the place where my own sympathy for it starts to break down, which is the question of presidential control broadly over how congressionally appropriated funding is spent and ultimately whether it's spent at all.

And so there's a couple of questions here where I think, again, we're going to have Supreme Court cases on all of these things, right? But first you have the question of, Congress, you know, appropriates money for USAID. Question is, how much control can the executive exert over how that money is spent?

So we're going to get into each of those areas or try to. But just at the outset, you know, we expected something like this. I think it was clear from the beginning that Trump back in power was going to be a more aggressive figure. What in this area has surprised you the most, I guess, given that anticipation?

Can it take that money and say, okay, Congress appropriated this money for foreign aid, but we think the interests of the US government are served if we define foreign aid to mean... Subsidies for conservative podcasters in, you know, East Asia, you know, Singaporean podcasters instead of humanitarian aid or something. Right. To take an imaginary example. So that's you're still spending the money.

But then there's also the more potentially sweeping claim, which I'm interested in because it seems like it would push executive power basically as far as it can go, which is the claim that the president has what's called impoundment power. over federal spending. Can you just describe what that argument is? Sure.

And this was passed under Nixon, under Richard Nixon.

So your perspective is first that the Supreme Court would probably say that the Impoundment Control Act is constitutional?

Because a war could end, right?

Right. So those were just just to be clear, because I think it's a useful thing. The Obama administration, in my view, essentially tried to change U.S. immigration policy in a pretty sweeping way in its second term by saying we are going to carve out big enforcement discretion, discretion exemptions. Yeah.

And by the way... Neither did the Supreme Court. Right. And...

And now- Right, no, I mean my own. I wrote a couple of columns that I referred to it as Caesarism.

Right. I mean, so this is what I don't understand about that argument. And maybe it's connected to the practice of the past prior to the Impoundment Control Act. But if you took that argument to its logical conclusion, wouldn't it mean that Congress could create Medicare by statute and a Republican president could just say, we're not going to run Medicare? Yes. Right.

But if this kind of argument came before the Supreme Court and you were a lawyer for the administration... And the Supreme Court said, okay, well, what is the limiting principle on this claim? Do you think they would come up with a limiting principle? Would they say, well, of course, all this means is we can cancel discretionary spending but not entitlements or something?

And this relates to the work that you did under George W. Bush.

Right. I'm interested in this both because I think it's a terrain where they have signaled potential for litigation, but it is also the place where if you were imagining a total constitutional revolution as the outcome of the Trump administration, this would take you to a total subordination of the legislative to the executive, right?

Yeah, well, and then obviously, in certain ways, the biggest dimension that it's happening on is the economic policy of the United States. And the tariff debate, I think, has not been framed as much as these other debates that we're talking about as a kind of legal constitutional issue, right? But the scale of the Trump tariffs has prompted lawsuits, or at least one lawsuit, I think, and threats.

Yeah. of further lawsuits. Again, as a layman, I read through some of the claims and arguments that Trump is exceeding his authority, that nothing in the tariff delegation power allows for these kind of moves at this scale with this kind of duration. What do you think?

Well, it's had – I mean, in fairness to the conservatives, it has had – These are my friends, by the way. Right. It has had immediate and dramatic effects on conservatives. The global economy has, you know, has threatened. I mean, there are principles at work in legal debates, but there's also policy scale matters. And the scale of this policy seems quite substantial.

But those tricky legal issues also matter because the framing for this entire conversation, right, is not just what the Constitution says, but the political context and the political climate. Yes. And the Supreme Court clearly doesn't want to be in 17 different direct collisions with an aggressive administration. And so if you tell me, I think the administration has a pretty good case here.

Plausible case. Plausible case. What I hear is that. John Roberts and Brett Kavanaugh and maybe Amy Coney Barrett are going to want to pick their fight somewhere else.

All right. Let's take a quick break. And when we come back, we'll talk a little more about potential conflicts at the place where all of these debates are heading, the Supreme Court. All right, Jack, we were just talking about how the court might rule or how the court might think about a ruling on tariffs and presidential power over tariffs.

And I offered a kind of political framing for that decision where the court might be calibrating. how it rules and also which cases it takes and which battles it picks to a difficult political moment. So making decisions based on politics as well as just a straightforward interpretation of the law. Do you think that's a good way of thinking about these issues?

Like how much in this highly politicized moment is the court thinking to itself, we are dealing with a difficult administration with threats of, you know, at least threats of something that someone would call, could call constitutional crisis, maybe not you, right? And therefore we are really self-consciously picking our battles.

Yeah, fair point. It's Roberts, Kavanaugh, and Barrett.

And you've written about this. You don't think that they're ducking fights.

Okay. Then let's just push a little further from that into actual worst case scenarios. And I'm going to try and force you. We were talking earlier, right, about the case of Garcia sent to El Salvador, right? That's sort of, in a way, the clearest point of tension right now.

Your argument there is that that's a case where you could effectively have a kind of collision between the executive and the courts. But in the end, you know, the executive doesn't do what the courts want, but there isn't sort of. a formal constitutional argument that they have to, right?

Right. So that would be one set of cases where the court just decides that it has some constitutional limits on what it can force the executive to do, even if it thinks the executive is doing the wrong thing.

But you could imagine then a situation where the court would pick a fight. Your view right now that you've expressed elsewhere is you don't think the administration, in a case where the Supreme Court was on pretty strong constitutional ground, would want to defy or be seen as publicly defying the court.

You've said that. You can say something different now.

Okay. But now I'm going to force you to give me in a scenario where you get such a Supreme Court ruling that is clear what compliance means and what noncompliance means. And the Trump administration straightforwardly is not in compliance. And this is my curiosity. If you're John Roberts in that situation, what tools does the court have to

in a situation of clear noncompliance to use besides its moral authority and so on?

Ultimately, I mean, you know... It does have, you know, it has marshals, right?

And do you think, again, going back to the hypothetical calculations of the Supreme Court, do you think then that their calculations change after 2000 and where are we now? 2026, right? So suppose you have a Democratic House after 2026. Does that make the court feel more confident in how it pushes against the White House?

Certainly, you'd have mass protest and so on. I think, to me, the question in that case is, what does John Thune do? Yeah, exactly. What do the embodiments of Senate Republican legitimacy do in that situation? You're the political expert.

You noticed I took a delaying sip of coffee. I mean, I think it depends, you know, to use the hedge that you've availed yourself of on what the case is and what the circumstances are. I guess my sort of running question is, what kind of conversations are people like Thune having? having around those kind of issues and what kind of conversations are they having with the White House and so on.

And I have a certain amount of confidence that is not universally shared in American democracy as an actual check on a rogue president. And

I had this confidence when the positions was reversed and I had a lot of conservative friends who looked at sort of the convergence of unified democratic control of Congress with unified progressive control of Silicon Valley institutions and these kinds of things and said, oh, you know. We're headed for a world where no Republican can win the presidency again.

And I think it's clear that that assessment was wrong and that American democracy was resilient to a certain kind of left wing consolidation of power. Trump is a very different kind of figure, but. Yeah, I'm hopeful that American democracy is the interest, and the interests it creates for Republican senators in swing states, right?

So let's say there is no worst case scenario. There's no explicit conflict between Trump and the Supreme Court. There's wins and losses. But overall, the court blesses a lot of what the administration wants. The administration accepts whatever curbs it offers. So this is sort of The best case scenario for a Trump executive power revolution, what does that look like going forward?

How would you describe the post-2028 constitutional landscape that that would usher in? Okay.

So it's... So this is places where they could lose and it could weaken the presidency's powers relative to Bush and Obama.

Right. And so connected to that point, there's been a lot of talk just in the first few months from critics and skeptics of the administration looking at these kind of things and saying we're already in a constitutional crisis that, you know, the administration is messing with the courts. It's being disrespectful to the courts. It's not following congressional statute and so on.

On the abuses, without getting into all the details, maybe let's end by imagining a future democratic president or a future democratic control of government, right? Yeah. Two related questions, right? One, Democrats win and have a trifecta in 2028 after a period where there's been a consolidation of executive power, but there've also been a lot of abuses.

Do you imagine the Democratic Party taking up some of the ideas that you advocated for after the first Trump administration and saying, we are going to limit our own, you know, we're looking at what Trump did and we think he went too far in all these ways and we are going to, through statute, put in new limits on presidential power?

Obviously, if things are decided constitutionally, they can't, you know, they can't limit it. But can you imagine executive power limits as an issue reemerging the way it was in the 1970s, right?

All right. It gets worse in the next round. On that note, Jack Goldsmith, thanks so much for joining me. Thank you very much, Ross. And if you enjoyed the conversation, please recommend us to your friends and leave a review. Interesting Times is produced by Sofia Alvarez-Boyd, Andrea Batanzos, Elisa Gutierrez, and Catherine Sullivan. It's edited by Jordana Hochman and Alison Bruzek.

In your view, what is a constitutional crisis and how will we know we're in one?

so

Donald Trump is attempting a revolution in executive power arguably unseen since the time of Franklin Roosevelt and one that whatever happens will probably leave the executive branch dramatically changed. So we're going to talk today about where this push is meeting the most resistance, but also where and how it might succeed.

So let's get into some of the specifics. We're not going to tackle all 1,233 pieces of standing litigation, but I'm going to pick up on some of the categories you talked about and I guess give them my own spin for a minute and say I'm interested in talking about Issues of deportation, especially deportation to El Salvador, in particular, to a Salvadoran prison, especially.

There's power over the federal bureaucracy, and you've been talking about that. And then I think we should mention power over economic policy and tariffs. And then we'll get we'll circle back, I guess, to crisis scenarios and also non-crisis scenarios at the end. So let's start with power over non-citizens.

You've had visa and green card holders have been detained and people have had their visas canceled over political activism, participation in campus protests. There's some debate about the specifics. In one case, it appears that a woman had her visa canceled because of an op-ed she wrote. So there's that terrain.

And then the administration has invoked the Alien Enemies Act, a law dating to 1798, giving the president broad wartime powers to detain and deport non-citizens and use that as a justification for the deportations to El Salvador in particular. Right. So first, just to continue what we were saying before, just how radical do you think this set of actions are?

And I'm joined today by a man with a lot of direct experience working on questions of executive power as the head of the Office of Legal Counsel under George W. Bush, a president not known for taking a minimalist view of executive power. Jack is now a professor at Harvard Law School, and he's been writing eloquently about executive power throughout the entire Trump era.

And that was the precedent, right? That even in cases like World War II, that if you, you know, detained someone and deported them because they were German or you had suspicions of Nazi sympathy, right? The precedent suggested that they still got a hearing, right?

So in this case, you would be able to contest whether you are actually a member of the Venezuelan gang.

Right. And that's the claim that's being made on behalf of the people who have already been sent to El Salvador, that they were not actually in the gang, that they were misidentified as gang members based on tattoos and so on.

Right. But that would be litigated, I mean, like most of these things, all the way to the Supreme Court, right? Yes. In the end, the Supreme Court is going to issue, presumably, a ruling on whether you can apply the Alien Enemies Act... To this gang. To this gang. Yes. But for a little while, was the administration formally arguing... that its power here was unreviewable?

But then they walked part of that back, right? By the time it had reached the Supreme Court, they were saying, well, of course we concede that people get some kind of review.

So let's talk about probably what is now the highest profile case involving law. an illegal alien remanded to El Salvador. And that is the case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia. He was deported to the Salvadoran prison. He is presumably held there at the moment. And there was essentially a stay of removal. Is that right?

Jack Goldsmith, welcome to Interesting Times.

And something may change with this case between the time we're having this conversation and when the podcast actually appears. But right now, what is the state of play in terms of – because the Supreme Court has actually spoken on this case to some extent. Yes.

So, let's dive right in. In a recent essay just a few days ago, you wrote that Donald Trump is, quote, taking a moonshot on executive power. So, let's start generally. What does that mean, and how is this administration different from all other administrations?

Right. And the government's claim, just to be clear, is that they made a mistake. But now he's in a foreign country under foreign sovereignty. The foreign sovereign, as of this taping, has said they're not going to return him. And then presumably you could argue that it's not in the interests of U.S.

foreign policy to force that foreign country to return him, which is, you know, a not entirely plausible argument, given that El Salvador is a client state of the United States.

So Daniel, I read your report pretty quickly, not at AI speed, not at super intelligent speed, when it first came out. And I had about two hours of thinking a lot of pretty dark thoughts about the future. And then fortunately, I have a job that requires me to care about tariffs and who the new pope is. And I have a lot of kids who demand things of me.

And so I was able to sort of compartmentalize and set it aside. But this is currently your job. right, I would say. You're thinking about this all the time. How does your psyche feel day to day if you have a reasonable expectation that the world is about to change completely in ways that dramatically disfavor the entire human species?

From New York Times Opinion, I'm Ross Douthat, and this is Interesting Times. The age of AI is already with us. The big question is how far and fast the revolution goes. My guest today represents the very far, extremely fast perspective. He was a researcher at OpenAI who quit because he thought the company was acting recklessly.

And he's the co-author of a new forecast which predicts that within just a few short years, we might be living in a post-work pleasure dome under the rule of oligarchs managing a machine god. Or we might all be dead. I'm personally skeptical that the danger we're facing is quite this immediate and dire. I suspect that there are more limits on AI's capacities than my guest's scenario envisions.

But it's important to hear from insiders who take these possibilities seriously, because many people deeply involved in AI work believe that they're bringing this future to life and assume that they're working and we're living in the shadow of a possible apocalypse. So, Daniel Coccatello, herald of the apocalypse, welcome to Interesting Times.

From New York Times Opinion, I'm Ross Douthat, and this is Interesting Times. Just in time for the debut of this show, almost as if he planned it that way, Donald Trump has taken a sledgehammer to the global economy, as his new tariff regime yields crashing stock markets, rising global uncertainty, and widespread fears of a recession.

But there isn't really, from the age of globalization, I concede that relative to how the U.S. economy was doing in the immediate post-war period, the age of globalization has been a disappointment. But it's not like there is some counterexample where you say, you know, oh, the French practice more protectionism or the Germans or the Japanese and their economies are in much better shape.

Isn't the U.S. economy still in the best shape of any developed nation, of any big, rich, developed nation right now? And doesn't that suggest something about the potential scenarios on the table?

economy, where the tariff debate centers in, before we get into the Trump tariffs themselves, so that hopefully the conversation will still be of use, even in a future in which the audience knows more about how all this plays out than we do. So that's the plan. And I want to start with a big picture question.

Okay, let's take a quick break there, and we'll be right back. So what do you make of other arguments for tariffs? We've been focused on manufacturing, but in the swirl around President Trump's tariffs, you've had a lot of other cases made, right? One is pretty clearly linked to the rebuild manufacturing case. It's a national security case. It says that

Look, you know, China is a great power competitor. It's possible that a global pandemic originated in certainly it originated in China. It could have originated in one of their own laboratories. They could invade Taiwan. There's all kinds of ways where we could have to. We already did briefly decouple and could have to decouple from them.

And so therefore, again, it's worth a little bit off GDP to have more of our supply chain domestically and so on. I assume that you find that argument somewhat convincing as well.

When Donald Trump was reelected and entered office, a lot of people thought he had gotten very lucky, that he had inherited an economy that was in really good shape, with low unemployment, with inflation finally coming down after the Biden era, with a high stock market, and with a sense of big technological breakthroughs potentially on the horizon.

But isn't that partially just a case for industrial policy of the kind that, for instance, the Biden administration tried to pursue? I'm sort of looking for substitutionary policies that serve the same kind of goals without taking the growth hit from tariffs. It seems like you could argue, well, we have a certain set of industries that aren't technically part of the defense industry.

budget, but that we want more of in America. We want more chips and so forth manufactured in America. Why not just make that part of our spending program, right? And support those industries because we know the specific things that we want instead of putting up general barriers around the world that slow growth.

So, Oren, to begin with, what's wrong with that narrative from your perspective? What is wrong with the American economy in the year 2025 that could make anyone interested in any kind of radical or dramatic restructuring?

And what about deficits? One of the arguments that, again, has floated around in the last few weeks is that tariffs are a way to raise revenue, right? Which they obviously are. The U.S. has a big deficit problem. And the deficit problem is itself taxable. connected to the global trading order. And it has to do with the strength, in part, the strength of the dollar relative to other currencies.

So you have people arguing, one, tariffs will raise revenue directly, helps cut the deficit, and you don't have to do some kind of grand bargain between Democrats and Republicans. That's very difficult. The president can just go ahead and do it. It's the only way a Republican president can ever raise taxes. I've heard people say that.

And then maybe people say it can also be linked to some global negotiation where countries come to the table and all agree to change sort of how their currencies work or accept lower rates on U.S. debt or something that – helps us deal with our budget deficits.

The difficulty there, right, is that, especially in the first case, if tariffs do what you want them to do and lead to the reshoring of manufacturing, over time they raise less and less revenue. So a successful tariff that helps reindustrialize America is not going to be a big revenue generator. So where do you see the deficit-cutting stuff fitting into this?

And do you buy the idea that you could do some sort of grand renegotiation of U.S. debt?

budgeting process has been known to do that.

All right, let's take a break. And when we come back, we'll talk about what the Trump administration is actually doing. Okay, so this you have brought us to the actual tariffs, not the theoretical tariffs. And I'm going to put words in your mouth and say briefly that the Oren Cass preferred tariff program is one that specifically tries to isolate China.

generally imposes a 10 percent global tariff that is sort of stable, persistent and compatible with global trade and maybe include some other country specific tariffs related to negotiations. Now, you could argue that is what Trump has done. The tariffs on China are quite high. There is a flat 10 percent tariff.

And then there are these country by country tariffs that people have been arguing about. But I want you to tell me because I read your take on the tariffs and it seemed like it was very general praise wrapped around a pretty actually specific critique. So I want you to tell me what you think is wrong with what Trump is doing on tariffs.

And what about the country by country tariffs as they exist right now? Because there was the Trump administration used the rhetoric of reciprocal tariffs, which implied to most people that essentially we were saying, if you have X tariff on our goods, we will have the same tariff on your goods. And we want to mutually then negotiate down from there.

In practice, instead, the Trump administration has a formula seemingly that's just designed around trade deficits with other countries, where if you have a trade deficit with us, we are putting a big tariff on you. And it seems to me pretty obvious that in a global economy, we're going to have lots of countries that we have trade deficits with.

Maybe we want to have trade surpluses with more countries. Fair enough. And that's what we're working towards. But it seems completely bizarre to say, you know, any random country that has a completely different economy from ours, if you're not importing exactly as many American goods as you're exporting to us, we're going to tariff you. Isn't that just daft?

One is— You can say it's just daft. You can just say it's daft.

But you were just telling me in the case against industrial policy from the right that the conservative, the free market oriented conservative would say, you know, we're not going to be able to micromanage. you know, which factories to build exactly, which industries to support. We want to set something low and flat in tariff policy that just encourages domestic manufacturing in general, right?

It seems to me like the same has to be true with this country by country stuff, that you're not the idea that we're going to be micromanaging the trade balance with, you know, Italy, Hungary, Turkey, India, Bangladesh to figure out like, you know, how do we get them all back in balance? One, that seems unworkable. And two, And this is something that just hangs over this whole conversation.

It just seems like a way to fit in with the president of the United States' particular obsession with the idea that, from his perspective, all trade deficits seem to be bad, at least in the way he talks about it. So everyone who's designing these policies in the White House is sort of working around a core Trumpian perception that probably is wrong. Thank you.

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you for watching.

So let's be a little more specific about those broader challenges, because as you mentioned, U.S. GDP has continued going up throughout this period. And in fact, so has, to some extent, middle class incomes, not just middle income, but working class incomes. They went up in Trump's presidency. They went up in Biden's presidency, even though then inflation ate into them.

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And overall, middle class Americans, just in terms of the numbers, are meaningfully better off than they were in the 1970s. But you don't think that captures something really important, right? There's something those numbers are missing?

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So to try and understand where this radical policy came from and where it might be taking us, our 401ks, our unemployment rate, I'm joined by Oren Kass, who's the founder of American Compass, a populist conservative think tank that has for a while now been arguing for tariffs and for some kind of dramatic change in America's relationship to global trade.

Okay, so stipulating that there is a big debate about all these numbers, as you mentioned, the American Compass Index of Human Flourishing is hotly contested and much argued over. Stipulate for the sake of argument that there is some kind of stagnation here, especially for young men. What does trade have to do with it?

Okay, but so is the issue that we've lost manufacturing or that we've lost manufacturing jobs? Because one of the arguments that you often hear is that American manufacturing in terms of how much stuff we produce is still roughly where it's been for decades now. We've lost ground in comparison to China because China has become such a powerhouse.

But the American manufacturing sector has not collapsed. What's collapsed is the number of Americans who work in jobs in that sector. Do you agree with that?

So what is so special about a manufacturing job as opposed to a service sector job? Because someone might say, look, yes, the U.S. economy has fewer people working in factories than it did in the heyday. of, you know, Detroit and the big three auto manufacturers and all the rest. But America is also a lot richer than it was back then.

And I think most people argue that global trade has led to lower prices in at least some areas for some goods. So what's wrong with a world where someone works in a service sector job instead of a manufacturing job? enjoys lower prices. And then beyond that, presumably the richer U.S.

economy can pay for under an income tax credit or a larger child tax credit to essentially increase wages and give a kind of premium based on the surplus of a wealthy society. Why is that not just as good as a world with many more manufacturing jobs?

So, Oren Kass, welcome to Interesting Times.

But suppose you had a resurgence of manufacturing jobs right now. Wouldn't they look quite different from manufacturing jobs in 1985 or even just before the China shock? Because yes, manufacturing jobs have even now have some of the features you describe, but we have passed through an age of automation and robotics. We are entering some kind of age of AI driven automation.

I hope it is. So, a podcast, like everything, is a moment in time. And the moment in time in which you and I are speaking is Monday morning. The markets are open and down so far for the third day since Donald Trump announced the great liberation of America from the foreign yoke.

And when I hear people talk about the factory jobs of the future, even people who are bullish on there being good factory jobs, it's sort of taken for granted that these are not actually the kind of jobs that, you know, a blue collar steel worker would have had in 1977, right? The argument is, well, these are actually better jobs, they're less backbreaking, they require more skills, and so on.

But then, if that's the case, and maybe it's not the case, aren't they not filling in the same niche in the economy, right?

So when I interviewed the vice president before he became the vice president, and we talked a little bit about this issue, and he talked about the idea of, you know, the six or seven million American men who have dropped out of the workforce, who are particularly vulnerable to opioid addiction and family breakdown and all of these things.

Are those the kind of workers who are likely to be hired in the factory of the future that is highly, highly automated?

Right. But do you think that there is a cost to overall GDP from using tariffs, essentially to wildly oversimplify the argument for tariffs that is implied by what you're saying is that you raise the cost of importing from factories outside the United States. So it becomes more economically viable to build factories inside the U.S.,

And this podcast, therefore, may not cover events that transpire between now and Thursday morning when it's released, but we're going to try and have a fairly high-level discussion about the condition of the U.S.

The typical economist responds, that may be true, and you do get some potentially specific benefits, although they would have doubts about how all this works. We'll get into in a minute. But they would say, but look, your overall, the overall society is going to be somewhat poorer.

And is that a tradeoff we should be willing to make some points or fraction of a point off GDP to have more people working in upstate New York and central Ohio?

Hey, how are you? Hey, Ross. How are you? I'm great. I'm great. What an amazing head of hair you have. This is great. Thank you. Thank you. You look fantastic. You look vital, one might say. Thank you. This is a very important part of the discourse on the online, right? Well, we're going to get into that. From New York Times Opinion, I'm Ross Douthat, and this is Interesting Times.

But isn't that then a little circular? Then you're saying all great art is somehow right wing. Like to me, for instance, I feel like, you know, a TV show that I've enjoyed is Andor. It's one of the few Star Wars shows that I've enjoyed. I see that as kind of left wing art. It's a show that uses the background of...

you know, the empire in the Star Wars universe to tell a story about sort of, you know, punishing militaristic tyranny and resistance to it in ways that are sort of left coded, but also it's a really good show. Whereas I would look at at at girls and say, look, it is a in the end, it's a scabrous satire of a particular kind of upper middle class lifestyle in a liberal city.

And so it is it is coming from a right wing perspective. So do you think there can there be great left wing art from your perspective?

That's a deep cut. So that shows just how far back your online experience really goes to the days when I had more hair and it was me and other junior varsity pundits arguing on the internet. But I think, and you can correct me about this, I think the first time that we actually seriously interacted was... Correct. Correct. And at that point, right, you had a dual identity.

Okay, good.

Yes. So this takes us into one of the phrases that I think gets used to describe what the counterculture is up to. And I know you're ambivalent about this phrase, but it's the idea that gets called vitalism, right?

Which is this term that means, let's say, a celebration of individuality, strength, excellence, and an anxiety about equality and democracy as, just the way you described, as leveling forces, enemies of human greatness. And it gets connected to Friedrich Nietzsche, You know, I think there's an Ayn Rand who's, you know, a very popular novelist on the American right.

Whatever you make of her actual books is in some sense in this school. But that to me seems like one common thread, including in the books that you yourself have published. Like what links the white Russian general standing athwart the Bolsheviks? to the Hardy Boys, to Conan the Barbarian. It is some kind of idea of human greatness beset by mediocrity and so on. What do you think about that?

Right. And it's an escape from, and now I'm going to move to a second term that you yourself have used, right?

It's an escape from what gets called the longhouse. And You mentioned, you know, sort of men and women as sort of each vital in certain ways. But The Long House is a specifically feminine coded narrative of like what's wrong with contemporary life. So what is The Long House?

And just so listeners are clear, this is a reference to I mean, there's a kind of I'm going to call it a pseudo anthropology because I don't think you're actually making specific claims about the human past. But there's a contrast between sort of longhouse culture of a literal longhouse of a tribe sort of crowded together under one roof with what the freedom of the step barbarian.

I agree.

As Jonathan Kieperman, you were still, right, a lecturer in English at UC Irvine? Correct. That's right. And then you were Lómez, a right-wing anon is the term that people use. That's right. Who wrote pseudonymously online. So that was 2020. And then in 2022... you founded a right-wing publishing house called Passage Press.

So concrete examples would be the crusade against Greek life at universities, right? You would see as... Longhouse in action and corporate H.R. departments and sensitivity trainings. Longhouse in action. Right.

two objections or responses. The second one will be more specific to my own worldview. But the first one I think is a more general one that many listeners would have. They would say, look, What has actually happened in the last 25 years in the longhouse era, as you describe it, is guess what? We removed restrictions on women's advancement and they started out competing men.

They're not longhousing men. They're just getting the promotions that men used to get and, you know, succeeding in corporate America where men used to succeed. And yes, there are specific cases like the military where physical differences between men and women matter and, you know, maybe...

Maybe there you could say sort of gender equality has gone too far because it ignores those physical differences. But when you're talking about corporate America or political America or any of these environments, women are succeeding. Men aren't. And now men are complaining that women are oppressing them.

Like, isn't this just isn't the longhouse just a long male whine about a failure to adequately compete? And you're pretending that. You know, oh, for the days of the step barbarians. But, you know, maybe you should suck it up and and actually, you know, actually compete on the grounds that we have in 21st century America. What do you say to that?

And that, I would say, raised your profile pretty dramatically to the point where you were important enough to have your real name exposed by a reporter for The Guardian. Correct. In 2024. And then by January of 2025, just recently, you were notable enough to host one of the big inaugural balls, which was called the Coronation Ball. So... Did I miss anything?

Now a more personal objection rooted in my own religious commitments, which is that, as you say, I have a lot of sympathy for the broad view that. Late modern life has become decadent and some kind of sense of possibility, some kind of sense of action, some kind of sense of human capacity is really important to getting us either out of this trench or through whatever weird bottleneck

digital life and AI are going to create. I agree with all of that. However, I'm also a Christian. And all of the authors that I've mentioned who are part of the vitalist tradition, Nietzsche, Rand, Bronze Age pervert, see themselves operating in opposition to Christianity.

They see Christianity as fundamentally, it's either, you know, it's a religion of the weak, it's a religion of women, perhaps, it's against the erotic. And so when I look at the right-wing counterculture right now, I see A force that has sort of, you know, there are people who are, you know, really into traditionalist Catholicism and whatnot there.

But there's also a lot of people who I think in their own story about what went wrong with the right, the normie right, the boring right of Kevin McCarthy, you know, sort of think at some level, you know, it was a bunch of weak, thin milk drinking people.

Christians who didn't understand that, you know, what is actually best in life is to crush your enemies, to see them driven before you and to hear the lamentations of their women. Right. So I'm curious, what is your attitude towards those debates? What's your attitude towards Christianity and religion?

But so younger, if I'm remembering his trajectory correctly. Yeah, he was part he's part of the German right. He's not a Nazi, but he serves in the Third Reich and he's not someone who Listeners should think of as like Heidegger, who just sort of goes who goes Nazi in that way. But he remains very much on the anti-liberal right throughout that period.

And my sense of him is that he he did have that sort of a view of Christianity, as you described, to some degree. But it was sort of Christianity as a kind of useful force for. for resisting the degradation of modernity and so on. And then he does actually become a Catholic in very old age, right?

How is that for an account of your trajectory?

So it's like you get to be a vitalist for many decades, and then at the end, you're like, all right, all right, time to succumb to full Christianity. And it just seems to me that even in vitalism, there are people who are anti-Christian, like Bronze Age perverts, like the Nazis, right? And then there are people who want to put it to use.

But I'm a little ambivalent about having my religion put to use in that way.

well. All right, let's pause there. And when we come back, we'll talk about Donald Trump's role in all of this. So let's talk now about Donald Trump. Trump starts as a cultural figure. Anyone who's old enough to remember the Trump who existed before he became a politician remembers the tabloid fixture, the reality TV star, the self-creator whose life is in a

But you've written a bunch about Trump as a heroic figure. You've explicitly compared him to Aeneas, speaking of sort of mythological heroes. Talk to me about that, Trump as hero. What does that mean?

Yeah. I mean, look, my my own view of Trump, as you probably know, has all has changed. I think we have sort of each moved and each shifted. And I've ended up closer to where you were four years ago and you've gone a bit further. Right. So I just had trouble from the beginning of seeing Trump as anything other than a symptom of.

of decadence like you know the reality TV host becomes president of the United States because you know he's triumphing over all these mediocrities and failed politicians and so on but it's only and he is representing a kind of revolt against decadence I agree a desire for something more but he manifests that decadence at the same time that was sort of my basic take and then over the same period that you have come to see him as a heroic figure

I've come to see him as, yeah, someone who has a more providential place, a bigger place in history, who is still part of a decadent era, maybe is still more of an anti-hero than a hero, but is bigger than I thought. And there is some of that, you know, that retrocausality. Once you have Trump surviving the assassination attempt, you read that back into the past.

But I wouldn't go as far as you do, I guess... For reasons, I think part of the reason maybe connects back to what we were just going back and forth about, like about my Christian doubts about vitalism. To me, I look at Trump and I see someone who has more capacities than I credited with him at the start. But the capacities that he lacks are restraint.

Magnanimity a sense of sort of moral limitation and I think that lack is connected to the fact that I don't I don't think he's fundamentally religious I think maybe he believes in Providence now that Providence saved him but but not in any kind of conventionally Christian way and I think it's the reason why.

It's both reasonable for liberals to worry about where that appetitive side of him takes us, but also just to worry about sort of, you know, again, chaos and mismanagement and all the things that also come in from an absence of restraint.

No, I think the issue is more that if you see the hand of Providence operating through George Washington and John Adams in the founding of America, you could see the hand of Providence operating through Donald Trump. in the chastisement of America.

That like Trump is a great man of history whose role is to chastise the liberal intelligentsia and the never Trumpers and all these groups that failed to govern America. But it doesn't mean that at the end of the day, he's actually saving America. Sometimes it's just a chastisement, right?

Like that, I feel like that possibility deserves more consideration from people who have this kind of mystical reaction to the drama of the Trump era.

But I wanted to just sort of on that question of restraint, like part of what Trump does, part of his lack of restraint, right, is, you know, a refusal to respect any taboos to sort of push through, you know, whatever the taboos of progressive culture are. And in the same way, part of the right wing counterculture is all about taboo busting. Yeah.

But, you know, one of those taboos, and this is something that connects Trump in some ways to the counterculture, is taboos around race, because there's a lot of racism in right wing counterculture in various forms. It's there in the online memes. It's there in the would be Nietzscheans like BAP. Anyone who goes from this conversation and gets a copy of

Bronze Age mindset and reads, you know, certain paragraphs will say, well, this guy is a terrific racist. Right. Sure. And I want to offer before you interpret this, I want to offer three interpretations. Take the interviewer's privilege. I think you could say, OK, this is just about performative rebellion. A counterculture needs to shatter taboos.

The taboos of liberal culture around race and gender. Right. Possibility to you want to reclaim and re legitimize parts of the American past. American past had a lot of racists, right? You're trying to restore and reconstitute a lost pre-progressive world. Okay.

It's sort of inherent in the project that, you know, you're basically trying to rehabilitate writers and thinkers who contemporary piety would try and rule out because they held at the very least un-PC opinions. So those are two arguments that I see as sort of justifications, complete or not, for the kind of racist stuff.

But then there's also the possibility that there's just a serious belief in racial inequality. And maybe it's not religionizing Nazism, but, you know, if you spend a fair amount of time online, it's not that many degrees of separation from the right-wing counterculture to the, you know, people on X.com talking about what a great artist Hitler was. You know, such a great artist.

Yeah, I mean, I think so. Those were columns that I wrote where I essentially deliberately cultivated a kind of split personality and drew up out of my union subconscious a version of myself that was that would be pro-Trump, right? So I was never for Trump. I was part of never Trump, whatever that may have been way back in the past.

So anyway, I wanted to offer those as interpretations today. And then have you talk about why is the right-wing counterculture racist? Sure.

The technical deficiencies of Adolf Hitler are definitely definitely there in a few places in his life.

So I buy a version of that argument. And it's very clear just from like watching the culture that that the sort of ascendance of certain kinds of DEI narratives, the kind of Robin DiAngelo stuff where it's like white people are conducting psychological self-scrutinies and so on to root out the hidden structural racism in their heart, all of that contributes to

And I retained a basic view that it was a mistake for conservatives to sort of lash themselves to the Trump phenomenon. And so for me, it was like Italics Ross was not the true Ross lurking below the surface. That wasn't how I thought about it. But I thought about it as, you know, a set of ideas that certainly existed in my consciousness.

an emergence much more than at any point in my lifetime of a kind of distinct, like white racial identity among some conservatives, younger conservatives, especially online conservatives, especially people in the orbit of the right wing counterculture, especially this is all, I guess, several different questions though, right? One, That still might be bad, right?

If it's bad to have sort of a tribalist view of politics among non-whites, isn't it potentially bad to have a tribalist view among whites, even if you're creating a cultural political explanation where it's understandable? That's question one. Question two is more concrete, right? It's like, okay, how far back... Are you trying to turn the dial, right?

And I want to keep it in culture, so I'm going to give a cultural example. I grew up, I was a big fan of the Tantan books, the Tantan comics, the Boy Detective, Captain Haddock, and so on. Those were a huge influence in my childhood in the 1980s, 1990s. The Tantan books are from like 1920 through 1960. One of the early Tantan books is called Tantan in the Congo. And it's super racist, right?

Like it is a set of super racist caricatures of Africans that are not like friendly ethnic stereotypes the way the appearance of like Arabs and Italians are elsewhere in the book. They're more racist than that. Well, I'll just be really explicit. Would you publish Tantan? Like Tantan in the Congo sort of disappeared. Was it good that it sort of disappeared?

You know, I'm not familiar with this exact book.

Imagine you could you can pick another. But but like, is it is it OK that certain things from the past that were very racist disappear?

Most Americans would say Tintin. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I don't know how to pronounce these things. Trump supporters say tin-tin. New York Times columnists say tan-tan.

and that were really useful for understanding sort of where American culture was, why people supported Trump, and that New York Times readers needed to engage with.

But but still. There's sort of a question beyond that, right, about the cultural side of this, like, again, the world of sort of memes and discourse and so on.

I'm curious, before we sort of dig into the ideas themselves, was there like a moment when you felt a kind of shift in the culture just in the last few years where it seemed like, you know, you were going to exist as yourself as a public figure instead of as an anonymous arguer online?

Yes, it includes some, you know, rehabilitation of traditional conservative arguments about problems with the welfare state or the necessity of policing that are familiar from the 1980s and 1990s that sort of the progressive consensus suppressed. That's different to me from, you know, kids online posting racist memes and saying, it's just irony. I'm just being ironic. I'm busting taboos, you know.

Okay. But at a certain point, doesn't the mask become the face? Doesn't the irony become indistinguishable from just, you know, being against kind of against black people? And then for you as a publisher, right? Yeah. It's fine to say we should preserve these, you know, we should have historical memory. We should know what the past was like. Right.

But I don't think you'd want to be like you would have a certain audience if Passage Press pivoted further right and was like, we're publishing, you know, we're publishing Rommel books by, you know, Alexander Stevens and, you know, Confederates and so on. Wouldn't you worry? And I guess this connects to the question about like moral restraint. Wouldn't you worry about yourself? in that scenario?

Even if you thought it was fine to, you know, don't want these things banned, but do you want to be the person publishing all of that?

I guess I'm more skeptical of that. Not in the sense that I think that if you – sort of allow or encourage certain debates that suddenly the U.S.

turns into the antebellum South or Nazi Germany, but just that there are a lot of people and this, you know, there's versions of this on the left and issues around anti-Semitism especially on the left that are sort of a separate conversation, but there is some overlap between

I think it is bad for people to sort of be in a position where they are questioning not, you know, what is the proper design of welfare policy and policing, but, you know, do we need to give some reconsideration to, you know, Hitler's views about Jewish conspiracies? And I'm not I'm not saying I'm not I'm not accusing you of taking that position.

I'm just saying right now, when I look at these spaces, it's like I'm a child of the 1990s. Right. I think it was OK to live in a world where there were taboos about Nazi Germany and the Jim Crow South and that that didn't have to preclude having honest debates about race and crime and policing and all of these things. But I just when I look at like, again, the sort of the moral character of

that is encouraged by sort of racist meme culture, I'm not worried they're gonna take over. I'm just worried about them, I guess.

Yeah. And again, this is the last thing I'll say, but I think it's partially like you started out talking about how your sense, I think you would put it this way, right? That there was anti-white racism at work in progressive politics and culture in the last five or 10 years. That like, you know, there was sort of a critique of whiteness

as this miasmic force that was, you know, functionally applied a kind of suspicion and hostility towards anyone who was white, certainly anyone who was white and male. And I wouldn't go as far as you with that, but I don't think that's wrong. I think it was bad.

I'm comfortable saying it would also be bad for there to be more and more anti-black racism or sort of anti-Semitic curiosity on the right, just because it affects our shared life. And I think, you know, in ways that have cultural effects, have political effects, I think they have effects on the Trump administration.

I think one of the ways that the Trump administration may fail, as I said before, is that This is not a racial issue per se, but it regards some of its fellow citizens with a certain kind of contempt. That's a problem for a would be great leader. I think contempt is bad. I think racism encourages a kind of contempt.

And so, yeah, I don't have a single like America is going to become Nazi fear, but I do have a fear about the impact of racism. Taboo busting around race on the kind of institutions that right wing people might build and so on.

We'll be right back. All right. Let's just talk briefly about the future. How lasting do you think that the vibe shift or whatever else is will turn out to be? At the start, I introduced you, right, as the host of an inaugural ball. You're appearing on a New York Times podcast, very prominent position, right? But Passage Press is a boutique publisher.

And we didn't really get into this, but there is a sort of mass, obviously a more mass market side of the vibe shift, I think. You know, the Joe Rogans and Theo Vons all the way to Andrew Tate, Vitalist. All of that is there and part of the culture. But even that still, to me, exists in a pretty separate universe from the people who make pop music today. Or TV or who publish mass market fiction.

So I'm I'm curious. Do you see that part of the culture moving rightward books, movies, TV? What would what would that look like?

All right. So last question. Donald Trump calls you up and he says, you're in charge of the National Endowment for the Arts and you're setting up a program to celebrate America's 250th. And part of that program is you're going to ask every high school senior to

to public high school senior, maybe use the leverage remaining in the half dismantled Department of Education to enforce this to read one book and see one movie.

Are you going to say the Godfather? Because, OK, good. See, there you go.

All right. On that chthonic note, Jonathan Kieperman, thank you so much for joining me. Thanks, Ross. This was great. Mixing by Pat McCusker Audience Strategy by Shannon Busta and Christina Samuluski. And our Director of Opinion Audio is Annie Rose Strasser.

There's been a lot of talk about a vibe shift since Donald Trump's election and return to office. A change not just in American politics, but in American culture. A sense that right-wing personalities are suddenly driving cultural discourse. And one way I've been thinking about this is in terms of a phrase that is traditionally applied to the left. And that phrase is counterculture.

That's that's a boringly respectable story. OK. And I and I don't I don't believe it. I mean, I do believe it. But I think what you're describing there is a description of the trajectory that you see, you know, for instance, with my former colleague.

Barry Weiss, right, and her publication, The Free Press, which has been tremendously successful and has represented sort of a meeting place for former liberals disillusioned by progressivism, various eccentric people who wouldn't have called themselves conservative but have ended up on the right. Passage Press, you're not publishing...

you know, a sort of respectable libertarian critique of the welfare state. You're publishing fiction, weird stories, and radical philosophy. You published The Hardy Boys, the original Hardy Boys, before some sort of multicultural PC cleanups. You publish a war memoir by a Russian general who fought against the Bolsheviks.

You publish writing by Robert E. Howard, the creator of Conan the Barbarian, H.P. Lovecraft, but someone like Curtis Yarvin, who is an example of an author you've published, right?

Curtis Yarvin thinks that the United States should become a kind of based monarchy run by some kind of Silicon Valley-esque chief executive with a dissolution and revolution of the order of government in Washington, D.C.

Nick Land is another example of sort of subterranean far-right intellectuals who would not have fellowships at the American Enterprise Institute, who would not operate in mainstream conservative or sort of centrist or center-right circles. So tell me about that stuff.

So let's try and get into what is an authentic cultural right. To me, Passage Press and the work you're doing is clearly linked to a bunch of different groups. So you have the sort of Silicon Valley right of someone like Yarvin. Peter Thiel is obviously often invoked as sort of a godfather in that zone.

I think the best way to understand politics right now is that the United States, for the first time in my lifetime, has a real right-wing counterculture. A edgy, radical-seeming alternative to the status quo. And so I thought one way to talk about that counterculture was to invite someone who I see — we'll see if he disagrees — as one of its representatives. And that's you, Jonathan.

There is the Red Scare podcast, right, and the so-called Dime Square scene in New York, which is basically... And again, for listeners who think this is a contradiction in terms, it's basically right wing hipsters. Yeah. Then you have the Nietzschean former graduate student turned online essayist and influencer Bronze Age pervert. Right.

Who has received, you know, interesting profiles in mainstream publication. So those would be examples that I would see. But who do you see as your allies and fellow travelers in the cultural project?

So why is that? What is right-wing art missing that... That the right wing counterculture is trying to supply. What are the ingredients?

Well, I want to make this just a tiny bit more concrete and say from any period, not the last 20 years, any period in American life, modern Western history, give me an example of something you consider successful right-wing art that doesn't fall into the traps you've described.

So, Jonathan Kieperman, welcome to Interesting Times. Ross, it is great to be here. We've known each other for a while online, of course. Purely as digital entities, yes.

What is the coding? What makes, you know, to a listener for whom it seems absurd to call No Country for Old Men right-wing, what makes that right-wing to you?

Yes, this is this is a this is a hobby horse of mine.

There's a saying that comes to mind these days. May you live in interesting times. It's understood to be a curse, even though it sounds like a blessing.

The smartphone and virtual reality are forcing deep changes to basic human relationships.