 So, welcome everybody to our second live stream conversation, which we're planning to make into a recurring series. I'm Zach Weissmuller joined by my colleague Nick Gillespie and our guest, Joan Goldberg, and of the Dispatch, and we're going to talk about the recent election in Italy, which saw the ascendance of the Brothers of Italy party to power as the governing coalition and likely paves the way for Italy's first female Prime Minister, Giorgia Maloney. The reaction has been swift, severe. Many commentators have characterized this as the return of fascism in Italy, pointing to some of the past associations and political imagery as evidence that neo fascists are now in charge. On the other hand, some American conservatives have said the rhetoric's over the top. The left is just throwing around the term fascist again to discredit a political movement they don't like. But talking through this with Jonah would be worthwhile because he published the best seller on this very topic called liberal fascism in 2008. And at the same time, he's become known as one of the most persistent and incisive critics of the brand of right wing populism that Trump brought into the Republican party, and which we're seeing take hold in many places in Europe, besides Italy, places like Hungary and even Sweden. I want to start with you, Jonah, on this question of fascism. You wrote in your book that fascism is really this very slippery concept. You called it an academic version of Heisenberg's uncertainty principle and that the closer you look at it, the less clearly defined it becomes. So without warning in mind, what is your kind of overarching understanding of fascism? Yeah, so I think an easier way to sort of think about it is that there's a simple version of trying to under their two simple ways of understanding fascism. And there's one extremely complicated way. First of all, there's the actual doctrine of fascism that was put forth fascism is invented term. It derives from the fascist, which is that bundle of sticks around an axe was a symbol of Roman authority symbol of trust in authority before that. And the basic fundamental meaning of it is strengthen numbers, right? It's like all these sticks around the axe and it shows that, you know, we're stronger together kind of thing, strengthen unity. And so the fascism that Mussolini came up with originally comes from the left. It was originally, he was one of Europe's leading socialists. He actually earned the title Ilduce as the head of the socialists in Italy, not as the head of the fascists. The first campaign that the Italian fascists did was explicitly as left wing. And then some of the scholars or historians of the period say, well, he moved. That's when he learned to move right. And my argument to be that was when he learned to move populist and nationalist, but not necessarily right on any policy sense. And so you can look at the doctor, you know, they're there. One of the problems you get with this version of fascism is that it, it changes over time because Mussolini keeps changing the definitions keeps rewriting what the thing means, but that's one way to look at it. Another way to look at it is it's just a form of authoritarianism, and, you know, nationalistic authoritarianism, and I'd be perfectly happy with that. The problem is you then get to the complicated way of thinking about fascism, which is this way where the academic left and and the activist left for much of the 20th century and 21st century was absolutely determined to make it seem like it was the polar opposite of communism or Bolshevism or or or Castroism or whatever that these things were at either side of the political spectrum is the extreme right and the extreme left. And that's just, it just makes no sense if you gave someone sort of a field guide to walk around the 20th century. And you said and you define fascism as a unitary authoritarian leader who seizes the means of production and controls industry and stifles free speech and does this and does that. And it's heavily into militarism and the civil realm as well as the external realm. There's no way you can say that Castro was the opposite of a fascist but Mussolini was a fascist. So people start getting really, really clever and never mind how trying to describe Stalin right who fought World War two is the great patriotic war for Mother Russia. So it gets very complicated because people want to make it sound like these things are very different. And my argument is is that borrowing from Richard pipes the intellectual historian and Harvard disease now I think but he said look basically Bolshevism and Nazism are both heresies of socialism, they both have the roots in the socialist radical revolutionary tradition. They play on the same sort of emotional types. It's just that fascism understood that nationalism is more appealing to people in a single country than universal class solidarity which is what Marxist was Marxism was based on. And so just I'll wrap here but if you look around at the 20th century. Basically, basically every successful socialist revolution under not talking about democratic ones but like serious Marxist communists, they all become nationalistic China becomes nationalistic the Soviet Union becomes nationalistic, because nationalism turns out as the only way to glue together the people because abstract concepts about you know dialectical materialism don't do the trick, but nationalistic appeals to blood and soil and shared memory and all that do and so I would argue that basically most communist regimes are essentially fascistic and most fascistic regimes are essentially socialist. I noticed that. Yeah, sorry. Let me just throw in one thing there, because I noticed that there was a response to one of the tweets promoting this that someone said that I think this guy's named durr Einstein Lear one. I think it is an error of thinking to call it fascism socialism or communism as we think of them, collectivism covers it all the sacrifice of individual rights in favor of an agenda. I mean, I kind of like that formulation just because I'm in favor of individual rights and individualism is that a fair kind of way to think about these movements and the opposition, or is that. If you want to if you want to keep it simple. It's just authoritarian collectivism right and it's just one of flavor, one brand name among many different brand names and their subtle distinctions about the kind of rhetoric they use the kind of appeals that they make their relationship with organized religion and in this place but not in that place and that kind of thing, but it's just really not particularly complicated and it's amazing if you talk to people who grew up in Eastern where you know they come from places where both communists and fascists or Nazis ran things for a while. At the area where the rubber meets the road of lived experience the distinctions between these things are very, very small, because all authoritarian militaristic regimes are basically the same in the in their their crushing of human liberty and all the rest and so we've the problem with the word fascist is it's evolved into, you know, in Orwell spotted this in politics in English language and 46 he said look fascist has simply come to mean anything not desirable. And so, I mean it has to drive you libertarians absolutely bad because it drives me baddie to have people who are libertarians called fascist as if like the Nazis were these big free marketers and privatizers or something. But if the left doesn't like it they call it fascist and that has its roots in Soviet doctrine but we're that's too far afield for now. Yeah, can I ask just very quickly, could you talk a little bit about how Franco fits into, you know, not not whether or not he's the true fascist or not but how did Francoist Spain. You know, what was the flavor of you know kind of authoritarianism that was there and do you think that in a weird way I mean he kind of disappeared because Spain was a basket case for most of the 20th century but is it his kind of version of authoritarianism that seems to be coming back in a big way. Yeah, so this is an interesting question if I may I mean just because he fuses religion and, you know, and a past like you know every country creates a national myth but he had a pretty long, you know, success but he had an incredibly long run. And a lot of it was appeals to a golden age, but not as elaborate, you know, perhaps as like the invented Nazi past past or Mussolini's linkage of modern Italy which is a product of 19th of the 19th century to ancient Rome. Yeah, so it's an interesting question. Because I think there are a couple things going on first of all, a lot of fascist scholars of fascism have kind of come around to the idea at least last time I dive deep into this come around to the idea that that fascist Spain wasn't actually fascist. The phalanges or whatever they call themselves the party of Franco, they would put up press releases saying yeah we're not that. And we got to remember that Spain stayed out of World War two. I didn't want to have any part of any of that kind of stuff and in fact the safest place to be in all of continental Europe. If you were a Jew was Spain and refugees from all over displaced Jewish refugees from all over the place first went to Italy because they knew they'd be safe there. In 1938 were not the Nazis basically take over, but beyond that they all went south to Spain because Franco was not a genocidal anti semi neither was Mussolini but anyway. So there's that part of it is that he was just a classic authoritarian cardio right wing kind of dictator, not looking to export revolution or any of that kind of stuff. I think one of the reasons why he is so frozen in people's imaginations as like this face of fascism is because of the Spanish Civil War, which was the testing ground for the contest between the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany and you had so many Western like American intellectual pro Soviet communists fellow travelers whatever who went and either chronicled it or fought in like the Lincoln brigades and that kind of thing that the propaganda about the rightists in the Civil War was so wildly disproportionate to the reality. And it just sort of hung there and stuck because they had sort of a sense of personal grievance and that I think the hang time of that stuck with people but you can be a right wing dictator and we already right wing dictators are bad without being a totalitarian right and certainly without being a fascist certainly without being a genocidal, you know, murderer. We've had lots and lots of right wing dictators out there and left wing dictators. I think right wing dictators I'm a Jean Kirkpatrick guy I think they're generally better for countries because so long as no one questions their rule. They leave a lot of civil society and a lot of institutions alone because they don't have this let's start over at year zero mentality. Yeah, I don't think Franco, I think there are very few people who would put Franco in the same box as as certainly as Hitler or even a Mussolini. Do you think though that that model because you know one of the things that we're you know we are still talking about totalitarianism as if it's 1940. And realistically most governments and and you know China is an interesting case study to think about this in terms of authoritarian regimes, but for the most part, they are not trying to get into every single nook and cranny every aspect of lived They, you know, expansive governments are happy to kind of let people go about their business somewhat. You know that I mean, you know that the totalitarianism that you see figured in books like 1984. You know, like it, it's been tried and it's failed. And so then you get something more like, perhaps a Francoist regime where there are a lot of appeals to the past to uniformity to solidarity, certainly to the authority of the government but you know they're they're not trying to come into your house and dictate that everything that you have in your house perfectly matches some kind of totalizing ideology or philosophy. Yeah, I mean, it's worth just if you knew it's just trivia it's worth pointing out that Mussolini is the guy who actually creates the word totalitarianism and he did not mean it as an evil thing right I mean this is one of these things it's very hard for people who look at who who think that like the Nazis chose to be the bad guys and be portrayed as evil people by British actors in movies for a thousand years. Mussolini was not saying totalitarianism was the way that we think of totalitarianism or the way Hannah aren't or anybody wrote about totalitarianism. He thought of it more like a holistic way. Right everyone everyone's included everyone belongs everything within the state nothing outside of the state, but the state wasn't this controlling evil thing it was this, you know, familial body politic no one left behind kind of sense. No child left behind in some ways, you know, and. And so I agree like China's kind of a problematic case because of the the social credit score stuff and North Korea is kind of a problematic case. The Taliban you could say is like totalitarian in the sense that they're very few nooks and crannies of life that you have any agency. Right according to these kinds of things but the kind of soft totalitarianism which I think is something Hayek and others wrote about that you can you can see in the West has more to do with. robust civil society sort of media cultural shaming and bullying. Then it has to do with sort of state driven things although I think the state can play a role in some of that stuff and in negative ways title nine stuff and all that. It's more crowdsourced totalitarianism. This holistic in the sense you're talking about that and this you know it's a kind of bastardized version I've always thought of enlightenment systems of thinking where it's like you are figuring it all out and you're creating a unified field theory and in a way. What we're talking about here is an authoritarianism perhaps in Italy, where it's like everything fits into the system, and if it doesn't. It gets kicked out you know it might be silence that might have you know castor oil poured down its throat until it dies. You know there are various ways to deal with it or the system adapts to it but the idea, you know and this is something every environmentalist I think every Christian Catholic integral list understands that like. All things are connected, we live in a world that we're doing systems thinking, which was kind of new a novel when it started being applied to, you know things like environmentalism in the 60s, but that's the world everybody thinks in that way. And so for the same reason that you know you shouldn't buy from a company that employs slave labor or children and factories. This is the world we're living in where we think every everything is fractal every every action every part of our lives contains the everything else. I agree that entirely and once you start once you buy into that, it's kind of like wow where does this stop, you know right so I just want to have a I want to have a quiet cup of coffee without worrying where the fucking beans come from, or you know whether or not I you know is it is it immoral for a man to stand while he peas because women can't do that. I mean you know you just want to you want out of the system for a right so I agree that entirely I've been saying for 20 years that the single most fascistic thing fascistic thing that is said every day in America is if you're not part of the solution you're not part of the problem. This idea that you don't have a right to exit you don't have a right to be in a safe harbor to not care about some issue is considered to be you know it's like this is how Ingram Kennedy talks about race right you're either you're either a racist or you're an anti racist there's no neutral position and anti racist requires you to do the things that I say prove you're an anti racist because you're assumed to be guilty until proven innocent and guilt and innocence is determined by whether or the policies I choose right that's a very fascistic way of thinking about things and there's a term. I mean it's Buddhist think this is like short I think it's very human our brains want an integral social order I think that's right and then one of the things about modernity is realizing that you can only have them at certain scale so you can have it in your little church but you can't really you know it's it's it's high ex microcosm versus macrocosm you cannot scale out. You know the G'mine shaft to the entire gasel shaft without ruining both right and the Germans I'm sorry to throw around all the German lingo but I don't get to do it very often. The German Nazis had a phrase that they stole from electrical engineering I think called like shelter which meant coordination. And it basically said, every it's sort of it was sort of like an updating of the sort of Darwinian stuff about the body politic, which said every institution in society needs to be like a chip or a transistor in a machine, all working together all pointing in the same direction, all in service to the same ideas so one of the things that scholars who tell it how Italianism will point out about the differences between the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany is that Nazi Germany seems superficially more right wing, in part because it allowed a lot of old institutions to keep existing, whereas the Soviets tore them all down and started over kind of thing. And the problem with that is that under the theory of the glyceum tongue, you could be a quote unquote, independent fraternity at a university. So long as the leadership of the university was sworn into and loyal to the Nazi Party program. And the same thing with the ballet company and the bowling league. And so it was a way to see to project superficial national normalcy, while at the same time guaranteeing that all or is pulled in the same direction, and that all descent was punished. If I may, if I may just for a final point on this broader topic, you know, Chuck Freund, Charles Paul friend of use right for reason a lot I retired in the, in the odds. But he talked about in the Soviet Union how the Western music that most freaked out the Soviets was not rock and roll or even jazz it was teeny bop or pop by people like Neil Sadaka. And Paul anchor where they were singing, you know, kind of silly tunes about like puppy love where it was like, because there was no political dimension to it at all like rock at least it's like oh you know you're pushing back against something or whatever and this, the thing that they couldn't stand was the idea that there existed a world in which politics and ideology just did not matter. And that freaked them out and in many ways, I, you know, again, you know, we need to draw many many distinctions but this is part of what life in 21st century America is like you know we have people who have dueling comprehensive holistic systems of understanding everything the shower you take in the morning to the job that you during the day and the TV shows, or the live theater you watch at night. And, you know, you either are with the program, or you're not and you know you're either part of the solution or you're part of the problem and that's a, you know, it libertarians find this very appealing like one of the things when you talk to libertarians are like what's appealing about it is it's a full system. It explains everything. And there are real problems with that and you know you've been yapping about Friedrich Eich or invoking him several times I think Hayek is one of the people who is problematic to certain types of dogmatic libertarians obviously because in, you know, particularly in the counter revolution of science which I think is his most important book. He questions, you know whether or not the enlightenment was right to start thinking about single systems that include all of human activity because that way madness lies and I think we're living in an attenuated version of the, you know, of the mass, you know, psychosis that came out of that that engineering mentality in the mid 20th century. I want to talk, I think we should talk a little bit more about Maloney's attitude towards all this towards totalizing systems and whether she is an advocate of that or an opponent of that because there was this this viral speech that she made that a lot of conservatives were sharing approvingly that in some ways seems to be pushing back against kind of, you know, categorizing everyone from the top down but at the same time Nick you had some serious problem qualms and objections to it. I wanted to just play that clip, and then have me give have you give your reaction to that and everyone this is going to be an Italian subtitled so if you're just listening it's going to be a couple minutes of Italian but there are subtitles. Yeah. This is the reason why today we are doing so much. This is the reason why today this point has made so much fear because we don't want to be numbers. We are here to say that we don't give numbers. We will defend the value of the human person, of every single human person because one of us has a unique genetic code and it is visible. And this is what one likes to say. We will defend it, we will defend it. He's the father of the family. He's the father of the family. He's the father of the family. Repentance for our freedom because we will never be simple and simpleように valiera especulation e diniziario. That's a beautiful language. It IS. Yeah. is. What's your reaction to that, Nick? Because she does talk a little bit about individualism, individual identity, but it's kind of a stew of different things in there. Right. And it's also, you know, what's being opposed is the idea that you are either this member of, you know, of a family and of a nation and of a gender that is okay, or you are a perfect consumer slave that you've been denuded and deracinated of all thick identity that you're born into and culture that is around you. And then you are just like a sitting duck for, you know, international financial speculators, which in an Italian context in particular is a, you know, is the way of talking about Jewish bankers and international capital, which exists only to exploit people. What set me off about this is that the, you know, the individual, I think what is great about modernity and sometimes I call it libertarian modernity is that we have shifted from a time where you are born into a system and that system defines you, whether it's the family, whether it's the nation, whether it's the religion, whatever, gender roles and things like that. Modernity in one way can be looked at as the shift and this is, you know, what happens in the Enlightenment, the shift from the system to the individual getting to make more and more choices to define themselves as they see fit and to move into different systems to create new systems to try out new things and new identities and move freely. And I think about, you know, that in the context of my mother's parents were Italian immigrants who moved to the United States from southern Italy in the mid-1910s, essentially to escape World War I, where my grandfather certainly would have been killed, he was an uneducated farmer who had been, you know, for a thousand years. My grandparents on both sides, my father's side was from Ireland, but, you know, they were raised to be peasants and serfs and fodder for other people's existing systems. The move to America was a change in that and I feel like she in the name of individual sanctity is reasserting the idea that God, country, and family are the things that matter most. And it just seems to me, you know, particularly, it seems to me that's at odds with the individualism that she is invoking and that we take for granted in many ways in the United States as a liberatory force. When you layer that in an Italian context and Italy in a, you know, in a, you know, defensible way is a failed state. Since World War II, you know, it has a new government every six months, every couple of years, and they are looking for outside reasons for why it is not working as well as it should. That worries me because in a European historical context, when you start blaming outsiders for your problems, bad things follow from that. Her party is insisting on, you know, they're against gay marriage. They are against migration, both legal and illegal. They don't like refugees coming. They are asserting a traditional identity, a traditional Italian identity that is based on this God, family, country thing, which is a recent vintage, the way that they define it the way that, you know, the Catholic Church, which I was raised in and I have five of seven sacraments, like I'm pretty, you know, I'm pretty far up the list on that. You know, the Catholic Church changes how it acts and what it believes over time, but it always pretends there's a broken, you know, unbroken chain of succession that it goes all the way back to Peter and Rome. And these appeals to a unified past to an overwhelming past trouble me because they are a hallmark of authoritarianism and of European fascism. So I mean, those are some of the things that brought my hackles up. The question for us, particularly as libertarians, particularly in America, because you know, when we talk about conservatism, the way that it's being talked about now by national conservatives and whatnot, it's like, I am an individual, do I have the agency to make my choices? And do we respect the idea that we should be expanding individual choice making, not restricting it in the name of getting back to some kind of unified social order? Yeah, so Jonah, I tend to agree with Nick's reading that there's a kind of cramped idea of what individualism is in the vision she's putting forth there. But, you know, these are the kinds of things that I've been hearing conservatives complain about for a long time attacks by progressive, by the progressive elite on the family, on religion, traditional gender identity. So it's easy for me to see why some American conservatives and even some libertarians have shared this enthusiastically. Do you think that her complaints here have a valid basis? Yeah, I'm more let me put it this way, I'm more sympathetic than you guys are to what you said without being particularly sympathetic in the sense that, first of all, as long as they stay a democratic and fairly decent country, really couldn't give a rat's ass how Italy does its politics, right? They can't they can't invade Ethiopia, right? There are a bunch of things they can't do. But like, I'm kind of reminded of the Jackie Mason routine where Jackie Mason was like, it's weird with Jews and Italians, you put a Jew in a uniform, and he can kick everybody's ass. But like, the Jew out of uniform is this guy you pick on on the schoolyard and Italian out of uniform, they're incredibly tough, but you put them in uniform and they fall apart. And of course, it's unfair, he was a comedian, but like, fascist Italy, you know, did some terrible things. Some people were put to death, lots of people were beaten up and thrown in jail. Lots of property was taken away. I'm not defending any of that. It just the Italians were sort of incapable of being as brutal and ruthless and terrible as Nazis were, in part because biological racism just doesn't work in a country like like Italy. And so and she herself has said Italy is in the graveyard and we're done with fascism is in the grave where it's dead. We're not bringing that back until she proves otherwise. I kind of feel like we can take her word for it where I have so I have I have no problem with wanting to protect the family. I think the family is hugely important. I think I have no problem with wanting to give space to religion, particularly in a country like Italy, right? Like that all makes sense to me where I sort of my where my record needle scratches is when she says we're not going to be victims and turned into raw consumers by financial speculators because what the hell is that? I mean, like it's like she can't attack the state because she wants the state to be very strong. And this sort of scapegoating thing is weird. And I agree with Nick that it has there's something ominous about it because it is essentially a conspiracy theory. And the idea that markets don't respond to the needs of families is kind of weird. The idea that markets can't respond to the needs of these various forms of identity is kind of weird. But markets are always looking for markets. And they cater to anybody who has strong preferences. And there's no reason why there's this this idea that there's relentless capitalist assault on on family or faith or any of these kinds of things. What bothers me in the American context is why the hell are people sort of saying, yeah, let's do that here? I mean, like America is not Italy. It's not Hungary, the degree to which people talk about some of them very good friends of mine, you know, talk about Hungary the way the left talked about Cuba or Sweden or Russia in previous eras is creepy and weird to me. And for what it is to me is it's basically it's sort of it's a mix of power worship and propaganda where you just sort of say, look, they're getting away with stuff. I kind of like that's how we so we should do that here. And I'll be in charge the way Victor Orban is in charge over there. And we'll get everything that we want and democracy and liberalism and all this stuff gets in our way. It's very reminiscent of like Tom Freeman looking at China in the 1990s and saying, you know, he actually wrote a chapter of his book called China for a Day where he wanted to just sort of be an authoritarian quasi totalitarian one party state for a day. So he get all his favorite policies implemented. It's it's a very old form of American intellectual power worship. And it's incredibly dangerous. It's in many ways anti American. And I don't mean that in sort of like a sort of glib way. I mean, like literally, it's not the American tradition to say, let's go like on one of those game shows with a shopping cart through Europe and just grab totally alien ideas and contexts and throw them in our cart and bring them to America and impose them here. Americans are not Italians. We're not even frigging Canadians. And the idea that you can go shopping in Hungary or or Italy or Russia and grab ideas that you're going to impose with the state in the United States is completely a tell on what your actual motives are and very little to do with any sort of serious political program. This I mean, it's what what you're alluding to here is the rise of national conservatism in America. And these are the people who are largely cheering the rise of Maloney in Italy and Orban and Hungary. I I just wonder, you know, you said on one hand, you don't really care much about what happens in Italy. On the other hand, you know, we had we all remember Brexit kind of preceding the rise of Trump. Like, should we be thinking about it in those terms? Do you think is this kind of a bellwether of, you know, what's coming to America? Oh, that's fair. I mean, if you're talking about it as a canary in the coal mine about the kind of politics that are coming, that's a perfectly legitimate thing to care about. And again, I did caveat saying I want Italy to stay a decent and democratic country. I also wanted to stay a country that I would like to be a tourist in, you know, but but they're free to figure out things as they go. I have I like I like real diversity, you know, diversity of institution, diversity of ways of seeing the world. I want, you know, I want European countries to feel like they're a different country when I visit them. And so I give leeway to other countries that I wouldn't give to my own. But yeah, look, I mean, I think there's there's a really important article in I want to say it's the European Journal of Political Science, but I might have the title wrong. A few years ago, which studied basically every recession and depression going back to I think to the 1830s, and it found that financial crises in particular ones that financial crises that cause recessions in particular have very long populist tales, because there's something so dislocating about financial crises other than like other economic shocks, you lose your mortgage is not just you lose your job, you sort of you feel like the system lied to you. And I think that the financial shock of 2007 2008 created what made Trump possible. It made the tea parties possible. It made Occupy Wall Street possible. It made Bernie Sanders someone that people take seriously. And I think we are still in the long tail of populism from that to a certain degree. There are other things that fuel populism, the changing nature of automation and and and all that. I think social media makes everything worse in lots of ways. So it's worth paying attention to to be sure. But you know, the idea I'm like I wrote about this recently, I lived in prod for a very short period of time. Matt Welch was there when I got there. And he was there after I left. He was there much longer. But I remember talking to people about the Yugoslav Civil War at the time, which was going, which was really getting going back then. And there were already murmurs about the Slovakians wanting to leave Czechoslovakia. And I kept asking Czechs, you know, do you think there's going to be a war like that here? And the Czechs are not going to kill people to keep Slovakia. And Slovakians were like, I'm not going to kill people to like leave, you know, it's just not like it doesn't work in a way. And the only reason I bring it up is like in in the early 1990s, we had a lot of talk about the Balkanization and the breakdown of the international order and all this kind of stuff because the Soviet Union and all that. Different countries are different. I mean, again, Nazi Germany and fascist Italy, very different countries. What happens in Italy doesn't necessarily come here. And if it does come here, it won't be the same thing as that happened in Italy, because Italians are different than Americans. I think I agree with that completely. But Zach, I also think you're right to kind of put it in the context of Brexit, which also reminds me of Brexit and Trump, in a way, are good illustrations of Martin Gurry's argument and the revolt of the Republic, you know, that we are in an age now where it is relatively easy to mobilize forces that tear things down. But then, you know, and they're responding to failures and systems to actually deliver what they say they're going to do. But then they don't know what to do next. And Brexit, you know, I mean, it's amazing because the Brexit vote happened. And it's still not really completed. And they've gone through a couple of different, you know, they'll go through a couple different more prime ministers and governments before they probably end up coming back to something that's relatively close to what the EU was, or England's response with the with the Italian situation here and particularly those appeals to God, country and family. And I am a huge admirer of the way at various points that, you know, the Catholic Church in Central Europe was one of the main bulwarks against communism and absolutely work, not, you know, depending on where you are, the Soviets tried to break down the nuclear family, you know, so did the Israeli government in its early days, because they recognize that families are oftentimes counterforces to, you know, to the state or to other sources of power. So like I understand all of these groups, you know, religion, family, national identity, can act as a powerful hedge and push back against a larger, you know, insurgent force. And I think that's all good. But what worries me is when people want to stop that movement, because they say no, our version of what we're talking about is good. And now the individual, the individual's right to decide or choose can go to hell. I think what we're seeing in Italy and certainly, actually, fuck Italy for now, you know, there's my, my, you know, my family left 100 years ago, so I don't have to worry about it anymore. But in the United States, I think what you're seeing among a lot of national conservatives is at the precise moment when the United States is becoming more diverse, there are more types of people in the country than ever before. And they are mixing in new, mongrelizing in new ways that I personally, I'm drawn to, I find exciting. There's a reason why after 30 years, I moved back to New York, because I want to be in a place that is a mixing, you know, a melting pot in a mixing bowl and all of that kind of stuff. It's not for everyone. But the way national conservatives talk about this is it is too disruptive. It's too chaotic. I am lost. And my traditions and my culture and my meaning and they want to rigidify what is considered an acceptable identity, what is considered an acceptable life philosophy, or lifestyle and things like that. And to me, I find that I find that really disturbing. Because what national conservatives are doing, and Jenna, I'd be interested in your sense of the shift from an older version of conservatism that you were raised in and you, you know, helped kind of articulate in the course of your career, national conservatives are now saying, you know, we should use the state to enforce our vision of the good life. That is me layer. Yeah. I want to layer one thing on top of that to have Jonah address because, you know, looking at the Italian situation in particular, you know, there was a vote of no confidence against the government as they have faced this increasing economic pressure, both from the COVID-19 lockdowns and or interest the pandemic generally and also the war in between Ukraine and Russia. And Maloney, interestingly was, I mean, she's very, she's been against, she came out against the lockdowns. This has been like an animating thing in the United States against kind of the progressive movement here is a backlash to a lot of the COVID policies that were enacted by blue state governors. But there's this weird irony, which I think Nick is talking about here, where the solution being presented as well, not we need a kind of libertarian reset, it's that we need a right wing social engineering type of reset, like the left has captured all the institutions. So it's not that we need to reduce the power of the government, it's that we need the rights to recapture all the institutions and form them to our liking. How did this happen? Is this good? And can we, you know, escape that or offer some sort of like viable alternative? Yeah, so there's a lot there. I'm glad you brought up the pandemic. I think that's another thing. I'll just get that out of the way that fuels populist intent. You're so right about, you know, I would say even even 911, but certainly the financial crisis and COVID like we, we haven't actually kind of accounted for what a major impact the financial crisis and the slow recovery from the recession really is. And you know, one of the things just to add into that is that what's amazing to me is people that I know who are under 30 or say under 35 have kind of become adults in a system that they feel doesn't speak to them. So it's not even like they're disillusioned. It's like they have only, you know, it's not like they were riding high and then they lost their job. It's like they don't even get the job that they have promised. Yeah. And the, and, and, and similarly, I think the pandemic, like, I think it's in the John Barry book about the Great Influenza, like when the, when the last pandemic, you know, 100 years ago ended, people just didn't really want to talk about it. They were sort of so ashamed of how they behaved. And I think a lot of people behave badly on both the left and the right during the pandemic because our brains are wired to like deal with invisible enemies in all sorts of complicated ways. And the political, as John and I will tell you, the political centers of Iran are very close to the concern about hygiene centers of our brain. So anyway, that, that aside, I think, look, I want to be clear about something. I think most of the national conservatism talk is bullshit. And I mean that in a, in a, in a pretty serious way, I think we can get into the analytical stuff and there, I mean, and there are some serious people who are into it. I just think they're just wrong. And they're caught up in what they think is an idea whose time has come. But they're decent people and all of that. But I also think there are a lot of young people in particular, who are, I want to get into, we're since talking about Italy, I don't want to get into Italian elite theory, but there are a lot of people who see this as a way to skip a whole bunch of rungs in a ladder and be the leader of a new movement that they think will take over. And then when they take over, they'll be much higher than they would be if they paid their dues working up the old ladder. And so there are a bunch of kind of desperate people who are getting on a bandwagon at a time of legitimate vulnerability for traditional conservatism and saying, you know, I'd rather start a new club than be the assistant treasurer in this long standing club. And I think that explains a lot of the passion about this stuff is, is it's careerism and ambition less than serious ideas. And one of the tells about that, you know, and Nick and I are two people actually like care a great deal about sort of weird quirky ideological intellectual history is that none of their ideas are particularly new. Like the post liberal integralist Catholic guys, this was the exact argument that was going on between sort of within the national review world between Bozell, who started a magazine called Triumph and National Review. All of these arguments are pretty old. Most of them were defeated at various times. And a lot of it is just sort of warmed over Buchananism in a lot of ways. I think a big chunk of it is also just simply a product of the hyper polarized time that we're in. And, you know, one of the things I, you know, there are a lot of things I would do differently if I were to write liberal fascism again. One of the things I regret is I'm one of the people most responsible for injecting this obsession about Saul Alinsky into the right. And but I wrote about Saul Alinsky as a bad guy. Right. I was like, this guy is a bad guy. He cheats. He lies. He thinks everything is permissible nearest weapon to hand politics. It's immoral and bad. And there are some weird stuff that happened on the right where it first became sort of respect your enemies. Oh, the left uses these tactics. And then very quickly it became we have to use them too. And so this Alinsky so infected so much of the right that you get these people who behave as bad as they imagine their political enemies behave and not even actually how they actually behave. But like the worst versions in their imagination of their enemies, they now think we have to do it. That's bananism. That's so much of this stuff where it's like it's like own the libs and liberal tears or delicious stuff has now become the aim of it rather than sort of an ancillary benefit. And I think that's unsustainable and irresponsible and intellectually indefensible. What's your so what's your response to their fundamental critique that kind of playing nice or within the those boundaries, those, you know, those norms is just a losing strategy. I mean, Jonah, you are just apologizing yet again for David's Frenchism. Yeah. So I think all of that, I don't say all of that because look, there is, I share a lot of, you know, like I'm still a conservative. So there's some things I share concerns about with people who call themselves conservatives. But I mean, I just take the example that I find most annoying is this idea that you get from this new sort of common good constitutionalism crowd. And whenever you hear common good from a right winger now, just think it's social justice for right wingers. It's that's just what they're talking about, right? Social justice for the left basically means everything we want is social justice. It's a permission structure for saying we should just be in charge and get the things that we want. And the common good conservatism stuff is basically the same thing. And so there's this argument that you get from a lot of these people, particularly these people who are very hungry and ambitious to, you know, rise much faster and like the legal profession who just assert that liberal constitutionalism, you know, that originalism is morally neutral. That it's procedural liberalism and that conservatives will always lose in contests over procedural liberalism. That complaint died down a little bit after Dobbs, I have to point out. But the idea that the liberalism inherent in the constitutional structure is somehow value neutral is mind bogglingly stupid, right? The idea that you should have the right to face your accuser in court is not morally neutral. The right that you should have a jury of your peers is not morally neutral. The right that you have a right to your property is not morally neutral. The right that you have the right to to worship as you see fit, to speak your conscience, to move freely. None of these things are morally neutral. They are in fact profoundly moral policies and commitments that human beings murdered each over over for centuries to reach as a sort of this post-wisphalian compromise about how to run a society. And to solve the sudden say that if a neutral process, which is another way of saying a fair process, right, that applies to everybody the same, which is a very moral position to take, that if we don't win everything, that just proves the system doesn't work. I think it's so profoundly misguided and dangerous. And the level of underpants, no, I'm thinking in so much of this is just mind boggling. Step one, we purge the old fusionist right and the libertarians who ran Washington for 30 years. Step two, question mark, question mark, question mark. Step three, total victory. I mean, you had JD Vance talking about what that the government should seize the assets of the Ford Foundation and give them to displaced workers in Ohio or something like that, right? Can you talk? You want to put it into law that the government gets to seize and talk about fascism, gets to seize the assets of ideological opponents and give them to their allies? I mean, how could that work badly for conservatives when the government is run by us? Can I ask how much you touch on it a bit? How much of this is generational in a way that is almost independent of ideology? Because there's a version of this going on on the left, too. You have Bernie Sanders and you have Gray Beards, but on both sides, you have a lot of people, older Gen X people now and certainly boomers who are fitter than ever and living longer and not vacating the stage. And you have a press of younger people, regardless of ideology, who are just like, get the fuck out of my way. And I find there's just that pressure that we got to unstop the toilet here, which is a very unfortunate metaphor, which makes no sense. And I apologize for it now and forever. Particularly because they're unstopping it from below, which is the problem with them. But one of the things that I find kind of fascinating about it is, and again, this is irrespective of ideology, is that this 60s generation, for lack of a better term, when they were facing that, a lot of them just went out and built their own institutions. They built their own communes, whether they were right-wing organizations or left-wing. I mean, even Buckley in like the 50s, who's the ultimate establishment guy, went out and built a new magazine that created, in a 50-year run, transformed the American political landscape and cultural landscape. And that to me is one of the things that's most frustrating is that you have that useful exuberance and sense of entitlement that the future is ours and we want it now. Everybody is like Jim Morrison. But they're not saying, and we're going to go build our own stage. They're going to say, we're going to take it from you. And now I'm really showing my age, but it's like spoiled children. The kids today are all Veruca Salt. They're not going to go build their own factory and buy stuff. They're just going to get it from the people who have already made the money. Yeah, so I mean, we're pretty much on the same Gen X page on this. If you look at so many of the controversies at the New York Times or the Atlantic and a lot of these mainstream liberal institutions, or if you talk to some of the people who run those places or at NBC or MSNBC, I have friends in various of these places, the baby boomers and Gen Xers are just flat out terrified of the young staffers. And I think that one of the things, and so like a lot of the Me Too stuff turned out to be far more legitimate and there were far fewer cases of exaggeration than I would have expected. But when you look at some of the like the woke controversies, the guy who used the N word of the New York Times, who was just sort of like pulled down, even though the way he used it was utterly defensible. A lot of these things I think are exactly that. They are. It's a masthead struggle. Yeah, it's it's it's it's the the young is getting frustrated. I think the one of the dynamics that I don't think it's nearly the coverage or sociological investigation that it deserves is like, you know how like the the French Revolution and several revolutions since the revolutionaries were like college students and young people who got worked up in saloons or bars, right, or cafes, and they would egg each other on and they get all worked up and let's go build a barricade, you know, blah, blah, blah. I think slack channels at some of these institutions play the same role. And like my understanding is that the New York Times, the people who are allowed in like the group chat and are included like, like the newspaper delivery union officials, whatever. And since these kids are so cowed by charges of sexism or homophobia or whatever, that you get this dynamic where everyone has to prove that they're part of the glyceal tongue, right? Everyone has to prove that they're part of the group think and they are not dissenters from it, that they get whipped up and then it spills out in public. And you're like, why is everybody starting at a level of anger at like nine? That's something that seems so innocuous. And it's because we're not seeing what's going on in these virtual, you know, saloons of revolutionary Paris. There was. Oh, God, I'm sorry. Go ahead. Well, I know that we're running out of time. Jonah, how much longer do we have you for? I can hang out for a little bit more. It's fine. Okay. Okay. Well, yeah. But before you before you have to go, I did want to bring up one specific topic, which always comes up. Anytime you come on reasons platform, we get a lot of people, you know, saying we need to grill you about foreign policy. And I just wanted to bring it up in the context of, you know, it's something that I think is an underrated driver of the right wing populist phenomenon. Most Americans, you know, don't put it at the top of their list, according to polling, but there is a sort of realism on the rise. And, you know, I do come from a pretty non-interventionist perspective. There's a there's this recognition, I think, among Americans that we can't endlessly spend money supporting other people's fights around the world. And if you go back to every modern U.S. presidential election, you know, as far back, let's say as George W. Bush not involving an incumbent, the more rhetorically non-interventionist candidate has been that's been the winner up through Trump. And so I'm just wondering, you know, is there perhaps a lesson here that both the center-left and center-right need to learn if they want to prevent their own obsolescence? Because, you know, in terms of protecting institutions and, you know, not burning it all down, that's something I've come to have a much more greater appreciation for and affinity with conservatives on in recent years. And I think that's something we need in our politics. And it's something I've criticized within the libertarian movement as well. But the, you know, the foreign policy question, I think, is a big divide and a big rift there. And, you know, have you ever thought about it in that context? Because that is one aspect of national conservatism and certainly Trumpism. Yeah, no, it's an interesting question. It's a good question. It's something, and look, depending on who's demanding that I be grilled about foreign policy, there are things I wrote 20 years ago that I would not write today. And I don't need to list them all. But if someone's throwing around quotes from something from a long time ago, you know, 50-something-year-old Jonah is different than 20-something-year-old Jonah. That said, there are a couple of things going on with the question that I think are interesting. And I mean this in a totally good faith way. One is you could actually turn the question around. And we're supposed to be sitting here talking about how we're troubled by national conservatism. I could ask you guys, as libertarians, does it trouble you that the national conservatives are moving in your direction in foreign policy? What does that say about your foreign policy commitments? Second, you said, you know, like you made this point about presidential elections. And I think it's a good point. I'm going to put a pin in it because I might question it to some degree. But let's just stipulate that it's true that more non-interventionist foreign policy is more popular. That may be true. I suspect that it's always true until a bunch of jihadis cut off a bunch of American journalist heads or a dictator invades a democratic country or a country trying to become democratic. The Jacksonian part of America that I like is that, you know, we want to get like take about getting out of Afghanistan. Joe Biden shared very much the NatCon and for a lot of libertarians, libertarian position on foreign policy. We just got to get out 20 years of war at a long back-and-forth Peter Suderman about this. And the thing is that, yeah, as a generic proposition, I want to get out of Afghanistan. Lots of Americans want to get out of Afghanistan. What they don't want is to be humiliated or feel like the investment wasn't worth it or feel like they lost a war and the bad guys took over. And so opinions wildly changed after Biden screwed up the withdrawal from that country. People's Americans' attitudes with about foreign policy, I think, are much less simplistic than a lot of the ideological arguments about this stuff would make it seem. And regardless, again, stipulating that you're right about the popularity of non-interventionism, which, again, I don't think holds steady in the way that maybe the framing suggests, but let's say it is, it's popular. Simply because something is popular doesn't necessarily mean it's the right policy. And one of the reasons we're why we can't have nice things, one of the reasons I argue with the NatCon guys all the time and always yell at me, say, don't you understand this is what Republican voters want? Don't you understand this is what Americans want? And my position is I don't care. It's still the wrong thing to do. I've been writing against populism for 20 years, and it used to mark me as sort of a conservative and good standing. Now it marks me as a cuck. And the thing is, is like, you know, as Kevin Williamson says, you know, the other day, we were talking on one of these kinds of things, and someone said, you know, well, this is what are the American people want? And he said, well, that's the first strike against it. You know, I don't put, I think democracy and populism are very different for all sorts of ways. But one of them is the procedural mechanical way about making decisions as channeled through elections, through elected officials who sort of are supposed to apply their judgment and their prudence to a question and not simply be wrote respondents to to voters. Populism isn't even about voting. It's just about pure anger. And the idea of listening to the mob. And when people say to me all the time, I mean, all the you don't understand, people are really angry. They just you just don't get that they're so angry. I was like, okay, no, I think I get that they're angry since they vent their anger at me almost every single day. I get the sense. But let me ask you, what was the last time you made a really good sound decision when you were blindingly angry about something? That's not how you're supposed to do politics. So I'm completely open to arguments about retrenchment in foreign policy about going a different way. I you can have to work really hard to say we should get out of NATO or something like that. But that's fine. But if you're just going to say, well, this is what Paul say, or this is what a focus group says, or this is what a bunch of people shouting say, or what people who phone in, you know, who like email into Tucker Carlson's TV show could not give a rat's ass about it, because that's not an argument. Could you talk briefly, you mentioned Buchananite, and I'm curious if a lot of our audience here may not know who you're referring to. James Buchanan, one of the greatest presidents in the United States. Yeah, I mean, he's right. He's the bachelor too. So he had that going far. He had his weekends free. No, but Pat Buchanan, you know, bestowed the earth like a colossus, you know, when we were, you know, making our careers, you know, and I mean, basically, you know, from about 1970, until what, maybe 2005, 2010 at the latest, I mean, he was a giant figure. And in the 90s, he, you know, took on George H W Bush, he took on the Republican establishment and was articulating a populist line. He was against, you know, he was, he pushed culture war battles that were still being fought about now, you know, about gay rights or alternative lifestyles and things like that. But he was also a, you know, weirdly a non-interventionist, while sometimes a Cold War hawk. But how important is he not, not as a direct figure, but like his thinking to a kind of Republican or conservative party crack up? Yeah, so I mean, so again, Pat Buchanan ran in 92 and again in 96. It's interesting, I just wrote about this yesterday. But, you know, in 96, he was a protectionist. He was a immigration restrictionist in robustly. He was used for industrial policy. He played cute dog whistle games about how he was against affirmative action. But if we're going to have it, we should have it for people like O'Malley's and, and that kind of thing. So he did a lot of white identity politics kind of sub Rosa. Very anti Israel, very anti Israel to a point where if I'm not mistaken, I mean he was, he was dubbed, you know, actually anti Semitic by William Buckley in the pages of national review, if not quite as bad as some other members of the national review family. Yeah, he played, he played footsie with things. And, you know, we were talking about Rob Long earlier, but you know, I have this sort of standard line about how I have deep roots in conservatism. True story. Pappy Cannon was at my bris. And Rob Long said, that might explain his attitude towards the Jews. And he was introduced to my dad by a guy named Victor Lasky, who very few people remember, but who was actually my brother's godfather. And Victor introduced him to my dad and said, Sid, I want you to meet Pappy Cannon. He is a terrific red baiter. And it was meant as a compliment and it was received as a compliment. So but anyway, but it's interesting if you go back and you look in 1996, what the American Conservatory Union, what the Heritage Foundation, what all sorts of like leading institutions, what national review, you know, wrote about Buchanan, they all said he's not a conservative anymore, because he was for industrial policy. He was for sort of playing games about identity politics. He was against, you know, trade, yada, yada, yada. And I bring that up in part because I get key. I keep getting told that I'm not a conservative anymore as if I'm the one who change when in fact the party has moved or I should say the grassroots and a bunch of institutions have moved towards the Buchanan. I position on stuff. I think some of that is the work of Buchanan laying down the groundwork for some of these things. A lot of it is Trump. And a lot of it is just sort of the, you know, one of the problems we have in the culture right now is no one has allowed this. No one wants to say they're the establishment. Everybody wants to be the outsider. And the sort of outsider groups are making these kind of pitchfork pat Buchananite kind of arguments. And so I think he has a, you know, he's going to matter as a matter of intellectual history in all sorts of ways. And he's sort of like the dashboard saint for at least some of the neck. Part of the problem is that there are actually some really if some profound ideological disagreements among that whole mass of people, right? The sort of ultra ultra montane Catholicism is kind of hard to reconcile with national conservatism. And and then there's just sorts of other people are far crankier, which is why I think it has much less to do with intellectual coherence and consistency and more to do with it's just where the heat is and they're all like moss. If it means anything tonight in New York, I'm going to the first compact magazine lecture, which is a magazine started by Sarabha Mari, who is, you know, an Iranian convert Catholicism who started this new magazine that's bringing together all people, Michael Lind, who was an enemy of national review conservatism in the 90s is giving the first lecture and he's being introduced by one of the hosts of the Red Scare podcast. And then the Yugoslavian philosopher Slavožižek is on the mass set of compacts. So it's a world which is stranger than we can imagine in many ways. Can I also and I don't mean to preempt you, Zach, but this question of nobody wants to be the establishment is kind of fascinating, right? Because and I should also add that Papu Kenan has had a large influence on many libertarian thinkers, particularly people who read Lou Rockwell.com and, you know, are involved in like the Mises Institute because of his anti interventionism, which is somewhat selective. Because I remember being on TV shows with him where it was like we got a bomb Iran and Iraq and all of that. And it's just like, you know, it doesn't want to intervene in the Yugoslav civil war on behalf, I believe, of Kosovo, right? Because they're part of Christian Europe and all that kind of stuff. But that but that idea of Christian Europe or Christianity, whatever that means is somehow important to all of these people. But that question of the establishment, it's kind of a great moment in the sense that like so much has been leveled. I mean, you left National Review. National Review is, you know, as monumental a political institution, you know, certainly in post-war America has anything else. I mean, it really, you know, and I went to the 50th anniversary dinner, which I believe was one of the last public appearances of Bill Buckley, who was in a kind of bitter mood, even though he had, you know, the National Review in half a century had changed the Republican Party to change the political culture that had elected, you know, Ronald Reagan and, you know, George W. Bush, who at first they were kind of bullish on, etc. And now everything seems to be in ashes. Like, you don't want to be part of the establishment. What's going on there? And is it a good thing that we now live in a dispersed, decentralized world where people are fighting, you know, have we gone back to, you know, an era of nation states where, you know, perhaps more people can sort to be where they want, albeit in a more fragmented kind of polity? Yeah, I'm not there with you on that. I think that, first of all, just to be clear, I have nothing but love for National Review and my friends there. And I did not leave in some grand huff. I left in part because after 20 years, I wanted to start a new institution. And I thought that I was also on this weird kick that I thought that, I mean, there are a bunch of different reasons we don't need to get deep in the weeds in it. But one of them was, weirdly, I felt like it kind of fell to me, and people like me, to model the behavior that I thought was so lacking on the right. Because as you know, I used to be much more of a red meat, you know, duke it out kind of guy. But that was always within the context where there was like establishment people saying, Jonah ran it in, ran it in kind of thing. And now they're the establishment people are crazy as far as I can tell, or at least a lot of them, or at least they want people to believe they're crazy for small dollar donations. But regardless, I think you've used this phrase from time to time that you like, was it like a utopia of utopias were different communities serving different people, right? And as long as you have the right of exit, people can be part of any, you know, sort of community they want. We probably both agree that certain basic protections about civil rights are probably baked into that. But for the most part, let a thousand flowers broom. If you want to be an Amish, be an Amish. If you want to be a Hell's Angel, be a Hell's Angel, whatever, right? I am, even though I will argue till I'm blue in the face that the great and good thing about America is that as a political matter, the fundamental unit of the political system is the individual because he can't make it to family. It just doesn't work as a procedural thing, right? It's got to be the individual and that the hero in the American political tradition is the guy who stands up to the mob, not the mob. That is an in nutshell, why I don't like populism. But as a matter of political philosophy of sociology, I want a lot more sticky institutions. I want all because I think where human beings flourish, where human beings actually find meaning and life satisfaction is by their membership in groups, you know, and in long lived groups, not like every five minutes, we're starting an expansion team and we're hopping over to that. And so like I'm one of these eyes and like long time listeners in my podcast, don't want to hear me say this again. But like my big problem with partisanship today is that it stems from the fact that the parties are so weak, not that they're so strong, because weak parties create strong partisanship, because politics starts to become essentially a secular religion for people. And if the parties actually had a better and more responsible fiduciary sense of their own obligations to protect their brand and protect what they believe in, Bernie Sanders never would have been allowed to run in the primaries for president in the Democratic Party and Donald Trump never would have been allowed to run in the primaries for president in the Republican Party. And what we need are more people who say I'm here in this position for a reason. And the institution that I'm at is more important than my personal desire to be a Twitter celebrity or social media influencer and all the rest. One of the problems I have with, and it gets back to where we started this conversation, but the Gleischaltung and everything being saturated with politics, I want more people to stay in their fricking lanes. And when you live in a society where every single CEO feels like they have to put forth a statement on every political controversy of the day, where every single friggin Hollywood star feels like they have to check every box when they accept an Oscar, where every store, I can defend the Black Lives Matter movement in all sorts of ways, but requiring every single store to put up a sign in its window is kind of creepy. And when we live in this era where everyone has to wear their badges about all of their ideological commitments, it makes it very hard for institutions to do their jobs. And that's the whole DEI stuff and the social justice stuff with corporations, I think is very different, dangerous because I want widget companies to make widgets. And we live in a society now where everybody feels like they have to exploit institutions for their own self-aggrandizement rather than actually serve and give themselves over to institutions to make them better and to make themselves better. And I think that's a real problem in our society. I don't disagree with you about that in many ways. And I think the question then becomes why were these institutions so weak? And what happened? And what is the role of the people who ran the institutions in destroying them? And then also, how do you rebuild trust and confidence in institutions? Because that's the thing when you look at the last 50 or so years, there's a straight line decline in trust and confidence in institutions, both public sector and private sector and philanthropic. And mostly that's not because we are just horrible human beings. It's because those institutions failed their missions in profound ways and didn't take responsibility for it, I think. And I agree that we are not simply jumping from iceberg to iceberg all the time. I often am accused of being this arch individualist where you are born without a past and you're not meshed in a social, political, cultural, economic system. And you can just do whatever you want. I don't think that at all. I just think every moment we should be expanding the scope of choice for individuals to discover and to act on how they want to live. But I think there's a lot of value in what you're saying there. Well, that brings me to what I hope we can wrap this conversation up with, which is what is an alternative vision of how to rebuild those institutions? Because when I look at Europe, it's like the options are this right-wing populism. There's democratic socialism. There's the kind of progressive technocrats. And then when I look at the US, the options aren't really that much different, but that seem to be presented at least in the form of the major influences within our two major parties. So I guess that's what I would like to put to each of you is what would you like to see? What competitor to those visions could plausibly arise that you would advocate for? Okay, so two points. One, I want to see a lot less transparency, but a lot more accountability. I think one of the problems we have, I think C-SPAN is full of patriotic people, and it was a great thing and all that, but putting cameras on Congress has helped make Congress suck. And having an eyeball with the public, it is literally impossible to have serious negotiations of any kind when they're in front of cameras. And I think that's one of the things that really weakened institutions. I want less democracy within institutions, particularly within the political parties. The political scientists used to talk about how democracy is what happens between parties, not within parties. I would get rid of the primaries. I think they've been a huge problem. But then lastly, I think, and Nick has heard me give this spiel many times over the last 5,000 years. But federalism is the only friggin real answer for a lot of this stuff. If you send power down on the most local level possible, first of all, it is impossible to have one size fits all politics from above. And I think one of the things, picking up again on this theme that we've been talking about all along, one of the things that really riles people on the left and the right is this one size fits all sort of cultural imposition from above thing. It's like, why should I, why do people in San Francisco have any reason to tell people in South Carolina how to live? And there's this feeling that abstract, sort of like Maloney stuff about financial speculators, that there are these cold unseen people from very far away who are running my life. And if you send power down the most local level possible, you will still have cultural fights. You'll still have disagreements. But you'll know who to fire, right? Because of the official, the powers that be will have names. You'll see them at town meetings and whatnot. And moreover, in the sort of populist fights about whether it's gay marriage or transgender stuff or whatever, you'll still have those disagreements. But the winners have to look the losers in the eye. They'll see each other at soccer games. They'll see each other at, you know, the supermarket or a church or whatever, and that creates a certain amount more of civility and humility in people. And I think that one of the things that, that is the real danger in politics that creates these populist back rashes creates all of these different ideological movements that search for meaning to fill the holes in their souls is people don't understand that a lot of things just don't work at scale. You know, even Rousseau thought that his sort of general will soft totalitarianism or hard totalitarianism stuff couldn't work anywhere larger than the city state of Geneva. People like people are only wired to know as human beings like 100, it's called Dunbar's number, like 150 people. Everybody else beyond that is sort of an abstraction. And when you have a central power centralized government trying to say this is how everybody has to live, it creates all sorts of problems because you're going to get mad at people who are abstractions and who aren't real people inside of your head. So send it all down to the most local level possible. This is the most mobile country in the most mobile time in the history of humanity. If you're a libertarian minded person and you're stuck somewhere where the rules don't let you have booze on a Saturday night or whatever, you can either argue democratically against it or you can move. But that's what I was sort of meaning about better about real diversity. I want this country to be a more interesting place to drive across where more people get to live the way they want to live, including in large groups. Yep, that sounds good to me. What about you Nick? Does that jive with your vision of where we need to head? Yes, in large part, but I also think there are, and this is where libertarianism, Ron Bailey and I have talked about this a lot and I know Jonah who used to work with Ron way back when had similar conversations. But there is something totalizing about libertarianism because it will say at some root level, certain rights cannot be legislated away. And so there should be more diversity, there should be more experiments in living, to use John Stuart Mills phrase, that are currently happening. But I also just without getting into kind of political maneuvering and things like that, I also think we need to start with a recognition that things are actually much better than we talk about. In just the 21st century, we went through 9-11 to terrible wars that were bad. We went through one of the biggest financial collapse and financial crisis since the Great Depression. We had COVID. There's all these things and we are actually doing really, really well as a society. People are not starving. They're, you know, what we can do is first acknowledge that we are actually doing pretty well. Another thing that I think we need to cultivate, and I'm not exactly sure how to do this, but is to cultivate a sense of history and appreciation. I mean, the reason why I remain optimistic and the reason why I want to see more experiments in living is because my parents were born in the 1920s and they were raised in slums and ghettos. They went through the Depression and World War II. And, you know, I am a generation removed from welfare. And my kids are doing much better than I am. And I'm not saying that that means everybody is or that if you're not doing well at your fault, but it's like the amount of progress that has happened in America in the past 100 years is phenomenal. And it's also replicated throughout the globe. And we do not take any account of that. We don't think about things that are older than a couple of weeks. And that leaves us in a kind of delusional state that the world is always about to end and that, you know, we are one or two gay marriage laws away from complete, you know, mental chaos and civilizational collapse or the environment is about to, you know, burn up. And these are idiotic responses to being alive at this time. And I think starting with an appreciation of that as well as a recognition of, you know, anything that is human is not alien to us. And that we, you know, we are in a very good moment in time that we can make better by actually becoming more committed to something like pluralism and tolerance and all both, you know, all of the disruption that that entails, but also all of the humility that it forces upon each of us when we start to tell people how to live. That's a thank you so much both of you. I think we'll end the stream there. And thanks for everyone who watched. We'll see you next week. Thanks, John. Thanks for having me.