 Trevor Burrus Welcome to Free Thoughts. I'm Trevor Burrus. Aaron Powell And I'm Aaron Powell. Trevor Burrus Joining us today is Yuval Levin, editor of National Affairs. He is the author of four books. His latest is Fractured Republic, Renewing America's Social Contract in the Age of Individualism. Welcome to Free Thoughts, Yuval. Aaron Powell Thanks very much for having me. Trevor Burrus You say that America is stuck in nostalgia of baby boomers. That's one of our problems or maybe the source of it. What do you mean by that? Aaron Powell Well, I think having just come through an election where two 70-year-olds were fighting to lead the country, I think we all have a little bit of a sense of what I might mean by that. But it's really, when you step back a little bit from our politics and think about how we understand our situation, how we talk about our problems, what you realize is that so much of what we have to say now is about how America has changed from a certain kind of golden moment in the 1950s and early 60s that seems to a lot of our leaders like the norm and what we ought to strive for, a moment that the left misses because it involved a much more regulated economy but also one that offered a lot more opportunities to all kinds of workers that the right tends to miss because it offered cohesive families and stronger communities and that in any case, everybody treats like what America ought to be. And the challenge we have now is how to make America great again that way to coin phrase. And so we talk about bringing back coal and steel and we talk about bringing back unions and this and that. And we talk about these as though they are solutions to 21st century challenges. And of course, in some ways, the things they offered are things that we need at any time. But they're also as ways of thinking about our economy and our society, not all that well suited to 21st century realities. And I think for both left and right, that nostalgia is really a way to avoid thinking about those problems rather than a way to come to terms with them. Do you think that they did this, the people who lived in 1917, I was thinking about this the other day, how much we talk about Reagan. When I think about 1917, I don't really think they spent so much time hung up on the 1880s talking about, oh, the Arthur administration was really the best time in America. I mean, in my perception, it wasn't, it didn't define. I might be wrong, but did you do any research into how much nostalgia ran previous American political conversations? You know, in a sense, of course, nostalgia is always part of the life of any society. And it's especially always important to a certain kind of conservative in politics. So not all nostalgia is bad. And you can't get rid of nostalgia entirely. But the intensely dominant nostalgia of the boomers in our time is, I think, quite unusual. It defines the way we understand ourselves. And I say we, that is not only those who are themselves baby boomers, but, you know, college students today, when they find that they have something to protest, they almost subconsciously emulate a model that they did not witness, a model of college protests in the 1960s. When we think about what our society is, we think of it as getting older with the baby boomers. We think of it as having been young when they were young, and as having gotten older as they've gotten older. That's really a little crazy. And it's also, it stands in the way of our seeing what opportunities we have now, what's fresh now and new, not just what's old and ending. And, you know, not to simply talk down the baby boomers, but the intense dominance they've had over our culture and our self-understanding has really done a huge amount to shape our politics throughout their lives. As a member of Generation X, the greatest generation, the influence of the boomers could be frustrating. But why do they have this outsized influence? What's special about that particular age cohort? Well, I think that, first of all, they are a massive generation and they grew up just as a certain kind of consumer-oriented economics and a certain kind of modern democratic politics was taking shape. And so throughout that time, they've just been intensely dominant. And really, when we think about ourselves as a country, I mean, I'll give you an example that I use in the book. 1950 was the peak year of the baby boom, the year when the birth rate was highest. A person born in 1950 would think now about the 1950s as a child and would have a kind of child's view of that time. Simple, families were strong, everything worked. That person would have been a teenager in the 60s and so remembers the 60s through that lens as an exciting time, the music was great, everything was possible, we were all idealistic. By the 70s, that person was entering his or her 20s, becoming an adult, a little bit disillusioned, not quite so confident. By the 80s, they were starting a family and maybe thinking more about the mortgage than about changing the world. By the 90s, it was really their time and things seemed like they might work out. They entered this century still very confident but starting to see a little bit over the hill. And by now, they're feeling like this isn't their world anymore and it's not the country they recognize and maybe the America they knew is the America they ought to make available to their grandkids but they can't. That's how somebody born in 1950 would see the last seven decades. I would argue that it's also how our entire society sees the last seven decades, including a lot of people who were not born in 1950, but we understand ourselves as having gone through that process because they went through it and the cultural dominance is just so intense that it does stand in the way of some important self-diagnosis and prescription. Well, it seems like a lot of people, Aaron and I have talked about this before in other cultural contexts that however old you are, if you say, when were things best? It's like, well, it's like 12 to 20. I'm like, oh, what a shock. You probably didn't have a job. You got to hang out all day. And people will say, oh, well, video games were clearly the best when I was 12 20, which is like categorically not true. Comic books are the best. No, that is not true. It's especially hard for us who kind of grew up in the 90s. The 90s objectively kind of sucked, but I still think they were the best time. Exactly. So is there a rolling nostalgia too because even someone like President Obama who's not a baby boomer, I think, I don't know what the technical cutoff is. You probably is a baby boomer technically, but just barely. It was born in 64. But all this discussion of when Washington worked and it was there a time when Washington worked and should we be trying to go back to that? Yeah, I think there certainly is a rolling nostalgia. People do miss their own youth. They now make Transformers movies. There's no other excuse for that. That cartoon is just not that good, by the way. No kidding. Aaron looked to be like, I'm wrong. Oh, no, because I rewatched Transformers the movie, the original cartoon like a year ago. Yeah, it's pretty bad. I was totally obsessed with Transformers and I now look down on my old self and wonder what was going on there. But look, that happens. That's unavoidable. But I do think that the dominance of the boomers in our politics and our institutions generally is different than that. It has persisted in a different way and it's shaped these institutions in a somewhat different way. And so, yeah, this talk of when government worked is always about that period in really the late 50s through the mid-60s when on some issues, certainly not all, and people often sort of put aside, say, civil rights or assassinations and the burning of a third of Washington D.C. in that period. If that's when government worked, I'm not so sure that's what you want to go back to. But this elite consensus that was so dominant for that period that allowed the great society to happen in a kind of bipartisan way, obviously a lot of people who work in these institutions kind of miss that or they hear about it from people who were present for it and think that's a time when we could do big things. But the way nostalgia works is you remember the good and you ignore the bad. And you know, American life has changed dramatically since that time. In some ways that are bad. We are a much more fragmented society, a much less unified society in a sense. There are fewer opportunities for lower-skill workers, for example. But it's also changed in some ways that are dramatically for the good. We're a much more open society, a much more diverse society, a much more dynamic society. Women are in the workplace. Right. If you didn't happen to be white and a man at that time, this might seem like a better time than that. And so, you know, I think we have a tendency to only see what we want to see. That's the nature of nostalgia. But again, it's being so dominant now makes it hard to understand quite what our problems are and also hard to see what strengths we have dealing with them. Were there specific reasons why that time was aberrant? I mean, just in American history. I mean, we had post-war. We had certain things happening. I mean, are there also specific reasons that we should not treat that as the norm because of some sort of aberrant conditions? Yeah, absolutely. So the kind of first third of my last book of Fractured Republic is really about this question. And I do think there's a way in which the United States of that time was very unusually unified and cohesive, where the first half of the 20th century, very broadly speaking, obviously, very generally, in cultural terms and in economic terms and in political terms was a time of coming together of cohesion, industrialization and progressive politics, which grew the government to match the economy, truly mass media, really much more so than now, where everyone had just a narrow set of mass experiences together through media, really created a very cohesive society. And then that society went through the Depression and two World Wars. And the America of the 1950s was a very unusually cohesive version of our country. It had enormous faith in large institutions, very unusual faith. When you look at the public attitudes as measured at that time, the University of Michigan at every presidential year does this big survey of public attitudes and they ask people what they think about institutions. They ask people, how often does the federal government do the right thing? 1964, 72% of the public said either all the time or most of the time, 72%. That's a culture that would never make the show. In 2016, the House of Hearts 13% 13% total. So this country has changed a lot in that sense in its attitude, not only about government, but about institutions generally. And I would say that that was the aberration that America in the 19th century also had no faith in institutions. The approval rating of Congress at any point in the 19th century would have been in the single digits. The country was struggling with diversity and mass immigration pretty much all the time. But that period after the war and immigration is another good example where because of the immigration laws adopted in the 1920s, the portion of Americans that was born abroad was probably at the lowest it's ever been in American history in the 1960s. In the 1970 census, the percentage of Americans born abroad was below 5%. It's a little more than 4.5%. This year it's about 15%. And that is a big change. It's a dramatic transformation. But it was also 15% in the teens, in the 19 teens. That is America's been more like this for most of its history than like that period after the Second World War. But that's the period we take as a norm and that's very hard to live up to in some ways. Well, so if that's the norm, it's so it could be the case that it was anomalous in all of these ways, but that it also was pretty good in a lot of ways. So is it so that the desire we can talk about whether we should want to return to that world. But are there reasons why even if we did, we couldn't? Yeah, sure. You know, the things we miss about that time, the cohesion, the sense of unity, also the actual practical opportunities that workers with different levels of education had, those are things worth missing. We're not crazy to miss that period. But what's happened since that time is a fragmentation, a diversification of American life that cannot simply be rolled back so that if all the major forces in American life were pushing every American to be more like everybody else for much of the first half of the 20th century, all those same forces were pushing Americans to be more like themselves in the second half of the 20th century and in our own time to be more of what they already are. And so in a sense to fragment and refragment our society in different ways, there are a lot of very good things about that too. And our politics is not very good at seeing those good things because we only see ways in which we've changed for the worse since that mid century period. But I think the key point is your point, which is we can't go back anyway. And the question is, how do we now, given the country we are with the particular strengths and weaknesses that it has, how do we now think about unity? How do we now think about opportunity? How do we now think about solving the problems we have? You talk a lot about individualism in the book, which it was hard for me to read. I think I read that you were pretty down on it, but I wasn't exactly sure how you were defining it because at one point you write, if the new American ethic pushes every individual to become more like himself or herself rather than more like everyone else, it will, even at its best, tend to accentuate difference to increase distances and to turn a range of distinctions into a set of bifurcations. Now, first of all, that seems like you're against the people find themselves, which seems to be really against the post-war period. And then second, why wouldn't everyone find themselves not go to bifurcations, but just individualization, like multiple vectors of differences as opposed to just two different? Well, I think if you think about the nature of social diffusion of this process of people becoming more like what they already are, that almost unavoidably becomes a kind of polarization. We think of polarization as something political, as people becoming divided along lines of left and right. But economic polarization, what we describe as inequality, social polarization and distancing, people do clump together. But what you have are, what you have is a kind of polarity, is two clumps at the ends rather than one in the middle. I think that's ultimately how the kind of social diffusion we've gone through works. And you see it in our society over and over, that there is a distinct top and bottom now, or left and right now, in ways that in that period that everybody misses so much, there did seem to be more of a middle. Now, that's not all bad. And certainly I wouldn't argue that individualism is all bad. I do think we have to see that there are ways in which it is bad, that there are ways in which it becomes isolation, that there are ways in which it becomes division and fracturing, and that people do need a kind of social experience. People do need to be part of something larger. And so we have to be alert to the costs. We have to be alert to the downsides. But honestly, today in our politics, the greater challenge is being alert to the upside, is being clear that not everything has gone wrong in America. That in quite a lot of ways, this is a better country than it was in that period. And that our challenge now is to address the problems we have as this country, rather than to address them by wishing we could become something we think we used to be. So if it's pulling into two camps, if it's a bifurcation, then how is it, I could see it bad in the sense that it creates the two sides and you have, so you basically have enemies or an other now. But the sense of like, you need to be part of something, you need to have societal connections. I mean, America has an awfully large population, so half of it is still a very large population. And so for all pulling, you know, if individualism makes us look more like, you know, becoming more like who we are makes us look more like either coastal elites or heartland, you know, working class, that still is a large community that we're a part of and share a great deal with. Well, I think the question is whether there is some kind of solidarity that holds that community together or whether people are at the top and the bottom when you step back and look at them demographically or statistically, that's not the same as saying that they feel themselves to be part of something larger than themselves. I do think that there's a way that our culture now encourages us to think of ourselves in isolated ways. Not totally, not simply or completely, but more than we've been accustomed to. We have a lot more options, we have a lot more choices, everything is much more customized. And so it's simply less the case that we're compelled to do more together and therefore it's less the case that we have a lot of common experiences in the ways we might have had in the past. So that the idea of community comes to mean something different and we're certainly looking for ways to make that work in this world, to look for communities that are virtual or for communities that are chosen, that can work. I don't think that's faded to fail, but it does present us with a challenge and for a lot of people it does feel like isolation, like loneliness. I think that if the pressure of conformity was the great social problem in the middle of the 20th century, the pressures of isolation and loneliness are the great social problem now and they are serious problems. And the kind of individualism that you're critiquing because you're not you don't think it's all bad but it has certain social forces but the negative side comes from what I read and pulling away from different institutions like the family and community. Is that a product of individualism per se would you say? Is the church to I guess the sort of intermediary institutions? I think it is, you know, this is an argument that Alexis de Tocqueville made about America in the 1830s and it doesn't simply apply to contemporary America but in some important ways I think it does, that what individualism does is pull us out of the mediating layers of our life. It leads us to live in a kind of narrow circle around ourselves and that means that it leaves in place only or almost only the individual and the national state. I think radical individualism ultimately leads to statism in a dangerous way because it leads us to think that there is no way to meet our common needs except in one big hole because it kind of blinds us to everything that stands in between the individual alone and the government as a whole. I'm trying to picture this person, that's a thing, I'm trying like so Yeah, think of the life of Julia, right? That's a caricature of that. Is that person pulled away from their social connection? I'm trying to think of the person who you think by making individualist choices of sort is isolated. I mean we're the bullying alone but is it not going to Kiwanis Club and not going to that kind of stuff? Because most people I know have a lot of friends and a lot of connections and all that kind of thing. Yeah, most people we know do and we probably live in an unusually healthy part of our society but a lot of people in America really don't have that in their lives. They don't have a thriving family first and foremost. They may not have truly a functional community. They may not have a kind of workplace that lets them form friendships that then turn into communal institutions on their own. They may be isolated and alienated from religious institutions and I do think that that is more of a problem than it used to be. Now it's not simply a problem because a lot of it is chosen. That is, you know, not everybody sitting in the pews in the 1940s and 50s really wanted to be there. There was a lot of pressure to do that and not having that pressure now is certainly in part a very good thing. But it also does mean that we have less connections with one another and that when we can choose to define our own experiences online and virtual ways, for example, we do have less unchosen experiences with the people immediately around us. I'm not suggesting that means that we should return to the age of the Kiwanis Club. In fact, I'm arguing precisely that can't be done but I do think we need to look for ways to empower those mediating institutions in our time and to me in part that means that we need much more of a politics of decentralization. That when we think about how to solve our problems, we should think much more about how to solve them near where we are than about how to empower large institutions to solve them for us as isolated individuals. That seems to run into a potential problem with the nostalgia because with the way that the nostalgia plays seems to play out politically is if the on the left they're nostalgic for the kind of large social programs and worker protections and strong unions on the right they're nostalgic for the strong families that came about through there's a tie to like law and order and... Separate the beds where the two husband and wife sit together. And it seems like the anti-immigration plays into that like keeping us all the same in certain ways that all of these things rather than pointing to a devolving of the government to more local institutions the solution that gets advanced is well we need the federal government we need to centralize more so that the federal government can push the whole country back to the 60s or back to the 50s. Absolutely. I think that nostalgia today definitely cuts against the kind of argument I'm trying to make and it's part of why I think that nostalgia is so problematic in a sense we're nostalgic for a time when we could take for granted a certain degree of social cohesion and didn't have to work hard at building it and we were spending it we were spending it as a kind of fuel to enable various forms of liberalization having spent it we now don't have it and we need to replenish it and the argument for that is a very challenging argument in our society. There's no question about it. Do you see the causal chain running because it means you mentioned previously and then one of the quotes administrative centralization often a company cultural and economic individualism is this because they push for individualism first and then the kind of people we describe push for more government because they feel isolated I'm trying to figure out how the causal or is it there is a mixed up chain because does Medicaid make people feel right individualistic and then they won't push for more government. I'm not sure the causal chain here. Honestly I think it's a kind of vicious cycle. I mean it seems to me that there's always been an inherent individualism a radical individualism in progressivism. It's not a libertarian individualism. In a sense it wants to liberate people from moral obligations by binding them to economic obligations to one another a kind of economic collectivism that enables that enables moral individualism is basically what the left is now and has in a way for a long time an example of one of those. That's what the welfare state enables right it it it argues for a certain kind of economic collectivism not communism but you know a way of socializing our economic needs and it does it I think in its own terms in order to liberate us from moral obligations to provide for us without demanding responsibility in return. That's a kind of conservatives way of describing it and it's a negative way of describing it but you can see the appeal of it you know the idea is people just in order to genuinely be free and really exercise their freedom people need to be free of material want and we're a very wealthy society and we ought to be able to provide for that and then allow people to to exercise their freedom you know Nancy Pelosi made the case for Obamacare by arguing that it would liberate people to be to be freelance artists. I think she really meant that I think that that's that's the way that she understands her own progressivism and it isn't crazy I just think it ultimately doesn't work. Also reminds me of there was an article maybe five years ago in the Washington Post arguing that the government should guarantee a minimum income to your 30 so you could go backpack Europe and start a food truck so 20 30 is the new 20 and so pretty much we're just going to be in the healthcare debate that I'm so involved in we now find ourselves talking about kids who are 26 needing to stay on their parents insurance kids who are 26 that's kind of what progressivism leads you to how then does the the recent trends we've seen so you say that the progressives are kind of interested in the economic solidarity which then freezes up to be morally individualistic how does the the recent trend of shaming and the campus free speech stuff fit into that because that seems to be the op I mean it's it doesn't have much to say about the economics but it's very much like no you don't have any moral freedom right well you know I think that in its own terms it understands itself to be vindicating a kind of moral freedom that is what it doesn't permit is limits on moral freedom what it doesn't permit our views that reject the legitimacy of other people's ways of life and so understood in the brightest light in the best light which is not how I tend to see it honestly I think that political correctness is a way to enable that kind of freedom because the one thing it won't allow is the delegitimizing of anybody else's way of life and so it's it's a kind of it's a kind of moral relativism but ultimately one that has to to become oppressive in order to become effective in the first half of your book as we've done here you diagnose so to speak talk about the history since the post-war era and then the second half is what can we do about that is an overview what what generally do we get this means of course that the second half is much less satisfying than the first there's no way around that have a magic solution yeah I wish I did I'd probably be somewhere else if I hadn't I think so that is to say this in this kind of project the diagnosis is always going to be more persuasive than the prescription and it has to be said that I certainly offer the prescription as a very partial remedy I think the importance of thinking in terms of decentralization of allowing whether it's federalism and public policy or kind of subsidiarity and how we think about our institutions is one way to answer the question of how does a diverse but divided country use its diversity to address the problems it has I don't think we can reverse the diversity more importantly I don't want to and I don't think we should want to but we need to think about how as the country are which is diverse and also very dynamic but also divided how we address the challenges we have I think that means trying to use diversity as a means of solving problems and in that sense I find myself very drawn to the likes of Hayek who argued that in fact diversity is actually the most effective means of solving problems I think often that is the case and so for public policy that would mean allowing much more local experimentation much more trial and error in our public policy rather than assuming we have the answer and what we're lacking is the power to enforce it we should come to terms with the fact that we don't have the answer and what we need is a means of discovering it in an ongoing way and that does lead me to a kind of market oriented economics and public policy thinking not simply and not completely but to a much greater degree than now tends to reign in our public policy debates does that mean we should go and we can go all the way and go to like a nozicky and utopia of utopias well you know I'm a conservative and my previous book was about Edmund Burke and Thomas Payne and I came to think that a one sentence summary of Berkey and conservatism is to say that you should never take any idea to its logical conclusion and so I do think that there are there are grave dangers and risks when we go all the way but I think we should go much further in the direction of enabling experimentation as the core of how we think about public policy in America and it's just not what we do now and there are some things when you talk about some specific issue areas which it seems that you think that both the left and the right need to give up some maybe sacred cows and move forward so one of them is inequality or the way you can see it is inequality a problem? Well I think that inequality is one form of the kind of polarization that we see throughout American life now and I don't think it makes sense to see to define the problem as inequality because I think that poverty is certainly a grave social problem but I don't think that wealth is a social problem and when you define the problem as inequality when you define the distance between the top and the bottom as the nature of the problem you come to land on solutions that are really much more about lowering the top than lifting the bottom because it's just much easier to do and so we don't think enough about opportunity we think too much about inequality I think it would make much more sense to think in terms of how do we enable people who aren't rising in our society to have more of a chance to rise and obviously there's no simple way to do that but a social policy debate that's oriented around that problem it seems to me would be focused much less on punitive policies at the people who supposedly have too much and much more at finding opportunities for people who have too little How much does geography play into this story too? There's my Twitter feed the last several days had active debates about spreading the federal government out throughout the country that we need to move our institutions not just split them up and let local stuff handle it but take the top down centralized institutions and move the Department of Agriculture to Akron This might be one of the best ways to get people just quit the Department of Agriculture just like you're going to Bismarck sorry yeah so the question about moving people out and getting people off the coasts Yeah look I like the idea it's a little too clever to really do much but I think it's the right way to think about what decentralization might mean I certainly think that geographic concentration is a big part of the problem geographic concentration leads to a situation where people who are living different lives don't encounter each other and don't know a lot about their country and don't have an opportunity to really understand what people in other situations experience and so I do think that the problem of kind of bi-coastal elites is a genuine problem and I certainly think we could also break loose some of the holds and strangleholds on power that the federal government has by moving some of it out it's amazing that it hasn't been tried before it's very rarely been tried before when the Social Security Administration was moved out to Baltimore that was treated as if it were a kind of breaking of some religious code and you know the people who work for Social Security would rather be in Washington than Baltimore and that's really too bad but I think there's a lot to be said for that kind of decentralization but much more important is genuine distribution of power not only in a geographic sense but in a truly political sense allowing institutions that are a little closer to the ground to exercise real authority and have real choice in how we solve our problems. Is upward mobility a problem? We've been hearing a lot of complaints about this and some people have assigned Trump or Trump's presidency. Is it, are we having an issue with upward mobility? I think we are. It's a difficult problem to diagnose because you know mobility at the very least you have to think of mobility in two ways. One is absolute mobility. That is, are you making more? Do you have a higher standard of living than your father did at your age or than you did 15, 20 years ago? The other is relative mobility. Are you higher or lower down the social ladder? Relative mobility has been pretty poor in the United States for a long time including in that golden age that people look back to. Really, at any time since the middle of the 1950s if you're born in the lowest quintile, the lowest 20% of incomes in America, your chances of getting to the middle class let alone to the top are extremely low, abysmally and depressingly low. They're not much lower now than they were in the 60s but they're quite low. It is a real problem. What has changed is absolute mobility which used to be much greater in American life. Even among the poor in some respects, especially among the poor in basic improvements in standard living would mean fairly dramatic improvements over the course of a generation for Americans in every part of our society. That has not been the case over the past generation and there have been improvements near the top. There have been fewer, less of an upward movement in the middle and the bottom. And I do think that's part of the frustration people feel, the sense of running in place. It's hard to tell how much of that is driven by these statistics but it is one way in which American life is somewhat different now than it was two or three generations ago. So which of the big programs that the federal government engages in now do you think are doing the most harm in maintaining this divide or preventing us from moving in a better direction? Well, I think that there are ways in which some of the bigger problems we have administrative and public policy problems we have, genuine policy problems are being exacerbated constantly by public policy. This is certainly true in healthcare and I don't just mean Obamacare but the government's role in the health system in Medicare above all, Medicaid to a lesser degree encouraging third-party payment through the employer exclusion, these are huge problems that are being made worse by very bad public policy that we just seem to be incapable of changing. I also think that the role the federal government plays in higher education which isn't spoken about enough, higher education is obviously essential to upward mobility. It is a way into the middle class and the role the federal government plays is basically as a gatekeeper. The nature of the student loan system and its connection to the accreditation system means that higher education can't modernize and can't change. Obviously modern information technology should totally transform higher education and that is not happening because we're stuck in a model that looks like a four-year college. It's a model that not everybody can get into and make it through and it's a model that obviously ought to be diversified and altered and really what stands in the way of that is bad public policy. I think it's one of the clearest instances of that happening. You've written that in order to solve some of these things, especially these things that I think there's a broad agreement that it's just horrible. I mean, maybe not for the same ways but that we just can't have this anymore. You've said that the left and the right both need to give up some of what they're clinging to. What do they need to give up? Well, I think for the left there is this sense that social democracy is the future and that anything that is not social democracy is not the future. It's an incredibly powerful idea on the left and it means that any time we move in the direction of more universal government programs that provide more uniform benefits that feels like progress. Any time we move away from that that feels like we're moving backwards and into the dark ages. That just cannot be the way the left continues to think and I think that in order to achieve the ends that liberals and progressives have in mind, they have to be much friendlier to market means because those really are the best ways available to us now to achieve the kinds of things they want to achieve and it's amazing how difficult it is for that idea to sink in. It's not so far, I think, really part of the way the left thinks about public policy and it really does have to change. I think for the right, the right for a long time now and by the right I really mean Republicans in American politics have been stuck in the Reagan years and on repeat for an awfully long time and so that means especially that the diagnoses that conservatives bring to public policy are out of date. The idea is we still have the problems we had in 1978. We should be very careful about sparking inflation. The tax code stands in the way of growth and deregulation will make everything work out. These things aren't exactly false. I do think lower taxes would help growth. I do think we need less regulation but to argue that these are the problems is really not to think about a lot of America's biggest 21st century challenges. Not to think about mobility. Not to think about social isolation. Not to think about ways in which certain kinds of market solutions can help in the welfare system and in the education system. Conservatives do offer ideas on these fronts but they're not central to how we tend to think about politics on the right and it seems to me that it would have been bizarre for Ronald Reagan in 1980 to say that America's challenges were what they were in 1950 and we need to understand that it is equally bizarre for Republicans today to speak that way about the 80s. What about the culture wars? It seems like something we've left off in this conversation and I know you discussed in the book but these create problems that might be different. So some of them come from Supreme Court rulings for example which apply to the whole country in a different way. So the gay marriage decision and then maybe for the left the heller decision should we be deconsolidating the social issues too? Well look, I think that that is a place where the right does have to change its basic mindset. I think social conservatives and I consider myself a social conservative have tended to think about our situation in the country as a kind of rightful majority being denied its rightful place. And so to describe the place of social conservatives as the moral majority to argue that there's this tiny sliver of liberal minority that is radicalizing our institutions and how dare they. Maybe that used to be the case. I'm actually not quite sure it really did used to be the case. It certainly is not the case now. And social conservatives have to think more like minorities and in good ways. This isn't a bad time to be a minority in American life in fact. It's not the worst time anyway for sure. And I think there's a lot of ways in which social conservatives would be much more effective if we tried to be more persuasive rather than possessive about the public sphere. If rather than saying this is ours, how dare you? We said we have a better way. Think about this. And it is constantly astonishing to me how rarely we really do that. How rarely we approach the country that way. And I think a lot of the frustration and some of the kind of apocalyptic mindset of some social conservatives today has to do with the sense that we used to be the majority and now we're not. And that means we're losing. In some ways of course that's true but it also means that we have all kinds of opportunities to try to be a persuasive minority. And there are a lot of means and levers now for persuasive minorities to make their cases that are just not being used by social conservatives. And I think if we thought more in 21st century terms and in terms of devolution and decentralization in communal terms we would stand a better chance of being persuasive. If progressives put, you know, to oversimplify if progressives want economic solidarity and moral individualism and conservatives want more economic individualism conservatives like the Reagan sort and but more moral solidarity. How does the Trump movement and that populism fit in? Because that seems to be one where they want solidarity in both programs. Yeah, I think that's right. It's solidarity pursued by means that it seems to me are likely to be ultimately destructive of solidarity but I do think that there is a deep desire for solidarity at the core of something about the Trump movement. It's certainly one of the things that Trump was able to channel and tap into. We've had a kind of politics of liberty for some time in America. May not always feel that way but you know, all of our powerful political parties have tried to present themselves as making a case for liberty in its own way and I think we are now entering a period where there is going to be a much more kind of open on the surface desire for solidarity in American life and the left and right in different ways are trying to appeal to those. The trouble is that at this point they're both making those appeals in ways that are crude and destructive of liberty and ultimately I think also of solidarity. The left is trying to argue for solidarity through a kind of imposed universalism through a kind of coercive moral relativism. Coercive relativism just is incoherent and is ultimately going to be unsatisfying. The right I think, the right sometimes argues for solidarity through a kind of purification that is, we'll be stronger together if we're less diverse, if we have a clearer sense of who's inside and who's outside. I would say the best way to translate Trump's message on this front is to say that he thinks that if we build walls around our country we will be able to lift up some of the walls within our country. That's not quite crazy but I think that it doesn't take nearly seriously enough the real challenges of solidarity in 21st century America and it also downplays the advantages of our diversity which are just not part of Trump's rhetoric at all. As you were writing the book and I know at the end you say this is sort of something you've been thinking about for a long time it's a collection of ideas that didn't just pop into your head one day but it seems like based on the publication date that the Trump thing probably started coming up as you were writing the book did that make you and has that made you just say there are things I need to maybe tweak a little bit or reevaluate it? Yeah, so the paperback edition of the book will be out in May and has a kind of what do we make of Trump epilogue at the end of it. I finished the book I turned the book into the publisher in Halloween of 2015 so October 31st Trump was running and was strong but I certainly would not have guessed that he would be the Republican nominee or the president at that time so the book doesn't really talk about Trump and you know there's certainly a way in which what it does talk about presage some of Trump and can be understood as explaining some of what was behind Trump but obviously there are also a lot of ways in which like everybody else I just learned a huge amount in the past year that I surely didn't know before. I would say I'm much more struck now by what we were just speaking about that's that strong desire for solidarity in our politics which I think contributed both to Sanders and to Trump's strength and I would say that that the simple fact that people would be unsatisfied with fragmentation and fracturing is something I didn't quite account for enough I also think the power of alienation as an organizing principle for an electoral coalition in this fractured society is something that I didn't take seriously enough I think that's part of what Trump really showed his coalition was a kind of alienated coalition and that turned out to be an extremely powerful way to patch together a political coalition. Well, you could read the book now I mean it's hide site 2020 but it's like oh, this is here's what Yuval says we're a fractured republic and we've lost some sort of cohesiveness and then William 2016 Bernie and Trump I'm offering you cohesiveness so maybe that's not what you expected. No, I encourage you to read the book as having predicted perfectly exactly what would happen. I certainly encourage that. I would say that I didn't predict it I don't know anyone who did but I do think that some of the forces that I tried to point to were elements of what we ended up seeing in 2016 in ways that remain relevant that haven't been transformed by Trump but that maybe are highlighted or brought out in different ways by the experience of the past year. Do you think that the as the baby boomers age and retire and drop out of like our political classes that this nostalgia will change that these stories of these decades will change and if so what impact will that have on this broader theory? Yeah, it's a great question. I do think that one of the things that an election between two 70-year-olds has to mean is that we are probably more at the end of a chapter than at the beginning of a chapter in America's national life. Well, I think you could maybe say that Trump is the first president of the 21st century. Yeah, I think you can but Trump is also a deeply nostalgic figure himself and he is 70 years old and his supporters also are older than most people involved in our politics and the question is what becomes of younger voters in this environment and under these pressures? It's a very hard question to answer but I do think that a generation of political leaders who are more at home in the 21st century whose instinct is not to say this is not the country I recognize even if their instinct is to find trouble and problems with it could offer us a better way to deal with some of these problems and I think you see that somewhat among Republicans a lot of the people rising to prominence now are kind of generation Xers and their first instinct is not to say I don't recognize this country. Some of them are trying to be nostalgic to kind of pretend to be nostalgic. Ted Cruz does this. He always kind of speaks as though he's speaking to a retirement home audience but I think we also see just greater comfort with this America as it is and that alone helps you see some of the problems a little bit. The Democrats don't have that middle generation very much. I think you'll see it rise now that they're not in power. A lot of those people will start I think to enter politics but they do have a real problem of their leaders really are elderly and their activists are too young to really be national leaders. That certainly hurts them at the moment. So does that this is a this is a question we ask a lot on this show which I was thinking means that we just have a lot of pessimistic people on but the question is are you optimistic then? Well, I'm hopeful. I think optimism is silly, right? Optimism is just expecting good things to happen. That's just dumb and optimism also encourages passivity. It just says sit back, it'll be fine. Hopefulness, it seems to me is something like the belief that the resources are there for things to turn in the right direction and that invites activity, not passivity. I am hopeful. I think America has a lot to offer. I think looking at the 21st century there's no one you'd rather be than America. Now a lot of that is because other developed countries have much bigger problems than we have really terrible problems. Well, we have just terrible problems but I also think that America has a way of self-correcting, of recovering has a kind of culture of liberty and creativity that frankly other developed countries often haven't had and that in a moment that calls for creativity that calls for experimentation we're lucky to be here. Thanks for listening. This episode of Free Thoughts was produced by Tess Terrible and Evan Banks. To learn more visit us on the web at www.libertarianism.org.