 Trevor Burrus, joining us today is Jonah Goldberg, senior editor at National Review, a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and Frequent Fox News contributor. He's the author of 2008's Liberal Fascism and 2012's Tyranny of Clichets, How Liberals Cheat in the War of Ideas. Welcome to Free Thoughts, Jonah. Hey, it's great to be here. So I'd like to start with your background. Do you have – were you a – by birth, a conservative by birth, or did you have a clique experience? Do you have some sort of dark leftist past? I may have had some dark leftist weekends, but no sinister past. So I grew up – I mean, people have heard me talk about this before, we'll remember some of these jokes, but I grew up on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Okay, that's pretty – We were like Christians in ancient Rome, right? You were like one of the very few conservative families around, and I was sort of – I always joke about how you would meet in Riverside Park and draw a little sea in the dirt, your foot, and he's like, I'll meet you in the catacombs under Zabars. And so it's one of those parlor games you get into a lot with libertarians and conservatives and people who understand that they're ideological is like, would we still be us if we grew up in, say, the Soviet Union, right? I mean, there are those kinds of questions. And I sometimes wonder if I had grown up in some socially conservative neighborhood – We're being reactionary, but basically different. Right. In Missouri, what I have been a contrarian by being a liberal, I don't think so, but you never know, right? It's an interesting counterfactual. So I always saw being conservative as being sort of against the grain in New York, 1970s, 1980s, and all that kind of stuff. My dad was a huge influence on me. My dad was a classic sort of – I know he didn't call himself a neoconservative, but he was a neoconservative in the sense that he had a long, dark, leftist path, or at least a short, dark, leftist path, and moved rightward. So very much like the Irving Crystal. Very much. When I first moved to Washington, Irving reminded me a lot of my dad. My dad's idea of a good time was going on long walks with his sons and explaining to them why Stalin was a bad man. So I don't know that I was conservative from birth. The thing about me is that I never planned on going into this line of work. I wanted to write comic books and science fiction novels when I was a kid, and I kind of fell over backwards into this. It wasn't until I really went to college that I realized how immersed I was in politics and media and all that kind of stuff. I'm not saying I found out I was smarter than people. I was rejected from every college I applied to. It's just I knew things about politics and history and culture that normal kids didn't. And I don't mean that to brag. I just mean that that's sort of what was going on in my house, is that it was a lot of conversation. My dad subscribed to partly for work, but probably 20 newspapers and 40 magazines, and we were just sort of drenched in all that stuff. Now you mentioned the people who know their ideological, which made me think about the interesting fact that conservatives and libertarians when asked questions like this, we'll often talk about what the left has called or the feminists like to call the click experience, that it's different. I don't know if the left gets the question of like, when did you realize you were left? But conservatives and libertarians often get this question, was it some day and then you realized why do you think that's the case? Well, I think there are a lot of reasons for it. I have this long spiel about how there's a reason why comedians are wildly overrepresented by blacks, gays, Jews, and Canadians. The real subversive of all that. Well, no, but for all those same reasons, right? I mean, Canadians are observers of American culture, but they are not part of it. They get a huge amount of their television and their pop culture from America, but they're also slightly alienated from it. You know, you don't have to read Invisible Sun and all that kind of stuff to understand that to be black on a mainstream, conventional, mostly white campus meant you had to understand your own culture and also the majority culture. Same thing for Jews, same thing for gays. And that gives you a certain amount of critical distance from the mainstream while still understanding the mainstream. And it's sort of that half layer of alienation that and comedians have that same thing. They have this ability to observe life as if it is something beyond them. Like aliens watching the planet kind of thing. But they're also very fluent in it, right? And, you know, you look at John Stuart, I mean, one of his brilliant things is he could speak the language of pop culture probably better than anybody alive. And so anyway, I think there's something similar goes on with conservatives and libertarians in the sense that we understand the mainstream culture. We understand the mainstream intellectual culture, but we're not of it and gives us this ability to talk about it with a certain amount of critical distance that I think I think is very good and very helpful and is one of the reasons why libertarians and conservatives by my lights tend to be, first of all, more objective and correct. But it also means that we are seen as slightly the other. Yeah. But on the John Stuart point, which just pops my head, which is an interesting question because you mentioned the comedians and some things that come up every now and then is whether or not conservatives can be funny or do a thing like John Stuart or what John Oliver is doing now. And a lot of times when conservatives and libertarians have tried to do that, it's failed pretty miserably. It's been very clearly ideological in a certain way. Do you have any theories about why it's... Oh, yeah. No, I get asked about this a lot, you know, in part because I'm sort of known as a conservative and crack a joke, right? And some people say that I'm the funniest scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, which is sort of like... It's an August list. Yeah, it's like the best Oktoberfest in Orlando, you know. It's saying something, but just not a lot. But, you know, I get asked about this a lot. I think that part of the problem is that most of the attempts to do a conservative version of John Stuart lie in the fact that they try to do a conservative version of John Stuart. John Stuart doesn't go out to try to... We didn't, you know, he's... We're recording this shortly after Trevor Noah just started as the new host, which I haven't seen him yet. He didn't set out to do a liberal show. It became more and more liberal over time as he became sort of the dashboard saint of sort of the left-wing blogosphere and all that. But he set out to do something funny, and that's a very different thing. And I wish these attempts, which keep coming back sort of like herpes for conservatives to do these funny right-wing shows, I wish they would stop trying it so hard to be conservative. I mean, sort of like Trotskyite art, right? And instead, just try to be funny because it turns out that actually a lot of stand-up comics are conservative and really libertarian. I mean, and they're getting more libertarian by the day as college campuses become these sort of bizarrely sort of nerf-bat, Stalinist outposts, right? I mean, they're not going to... No one's going to get shot, but you know, you can't tell a joke anymore. That whole controversy was with Seinfeld and whatnot. You know, Amy Schumer has come out. Amy Schumer is clearly left-wing in her politics, but she's actually becoming... A lot of these people are becoming essentially libertarian free speech warriors because they recognize the way that a lot of the culture is going. And that's fine. I think there are plenty of libertarian and conservative-minded, funny people out there. The part of the problem is that the people who produce these shows and the networks that sign up these shows, they want... Either they don't think conservatives are funny because they're left-wingers, right? Or if they want to sort of counter-program and do something conservative, they think the smart thing to do is go hire a conservative to be a funny conservative. And that automatically politicizes it. It removes from the conversation a lot of good material. I mean, I used to be a big defender of the Simpsons in part because it's not that it was ever a conservative show. It's just that they were equal opportunity. And if they could get... Or South Park. Or South Park. When South Park is actually very libertarian, particularly compared to the Simpsons, although I haven't watched the Simpsons much in a long time. But my argument about the Simpsons was always that if there are 50-50 equal opportunity guys shooting at Republicans and Democrats, conservatives and liberals, that is about 48% more than conservatives usually get in the popular culture. And we should claim that as a victory and move on. So that's all I got out of that. So... And you've been talking about conservatives and libertarians. You consider yourself a conservative. Why aren't you a libertarian? Oh. Well, the way I kind of explain it to people... And I've gone around the... Writing liberal fascism in my first book made me much more libertarian. And part of the problem is early on in my years as a pundit type, I got into a lot of fights with a certain subset of libertarians. There's a lot of subsets. Yes, I've gotten to many fights with them, too. There are many rooms in the mansion of libertarianism, which is one of my big beefs about libertarians is that libertarians, when arguing with non-libertarians, they argue as if their libertarian is this unified ideological whole. And that libertarianism is the one consistent ideology. And then when you put 10 libertarians in a room and you discover there are 15 positions on something, you turn out that that's mostly BS. And I really can't stand that insider-outsider stuff. Conservatives at least acknowledge that we got a lot of differences inside of our tent. Libertarians tend to have this... We'll have all sorts of fun arguments when the tent flap is closed. But when we argue with non-libertarians, we're all going to act as if we're all in it together. And I find that kind of grating after a while. But anyway, one of the ways I like to explain my position is that at the federal level, I'm essentially 95% libertarian. If you can take out foreign policy, which I think you can, right? At the federal level, I'm about 95%, well, 80% libertarian. It kind of depends on some issues. I'm sort of off reservation. At the state level, it's more like 50-50. And at the local level, I'm pretty much a hardcore communitarian. There are certain rights that we all have to have guaranteed. You can't bring back slavery. You can't bring back Jim Crow. We fought a civil war over these issues. It settled. We amended the constitution a couple of times. Done, right? But beyond that, if some local town wants to ban gay weddings or ban... Or allow only gay weddings, right? I mean, I don't really care. Well, maybe ban guns. Or ban... I mean, the Second Amendment. There's a problem there, right? So there are some issues that by their very nature become federal issues. But my druthers would always be to err on the side of saying these are local issues. I mean, Johnny Cash wrote a song, you can't bring your guns to town, right? And if that's a local ordinance, it bothers me a hell of a lot more than if it's a federal ordinance, right? Because then there is no right to exit. And I do this whole thing on college campuses about how I think that federalism, basically the process of pushing public policy issues to the lowest democratic level possible is the best system ever conceived of for maximizing human happiness. Because it lets the most people live the way they want to live. Some people will live very conservatively in ways that a lot of people at the Cato Institute will despise. And some people will live very libertarianly, which people at the Cato Institute will celebrate. And a lot of people will find a happy compromise in between. But the beauty of pushing these things out on the most local level possible is that the winners have to look the losers in the eye the next day. They have to see the losers at their kid's soccer matches and on the line at the grocery store. And they have to live with the consequences of their decisions. What we have now is we have a system where we have these competing elites, not to get all Mosca and Pareto on you, but we have these competing elites at the federal level. And I think conservatives do it less than liberals and leftists, but they still some do it where they say, well, the federal government is going to impose one side's vision. I'd rather it be mine. And they try to do a one-size-fits-all understanding what this country is about. That's not what this country is about, right? I mean, Barbra Streisand gets to live whatever kind of life she wants to live. And John Ashcroft gets to live whatever kind of life he wants to live. But they don't have to make them live together. But we don't have to make them live together. That would be a reality show. That would be a fantastic reality show. But they also don't get to impose it on everybody else. And so on a lot of issues, I'm very libertarian. On a lot of issues, I'm very conservative. It just kind of depends. The one thing I think ultimately the problem and partly the reason this is so fresh in my head is I just wrote the new forward to this what is conservatism book that Frank Meyer put out, which is sort of the federalist papers of fusionism, right? And I think fusionism is a bit of a problem. Philosophically, it's flawed. It's this idea in national review where I hang my hat most of the time is an avowedly fusionist enterprise. And the argument, the pithy description of it is that a virtuous society must be a free society because virtue not freely chosen isn't virtuous. If I compel you to do the right thing, you aren't doing the right thing for the right reasons and you get no credit for it. You have to want to choose the virtuous path. I think as a political organizing principle that's great. It's served the conservative movement and the libertarian movement quite well for over a half a century. But at the philosophical level, I think there are problems with it. And the sort of jokey summation I have about libertarianism has always been libertarianism is the single greatest political philosophy ever conceived of except for two weaknesses, children and foreign policy. And if neither of them existed, there's no sane argument for not being a libertarian. But we do have to take some care about the kind of citizens we raise in the next generation. And that means a certain amount of, for one of a better word, enforced conformity or authoritarianism or however you want to put it. And we do live in a world where the Hayekian extended order tends to stop at national borders. And there are people beyond those borders who want to do things that requires a strong national defense. And that's where I come down on all that. You mentioned when you were writing liberal fascism, which is a spectacular book, greatly influenced a lot of, reading your footnotes or reading your sources influenced a lot of further research of mine. But you started becoming more libertarian. Was it kind of the fact that there is a vein of conservatism? Not necessarily fascist, but in terms of creating a state family, socializing people in a certain way that kind of starts to seem like the kind of fascism that Mussolini practiced and things like that? Yeah. I mean, I guess the question is sort of a question I asked Charles Cook at the event we had on the conservatarian book was would conservatives be against state education or if they controlled the curriculum? I mean, that kind of family building, that kind of state building, what you see in fascism traditionally? Well, I mean, this sort of gets back to the earlier point I was making. If forced to choose between competing state ideologies or ideologies of the state that we're going to impose on people, I'll choose the conservative one almost every time, right? So if we're going to play that game and I've got to pick a side, I'm going to pick the conservative side because I think there'll be less damage done to the society, but I'd rather not play that game, right? So there's this ancient tension within the conservative movement of those who are anti-state and those who are anti-left, right? And seven out of 10 times that distinction is written on our hearts, right? Because we're both anti-state and anti-left. You know, are you – and your question about schools gets to the heart of it, right? I mean, are you anti-government schools, the way Milton Freeman would talk about it? Or are you anti-using tax dollars to impose this left-wing ideology on our kids? And if we could just get in the time machine back to the 1950s where they didn't do that, would they be okay, right? I don't think necessarily either strain of those things is fascistic in the way that we're talking about. I do think – because I think – and we can get in the weeds on this if you like, but Friedrich Hayek, it's sort of one of my pet things, is I cannot stand the misuse and abuse of his essay called Why I'm Not a Conservative. Me too. We're on the same page. Yeah. And so, you know, Hayek never called himself a libertarian. He called himself an old wig. Old wig, yes. Which is exactly how Edmund Burke described himself. And Edmund Burke, as many of you will remember, was the founder of modern conservatism. And the conservatives that he was talking about are blood and soil conservatives of Europe, the demise types. And that was never what conservatism in America was about. And that's why Hayek says America is the one country in the world where you can call yourself a conservative and still be a defender of liberty. Because what we are trying to conserve is a classically liberal revolution. Everything would be so much easier if libertarians could finally junk the most unuffonious words until conservatarian came along. And just call yourselves liberals, or classical liberals, which is really what most of you are. I would love to be able to do that. I don't like to call liberals liberals. I like to call them leftists. Yeah, or progressives. I'm taking it back. You know, I agree with that. If we could do that, that would be wonderful. And it's a very recent innovation to say it otherwise. But no, so what made me just get back to your actual question, the fundamental thing that I took away from writing liberal fascism in terms of this conservative libertarian thing is that – and I can do this – I do this whole riff in speeches about it, but I call it the fundamental category error in politics. And this category error is a mistake that libertarians never make. Conservatives only rarely make. And the progressives or leftists hold dear as the center point of their entire philosophy. And it's simply this, the government cannot love you. It cannot be your mommy or your daddy or your tribe. It can't give you – fill the holes in your soul or any of that kind of stuff. It can only be government. And that means it's good for a handful of things. It's okay for a few more. And then it's really bad for the rest. And that's the one – so Chesterton – there's this great discussion by Bill Buckley about Chesterton and the importance of dogma. And Bill actually got his example wrong in this, as Virginia Pastrell once pointed out to me, but he says, look, we learned from Chesterton that dogma is important to constrain the realm of what is acceptable in a society, right? And he says – quoting Chesterton, he says, the purely rational man will not fight – the purely rational soldier will not fight. The purely rational man will not marry, right? I mean, you have to have a larger sense of your place in the universe and your meaning and all over the rest in order to do some things that we need you to do in a society. And then he says, look, he was arguing with Murray Rothbard. He says, Rothbard thinks that people should go and – that lighthouses should be able to charge boats for the use of their lighthouses. Now, it turns out as Virginia Pastrell and Michael Lynch once explained to me that in fact that happened all the time, right? Buckley didn't realize this. But his larger point is the correct one. He viewed – he said, he has a great line there. He says, look, a country that is constantly debating whether or not we should privatize lighthouses probably won't socialize medicine. And I think sometimes libertarians take this category error point too far and see themselves as atomized individuals and all the rest and don't give enough space to the possibility that part of being free is to live conservatively in a conservative community which is allowed to impose restrictions on the individual. But at the same time, if everyone had the libertarian position, government would make far fewer mistakes and we get into far fewer trouble because dogmatically, it is almost impossible for libertarians to impose any kind of tyranny. Now, the question I have here which is – I think we've kind of taken an answer to some extent, but some libertarians who might be listening to this would resist the categorization of being on the right. And this might just be an example of the one-house, many, many rooms kind of example. But a lot of libertarians think it's unfortunate. Some people hear, Kato, we're not clear why we usually get categorized with heritage when half of our opinions are on the left. Do you think that there's a good reason that libertarians are on the right or is it just a historical fight against communism or is there something about libertarians and conservatives that are generally – except for maybe some differences – generally the same kind of approach to the world? Yeah. I think for the most part, libertarians belong on the right. I think libertarians bristle and can't stand being for the most part on the right, but they are. And the reason for it is simply that – well, no, I shouldn't say simply that because I think – and there isn't a single reason for it. I think it's what social scientists would call an overdetermined phenomenon. There are a lot of reasons for it. One of them has to do with the history of anti-communism. Another one has to do with what I was getting at earlier about how conservatives are defenders of the classical liberal revolution and so are libertarians. And so even though the conservative argument may be more deeply rooted in cultural heritage kind of arguments and all the rest, at the end of the day, conservative constitutional scholars and libertarian constitutional scholars, there's an enormous amount of overlap there, right? Because both sides actually believe the text means something and all the rest. I think that… Now, does that speak to something itself in the sense that why would both sides think the text means something? Is there an underlying causal factor? One of the things you write on tyranny cliches is that conservatives are more honest about their indebtedness to ideology, which I think is true of libertarians, too. Oh, it's absolutely true of libertarians, which I think I acknowledge in the book. Yeah, yes, you do. Yeah, yeah. No, I mean, look, we're dorks. You walk around Washington and I've been here for almost 25 years, right? I mean, we literally have kids, really smart kids, wearing their favorite philosophers on their tides, right? We're like a bunch of Dungeons and Dragons geeks, right? I'm a level 9 Hayekian, you know, and all that kind of stuff. And I think that's wonderful, right? And I do think this is one of the things that unites for certainly intellectual conservatives and intellectual libertarians. You know, there's something different when you get down into sort of raw populist kind of emotional stuff. But at the philosophical and intellectual level, we're united by an enormous number of things with constitutions. One, an understanding of the role of the state within broad confines is another. You know, this is a point I often make on the single area that matters most in public policy, which is economics, right? I mean, other than a sort of our fundamental constitutional rights, where we also largely overlap, there are no, at least prior to Donald Trump, there are no economic, conservative economic thinkers. There are no libertarian economic thinkers who aren't also essentially conservative economic thinkers. Your hero economists are my hero economists. You know, it's Milton Friedman and Adam Smith, and you can go down a long list and Thomas Sowell and all these kinds of guys. There is no separate group of just libertarian economists or just conservative economists. I mean, there might be some economists who are very conservative, but their economics is perfectly, they would fit in just fine here, right? I mean, the protectionism just simply doesn't exist among conservatives, again, at least prior to Donald Trump. And so, I think that that's part of it. And then the other thing is that we are in contradistinction to liberals and leftists. We actually take ideology seriously, and we take ideas seriously. And this is not to say that there are no serious intellectuals on the left in all the courts there are. But are there anyone wearing ties with their favorite philosopher? But that's exactly right. And E.J. Deon actually writes about this in one of his books. He says, you know, look, liberals just simply orient themselves to politics differently, that conservatives tend to be ideational. That is, we rally around certain ideas. Liberals and leftists tend to rally around, are coalitional, and they're activists. And I think that this stem, I mean, I can get, again, deep in the weeds on this, but I think this stems a lot from American pragmatism. I think it stems a lot from the fact that Eric Vigelin was largely right when he said that, to a very large degree, progressivism or leftism or whatever you want to call it, is in a sense, it's a political religion. And it's fascinating when you go to libertarian or conservative egghead confabs, right? It's a lot of weedy, narrow, intellectual fights, you know, all about Randy and this and Burke, that and all that. And you go to left-wing ones, and it's a lot of testifying. And registering to vote. Yeah. It's, well, yeah, on the political side, it's registering to vote. The conversation is all very religious. It's testifying in the religious senses. I feel that we shouldn't live in a kind of country where X has to come at the expense of Y. Sing it, sister. Yeah. And the idea that there shouldn't be trade-offs, that there's a unity of goodness, and that all good positions go together, that is a fundamentally religious point of view. It's a kingdom of heaven on earth kind of point of view. And it's something that conservatives who tend to be, you know, a lot of them tend to be a much more religious bent, they already have their religion in a traditional form. And libertarians, I mean, I know there are plenty of religious libertarians, but a lot of them, they don't look to the state and to politics to fill that religious part of their lives. And so I think that, you know, it's funny, because I think there is a tendency among libertarians to want to be cool. I'll test to that. I mean, I'm already cool, but I see a few other people with that. I mean, just sitting here. I'm just hoping some of them runs off on me. And in the secular popular culture, conservatism is uncool, which is kind of funny, right? Because the whole point of secular popular culture is to be rebellious. And it's amazing. The one thing I love going to college campuses, and I always try to say, you know, look, let me get this straight. Your professors are liberal. Your textbooks are liberal. The publishing industry is liberal. The music industry is liberal. The mainstream media is liberal. The fashion industry is liberal. Your high school teachers were probably liberal. The administration here at the school is liberal. And yet you think you're sticking it to the man by agreeing with all these people, right? I mean, if you want to be a real nonconformist, you know, be a pro-life Christian evangelical at Brown. You know, be Alex P. Keaton. Yeah. From family ties, wear a suit all the time. Young Republicans. Right. So that's the thing, is that so much of what counts as sort of rebelliousness is actually conformity. And I think that there is a, regardless, there is a tendency which I find grating at times for libertarians to try to prove that they are cool and more conversant and fluent with the popular culture by trying to throw conservatives under the bus. And the problem is, at the end of the day, as liberals will not have you. I mean, yeah, if the issue of climate is all about drug war and gay rights, you know, to a certain extent they'll have you. But you're never going to get liberals to replace the state with freedom. That was a line that Brian Doherty had when he was here talking about his Ron Paul book. He made a comment that the fact that despite Ron Paul being more left than the left on the issues that they're supposed to be good on, and they totally disavowed him or mostly disavowed him, proved to him that the left is only a party of sort of redistribution and social justice. Like, well, all those things don't really matter. What really matters is whether or not you're for the corporations or whatever that means for redistribution. Right. Well, Brink Lindsay ran into this quite a bit when he was here with his... He's still here. Oh, he came back. Oh, good. Oh, good. I like Brink. I'm a fan of Brink, but we have our disagreements. You mentioned the religious aspect, which is which a lot of your writing, especially in tyranny cliches, it's very good for pointing out how political rhetoric is very self-serving a lot of time when other people have ideologies and you just have things that work. For example, you brought out one of Obama's speeches and you're very good... One time I saw George Lekoff give a speech to my class in law school and he said, the problem with liberals is that we're too rational, which is interesting to me because I was like, well, of course, everyone thinks that. No one thinks they're irrational and you're very good at pointing that out. But then it concerns me if we're going to categorize the leftist or sort of pseudo-religious or whether or not we're pathologizing them in a negative way because it seems to be a bad thing if we think of leftism as some sort of disorder or religion, which I know you're not saying is entirely true. It just has elements of it. But a book like Dinesh D'Souza's The Roots of Obama's Range is kind of doing the same thing of just being like, well, let's try to explain Obama via other... Something else than just trying to address his ideas and explaining his ideas. So do you ever have concerns about pathologizing our opponents on either side? Oh, yeah, no, no. I mean, obviously, look, I mean, some of that is just simply endemic to politics and it kind of drove me crazy that people thought, you know, I don't want to get into Dinesh in particular, but thought that somehow Barack Obama passed Obamacare because his father was an ebode tribesman and whatever. You know, it's like, well, some 245, 250 other congresspeople voted for that law and they... That's been a main part of Democrat thought for 20 years. Right. So the... If not... If more. If not longer, right? And so the idea that somehow it can all be explained by this otherization, you know, otherizing Obama, I thought was a real distraction and truly problematic. At the same time, I don't think... You know, I'm a big enemy of these... I'm not saying you're doing it, but there's sort of an undertone of it. Everybody does it, false parallelism, right? Yeah, moral... I understand. Yeah, there's a problem with that. I mean, I think Buckley had the thing of if someone pushes a woman in front of a car and someone pushes him out of the front of the car, you would be like, well, everyone pushes women around and there's two different opinions. I'm just saying it's... Sometimes it's concerned... I prefer to try and think of my opponents as having arguments rather than pathologies. Right. Well, let's put it this way. Even though my tendency is to want to pathologize. Let's compare rather than... Let's compare, you know... Let's compare Russ Roberts and Paul Krugman, right? No. I think... They've had some fights. I know they have, right? You know, and so Russ Roberts, who I've never met... He's been on... He's been on here. But I'm a fan of his podcast and Russ Roberts is almost to a fault willing to acknowledge the possibility that he suffers from confirmation bias. He acknowledges... He says, look, at the end of the day, if you're a Keynesian, you can find enough data to support your position and if you're not, you can find enough data to support your position. And ultimately, it's just... It's a muddle and I'm always... And he says it over and over again. He says it in debates with Krugman. I'm always open to the possibility that I'm just looking for the evidence I want to find, right? Paul Krugman will never make that kind of concession. Paul Krugman says, instead, things of profound assininity, like facts just have a liberal bias, right? Now, that is a better distillation of confirmation bias than anything you could ever come up with. And I think that if you... When Barack Obama talks about how... In that... I have that... I begin the book with this where he gives a speech the day before his first inaugural where he says, we as a country need to have a new declaration of independence from small-mindedness, bigotry, prejudice, and ideology. I bet those are things that other people suffer from. Right. He's always talking about other people. He's always talking about how he's not an ideologue. He's a problem solver. Now, close to seven years into the Obama administration, the idea that you can have the view that Obama is great. You can have the view that he's been terrible or someplace in between. But I can't take you seriously if you don't think he's ideological. I mean, I just... I literally think that you have at your own ideological insane blind spot if you think his only approach is to be a pragmatist and a problem solver. The thing is that conservatives and libertarians are willing to admit that they have an ideology. Now, ideology is not a bad word. I mean, yeah, there's some bad dictionary definitions of it. The Frankfurt School definitely had their definition of it. Right. It all traces back to basically Napoleon and Marx who have this... They change what ideologue means to go from someone who cares about ideas to actually mean someone who's sort of insorceled and has been brainwashed and all that. And it's nonsense. Brainwash is another really good example of a term that you only call other people and you would never describe yourself as brainwash. Right. Right. Right. And it's like Erick von Knut-Ledin, who I'm a big fan of, for those looking to find him, he's been dead for a long time. He's been using this Austrian writer for National Review. And he makes a very good point. He says, first of all, in Europe, ideology and worldview are simply interchangeable terms. They're synonyms for each other. Moreover, in America, 95% of the sentences that mean anything about ideology, if you just replace worldview, you get it. Right. All I mean by an ideology, it's not a set of principles that I'll adhere to when the facts disagree with my ideology, but it is a checklist of my principles. I believe certain things after thinking seriously about things, about reading history, and all the rest. And I've came to certain conclusions about how the world should work and the use of questions I bring to new facts. The idea that somehow liberals aren't ideological about homosexuality, about guns. Social justice. Social justice. Right. I mean, you can go down a whole long list of things. The idea that they're taking each and every one of these issues purely on an empirical basis, weighing the pros and cons and the facts is insane. And yet they claim it time and time and time again. It is a tradition that goes back in liberal and progressive intellectual writings. It goes back over 100 years straight through the pragmatist thinkers. And it is a con. It is a way of saying your ideology is, so think of Charles Beard. Charles Beard is this famous economic historian who says that the founding fathers were only cared about protecting their own narrow economic self-interest. Now, this has been completely debunked, but it's still hugely popular in all the wrong places. And what he was really doing is he was promulgating his own ideological interpretation. What all these pragmatist types were doing was promulgating their own ideological interpretation and saying, no, we're just disinterested observers. We only care about the facts. Anybody who disagrees with us, well, you're like the founding fathers. You've got this ideology that explains all of your points of view. And it is a con. And it seems to me that almost any other realm of life, part of being self-aware, part of being wise in the classical Aristotelian sense, is understanding your own biases, right, is understanding the world that you, the way you want it to be, right? Because that's the only way you can check yourself to say, wait a second, am I just looking for the evidence I want to find? If you don't believe that you have that capacity, if you don't have a internal sense, I mean, the idea that somehow Paul Krugman isn't out there looking for the evidence that he's always right about everything is insane. And the fact that he lacks the awareness to con. To acknowledge that point is a huge indictment of his entire work. And it might be called a pathology. Yeah, it might be, or at least it's a mistake. It's some sort of mistake. In liberal fascism, I've always actually wondered about this. When you wrote the book, and as you say, fascism properly understood is not a phenomenon of the right at all, instead it is and always has been a phenomenon of the left. You also say many of the ideas and impulses that inform what we call liberalism come to us through an intellectual tradition that led directly to fascism. How did the left react to that book to you? I mean, so on one level, I mean, you're good at being like, I'm not saying you're fascist now, but you also wanted to point out that it matters to some degree to know the genesis of these, or at least they're not of the right as a typical thing. But did you get any good responses from the left? Oh, I didn't even know that, or was it mostly just like you wrote a book that called us fascists and then you took a walk? For the most part, it was a very disappointing reaction. First of all, the book was attacked for two years before publication, which kind of inclines me to think that some of these people were not going to like it no matter what I said, right? And I understand that the cover is a punch in the nose, and the title is a bit of a punch in the nose, and I get that even though the title comes from a speech by H.G. Wells, it's not something I... And the cover is brilliant. It's a smiley face with a Hitler mustache. But a couple years after publication, there's this guy, I can't even remember his name, but he's one of these guys whose entire cottage industry is to say that conservatives are fascists and that we must be eternally vigilant, and sort of a classic, what's the Southern Poverty Law Center type? One of these guys. Anyway, he can... Classifying was a hate group personally. Right. He convinced the History News Network, which is a pretty good site, to do a symposium on my book. And the amazing thing is no one invited me to participate. And it's not like the author is dead, right? And Ron Radosh, who is a great historian, intellectual historian, who gave it a glowing, wonderful review by the way. Yeah, it's a real neo-conservative book. It used to be on the left. It used to be a true communist, right. And I'm not sure he would call himself a neo-conservative, but who knows. Anyway, he gave it a glowing review and he invited him to do it. And he said, you know, shame on you guys that you're not inviting the person who you're going to eviscerate, right. And so I was actually delighted by this thing. I said, okay, finally I'm going to get smart criticisms of this book, right. Because I think that most of the reviews were pretty bad. The New York Times one wasn't actually all that bad. But then when the FATWA went out that, no, we must destroy this book, not give it an inch of ground, the rest of them were mostly bad. I mean, Michael Tomasky's was sand-poundingly stupid. But so here's your news network. They even got Robert Paxton as like the dean of living fascism historians, I guess, you know. And I got to say, you know, none of them were particularly very good. Paxton, I focused on Paxton simply because he was important. So, did they write these down into a symposium? Yeah. And so everyone, you can go look it up. I'm sure it's still on the web and my response to them is still on the web as well. And they score some points, you know, which I'm happy to acknowledge. But on the grand picture of it, I really wouldn't change at least the first half of the book, which is the historical part. The second half is a little bit of a screed. But and one of the reasons why it was so difficult for the left to deal with the book is I define my terms. Here is what I mean by left wing and right wing, right? And this sort of gets us back to where we started this conversation. In American life, at least on liberal terms, right? So forget our terms and where the schisms lie. On sort of conventional liberal terms, something is there are two pillars of right wingness in American life. There is the classical liberal pillar, right? Small government, limited government, free markets, free mines, Cato Institute, property rights, all of that stuff, the sovereignty of the individual. And then there is the cultural conservative pillar, right? Family values, tradition, all that kind of stuff. If you are very far over the line for either one of those categories, you are considered right wing. At National Review, because we're fusionists, we try to be both, right? We try to marry those two. But Cato is all one pillar, very little of the other pillar, and you're still in, we were talking about before we started how you get frustrated sometimes, you're called a right wing think tank. That's because to the left, if you don't think the government should be in charge and drive it as the engine of progress, that's it, then you're right wing, right? If that's how we're going to define right wing, those two pillars, then fascism by any rational understanding of the phenomenon was not right wing, right? Now you could, it was, you know, Nazis hated Christianity, Mussolini hated Christianity, you know, Hitler said he wasn't a patriot, he was a nationalist, and he wanted to bring, he would never bring back the monarchy, he would never bring back democracy. Well, it certainly also had the wig view of history that the progress is defined as like the next step is increased state control. Absolutely, there's deep, deep doses of the Galenism. And that's a huge element in sci-fi, some sci-fi is better at this, but a lot of that centralization is synonymous with progress. That's right, and that a lot of that comes from Hegel, right? I mean, and Hegel in Marx, obviously. And so the response to the book, I mean, I wish I had better interlocutors. I mean, and obviously I have my confirmation bias here, right? I mean, but I never read a review of the book from the left, at least, where I said, gosh, they got me. I mean, it's interesting. So the New York Times review by this guy, David Oshinsky, a historian at the University of Texas, I think, he, you know, tendentiously but accurately describes the thesis of my book for the first couple paragraphs that fascism is a phenomenon on the left, that, you know, Mussolini was a man of the left, that it comes out of the left, yada, yada, yada, yada, yada, that it was statism and centralism, yada, yada, yada. And it's only when I get to, he says, Goldberg is on less solid footing when he gets to FDR. No, well, I'm like, well, game over, right? Because that's 132 pages into the book. By this point, I've said that Wilson was a would-be, Woodrow Wilson was a would-be fascist, that Mussolini was a man of the left, that Nazism should be understood as a left-wing phenomena. And if you want to say I'm unfair to Franklin Roosevelt, fine. At the same time, the Blue Eagle is a very disturbing fascistic type of thing. Oh, it absolutely is. And there were, you know, and the, the, the, the second in command of the National Recovery Administration, General Iron, General Iron, Hugh Ironpans Johnson was an open admirer of Mussolini, handed out fascist tracks in the White House. He hung a portrait of Benito Mussolini on his wall. During the Democratic Convention, he handed out a memo saying that FDR should be like Mussolini and send all of Congress and the Supreme Court to an island for 90 days. I mean, the idea that I'm just simply asserting that there was some cross-pollinization here is insane. And I, and one of the reasons why the book is so long, and there's so many footnotes, is because I knew that people would say I'm asserting things without evidence. And so I had to beat the crap out of the reader with evidence, with example after example after example. And the fact that so few people were willing to deal with the book on its own terms and instead deal with the straw man that the left wanted it to be was very frustrating to me, but also sort of a sign of its success. And since then, you know, I've heard from a lot of sort of academic types, always off the record, always sort of sub-Rosa, that they find it useful. They actually invited me to come speak to a class on fascism at Harvard about it, which I thought was an interesting sign. And it's interesting, it's now in 11, I don't know, it's 11, it's somewhere between 8 and 12 languages. And it's amazing, whenever I meet people from Eastern Europe, they don't think the thesis is very controversial at all, because if you lived under communism and then you lived under Nazism, you understand that they're really not opposites, right? I mean, at the end of the day, the intrusions into your life are so close to equal that almost the differences between them are aesthetics rather than sort of some fundamental difference. Moving briefly to modern politics insofar as we have to occasionally live through periods of time, such as this, there's a lot of discussion that's been happening recently about the rise, so we're recording this in September 2015. So the rise... The very end of September 30th. The very end of September 30th. So the rise of outsider candidates, extreme, somewhat extremist candidates, Bernie Sanders, not necessarily an outsider, but then Trump, Fiorina, and Ben Carson, and then even people like Jeremy Corbyn in the UK. Do you think that this is actually signaling anything? Because we also have the incredible distrust of government in terms of distrust of Congress and distrust of not record level lows. Is this indicating something broadly, or is it just sort of primary, free-for-all season that is harder to take any actual lessons from? No, I think there's something bigger going on. And we can do the rank punditry part, but the shelf life on that is going to be pretty short. I do think there is something larger going on. It's interesting. In 1968, you had student revolts in the most heterodox number of countries, from Mexico City to Bali to Indonesia... Budapest. Well, across Europe and the United States and Canada and lots of South America. The circumstances on the ground were obviously very different in different places, but there was something also just in the water then. I think there's something in the water right now. There is this sense, I think, across the development and developing world that the nature of technology, the nature of the economy is getting out ahead of the people who claim to have mastered it, that we don't really know where things are going. We don't feel like we're getting any richer. I personally think inequality is BS as a serious issue. The only time inequality is a real issue is when it is a statistical symptom of a real issue. Poverty and mobility. If the bottom quintile lost their jobs tomorrow, that would increase income inequality. The problem isn't in income inequality. The problem is 20% lost their jobs. The way the left talks about inequality, which is very Russoian, is very abstract and separate from the real public policy issues, I think is nonsense. But I think there are smart people on the libertarian and conservative side who talk about income inequality the right way, that it's a symptom of something. But anyway, people don't like it. There is this sense that it's increasing. There's also the sense that the elites, and I'm a big fan of Joseph Schumpeter and why he thought capitalism will come to an end was because the new class would just take over and they would redefine civilization for their own benefit. I think we're seeing a lot of that. I think whether it's the EU or the American economy or the Davos crowd or wherever you want, the kindling is there for a lot of different reasons. It's another one of these overturn determined phenomena. This kindling is there for a populist prairie fire. And Donald Trump is. Well, and that's the really weird part. But do we want to… Yeah, it is. I feel like I should be wearing a piano keyed necktie saying I feel like I'm taking crazy pills here. Well, since you work in national review and you guys have been, all of you have been hitting him with body blows of extreme rhetorical flourish and it doesn't seem to matter, which is… Yeah. No, and there are a lot of BS pop psychology about this, that like, oh, we feel like our pundits don't matter. Our sinecure and the Washington establishment is evaporating and that's why we feel threatened by Trump and yada, yada, yada, right? And so first of all, the idea that somehow it is a great business strategy of mine to piss on the shoe in the corn flakes of a big segment of the conservative base is insane, right? I would have been… If I were driven by economic self-interest, the smartest thing I could have done is just not attack Trump at all, just stay quiet and ride this out, right? But I think what is happening, the threat that Trump poses is a real one. Not that I don't think he's going to get the nomination. I don't think if he became president, he'd become a dictator. I think this country chews up dictators. None of that stuff. What bothers me, what scares me is the way in which we're seeing conservatives and quite a few libertarians throw out their principles and their dogma and their ideology out of anger at the quote-unquote establishment and out of essentially a cult of personality for this guy. And the example I would use the most often was there's a poll a couple weeks ago where they asked Republicans whether or not they supported single-payer health care, something like 16% said they did. They were then told that Donald Trump supported it, and support went to 46%. Now, if there is an issue that institutions like the Cato Institute and the American Enterprise Institute and National Review and Fox News has spent more time on the last five years than educating the American people why single-payer is a bad idea, and the one group that you would think would have been persuaded by that would have been the conservative base or the Republican Party, right? And at all it takes is being told that Donald Trump is in favor of something to abandon that in a heartbeat. That is really depressing to me. Another thing that's really depressing to me is the, and I don't for a moment think that Trump supporters are a bunch of anti-Semites and bigots. They're not. I mean, these are my people. These are the people who have been reading National Review. These are people from the shop on the floor of CPAC. They're good people. But the bilious nastiness that Trump has unleashed that has been fairly surprising to me, particularly because it's so stupid. I mean, the idea that the Storm Front neo-Nazis would support Donald Trump is kind of insane just on the merits, right? And that because Donald Trump isn't an anti-Semite and I don't think he's smart enough to be a white nationalist. I mean, I think he just doesn't know what he's talking about, right? But these guys rallied around him because they see him as a battering ram to destroy the establishment. And so these trolls, some of whom I kind of think are probably getting funding from Russia, have been saying insanely disgusting things. There's some that have Twitter handles that are literally pictures of ovens and about how you should get in the oven and all this kind of stuff. When I responded to some of these jackasses making jokes about this guy named Joshua Goldberg, who was arrested for faking being a member of ISIS, and I just tweeted and said, look, my brother's name was Joshua Goldberg. He died a few years ago. I don't find any of these jokes very funny, right? The first response I got from that was, was he turned into a lampshade or soap? And so I've been getting this kind of stuff. My colleague David French has been getting worse stuff because he had the temerity to adopt an Ethiopian child, right? Which is polluting our bloodlines according to these neo-Nazi jackasses. And so anyway, I don't hold any of that against Trump supporters. And I think it would be grossly unfair guilt by association to hold them against that. But when I was getting the full wave of this crap, shocking, shockingly few Trump supporters would get in my timeline or send me an email and say, hey, look, I think you're an idiot about Trump. Trump is great, blah, blah, blah. But these guys don't speak for us. And I think under normal circumstances, if I was being subjected to this stuff, if David French was being subjected to this stuff, there's a normal primary season. And I was criticizing John Kasich or Rand Paul or whatever. And anti-Semites, for whatever reason, were coming after me for that. I would like to think that Rand Paul supporters would say, hey, look, I think you're wrong. Rand's our guy. But these guys don't speak for me. And the Trump supporters basically just sat on the sidelines. And again, it's anecdotal. It's not a scientific thing. It could be impressionistic. A lot of this happened over Labor Day weekend. There are all sorts of explanations for it. But I've been doing this for a very long time. I've been in the middle of an enormous number of social media and internet. In internet years, I'm older than Methuselah. So I've seen a lot of this before. And again, it's my own impression. I wouldn't want to say that this was a hard and fast rule or come to any scientific conclusions. But you get the sense that Trump supporters are willing to, if they're willing to throw over opposition to single-payer health care, it seems like they're willing to throw over a lot of other things, too. And that I find really disturbing. You mentioned you've been doing this for a while, the punditry business. It's always changing. But in a broader sense, does this town, do you ever get tired of it? On some days? I mean, maybe some days, I guess. But not the bad policies of this town, which conservatives and libertarians are always going to get tired of. But the dogma, the lies, the bad arguments, the grandstanding, the political scandals, and then you go on and have to comment it again. And you're just like, well, this is just SSD, DD again. Do you ever get tired of it? Or is it always changing? Well, I get exhausted with it. I really cannot stand the spinner class. I have individual friends who are acquaintances who are in that class. But as a profession, basically find it dishonorable. I mean, I'm not a big believer in most of the sort of Jesuitical understandings of journalistic ethics and all that kind of stuff. But I do believe that my only job is to tell the truth as I see it. And as long as I do that, I'm on solid ethical and moral grounding. And when there are people out there who are paid to say things they do not believe, and I personally could not do that. And that's one of the funny things about these days, all of a sudden being told I'm a member of the establishment and I'm part of this Georgetown cocktail party set. I hate all that stuff. And I have very little to do with it. I think I've been to one cocktail party that happened to be in Georgetown in my life. And I spent most of my time as a pundit, like Howard Hughes, with Kleenex boxes on my feet in my basement writing about fascism, right? And the idea that the author of liberal fascism is secretly trying to endear himself with sort of liberal elites I find very hard to swallow. And so, yeah, no, I get very weary of that aspect of Washington. But I'm also – I just don't interact with a lot of that. I have friends that I made in Washington 20 years ago and that is about 75% of my friends. And I try to get out of Washington a lot. My wife's from Alaska. We try to drive across country a lot. It's a very healthy thing for people in my line of work to do is to drive across this country because you learn, first of all, it's a big frigging country. And second of all, you learn or you relearn that most people don't look to Washington to solve their problems or to define their lives. And that is something a lot of people in this town really don't – I mean, they may understand it intellectually, but they don't understand it on an emotional level. And I think what happens here is vastly more important than it really is. Thank you for listening. If you have any questions, you can find us on Twitter at Free Thoughts Pod. That's Free Thoughts P-O-D. Free Thoughts is produced by Evan Banks and Mark McDaniel. To learn more, find us on the web at www.libertarianism.org.