Ask Me Anything—April 2023
I answer questions about Tucker Carlson, what Richard John Neuhaus would make of First Things today, whether secularism is good or bad for American politics, and the state of my own mental health
Every month or so, I invite paying subscribers to pose questions about pretty much anything. When I run the responses, I drop the paywall so all subscribers (paying and non-paying alike) can read them. That means today’s post is open to all: You won’t need to become a paying subscriber to finish reading—or even to listen to the audio recording of the post, which I’ve place at the top of the post just this once.
But that doesn’t mean there’s no reason to begin paying. On the contrary, there’s the strongest reason of all: The people gathered here are smart, curious, searching. Don’t you want to fully join us on the adventure of trying to understand this crazy/wonderful country/world? I thought so! Come on in, the water’s fine….
Louis D
How do you take care of your mental health as you write about these depressing issues day after day?
Good question. I definitely have emotional struggles, though they are usually wrapped up with childhood traumas and their reverberations throughout my adult relationships. I’ve been quite open in my writing about my own experiences with therapy, which go on to this day. But covering politics isn’t a big part of what I wrestle with on the (metaphorical) couch.
Yes, writing about politics since 2016 has often been a downer, but I tend to be a bit of a downer by disposition. Don’t get me wrong: I’ve never been clinically depressed, but I am temperamentally prone to sadness. I don’t expect things to turn out well. I incline toward pessimism. I don’t believe in providence or its secular analogue (progress). I distrust happy endings—in movies, books, politics (or eternity, for that matter). I have a tragic sensibility. That’s one of the things that makes my liberalism kind of distinctive and somewhat akin to the moderate conservatism associated with thinkers like Edmund Burke, Michael Oakeshott, and the early neocons who gathered around The Public Interest in the late 1960s and ’70s.
Viewed from this standpoint, the populist shift in our politics since 2016 has been surprising and often deeply worrying (especially on the afternoon of January 6, 2021). But it hasn’t fundamentally shaken my view of the world in the way I think it has a lot of liberals, progressives, and Never Trump/Reaganite conservatives. So I’m doing alright—hoping for the best, planning for the worst. Which is, it seems to me, a pretty good way to live more generally.
Ronald Beiner
What would Richard John Neuhaus think of the current iteration of First Things?
Mark Gordon
What do you think of the phenomenon of Integralism?
Tony Annett
Do you stand by your analysis in The Theocons? If you were writing this book today, what would you say differently?
The question of what Neuhaus would think of FT today is a hard one—and obviously entirely speculative. The answer depends on whether I assume he would have remained wedded to the principles and modes of thinking that carried him through most of the last 2-3 decades of his life. (He died in 2009.) If he continued to affirm those principles and modes of thinking, he would have become a Dispatch-style center-right Never Trumper who refused to vote for Joe Biden and held out for the GOP to regain its senses.
My hunch is that this wouldn’t have been where he ended up. For one thing, Neuhaus was a left-wing antiliberal radical in his youth, and as I explain in The Theocons, that radicalism sometimes returned after he migrated to the right, especially when he became convinced his own side was in danger of losing. That means, in terms of temperament, he would have been susceptible to the despair and desperation that convinced many on the right during the second term of the Obama administration to give Trumpian populism a try. (The Obergefell decision embedding same-sex marriage in the Constitution would likely have been a major catalyst for him, as it was for many others on the religious right.)
The other thing that may have pushed RJN toward the populist right is Pope Francis. The thought that Pope John Paul II, Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush, and Pope Benedict XVI were all allies, fighting for the same things, was a huge contributing factor to Neuhaus’ political commitments. The church coming to be led by someone clearly on the leftward side of decades-old debates would have shaken him and forced him to re-evaluate a lot of his prior judgments about where history was heading. Could it have led him to shift FT in the populist direction the current editor (R.R. Reno) has embraced? I think so. Though I’m a little uncomfortable saying that precisely because it’s based entirely on my own musings.
One thing I do feel pretty confident in is the conviction that he would not have become an “Integralist” who attempts to unite church and state. That was anathema to him. I think it’s more likely he would have moved in the opposite direction, giving up on hopes for blending Catholic encyclicals with the Republican Party platform and leadership. Supporting Trump would have required that shift. So to answer the question about the Integralists: I don’t think much of them at all. In fact, of all the various factions on the right, I think of them as the most deeply confused and foolish in their judgments about the country and what’s politically possible. (I’ll return to this theme in my answer to the next question.)
As for The Theocons, I’ve already mentioned one aspect of the book that I stand behind (the analysis of what might be called Neuhaus’ political psychology). More generally, I think the intellectual history in the first half of the book is solid and I remain proud of it. The later chapters on theocon hopes for the second Bush term and beyond are pretty badly dated—and were already dated by the paperback edition of the book, which came out a year or so later. (I discuss this in the Afterword I contributed to the paperback.) So those sections aren’t worth much today, except as a snapshot of how the theocons were thinking around the time I wrote the book. I also have some misgivings about the strident secularism in the book’s final chapter. My second book, The Religious Test, was written in part as a corrective on this point. In the latter book I reject Jefferson’s metaphor of a static wall permanently separating religion and politics and instead treat them as fighting along a skirmish line that moves back and forth across a battlefield over time. That revised position remains my view today.
Luke Christofferson
What are your thoughts on the decline of Christianity in America, both in attendance and in moral strength, in relation to the rise of grievance and anger as primary motivating factors in the Republican party? Do you have any strong beliefs on the primary causal direction, i.e., the rise of grievance and anger weakened the Church or the weakening of the Church allowed for the rise of grievance and anger?
Articus
I’m curious what you make of America becoming a more secular country? This seems to be impacting a lot of other trends, and I’m curious if you think this will be a net positive or a net negative, regardless of personal religious belief or lack thereof. Also, do you expect this trend to continue?
Very good, challenging questions. I think any big event or trend in the world tends to involve a feedback loop among various causes and effects, making it unwise to work too hard at isolating one variable as a cause and another as an effect. That means I’ve come to think more like a historian than a political scientist, despite having a Ph.D. in the latter and only an MA in the former. But regardless, I think we can see this feedback loop pretty clearly on the issue of Christianity and the moral nastiness of right-wing populism. The close association of the Bush 43 administration (and its failures) with both evangelical Protestantism and the Catholic figures I wrote about in The Theocons helped to turn many younger Christians against religion. Meanwhile, Trumpism is clearly the expression of a more secular form of right-wing politics than the one that prevailed in the U.S. twenty years ago. (I often paraphrase a Ross Douthat quip from 2016: If you disliked the religious right, you’re going to hate the post-religious right.)
This second point can be easy to misconstrue because, for example, Trump appointed the Supreme Court justices who gave the religious right its greatest victory in half a century (the overturning of Roe v. Wade). But that misses a crucial change in the meaning of Christianity over the past two decades: Where the term once denoted orienting one’s life around faith and bringing its precepts to bear on politics, now it’s more of a cultural identity that gets affirmed by people who rarely if ever attend church and simply use the term to signal a position on the right side of the culture war (which is waged for secular reasons, including a generalized hatred of the left).
So, when it comes to the second question, my answer is that I’m worried that the country’s growing secularism could be contributing to a rise in political extremism. To return to Douthat, I’m increasingly persuaded that he’s right to suggest in his writings that the decline of organized religious faith doesn’t so much produce a country with less religiosity as a country with more disorganized forms of faith that have all kinds of unpredictable political implications. I include so-called “woke” trends on the activist left as another, very different (and, for me, unwelcome) form of post-Christian religiosity.
Kevin Donohue
You mentioned in a reply to a comment I made that you’re not an Adam Serwer fan. I’m not trying to foster a feud or something, but you indicated the way you try to conduct yourselves is very different. I like both of your writing. I’m curious for you to expand on your thoughts.
Serwer has come at me pretty aggressively on Twitter over the years about things I’ve written that try to make sense of the appeal of right-wing populism, and that has made me disinclined to read his essays for The Atlantic. So I can’t really speak with great precision in answering the question. I will say, though, that his “The Cruelty is the Point” essay is clearly a classic of the (first?) Trump era that captured something important in vivid, memorable prose.
But even in that essay, it’s possible to see some of what I dislike about his writing. There’s a brittle moral piety to his work that leads him to divide the population of the country into the children of light and the children of darkness. He and his progressive allies are on one side while their opponents are on the other, almost irredeemable in their complicity with Evil. As I understand it, his criticism of my writing amounts to him thinking I’m complicit, too, because I’m insufficiently inclined toward denunciation. So I must also be denounced in order to uphold the moral order of things. That’s not how I comport myself as an intellectual.
I also think Serwer, like other progressive writers whose expertise lies mainly in American history, tends to treat contemporary political developments as expressions of distinctively American maladies and obsessions. That’s obviously true in part (sometimes in large part). But it denies or downplays the continuities we can see across the liberal-democratic world over the past decade. Those continuities point toward broader, structural causes of the rise of right-wing populism beyond the American past and its demons.
My launch essay for “Eyes on the Right” was written with Serwer (and others) in mind, so if you want to hear more along these lines, I suggest going back to that.
Russell Arben Fox
Apropos of the news of the week: What's your best Tucker Carlson story? Or anecdote? Or complaint, criticism, curious observation, whatever?
Dalessandro
How do you explain formerly progressive figures like Glenn Greenwald and Matt Taibbi becoming horseshoe reactionaries? Is it simply a case of going where the market lets them make money, or some psychological resentment that was always there under the surface? Or something else?
I’m afraid I have no Carlson stories. Never met him. I largely agree (once again) with Douthat’s take on his place in the post-2016 right: Carlson’s show gave us a glimpse of what a full realignment might look like—one in which the GOP shifted to be fully antiliberal on both culture and economics. It would be strongly (white) nationalist and friendly toward socialism. National Socialism, you might call it, though Douthat doesn’t.
One thing I liked about Douthat’s column is that it highlights the important role of one-sided skepticism in Carlson’s latter-day political commitments. That meshes nicely with my early post about Glenn Greenwald (and, by extension, his ally Matt Taibbi), which attributed Greenwald’s ideological trajectory to what I called his “selective skepticism.” That’s his tendency to be maximally skeptical of any authority connected in any way to (center-left or center-right) liberal institutions, combined with maximal credulity about … anyone who raises or shares those skeptical objections. So, for example: Those who favor aiding Ukraine in its war with Russia deserve absolute skepticism because the people staking out that position are centrist liberals, while Vladimir Putin’s claims about the war should be taken at face value.
Now, I think this is an incredibly irresponsible way to comport oneself both intellectually and politically, one that is guaranteed to produce terrible judgment calls—and I wish Douthat could muster up more criticism of it than he does in that column. But I do think this is the right way to make sense of this whole bunch: Carlson, Greenwald, Taibbi, and those who revere them.
Maggie
Given all the factors you can think of in a minute or so, what's the best city in America?
There are so many factors, with many of them subjective, that I can’t properly answer this question—and not even for myself personally, since there are lots of cities I’ve either never visited or know only minimally. But I will say this: I know New York City the best, having been born there and lived there for a time later in life. I also visit it frequently, especially Brooklyn, to see friends. It’s the one American city that rivals London, Paris, Rome, Berlin, and the other great, sprawling cities of the world. I also like things about Philadelphia (where I live now), Boston, Chicago, and Miami. I’ve lived in and liked Salt Lake City. I like what I’ve seen of Denver, Seattle, LA, and San Diego. I think San Francisco is one of the most physically beautiful cities I’ve ever seen (I love a city with steep hills), but the last couple of times I’ve visited, it’s been a filthy, disordered mess (as everyone seems to agree by now). I think that’s a shame—and that contemporary liberalism’s refusal to confront this problem (there and elsewhere) is one of its gravest weaknesses.
James Ackerman
If (hopefully when) the GOP candidate loses the 2024 election, what do you think are the odds of actual, possibly geographically widespread, violence this time?
It will depend in large part on how close the outcome is and whether the defeated Republican stokes the unrest with lies about fraud. I also think violence by the left in response to a Republican win is a real possibility.
Michael Mohr
Something that keeps coming up in my feed is book banning on the right. I get it: Historically this has come much more from the Republican side. But over the past decade we’ve clearly seen a shift towards far-left “woke” book censorship, less so from state government but de facto via other methods such as using Twitter to pull books from publication, boycotting, etc. It seems like every time these debates come up on the left, they deny there’s ever been or is now a censorship problem on their side. Any thoughts here?
What the two sides share is rising censoriousness—a tendency to want to shut down views each dislikes. But, for now, only one side (the right) uses government power to impose it, and that means only one side is engaging in censorship. I try to be very exacting in drawing this distinction. A Twitter mob demanding a publisher withdraw a book is censorious. If the publisher capitulates to the mob, that’s cowardice. But it isn’t an act of censorship, which is what happens when the government steps in to prevent publication or dissemination of a book, article, speech, etc. As a writer and someone who reveres the open exchange of ideas, I disapprove of censoriousness. But it’s far more dangerous when it’s welded to government power. That’s one of many reasons why I think the right is the bigger threat to liberal democracy in the United States at the moment.
Mark S.
Why are the Democrats all-in on transgenderism, to the point of passing laws in multiple blue states that allow the state to take children away from parents who do not “affirm” their child's “gender identity” and sign off on “gender affirming care” (which means puberty-blocking drugs, cross-sex hormones, and disfiguring surgeries, of which there are at least hundreds per year in the U.S. on children with a diagnosis of “gender dysphoria,” per a recent Reuters analysis of insurance claims)?
Democrats are “all-in on transgenderism” because they are trying to be nice, and they have embraced a view of personhood that treats each individual’s claims about his or her own subjective state of mind as inviolable. So if a young person who was born a boy says he feels like a girl, the impulse is to want to accommodate that claim and not reject or judge it. And of course we live in a culture in which millions of people (including minors) take anti-depressants, stimulants, and steroids—and undertake plastic surgery (boob jobs, butt jobs, nose jobs, tummy tucks, face lifts, liposuction, CoolSculpting, etc.) to bring their bodies into conformity with subjective desires. Why should gender preferences be any different?
I have criticisms of all these trends, and I think “gender affirming care” (a euphemism I never use without ironic quote marks) should only be given to adults—because it often involves making major and permanent changes to bodies, and teenagers are unreliable judges in their own cases. But I also think it’s important to recognize that the Democratic position on these issues is both (1) continuous with much broader trends in the culture; and (2) comes from a place of good intentions (however misguided).
(By the way, I am working on a major statement on these issues for the Substack. It will take the form of a “Liberal Manifesto on Sex and Gender” that I’ll publish at “Looking Left” when it’s ready. I’m taking my time on it, because it’s important and will be controversial.)
George Scialabba
It must be obvious even to Democratic Party higher-ups that economic populism—taxing the wealthy, expanding federal health insurance, rolling back regulatory capture, shrinking the financial sector—would be a winning formula at the polls. Why are they so leery of it? Is the party really a wholly owned subsidiary of Wall Street?
Would this be a winning formula at the polls? I’m not so sure. The Democratic electoral coalition is increasingly highly educated and (in part for that reason) pretty well-off economically. If the party wants to go with the trend, it will want to remain centrist on economics to keep these voters on the team.
On the other hand, if the party wants to defy the trend and move left on economics, it will need to combine that move with greater moderation on cultural issues, since the more economically populist factions of the electorate tend to be more conservative on culture. Are Democrats prepared to do that? I don’t think so, because the highly educated and economically well-off base of the party also tends to be very left on culture.
So I think the party has the following options: stay centrist on economics and left on culture; or move left on economics and to the center on culture. If the party tried to go left on both, I fear it would end up losing to Republicans in a bloodbath.
John Murphy
If you were brought in to advise a group of musicians on how to set up the ideal rock band, what would you tell them?
Kevin
Generally, what are your thoughts on Steely Dan? Are you a fan? Why or why not?
Like the question about cities, this one about my ideal rock band is incredibly subjective. All I can do is tell you what I like. I love piano. It’s my favorite instrument by far. So I like a lot of piano in a band. And I also like a very full sound, with at least two guitars filling out the mid-range. When it comes to solos, I prefer melodicism: David Gilmour or Mark Knopfler over Eric Clapton or Eddie Van Halen. I love Neil Peart of Rush as a drummer, but I don’t expect that kind of flashiness and technical proficiency in other bands; what does matter to me for drums is that the drummer hits hard. And on bass, I prefer busier McCartney-style melodic lines.
That’s why my Platonic ideal of a rock band (that’s a funny thought) is something like Bruce Springsteen’s E Street Band during their mid-’70s to mid-’80s heyday: several guitars; fantastic piano runs; a separate organist to fill out the sound; a hard-hitting drummer. I don’t like Springsteen as a soloist on guitar, but Clarence Clemons’ very melodic sax solos filled that space for me.
But hey, I also love harder rock (Foo Fighters, the Canadian band Big Wreck) and singer-songwriters who mostly work with studio musicians. In the end, the song is usually most important to me.
Finally, I’m sorry to say I’ve never been a Steely Dan fan. The jazzy melodies and harmonies, and Donald Fagan’s singing, leave me completely cold. Just not my thing. Sorry to disappoint.
Michael Gibbons
While our current political Hot Mess has many precedents both here in America, and throughout World history, I'm wondering if you would be able to point to a couple that you find particularly apt?
Tim
I despise Trump for what I think are objective reasons, but I worry that Trump is less the problem than his base (propagandized followers of dishonest demagogues). Assuming Trump can be replaced at the head of the right-populist movement, he will he be? And what is the time frame for these sorts of fevers to break?
I hate to close out on a whimper, but I don’t have a great answer to either of these questions. I know a fair amount about history, but I don’t look to it for straight parallels to the present. There are some such parallels in Thucydides’ account of Athens before and during the Peloponnesian War; in histories of the Roman Republic’s transformation into an empire; in Florentine republicanism during the Renaissance; in the English Civil War and Revolution of the 1640s; and in Weimar-era Germany. Some imply we’re headed to disaster. Others give us glimpses of eras of turbulence that pass after a time.
I think there are two things that make our situation somewhat unique: At 330 million people, our country is truly enormous by historic standards (very far from the city states of the ancient world and Renaissance Italy—and quite large even for a nation state); and digital technology has us networked in a way that allows popular mobilization at a scale and speed that’s also largely without precedent. Will these variables make it easier or harder to get past the dangers of the moment? And do they incline us toward tyranny, civil war, or a return to the relative placidity of the post-1989 era? I don’t know, but I suspect we’ll find out over the next couple of decades. (How’s that for an unsatisfying answer?)
As for Trump being replaced, demagoguery is a difficult skill to master, as Ron DeSantis has been learning over the past few weeks. I don’t see anyone else on the right who can do what Trump does—except maybe Tucker Carlson. If he could run for president from his house in rural Maine, I’d be very worried about him launching a campaign. But I don’t think he’ll have the stomach for barnstorming the country over the next 18 months. We may have dodged a bullet there.
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