Ask Me Anything—August 2023

I answer questions about whether the U.S. is a plutocracy, why I downplay the anti-liberalism of the Democrats, and what I consider the best music released in the past six years

3D illustration of pink color human brain lifting heavy barbell. Stock photo. (OsakaWayne Studios / Getty Images)

Brief Announcement: I will be on vacation next week with my family. So you will next hear from me early in the week of August 21 (the week of the first Republican debate, if you can believe it). Until then, happy summering to all.

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Scott
If you could spare the life of any deceased popular musician of the past century for an additional twenty years, who would it be and why?

Tough question. The rock-legend deaths that have hit me personally the hardest so far are David Bowie, Tom Petty, and Neil Peart of Rush. But much as I enjoyed latter-day Bowie and Petty, they had very full careers that produced immense amounts of great music. And Peart had pretty much reached the end of the live-drumming road by the time he was diagnosed with terminal cancer.

That leaves me with the very predictable choice of John Lennon. He died horribly young. I would have liked to hear where his songwriting took him over another 20 years. Plus, I’m quite sure Lennon and Paul McCartney would have decided to try writing together again at some point, setting up what would have been hands-down the biggest collective pop-cultural event in human history: a Beatles reunion album and tour.

If not Lennon, I’d have to go with Kurt Cobain, if only because he was just 27 when he died. I would have loved to follow along as he aged and grew as a songwriter over a couple more decades.

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Louis D.
The replication crisis that shook psychology in recent years has yet to reach full force in political science, but it's likely that we'll get there eventually. Until an army of brave grad students and assistant professors sort through it all and weed out the bad stuff, will this affect your selection of readings for your syllabuses, or will you adopt a wait and see approach?

My primary major field in graduate school was political theory, the least “empirical” of the discipline’s subfields. I’ve also been out of the academy since 2000. Put those two things together and I’m in no position to have a strong opinion about this topic. In my course this fall on the Republican primaries, I’ll be using a mix of political science scholarship and history books and documents. The former will provide relatively straightforward analysis with evidence partly drawn from public-opinion polls and research, which strike me as pretty reliable overall. Basically, my rule of thumb in everything is to read skeptically. I have a pretty refined BS detector that serves me well in what I read and write. I trust it to function just as well when I’m teaching.

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Will
In light of David Brooks’ recent essay on meritocratic inequality, what do you make of efforts by Senator Chris Murphy and Ian Marcus Corbin emphasizing the need for a spiritual renewal and visiting Appalachia? Do you think talking more about and addressing issues like loneliness, anomie, and deaths of despair could weaken the appeal of demagogic populism?

Lisa Finley
Following on Brooks’ column about the meritocracy, what degree of influence has the fear-mongering marketing by the pseudoscientific wellness industry played in amplifying the urban-rural divide and distrust? Since this false marketing relies on conspiracy theories, it seems to have functioned also as a vehicle for other conspiracy theories, i.e., election fraud and QAnon.

I’ve lumped these two Brooks-related questions together even though they are asking about very different things.

To Will: I’m sympathetic to understanding many of our problems in terms of a “spiritual” crisis, but to the extent that’s what’s going on, I’m skeptical there are policy solutions available. Sure, let’s talk about loneliness and depression. But government programs are unlikely to be able to make a meaningful dent in them. People need to go to church, or adopt fulfilling hobbies, or get married (and stay married). Policy changes might be able to nudge things a bit in this direction, but the problem (and the country) may just be too big and government too blunt to “fix” it. I’d also add that we’re seeing parallel problems across many countries in the world, which points to deep causes embedded in the structure of our modern (or postmodern) lives. Those causes are probably beyond the reach of a single nation’s government programs.

To Lisa Finley: I tend to see those trends as following from rampant skepticism of authorities rather than serving as a cause of it. I also try not to be overly judgmental about people looking for relief of pain and suffering in things like “alternative medicine” and other kinds of healers. Usually people who do this have grown frustrated after scientific medicine has failed them. We know less than we might like about healing, and I have empathy for people who look for help wherever they can find it.  

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Philip
What do you hope your students take away from your classes?

Two things, basically. First, I want them to learn facts/information: the names of certain politicians, writers, institutions, publications, and historical events, trends, and ideas. Second, I want them to learn how to think intelligently and wisely about those facts and that information. In my classes, I model how to think skeptically, which I also do in my writing for the Substack. This doesn’t mean the selective skepticism that I think hampers people like Glenn Greenwald and Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. I mean the self-limiting skepticism that applies doubt judiciously to all claims made by everyone—including myself. I believe a good teacher presents everything with an implicit “but I could be wrong” hovering in the background. If I cultivate that habit of mind in my students, I will be content I’ve done my job well.  

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Kevin Bowe
As an institutionalist, you are mindful of the bipartisan mistrust many people feel about our political institutions. Are they misguided in this thinking, and if so, why; or are they correct and many institutions are calcified and fail to address the critical issues at hand? If so, how should institutionalists respond to this problem?

Those are important questions. My answer is a pretty typical (for me) both/and. Yes, institutions and the elites who run them have made more than their share of mistakes over the past couple of decades: Iraq, the financial crisis, some COVID decisions, etc. But I also think we’re too prone to an indignant response. I think that’s because our expectations are too high (running policy in a dynamic, continent-wide, stupefyingly diverse society of 330 million people is hard!); because people in positions of authority are too prone to displays of misplaced confidence; and because our reaction to institutions and elites has joined up with the free-floating libertarianism that has always been strong in American culture but that has reached unprecedented heights since the 1960s. We expect authorities to be terrible, and we latch onto any evidence we can find that confirms this suspicion. Then add in the fact that each party thinks it gains politically by hyping the incompetence or corruption of whatever the other party is doing when it’s in power—and we’re left with a funhouse-mirror distortion of reality.

So, in sum—My answer is: Yes, there’s a problem, but it’s exaggerated. On the other hand, it’s rarely effective to intervene politically with the message that people shouldn’t care about the things they care about. So I don’t have a great answer to the related question of what we’re supposed to do about our fixation on the failures of our institutions and the elites that run them. (That’s also typical for me.)

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Voice of AmreriCast
Is there a Republican national figure, either running for president or on a major platform, who is capable of helping move the GOP beyond Trump devotion and the MAGA form of harsh disparagement of political opponents?

dg202
There has been the expectation since basically 2016 that someone (e.g., DeSantis) would emerge as a clear successor to Trump to carry on "Trumpism." Barring some dramatic shift in the next 6 months, however, it appears that Trump will retain hold of the Republican Party for at least this oncoming cycle. My question: Once Trump finally is gone, as he inevitably will be, what sort of dynamic do you think emerges in the GOP’s efforts to find a successor?

Dalessandro
What do you think the political climate will look like in 10 years, when presumably Trump will have gone on to his reward, or will be otherwise used up. Will there still be a Republican Party, or multiple parties?

I don’t see such a national figure in the Republican Party, I’m afraid. I like to think I’m about as critical of Trump as it’s possible to be, but I will give him this: He’s a world-class demagogue. That is a rare political talent. If Trump had died in, say, 2021, where would the GOP be right now? Probably rallying around DeSantis, or someone who would have run for president without Trump sucking up so much of the oxygen—like Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin or Georgia Governor Brian Kemp or Texas Governor Greg Abbott or Iowa Governor Kim Reynolds. But none of those people are remotely as talented as Trump at eliciting, channeling, and mobilizing grievance and anger. So if any of them became the GOP nominee, the result would almost invariably be a de-escalation of Trumpian populism. But not because the voters had grown tired of it. Just because there’d be no one around to tap into and inspire it as effectively as Trump has.

Honestly, the person who probably comes closest to Trumpian demagogic talent on the scene right now is Kari Lake. So let’s hope she continues to fall short of actually winning office in Arizona.

As for whether there will be a GOP in ten years, I assume so. Why wouldn’t there be? Republicans do very well, and far better than I’d prefer, in our politics. They control more state houses than the Democrats. They have a majority in the House, and are just a couple of seats from a majority in the Senate. Trump lost in the Electoral College in 2020 by just 43,000 votes in 3-4 states. That means our parties are close to tied. Why presume one of those parties will disappear or break up within the next decade?

I fear that your question may follow from a misleading assumption that’s quite common among some Democrats—namely, that the GOP’s ruthlessness in using counter-majoritarian institutions to gain and hold power means the party is unpopular. The truth is that most of those means would be completely off the table if the two parties weren’t pretty damn close to begin with. Republicans are almost winning outright majorities fair and square. They then use counter-majoritarianism to leverage that closeness into actual victories. But even without that added boost, the GOP would be doing pretty well.

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MarkS
Why do you persistently downplay the anti-liberalism of the Democrats, who do things by administrative fiat (like ban single-sex sports in schools) that would never pass a small-d democratic referendum?

For one thing, liberalism and democracy aren’t the same thing. If what you say is true and Democrats systematically pursue unpopular policies (for the record, I don’t think they do), that might be a sign of too much liberalism (overemphasis on the rights of this or that group instead of seeking to win broad democratic majorities).

I think it’s more accurate to say that the Democrats are a party that’s an agglomeration of interest groups and activists pulling in different directions. Depending on the strength of these factions in different parts of the country and within the national party, each has greater or lesser power to demand policy and regulatory favors and concessions in return for support. This is what drives a lot of what we see from the Democrats, and it’s often quite “democratic.”

But let me take a minute to respond to the core of your question, which concerns why I personally “downplay” how bad the Democrats are (in contrast to my usual emphasis on the right). The answer, obviously, is that I don’t think I’m downplaying anything. In my judgment, the Democrats are a perfectly normal center-left party, even though they often come down a couple of clicks to my left and sometimes annoy and frustrate me.

You judge differently: You are one of the most prolific commenters on my Substack, and your response to nearly everything I write, no matter the topic, ends up focusing on transgenderism. I’d suggest this is evidence of an obsessive preoccupation with this one issue above all others. In my judgment, it is … ill-advised to accord this issue that degree of importance and attention. If I agreed with you that transgender issues are more important and dangerous than just about anything else going on in the country, I’m sure I’d also share your view that the Democrats are pretty horrible.

As I’ve said in previous posts, judgment is all we have. You and I disagree in our judgments. It’s always possible to try and convince someone who judges differently to change his or her mind. You and I have tried to do that with each other, but it hasn’t worked in either direction. I’m not sure how much more there is to say about the topic.

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Donny from Queens
This is piggybacking off your last post a bit, but how can someone like Walter Kirn insist that both of these are true: 1) the liberal meritocratic elite has mismanaged the country into an unrecognizable hellscape that is still declining; and 2) life out in the sticks is healthy and idyllic?

I think “unrecognizable hellscape” is a bit of hyperbole that sets up the apparent paradox you ask about. Kirn doesn’t go that far. He also talks in the interview to which I link in the piece about how the positive social character of rural life in his Montana town did degrade somewhat during the pandemic. I suspect he would say it had farther to fall and rebounded faster than many more urban and suburban places. As I said in the post, I don’t buy all or even most of what Kirn is saying. But I sometimes think there’s value in listening to what someone with different or even extreme views thinks about the world, provided the person is smart and writing in good faith. Both are true in Kirn’s case, and I therefore find value in trying to view the country through the lens of his assumptions. Doing so reveals things I might not otherwise notice. That would be my case for not letting his strong opinions provoke you too much.

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WR Bergman
Republicans who were repelled by Trump now find themselves homeless or a "remnant" in exile. I am struck, though, by how many still attach themselves to the conservative/libertarian Republican Party dogma whose evolution and postures put them in the position they are now. They emphasize that they are “classical liberals” as perhaps a way of signaling their distance from the Trumpian evolution of the party, but all the old reflexes are still there. What changes do you believe these Republicans have to embrace either in principle or policy to avoid the mistakes that in 2016 alienated the electorate?

I’ve said on other occasions that completing the populist realignment of our parties that began around 2016 will require either that the Democrats moderate significantly on culture or that Republicans moderate significantly on economics. Both would involve becoming more populist in more than a symbolic/rhetorical sense. So my answer to your question about Republicans is that Trump made a big mistake in letting the “classical liberal”/libertarian Paul Ryan run the show in Congress during the first two years of his administration. It would have been smarter to try crafting the kind of right-populist economic agenda that Oren Cass is fashioning at American Compass.

The problem, for both parties, is that the electoral coalition of each has powerful factions that oppose any populist shift on these issues. For the GOP, it’s the party’s wealthiest donors. Now, Cass wouldn’t have been able to launch his venture without some rich backers, so someone (Peter Thiel? Someone else?) must favor a change. But I still think most wealthy Republican donors, for purely self-interested reasons, are primarily interested in cutting taxes and entitlements. Until that changes, the Republicans will remain ideologically stuck.

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John Murphy
What is your take on public employee unions?

I’m not a fan. When they strike, they are striking against their fellow citizens (that’s all of us), not shareholders or Big Capital. And as we often see with teachers unions on the left and police unions on the right, the interests of public employees can and sometimes do clash badly with the public good. (Prediction: My lefty subscribers will be unhappy with this answer.)

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John R. Holt
To what degree has the U.S. become a plutocracy?

The United States seems content to tolerate greater disparities in income and wealth than many other liberal democracies permit or accept, on the rationale that a system that allows a few to become (and remain) multi-billionaires will have greater upward mobility for all, not to mention an economy and culture of greater dynamism. While I think the latter supposition is probably true, I doubt the former is. But I nonetheless think it’s true that many Americans are okay with having Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos around because that somehow means that they themselves could become the next Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos.

Where I agree with this conventional wisdom is in holding that economic mobility is more important than equality. So it’s fine to permit people to become rich (even fabulously rich), as long as that resulting class is prevented from using its power to rig the broader system to prevent others from joining them at the top, through monopolies, rents, gratuitous tax loopholes, and more average-everyday forms of corruption (like undue access and influence on officeholders).

Judged by that standard, I think we’re doing … not great! But I wouldn’t go so far as to describe the U.S. as a plutocracy, which I’d say is a polemical term for the ancient Greek concept of oligarchy (rule by the rich). I think Aristotle would call our system a form of polity, which blends rule by the many who are poor (democracy) with rule by the few who are rich (oligarchy) by fostering a large, politically moderate middle class. Writing in 2023, I’d say we’ve tilted more in the direction of oligarchy since the Reagan administration from the baseline that prevailed during the more egalitarian postwar decades. I think that probably requires some additional redistribution for the sake of rebalancing. But this is far from a call to revolution.

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DonM
What is your take on how National Review deals with Donald Trump?

I think NR wants to be the clearinghouse for conservative ideas. To the extent that the conservative world has shifted in a populist direction since 2016, NR has shifted with it. Which is fine. The problem is that Trump is personally so unfit for high office and so morally repulsive that the magazine has been kind of stuck. If they denounce him outright, they will cease to have any influence on the right. If they embrace him, they will have to compromise with too much that they know is wrong and bad. Hence the allure of staking out an anti-anti-Trump position.

They aren’t alone on the right in doing this, though there are a lot fewer doing it now than there were in 2017. That’s because lots of right-leaning intellectuals have come to accept Trump with all of his warts, while plenty of others have left the conservative world altogether (this includes my colleagues at The Bulwark, who are now mostly conservative or moderate Democrats). But NR remains where it was six years ago: Disliking Trump and hoping/working for an alternative, but emphasizing the awfulness of Trump’s enemies far more they they do Trump’s awfulness itself.

I’d say that’s better than those who now hock Trump’s bullshit for fame, fortune, and power, but it’s less admirable than refusing to play the Trumpian game at all. Which means, I suppose, that my take is: Could be worse!

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Brian Gavin
Do you believe, as I do, that Joe Biden should retire in favor of a younger Democrat to be determined via the primary gauntlet?

If it isn’t too late for this, it’s certainly getting close at this point. The longer Biden waits, the more it will seem to powers that be in the party that he should just hand things over to Kamala Harris. But I think she’d be a disaster against Trump or anyone else in the general election. So that doesn’t make me pine for Biden to exit the stage. The people I’d vastly prefer to see running (Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker, Colorado Governor Jared Polis, or best of all Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer) would have to raise mountains of cash, run a bruising primary campaign against the sitting vice president, and not tear the party apart in the process—and all starting from absolute zero just a few months away from the first primaries. That’s a tall order!

The time for Biden to back out was last spring, if he wanted to give alternatives the space they needed to fight it out in a productive way. As it is, I fear we’re stuck with the incumbent president.

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Marcus Meeks
What are five albums released in the last five years that you recommend?

Because I’m in charge around here, I’m going to adjust the question so it reads, “five albums released in the last six years,” because I thought there was good music released in 2017 that I want to include on a list of recommended recent music. I’ll also give a YouTube video for one great song from each record for you to try out. So here we go, in chronological order.

1. Big Wreck, Grace Street (2017)

   “One Good Piece of Me”

(Me on Big Wreck)

2. The National, Sleep Well Beast (2017)

   “The System Only Dreams in Total Darkness”

(Me on The National)

3. Dawes, Passwords (2018)

   “Crack the Case” (Live)

(Me on Dawes; and again on Dawes)

4. Phoebe Bridgers, Punisher (2020)

   “Chinese Satellite”

(Me on Phoebe Bridgers; and again on Phoebe Bridgers)

5. Taylor Swift, Folklore (2020)

   “Illicit Affairs” (Long Pond Studio Sessions—Live)

(Me on Taylor Swift; and again on Taylor Swift)