Ask Me Anything—August 2025, Part 1

I answer questions about what Dems can do to win back voters, whether Barack Obama did a good job responding to the 2008 financial crisis, and how much we should fear the evangelical-Trump alliance

Illustration of a high-resolution brain tractogram, depicting the complex network of neural pathways in the human brain. The intricate fibre tracts are visualised using advanced diffusion tensor imaging (DTI), providing insights into the brain's white matter connectivity and structure. (Thom Leach / Science Photo Library / Stock Photo / Getty Images)

This is Part 1 of a two-part Ask Me Anything post. Part 2 will run on Friday. I’m traveling this week without my microphone, so I won’t be doing audio versions of this or Part 2. (It’s always been a little awkward for me to do those for AMA post, with their often lengthy reader questions.)

I also want to remind readers about the second annual “Liberalism for the 21st Century” conference taking place in Washington, D.C. next Thursday and Friday (August 14 and 15). Readers of this newsletter can use “LC20” as a promo code to receive a 20 percent discount on the conference fee. I hope to see you there!

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J Dalessandro
I'm always jumping ahead to see how the novel ends. I don't think this clown show is running the full four years, but I can predict with absolute certainty that our Second Pedo President is going to kick off one day. Now that he has done us the service of demonstrating that our constitutional structure is rotted through and full of little passageways for the rodents to eat away at the foundation, how does the rebuilding process begin? We obviously cannot merely brush ourselves off and say, “well that was unpleasant” and pretend we are getting back to what used to be called normalcy; we need massive reforms. How can this be made to happen?

myrna loy's lazy twin
I think that strong, trustworthy institutions are important for a healthy democracy. The Trump administration has been going after institutions, which is obviously bad for democracy and society at large. Over the past 10-15 years, many of those institutions did things that made them less trustworthy. Stuff like the African American Museum putting up a chart stating that hard work and timeliness were white traits and probably half the things that came out of the CDC during Covid made it pretty clear that institutions were not necessarily trustworthy. Since then, institutions have quietly stopped making some of the more contentious claims, but they haven't really walked much back openly let alone explained why this happened and what they are going to do to avoid compromising the public's trust in them in the future. How much of our collapse in trust do you think is due to the conduct of institutions vs other factors? And how much did their conduct make them more vulnerable to attacks by the Trump administration?

Michelle Togut
If you were to give the Democrats one piece of advice on how to defeat Trumpism and win back voters, what would it be?

Is Donald Trump going to die one day? Without a doubt. He might even die before the end of his term in January 2029. But of course, if he does, he will be succeeded by Vice President JD Vance. Which means that it is extremely likely that some version of this clown show is, in fact, going to run a full four years (at least).

As I’ll say in response to another question or two below, I think J Dalessandro’s question may understate the depth of our problems. I agree we need reforms, and I have called on the Democrats to refashion themselves as a party willing and eager to spearhead such reforms. But in my view, those reforms are primarily needed in order to rebuild trust in our public institutions, as myrna loy’s lazy twin suggests, not to punish one side or party in our politics for its misdeeds. A lot of things Trump is doing that Democrats despise have been made possible by this collapse in trust, and some of that collapse can be laid at the feet of Democratic allies working within those institutions.

Practically speaking, this means we can’t look for the solution to our civic problems in enactment of sweeping institutional change: Abolish the Senate! Pack the Supreme Court! Outlaw gerrymandering! Those reforms might sound good, but if they are enacted by one party alone (inevitably for its own benefit), they will just be swept into the centrifugal forces already helping to destabilize the country. They will give the other side further evidence that the system is rigged to favor their enemies. This will drive trust in our institutions even lower and make one side or the other even more desperate to seize power and even less likely to relinquish it.

Let me put the point in a slightly different way: Our institutions have all kinds of problems. But the bigger problem is … us. Half the electorate voted for Trump after everything it saw from 2016 through 2024. If that astonishing fact isn’t seared in your brain—if it doesn’t shape all of your thinking about what comes next—then I think you will be led astray into wishful thinking.

But that doesn’t mean I have no practical advice. I appreciate Michelle Togut’s narrowly focused question. My one piece of advice for Democrats would be one Matthew Yglesias often emphasizes: the party should moderate on culture (and admit errors and overreach, as myrna loy's lazy twin advocates) so that the party can win more Senate races. If the Democrats continue to make adherence to leftist positions on cultural issues a precondition for receiving DNC support, they will struggle in lots of red and purple states, which could put winning a Senate majority out of reach for many election cycles to come. And that means Democrats will have no power to reject executive branch and judicial nominations or launch Senate investigations or hearings into executive branch overreach. Such cultural positioning may also make it difficult for Dems to win Electoral College majorities. That could mean Republicans remain in control of much of the federal government for a long time to come.

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John Murphy
What is your take on how President Obama handled the financial crisis? Did he prudently steer us clear of another Great Depression or was he too accommodating to reckless and greedy financial executives, which fueled angry populist movements on the left and the right?

On one level, I think Obama did a fine job—or rather, as fine of a job as any Democrat could have done under the circumstances. Congress wasn’t going to approve a bigger stimulus, which the economy needed. So he ended up undercharging the economy, producing years of anemic growth through no fault of his own. On the other hand, the combination of Trump 1.0 and Joe Biden overcharged the economy during the COVID pandemic, helping to give the country the worst bout of inflation since the early 1980s. I think this shows that it’s very hard to get things exactly right when we’re talking about managing macroeconomic convulsions.

But then there’s the question of legal consequences for the investment bankers who contributed to the financial crisis of 2008. I very much supported Obama’s effort to provide stability at a moment of intense volatility and uncertainty, when it looked like the global credit markets might seize up entirely, producing a second Great Depression. We avoided that, in large part because George W. Bush and then Obama did everything they could to inspire confidence at their competence, which in that moment amounted to showing the global economy that the government wouldn’t allow the financial system to collapse, with any effort to lock up the richest guys in finance deferred until some later moment, or never.

Did this decision contribute to the subsequent rise of populism on both the left and right? Yes, probably, since it could be made to look like the wealthy benefitted from their chummy connections to powerful people, while ordinary Americans often lost their houses and life savings with only a minimum of a safety net. But it’s important to recognize that these populist fires are burning in countries around the world, regardless of their degrees of separation from the banks and investments behind the 2008 crisis or the policies they pursued to alleviate the economic fallout.

We appear to be living at a time when technology (especially the network effects made possible by smart phones and social media) encourages populist reaction to … whatever development is pissing people off at a given moment. If Obama had done more to go after the bankers, some still would have said he had done too little, while others would have insisted he went too far, turning us into a communist system in which businessmen are prosecuted for making bad investments. I’m not saying either would have been fair, just that such populist sniping from the left and right against the center would have happened anyway—which might mean that we live at a time when such populist impulses are an inevitable factor in democratic politics, no matter what’s going on.

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Brian Newhouse
You come, if I recall correctly, from a religious-intellectual background. Do you think the later W.H. Auden (I'm thinking particularly of the essays in The Dyer's Hand) might have anything to offer to a present-day reader?

I learned a lot about religion (specifically, Catholic and Protestant Christianity, especially in the United States) from working at First Things. But my deeper education preceded that chapter of my life and came from the study of political philosophy and intellectual history, neither of which involved an especially serious focus on religion.

That said, I’ve learned a lot from reading some serious religious thinkers down through the years: Augustine, Pascal, Franz Rosenzweig, Reinhold Niebuhr, TS Eliot, Walker Percy, the encyclicals of Pope John Paul II, Stanley Hauerwas, Peter Lawler, Alan Jacobs, David Bentley Hart. That’s an eclectic list, and Auden isn’t on it. I love some of his poems, but I’ve read very little of his prose first hand, including The Dyer’s Hand. I should change that.

The thing I most appreciate about the authors I’ve listed is how they expand my understanding of human nature. Judeo-Christian anthropology really does have a different shape than ancient Greek philosophical accounts of it, no less than modern scientific-reductionistic construals. (And the Jewish and Christian (and Roman Catholic and Protestant and Eastern Orthodox, not to mention Muslim and Buddhist and Hindu) theistic variations have all kinds of differences as well.) If Auden’s essays will help me to expand my horizons on these all-important matters, I will be eager to make time for him—though maybe not until I’ve finished my current book project, which is taking up an awful lot of my intellectual energy at the moment.

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Nick Wright
While the main focus since Trump's second inauguration in January has been his impact on economics, international relations, and the U.S. Government, I anticipate subtler and therefore more insidious and long-lasting changes to American society, and ultimately laws and government policy, driven by a rise in religious fundamentalism. We read that evangelicals were the decisive voting bloc in his November victory, and Trump has gone to great lengths to pander to them. If their symbiotic relationship continues—bolstered by powerful evangelical loyalty, or at least sympathy, in both the Congress and the Supreme Court—will we not inevitably see increased intolerance in the country?

As the author of a book (The Theocons) about the threat posed by the ideology of the religious right roughly 20 years ago, I will say that I don’t think this isn’t the right way to look at the current situation. The country is more secular than it was 20 years ago; the Republican coalition is more secular than it was then, too; and the parts of that coalition that describe themselves as evangelicals are, on average, less likely to attend church and read the Bible regularly than their counterparts a generation ago. Their faith has evolved into an identity marker: They call themselves Christians or evangelicals because those labels convey that they’re the good Americans, as opposed to those bad Americans on the other side of the partisan and culture-war divide.

My point isn’t at all that these trends aren’t bad or that they don’t constitute a threat to liberal-democratic self-government in the United States. They are and they do. But the nature of the threat is different now than it used to be, and it isn’t primarily one having to do with a faith community’s attempt to impose its religious views on the rest of us using state power. It’s about a coalition of people who strongly dislike numerous trends in American life going back decades, and in some cases a century or more, coming together to roll back or reverse those trends. The remaining devout evangelicals are one faction in this coalition, but just one, and they lack the clout of some others. (Recall the Trump’s campaign promise to oppose a nationwide abortion ban? It’s been six months, and there’s no sign of him or his party reversing course on this.)

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James Quinn
In the midst of all that is going on now, I keep hearing Lincoln at Gettysburg. Do you think that is at all a valid comparison?

I’m not sure if the question is asking about whether Lincoln’s great address at Gettysburg is especially fitting for our current moment—or whether he’s referring to Garry Wills’ excellent book about the speech, titled Lincoln at Gettysburg.

I’ll assume it’s the former and attempt an answer on that basis: I don’t think the comparison is especially apt. There are a couple of reasons why. First, because I see in the desire to invoke the spirit of 1863 a reaching for Manichean dichotomies: we’re the forces of light; they’re the forces of darkness. The North wanted to stop the expansion of slavery (and eventually abolished it), while the South fought to protect and expand the evil institution. Likewise, some of us recognize Donald Trump is evil and dangerous, while others adore him. The first group is righteous, the second is wicked and needs to be stopped.

I don’t think this is a helpful way to understand what’s going on. It may end up being fitting if we begin taking up arms against one another. But at the moment, we should be doing everything we can to keep playing by the ordinary liberal-democratic rules, which allow and assume the peaceful transfer of power between parties and politicians broadly considered legitimate by all Americans. You can’t do that when you’re convinced the other side is evil incarnate. In such circumstances, the only option is a fight to the death and a demand for unconditional surrender.

The other, related reason I prefer not to think in Lincolnian terms about the present is that it’s just too earnest. I’m not immune to the temptation to adopt a rhetoric of Grand Moral Conflict in describing politics at our moment. But one of Trump’s advantages may well be his combination of directing no-holds-barred rage against his enemies with an ironic and often very funny belittling of his opponents. Democrats and other anti-Trump factions in our politics would be well-advised to go for a lighter touch now and again as well, instead of blaring alarms all day and night every year for nearly a decade now. The Chicken Little phenomenon is real, and it’s getting worse over time. The sky can’t always be seconds away from falling.

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LJohnsonGoldfrank
You've stated in the past that you think civil rights law should only prohibit discrimination on the basis of race and not religion, sex, national origin, or ability (let alone sexual orientation and gender identity.) I must admit I find the idea of living in a country where employers have such free rein to discriminate to be frightening, but you've stated that you regard the Civil Rights Act as having been "civically corrosive." Would you explain your position further?

My position is similar to the one Christopher Caldwell lays out in The Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties, though with one important difference. Caldwell traces many of our political problems and polarization to the Civil Rights Act itself, whereas I think the core impulse behind the act—to address longstanding obstacles to black advancement rooted in the history of slavery and its legacy—was sound. That’s because slavery and its legacy is a uniquely pernicious, structural burden for black Americans—far more so than the obstacles faced by other groups.

What I think was a mistake was for the act to include other kinds of discrimination as well. This has empowered the courts and executive branch regulatory agencies to serve as moral policemen, seeking out and punishing private acts of prejudice and bigotry against an ever-lengthening list of specially protected groups. But who decides what counts as prejudice and bigotry? Why judges and bureaucrats, of course.

This was bound to provoke resentment, especially among those who don’t belong to one of those protected classes (whites, men, etc.). And now that they’ve formed a reactionary political movement behind Donald Trump, they’ve begun trying to add themselves to the list of protected classes. Affirmative Action for white men? It sounds absurd, but it may now be our reality—and it follows from the logic of the anti-discrimination law that comes down to us from the Civil Rights Act.

For those interested in learning more about Caldwell’s arguments, I highly recommend the episode of the Know Your Enemy podcast devoted to The Age of Entitlement. The hosts are firmly on the socialist left and hardly inclined to be persuaded by Caldwell. But they treat him and the book with the respect it’s owed, along with venturing some powerful criticisms of his claims toward the end of the pod.