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May 10, 2020 - The Ben Shapiro Show
01:06:55
Ross Douthat | The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special Ep. 94
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An ultimate solution to a lot of the problems that you and I agree face America, it has to come from cultural and religious revival, and government can't, like, will that into being.
Articles like, Don't Be Fooled by America's Flattening Curve, No One Deserves to Die of COVID-19 in Jail, and Trump, Why Waste a Crisis?
cover the New York Times' pages.
It's no surprise that one of America's most well-known media outlets leans to the left.
But a few writers for that fabled newspaper are, on the right, voicing their opinion on the Times' pages.
Ross Douthat is one of these few, and has been with the paper for the last 11 years.
He's made a career of sharing conservative thought in liberal circles.
Back in the day, Ross ran his high school newspaper, and founded an underground paper with none other than Michael Barbaro, host of the successful podcast, The Daily.
As a Harvard student, he edited the campus' conservative newspaper and wrote for the Harvard Crimson, and after graduating, rose through the ranks at the Atlantic to be their senior editor.
He's now published five books.
His latest is The Decadent Society, How We Became the Victims of Our Own Success.
And, twice a week, he writes a New York Times column covering topics like the pandemic and the will of God, our liberals against marriage, what will happen to conservative Catholicism, the age of American despair, often exploring conservatism in the 21st century.
In our conversation, Ross tells me what it's like to be a conservative working at the New York Times, his thoughts on adapting conservative policies for populism, and his warnings of America's future in the midst of stagnation and decadence.
Welcome to the Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Specials.
Joining us today is Ross Douthat.
Just a reminder, we'll be doing some bonus questions with Ross near the end of the show, but the only way to get access to that part of the conversation is to become a member.
So head on over to dailywire.com, become a member, you'll have access to all of the full conversations with every one of our awesome guests.
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Ross, thanks so much for stopping by.
I really appreciate it.
Thanks for having me.
It's great to be here.
Braving the coronavirus epidemic and everything.
You're live.
I've, you know, I've been on book tour.
So I've been flying not all over the country, but D.C., Washington, L.A.
So I feel like I'm a potential super spreader.
And everywhere I go, I just give people fist bumps and try and...
Contain the spread of the virus in my own way.
I definitely appreciate that.
So your new book is The Decadent Society, How We Became the Victims of Our Own Success.
I want to get to that book because there's a lot in there.
It's a really deep and interesting book.
But let's start with the obvious question.
What's it like to be a conservative working at the New York Times?
I mean, it's terrific.
I get the chance to write for people who disagree with me, right?
And isn't that what every op-ed columnist wants?
You're trying to change minds, persuade people, and I get to do it twice a week.
And as you can tell, I'm persuading people.
I've changed minds, right?
Just in my time at the New York Times, American liberalism has moved rapidly towards becoming anti-abortion, towards skepticism of big government.
I've had an immense impact.
I'm very proud of myself.
I'm obviously kidding about the second part, but I do think it's a gift to get to write for a newspaper that does, you know, as the stereotypes suggest, but they're correct, our audience is predominantly liberal, and sometimes it's a little stressful and exhausting, and I get, you know, dragged on Twitter, as everyone does, from time to time.
You know, the times in general, I think I've been there for 10 years, 11 years?
I've been there for a long time, amazingly.
And I think sometimes, you know, I'll get questions from conservatives like, you know, do they hang you in a birdcage in the office and pelt you with rotting fruit and so on?
And in fact, my experience of working there and being edited there has always been Excellent.
And, you know, to the extent that sort of I watch what I say, it's not because anyone's looking over my shoulder.
It's just because I'm sort of aware that I am writing for people I disagree with, and I'm trying to be as persuasive as possible.
So in that context, what do you make of a lot of the conservative critiques of the so-called mainstream media?
The accusations that places like The Times are wildly biased to the left, or as President Trump puts it, the failing New York Times and how it's fake news.
How do you deal with that being sort of inside the house there?
I mean, I think that, you know, the basic conservative critique of the mainstream media is right in the sense that the media has a, you know, institutions, elite newspapers are primarily staffed by people who vote for Democratic Politicians and candidates.
And it's not a conspiracy.
It's just the function of the fact that journalism has become an upper-middle class, you know, elite college-educated profession.
And people who come out of those colleges, as, you know, I did once upon a time, tend to be overwhelmingly liberal.
And then there are also some other, I think, sort of psychological reasons why the kind of sort of mental makeup that a lot of reporters have biases them maybe a little bit against sort of traditionalism and towards an ideology of sort of newness, novelty, progressivism, sort of psychological reasons why the kind of sort of mental makeup that But yeah, I mean, that's just a reality that inevitably, I think, informs the way that the news gets made.
And I think people at places like The Times and, you know, The Washington Post and Politico and so on are aware of that.
And, you know, there is an actual attempt to sort of try and correct for those biases.
And it just doesn't always work, right?
So, you know, I'll read things in my own paper that I feel like are inflected with too much liberal bias.
That obviously happens.
At the same time, what I say to conservatives is, you know, you don't have to like the editorials that The New York Times runs.
You're obviously going to disagree with most of them and you're going to see sort of, you know, things that seem like bias creep in.
But there are things the New York Times does that nobody else does.
and especially in an era when most newspapers have shrunk or declined.
Nobody covers sort of the breadth of the news, national and international, the way The Times does.
Nobody, you know, we're talking about the coronavirus.
Nobody has been covering what's been going on in China, you know, long before it came here like The Times does.
Nobody has the resources, nobody has the talent, nobody has the reporters.
And I think for conservatives who are interested in sort of, you know, encountering the world as it actually is, the, you know, the biases that creep into mainstream media coverage are not a reason not to read the Times.
You just have to be aware that, you know, That isn't maybe the only newspaper that you should read.
But you should certainly read it and subscribe.
I mean, I generally have the same take.
I mean, I do tell people they should read the New York Times.
They should just understand that what they're reading is going to be inflected in a particular way.
I'm not going to make you answer for all the decisions of the editorial board of the New York Times, obviously.
I appreciate it.
I mean, one of the great critiques, obviously, of sort of the editorial board, at least on the op-ed page, is that even among the conservative wing on the op-ed page, And this is true for virtually all the mainstream newspapers.
It's hard to find a single person who either did vote for President Trump or plans to vote for President Trump in 2020.
Why do you think it's so hard?
I mean, 50% of the population, presumably, around that number, will vote for Trump or voted for Trump last time.
Why is it so hard to find people to write for op-ed pages who voted for him or plan to vote for him next time?
I mean, I think part of it is just that, and you know this even better than I do, right, that there was intense resistance to Trump in especially, I'd say, the print portion of conservative journalism.
So it wasn't that, you know, the Times and the Washington Post and so on set out to hire a bunch of conservative columnists who would be squishy never-Trumpers, right?
I mean, someone like George Will, who's, you know, far more anti-Trump in certain ways than I am, was considered like a rock-ribbed sort of defining figure of the conservative movement until Trump came along.
So the reaction to Trump in that sense isn't just a function of who the New York Times hires.
It's a function of the fact that a lot of people, some of the, you know, best and smartest writers on the right, places like National Review and the now defunct Weekly Standard, and people like you yourself had strongly negative reactions to Trump.
And that has sort of then carried over into, you know, who's sort of on staff and who's writing about Trump as his presidency proceeds.
Now, I will say that the Times, you know, I'd say we have myself and Brett Stevens and David Brooks are sort of three workmen.
Right-of-center sort of permanent columnists, but we also have as contributing columnist both Chris Caldwell and Dan McCarthy who are in certain ways pro-Trump and have ended up writing more for us since Trump was elected.
And I do think there's a consciousness at The Times.
The Times does run pro-Trump pieces.
I think there's a balance between figuring out how do you get voices on the page who You know, do represent the breadth of American opinion and the 46 percent of America that voted for Trump, but also not just, you know, saying, well, we need to sort of hire someone to fill a quota if the conservative columns we already hired don't like the president enough.
But I think it's, you know, I did Ben Domenech's, you know, the publisher of The Federalist, I did his radio hour as part of this book tour, and every time I'm on his show he gives me like a ten minute harangue about the Times' failure to have a pro-Trump columnist.
So it's, I'm aware of the critique.
So, what do you personally make of Trump?
I mean, you're an opinion columnist, obviously.
So, we're now three and a half years into the Trump presidency.
From where I sit, as you mentioned, I didn't support Trump in 2016.
I didn't vote for either of the candidates in 2016.
He's been significantly more conservative on policy than I, for one, thought he would be.
A lot of my fears about what he would be have come true.
Some of them have been, I think, a little bit, were overstated in terms of the durability of institutions has been pretty good with regard to hemming in Trump's ability to break those institutions.
But some of my fears about, you know, the coarsening of American politics or the driving away of young voters from the Republican Party or the Republican Party centralizing around some of the worst instincts that Trump has.
I think that stuff has come true.
With that said, I plan on voting for him specifically because this is a new reality, meaning the status quo itself has changed.
We are not where we were in 2015 or 2016 when we had hoped to foreclose these particular things from happening.
Now the things have happened.
All of that is now baked into the new reality.
And so now the question becomes, do I think the country gets better with Trump continuing to push conservative policy but being Trump?
Or do I think it gets better for some reason by electing a Democrat?
Would that actually improve the state of the country?
So that's sort of my logic.
Where are you on President Trump?
So I agree with you in part in that, I mean, my biggest concern about Trump was actually less ideological because I'm probably a little more sympathetic to some of his sort of populist heresies and heterodoxies than you are.
So I was always, you know, mildly comfortable with the idea of a more populist president.
I was morally uncomfortable with, you know, Trump's morals, right?
But then I also had this basic fear that his level of competence was too low to execute the office, right?
And so, and that the world would react to this kind of level of unpreparedness in the American president with a series of sort of tests, crises, and calamities.
And, And that was something that, you know, for the first few years of his presidency, I think I mostly got wrong.
I thought the stock market would go down like my colleague Paul Krugman famously predicted.
It did not.
I thought figures like Vladimir Putin would be more aggressive in pushing at Trump.
And there's been some testing.
But in general, in spite of a lot of stumbles, I think Trumpian foreign policy The world has been more self-stabilizing than I thought, and Trump has made some decisions that I agree with.
So in that sense, I get in a lot of arguments with people who, like you, have sort of shifted and are probably going to vote for him next time, where they say, well, Ross, since you were wrong about that, shouldn't you come around?
And right now, my answer is sort of conditioned on the fact that we're kind of living with the coronavirus through the kind of moment that I feared, right?
You know, I'm not sure where the story will be once this airs, so I don't want to be too speculative, but I will say that Trump made a really good decision when the outbreak started in China, sort of against sort of the weight of conventional liberal opinion to have a travel ban and to sort of, you know, try and maintain some kind of quarantine at the U.S.
border.
But it was always clear that that wasn't going to be enough.
And Trump basically bought the U.S.
a month, and then as far as I can tell, Did nothing with it, and there's just been a lot of really incompetent execution in the White House in the face of, you know, a crisis that could kill thousands and thousands of people, you know, push us into recession and so on.
So my concern with the logic of, you know, I didn't vote for him last time, it hasn't been as bad as I thought, let's go again, is that you could make the opposite argument and say, okay, we gambled on Trump.
And we won.
He wasn't as bad as we thought.
The economy boomed.
He appointed two Supreme Court justices.
We're no longer in danger of having this big progressive swing on the court.
And now we're playing with house money.
And maybe, and, you know, there comes a moment when you make a series of gambles on a guy who, you know, has some qualities that don't make him an ideal president, where you want to take your chips and leave the table and say, you know, at some point, a Democrat is going to be elected again.
Better four years of Joe Biden now and a Republican party that can define itself pretty effectively against him for the future.
Then let's see what four more years of Trump bring.
You know, I mean, I lived through, as you did, obviously, the George W. Bush presidency, right, where you had a series and Bush was a much more competent and engaged president by far than Donald Trump.
And yet, you know, from the Iraq war to Katrina to finally the financial crisis, you had a series of rolling calamities that wiped out the Republican Party, gave us the sort of big liberal wave of the Obama era.
And I think culturally, too, had a big effect on sort of the culture's swing to the left.
And that's harder to prove.
But I think it's right.
And so my fear for a second Trump term is basically a version of that, that conservatives say, we gambled and won.
Now we can feel safe doing it again.
And then you'll get the actual rolling calamities.
And at the end, we'll look back and say, wouldn't have been the worst thing to have, you know, John Karius, our foil for four years and our, you know, our best young politicians getting ready to run against him instead.
So with all of that said, would your logic change if Bernie Sanders had been the nominee?
So it's pretty obvious when we're filming this that Bernie Sanders will not be the nominee.
Joe Biden, basically because, in my view, people actually, for one moment in time, actually looked at Bernie Sanders.
It was one thing when he was off to the side and he was just shouting at the moon.
And you could be like, OK, well, this is kind of fun.
Let's do that thing.
At the moment, he kind of entered into the center of American politics.
And it was clear that he might be the nominee.
Even the Democratic Party looked at this and went, this is not A thing.
And they shifted back to the senile, the senile neuroctogenarian who can't string together a sentence.
He's obviously less threatening.
I mean, Biden is less threatening for the country.
I think it's a very good thing that Joe Biden wins the Democratic nomination and not Bernie Sanders, namely because I think it would be horrible for the country if half of the country had had to centralize around an anti-American communist.
It's much better for them to centralize around they don't like Trump and here's just an old politician who's been an old politician since he was 29.
So the logic that you're speaking makes a certain amount of sense versus Biden, who's basically a status quo candidate.
Would it have changed radically if Bernie Sanders had been the candidate?
I go back and forth on that, right?
So on the one hand, obviously, Sanders is from any conservative perspective more ideologically threatening than Biden.
At the same time, there are ways in which because Sanders is an ideological outlier and he would, you know, he probably wouldn't carry lots of down-ballot races with him, Democrats would be less likely to win the Senate.
You could imagine Sanders being actually a much weaker president, even than Biden.
And I expect Biden to be a pretty weak president too.
And oddly, I mean, I think from, and this is, you know, goes back to our mild disagreements, but I think if you're a populist conservative, A Biden presidency is better for you because Biden is like Mr. Status Quo, you know, Mr. Return to the Obama era, you know, Mr. Making deals with China, Mr. Soft corruption in his family.
And it lets the sort of the people who want to continue some form of Trumpism sort of pivot off that.
But if I'm Ben Shapiro and I want the party to sort of swing back a little more towards Reaganism and limited government, then actually a Sanders presidency is the better I mean, I think that argument exists.
I think there's an argument for Shapiroism, right?
That a weak and constrained socialist in the White House is actually what you would need to get the Republican Party back where you want it to go. - I mean, I think that that argument exists.
My fear is that just for the country, it would be, listen, I'd mint money if Bernie Sanders were president. - You would literally build your own mint.
This is correct.
I mean, I would be stocking up like the whole deal.
But with that said, the great fear, of course, is that for the Republican Party, you always center around the person who is the head of the party.
So yes, there would be a better foil for Republicans to work off of.
But that foil would also now represent the heart and soul of the Democratic Party in a way that it's not clear that full-on anti-American socialism does at this point.
I don't think that Joe Biden has a knee-jerk dislike of Americanism in the same way that That Bernie Sanders does.
I think Bernie Sanders is basically an old communist fellow traveler, and he has yet to identify a thing that American foreign policy has done right.
He's Howard Zinn, just alive.
And Joe Biden is basically, you know, A softer version of Barack Obama, but dead.
Yeah, I mean, Sanders in foreign policy would be... That's what frightened me, honestly.
Domestic policy wasn't going to get me.
You would get a more sort of withdrawalist approach to foreign affairs.
You would get a little more moralism in the sense that Sanders, because, you know, there isn't a...
If you want, weirdly, the most pro-communist figure in the democratic field, in terms of what communism is now, was Michael Bloomberg, who couldn't find a bad thing to say about the Politburo, right?
So if you get Sanders in, you know, Sanders would talk probably more than Trump about human rights vis-a-vis Russia and China, but he would also give Russia and China more space to maneuver on the global stage.
So in a second, I want to get into what you've described as Shapiroism versus maybe Douthatism.
There's no Douthatism.
I'm just, you know, I'm a neutral observer of all.
We'll posit one in a second.
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Alrighty, so let's talk a little bit about the sort of populist-conservatism versus non-populist-conservatism battle.
Because this is really, I think, the most interesting battle inside the Republican Party.
And it's been sort of papered over to a certain extent by the Trump victory.
I think it was going to break out into the open if Trump had lost.
But it was really interesting because this has long roots.
Obviously, you've been writing about this for a long time.
You were writing with Raihan Salaam about a more interventionist sort of conservative view of government that shares some features of Bush-era compassionate conservatism in some ways.
I grew up opposing a lot of that, opposing the compassionate conservative label, because in my view, markets are not uncompassionate.
But maybe you can spell out what you think conservatism should look like, because it's been articulated in a bunch of different ways.
I've heard sort of the Lockean versus Burkean argument, the idea being that John Locke is government is there only to protect fundamental rights, and Burke being government is there to protect a traditional culture that leads to the rights arising.
I've heard this Kirkian argument that conservatism is more an attitude than a set of policy prescriptions or even a philosophy.
How would you describe the conservatism that you'd like to see?
I guess I'd frame it this way, which is that conservatives should support free markets because free markets are efficiency and growth maximizing structures.
But free markets are not always maximizing for every human good.
And I think there are certain social goods in American life that over the last 50 years, as cultural conservatives have been arguing for a while, have started to crumble.
Meaning that, you know, sort of the two-parent family is in decline, religion is in decline, sort of social engagement and community joining and so on, all these things are in decline.
And on the one hand, there are limits, obviously, to what government can do, Government can't start a religious revival, government can't make you love your wife, and so on.
But there are also ways in which globalization and changes that have been, in certain ways, efficiency-maximizing for the world, but not necessarily for, like, middle- to working-class America, have weaken the economic structures that are underneath sort of the ability of like, you know, somebody to raise three kids on a single income, right?
And so my view basically going back, as you said, to the Bush era is that there are things that you can do with the design of, you know, tax policy and the welfare state that we have now and so on that can build a somewhat firmer structure under those sort of tax policy and the welfare state that we have now and so on that And so, you know, my primary interest, which is, you know,
not identical to where all of the populists go has always just been family policy.
And basically the view that, you know, everything in Western life has gotten more efficient in certain ways, except taking care of and raising kids, right?
There's no like labor-saving device, except maybe, you know, maybe an iPad to get on a plane, right?
That makes it easier to raise kids.
And that means that the costs of raising kids have actually gone up in various ways over the last 30 years.
And birth rates have obviously gone way down, including in the U.S. over the last 10 years.
This is something that wasn't true back in the mid-2000s in the Bush-Compassionate-Conservative era.
You could still say that America was a birth rate outlier, and now it's not.
So with all of that in mind, I basically support using government power to do more to support families.
And that can take the form of tax credits, it can take the form of child allowances.
I'm basically in favor of proposals that are totally neutral between working parents and stay-at-home parents, so I'm against the sort of, I'm very against universal daycare and pre-K.
I think there's room probably for a little more family leave policy, but mostly I just want to give families of young children more money.
So that's sort of my that's my version of the larger populist thing.
But then there are obviously, you know, whether it's someone like Orrin Cass or Tucker Carlson, most famously, who, you know, argue that we should go beyond this and basically have a kind of industrial policy that focuses on building up American industries.
And I'm not all the way with all those ideas.
I do think, though, that there are reasonable points, again, particularly in the context of like the coronavirus thing, right, where, you know, the sort of pure free market view says, well, look, the most efficient thing is to have all of our factories in China.
because that maximizes our GDP and maximizes China's GDP, and we all get rich together.
But there are also some reasons why it's not good to export your entire industrial base to China when China is, one, ruled by a mix of communist and fascist dictatorship, and two, China is totally vulnerable to things like this pandemic, where suddenly you can have a China is totally vulnerable to things like this pandemic, where suddenly you can have a shutdown in the global supply chain, and we can't even manufacture the N95 masks that you're supposed
So that has made me, I'm a little bit agnostic about the industrial policy stuff, but the coronavirus thing has made me a little more open to the idea that, again, public policy should say, look, there's a national security interest in not totally de-industrializing the United States.
Again, even if in global terms that's not the perfect efficiency maximizing perspective.
I guess that's douthatism to the extent that it exists.
I mean, the strongest case, obviously, with regard to not investing in China is, in fact, not in direct conflict with the sort of long-term free market case, meaning that if you're fostering the growth of a communist regime that exploits labor, that is actually not helping the free market.
You're actually propping up a massive government infrastructure that is repressing a billion people.
But it's something that I agree with.
I want to go back and examine a couple of the premises that we're talking about here.
So when you first said you support the free market, the rationale for supporting free markets was a utilitarian one.
You said the free markets are efficient, they're excellent at building prosperity.
Folks like me, I've suggested that free markets are not just Good in that they are utilitarian.
Free markets are good in that they are inherently moral, meaning that you own property as an individual human being.
That is, it's a Lockean argument, essentially, that as an individual, you have a right to the property that you create, that people do not have a right to take that away from you in the name of broader communal interest, and that the general notion of being able to violate somebody's consent because you have higher priorities through a simple majoritarian vote is a violation of and that the general notion of being able to violate somebody's consent And my great fear with sort of arguing for the market in utilitarian terms is that you're correct in the sense that you can always argue different forms of utilitarianism.
What's more utilitarian, a higher GDP or more working families, if you believe that the market is working in direct opposition to that, which I'm going to get to in a second.
I'm not sure that that's the case from what I said.
But what do you make of the moral argument for markets?
Because some people say they're two cheers for the free market kind of people.
I will count myself in the three cheers for the free market person.
I just think that the market doesn't do everything that people want it to.
The market isn't the end of the human need.
Markets are great at what markets are supposed to do, allowing me to keep what I build and alienate that which I build and alienate my own labor, allowing me to create more prosperity.
And then there's an entire other side of human life, which is the spiritual need, which is not going to be filled by materialism, no matter what you do.
And that leads to sort of the second question.
I don't mean to dump all the questions at once.
I can answer them all.
It leads to the second question, which is, you know, the sort of common good conservatism has suggested that it's the markets that have worked in opposition to family that has driven childbearing rates down, that has broken up families.
I would suggest that government interventionism over that same period has been extraordinary.
that government is far larger now than it was in the 1930s, 40s, and 50s when family structures were far more intact, that the welfare state, there's a solid case we made that it had horrific impacts, particularly on black families, and that the problem here is trying to solve a cultural problem, namely the decline of religion, with a government infrastructure that is not designed to fill that gap.
So, I mean, yeah, I am more of a two cheers for capitalism guy, which doesn't mean that I reject the moral case that you make.
It's more that I think that in the real world, it can be hard to separate out the forms of capitalism where you are achieving something that is sort of your personal achievement alone.
And where you are embedded in structures that make that kind of achievement less.
I mean, and this is going to sound, you know, a touch like the you didn't build that on the Warren stuff, right?
Which is, and I think there are bad things about those arguments.
But what's bad about those arguments is that they discourage people from being entrepreneurial.
That it is good for people to believe that they can build something and that it is something that they have an ownership stake in.
And they do, right?
And, you know, human creativity is an incredibly important part of all of the great things that capitalism has done.
That being said, like, if you, you know, inherit $5 million from your father, right?
It's not clear how that fits into the lock-in process.
paradigm exactly of, you know, that you deserve everything you earn and so on.
And similarly, and this is something that libertarians don't disagree with at all, right?
But the structures of crony capitalism and the linkages between government and business and so on make it, if you're looking at a given society, it's not always easy to say he deserved that, she didn't deserve that.
It's, You know, there's a mixture going on.
And that's been true from the beginning of capitalism, right?
that the free market is something that has always been structured in part by government decisions and government interventions and so on, going back to, you know, in the U.S., back to the public improvement programs of the 19th century, and, you know, in the case of Europe, going back even further than that.
And I guess that reality, I think, makes me comfortable balancing sort of your moral argument and saying, yes, that's true, we want a society where people think it is, you know, moral to build and keep what you build, but also say, you know, that we can have a certain amount of you know, that we can have a certain amount of redistribution because we can't quite see where perfect justice lies, and so you want to have some, you know, some sort of baseline where you're not letting people fall below certain floors.
And then you also want to recognize that while markets, you know, while there is a moral case for markets, they do, in some cases, select for efficiency rather than sort of perfectly shared human flourishing, right?
So, like, I agree with you, right, that, you know, the free market did not destroy the American family, right?
And I...
I'm a cultural conservative because I think that the cultural story matters more than the economic story, and I've had plenty of arguments with liberals where I'll say, you know, if you look at the timeline of divorce rates and these different things, it's not deindustrialization that did it, that sort of the cultural revolutions of the 60s mattered more.
That being said, it's also the case that Um, that, you know, the shift from an industrial to an information era economy has been very rewarding for highly educated Americans and less rewarding for people who would have done better in the industrial economy.
And that's not a sort of moral failing on the part of factory workers who just need to, you know, learn to code, right?
No, of course not.
Or something.
And so, you know, there, when something like that happens, there's room for policymakers to say, How can we one, preserve the utilitarian gains or the utilitarian advantage of the free market?
Two, avoid creating a society where people don't accept the moral case that people should be able to be entrepreneurial and keep what they build, but also figure out how to avoid ending up in a country where you have a sort of depopulated, drug-addicted hinterland and, you know, these sort of rich urban cities where everyone has college degrees and is clustering, but no one can afford to live there and nobody has kids, right?
And there are libertarian responses to that, right, that are sort of reasonable, you know, sort of build more housing stock, right?
I mean, it's not—I think there is a version of libertarian populism that would accomplish some of the policy goals.
That I want to achieve.
And some of the people—I think some of the people like Tucker and others, you know, when they talk about, like, well, the rising cost of medical care or the rising cost of education and so on, there are libertarian policy proposals that would help reduce those costs and make things easier for families.
But, yeah, I'm also perfectly comfortable, you know, as was Friedrich Hayek, right?
Like with the idea of a certain amount of redistribution.
A lot of the original sort of founding fathers of libertarian conservatism were not sort of full tilt boogie Ayn Randians.
They said, you know, we need a certain amount of, we need a certain kind of welfare state to Sort of maintain people's commitment to capitalism in certain ways.
And I think that's right.
And I think, you know, at various points in time, you want to redesign the welfare state you have.
I mean, just to take one very small example, right?
So in the 1990s, you know, you mentioned the perverse effect that anti-poverty programs had on family formation on, you know, encouraging Teen pregnancy and so on.
That was sort of the conservative argument in the 80s and 90s.
And conservatives, along with Bill Clinton, passed welfare reform, and lo and behold, teen pregnancy went down.
And liberals don't think that the welfare reform led teen pregnancy to go down, but I think it was probably one factor, and that was a conservative policy victory.
But here we are now, 25 years later, and our social challenge isn't a skyrocketing teen pregnancy rate, it's the fact that people aren't getting married and aren't having kids at all.
And in that situation, I'm worried less about, you know, the perverse incentives of spending, you know, if you'd spend a little more money on families, maybe some people are more irresponsible with what they do with that money.
I'm less worried about that in this moment than I would have been 25 years ago.
And I'm more of the view that, you know, if you encourage people to have more kids, you know, I'd rather have a society where there were a few more out-of-wedlock births if we were getting the birth rate up.
Generally.
So you want, I'm just, I think you want to be adaptive in the way you apply conservative policy.
And I think what's good about the populists, you know, allowing for errors and so on, is that they are trying to be adaptive.
They're saying, well why did Donald Trump get elected?
Like, how did that happen?
Why didn't Ted Cruz's arguments carry the day with Republican voters?
Well, let's take our voters seriously and, you know, look at things that went wrong.
Let's look at things we predicted that we were wrong about, where we thought that, you know, opening trade with China would, you know, produce many more winners than losers, and in fact, it produced some real concentrated job losses.
You know, what can public policy do about that?
So I think there's room for that without, you know, casting Adam Smith and John Locke into the outer darkness, right?
So in a second, I want to ask you about the differences in culture versus sort of government policy.
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So let's talk for a second about the differences between sort of culture and economics and what they can do.
So one of the reasons that I can afford to be quite libertarian about, you know, what I think government ought to do is first, there's the affirmative argument, which is that I'm very much afraid that there's not a limiting principle to government should do X to support families and government should just do X period.
Meaning that that assumes that the right people are in control of government and my basic assumption about government is that somebody who I don't like is going to be in control of those same mechanisms five minutes from now and using them against me.
And so my comfort level really exists, particularly on the federal level, at the government should not be able to do many of the things that the government is doing and that the gap needs to be filled really at the local level where you have much more agreement.
I'm much more willing to, in my local community where I know everybody, pay taxes for redistribution to people that I know and who go to my synagogue than I am for people who are across the country.
I don't know them.
I don't know what their motivations are.
I don't know what their living arrangements are, whether I approve of them.
I mean, church used to fill this gap.
In other words, this more libertarian orientation of American government that existed for most of the early history of the republic, that was predicated upon the existence of a virtuous citizenry that was going to be organized Basically by church, and the church was going to fill that gap.
As churches waned, this is where I think government has replaced churches.
As government has grown, churches waned.
Government has been fulfilling the supportive nature that church once played.
It's sort of an argument that Tim Carney makes.
As that happens, church has declined and now you have a perverse cycle where church declines, there's more need, government steps in even more, there's more need, government steps in even more, and then there's no limiting principle at all.
So this is really two questions.
One is, can these institutional problems even be solved by government?
Of which I'm quite skeptical.
And two is that Even if they can, would it be better to try and solve these problems on a cultural level?
So to take an example, if you're talking about giving certain tax credits to people for having children, I don't know very many people who think about the tax credit they're going to get when they have kids.
Most people in a prosperous society recognize that kids are more of a net drain on your resources than are a net benefit to your resources, no matter what you do.
I mean, they cost a lot of money.
The reason that prosperous countries don't have as many kids is because when you're poor, you need kids for your labor force.
And when you're prosperous, it costs you hundreds of thousands of dollars.
And so, why would you bother with that when you can spend that hundreds of thousands of dollars vacationing or doing whatever it is that you want to do?
I'm not sure that that's a problem that is curable by a simple tax credit.
The reason that, I mean, you're religious, I'm religious, the reason that I have kids is because I think there's a moral injunction to have kids, that it makes the world a better place to have children, and that I have a religious obligation to have kids.
As that wanes, I'm not sure that simply saying to somebody, here's 4,000 bucks extra a year for your kid, who's going to cost you five, that that's really going to solve the problem.
One, I totally agree that there is, you know, there's a basic limitation to what public policy can do to reshape culture.
And, you know, to the extent that there is sort of a ultimate cultural solution, an ultimate solution to a lot of the problems that you and I agree face America, it has to come from cultural and religious revival.
And government can't like will that into being.
That said, I do think people make decisions on the margins about whether to have kids with financial concerns in mind.
And so it's not that, you know, a couple who are enjoying their lives going backpacking and going on cruises and so on are going to say, oh, I get this, you know, $4,000 tax credit, I guess we'll, you know, become pronatalist and, you know.
convert to Orthodox Judaism, right, and start having kids.
That's not how it works.
But there are lots of families that sort of do end up deciding between having two or three kids, having three or four kids.
And when they make those decisions, finances definitely enters into it.
So if you say, you know, well, this kid is going to cost me $10,000 a year, but, you know, I know that, you know, because of a tax credit or some other public program, it's actually only going to cost me five.
I do think that makes a difference on the margin, and there's a fair amount of research on this.
A demographer named Lyman Stone, who's a Lutheran missionary in Hong Kong, has written a lot about how these different programs work, and some of them don't work at all, and some of them are badly designed, some of them seem to work.
On the margins, you can have some kind of effect on family formation and birth rates if you're willing to put enough money towards it, which I guess I am willing to do.
On the philosophical point, I think the problem there is that We're not sitting here in 1920 before the New Deal happened or in 1955 before the Great Society happened having an argument about whether a broad-based federal bureaucracy and a whole welter of programs should exist.
We're having an argument in a world where the administrative state and all its sort of colonies has existed in some form for almost 100 years.
And the problem for conservatives who say, well, it shouldn't exist because I want there to be a limiting principle, is that you're only limiting yourself.
Right?
I mean, that's, I think that's what, you know, if Sorab Amari were sitting here talking to you, and I'll try and channel him, he would say, well, all you're doing in this case is, for philosophical reasons, tying one hand behind your back and saying, Well, I don't want the other party to get in power and have these powers, but the other party has those powers and is using them when they're in power, right?
When a liberal administration is in power, it does not hesitate to sort of, you know, find the intersections of of government power and cultural power as, you know, the Obama administration did, for instance, all the time in its second term in the creative ways it used Title IX and so on to push private universities to do things and push state governments to do things that advanced various forms of the progressive agenda.
That's just reality.
And I think the problem for social conservatives especially is that if you just say, we want there to be a limiting principle, so when we're in power we're not going to push hard for things that we think help, you know, our vision of the good society.
What happens with Republicans is not that Republican politicians say, oh that's great we're going to have an austere libertarianism and Justin Amash, you know, will set the agenda.
Republicans say, okay well we've got some business groups over here that are very happy to take federal money and you just get Under Republicans, a sort of ill-thought-out crony capitalism, and you end up with a Republican Party that has the rhetoric of libertarianism and the reality of sort of just serving business interests.
And this is sort of my attempt to bridge the gap between populists and libertarians.
The populists say, the libertarians control everything and free market fundamentalism rules the Republican Party.
And the libertarians say, what are you talking about?
When the Republican Party is in power, it does crony capitalism.
But both of those things are true.
The rhetorical frame of the party has been libertarian.
But then, once in power, it just sort of spends money on business clients and tends to ignore families and sort of culturally conservative clients.
And I'm just not sure that the very principled approach that you take has ultimately served conservatives well in the culture war, which, again, doesn't mean that I have a 10 point plan for, you know, here's everything the federal bureaucracy should do to advance conservative goals. here's everything the federal bureaucracy should do to advance conservative But, you know, in the case of the Trump administration, even things like, you know, their their attempt to raise taxes on university endowments.
Right.
Or Trump's the sort of still being considered attempt to shift, you know, how federal architecture gets done.
Right.
And I don't think I imagine that's something you support.
And the architecture thing, for sure.
I was right.
But so I think there are creative ways for cultural conservatives in power to think, you know, a little bit.
How do we weaken institutions that are our foes and strengthen groups and cultural forces that are our friends?
And it doesn't have to take the form of, you know, spending a ton of money on something, but it does require a certain creativity about the uses of power.
And I think where I agree with the populists is I don't think social conservatives have thought as creatively as they should about the uses of power.
The countervailing point of view would come from sort of a utilitarian place, meaning I'm a social conservative.
I wrote a book, my second book was all about the evils of pornography and why there should be significant regulation on pornography.
You were way ahead of your time.
I was 20 at the time, 21, so it's been a while.
But with that said, one of the concerns that I have is that it seems to me that a lot of the populist conservatives, particularly some of the social conservatives with whom I totally agree on principle, that they're operating from a premise which is that we are at knife's edge on a lot of these issues when I think that in many cases, the issue has basically been lost, not only at the legal level, but at the cultural level.
And so arguing that the government should be used in order to do acts that I like, that while I may like that, while that may be nice, while the left may do exactly the reverse to me, if it's just a question of whose ox is being gored, the reality is that my ox is likely to be gored a lot more often than the other guy's ox is likely to be gored.
And not only that, If the country basically just becomes a raw battle between two competing poles of power who are just going to gore each other, that the country actually doesn't have a future, that there's no way for us to live together.
Because at a certain point, one of those groups is going to become the permanent minority.
And then the question is going to become, well, why do I stay in a country with this other group of people who are cramming down their version of policy on me?
When it's possible that Republicans, by taking the government out of the equation, in some cases have actually allowed more room
for cultural conservatism to thrive, meaning that when people don't feel threatened by cultural conservatism, when they don't feel that cultural conservatism is going to come along with the power of the government gun and compel particular activity, it's easier to make a case, like, leave my church alone, and people say, okay, well, you're not trying to force anything on me, so I guess I'll leave your church alone a little bit more than, okay, well, my church is really important to me, and it's so important that when we get power, we're going to reverse Obergefell, and we're going to pass a federal marriage amendment.
Right, which is not going to happen.
Yeah, and I agree that there is a certain over-enthusiasm, maybe.
And it could drive a reaction, is the point that I'm making.
It's sort of the same point that you were making about Trump could drive a reaction that pushes everybody to the far left in the Democratic Party.
The cultural conservative point is, if you say, I'm going to use the government to come after things that you like, and then they say, OK, well, when we get power, so far we've basically left the churches alone, but now we're going to go full Beto O'Rourke.
We're removing all 501c3 status from every church that doesn't I'm pretty sympathetic in certain ways to the case for de-escalation, and I wrote a lot after Obergefell about sort of, you know, how do we figure out pluralism, right?
can't come take my kids.
It's not a thing that I remember.
I remember that.
That got some attention.
Yeah.
I mean, I think so.
I'm pretty sympathetic in certain ways to the case for de-escalation.
And I wrote a lot after Obergefell about sort of, you know, how do we figure out pluralism, right?
How do we figure out a way for religious conservatives to sort of be respected as a minority in the society that has changed?
And, you know, how do we live together in peace and so on?
I will say that I didn't feel like I got a ton of take up on those arguments from my liberal friends.
And the I mean, I think part of what the social conservatives are reacting against, too, is the speed with which we went from, you know, same sex marriage, Doesn't affect your marriage, and it's just a sort of expansion of freedom.
This I agree with, obviously.
Right.
To, you know, substantial, you know, what would have been seen as... Or shutting down your church or your synagogue, yeah.
Right.
Substantial infringements on religious liberty and infringements contemplated further, you know, where, right, O'Rourke is like sort of doing the full, you know, tax your churches and take your guns kind of liberalism.
Although the fact that O'Rourke and other candidates like him didn't actually Go anywhere in the end maybe is a sign that some kind of cultural truce is more possible.
But no, I go back and forth.
I think there is definitely an argument for cultural de-escalation that is not where the sort of younger religious conservatives are right now.
I think the challenge for Republicans though in sort of managing all this is figuring out You know, where they can deliver actual victories to religious conservatives too, right?
Because if you say to religious conservatives, you know, well, we're never getting rid of Obergefell, you know, we're never having the federal marriage amendment or anything like that, religious conservatives can say, okay, I can live with that, but You know, what I've given blood, sweat, and tears to get justices on the Supreme Court, and at least they're going to create more space for abortion restrictions, right?
And so, like, this is sort of the unanswered question right now of the Kavanaugh appointment and sort of where, you know, where does the court end up going on abortion, right?
And if we go through another five years where the sort of Roberts and Kavanaugh between them sort of At best, maybe chip away a tiny bit at Roe.
I think you're going to have a lot of religious conservatives who say, why did we fight so hard for Kavanaugh while Susan Collins was telling everyone he wouldn't overturn Roe?
We're going to impose firmer litmus tests on judges that are more ends-based, more outcomes-based, more like what liberals impose.
So I think that sort of That's like a zone where you can imagine, I think, religious conservatives justifiably saying that this whole system has not worked out well for them.
In that area, I'm in full sympathy.
I mean, I think that there should be plain, plain litmus tests when it comes to Supreme Court justices from the right.
I mean, the left is not shy about this, but it's not even because the left ain't shy about it.
I think that originalism does lead to particular results.
And one of those results is that Roe is a bunch of crap.
And pretty much everybody who has studied Roe as a legal matter, right, left, and center, and is honest about it, recognizes that whether you like the outcome or not, Roe has absolutely nothing to do with the Constitution of the United States.
He may like the outcome, but to me...
One of the interesting things about sort of the populist versus non-populist fight on the right is how much miscommunication there is.
What I mean by that is this is a perfect example.
I don't think there are a lot of people, even on the libertarian right, who would be anti.
I mean, aside from maybe people who are overtly in favor of just pro-choice mechanisms.
But if they're honest about their legal analysis, I don't think there are that many people on my side of the aisle who would say, There shouldn't be a litmus test on Roe.
I think there absolutely should be a litmus test on Roe for judges.
I'm not willing to trust justices with their vague articulations of originalism.
I mean, I was the only person I know who came out against Roberts before he was actually confirmed in 2005 because he didn't have a track record.
I came out against Kavanaugh because he didn't have a track record.
So I'm very much in favor of conservatives driving a hard bargain.
And I don't think, right, and I think that's too a case where, yeah, I don't think it's I don't think it's mostly the sort of, you know, limited government conservatives who are against imposing litmus tests.
It's more there that they sort of, you know, the institutional Republican Party is not enthusiastic about overturning Roe and that in turn creates sort of pressures where It's easier for Republican justices to give the Federalist Society a little of what it wants on Chevron deference than it is to go further on Roe.
Although, to be honest, even on the sort of administrative state stuff, I think you may get less from this court than some conservatives want or expect.
So, I do want to ask you about where you think the Republican Party is going post-Trump.
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So post-Trump, where do you think the party goes?
Because that's really what we're talking about here.
Because Trump has papered a lot of this over with the rubric of just being anti-left.
And that may be sort of the future of the Republican Party, is you just oppose the left and hand out a tax cut every so often.
Hasn't that been the Republican Party for most of our lifetimes, in certain ways?
Yeah, it has.
And I think that you could easily see that accelerating.
But as we sort of move Presumably at some point into a future where it's non-oxygenarians running against each other.
Where do you think that the Republican Party goes?
Do you think that it sort of reverts to the social conservative populism that you're talking about?
Do you think it moves in a more libertarian direction?
That's been sort of the great battle, I think.
Yeah, I mean, I think that so one, as I said earlier, I think a Bernie Sanders presidency would probably produce more of a libertarian swing and the Joe Biden presidency would produce more of a populist swing.
But I think generally in sort of demographic terms, the Republican Party has less of a sort of naturally low tax limited government base than it used to.
And its coalition consists of Religious conservatives, many of whom are probably somewhere in between the two of us on these issues, and then a lot of the sort of more secular working-class voters who were moving into the coalition before Trump, but that's obviously accelerated.
So that means I think that, you know, some form of populism is going to be with us for a while, and the question is what form does it take, right?
And this is not a new thing.
I think that every Republican president comes in and ends up, you know, being a little more activist and interventionist in government policy than you would like.
And so I think if I were, if I had your views, I would be spending a lot of time thinking, you know, what, what's the least bad form of activist government, right?
Is it, you know, what George W. Bush did was very focused on education and poverty, right?
And whereas what the populists now want is more focused on family and industrial policy.
So those are two Different ways of compromising your libertarianism.
And it's, you know, since politics is the art of compromise, it's worth thinking, for more libertarian conservatives, it's worth thinking about, you know, well, which of those is better?
You know, would I rather have compassionate conservatism come again, or would I rather have Josh Hawley and, you know, his sort of, like, war on Silicon Valley as the thing in my party that I don't love but I have to live with?
Let's talk about kind of the state of the country overall, because while we're having this argument, are we just shifting around the deck chairs on the Titanic a little bit?
So in your book, The Decadent Society finally gets a pitch here.
Are we a decadent society?
So you give a definition of decadence, which suggests economic stagnation and a certain level of cultural stagnation.
I'm sympathetic to the argument, honestly.
More sympathetic on the cultural stagnation than on the economic stagnation I think there are a lot of buried elements of statistics that tend to suggest that Lifestyle has risen fairly dramatically actually over the last three to four decades including the amount of space that we live in I think a lot of definitely have bigger houses.
We have bigger houses.
We have nicer things.
We are working fewer hours on the job than we ever have, really, and we're spending more vacation time.
So those were usually fairly good indicators of an economy that's doing fairly well.
But you're right that it's a less ambitious economy, and it feels like it is bifurcating between sort of knowledge based economy and people who are maybe getting left behind in The so-called IQ economy.
And it's also an economy that is floated on, and here I'll speak your language, it's floated on unprecedented deficit spending.
Yep.
Right?
So, it is true that, you know, the growth that we have, well, two things are true, right?
First, the U.S.
economy has not collapsed.
It hasn't gone, you know, people have not been immiserated.
America is richer today than it was in the 1970s.
People do have bigger houses.
There are sort of advantages to the economy right now.
That being said, right now at this sort of, you know, pre-coronavirus peak of economic activity, we've got 2% growth with trillion-dollar deficits.
And 50 years ago, or even, you know, briefly under Reagan and then briefly again in the late 1990s, we had 5% growth with either much lower deficits or no deficits at all.
And so that's, when I talk about economic decadence, that's sort of what I'm talking about.
It's not that we're impoverished.
It's not that things haven't improved on the margins.
It's that we have become a rich society that sort of pays ourselves to feel richer than maybe we actually are.
And that doesn't mean it's unsustainable.
I think actually with low interest rates and an aging population, you can carry these deficits longer than the Tea Party thought in 2011.
But it's still a sign that the underlying structures of the economy are not great, and certainly not what they were under Eisenhower or under Reagan.
It's never great when you're turning to the central bank as your chief method of dumping the economy.
And you can't, the central bank prints money and we never get inflation, which again suggests that we're a long way from sort of being the truly hot economies that we had under Reagan in the 50s.
And I think that's, I mean, my basic view is that we're not rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic because I'm not sure we're about to sink.
I think the issue is more that we are sort of stuck, basically, and we still have technological innovation but it's concentrated heavily in Silicon Valley, heavily in communication and simulation, and we haven't achieved the things that we expected we'd achieve in You know, cost of energy, in transportation changes, in medicine, we've made sort of grinding progress against cancer, but we haven't had any of the leaps that we had with penicillin and other things in the past.
And then we're getting older.
You know, we were talking before, we're having fewer kids, people are, you know, enjoying their vacations instead of having the extra kid, and that in turn puts more, it puts more pressure towards stagnation, because societies get older, They're less entrepreneurial.
They're less dynamic.
And they're, you know, less averse to fundamental change to any system.
So, like, a libertarian is going to be very frustrated in this society because there's this huge barnacled bureaucratic welfare state built up that nobody can actually reform, right?
So the big reforms are, you know, a little bit of tinkering around the edges under Ronald Reagan, and then Obama sort of jerry-rigs an extra arm onto the whole system to give a few more people health insurance.
But you don't get sweeping programs of reform.
And I think that the danger where, you know, is that you then There was sort of a dystopian slide here, right, where if all your progress is in your phones and your video games and your technologies of simulation, and if politics isn't responsive to movements and activists, you can't actually change anything.
And if society is getting older, then you just can easily imagine a world where the trends of the last 10 years continue, where you have this retreat into virtual life, pornography, You know, we legalize marijuana and give everybody opioids and you sort of numb everything down.
Brave New World kind of thing.
Brave New World, exactly.
And, you know, I'm not saying we're going to be there in 50 years, but I think if you were saying... Brave New World is not, in fact, a horrible place for the people living in Brave New World.
No, they're very comfortable, you know, right?
It's like, you know, we need to do the Elon Musk, Joe Rogan thing where I light up a joint.
A joint or something.
But therefore, because it's not that bad, there's a lot of people for whom what in the book I call sustainable decadence becomes the best thing they can imagine.
Where it's just like, all right, you know, we thought we could go to the moon, but we can't go to the moon.
We thought we could cure cancer, but we can't cure cancer.
But we're rich and we're stable.
We're living 82 years.
It's not so bad.
And they're right.
It's not so bad.
But something fundamental has been lost in American society in the last 50 years.
And I think this is something that Trump, in his way, totally got, right?
Make America Great Again was, you know... For American ambition.
Right.
It was like... And, you know, Trump's best speech of his presidency was his last State of the Union, which was basically him saying, we beat decadence.
And that wasn't true, right?
2% growth does not beat decadence.
But I think it spoke to people's discontents with this, that people know that there was an America that you can see if you go watch the Apollo 11 documentary that came out last year.
You can see the remains of it everywhere in Southern California, right?
This was like the future of the entire world.
Um, you can see it if you watch Tarantino's Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, right?
Like, this culture that was so young and filled with energy, some of it toxic and some of it terrible, but energy all the same.
But we don't know how to get back to that.
Yeah, and I don't think you can get back to it without something disjunctive happening.
And so the last part of the book is me talking about the various weird things that would have to shift for us to get out of decadence.
And some of those have to do with invention.
You could imagine scientific breakthroughs that take us out of our phones and into some different world.
And some of them have to do with politics and political realignment.
But ultimately, I think you and I agree on this.
I think the sort of despair of the late modern world has to be answered ultimately by a recovery of a sense of purpose, the sense that the human story is a story and that somebody, capital S, somebody is actually telling it.
So, that's my Catholic bias, but I don't think it's wrong.
I think the ennui of decadence is in part, it comes in with a view that, you know, we filled the world.
Space is too far away.
We can't get to the moon.
We can't get to Mars.
And God probably doesn't exist, so we're just stuck with ourselves forever.
And only some combination of Elon Musk's rockets and a religious revival can get us out of that.
I do want to ask you a couple more questions about how we as a country move past decadence, how we do that as a society.
But if you want to hear Ross Douthat's answers, you have to be a Daily Wire member.
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You can hear the end of our conversation there.
Be sure to pick up a copy of Ross's new book, The Decadent Society.
It's available today on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, anywhere you buy books.
Ross, thanks so much for stopping by.
This was really fun.
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