Paying Taxes in the DOGE ERA: Moral Duty, Religious Experience, or Place of Protest?
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In this episode of Straight White American Jesus, Brad sits down with Dr. Ruth Braunstein, professor at Johns Hopkins University and author of My Tax Dollars. Together, they explore an unexpected question: Can paying taxes be a moral act?
Far from being a dry civic obligation, Braunstein argues that taxation can serve as a collective ritual—one that reflects our values, builds solidarity, and fuels moral debate. The conversation traces the historical evolution of tax narratives in the U.S., from patriotic propaganda during World War II to the rise of anti-tax movements tied to abortion, war, and distrust in government.
They also unpack the cultural shift from taxes as a civic duty to something to be avoided or even bragged about, as seen in Donald Trump’s infamous comment on dodging taxes. Throughout the episode, Braunstein sheds light on how Americans’ attitudes toward taxation reveal deeper fault lines around democracy, governance, and belonging.
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Axis Mundi What could be more boring or divisive than paying taxes?
Taxes are something that we all do begrudgingly.
We can tell our friends at work around the water cooler about how Uncle Sam is bleeding astray.
But what if the commonality of paying taxes is what makes them sacred?
What if the ritual of paying taxes to our federal government and other entities is somehow what binds us together as Americans who not only begrudge the fact that we have to pay, but are also united in the fact that we are contributing to a government that offers services?
What if, as Ruth Bronstein argues in her new book, My Tax Dollars, paying taxes is a kind of collective ritual, something we do individually together?
And what if it's a way to understand the moral issues that divide us as a country?
To me, the issue of taxes has come into a new relief in light of Doge and the Trump administration's attempts to dismantle the federal government.
We have someone in office who boasts about avoiding taxes, somebody who's made a virtue out of not paying into the national pot.
That person is now our president, and he's equipped a team of people to dismantle the services, the programs, the policies, and the institutions that help to protect us, whether it's through foreign aid, whether it's through Medicare or Medicaid, whether it's through Social Security, on down the road to national parks.
Today I welcome Ruth Bronstein to the program, faculty at Johns Hopkins University, the author of many works on Christian nationalism and political sociology, and the author of a new book called My Tax Dollars from Princeton University Press that analyzes all of this and more.
I'm Brad Onishi, and this is Straight White American Jesus.
Straight White American Jesus Welcome to Straight White American Jesus.
Great to be with you on this Monday.
I am welcoming a returned guest, someone who's not only a fantastic academic and scholar, but a great person.
And that is Dr. Ruth Bronstein.
So, Ruth, thanks for coming back.
Thanks so much for having me, Brad.
You've been all over recently.
You've been here like a month ago or so talking about a different project.
Somehow you made a whole podcast about evangelicals resisting Trumpism and, I don't know, wrote a whole book that just came out as well.
So first question is, are you okay?
Have you slept in a while?
Do you need water?
Like, yeah.
Need sleep and water.
Yeah.
Okay.
So truly astounding all you've been doing here over the last year.
We're here to talk about your new book, My Tax Dollars, The Morality of Paying Taxes in America.
And I just want to say that like you are truly courageous because like coming up with a book on taxes, the thing that is like A, many people consider boring, B, many people hate, and being like, I'm going to spend a decade of my life digging into that.
Like what kind of fortitude does it take to write this book?
This is like amazing.
I mean, honestly, how do you, how do you find the drive to write this?
Tell me.
I'm generally need to know.
It is a truly strange life choice.
I agree.
But I often joke that I already study things that nobody wants to talk about at parties, right?
I study religion, politics.
So why not just add money and taxes to the list and laugh as people beeline away from me as I tell them what I'm working on these days?
But I like to think that it's now my mission to make people feel excited to have a conversation about taxes once they realize how interesting it actually is.
Well, two things.
Coming in 2030, Ruth Bronstein's magisterial new book about death and dying.
And that will just complete the thing.
Religion, politics, taxes, death.
No one will talk to you at a party ever again.
Second, I'm genuinely excited to talk about taxes.
So you've succeeded and you fully got me ready for this.
And I'm excited.
I'm going to read from page two.
And I think this will really set the tone for a discussion.
As a scholar of religion and politics, I could not help but see something distinctly religious-ish in how Americans approach taxpaying.
Taxpaying embeds individuals and their money in something larger than themselves and over which they do not have full control.
As with much of religious life, taxpaying is mostly quiet, or excuse me, quite dull and routine, but it can also stir us to passion and reflection on what we value and what kinds of citizens and communities we are or wish to be.
Taxpaying is boring.
Taxpaying is divisive.
Taxpaying is something we do begrudgingly.
But talk to me about how we might conceive it, conceive of it as religious-ish and both sacred and profane.
Yeah, well, I mean, all those qualities that I pointed out about taxpaying, that it is boring and dull, that it embeds us in something larger than ourselves, that it helps us to reflect on what's important to us, like all of those things are also true of religion and religious community in many cases, that we like to think of religious experiences often as this kind of ecstatic, energetic moment.
But in many cases, most religious ritual is dull and compulsory.
And you go through the motions to some degree with the hope that, yes, in some future moment, maybe you'll have a kind of momentary, more ecstatic experience or not, right?
That it's kind of a slow burn set of experiences.
And so I actually don't think it's all that different in that way.
And importantly, when we pay our taxes, it is a small way and one of many ways that we are materially connecting ourselves to this thing that we call a country, a political community.
And it requires reflection on what that means, on what it means to give, make a small sacrifice of some part of ourselves for this thing that is bigger than us.
And so in all those different ways, I do, you know, see those parallels.
And then of course, there's, there's the ritual dimensions of both that we can talk more about.
I had an ecstatic experience recently that felt religious.
And it's, it's because I thought I was going to owe a lot.
When my, the person who does my taxes did my taxes, I told my partner, like, all right, let's see how much we're going to have to pay here because I think we're going to have to pay.
And I got it back and it said they owed me money.
And I am a bad dancer who is in his 40s and is not really the kind of guy who's dancing a lot right now.
And I danced in my living room in a way that felt ecstatic.
And I will tell you, that was directly related to taxes.
So let me ask this question.
You already hinted at this, but I have long decried the lack of civic ritual in this country.
We don't really have many things that tie us together.
One of them is voting day.
You know, I've always felt on voting day this sense of, and perhaps that's changed for people in light of recent events and elections, but voting day for me has always felt like this sacred day where we actually go out in public, mark a box, see our neighbors, stand in line, get a sticker.
There's a ritual to that that to me feels very important and it connects me to people around me.
Taxes is similar and different.
We don't necessarily do that out with others, but it's something that somehow unites all of us.
Because like, if I wanted to say something at a barbecue with people I don't know that well, the preschool parents who I kind of like, kind of don't, kind of know, kind of don't, it's like, oh, tax day, huh?
And yeah, everyone's kind of like, yeah, tax day.
Or if I'm at work and I say, it's payday and we're, we're at happy hour or we're at the water cooler.
It's like, oh, look at these taxes.
Who's FICO?
The whole thing.
There's a sense that we often don't think about taxes as uniting us into a collective.
And that comes across in your book.
Is that something you expected to find?
Is that something you knew going in?
Or is there things you discovered along the way?
No, it's definitely something that I became more and more aware of as I was doing research for the book, that there's so much discourse in our country about tax paying.
And as I point out, some of it is quite reverent and sort of holds tax paying up as a kind of civic duty and virtue.
And others is much more negative and talks about it as this sort of, you know, illicit form of theft and that is illegitimate.
But at the end of the day, it's something that when you talk about taxes and particularly paying your federal income tax in this country, people identify with some combination of those feelings.
And I did the math for a substant column a week or two ago where I tried to think about what are the big unifying experiences in the United States, especially after the decline of the so-called monoculture, right?
That we no longer sort of participate in these sort of shared cultural experiences.
And people like to hold up the Super Bowl today as a rare monocultural experience that, you know, vast quantities of Americans are tuned in for either to hate watch or to love watch or to watch the ads or something, but we're all watching the Super Bowl.
And more people filed a individual income tax return last year than watched the Super Bowl.
And so just as far as shared experiences go, that is one of them.
And the actual act of having to collect those forms, fill them out and send them to the IRS for better or for worse is a shared experience and a ritual that I think we can understand through that lens of civic ritual and understand what, how does it look similar to things like voting?
How does it look different?
And how do those similarities and differences actually shape what it does, right?
Ritual is important to religion scholars because it does something, right?
It has an effect on those who participate in it, or at least it's intended to.
And so how can we sort of think about the taxpaying ritual through that lens?
So, you know, as I've said at the top, friends, we're going to get to the fact that we've elected someone twice who boasts about evading taxes.
We're going to get to the fact that there's a large-scale effort underway to dismantle the federal government and a lot of the institutions and services that our tax dollars go to that help make us more safe, more healthy, more protected, more cared for, and so on.
Before we get there, though, I want to talk through two things.
One is when this sense of paying taxes was highlighted and inculcated as a sense of virtuous citizenship and how that declined.
And then I want to get to the case studies you have throughout your book.
But is it true that in the kind of post-World War II era, there was a sense that paying taxes was the act of a good, virtuous American citizen who was doing an act of duty and loyalty to their country?
And did people actually buy into that, Ruth?
Yeah, they did.
And it didn't come out of nowhere.
So the federal income tax, which, you know, most Americans are at least going to have to file a federal income tax return, whether or not they owe taxes.
Today, that's what's called a mass return-based income tax.
And that didn't exist until World War II.
The federal income tax was constitutionally mandated about a couple of decades before the war, but it really only applied to the wealthiest sort of strata of citizens.
And then when we entered World War II, we needed money.
And so we expanded the federal income tax to what's called a mass tax, where almost all Americans owed it.
And that was a big change.
And so the federal government realized that it was going to be a big effort to even inform everyone that they owed this tax, let alone get them to follow through on paying it.
And so what did they do?
They launched probably one of the most significant propaganda efforts that the government has ever launched in this country's history in terms of internal propaganda.
They had the greatest marketing minds of the day donating time and talent to promoting this message that you can do your part for the war effort, not only by planning victory gardens and saving scrap metal and buying war bonds, but by paying your income tax.
And in the book, I talk about, you know, the crown jewel of this propaganda campaign was a seven-minute Walt Disney short film that stars Donald Duck.
And it's truly a masterpiece and funny, honestly, and also quite ominous at the end of it.
But, you know, it really tells the story that you are a good citizen, not just by being a soldier, but by paying to put the weapons in the hands of the soldiers and that your income tax is going to be physically transmutated into a gun or a bomb or a plane.
And so that's how you do your part.
And then, you know, there's a range of other examples like Irving Berlin, who I sometimes describe as like the Lynn Manuel Miranda of his day, like the sort of like, you know, like great sort of like person and artist and popular musician dedicated a song to the Treasury Department that's about paying his income tax and being proud to do that.
And so we kind of, you know, this was an all hands on deck effort and the message stuck because people for the first time in American history started paying an income tax.
And that became part of a routine that continued even after the war.
There's a real sense to me reading the story and learning about the Donald Duck film and the other things that there was a sense of we during this period of American history.
Now, did that pertain to everyone?
Of course not.
Was this the era of Jim Prow?
Was this the era of Japanese incarceration?
Friends, you know, if you listen to this show, I am not trying, I am not nostalgic for the 1950s and I am not trying to make it out to be this great time.
What I'm saying, though, is when it comes to a significant sum of Americans feeling as if they were part of something together, World War II was one of those moments of there's a clear bad guy.
That is fascism.
That is Germany.
That is Japan.
And so we are going to fight that together.
Once again, not in any way that was a kumbaya Garden of Eden kind of sense.
But when I read about taxes during that period, I'm like, I cannot think of from the 1960s onward trying to sell Americans that kind of propaganda because they would just never buy it again.
And that leads to the people who have kind of taken these protest angles and approaches to paying taxes.
You highlight in your book these three movements, the anti-abortion folks, the anti-war folks, and the anti-government folks.
Talk to me about the ways that these groups, any one of them, really devised a political ideology that said, if I pay taxes as I'm being asked, I am supporting something that is so morally reprehensible to me that I don't think I can do what you're asking of me, government, and that's just not something I'm going to participate in.
Where did that come from?
And what does that look like on the ground?
Yeah, no, it's fascinating because, you know, if World War II is this starting point for the positive moral argument that paying taxation is a civil, civic virtue and a way to be a good citizen, that continues after the war.
And for a couple decades, that sense of pride gets transplanted from pride in being part of a war effort to pride in like building this kind of democracy and civilization and a robust middle class in the federal highway system.
And there's different kinds of projects that people can focus on as sources of pride that they're paying for.
And then around the Vietnam War era, that stops.
And that kind of feeling of unity that was, of course, always a bit of a false unity, was a white middle class unity, gets disrupted by a variety of movements that emerged during that time.
And of course, the civil rights movement is one of them that is raising awareness of the extent to which this was always a partial unity.
But you also had the women's movement and pressing for greater women's rights, including reproductive rights.
And you have the anti-war movement that looks at the Vietnam War and says, you know, maybe World War II was a good war or a just war, but this is not.
And so you have a mass movement resisting it.
And out of both of those movements, you have these voices that emerge to say, like, my tax dollars now are being used not just for these, you know, civilizational goods that benefit everybody, but are paying for things that are morally divisive.
In one case, the anti-war movement is focusing on war, and they're saying that I cannot in good conscience pay for the Vietnam War.
Now, to be fair, there were voices in that movement that have been saying that for a century, including during World War II.
And there was a small handful of pacifists who did conscientiously object to serving World War II.
They were punished pretty severely for it.
They often ended up in prison, but they did take that moral stand.
But by the Vietnam War, that's more of a mass opinion.
And they're able to build a large enough movement that's saying, I can't pay taxes that are contributing to war.
And you really start to see that war tax resistance emerge as a tactic that many Americans are participating in.
Around the same time, the anti-abortion movement sees that argument and says, well, we feel the same way, but about abortion.
Now that in the wake of Revie Wade, abortion is legal.
And in many cases, that they directly borrowed from the anti-war movement's playbook.
There were people who were actually part of both movements, particularly Catholics who take a position of being kind of pro-life from womb to tomb and are also anti-war and are still a small part of this sort of overlap between those movements.
So these weren't just like coincidentally two arguments that emerged.
They emerged in concert.
And then around that same time, and I can talk more about this in a bit, but you have an emerging anti-government movement that comes out of two streams that I trace in the book.
One is the kind of emergent libertarian movement that becomes sort of independent from the conservative movement in the 1960s.
And also the far kind of Christian nationalist movement, we would call it today, but often out of a very racist right history.
And both of those movements, for different reasons, had arguments that delegitimized taxpaying and taxation as part of essentially a government plot to either expropriate property from private citizens in the libertarian case, or essentially destroy the Christian nation through a kind of Jewish front organization like the IRS.
I want to get to that point because obviously, for listeners of this show, that will be particularly relevant and of interest.
I want to ask a larger question before that, and that is: you know, a couple of weeks ago, I interviewed Max from UNFTR, and we talked about this very long and kind of zoomed-out story of the United States that goes like this.
Leading up to the war, FDR expands the federal government in a way that was revolutionary.
And there really is an ideological divide in this country now and for a long time over what happened with the New Deal, what happened with the FDR presidency, and the legacy it left.
The argument that Max made was, look, up until about 1954, the United States is on track to look a lot like its European peers in terms of the way the government spends money on social services, a social safety net, the ways that we think about our responsibility to all people, the way that we tax the ultra-wealthy and the wealthy at high rates.
This starts to at least resemble contemporary Nordic countries, contemporary France, okay?
But then we made a sharp turn.
And one of the turns we make 60s and afterwards is the groups you've just mentioned, whether they're the libertarian, the religious right, others working at times in alliance to make the government and taxes an enemy.
That paying taxes is not a moral virtue or an act of citizenship.
It's something you do to an evil, corrupt entity.
And now we've arrived at a place where Donald Trump boasts that he hasn't paid taxes in a long time and he won't show us his tax returns voluntarily.
And it seems to be the apotheosis of that movement.
Now, that's a really broad story.
I know you're a sociologist.
You're like, Brad, I like data.
I don't like these broad sweeping narratives.
Don't pull me into your story time.
But do some of those contours at least smack as accurate for you?
Yeah, no, absolutely.
And I think that part of the goal of data is to start mapping out a bigger historical story of where this all came from.
And so I absolutely think that that New Deal moment as a kind of origin story for some of the debates that we're having today was essential.
And particularly the symbolic association of the income tax with socialism that really continues to drive so much of the fear and anxiety about, you know, quote unquote, big government.
And so, yeah, no, that's a really major motivating force.
And so if you believe that socialism is evil, right?
Is truly evil, and you believe that taxes are the fuel for that socialist machine, right?
There is a reason that folks who are anti-tax and particularly on the right talk about feeding the beast and therefore needing to starve the beast, right?
We use really graphic, what I refer to as sort of sacred and profane language when we talk about tax paying.
On the positive side, people refer to it as the lifeblood of the nation or as civilization, as essential as the air we breathe.
So it's like truly a source of life, which is like the way that we convey sacredness of things in a kind of contemporary moment.
And on the flip side is this, it's a form of theft.
It is a, you know, a beast that needs to be starved.
And so there's a real like violence and life and death kind of symbolism associated with both sides of this.
And, you know, this is why I use the language of sacred and profane, where, you know, taxation can be framed as profane because it is viewed as a deep threat to some alternative sacred good, right?
That the people who are most anti-tax are not just against it because they would rather keep their money.
I mean, some of them do, but it's because they view it symbolically as so threatening to something else, which in this case is about like individual freedom, you know, capitalism, property rights, et cetera.
And so, yeah, I think that once we see it in those terms, then it helps to understand why it drives people to be willing to die in order to not pay their taxes.
Yeah, you can see in that story how and why libertarians and the Christian right were able to form an alliance for so long.
I think that alliance has crumbled a little bit here over the course of the last couple of years.
But you can see how that anti-government, anti-tax narrative would align those people.
Would you give us just a real quick primer for anyone listening wondering why paying taxes destroys the Christian nation?
How is that true?
Yeah, so that idea comes out of a far set of ideas that A, believes that the United States is a Christian nation and not just any kind of Christian nation, but a Christian nation created for white European Christians by God.
And this gets theologically rooted in the sort of most sort of white power parts of the far right in something called Christian identity theology.
Calling it a theology kind of gives it more credit than it deserves, but I'm sure listeners of this podcast are somewhat familiar with Christian identity theology.
But essentially it argues that what we call sort of Israel today is not the real Israel, that the United States is the real Israel, and it was given to God, given to white Europeans by God, and that people of other races, and particularly Jews, are not even full human beings.
They were like mistakes made by God before they created white Europeans, but that they are nonetheless constantly trying to kind of steal the country back from those white Europeans.
And one of the ways that they do this is through the government, that the government has essentially been taken over by these racial and religious outsiders and through things like the IRS are trying to, you know, decenter the role of white Christians in the United States.
A lot of this came out of a strong stream of white supremacy and anti-Semitism in the post-war period, where many people who had, you know, been relatively mainstream in their political views were exposed to these ideas through people like Henry Ford, like really mainstream, powerful figures of the country were circulating ideas, particularly anti-Semitic ideas about kind of a small cabal of Jews who have taken over the United States government.
When we hear about the deep state today, it's essentially a reflection of those longstanding conspiracy theories.
And so within that movement, taxes became a symbol of this.
And I talk about a guy in the book named Gordon Call, who is a part of the early days of the posse comitatus.
And he becomes really fixated on the idea of taxation in the Federal Reserve as part of these efforts to destroy the Christian nation, spends a lot of his time spreading those ideas.
He goes on TV.
He stops paying his taxes.
He becomes a fugitive.
He ultimately ends up killing several federal agents and then himself being killed.
And to this day, remains a martyr for people who hold those views.
And, you know, it's just one of many examples that you could give of that.
So if you have government programs that go to things like enforcing civil rights, desegregating schools all the way down to affirmative action, you can hear education.
Yeah.
And right along with the education piece, you can hear in these people, and I think most people listening will connect the dots that, oh, the public schools are centers of indoctrination and of anti-Christian ideology and godless ideas.
And therefore, the tax money that I'm paying that goes to public schools is money that's going directly to these satanic centers of miseducation and propaganda.
And now we're off and running.
And I think you can get the picture, friends, of why one would think that the taxpaying is destroying the Christian nation.
I want to sort of move into things that are beyond the scope of the book, but I think directly related to it.
And that is we have elected somebody who boasted about avoiding taxes, paying no tax, and when asked about it, really gave a line that was like, well, I'm smart.
I'm smart for avoiding taxes.
And this is a line J.P. Morgan gave 100 years ago.
Was there any symbolism to Donald Trump being elected as someone who boasted about being smart enough to not pay tax rather than someone who said, I'm an American and of course I do my duty and I pay my taxes as I should?
Yeah.
No, I definitely think that was an important sort of statement by the American people and for a couple of reasons.
So one of it has to do with just understanding his comment.
And I think it's helpful to sit back and recognize that what is he doing with that comment?
This isn't, you know, that you are trying to turn this into an example of my moral failings, that I am not a good citizen.
And I'm going to reject the premise because this isn't even a moral issue.
And so when I talk about tax paying as sacred and profane, I also talk about how that's a moral register that is not always where taxation lives.
That taxation can also live in this much more mundane register where it's dull, it's boring, it's just business, right?
It's another bill that I pay and why would I pay more than I owe?
And keeping tax paying profane, I mean, mundane, is not necessarily like the natural state of things, just as making the case that it's sacred or profane is not the natural state of things, that people are doing work to frame it as profane, as sacred, or as mundane.
And so when people like J.P. Morgan and Donald Trump are saying, this is just a mundane issue that has nothing to do with morality, that is making it impossible for people to apply moral sanctions to him for, you know, doing something that most Americans feel morally obligated to do.
It would be as if you tried to say like, well, my server didn't stop me at the door when I left without paying my check.
So it's what that's on then.
Or, you know, nobody stopped me when I cut in line.
So these are things that are moral sort of norms that we have and in some cases, legal norms, but they're backed up by moral norms.
And as a society, we morally sanction people who do not abide by them.
And so he rejects our ability to morally sanction him.
And this is part of a much broader effort by very, very wealthy individuals and corporations over the past several decades to increasingly shirk their duty to pay the taxes that they owe through a variety of tax avoidance and evasion strategies, tax shelters abroad, et cetera, and to do it under the guise that this is just good business and it's perfectly legal, what we are doing.
And so I argue that like that's a strategic way of keeping taxes mundane so that we cannot apply a moral sanction to them.
We can't shame them.
And that's one of the tools that people have to make sure that people aren't shirking their duties.
At the same time, this only works in a moment when many Americans are losing their faith in institutions, particularly government institutions, and are beginning to kind of question the social contract itself, which if we think about the sort of like roll pay our taxes and the government will do certain things for us and we all do our part.
And that's a kind of contract that we enter into and constantly renegotiate, we're in a moment of real questioning of whether that contract is a good one.
And so, you know, I think that you have that underlying context in which Donald Trump recognized he could get away with this and people didn't either couldn't hold him accountable or wouldn't because they kind of saw some of themselves in that sentiment.
To me, this was a moment, too, where American foreign policy changed.
And I know some of you are like, come on, man.
Like you just, we're talking about whether or not the presidential candidate thought paying taxes was important.
And the reason, though, I think foreign policy changed there, and if you'll bear with me, is in the post-war moment, you have this sense in this country that we are the upholders of democracy.
And as I've said on this show many times, the American imperialism since World War II, so damaging and hurtful, and so many failed attempts at so many things that should not have been done.
But the governing message from the government, and that many Americans accepted and believed, was we are the upholders of democracy around the world, and we need to do things like help Germany after 1989 sort of become a functioning, unified, democratic government.
We need to help all of our allies in Europe, and we call them allies, and we need to push for democracy in Central Europe and former Soviet states.
There's a sense of moral responsibility there, sometimes misguided, oftentimes damaging, sometimes catastrophic, that you could see mapping onto, of course, I pay my taxes because I'm part of a collective body that is doing something like upholding democracy all over the world so we don't get another Mussolini, another Hitler, another Stalin, and so on.
And we get to this moment like 50 years later where the president or presidential candidate's like, no, I don't pay taxes because I'm smart.
Why would I do that?
And everyone is, not everyone, many people, 70-something million people are still willing to vote for him.
And I remember asking a family member who I respected about this, and they're like, oh, he's just a good businessman.
And I was like, this is the moment that self-interest on the individual level and the foreign policy level took over.
This is nationalism and individualism in a nutshell.
I just acted amount of self-interest.
There's no way I would ever act out of a sense of collective or moral good.
Stop me if you think I'm crazy.
I don't at all.
No, and I think you're absolutely right.
And I will note that he's not that good of a businessman.
He goes bankrupt a lot.
But it speaks to the same theme, right?
That when he's in, no matter what business he's in, the goal is to extract and enrich himself as much as possible with absolutely no regard to how it impacts those around him.
And he emerges unscathed from those arrangements.
And I think we can learn a lesson from that about foreign policy as well.
And so there's a sense that the America first ethos that says we don't have to have responsibility for anyone else in the world, even if it's in our interest to do so, even if we believe that it makes us safer to ensure that other countries are democracies, right?
Goes right down to a kind of hyper individualism at an individual level that I don't care if my neighbors are fed and clothed and have good health care.
I want to keep more of it for myself.
And there's really, you know, not everybody believes they're paying taxes out of altruism, right?
Many people believe that we pay taxes and we provide a social safety net and we provide public education to everybody regardless of means because we don't want our society to descend into chaos.
Yeah.
That we want to live in a stable, safe and humane society that we benefit from individually.
So, you know, it's not really about like, oh, I'm altruistic.
It's about recognizing that we are for better or for worse entangled as people on the globe, right?
Or on this patch of land that we call the United States.
Like we cannot avoid that entanglement.
And the question is whether we recognize it and try to build a society that is stable and safe or we deny it and say, I'm going to go it alone and like operate inside of a fiction.
And so a lot of the sort of through line, I think, for many people is really being truthfully, I think, overwhelmed and stressed out by the extent of our global entanglement today.
Yes.
And their solution to that is trying to withdraw into a bunker, right?
And say, I'm only going to take care of me and mine.
And I'm going to try to build walls to keep everybody else out.
And it's an understandable mentality.
Like, I understand the impulse, but pulling up the moats, you know, pulling up the drawbridges and surrounding ourselves with moats actually doesn't, right?
We still have COVID, which affects everybody.
And so, I mean, that's a very long way of saying that I think that there's a real tension there.
And so, and I think it directly relates to taxes, to your point, because taxes become this way that we make manifest those entanglements.
Like we say, we say, whether you like it or not, we all live here together.
And let's build a common life that recognizes that we have different interests and values, right?
That creates a certain kind of minimum set of social norms that we can all benefit from.
Yeah.
Yeah, I'm so grateful for the ways that you've created a text and a work that shows us how taxes are a prism for almost every kind of national Fisher and culture war and debate over political ideology we have in the country.
Yeah, it is something that is unexpected.
I think a lot of people would say, how could a book about taxes ever illuminate these questions of Christian nationalism or libertarianism or foreign policy or America First or the MAGA movement?
But they do.
Friends, I'm going to ask Dr. Brownstein one or two more questions about Doge and the ways that our government services and policies and institutions are being dismantled.
And that's a matter of taxes.
Things that we pay for are being destroyed in front of us and they have an effect on us.
So subscribers, stick around to hear those questions and that discussion.
And if you're not a subscriber, today's a great day to think about signing up.
All the info is in the show notes and it is something that will help keep our flag up as a show and will give you access to all our bonus content, the 800 episode archive of this show and to get to listen without ads.
Check it out now.
Dr. Bronstein, thank you so much for stopping by.
You are doing a lot right now.
Tell us where we can find your writing and updates about this project and more.
Sure.
So one of the fun things I'm doing right now is I'm writing a weekly Substack newsletter.
You can find it at Democracy is Hard on Substack or just under Ruth Bronstein.
I'm also on Instagram, on LinkedIn.
And yeah, come check it out.
All right.
The book is my tax dollars and it's out now.
Go take a look.
As always, friends, we will be back on a Wednesday with It's in the Code and Friday with the weekly roundup.
