S2 Ep1016: Jonathan Cohn and Mark Lilla: Lobotomizing America

Hello and welcome to the Bulwark Podcast. I'm your host, Tim Miller.
We've got a two-parter today. But first, I wanted to mention yesterday, many of you emailed me, I appreciate that, about the fact that I guess I said that the Dave Chappelle clip I played was from last week when it was from 2017.
So whoopsie. I will say though, the fact that Dave Chappelle was making this very poignant critique of Donald Trump's tariff policy eight years ago does kind of undermine the arguments from some of the Trump fluffers on Wall Street who were so blindsided by this.
The Bill Ackmans of the world. Bill Ack's out there tweeting about how could this possibly be? It must be a conspiracy.
It must be Howard Nutlick who's long on bonds trying to hurt the economy. No, Trump's been warning you that he was going to do this for a long time now.
You just didn't believe him. So anyway, kudos to Dave Chappelle for his 2017 prescience.
And one other news item I just wanted to get to before we get to our guests because I don't think we're going to cover it in either of those conversations. There's some Supreme Court rulings last night with regards to the kidnappings, deportations, whatever you want to call them, to Cicat in El Salvador.
The first one was with regards to Kilmer Abrego Garcia. He's this father in Maryland who the government admitted was wrongly sent to El Salvador, you know, since the Justice Department lawyer that was making that argument was put on leave by Pam Bondi for, I guess, not being sufficiently supportive of the administration's lawless deportation regime.
So anyway, this went to the Supreme Court and John Roberts put a stay on the circuit court judge's order that Abrego Garcia be returned. Essentially, I think what court watchers are saying, and we'll have more on that later this week, is that, you know, Roberts put the stay on there because there's going to be a truncated timeline, which means that the Supreme Court is likely to act quickly in this case.
So in the meantime, Abrego Garcia is stuck in a torture dungeon in El Salvador. So hopefully SCOTUS can act with alacrity on that.
There's another SCOTUS ruling with regards to the Alien Enemies Act deportations, not the one where the Justice Department admitted they screwed up. For all these other folks who, many of them, it seems like they're very likely they screwed up, but the government hasn't admitted it yet.
In this case, the ruling is mixed. It's bad news, I mean, horrifyingly bad news for the 260, 300 some odd men who've already been sent to El Salvador because the options for relief for them seem to be a stretch, to be honest.
Not totally hopeless, but essentially, you know, kind of the court ruled that prospectively in the future, the administration needs to give people that are going to be removed based on the Alien Enemies Act notice and an opportunity for habeas corpus. I was watching one of the ACLU lawyers who's been really the point on this and says like at some level, this is good at least that the Supreme Court unanimously said that people deserve due process.
Like we are not, it's not Stalin's Russia quite yet. The bad news is like the way that they wrote it is that a lot of these folks, you know, are going to have to try to seek relief in the Texas Fifth Circuit, which is the most kind of hostile to asylum cases.
So at some level, it is good that the court did not just give total carte blanche to the president and Stephen Miller and Tom Homan to send anybody they want to a dungeon in El Salvador. On the other hand, what are the opportunities for relief, for recourse, for the people who have already been sent? There was no indication that the Supreme Court had any interest in forcing the government to return the people that are already in El Salvador.
So we will keep monitoring that and we'll keep you posted on what can be done. It's something that I'm certainly going to be asking politicians about when they come onto this podcast.
In the meantime, as I mentioned, we have a two-parter today. In the second segment, it's Mark Lilla.
He's a political philosophy and humanities professor at Columbia, whose big think writings about how we got where we are have been, I think, super compelling, and I've wanted to have him on the pod for a while. But up first, he's the new senior national correspondent here at The Bulwark.
He writes a bi-weekly newsletter, The Breakdown, about what is happening in our government. He's the author of The Ten-Year War, Obamacare, and the Unfinished Crusade for Universal Coverage.
It's Jonathan Cohn. Welcome to the pod, man.
Hey, it's good to be here. Very excited to have you on board.
I know what we're planning for you here, but why don't you tell the listeners kind of what role you're going to fill? Because I think it's really important. After Trump won, I was saying to Sam and Sarah and JVL and everybody that like, I don't know, I'm coming on here and popping off on a lot of stuff that I'm like learning about in real time.
And then during campaign season, this is my area of expertise. I can pop off on it.
But the changes are so dramatic in the actual functioning of our government, we needed somebody to come on and help me work through all that. And so I'm hoping you can play that role.
But give the listeners a little bit about you and what you're planning on doing. Yeah, yeah.
So, I mean, my background is as somebody who writes about policy, which my whole life I

always felt I had to apologize for in the world of political journals.

I'm like, it's a little boring. It's a little wonky, you know, but it turns out that, you know, policy is another word for what the government does that affects people and, you know, affects their lives.
You know, are they going to get health care? You know, are they going to get deported? you know, run down the list. And so, you know, the newsletter, the idea is twice a week.
And the idea is to look at the way I think of it is it's why policy matters, how policy matters. So there will be a mix of, you know, explaining when these debates are going on, you know, you hear that they're cutting funds at the National Institutes of Health, or that there's a tariff coming, or, you know, that they're going to, you know, they're talking about new, you know, rolling back environmental regulations.
Well, you know, I hope if I did my job right, number one, I'll be able to tell you what's actually happening, what that means and why. But then I'll also be able to tell you what that means for you, the viewers, for everyday Americans, how this is actually going to play out in the country.
And so a kind of mix of those two, a mix of kind of behind the scenes in Washington, but also what's happening out in the rest of the country. And, you know, they'll take advantage of the fact that I don't live in Washington, actually, I'm in the Midwest.
And so, you know, I kind of use that as my journalistic backyard and, you know, write about what's happening here, fly to other parts of the country and give you kind of a picture so, you know, you can understand what this all means. All right.
Rule America. You know, we're out here.
We out here. That's right.
Yeah. So your newsletter coming out a little later tonight is being focused on the impact of tariffs.
So you're in Michigan. I was talking to Mallory McMorrow, I guess, last week, and I know you've been interviewing her as well about her run for Senate.
And Michigan, in a lot of ways, is kind of ground zero for this. And people are going to be affected by tariffs everywhere, but just because of the cross-border exchange with Canada and because of the manufacturing that's happening in the state.
So talk about your reporting and what's coming out in the newsletter and what you're seeing in Michigan on the tariff impact. Yeah, yeah.
So, I mean, obviously, you know, this is Michigan, home of the auto industry. And, you know, if anyone who's lived here for a while knows, I mean, it's really even now, I mean, the auto industry is not as big as it used to be, but it is just so integrated into the economy here.
And it's not just the big three, right? It's not just GM and Ford and Stellantis, which we used to call Chrysler before it was bought by this foreign conglomerate. You know, I mean, you know, those are the big plants.
You drive around Michigan any length of time, you know, on the highway, at some point, you're going to pass, you know, the GM plant, and you're going to see all the trucks lined up outside. And that's obviously a big part of it.
But then there's this whole ecosystem, this whole economy around it, these suppliers, medium size, small small, and it just reaches into every community. And of course, they have a broader impact in terms, you know, the people working at the factory, they got to eat.
So they go to the diner, although we call them Coney Islands, not diners. But, you know, go to the Coney Island.
We do. I know.
It's a whole thing. You say that like a sentence? We go to the Coney Island? No, no, no, no, no.
I'm saying, you know, that's what they call them the coney island so you see i we are we are getting into like some sort of you know revelations about me which is although i've lived here for 20 years like i kind of you know i actually am from the east coast and i still have those traces you know but uh so you have this ecosystem all these parts suppliers and it just ripples through these communities and you know when it comes to the tariffs to the tariffs, you know, there isn't like, you know, we talked about Detroit, but the Detroit auto industry is really more like the Detroit Windsor, you know, auto industry. You may have heard this before, but, you know, it's not uncommon for a part that goes into, you know, an F-150, you know, if you sort of trace it, it will actually cross the border multiple times.
And there's just there's this constant back and forth traffic. And so the more you're putting tariffs on, you know, the more you're raising the price of these cars and these trucks, even if they're assembled here in the US, you're still paying for all the sort of parts that are coming into them.
Now, they're overlapping agreements and the Trump administration, sometimes it says, well, we might exempt this or we might not, but it's just all this instability. And you already are seeing the impacts.
There are announcements of plants idling, canceling plans to build new factories. So you're already seeing this ripple through here.
So that's what's going on here in Michigan. In terms of my newsletter, I actually, it was a story that kind of came to me from somewhat randomly from someone I'd interviewed for a story like two years ago on a totally different subject and he called me up and he actually he works for a um one of these boutique you know game companies that makes like strategy role-playing games I don't actually I you know I like to drink and go to football games and kiss people so I don't really know a lot lot about board games.
Yeah. So I will say, meaning there's a non-incel.

I was, you know, I was not.

I'm sorry, board game fans out there.

I'm sure there are very sexually active board game fans out there.

So anyway, please explain to me.

That's what I'm saying.

I know nothing about this culture.

I mean, honestly, I know a little bit more maybe, you know,

but I was like not a Dungeons and Dragons kind of kid or whatever, you know. I was checkers or, you know, go outside, you know but i was like not a dungeons and dragons kind of kid or whatever you know um i was checkers or you know go outside you know play football whatever again no one's salt intended anyway this guy called me who i know and he's like you know you know he's like i thought you might be interested to know our company is like we are like facing an existential crisis because of course you know you think about what's in a game it's board you know you know, the board and the sort of cards, and then the pieces, well, that's, that's all

manufactured in China, or Vietnam, depending on the company. And this is, you know, they're

talking about raising their costs 50 100% now that they can't do that. And this particular

company, like a lot of companies in this space, the joy of being a reporter is the things you

learn about that you never knew before. So I didn't realize this.
But for these, you know, very sophisticated games, I mean, they're expensive, right? We're not talking like, you know, $20 for the Monopoly set, right? This is like $100, $150 game. What they do is they sort of put out a call early that we are thinking of making this game.
And it's got some kind of whatever fantasy narrative to it. And people kick in money for a Kickstarter and they raise the money that way.
And it's about a two year cycle from sort of conception of the idea up through when you sell the game. And, you know, they price it out and people pay in.
And then when the game is ready, they get it. Well, they've now sold a bunch of games based on their cost projections from two years ago.
And, you know, this is a successful company. So he was explaining to me the process of how they price.
And he's like, look, we try to, you know, take into account the unthinkable, you know, we, what if postage goes way up? What if there's like a natural disaster that interrupts the shipping lanes between, you know, here and Asia, and they build that all into their pricing model. They did not three years ago, build into the possibility that Donald Trump would not only get elected, not only, you know, impose tariffs, but you know, be calling for a 54% or maybe 104% tariff.
104. On China now.
Yeah, yeah. And he's like, what do we do with this? I mean, you know, they've sold the product, they now owe it to people, it's gonna come over, it's gonna cost them twice much.
I mean, they're going to lose money on it. I mean, they are going to lose money on every single unit if this tariff stays in place.
So I thought that was a kind of interesting way to kind of get at a kind of inside, you know, what is it? How do tariffs actually work at that sort of business firm level? And, you know, I mean, this is like a small business, you know, it's eight employees. And, you know, they're, you know, it's not talking to them.
This is not, you know, making, you know, sort of impersonal making of widgets. I mean, they think of their buyers as like a small business you know it's eight employees and you know they're you know it's not talking to them this is not you know making you know sort of impersonal making of widgets i mean they think of their buyers as like a community right i mean you know this is again not my world not your world but well and you plan all this stuff ahead i think the interesting inside is that right it's like it's like oh these tariffs are going to come on by april 2 it's liberation day it's like that's not like how businesses work you know that they can just flip the switch on such a huge change in their cost in only a month.
I got a text from a non-political friend of mine. This is a little bit maybe the other side of the market from the board game market.
He had a friend who texted him that was importing high-end house interior stuff, the kind of marble or whatever that know only can get from certain countries around the world they're like we ask your political friend like is this gonna be around for a while like or like is this is this you know gonna go away is this a bluff like what is happening right like for people who did not like engage that closely in the political campaign who are businesses, I do think it's just been a shock to these types of smaller boutique businesses across different sectors that don't have lobbyists, weren't contemplating the idea that the marble they import from wherever could go up by whatever random percentage that country got on the big billboard that Donald Trump made with the bad math. Yeah.
Yeah. I mean, they had no idea.
And they still can't plan, right? Because he's all over the place. I mean, within the span of a day, you're getting 10 different messages from 10 different members of the administration.
I mean, it's a bad idea executed badly, right? They can't plan. And I actually did talk to the trade group for the toy companies and the small gamers.
And that's what they said. I said, look, I mean, isn't the whole idea here to kind of bring this production back to the U.S.? Can't you do this? He's like, we can't plan on that.
He's like, we have no idea what this is going to look like in a month or five years, you know? We're not just going to be screwing small screws into phones. We're also going to be hand-making individual pieces of the Dungeons & Dragons board game here in michigan that could be a new job coming to michigan from the fired government workers who knows displacement is happening on the fire government workers your health care is like really your go-to area of expertise so you've already already written a newsletter about kind of the dramatic changes we're seeing at hhs What from your kind of reporting has like struck you the most as far as, you know, potential ramifications from changes at HHS? Yeah, yeah.
I mean, there's so many. I'll just mention two that come to mind that, you know, we've talked about.
One is this sort of stunning gutting of future research and innovation and science and And it's at all levels. There's the immediate freeze and canceling of so many ongoing studies and grants into things like Alzheimer's and cancer, things people really care about and should care about.
Again, as with the tariffs in the most clumsy way possible, right? I mean, it's not just that, you know, they're canceling, you know, they're sort of taking away the funding for the National Institutes of Health of all these medical studies. This is very random, you know, when they hit Columbia University with all these funds.
I mean, the list of ongoing projects that just lost their money. I mean, it was everything from people studying, you know, ways to sort of, you know, combat, you know, osteoarthritis, right to, you know, I guess a cancer or Alzheimer's, you know, this was in the name of, you know, in theory, punishing, you know, Columbia for not cracking down on anti-Semitism.
And whether you take that seriously or not, I mean, you know, whatever. But like, even if that was the goal,

what does that have to do with a cancer study? I mean, why would you defund a cancer study? And that makes no sense at all. So I mean, you have that sort of immediate effect.
But then I think it's just the sort of longer term effect, which is there. And you know, there are so many scientists, young scientists who are now not going to go into the field, right? They're not going to get started.
And, you know, this is a classic case of a sort of, you know, the impact is we won't feel this tomorrow, right? We will feel the impact in 20 years when we don't have a cure for something we might have, because that scientist, you know, is going to go into some other field, you know, that skill set. And one thing I just, I keep coming back to as I think about this, I mean, if you sort of listen to Mosk or you'll listen to like Russ Vaught, you know, or any of these people who are sort of on this, you know, crusade, and there's just this implicit denigration, right, of these like researchers.
And, you know, as if these were like, you know, people, you know, you know, kind of exploiting the public till for their own good. Middle managers the hr department who aren't doing any work you know who are whatever like working eight working banker's hours like yeah sure and that's just not that's not the fucking scientists at hhs it's not it's not the scientists at hs or the university i mean almost by definition if you have the skill set of that scientific level and you're at a university or you're at hhs you know employed pages you can make a lot more money in the private sector oh yeah you're not there to get rich you're there because you care about this as an intellectual project as something good for humanity and look i mean every i know a lot of people are certainly well paid they're not suffering sure i live in a university town, I'm married to a professor.
So I mean, just to be, you know, I know this world, these are not people in poverty or anything. But like, you could be making a lot more money out there.
The fact that you've decided to be in a research, you know, or in the government says that you actually care about this. And this denigration of these people is something that just, we saw this also, I think, you know, I was thinking about, you know, I've written about this too.

We've talked about, you've talked about this, I know, you know, with the people working

at USAID, you know, people working on PEPFAR, you know, if you have the skillset, you know,

medical or administrative that you can make a lot of money in the private sector.

And instead, what are you doing?

You're working on getting drugs, you know, life-saving drugs to people with malaria or

HIV. These are the people we're denigrating? I mean, what are we doing here? I mean, what kind of value system is that? Putting aside the kind of all the firings and all the fallout from that, because you're going to be back on this pod talking about that a lot, I think, over the next few months.
Just also just like the straight health changes that we're seeing already from HHS, maybe not from HHS, but the impact of the rhetoric coming out of RFK maybe is having an impact. So we've seen now two measles deaths of children in Texas.
And I guess RFK gave kind of a tepid endorsement of the MMR vaccine in reaction to that. But what else are you seeing in that part of the health space? Yeah, I mean, it's kind of amazing.
You know, you know, in reaction to that. But what else are you seeing in that part of the health space? Yeah, I mean, you know, it's kind of amazing.
You know, it was tepid. It was a clear sentence, but it was like sentence 22 of a very long statement.
And it was just like, it was a perfunctory, you know, the MMR vaccine is an effective way to resolve this or something like that. It was like just a very perfunctory statement, which is better than nothing, you know, better than saying, hey, you know, one thing to consider would be beef tallow as a solution to this.
But like, you know, it's not great. Right, right.
Well, and I don't want to sound paranoid, but have you noticed that we haven't actually heard him say that? It's a great point. These are statements.
I mean, it's Bobby, it's Bobby. We should take the MMR vaccine.
Yeah, we haven't, we haven't heard him rasp that out yet. I don't think it's on video.
I'll be curious about the backstory here. You know, it turns out how those came to be and what he, you know, actually wanted it to say, whatever.
I'm sure that will come out at some point, or maybe I'll find out. You know, he is promoting this as we're, you know, this great health agenda, right? I mean, that's his thing, make America healthy again.
And the gist of the agency is to emphasize his idea of what makes people healthy, you know, which is no vaccines. And, you know, there's some parts of it that I think lots of people think, oh, that's, you know, let's get rid of artificial food dyes.
Let's encourage healthier eating. Sure.
I mean, that's, you know, that sounds great. But, you know, HHS does a lot of stuff to make people healthier to keep people healthy and all those departments are getting gutted we see that the cdc um he keeps talking about we want to do things for chronic health but we know we had all kind of all kinds of people working on hhs whether through government insurance programs or direct provision of services that are trying you know to work on chronic disease and make people better.
And they're all losing their jobs. So, I mean, I don't, you know, this idea that he's this sort of crusader for health, I think even if you put aside what he thinks and some of the, you know, the scientifically nonsensical views he has, I mean, even if you accept that that's a sort of reasonable, you know, kind of agenda, which, you know, I think most scientists would, you know, he's actually dramatically diminishing the staff of people whose job it is, is to make people healthier.
So that, how is that going to make people healthier? I just don't, I don't, I don't see it as nonsensical. And, you know, my sense is, you know, that I can't tell how engaged I've talked to people.
It's hard to know how engaged he really is. This is not like a master administrator we're talking here, someone who really knows how to manipulate the sort of bureaucracy.
So it's hard to know. It's like, at least partially, maybe it's kind of a Trump 1.0 version of him, is like he's getting some of his people in there, like Dr.
Casey Means and Callie there are some you know cranks and like random weirdos he's got like in hhs and you got to presume those people are doing something yeah no he's getting his people in and getting getting the people he doesn't like out i mean the the amount of expertise they've sent out the door is just stunning um you know the sort of best known at this point, I think, is Peter Marks, who was the, you know, top vaccine safety official, you know, who tried to be, you know, according, at least according to Marks, you know, really tried to be accommodating, you know, Marks said, you know, look, if you want to really look into this autism vaccine link that, you know, we've debunked repeatedly, sure, you know, I'll help you do that. And I think Marx probably thought, okay, we'll debunk it again.
And according to Marx, that wasn't good enough. You know, he, you know, reading between the lines, I think he thought Kennedy wanted to stack the inquiry against vaccines.
And Marx was like, no, but you know, you're losing all this, this institutional expertise. And then that gets back to what we were talking about earlier, which is, you know, institutional expertise in something like this is so important.
You know, someone told me it's going to seem like a sort of random and silly thing, but there was an official at NIH whose job it was, was like the sort of most knowledgeable person, like more or less on the planet on how to run a clinical trial, just the mechanics of how to do it, how to do it safely and what protocols and all that. that person's gone now and you know that's not like super sexy right it's not the person who's you know doing the cutting edge you know cancer therapy seems pretty important though right right and you know that person's gone and like you know at every level now it's going to be harder people you know and dealing with an ihs be that much slower that much harder that much more prone to failure and it's these are the kinds of things that set us behind and and i think i just this is the part of this that just blows my mind maybe i'm naive but even if you don't agree you know whatever you know sort of the sort of you know maga view of the world you know it is supposed to be about making america great and if you thought about like one thing what is america actually great at right now biomedical research like we are the world leader why i mean there's nothing ideological about biomedical research like why would you want to undercut that i mean it doesn't even make i don't even understand it from the maga point of view i mean i do i understand where it's coming from but it just seems obviously self-destructive.
That's the craziest part. It's hard to even see what the political advantage is.
It just seems totally, to get to our next guest, reactionary and crazy and just living in a cave. I understand the rationale for we're going to reform the way we do Medicaid and Medicare, and there've got to be certain cuts to those programs.
We've got to means test means test it some people are getting that they don't deserve and maybe there's some fraud and maybe we shouldn't give the whatever like there at least are like rational arguments for all that like we can't afford all the services that we're doing like because the scale of that spend is is so relevant towards like the debt we've accrued i'll have a rational debate with people over that that and what the right amount of reform is on all that. Cutting the NIH scientists might cost money, probably.
In the long term, it will probably cost us money because of whatever fucking disease we don't solve that then we have to send those people into the Medicaid and Medicare system. So anyway.
we will do a deep dive because this is going to be one of basically two crux points of the big tax and budget bill that's going to come this year is um what these guys do with regards to medicaid cuts and obamacare extensions etc so why don't you just kind of give people like the biggest picture outline of what you think is coming, what like the big, you know, fights are over, and then we'll do a deeper dive on it in a couple months when the rubber's meeting the road. Yeah, yeah.
So I mean, you know, look, they're writing this tax bill, they need to find money to offset the amount of money that you lose in the taxes is we think they do, who knows, maybe they will, they won't, you know, whatever, but they're looking for savings. And of course, they don't like government, you know, a lot of our conservatives who, you know, have very, you know, principled, they don't think government should be in the business of health, you know, they want to minimize government's role in healthcare.
And of course, we have this program, Medicaid, you know, gives coverage to more than 70 million, mostly low income people. Mostly it's sort of working age people and children by sort of in terms of numbers of people in the program.
Although most of the money in the program is actually a very big chunk goes to people who are either elderly or people with disabilities. You know, Medicaid is the single biggest financier of nursing home care in this country.
So they need to find the money. There's a couple of different ways to do it.
You could, you know, the biggest gun they could sort of fire and Medicaid would be to really kind of make a radical change in its financing. The federal government provides the majority of the money.
States make up the rest. You could cut back on what the federal government is contributing in any number of ways, in a very significant way that would leave states on the hook for much more, and most states would not be able to afford it, so they'd have to cut back.
This is the kind of change they've talked about. They've talked about this for decades when they were trying to repeal Obamacare.
It was part of the Obamacare repeal legislation. It's the toughest to do politically because it puts states on the hooks, including a lot of red states.
And, you know, it's gotten some attention in this round, although, you know, we've heard a lot of, you know, it doesn't seem to be the number one item on anyone's list, because it looks like a benefit cut, right? It looks like you're cutting Medicaid. And politically, that is dangerous at this point, even, you know, especially, you know, including in many red states.
So that is one possibility, very real, but at this point, doesn't look like the most likely. There's sort of a second category, which I do think is much more likely, which is they will, you know, looking at work requirements, work requirements, ideas that you have to demonstrate that you're employed or have a good reason why you're not in order to get Medicaid benefits.
It polls well, in general, if you if you take a poll, and it's an easy way to get lots of money out of the program. Is it though? I i mean like in the grand scheme of things for how much that they're going to be cutting in taxes is that a big enough ticket item to get to the trillion that they're trying to cut well it you know it depends on how they do it with any of these things you can sort of dial it up or dial it down um but you know the general rule is if you're getting a lot of money out of it that's a a pretty good tell that you're not just, you know, getting people who, you know, this isn't just about getting lazy people or encouraging people to work.
I mean, we've done versions of this before. And what ends up, you know, most people on Medicaid are working.
And if they're not, you know, it's because they're a caregiver, they have a disability, they're in school. So you're dealing with a small number of people who don't, you know, qualify for the program if you have a kind of work requirement.
But what happens in practice is it's quite difficult always to sort of verify your work status. There's all this paperwork that gets done.
You're dealing with a population, low income, maybe doesn't have a great education, hard to navigate the system. And every time this has been tried, the same thing happens.
you end up tons of people who qualify for Medicaid, have satisfied the work requirements and need it, don't get it. They get kicked off the rolls.
They get caught in this sort of bureaucratic hell. I mean, you spend so much money on the administration that you're not even, you know, that eats into the savings.
And people end up in the emergency room and they're getting treatment anyway, because we're not leaving people to die. Yeah.
So yeah, maybe not the most efficient. the most efficient doge though doge is pretty is focused on efficiency it's right there in the name right i i saw that i read that somewhere it's efficiency and you know there is a third category of what they call you know waste and abuse which is a sort of broad category which you know yeah like there are some financing games states play all kinds of financing games financing games with the system, as they all do.

Of course.

There's certainly a case for clamping down on those.

That's not going to be where the big fight is, though.

The big fight is going to be on how to actually significant substantive cuts

to try to get the ticket price for these tax cut extensions down.

That's really what it comes down to, right?

It does. It does.
The politics of this are very interesting because historically, here in the world of healthcare, the assumption was Medicaid was weak politically. It wasn't like Medicare.
Everyone pays into Medicare, everyone gets Medicare. We've seen in the last 10 years that's actually not true because Medicaid is, woven into our system at this point.
So, you know, nursing home care, which I was mentioning before, but also, you know, hospital system is sort of, you know, the economy of hospitals markets depend on it. It's really important, especially in rural areas.
And then that gets to this real politics of this is cutting Medicaid hurts a lot of red states, a lot of red districts. It's been interesting.
All of us have been watching this have noticed one of the, you know, on the Republican side, as this is sort of starting to get some conversation, you've heard skepticism from the usual suspects. Lisa Murkowski, famously a defender of Medicaid, in part because in Alaska, the native Alaskan population has been the main beneficiary of expansions of Medicaid.
This is a big reason she voted against Obama repeal back in 2017. Well, another senator who's been quite outspoken of all is Josh Hawley.
And, you know, not exactly a flaming liberal, but Hawley, you know, Missouri is one of those states where they had a voter referendum. Voters overwhelmingly approved an expansion of Medicaid so that it now covers everybody with incomes up to or just above the poverty line.

And the way my understanding is a little fuzzy, but my understanding is the way it's worded in Missouri is that that that amendment is that if the federal government somehow pulls back on that money, that amendment is still enforced.

They still have to provide that Medicaid coverage. Soouri is going to have to find the money for it it's a big ticket item you know they're going to have to raise taxes cut education they don't want to do that so holly has been quite vocal he doesn't want to cut medicaid benefits he said work requirements may be interesting um so i think that's something to watch and you know in the house i the House, I mean, there's a lot of, you know, you can look down the list.
I mean, of the vulnerable Republicans, there's at least 20 in districts where they've expanded Medicaid. And, you know, for most House members, the single biggest employer in their district typically is the hospital system at this point.
Hospitals. So they're going to hear about it.
Jonathan Cohn, so good.

We'll go way deeper on this in the future.

I appreciate you very much.

Welcome to the Bulwark.

It's good to have a policy nerd,

not a Dungeons and Dragons nerd,

but a policy nerd on the staff.

And we'll be chatting with you soon.

Thanks for having me.

All right, everybody.

Up next, Mark Lilla.

Mark Lilla. Hey, Mark, thanks for coming on the pod.
Glad to be here. For folks who aren't as familiar with your work, I thought maybe it'd be a good place to start just by giving us a little kind of penny tour through your backstory and your political journey.
Well, I guess relevant to this podcast, I got involved in intellectual politics when I became an editor of The Public Interest back in 1980 and worked for Irving Kristol and ended up going back to Harvard to get my PhD and worked very closely with Daniel Bell and Nat Laser and New Pat Moynihan. And so I was part of that whole world and then found myself drifting away from it in the 1990s as the neocon world changed, became more populist.
And since then, I've been, you know, I feel like I'm the last Mohican of the Moynihan tradition among my peers, I guess me and Leon Wiesel's here. Well, maybe Bill's kind of returned back to you.
Well, he has. Maybe a lost sheep and then has kind of come on back into the flock.
Prodigal son is back, right? With a big car and tail fins. Yeah, yeah.
So, you know, I got my PhD. I'm now a professor at Columbia.
I've been at Chicago, been at NYU. And my main place to write has been the New York Review of Books.
So now I'm also writing regularly for Liberties, quite happily. If your listeners don't know what Liberties is, it's an extraordinary quarterly edited by Leon Wieseltier that is as close to you.
You can come to the partisan review for our time. And so I find myself in this position of being the kind of centrist realist who annoys progressives.
and I still have relations with people on the conservative side. And I write about what's going on in the right, mainly with a broken heart.
My books, I have been, I've mainly been, I guess you might say, studying the dark side of the street. My interests have been in the counter-enlightenment, in the radical right, and have a couple of collections with the New York Review called the Shipwreck Mind, the Reckless Mind.
A few years ago, I blew up the internet with an article in the New York Times called The End of Identity Liberalism, which turned into a book that did not blow up my bank account, but still it's out there. Well, so this is where I first came to be aware of you was, I wish I could say it was by, you know, reading Liberties Quarterly, but it was from the Sam Harris podcast when you were speaking about this a while back.
And so I want to get into your new book and your coverage of the reactionary politics. If we could just spend a moment on the kind of democratic side of the aisle.
You wrote then in that once and future liberal, like you write as a frustrated American liberal, you had written that liberals bring many things to electoral contests, values, commitment, policy proposals, but they have not brought an image of what our shared way of life might be. Then obviously, then you wrote into kind of identity politics and how that fragments.
I just would wonder if you'd spend a moment kind of trying to encapsulate your arguments there, because they're very relevant right now, as those are the types of things a lot of Democrats are reflecting on today. Yeah, it's sort of become common wisdom now.
It was not

when, you know, I first wrote in 2016. My argument is not so much that the Democratic Party is not middle of the road.
It's rather that ever since 1972 or so, those on the liberal left have thought of themselves as belonging to a number of different movements connected to various causes. At first, it was particular causes like Vietnam, the environment, feminism, and so on.
And progressively, it became divided up by identity groups. But what Democrats lack that Republicans have is an idea that while there are causes, there's also the cause.
And that without securing electoral power, we can't do anything about the other little causes that we're interested in, but we're not adapted to talking to each other even about what our larger purposes are, what kind of society we see, what kind of vision of America inspires us that in fact is inclusive, inclusive in the best sense. So I talk about the potential glue being a heightened sense of citizenship and giving that a kind of content, a kind of social citizenship as well for understanding our commitments with the welfare state.
That's not too dislined from kind of something that Wes Moore, the governor of Maryland, was talking about when I interviewed him a while back and trying to kind of encapsulate how I think he called it like a liberal patriotism, which is in some ways has a relationship with citizenship. I'm just wondering, is there anything out there that you've seen that has encouraged you or that has animated you coming from, you know, folks on the left who are trying to work through all this in the fallout of the election? Well, not yet.
What I didn't say about the book is that I especially focused on the atomizing effect of identity politics on the liberal left side. And so in terms of developing a comprehensive view that people of every class could relate to of what a good America would look like, we're still stuck being hated, you know, in nine-tenths of the country.
I've not seen anything, as I relate in somewhere I wrote, that after I wrote my New York Times article, I met with some people by setting up summer schools that would be like the ones that exist on the right. So, Hertog and AEI and all those things that create a whole cadre of people who are trained to think about the cause in terms of both serious books, but also in terms of policy and meeting political actors.
We've never had anything like that on our side. And so I circulated a kind of mission plan to various people, talked to Senator Bennett and so on and various foundations.
And no one really nibbled. And finally, one of the funders took me out for a drink.
He said, look, I love this thing. If I have the money, I do it myself.
Let me tell you why it's not going to happen. He said, people in my class, the donor class, don't understand what you're saying.
Why? Because they think their idea of engaging in politics is to do three things in this order.

to focus on an issue, to focus on a candidate, and to focus on the next election.

Whereas when I was at the public interest in the 1980s and these summer schools were starting,

and I'm working for Irving Kristol, and these student newspapers are starting, there was a sense that you had to grab a whole generation and educate them and get them to know each other. And now, of course, as you know better than I do, people in these quite large circles now, they date each other, they marry each other, they divorce each other, their kids are now becoming journalists and working in government.
It's a whole sub-world. But we on the Democratic side are just all divided by our little issues.
So I'm hoping this summer to devote some time to doing something either in Harper's or the Atlantic, laying forward this idea and seeing if anyone who has money in institutions is interested in pursuing it. And the Turning Point USA side of this, you know, I go to their year-end thing every year just to kind of stay in touch with what's happening on the MAGA youth.
And, you know, I usually write kind of a funny article making fun of them at the end of the thing. But this year, at the beginning of it, I was like, I had to include kind of a preamble, which is, yes, there's some ridiculousness and some things that are noxious and horrific about it.
But, and but, it's like hard to imagine a democratic version of it. And like, that's a problem, right? Okay, one last thing on the democratic side.
Is is there any um like do you sense in the people that you're talking to obviously since you're kind of a point person on a critique of identity politics i'm sure you hear from people do you sense that things are really changing or that that there's kind of a papering over like do you think that it's sunk in you know the the pernicious elements of it obviously there were some good parts too trying to, you know, pivot back? Or do you think that that's more lip service at this point? My answer before January would have been that on the one hand, it's being institutionalized, and in a way that it becomes anodyne, you know, despite the huge bureaucracies, but bureaucracies have trouble persecuting people. When you have a small office, you can do it, but not when you have a whole bureaucracy.
But then Trump comes along with his anti-DEI campaign, throwing the baby out with the bath water, striking the fear of God in everyone. And, you know, I'm in one of those positions that people who follow politics are often in, where we don't like the way something is done, but are glad that something pernicious is gone or is leaving.
I think it's an opportunity for our side, actually, to rethink affirmative action. Because I'm still for affirmative action.
The problem is that it got generalized so that it applied to all these different groups, where essentially the original concern was, it still ought to be Black America. But it's hard legally to do that, to focus, right? So I'm hoping a reset will allow universities and businesses to do this in a more informal way.
Since obviously people in these institutions are committed to it without the mandates coming from above and without the bureaucracies in our institutions. Before we get to the book, one other of your past focuses I just want to talk about a little bit was reactionary politics.
I was watching an interview you did with Andrew Sullivan, where he asked you to explain the difference between kind of conservative impulse and the reactionary one. Well, I think the interview was like eight years ago, but it feels extremely timely of a feels extremely timely of a question now so i wanted to re-up it with you yeah yeah it is i think well in my view um we have two ideological pairs of adversaries in our political thinking and also in our political engagements the older one it's older in a sense in the American sense, but the older one is the tension between liberals and conservatives.
And that difference, to my view, rests on serious difference in the understanding of human nature and of the nature of society, that is how human beings interact and therefore how institutions should be shaped. And conservatives have a more organic view of society, of individuals' relation to society.
Contrary to the advertising, in fact, genuine conservatives ought to be in favor of constant change, because you're changing according to new conditions, but it's done slowly and organically. Liberals, on the other hand, stress, so that's Oakshot, right? Liberals, on the other hand, stress individual initiative, our freedom from organic society, even while being part of it, and feeling that the conservatives underestimate individuals and underestimate what we can do collectively.
Okay, that's one pair. Then the other pair, which grows out of the French Revolution, are two ideologies that are not about human nature, but about history, about the nature of history.
And both of them share a kind of apocalyptic messianic view of history. So one is the left revolutionary tradition from the French Revolution through the Russian Revolution, Chinese Revolution, and that's the idea that the fundamental struggle is over the course of history, who's going to control the future.
And the understanding that something is built up in history that then has to be grasped and then pushed in a certain direction. And so on the left side, the idea was that you would bring to a boiling point the contradictions of capitalism, and out of that, you would get a new society.
Reactionaries, on the other hand, have this mindset that there's been a rip in history, that there was a time in which we lived pretty well, organic society, communities, and all the rest. And then one day there was a kind of naphtha.

And something changed in the West or in the United States, where after which everything that was valuable organically in our society came under attack. Individuals became less virtuous, less happy.
We became a country of radical individualists, whether it comes to our social behavior or it comes to our economic activity. We end up with an atomized society, and we end up just being soulless cogs in a big machine.
And so there, the reactionary, though, has two impulses. One, possible impulses, one is to let's go back to the past.
And certainly one sees that on the right today. And it's been there for a while.
The other one, and this is closer to Trumpianism, the other reactionary view is that what we want to do is move into the future, but inspired by the past so that we get a new muscular future that's inspired by the way America used to be. But it's going to be not bucolic, but rather it's going to be muscular and strong and authoritative and all the rest.
In both of those positions, the nostalgia for the past and the idea of leaping to the future are deeply anti-liberal and deeply anti-conservative. It's funny listening to you talk about this with Andrew.
Like that conservative impulse as you describe it, right, the communitarian, you know, like the society matters, community matters, it should, you know, make change slowly, be skeptical of change. And that impulse is just like completely non-existent.
Like just listening to you describe it was very clarifying in that, you know, we are very much in a reactionary moment and there are different strains of it, right? And you've written about kind of the radical Christian nationalist side of the reactionary movement that we're seeing on the right. And then there's more of the tech version of that.
But do you think that is right? And that kind of reordering feels like a semi-permanent, nothing's permanent, permanent right but like that reordering feels like it's here to stay for a little while to me i don't know what about you yeah somehow an aquarium has been turned into fish soup and we have to figure out how to turn it back into an aquarium right well it's been interesting i mean if we about personalities, what happened to Rod Dreher or what happened to Patrick Deneen, they began speaking like the genuine conservatives. broad more in a kind of Blakey and romantic view of the past where with Patrick, it was more old small town America.
It was very attractive. His first book was really good.
I mean, his first political book. And then something happens and Trump coming on the scene and Orban coming on the scene somehow flipped a switch in the minds of certain people.
Now, there are still some people on the right of the old style. I think of Yuval Levin, and I'm sure there are other people at AEI that you can come up with.
But this toxin has entered the bloodstream. I mean, anybody that you name, and with love to Yuval, is, is not really part of meaningfully part of the party right now, you know, in any meaningful sense, for as far as power is concerned or influence.
As far as comes to power, that's right. That voice just just gets killed.
And so I spent a week, I was invited to teach in the summer school at the university of austin at texas two summers ago and it was weirdly schizophrenic so they have these courses that are called like forbidden courses just for people who don't know yeah the university of austin is kind of the barry weiss and some other folks did kind of a spin-off quasi-university it's not it's not i I don't think it's an accredited university at this point. Yeah, I think it is.
It's more for like challenging, you know, the status quo, challenging the way the universities are teaching our kids. So anyway, just to give people that, mostly from the right perspective, just to give people that backstory.
However, the president of it, Pano, I forget his last name, a Greek name, he was the former president of St. John's.
And so, when he came on, the vibe that was given off of it is that actually we're going to be kind of St. John's University with students who may have these right-wing politics, but they simply want to get away from a liberal environment, but will do what St.
John's did. And so I gave a course precisely on this subject, The Difference Between Conservatives and Reactionaries.
Great kids from nine in the morning until two in the afternoon. And then there was an afternoon program where it was, you know, it was just flag waving, own the libs, all these odd tech types who came in from Silicon Valley, futurist types.
Some of them talking about René Girard and all the rest. And it was just, and the kids themselves noticed it.
They said, you know, we're getting whiplash here, going from reading Roger Scruton and Michael Oakeshott in the morning and talking about DEI in the afternoon as if they're connected. It's one thing if, you know, you go to your study and study the Great Brooks and then you go out for the fight.
But there's this impression that these things have to connect. And it was a big disappointment.
I had some hope that maybe it would work out, but it's not. Okay.
Let's get to your book, Ignorance and Bliss, because there is, I think, a through line here and a connection there, which is one of the lines you have is that reactionary politics are flourishing in our liquid world should surprise no one. So make this connection for us to why, to the book and to like why you think this might be happening now on a deeper kind of level.
Well, just to give a super quick crazy of the book, it's something I began working on 25 years ago, when I gave a lecture at Chicago on this theme and was picking at over the years, the book is really about the human desire not to know and what the psychology of that is, and what the implications are for our beliefs about the soul and God and spirit, how we think about children and innocence, how we think about coping with the present and imagining a more perfect past. But the core of the book, the beginning of it, is kind of a, not so much an argument as an unveiling of the complicated psychology or the psychological forces that were beset by to know and not to know.
And so Aristotle says everyone wants to know, which is true. But the will not to know is really not explored much in the philosophical tradition.
But it shows up in literature, it shows up in myth. So I begin with the myth of Oedipus, who wants to know and doesn't want to know what his relation is with his mother wife.
And then St. Augustine, we move to the present.
So it's a kind of, I call it a ramble through some of these issues that on a theme that no one seems to pay attention to. The theme being kind of like, why do we want to block out this unpleasant information, essentially? Why is there this desire for ignorance? Yeah, well, part of it is we couldn't get through the day if we didn't.
An example I use in the book is imagine if everyone had an led screen across the forehead that where you just had a tape of what they were thinking at every moment and if you engage with them they're thinking about you and you're reading about yourself and they're reading about your reaction to them works out on this podcast everybody's just hearing what i'm thinking at every moment, but maybe at society level, that might not work. Yeah, right.
But you couldn't even develop as a self that you could know if yourself is nothing but the result of all this information coming in. So, there are all sorts of things we block.
We don't want movies to be spoiled. We wrap presents.
Don't want to go to the doctor if you feel like you have a, for some people. For some people, do you want to know the sex of your kid? So there are all sorts of ways in which we, certainly at my age, walking past a shop window is a very charged thing.
I've got to suck my stomach in and hold my head in a certain way that it looks like I have more hair than I do. So we do it in life.
But what happens is that at the much deeper level, we find it hard to cope with just the human condition. And we find it hard to cope with death.
We find it hard to cope with uncertainty in particular. And so we don't quite know how to regulate our own curiosity or make sense of this desire.
Some people are just naturally curious. We all know them, right? They're always looking stuff up online and looking at documentaries.
And then there are people who generally think they don't need to know more than they do. And then there are people, and they're the interesting ones, who are really resistant to new information, right? They have, you know, their views about things.
This is my view about vaccines, and it's not going to change. And so I think about how people get into that sort of position.
When it comes to politics, you can see how this would work itself out ideologically. But I also think we live in a special period, and that's what you mentioned.
I've learned a lot from the books of a Polish sociologist now dead named Zygmunt Bauman, B-A-U-M-A-N,

that your listeners may or may not know. And he wrote a number of books with the word liquid in

the title, the first one, The Liquid Society. He was a former Marxist, and he had this deep idea,

which is that Marx's and Engels's idea of everything solid melting into air was for them a tragedy. They believed in solidity.
And what they thought was that the sort of atomization of life under capitalism was unhealthy, and we needed to move to a more stable, just society, which would be after the revolution. But we find ourselves living in societies, not where, as in archaic societies, that the institutions we're born into exist when we die, or in a situation with maybe one or two things change.
But we've created a world for ourselves where everything is changing all the time. And with the internet, we're aware, potentially, of everything going on everywhere at all moments.
We're not built to cope with this. We're not built to live this way.
We're sort of built to live on land.

Instead, we're all suddenly on surfboards and the waves keep coming and we're just trying to stay afloat.

And in that sort of situation, this will to ignorance comes out as a kind of healthy one, too, that people can't make sense of all this change. And so they shut down.
They have certain views about sex and gender, case closed. They have certain views about old America, case closed.
Certain views about tariffs, forget the evidence, right? That's the situation we're in now. Yeah.
And in that sense, it kind of ties to this, like why, because you could imagine going the other way. I mean, like the tech utopians like made the opposite argument, right? Like was that we were going to come to this moment where we had all this information at our fingertips, people are going to know more than ever.
Like it's, it's not crazy to have thought that at this moment we would have reached a time of you know peak curiosity and interest in what was happening to uh and it feels like it's had the opposite result right there's been this retrenchment and so to me and kind of to reading the book and a lot of it is goes away you know you're you're back at aristotle and oedipus for a lot of the book but it it's like to me, a lot of this like most recent, you know, developments is really phone related, you know, like that it's like that some level, this like internal desire that we have to not want to know things that are unpleasant has been hypercharged by the fact that there's like so much unpleasant stuff being, being delivered to us at once. Yeah, and the more information we get, the more we feel we don't control our environment.
And that's frightening. And the tech futurists, they have this idea that we're going to know so much, but a lot of what we have to know is what other people are like.
But other people are changing all the time, and they're changing because things out in material life are changing. And so it's not that you, oh, we have this information that comes out from a stable world, and then we navigate it.
It's not that. It's that we're surfing and causing the waves at the same time.
And so our ability to master anything is, or when things go wrong, we don't have. Someone once pointed out to me that if you look at all the history of utopian schemes, none of them have prisons.
They're ideal cities. There's no sense that anything could go wrong, right? And the tech futurists are like that.
They don't seem to want to recognize the limits of what we can take in and our need. You know, we can't wake up every morning asking ourselves whether today is going to be a day when our parents love us, or it's one of those days when they're not.
We need to have a kind of continuity in our beliefs, just to get through the day. If we changed our beliefs, every second that we got new information, we'd be frozen in time.
So we need to kind of commit to an opinion for a while. I want to close.
I'm just wondering if you have any practical thoughts for the types of folks that are probably listening to this. And we have small liberal listeners mostly for the most part and people that are more curious on that scale that you kind of laid out.
But even with our listeners, I can just see it because we now know all the numbers. If I put up something that's like, this is going to be very bad news for Donald Trump, more people are likely to look at that than less, right? When I put up something that folks that listen to this are going to find unpleasant, either about what's happening in the news or what I think that the Democrats are doing or whatever, fewer people are.
Some people are are going to be like, no, screw you. Why are you telling me this? That's not everybody, but that strain is in all of us.
I don't listen to my favorite sports teams recap podcast after they lose. I only listen after they win.
And have any practical, you know, kind of thought, you know, having thought deeply about this, any practical ways for individually, for people to kind of navigate the ignorance and bliss? Well, with regard to politics, I guess the first thing is to notice what is happening. I mean, to notice this will to ignorance and how it pops up, and it can pop up on every side.
I mean, if you just look at the reaction of the White House under Biden and the press in his last years, the strong refusal to believe their lying eyes was extraordinary, right?

Yeah.

But the other thing in the moment is that, as you said, conservatism is dead.

These people are not conservatives.

And that you're up against reactionary forces that are all about will and not about understanding.

And they have to be met by other sorts of means. But we can give up, you know, our own quest for understanding precisely these things.
So checking your priors, and also just trying to get used to uncertainty when things change so much all the time, it's very hard to just sail forward and at least to be aware of that and what you're doing with regard to that. It just means more self-awareness.
Mark Lilla, I really appreciate you. The book is Ignorance and Bliss.
Thank you for coming on to the Bulwark podcast. And we'll be looking out for your writings in in the future stay in touch i appreciate it thanks a lot all right everybody else we'll see you back

here tomorrow for another edition of the bulwark podcast peace

Been waiting all day for you, honey Stand up when you're talking to me

Been drinking whiskey, I don't know what I'm saying

God damn, I feel free And I feel like I'm out of my mind I'm high, don't pay attention to downsides Oh Downsides As these days Go by Go by While we pray There's no lie There's no lie We never would've thought Life would would end up like this Designed clothes, seeing things the naked eye might miss Yeah The mind, it wonders I find that it's harder to realize What the fuck it is we don't understand It's a curse It's killed in Michigan, I guess I'm ill for hope But I'm pretty wise and I'm just a curse I heard that Everest is bliss

So it is what it is

You can miss the kill against the pinfall

But I'm pretty white

I just think of it

Everest is bliss

Yeah, that's what it is The Bulldog Podcast is produced by Katie Cooper

with audio engineering and editing by Jason Brown.

Six months from now, you could be running a 5K,

booking that dream trip,

or seeing thicker, fuller hair every time you look in the mirror. Through HERS, you can get dermatologist-trusted, clinically-proven prescriptions with ingredients that go beyond what over-the-counter products offer.
Whether you prefer oral or topical treatments, HERS has you covered. Getting started is simple.
Just fill out an intake form online, and a licensed provider will recommend a customized plan just for you. The best part? Everything is 100% online.
If prescribed, your treatment ships right to your door. No pharmacy trips, no waiting rooms, and no insurance headaches.
Plus, treatments start at just $35 a month. Start your initial free online visit today at Forhers.com slash talk.
That's f-o-r-h-e-r-s dot com slash

talk. Tone Pounder products are not FDA approved or verified for safety, effectiveness, or quality.

Prescription required. Price marries, boast on product and subscription plan.

See website for full details, restrictions, and important safety information.