S2 Ep1016: Jonathan Cohn and Mark Lilla: Lobotomizing America

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Speaker 43 Hello, and welcome to the Bulwark Podcast. I'm your host, Tim Miller.

Speaker 44 We've got a two-parter today.

Speaker 16 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.

Speaker 32 So whoopsie.

Speaker 45 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 blindsighted by this.

Speaker 48 The Bill Ackmans of of the world.

Speaker 45 Bill Ackman's out there tweeting about how could this possibly be?

Speaker 45 It must be a conspiracy.

Speaker 20 It must be Howard Nutlick who's long on bonds, trying to hurt the economy.

Speaker 51 No, Trump's been warning you that he was going to do this for a long time now.

Speaker 52 You just didn't believe him.

Speaker 55 So anyway, kudos to Dave Chappelle for his 2017 prescience.

Speaker 28 And one other news item I just wanted to get to before we get to our guests.

Speaker 57 Because I don't think we're going to cover it in either of those conversations.

Speaker 58 There's some Supreme Court rulings last night with regards to the kidnappings, deportations, whatever you want to call them, to Sikat in El Salvador.

Speaker 46 The first one was with regards to Kilmar Abrego Garcia.

Speaker 46 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.

Speaker 34 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.

Speaker 62 Essentially, I think what court watchers are saying, and we'll have more on that later this week, is that 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.

Speaker 70 So, in the meantime, Abrego Garcia is stuck in a torture dungeon in El Salvador.

Speaker 68 So, hopefully, SCOTUS can act with alacrity on that.

Speaker 56 There's another SCOTUS ruling with regards to the Alien Enemies Act deportations, not the one where the Justice Department admitted they screwed up.

Speaker 64 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.

Speaker 18 And in this case, the ruling is mixed.

Speaker 12 It's bad news.

Speaker 64 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.

Speaker 79 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.

Speaker 80 I was watching one of the ACLU lawyers who's been really at 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.

Speaker 82 Like, we are not, it's not Stalin's Russia quite yet.

Speaker 59 The bad news is that, 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.

Speaker 31 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 Holman to send anybody they want to a dungeon in El Salvador.

Speaker 70 On the other hand, what are the opportunities for relief, for recourse for the people who have already been sent?

Speaker 61 There was no indication that the Supreme Court had any interest in forcing the government to return to people that are already in El Salvador.

Speaker 67 So we will keep monitoring that and we'll keep you posted on what can be done.

Speaker 82 It's something that I'm certainly going to be asking politicians about when they come onto this podcast.

Speaker 26 In the meantime, as I mentioned, we have a two-parter today.

Speaker 22 In the second segment, it's Mark Lilla.

Speaker 80 He's a political philosophy and humanities professor at Columbia, whose kind of big think writings about how we got where we are have been, I think, super compelling.

Speaker 86 And I've wanted to have him on the pod for a while.

Speaker 26 But up first, he's the new senior national correspondent here at the Bulwark.

Speaker 43 He writes a bi-weekly newsletter, The Breakdown about what is happening in our government.

Speaker 28 He's the author of The Ten-Year War, Obamacare, and the Unfinished Crusade for Universal Coverage.

Speaker 72 It's Jonathan Cohn.

Speaker 78 Welcome to the pod, man.

Speaker 24 Hey, it's good to be here.

Speaker 43 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?

Speaker 66 Because I think it's really kind of important.

Speaker 7 After Trump went, 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.

Speaker 7 And then during campaign season,

Speaker 31 this is my area of expertise.

Speaker 67 I can pop off on it.

Speaker 23 But, you know, the changes are so dramatic in the actual functioning of our government.

Speaker 67 We needed somebody to come on and help me me work through all that. And so I'm hoping you can play that role.

Speaker 54 But what give listeners a little bit about you and what you're planning on doing.

Speaker 84 Yeah, yeah. So, I mean, my background is as somebody who writes about policy, which my whole life I always felt sort of had to apologize for in the world of political journals.

Speaker 84 I'm like, it's a little boring. It's a little wonky, you know, but

Speaker 84 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?

Speaker 84 You know, are they going to get deported? You know, run down the list. And so, you know, the newsletter, the idea is me twice a week.

Speaker 84 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.

Speaker 84 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.

Speaker 84 Well, you know, I hope if I do my job right, number one, I'll be able to tell you you what's actually happening, what that means and why.

Speaker 84 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.

Speaker 84 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.

Speaker 84 And, you know, they'll take advantage of the fact that I don't live in Washington. Actually, I'm in the Midwest.

Speaker 84 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 can understand what this all means.

Speaker 16 All right, rural America.

Speaker 3 You know, we're out here. We out here.

Speaker 19 That's right. Yeah,

Speaker 62 so your newsletter coming out a little later tonight is being focused on the impact of tariffs.

Speaker 57 So here in Michigan, I was talking to Mallory McMorrow, I guess, last week, and I know you've been interviewing her as well about kind of her run for Senate.

Speaker 56 And Michigan, in a lot of ways, is kind of ground zero for this.

Speaker 84 And people are going to be affected by tariffs everywhere, but just because of the cross-border exchange with Canada and because the manufacturing that's happening in the state so kind of 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 it's 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.

Speaker 84 You know, I mean, 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.

Speaker 84 You're going to see all the trucks lined up outside.

Speaker 84 And that's obviously a big part of it. But then there's this whole ecosystem, this whole economy around these suppliers, medium-sized, small, and it just reaches into every community.

Speaker 84 And of course, they have a broader impact in terms, you know, so the people working at the factory, they got to eat. So they go to the the diner, although we call them Coney Islands, not diners.

Speaker 84 But, you know, you go to the Coney Islands,

Speaker 84 we do. I know, it's a whole thing.

Speaker 87 Do you say that like a sentence?

Speaker 43 We go to the Coney Islands?

Speaker 84 No, no, no, no, no. I'm saying, you know, that's what they call them, the Coney Islands.
So, you see,

Speaker 84 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.

Speaker 84 But so you have this ecosystem of all these parts suppliers, and it just ripples through these communities.

Speaker 84 and you know when it comes to the tariffs you know there isn't like you know we talk 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 U.S., you're still paying for all the sort of parts that are coming into them.

Speaker 84 Now, there are overlapping agreements in the Trump administration. Sometimes it says, well, we might exempt this or we might not, but it's just all this instability.

Speaker 84 And you already are seeing the impacts. You know, there are announcements of plants idling, canceling plans to build new factories.
So you're already seeing this ripple through here.

Speaker 84 So that's what's going on here in Michigan.

Speaker 84 In terms of my newsletter, I actually, it was a story that kind of came to me from somewhat randomly from someone I had interviewed for a story like two years ago on a totally different subject.

Speaker 84 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.

Speaker 68 I, you know, I like to drink and go to football games and kiss people.

Speaker 77 So I don't really know a lot about board games.

Speaker 84 Yeah. So I will say, me neither is.
I'm not in. So I was, you know, I was like, I'm sorry, board game fans out there.

Speaker 26 Sure, they're very sexually active board game fans out there.

Speaker 48 So anyway, please explain to me is what I'm saying. I know nothing about this culture.

Speaker 84 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.

Speaker 84 I was checkered or, you know, go outside, you know, play football, whatever. Again, no insult intended.

Speaker 84 Anyway, this guy called me who I know, and he's like, you know, he's like, I thought you might be interested to know our company is like.

Speaker 84 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, the board and the sort of cards and then the pieces.

Speaker 84 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.
They can't do that.

Speaker 84 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.

Speaker 84 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?

Speaker 84 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.

Speaker 84 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.

Speaker 84 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.

Speaker 84 And, you know, this is a successful company. So he was explaining to me the process of how they priced me.
He's like, look, we try to, you know, take into account the unthinkable.

Speaker 84 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.

Speaker 84 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.

Speaker 78 104.

Speaker 84 100%.

Speaker 84 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 going to come over.
It's going to cost them twice as much.

Speaker 84 I mean, they're going to lose money on. I mean, they are going to lose money on every single unit if this tariff stays in place.

Speaker 84 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 the sort of business firm level?

Speaker 84 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.

Speaker 84 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?

Speaker 84 I mean, you know, this is, again, not my world, not your world, but.

Speaker 43 Well, and you plan all this stuff ahead.

Speaker 90 I think the interesting is that is that, right, it's like, it's like, oh, these tariffs are going to come on by April 2.

Speaker 21 It's Liberation Day.

Speaker 56 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.

Speaker 49 I get a text from a non-political friend of mine.

Speaker 17 This is a little bit maybe the other side of the market from the board game market.

Speaker 49 But he had a friend who texted him that was importing kind of high-end house interior stuff, like the kind of marble or, you know, whatever from that you only can get from certain countries around the world.

Speaker 78 And they're like, well, you ask your political friend, like, is this going to be around for a while? Like,

Speaker 43 or like, is this, is this, you know, going to go away?

Speaker 44 Is this a bluff? Like, what is happening?

Speaker 64 For people who did not like engage that closely in the political campaign, who are running businesses, I do think it's just been a shock to these types of smaller, you know, boutique businesses across different sectors that like don't have lobbyists, like 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.

Speaker 9 Yeah.

Speaker 84 Yeah. I mean, they had no idea.
And they still can't plan, right? Because he's all over the place.

Speaker 84 I mean, within the 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.

Speaker 84 And I actually did talk to like the trade group for, you know, the toy companies and the sort of small gamers. And that's what they said.

Speaker 84 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.

Speaker 84 He's like, we have no idea what this is going to look like in a month or five years.

Speaker 4 We're not just going to be screwing small screws into phones.

Speaker 81 We're also going to be hand-making individual pieces of the Dungeon and Dragons board game here in Michigan.

Speaker 28 That could be a new job coming to Michigan from the fired government workers.

Speaker 78 Who knows?

Speaker 85 Displacement is happening.

Speaker 1 We the people, in order to form a more perfect union.

Speaker 5 These words are more than just the opening of the Constitution.

Speaker 7 They're a reminder of who this country belongs to.

Speaker 8 and what we can be at our best.

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Speaker 22 Their name is new, but you'll find the same commitment to justice, progress, and the truth you've relied on for decades.

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Speaker 8 On the Fire Government Workers, your healthcare is like really your go-to area of expertise.

Speaker 56 So you've already written a newsletter about kind of the dramatic changes we're seeing at HHS.

Speaker 74 What from your kind of reporting has struck you the most as far as potential ramifications from changes at HHS?

Speaker 84 Yeah, yeah. I mean, there's so many.
I'll just mention two that come to mind that

Speaker 84 we've talked about. One is this sort of stunning gutting of future research and innovation and science.
And it's at all levels.

Speaker 84 I mean, there's the immediate freeze and canceling of so many ongoing studies and grants into, you know, things like Alzheimer's and cancer, things people really care about and should care about.

Speaker 84 Again, as with the tariffs, in the most clumsy way possible, right?

Speaker 84 I mean, it's not just that, you know, they're canceling, you know, they're sort of taking away the funding through the National Institutes of Health of all these medical studies. This is very random.

Speaker 84 You know, when they hit Columbia University with all these funds, I mean, the list of ongoing projects that just lost their money.

Speaker 84 I mean, it was everything from people studying, you know, ways to sort of, you know, combat, you know, osteoarthritis, right, to, you know, like I said, cancer or Alzheimer's.

Speaker 84 You know, this was in the name of, you know, in theory, punishing, you know, Columbia for not cracking down on anti-Semitism.

Speaker 84 And whether you take that seriously or not, I just like, I mean, you know, whatever. But like, even if that was the goal, what does that have to do with a cancer study?

Speaker 84 I mean, why would you defund a cancer study i mean 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.

Speaker 84 And one thing I just, I keep coming back to as I think about this, I mean, if you sort of listen to Musk or you listen to like Russ Vought, 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.

Speaker 84 Yes. 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.

Speaker 86 Middle managers in the HR department who aren't doing any work, you know, who are whatever, like working eight, working bankers hours.

Speaker 91 Like, yeah, sure.

Speaker 31 That's just not, that's not the fucking scientists at HHS.

Speaker 84 It's not. It's not the scientists at HHS or the university.
I mean, almost by definition,

Speaker 84 if you have the skill set of that scientific level and you're at a university or you're at HHS, you know, employed by HS, you can make a lot more money in the private sector. Oh, yeah.

Speaker 10 You're not there to get rich.

Speaker 84 You're there because you care about this as an intellectual project, as something good for humanity. And look, I mean, every, I don't want, you know, a lot of people are certainly well paid.

Speaker 84 They're not suffering. I live in a university town.
I'm married to a professor. So, I mean, just to be, you know, I know this world.

Speaker 84 These are not people in poverty or anything, but like you could be making a lot more money up there.

Speaker 84 The fact that you've decided to be in a research, you know, or in the government says that you actually care about this.

Speaker 84 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.

Speaker 84 We've talked about, you've talked about this, I I know, you know, with the people working at USAID, you know, people working on PEPFAR. You know, if you have the skill set, you know,

Speaker 84 medical or administrative, that you can make a lot of money in the private sector. And instead, what are you doing?

Speaker 84 You're working on getting drugs, you know, life-saving drugs to people with malaria or HIV. These are the people we're denigrating.

Speaker 9 I mean, what are we doing here?

Speaker 84 I mean, what kind of value system is that?

Speaker 62 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.

Speaker 81 Just also just like the straight health changes that we're seeing already from HHS.

Speaker 85 Maybe not from HHS, but the impact of the rhetoric coming out of RFK maybe is having an impact.

Speaker 13 So, we've seen now two measles deaths of children in Texas.

Speaker 38 And I guess RFK

Speaker 58 gave kind of a tepid endorsement of the MMR vaccine, you know, in reaction to that.

Speaker 76 But, you know, kind of what else are you seeing in that part of the health space?

Speaker 84 Yeah, I mean, you know, it's kind of amazing. You know, it was tepid.

Speaker 13 It was a clear sentence, but it was like sentence 22 of a very long statement.

Speaker 28 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.

Speaker 19 It was like just a very perfunctory statement, which is better than nothing.

Speaker 48 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.

Speaker 84 Right, right. Well, and I don't want to sound paranoid, but have you noticed that we haven't actually heard him say that?

Speaker 89 That's a great point.

Speaker 84 These are statements. I mean, I...

Speaker 38 It's Bobby.

Speaker 9 It's Bobby.

Speaker 85 You should take the MMR vaccine.

Speaker 2 We haven't heard him rasp that out yet.

Speaker 53 I don't think it's on video.

Speaker 84 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.

Speaker 84 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?

Speaker 84 I mean, that's his whole thing, make America healthy again.

Speaker 84 And the gist of the agency is to emphasize his idea of what makes people healthy, you know, which is no vaccines.

Speaker 84 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.

Speaker 84 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.

Speaker 84 We see that at the CDC. He keeps talking about we want to do things for chronic health.

Speaker 84 We had

Speaker 84 all kinds of people working on HHS, whether through government insurance programs or direct provision of services that are trying to work on chronic disease and make people better.

Speaker 9 And they're all losing their jobs.

Speaker 84 So I mean, I don't, I don't, you know, this idea that he's this sort of crusader for health, I think even if you put aside

Speaker 84 what he thinks and some of the just, 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.

Speaker 84 So how is that going to make people healthier? I just don't, I don't, I don't see it. It's nonsensical.

Speaker 84 And, you know, my sense is, you know, that I can't tell how engaged, I mean, I've talked to people, it's hard to know how engaged he really is.

Speaker 84 This is not like a master administrator we're talking here, someone who really knows how to manipulate the sort of bureaucracy.

Speaker 9 So it's hard to know.

Speaker 85 It's like, I mean, at least partially, maybe it's kind of a Trump 1.0 version of him is like, he is getting some of his people in there, like Dr.

Speaker 36 Casey Means and Callie Means.

Speaker 58 And like, there are some, you know, cranks and like random weirdos he's got like in HHS.

Speaker 67 And you got to presume those people are doing something.

Speaker 9 Yeah.

Speaker 84 Yeah. He's getting his people in and getting, getting the people he doesn't like out.
I mean, the amount of expertise they've sent out the door.

Speaker 9 is just stunning.

Speaker 84 You know, the sort of best known at this point, I think, is Peter Marks, who was the

Speaker 84 top vaccine safety official, you know, who tried to be, you know, according to, at least according to Marx, you know, really tried to be accommodating.

Speaker 84 You know, Marx 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.

Speaker 84 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,

Speaker 84 reading between the lines, I think he thought Kennedy wanted to stack the inquiry against vaccines and Marx was like, no. But, you know, know, you're losing all this institutional expertise.

Speaker 84 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.

Speaker 84 You know, someone told me that this, 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 and how to do it safely and what protocols and all that.

Speaker 84 And 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.

Speaker 26 Seems pretty important, though.

Speaker 84 Right, right. And, you know, that person's gone.
And like, you know, at every level now, it's going to be harder.

Speaker 84 People, you know, at any end dealing with NIH is going to 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.

Speaker 84 And I think I just... This is the part of this that just blows my mind.

Speaker 84 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.

Speaker 84 And if you thought about like one thing, what is America actually great at right now? Biomedical research. Like, we are the world leader.

Speaker 84 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.

Speaker 84 I mean, I do. I understand where it's coming from, but it just seems so obviously self-destructive.

Speaker 1 That's the craziest part.

Speaker 43 Like, it's hard to even see what the political advantages.

Speaker 79 Like it just seems totally, to get to our next guest, like reactionary and crazy and just like living in a cave.

Speaker 85 I understand like 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 and some, you know, we got to means test it.

Speaker 83 Some people are getting that they don't deserve and maybe there's some fraud and maybe we shouldn't give the whatever.

Speaker 15 Like there at least are like rational arguments for all that.

Speaker 31 Like we can't afford all the services that we're doing.

Speaker 79 Like because the scale of that spend is so relevant towards like the debt we've accrued.

Speaker 86 I'll have a rational debate with people over that and like what the right amount of reform is on all that.

Speaker 60 Like cutting the NIH scientists might cost money, probably in the long term

Speaker 57 will probably cost us money because of whatever fucking disease

Speaker 48 we don't solve, then we have to send those people into the Medicaid and Medicare system.

Speaker 30 So anyway.

Speaker 3 We the people, in order to form a more perfect union, These words are more than just the opening of the Constitution.

Speaker 8 They're a reminder of who this country belongs to and what we can be at our best.

Speaker 10 They're also the cornerstone of MS Now.

Speaker 12 Whether it's breaking news, exclusive reporting, election coverage, or in-depth analysis, MS Now keeps the people at the heart of everything they do.

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Speaker 73 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 what these guys do with regards to Medicaid cuts and Obamacare extensions, et cetera.

Speaker 49 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 fights are over, and then we'll do a deeper dive on it in a couple of months when the rubber's meet in the road.

Speaker 9 Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 84 So, I mean, you know, look, they were writing this tax bill. They need to find money to offset the amount of money that you lose in the taxes.
We think they do. Who knows?

Speaker 17 Maybe they will, they won't, you know, whatever.

Speaker 84 But they're looking for savings. And of course, they don't like government.
You know,

Speaker 84 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.

Speaker 84 And of course, we have this program, Medicaid, you know, gives coverage to more than 70 million, mostly low-income people.

Speaker 84 Mostly, it's sort of working-age people and children by sort of in terms of numbers of people in the program.

Speaker 84 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.

Speaker 84 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.

Speaker 84 You could, you know, the biggest gun they could sort of fire at Medicaid would be to really kind of make a radical change in its financing. The federal government provides the majority of the money.

Speaker 84 States make up the rest.

Speaker 84 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.

Speaker 84 So they'd have to cut back. This is the kind of change they talked about.
They've talked about this for decades when they were trying to repeal Obamacare.

Speaker 84 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.

Speaker 84 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?

Speaker 84 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.

Speaker 84 So that is one possibility, very real, but at this point, it doesn't look like the most likely.

Speaker 84 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.

Speaker 84 Work requirements, the idea is that you have to demonstrate that you're employed or have a good reason why you're not in order to get Medicaid benefits.

Speaker 84 It polls well in general if you take a poll and it's an easy way to get lots of money out of the poll.

Speaker 3 Is it though?

Speaker 28 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?

Speaker 84 Well,

Speaker 84 it depends on how they do it with any of these things. You can sort of dial it up or dial it down.

Speaker 84 But, you know, the general rule is if you're getting a lot of money out of it, that's a pretty good tell that you're not just, you know, getting people who you've, you know, this isn't just about getting lazy people or encouraging people to work.

Speaker 84 I mean,

Speaker 84 we've done versions of this before. And what it ends up, you know, most people on Medicaid are working.

Speaker 84 And if they're not, you know, it's because they're a caregiver, they have a disability, they're in school.

Speaker 84 So you're dealing with a small number of people who don't qualify for the program if you have a kind of work requirement.

Speaker 84 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.

Speaker 84 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.

Speaker 84 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.

Speaker 84 I mean, you spend so much money on the administration that you're not even, you know, that eats into the savings.

Speaker 85 Then people end up in the emergency room and they're getting treatment anyway because we're not leaving people to die.

Speaker 9 You know, so

Speaker 71 yeah, maybe not the most efficient.

Speaker 63 Doge, though, doge is pretty, is focused on efficiency.

Speaker 83 It's right there in the name.

Speaker 84 Right. 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,

Speaker 84 like there are some financing games. States play all kinds of financing games, you know, with the system, as they all do.

Speaker 84 And, you know, there's certainly a case for sort of, you know, clamping down on those. Although.

Speaker 62 That's not going to be where the big fight is, though.

Speaker 58 Like, the big fight is going to be on how to actually

Speaker 61 significant substantive cuts to try to get the ticket price for these tax cut extensions down.

Speaker 47 Like,

Speaker 47 that's really what it comes down to, right?

Speaker 84 It does. It does.

Speaker 84 And, you know, the politics of this are very interesting because, you know, historically, you know, here in the world of healthcare, you know, the assumption was Medicaid was weak politically.

Speaker 84 It wasn't like Medicare. Everyone pays into Medicare, everyone gets Medicare.

Speaker 84 We've seen in the last 10 years that's actually not true because Medicaid is so, you know, woven into our system at this point.

Speaker 84 So, you know, nursing home care, which I was mentioning before, but also, you know, the hospital system is sort of, you know, the economy of a hospital's markets depend on it.

Speaker 84 It's really important, especially in rural areas. And then that gets to this politics of this is cutting Medicaid hurts a lot of red states, a lot of red districts.

Speaker 84 It's been interesting, all of us who've been watching this have noticed one of the, you know, on the Republican side, as this is sort of starting to get some conversation.

Speaker 84 You've heard skepticism from the usual suspects.

Speaker 84 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.

Speaker 84 That's a big reason she voted against Obamacare repeal back in 2017. Well, another senator who's been quite outspoken of all is Josh Hawley.

Speaker 84 And, you know, not exactly a flaming liberal, but Hawley, you know, Missouri is one of those states where they had a voter referendum.

Speaker 84 The voters overwhelmingly approved an expansion of Medicaid so that it now covers everybody with incomes up to or just above the poverty line.

Speaker 84 And the way my understanding is a little fuzzy, but my understanding is the way it's worded in Missouri is that that amendment is that if the federal government somehow pulls back on that money, that amendment is still in force.

Speaker 84 They still have to provide that Medicaid coverage. So Missouri is going to have to find the money for it.
It's a big ticket item. You know, they're either going to have to raise taxes, cut education.

Speaker 84 They don't want to do that. So Hawley has been quite vocal.
He doesn't want to cut Medicaid benefits. He said work requirements may be

Speaker 84 so I think that's something to watch.

Speaker 84 And, you know, in 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.

Speaker 84 And, you know, for most House members, the single biggest employer in their district typically is the hospital system at this point.

Speaker 91 Hospitals. So they're going to hear about it.

Speaker 85 Jonathan Cohn, so good.

Speaker 4 We'll go way deeper on this in the future.

Speaker 55 I appreciate you very much. Welcome to the bulwark.

Speaker 48 It's good to have a policy nerd, not a Dungeons and Dragons nerd, but a policy nerd on the staff.

Speaker 44 And we'll be chatting with you soon.

Speaker 84 Thanks for having me.

Speaker 55 All right, everybody. Up next, Mark Lilla.

Speaker 1 We the people, in order to form a more perfect union.

Speaker 5 These words are more than just the opening of the Constitution.

Speaker 8 They're a reminder of who this country belongs to and what we can be at our best.

Speaker 10 They're also the cornerstone of MS Now.

Speaker 13 Whether it's breaking news, exclusive reporting, election coverage, or in-depth analysis, MS Now keeps the people at the heart of everything they do.

Speaker 20 Home to the Rachel Maddow Show, Morning Joe, the briefing with Jen Saki, and more voices you know and trust, MS Now is your source for news, opinion, and the world.

Speaker 26 Their name is new, but you'll find the same commitment to justice, progress, and the truth you've relied on for decades.

Speaker 31 They'll continue to cover the day's news, ask the tough questions, and explain how it impacts you.

Speaker 35 Same mission, new name, MS Now.

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Speaker 95 Amazon Black Friday week deals are here with everything for everyone on your list. Like your uncle Ricky, who ruined every single one of your wedding photos because his fly was open.

Speaker 95 Get him a three-pack of new underpants.

Speaker 95 And right now with Amazon Black Friday Week deals, you can save up to 40% on the gifts everyone wants, like the latest toys and housewares, and the gifts they need, like underpants.

Speaker 9 And Ricky, wear them, please.

Speaker 43 All right, we are back.

Speaker 81 He's a professor of humanities at Columbia University, author of the Once in Future liberal.

Speaker 56 His latest book is Ignorance and Bliss on Wanting Not to Know.

Speaker 57 I'm relating to that right now.

Speaker 28 It's Mark Lilla.

Speaker 87 Hey, Mark, thanks for coming on the pod.

Speaker 9 Glad to be here.

Speaker 43 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

Speaker 46 your backstory and your political journey.

Speaker 9 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 Crystal and ended up going back to Harvard to get my PhD and worked very closely with Daniel Bell and Nack Laser and New Pat Moynihan.

Speaker 9 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.

Speaker 9 And since then, I've been,

Speaker 9 you know, I feel like I'm the last Mohican of the Moynihan tradition among my peers. I guess me and Leon Weasel's here.

Speaker 50 Well, maybe Bill's kind of returned back to you.

Speaker 48 Well, you know, he's met maybe a lost, a lost sheep and the, you know, and then has kind of come on back into the flock.

Speaker 9 Prodigal son is back, right? Yeah. With a big car and tail fins.
Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 9 So, you know, I got my PhD. I'm now a professor at Columbia.
I've been at Chicago, been at NYU.

Speaker 9 And my main place to write has been the New York Review of Books. Though now I'm also writing regularly for Liberties, quite happily.

Speaker 9 If your listeners don't know what Liberties is, it's an extraordinary quarterly edited by Leon Wieseltier

Speaker 9 that is as close to you as you can come to the Partisan Review for our time.

Speaker 9 And

Speaker 9 so

Speaker 9 I find myself in this position of

Speaker 9 being

Speaker 9 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,

Speaker 9 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.

Speaker 9 My interests have been in the counter-enlightenment, in the radical right,

Speaker 9 and I have a couple of collections with the New York Review called the Shipwreck Mind, The Reckless Mind.

Speaker 9 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

Speaker 9 it's out there.

Speaker 65 Well, so this is where I first came to be aware of you.

Speaker 64 I wish I could say it was by

Speaker 56 reading Liberty's Quarterly, but it was from the Sam Harris podcast when you were speaking about this a while back.

Speaker 28 And so I want to get into your new book and your coverage of the reactionary politics.

Speaker 101 If we could just spend a moment on the kind of Democratic side of the aisle,

Speaker 67 you wrote then in that once in future liberal, like you write as a frustrated American liberal.

Speaker 67 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.

Speaker 70 Then, obviously, then you wrote into kind of identity politics and how that fragments.

Speaker 92 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.

Speaker 9 Yeah, it's sort of become common wisdom now. It was not when

Speaker 9 I first wrote in 2016.

Speaker 9 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

Speaker 9 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.

Speaker 9 and progressively it became divided up by identity groups. But what Democrats lack, that Republicans have,

Speaker 9 is an idea that while there are causes, there's also the cause.

Speaker 9 And that without securing electoral power,

Speaker 9 we can't do anything about the other little causes that we're interested in.

Speaker 9 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

Speaker 9 vision of America inspires us that in fact is inclusive, inclusive in the best sense.

Speaker 9 So I talk about the potential glue being a heightened sense of citizenship and

Speaker 9 giving that a kind of content, a kind of social citizenship as well, for understanding our commitments with the welfare state.

Speaker 57 That's not too disaligned 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.

Speaker 3 I'm just wondering, is there anything out there that you've seen that has encouraged you or that has animated you coming from folks on the left who are trying to work through all this in the fallout of the election?

Speaker 9 Well, not yet. What I didn't didn't say about the book is that I especially focused on the atomizing effect of identity politics on the liberal left side.

Speaker 9 And so in terms of developing a

Speaker 9 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.

Speaker 9 I've not seen anything, as I relate in

Speaker 9 somewhere I wrote, that after I wrote my New York Times article, I met with some people about setting up summer schools that would be like the ones that exist on the right.

Speaker 9 So HerTog and AEI and all those things that create a whole cadre

Speaker 9 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.

Speaker 9 And so I circulated

Speaker 9 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.

Speaker 9 He said, look, I love this thing. If I have the money, I'd do it myself.
Let me tell you why it's not going to happen.

Speaker 9 He said, people in my class, the donor class,

Speaker 9 don't understand what you're saying. Why?

Speaker 9 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.

Speaker 9 Whereas when I was at the public interest in the 1980s and these summer schools were starting, and I'm working for Irving Crystal and these student newspapers are starting, there was this sense that you had to grab a whole generation and educate them and get them to know each other.

Speaker 9 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.

Speaker 9 It's a whole sub-world.

Speaker 9 But we on the democratic side are just all divided by our little issues.

Speaker 9 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

Speaker 9 anyone who has money in institutions is interested in pursuing it.

Speaker 74 Aaron Ross Powell, Jr.: 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.

Speaker 48 And, you know, I usually write kind of a funny article making fun of them at the end of the thing.

Speaker 61 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.

Speaker 74 And like, that's a problem, right?

Speaker 44 Okay, one last thing on the democratic side.

Speaker 48 Is there any,

Speaker 21 like, do you sense in the people that you're talking to?

Speaker 49 Obviously, since you're kind of a point person on a critique of identity politics, I'm sure you hear from people.

Speaker 90 Do you sense that things are really changing or that there's kind of a papering over?

Speaker 94 Like, do you think that it's sunk in

Speaker 21 the pernicious elements of it?

Speaker 101 Obviously, there were some good parts too, and people are trying to pivot back.

Speaker 31 Or do you think that that's more lip service at this point?

Speaker 9 Trevor Burrus, Jr.: My answer before January would have been that, on the one hand, it's being institutionalized and in a way that it becomes anodyne,

Speaker 9 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.

Speaker 9 But then Trump comes along with his anti-DEI campaign, throwing the baby out with the bathwater,

Speaker 9 striking the fear of God in everyone.

Speaker 9 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.

Speaker 9 I think it's an opportunity for our side, actually, to rethink affirmative action because I'm so for affirmative action.

Speaker 9 The problem is that it got generalized so that it applied to all these different groups where essentially the original concern was and still ought to be Black America.

Speaker 9 But it's hard legally to do that, to focus, right?

Speaker 9 So I'm hoping a reset will allow universities and businesses to do this in

Speaker 9 a more informal way, since obviously people in these institutions are committed to it,

Speaker 9 without the mandates coming from above and without the bureaucracies in our institutions.

Speaker 3 We the people, in order to form a more perfect union, these words are more than just the opening of the Constitution.

Speaker 8 They're a reminder of who this country belongs to and what we can be at our best.

Speaker 10 They're also the cornerstone of MS Now.

Speaker 13 Whether it's breaking news, exclusive reporting, election coverage, or in-depth analysis, MS Now keeps the people at the heart of everything they do.

Speaker 4 Home to the Rachel Maddow Show, Morning Joe, the briefing with Jen Saki, and more voices you know and trust, MS Now is your source for news, opinion, and the world.

Speaker 22 Their name is new, but you'll find the same commitment to justice, progress, and the truth you've relied on for decades.

Speaker 31 They'll continue to cover the day's news, ask the tough questions, and explain how it impacts you.

Speaker 35 Same mission, new name, MS Now.

Speaker 38 Learn more at MS.now.

Speaker 95 Amazon has everything for everyone on your list. Like your mom, who treats every bouquet like it's headed straight to the Smithsonian.

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Speaker 59 Before we get to the book, one other of your kind of past focuses I just want to talk about a little bit was reactionary politics.

Speaker 97 I was watching an interview you did with Andrew Sullivan, where he asked you to explain the difference between the kind of conservative impulse and the reactionary one.

Speaker 48 Well, I think the interview was like eight years ago, but it's a it's a it feels extremely timely of a question now.

Speaker 71 So I wanted to re-up it with you.

Speaker 9 Yeah, yeah, it is, I think.

Speaker 9 Well, in my view, um, we have two

Speaker 9 ideological pairs of adversaries in our political thinking and also in our political engagements.

Speaker 9 The older one, it's older in a sense, in the American sense, but the older one is the tension between liberals and conservatives.

Speaker 9 And that difference, to my view, rests on a serious difference in the understanding of human nature.

Speaker 9 and of the nature of society, that is, how human beings interact and therefore how institutions should be shaped.

Speaker 9 And conservatives have a more organic view of society, of individuals' relation to society.

Speaker 9 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.

Speaker 9 Liberals, on the other hand, stress, so that's oak shot, right?

Speaker 9 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

Speaker 9 then the other pair which grows out of the french revolution are two ideologies that are not about human nature but about history

Speaker 9 about the nature of history. And both of them share a kind of apocalyptic messianic view of history.

Speaker 9 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.

Speaker 9 Who's going to control the future?

Speaker 9 and the understanding that something is built up in history that then has to be grasped and then pushed in a certain direction.

Speaker 9 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.

Speaker 9 Reactionaries, on the other hand, had 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.

Speaker 9 And then one day there was a kind of NACMA,

Speaker 9 and

Speaker 9 something changed in the West or in the United States, where

Speaker 9 after which everything that was valuable organically in our society came under attack. Individuals became less virtuous, less happy.

Speaker 9 We became

Speaker 9 a country of radical individualists, whether it comes to our social behavior or it comes to our economic activity.

Speaker 9 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,

Speaker 9 possible impulses. One is to let's go back to the past.
And certainly, one sees that on the right today.

Speaker 9 And it's been there for a while. The other one, and this is closer to Trumpianism.

Speaker 9 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,

Speaker 9 but rather it's going to be muscular and strong and authoritative and all the rest.

Speaker 9 And 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.

Speaker 78 It was funny, listening to you talk about the, talking about this with Andrew, like the conservative, that conservative impulse as you describe it, right?

Speaker 72 The communitarian, you know, like the society matters, community matters, it should, you know, make, make change slowly, be skeptical of change.

Speaker 79 And that impulse is just like completely non-existent.

Speaker 91 Like just listening to you describe it was very clarifying in that, you know, we are very much in a reactionary moment.

Speaker 97 And there are different strains of it, right?

Speaker 62 And you've written about kind of the radical, you know, Christian nationalist side of the reactionary movement that we're seeing on the right.

Speaker 70 And then there's, you know, more of the tech tech version of that.

Speaker 44 But do you think that is right?

Speaker 51 And like that kind of reordering feels like semi-permanent, I mean, nothing's permanent, right?

Speaker 62 But like that reordering feels like it's here to stay for a little while to me.

Speaker 78 I don't know. What about you?

Speaker 9 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 talk about personalities,

Speaker 9 what happened to Rod Dreyer

Speaker 9 or what happened to Patrick Denine,

Speaker 9 they began speaking like the genuine conservatives. Rod more in a kind of Blakeyan romantic view of the past, where with Patrick, it was more old small town America.
It was very attractive.

Speaker 9 His first book was really good. I mean, mean, his first political book.
And then something happens. And Trump coming on the scene

Speaker 9 and Orban coming on the scene somehow flipped a switch in the minds of certain people. Now, there are still

Speaker 9 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.

Speaker 47 I mean, anybody that you name, and with love to Yaval, 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.

Speaker 9 As far as it comes to power, that's right. That voice 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.

Speaker 9 And it was weirdly schizophrenic. So they have these courses that are called like forbidden courses.

Speaker 62 Just for people who don't know, yeah, the University of Austin is kind of the Barry Weiss and some other folks.

Speaker 68 It's kind of a spin-off quasi-university.

Speaker 72 It's not, it's not, I don't think it's an accredited university at this point.

Speaker 80 Yeah, I think it's more for like challenging, you know, the status quo,

Speaker 56 challenging the way that universities are teaching our kids.

Speaker 79 So anyway, just to give people that, mostly from the right perspective, just to give people that backstory.

Speaker 9 However, the president of it, Pano, I forget his last name or Greek name, he was the former president of St. John's.

Speaker 9 And so when he came on, the vibe that was given off

Speaker 9 is that actually we're going to be kind of St.

Speaker 9 John's University with students who may have these right-wing politics, but they'd simply want to get away from a liberal environment, but we'll do what St. John's did.

Speaker 9 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.

Speaker 9 And then there was an afternoon program

Speaker 9 where it was,

Speaker 9 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

Speaker 9 all the rest. And it was just, and the kids themselves noticed it.

Speaker 9 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.

Speaker 9 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.

Speaker 9 And it was a big disappointment. I had some hope that maybe it would work out, but it's not.

Speaker 56 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, Jeb, is that reactionary politics are flourishing in our liquid world, should surprise no one.

Speaker 43 So make this connection for us to why to the book and to why you think this might be happening now in a deeper kind of level.

Speaker 9 Well, just to give a super quick presea of the book, it's something I began

Speaker 9 working on 25 years ago when I gave a lecture at Chicago on this theme and was

Speaker 9 picking at over the years.

Speaker 9 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.

Speaker 9 But the core of the book, the beginning of it, is kind of

Speaker 9 not so much an argument as

Speaker 9 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.

Speaker 9 But the will not to know is really not explored much in the philosophical tradition. But it shows up in, it shows up in literature, it shows up in myth.

Speaker 9 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.

Speaker 9 And then St. Augustine, we move to the, you know, 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.

Speaker 62 The theme being kind of like, why do we want to block out the, you know, unpleasant information, essentially?

Speaker 69 Like, why, why is there this desire for ignorance?

Speaker 9 Yeah, well, part of it is we couldn't

Speaker 9 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.

Speaker 9 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.

Speaker 98 Works out on this podcast.

Speaker 82 Everybody's just hearing what I'm thinking at every moment, but maybe at society level, that might not work.

Speaker 9 Yeah, right. But you couldn't even develop as a self that you could know if your self is nothing but the result of all this information coming in.
So there are all sorts of things we block.

Speaker 9 You know, we don't want our movies to be spoiled. We rap presents.

Speaker 46 Don't want to go to the doctor if you feel like you have a,

Speaker 85 for some people, yeah.

Speaker 9 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.

Speaker 9 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.

Speaker 9 But what happens is that at the much deeper level, we find it hard to cope with just the human condition.

Speaker 9 And we find it hard to cope with death. We find it hard to cope with uncertainty in particular.

Speaker 9 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?

Speaker 9 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.

Speaker 9 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.

Speaker 9 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.

Speaker 9 When it comes to politics, you can see how this would work itself out ideologically.

Speaker 9 But I also think we live in a special period, and that's what you mentioned.

Speaker 9 I've learned a lot from the books of a Polish sociologist now dead named Zygmunt Baumann, B-A-U-M-A-N-N, that your listeners may or may not know.

Speaker 9 And he wrote a number of books with the word liquid in the title. The first one, The Liquid Society.

Speaker 9 He was a former Marxist, and he had this deep idea, which is that

Speaker 9 Marx's and Engels' idea of everything solid melting into air was for them a tragedy. They believed in solidity.

Speaker 9 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

Speaker 9 after the revolution.

Speaker 9 But we find ourselves living in societies not where, as in archaic societies that the institutions we're born into exist when we die,

Speaker 9 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

Speaker 9 and

Speaker 9 with the internet we're aware uh potentially of everything going on everywhere at all moments

Speaker 9 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 and 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

Speaker 9 that people can't make sense of all this change and so they shut down

Speaker 9 they have certain views about sex and gender case closed they have certain views about uh old america case closed certain views about tariffs forget the evidence, right?

Speaker 9 That's the situation we're in now.

Speaker 90 Yeah, and

Speaker 5 in that sense, it kind of ties to this: like, why

Speaker 21 because you could have imagined going the other way.

Speaker 99 I mean, like, the tech utopians made the opposite argument, right?

Speaker 99 Like, was it 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?

Speaker 58 Like, it's not crazy to have thought that at this moment we would have reached a time of

Speaker 44 peak curiosity and interest in what was happening.

Speaker 93 And it feels like it's had the opposite result, right?

Speaker 72 There's been this retrenchment.

Speaker 80 And so to me,

Speaker 56 to reading the book, and a lot of it goes way,

Speaker 94 you're back at Aristotle and Oedipus for a lot of the book, but it's like, to me, a lot of this most recent

Speaker 4 developments is really phone related.

Speaker 72 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.

Speaker 9 Yeah. And the more

Speaker 9 information we get,

Speaker 9 the more we feel we don't control our environment. And that's frightening.
And the tech futurists, you know, they have this idea that, well, we're going to know so much.

Speaker 9 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.

Speaker 9 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.

Speaker 9 And so our ability to master anything is, or when things go wrong, we don't have.

Speaker 9 You know, someone once pointed out to me that if you look at all the history of utopian schemes, none of them have prisons.

Speaker 9 They're ideal cities. You know, there's no sense that anything could go wrong, right?

Speaker 9 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.

Speaker 9 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.

Speaker 9 We need to have a kind of continuity in our beliefs just to get through the day.

Speaker 9 If we changed our beliefs every second that we got new information, we'd be frozen in time.

Speaker 9 So we need to kind of commit to an opinion for a while.

Speaker 66 I'm just wondering if you have any practical thoughts for the types of folks that are probably listening to this.

Speaker 91 And we have,

Speaker 28 you know, small, L-liberal listeners mostly for the most part, and people that are more curious on that scale that you kind of laid out.

Speaker 47 But even with our listeners, like I I can just see it because we now know all the numbers, right?

Speaker 72 Like 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?

Speaker 92 When I put up something that, you know, that folks that listen to this are going to find unpleasant, either about what's happening in the news or what's, what I think that the Democrats are doing or whatever, fewer people are.

Speaker 47 Or some people are going to be like, no, screw you. I don't, why are you, why are you telling me this, right?

Speaker 3 Like, that's not everybody, you know, but there's that strain is in all of us, right?

Speaker 61 I don't listen to my favorite sports team's recap podcast after they lose.

Speaker 92 I only listen after they win, right?

Speaker 16 You know, and like they're little examples of this.

Speaker 46 So, what, like, do you 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?

Speaker 9 Well, with regard to politics, I guess the first thing is

Speaker 9 to notice what is happening. I mean,

Speaker 9 to notice

Speaker 9 this will to ignorance and how it pops up. And it can pop up on every side.
I mean, if you just look at

Speaker 9 the reaction of the White House under Biden and the press in his last years,

Speaker 9 the strong refusal to believe their lying eyes was extraordinary. right yeah but the other thing in the moment is that

Speaker 9 as you said conservatism is dead these people are not conservatives and that you're up against reactionary forces

Speaker 9 that are all about will

Speaker 9 and not about understanding and they have to be met by other sorts of of needs

Speaker 9 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.

Speaker 9 When things change so much all the time, it's very hard to just sail forward and

Speaker 9 at least to be aware of that and what you're doing with regard to that. It just means more self-awareness.

Speaker 43 Mark Lola, really appreciate you. The book is Ignorance and Bliss.

Speaker 62 Thank you for coming on to the Bulwark Podcast.

Speaker 97 We'll be looking out for your writings in the future.

Speaker 47 Stay in touch.

Speaker 9 I appreciate it. Thanks a lot.

Speaker 44 All right, everybody else.

Speaker 62 We'll see you you back here tomorrow for another edition of the Bullwork Podcast.

Speaker 7 Peace.

Speaker 7 I'm high,

Speaker 7 high.

Speaker 9 Don't pay attention to downsides

Speaker 9 As these days go by

Speaker 9 over

Speaker 9 While we pray There's no love

Speaker 9 There's no love

Speaker 9 Never would have thought your life would end up like this

Speaker 9 Sunny close, seeing things are naked, I might miss.

Speaker 9 Yeah.

Speaker 9 My mind

Speaker 9 wonders.

Speaker 9 I find

Speaker 9 that it's harder to realize

Speaker 9 what the fuck it is with the one deserve.

Speaker 9 It's a curse.

Speaker 9 You're the miss again, I guess I'm infallible. Robert wise, and I just live around my

Speaker 9 restless.

Speaker 9 So that's what it is.

Speaker 9 You're the mission. I guess I'm infallible.

Speaker 9 I'm just taking a punch.

Speaker 9 Yeah, that's what it is.

Speaker 63 The Bulwark podcast is produced by Katie Cooper with audio engineering and editing by Jason Brown.

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