The Bulwark Podcast XX
[0] Welcome to the Bullwark podcast.
[1] I'm Charlie Sykes.
[2] It is Wednesday, and of course we have a lot to talk about.
[3] We have Vladimir Putin's very, very dangerous escalation in Russia.
[4] We have more indications of what a real man of political genius Ron DeSantis is.
[5] He's now facing a lawsuit from some of those asylum seekers that he duped into going to Martha's vineyard.
[6] We actually have a new poll out, though, showing that DeSantis has opened up a pretty significant lead.
[7] over Donald Trump among Republicans in his home state of Florida, which probably means that that timetable for Trump to lash out at DeSantis has been shortened.
[8] Also, just a quick note on my newsletter this morning, morning shots, I focus on a speech that Merrick Garland gave over the weekend at Ellis Island.
[9] And I know it received some attention.
[10] I'm not saying that it was ignored, but it's worth revisiting because Garland spoke just a couple of days after Donald Trump.
[11] begin to ratchet up his not so veiled threats that there would be violence and chaos and anarchy if he's ever held legally accountable.
[12] And of course, this again raises the question, is Merrick Garland going to blink?
[13] Is he going to be, is he going to align himself with the folks who believe that it's just not prudent to charge Donald Trump?
[14] It is simply too risky to stand by the rule of law.
[15] And so I read Garland's speech.
[16] to this group of newly minted American citizens on the rule of law as a very direct, I thought, and very clear response to Donald Trump's attempt to intimidate the Department of Justice.
[17] It's really worth reading, going back to it.
[18] I heard some commentary about it yesterday, and people were talking about, look, Garland is, I think that he's being as transparent as possible that he actually thinks that we need to uphold the rule of law.
[19] he understands the risks.
[20] He understands the fragility of the rule of law.
[21] And then he talked about our current polarization.
[22] And there were a couple of lines that just jumped out of me. Garland says we cannot overcome it this current polarization.
[23] By ignoring it, we must address the fractures in our society with honesty, with humility, and with respect for the rule of law.
[24] And then he also says, you know, we have to promise that we will do what is right even if that means doing what is difficult.
[25] So that's just a little bit of a background to a conversation that we're going to have today with one of the most interesting writers in America today, Stephanie Slade, who is Senior Editor at Reason Magazine, and who joins me on the podcast today.
[26] So first of all, good morning, Stephanie.
[27] Good morning, Charlie.
[28] Thanks so much for having me on.
[29] Well, you have to live up to that billing now.
[30] That was quite a billing.
[31] And I think I should just sort of warn people up front that this is going to be one of those podcasts that everybody's going to be mad at us at the end of it.
[32] But, you know, right, that goes with the territory?
[33] Definitely.
[34] Okay.
[35] I mean, because I wanted to talk to you about the cover story in the October issue of Reason Magazine.
[36] Both left and right are converging on authoritarianism.
[37] Now, you know, they kind of blowback we get on that.
[38] This is both sidesism.
[39] How can you say that both left and right have abandoned what we would call classical liberalism or liberal democratic norms?
[40] So we're going to face that.
[41] But I wanted to start off with the story.
[42] story that you published, I think it was just like yesterday or that were the day before, about your visit to the NatCon convention.
[43] The Natcons are the national conservatives.
[44] These are sort of the people trying to come up, you know, put a sort of a fig leaf of some sort of America first ideology on Trumpism.
[45] How would you describe the national conservatives?
[46] Yeah, I definitely think it started as an effort to sort of build an institutional and intellectual apparatus around the Trump movement.
[47] The first national conservative conference was in 2019 when he was still in office, and they've had three now.
[48] And the idea is to promote a sort of different vision of conservatism that is much trumpier, that is much more America first, that is sort of economically nationalist, and also more just, this is sort of the heart of my piece, that is, has a willingness to wield state power to go after.
[49] their enemies.
[50] Well, and that's the heart of it.
[51] And your piece actually has a picture of Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, who was one of the lead speakers.
[52] And he really sort of has come to embody some of what you're talking about today.
[53] The will to power was front and center at NatCon 3.
[54] That's the head of them, the will to power.
[55] What differentiates national conservatives from other right -wing varietals is the desire to use government to destroy their enemies.
[56] And this seems to be just an increasing theme across the board.
[57] This is not just Twitter trolls.
[58] You're seeing this pop up again and again and again.
[59] You start off by quoting one of the main stage speakers at this conference who said, wokeism is not a fever that will pass, but a cancer that must be eradicated.
[60] In this new reality, the only institution with the power to contend with and conquer the woke industrial complex is the government of the United States.
[61] And so, and this is Rachel Beauvard, who is, I think, you know, quasi well known.
[62] And I'm going to read another quote that you highlighted.
[63] The institutional left does not intend to leave anything of the old republic behind for us to salvage.
[64] Constitutionalism, scientific inquiry, individual liberty, civil society, volunteerism, patriotism, parental authority, free expression, that they're going to destroy all that, right?
[65] Free enterprise, religious pluralism, cultural diversity.
[66] They are coming for everything.
[67] saying so national conservatism must come for them.
[68] We must forge a comprehensive policy agenda for Congress, the presidency, and the states to break apart the left's every source of funding and power, not as an act of partisan retaliation, but one of national survival.
[69] Whoa, so let's talk about this, Stephanie, because this is a full -throated call for the use of government power, the coercive power of the federal government to use as a political cudgel against political enemies who are so dangerous, who would destroy everything that we hold here that we must destroy them.
[70] So so much for diversity, pluralism, or the peaceful respect for other points of view.
[71] This is a very interesting development on the right.
[72] That's right.
[73] And I went to this conference, and I've been to two of the three NatCon conferences so far, in part to try to understand what do they mean when they use this word nationalist?
[74] Because you could sort of imagine some more benign ways to think about the word.
[75] Maybe somebody might say, I'm a nationalist, and they just mean, I think we should be proud of our cultural inheritance as Americans.
[76] And we should be offended when people want to tear down the statues for great founders of this country or something.
[77] And you can also imagine a nationalist who is sort of focused on the nation state.
[78] And some of them are sort of a way of opposing the idea of moving towards transnational or supernational government.
[79] We are skeptical of sort of moving towards governmental layers that are farther away from the people.
[80] So we want to defend the nation state against the UN or the EU or something like that.
[81] And some of the nationalists do come at it that way.
[82] But what I found is that neither of those were the primary sort of way that nationalism was sort of was manifesting itself at this conference.
[83] Instead, it was, again, just what you pinpointed, which is the idea that we should be willing to use the federal government, the national government, to sort of impose top -down, one -size -fits -all solutions on the country in keeping with our conservative values.
[84] And, again, that very explicitly includes, and if it requires us to destroy our leftist enemies, then we will, you know, using the coercive power of the state, then we will do so.
[85] Okay, so you quote Hillsdale College's David Azarad.
[86] I think I was on a panel with him once.
[87] We said, imagine how quickly the political landscape would change if we had a core contingent of a Republicans who were committed to using power to defund and humiliate the institutional centers of power of the left.
[88] So, and you've written about this will to power conservatism before, but this is one of their main talking points.
[89] What do they mean?
[90] What are they, what specific things are they talking about?
[91] I mean, this is not just, this is not just sort of, you know, we are, you know, we are defenders of of America against the evil, you know, left.
[92] When they talk about defunding and humiliating these centers of power.
[93] What is their agenda?
[94] The argument is that the left has sort of taken control of the, quote unquote, commanding heights of our culture.
[95] So academia, the mainstream media, Hollywood, and so on.
[96] And now increasingly corporate America, they would say have been captured by the left and the left's, you know, woke ideology.
[97] And so the only thing left that we have to fight back against their capture of these important institutions is government power.
[98] That's their argument that they're making.
[99] And so we need to jettison this whole like libertarian commitment to limited government it's not it's no longer suited to the task of this moment you hear them use the phrase we know what time it is and they imply that people like me do not know what time it is which is to say it's time to forget liberty and limited government embrace big government and use the power of the state to destroy uh to to sort of break the whole that the left has on these various institutions and there and clearly they're talking about going after not just governmental institution or educational institutions, but also private corporations.
[100] This is something that Ron DeSantis has shown a willingness to do to go after private companies pass mandates on them, saying things they can and cannot do in terms of, quote unquote, wokeness or punishing them.
[101] But give me some sense of like, so, okay, they're going to use the government.
[102] What are they going to do, defund all higher education?
[103] are they going to come after American corporations?
[104] What?
[105] Well, some of it is a little bit nebulous, and I think it's kept vague intentionally.
[106] They're trying to keep their options open and not scare people off too much.
[107] But a lot of it is quite out in the open and quite explicit.
[108] So the idea that, for example, that we should be willing, they, conservatives should be willing to, in government, should be willing to use the power of the state to impose, you know, wield antitrust enforcement against any big tech company or bank or any other large corporation that isn't playing by the conservatives' rules to break them up, or we should be willing to use government power to impose common carrier status on these different entities to sort of take, come in and essentially either break them up or, I don't know, almost nationalize them, you know, say we can dictate to you from the top down how you will run your business.
[109] When it comes to education, higher education, there has been calls.
[110] J .V. Vance is one of the most prominent examples.
[111] He wasn't at this conference, but he has called for saying we should target big private universities like Harvard that are imposing their leftist agenda on students.
[112] We should target them.
[113] We should seize their assets using the taxation, to seize their assets to basically tax away their endowments because their endowments are ammunition that money is that they're using against us.
[114] And so we should be willing to use the state, the power of taxation, to go after them in a targeted way because they will not because they are not doing what we want them to do.
[115] As you mentioned, Ron DeSantis with the Disney example, Disney voices a political opinion that he does not like, that is critical of a state law that he supported and signed into law.
[116] And so in retaliation for them exercising their First Amendment right to have in a political opinion and voice it, he comes at Disney and tries to strip their various government benefits.
[117] The idea is not that we think that crony capitalism is a problem.
[118] we want to roll it all back, it's that we want to retaliate against this individual disfavored company for its political speech.
[119] So there are a lot of examples of using government power to go after private corporations or private universities.
[120] And big tech companies are a major, major target of all of this, but they're not the only ones.
[121] And increasingly now we're seeing them talk about how the banks have also been co -opted.
[122] And so it's not just the cultural institutions like Hollywood and the mainstream media anymore.
[123] It's really corporate America that these conservatives increasingly see as their enemies.
[124] And we need to, if that means that we need to embrace government over the private sector, then so be it.
[125] So Newsweek's opinion editor, Josh Hammer, has sort of boiled this down to its essence, which is really that the right now should use government to reward friends and punish enemies, which, as you point out, is generally an idea that's generally considered to run afoul of the rule of law by definition.
[126] And apparently newsweek sort of stealthily altered the sentence to call instead for the rewarding of good and the punishing of evil.
[127] But that's what Hammer meant, right?
[128] Reward friends and punish enemies.
[129] And what's interesting about that is that seems to provide an ideological gloss to what Donald Trump's id. I mean, that is Donald Trump, not as an ideological belief, but just as an instinct and would pretty clearly be the agenda of Trump 2 .0.
[130] And so what I think is interesting about this is to read this and understand that Trump is not a one -off here and that if Trump came back in with a vengeance tour, that he would have this intellectual political movement behind him that says, yes, this is exactly what we should do.
[131] We should have a president who is prepared to reward his friends and punish his enemies and use government power however he wants to do it.
[132] I mean, isn't that that's kind of the essence of this?
[133] It is.
[134] And it's really interesting, actually, because earlier I described the NACCON movement and the national conservatism conferences as an effort to sort of rally the best and brightest minds on the right to build this intellectual scaffolding around the Trump movement.
[135] And the idea was that he has this id and he has this power of persuasion, this charisma that's really got the base fired up.
[136] But we want to develop a policy plan that will actually instantiate these impulses he has.
[137] But actually, what I I've sort of seen the NACCON movement devolve into is one where instead of the id, and now they're building a sort of serious policy agenda around it, rather the it is seeping into their movement so that now they're no longer even primarily about policy.
[138] It's much more about us versus them.
[139] It's about the friend -enemy distinction, as they love to quote the Nazi jurist Carl Schmidt, the politics is all about the friend -enemy distinction.
[140] And you see that friend and enemy coming up in that quote from Josh Hammer.
[141] The Nazi philosopher, I think it drew me up a little bit short that they actually quote the guy saying, hey, do you know who he is?
[142] Do you know what he wrote about?
[143] Do you know how his ideas were actually put into practice?
[144] All right.
[145] So you wrote that one of the questions you had throughout the event was the extent to which the most bombastic voices represented the average sympathizer with national conservatism.
[146] And you got your answer in the reaction to Ronda, Sanchez.
[147] because they loved him, right?
[148] I mean, they loved his sort of clarion call to use the power of the state against individuals and businesses.
[149] That's right.
[150] And it's interesting.
[151] I was at CPAC in February of this year.
[152] I saw both Trump and DeSantis speak there, and the crowd there loved both of them.
[153] At this conference, the NatCon conference, which is a little bit more of a smaller and a more high -brow CPAC, there was not a lot of Trump.
[154] It was actually, his name hardly came up at all.
[155] and he was not invited to give a speech.
[156] This was very much a DeSantis crowd.
[157] I think they feel like he is the person with the more, the potential to sort of seriously carry their vision into reality.
[158] So during his speech, DeSantis said, you know, we were one of the first states to provide protections to, for all employees in Florida, and not just government employees against employer -imposed COVID -shot mandates.
[159] Our view is very simple.
[160] No Floridian.
[161] She'd have to choose between a job they need and the shot they do not want.
[162] And that's the same if you're a police officer or at, a municipality.
[163] You know, he also bragged about banning private companies from, you know, certain kinds of training programs.
[164] And you write, the idea the government may stop companies and organizations from setting the terms under which they will do business because other people have a right to participate in society is, of course, the same argument that leftists have trotted out to justify crackdowns against Christian wedding vendors that do not wish to participate in gay marriage celebrations and against religious schools that expect job candidates not to openly flout tenets of the faith.
[165] Yet conservatives have long argued that private property and free association do, or at the very least should, broadly protect employers' rights.
[166] This strikes me as an absolute sea change for Republican politicians.
[167] This is a real pet peeve of mine, because I actually got my start in the tail end of the Obama years covering religious liberty controversies and arguing for the importance of having a legal regime that protects people of faith and respects the rights of people of faith to live their lives in accordance with their deeply held beliefs.
[168] And this includes, this is not just limited to the four walls of your home or your church or your synagogue.
[169] This includes the right to go out into the public square and have opinions and make a living in accordance, you know, in a way that is in keeping with your deeply held convictions.
[170] This is important.
[171] This is why I stand on the side of the baker who doesn't want to make the cake.
[172] Not because I necessarily agree or disagree with that baker's individual choice, but because I believe that we need to have the freedom to exercise our religion.
[173] That's right there.
[174] That word exercise is right there in the First Amendment.
[175] And that means sometimes people are going to make choices that we don't like.
[176] And we are going to have to say, we're going to have to accept that.
[177] I think that the idea that business owners have the right to say, I don't want to do business with this person.
[178] I don't want to hire this person.
[179] I want to have a business or a religious entity, a charity, a school that has a certain code of values, a certain code, and we make hiring and firing decisions, we look for people who share our values and who live out our values.
[180] And that's important to us.
[181] And we should have, I just believe that they should have the right to do that.
[182] I want to live in a society where different organizations, different employers of different kinds, can have different values and can make hiring and firing decisions based on those values.
[183] It can make decisions about what kinds of contracts to enter into and with whom based on the things that are most important to them.
[184] That is a thing I've always argued, years.
[185] And I was for years arguing against the left.
[186] And today, you have folks like DeSantis on the right and a lot of people who support him who are making exactly the same argument on the other side saying, we're not just against government mandates for vaccines or for masks, but we are actually against anybody, any private business owner making the choices that they think are best to protect their customers, to protect their employees, to protect their values, to live out their values.
[187] And so we are going to, from the top down at the state level, preempt the ability of these companies to make the decisions that they think are right, because we know best.
[188] That is a leftist argument, but we're hearing it now from the right.
[189] Yeah, and, you know, five minutes ago, your position on this would have been held by virtually every conservative, certainly every libertarian thinker in the country.
[190] And so, you know, it was just a few months ago that I was on a panel with Rich Lowry from National Review, who was critical.
[191] of Donald Trump was saying that I just don't understand how you can't embrace Ron DeSantis because he's just basically a regular, you know, Republican.
[192] He's kind of a mainstream Republican.
[193] And I remember pushing back saying, well, no, unless you completely redefine what it means to be a conservative Republican, because the things that he is doing about free speech, private property and all of these other things, leaving aside the performative cruelty with immigrants, is not at all what Republicans were saying like, you know, just a few months ago it feels like.
[194] I mean, so, and this is why your piece is so important is it underlines this complete reversal of the polarities of politics where the arguments that we had spent years pushing back against now are being embraced by leading conservative or quote unquote conservative Republicans.
[195] Exactly.
[196] So this leads me to the part that I think we're, We're probably going to be, you know, stepping on some toes with, and you've alluded to this.
[197] Oh, and by the way, before I get into this, so when we're describing this, will the power at NatCon, I don't know whether you use the word or not, but the open embrace of using coercive government power to punish your enemies and reward your friends and to impose your agenda, regardless of, you know, private property or free speech rights.
[198] Is that fascism?
[199] Is it a formal?
[200] Is it semi -fascism?
[201] That's a great debate that's happening right now.
[202] I'm not necessarily a combatant in the rhetorical or sort of semantic question.
[203] I think there are worrying signs here that this is certainly, there are aspects of this that are fascistic for sure.
[204] But I also know that that word has sort of lost some of its usefulness because as soon as you say, you know, a large percentage of the population just tunes you out.
[205] They say that this person is exaggerating, must be exaggerating.
[206] So, you know, we're not, this isn't, nobody here is, is, is Hitler.
[207] So why would you be using that word?
[208] So I don't think it's necessarily that helpful to, to employ it.
[209] Although I find the debates over whether, you know, the extent to which it's applicable to this moment to be quite interesting.
[210] Okay, so your piece that I want to talk to you about is the cover story in Reason magazine that both the left and the right are converging on authoritarianism.
[211] Let's leave the F word aside.
[212] And you argue that the problem with American politics is not polarization.
[213] It is rising illiberalism.
[214] And what you write is something is broken in our politics, just about everybody knows it, but it can be hard to put your finger on what it is.
[215] And so polarization has become the shorthand for what's gone wrong, right?
[216] I mean, you know that the take used to be that we used to have conservative Democrats, liberal Republicans, mushy moderates today the parties are further apart than ever.
[217] but you argue that that explanation is missing something.
[218] What is it missing?
[219] What do you think is actually the problem?
[220] Basically, it comes down to the idea that polarization suggests, at least, that the two sides are moving farther apart from each other.
[221] But in ways such as the one that we were just discussing with DeSantis, essentially making a leftist argument from the right, there are many ways in which the two sides, especially on the extremes, especially the sort of elite voices that are leading the conversations on these two extremes, that they really are starting to resemble.
[222] each other an awful lot.
[223] In terms of the actual policies they're calling for in some cases, so you have, for example, Tucker Carlson on Fox News praising Elizabeth Warren's economic policies.
[224] In that sense, you have a clear overlap between the actual policies that somebody on the left and somebody on the right are promoting.
[225] But also, and maybe even more important than that, is just a sort of almost aesthetic and values -based rejection of the idea of liberalism.
[226] And by liberalism, of course, I don't mean left of centerism.
[227] I mean classical liberalism, the idea of individual liberty and limited government and the fact that the notion that government exists to protect our individual rights and to let us be as free as possible to pursue our lives outside of that.
[228] That is being rejected on both sides in favor of a sense that, no, if you're not living the way I think you should be living, then I should use the coercive power of the state to force you to enforce my vision of good society and the good life upon you.
[229] That's a thing we're seeing on both the left and the right these days.
[230] And I know that that's a bit of a controversial.
[231] It's controversial to people on both sides who object to my suggestion that their side is it could possibly be as bad as the other side.
[232] But it's a long magazine article that we published it long intentionally because I wanted to really provide just one example after another after another to back this argument up.
[233] Okay, so, I mean, the pushback on on this, which I'm sure you're familiar with, would be that, okay, so you may have people on the fringes doing it, but it is not symmetrical.
[234] So, for example, the Democrats are led by Joe Biden, while Republicans are embracing an increasingly unhinged in extreme Donald Trump.
[235] So the argument would be, look, Democrats are not embracing this kind of left -wing fascism while Republicans are.
[236] So how can you say that both sides are contributing to this?
[237] I think it's fair to say that Joe Biden is being dragged to the extremes by this sort of the faction within his movement that is the least liberal, the most illiberal faction within his movement, is having quite a bit of success more than I expected.
[238] I admit, I thought that he would be a moderating force on his party.
[239] And I think that he is rather being dragged to the extremes.
[240] And we've seen some pretty disturbing things out of him, just that the kinds of things that folks on the right then can point to to justify them acting on their own worst impulses.
[241] Okay.
[242] So when they say your FBI wants to treat parents at a school board meeting as domestic terrorists, they're not making that up.
[243] They're pointing to, they have real grievances against the way that this administration has behaved.
[244] Now, you might think, and I, I wouldn't necessarily argue with you that on the whole, the right poses a greater threat.
[245] I don't think saying that both sides are coming to resemble each other requires you to think that they're equivalent in every way.
[246] And in fact, part of my argument is that one side does something wrong, breaks the rules in some way.
[247] And it justifies the other side than doing something even worse.
[248] So it's escalated.
[249] Spiraling.
[250] Yeah.
[251] Well, I mean, I guess part of it is also, you know, the timing to come out with a both sides article at the moment when Donald Trump, who is the former president and seems likely the to be the next Republican nominee, and maybe the future president, is embracing QAnon conspiracies, is making these veiled threats of violence at the time when we've just been discussing the national conservatives, embracing a radical right -wing agenda that would override freedom and private property.
[252] For you now to come out and say, yes, but both sides are doing it.
[253] I mean, I'm looking at that picture, and then I'm thinking, okay, Joe Biden is more progressive than I would like, but this is not in the same category at all.
[254] Again, I really do think the right is responding to a real genuine sense of threat coming from the left and that they're not imagining it.
[255] Again, I spent the early part of my career writing about these religious liberty controversies.
[256] I did a big investigation for America Magazine about the ACLU and the Obama administration essentially targeting Catholic hospitals trying to force them, use a force of law to require Catholic hospitals to perform abortions and transgender services and elective sterilizations or go out of business.
[257] They were trying to destroy Catholic hospitals or force them to forfeit their Catholic character.
[258] That to me is not a small threat.
[259] So when people on the right say, we feel under threat, I don't think that that's entirely in their minds.
[260] And so the flip side of the argument you just made is, you know, people will say, the left has been attacking the right for years and where were you?
[261] will say is I was there writing about that, and I was calling it out, and I was disturbed by it, and I'm not going to stop just because it's happening on the other side now.
[262] You know, it's interesting, this issue of the Catholic hospitals just sort of parenthetically.
[263] I remember in the before times, before all this happened when I was, you know, on local radio and local television here in Wisconsin, that I sat down with then -arch bishop Timothy Dolan, now Cardinal Timothy Dolan, and we did an entire program about what he saw as the threat to the independence and the conscience of Catholic hospitals.
[264] And I remember him looking right at me and saying, and I asked him, I said, well, what would you do if they required you to perform these procedures?
[265] And he looked right at me and says, we would shut them down.
[266] I still remember that because I was so, I was so shocked by all of that.
[267] But I guess I also, you know, yes, you can point to these efforts, but in terms of scope and in terms of the immediacy of the threat, look, I have written books about political correctness and intolerance on the left.
[268] So, you know, what's what's going on.
[269] on at, you know, Barnard College or what's going on at the, you know, University of California at Berkeley, et cetera.
[270] But we are now talking about a political moment where you actually have a political party that may be poised to achieve, you know, overwhelming political power at the state and the federal level with this kind of radical agenda.
[271] Yes, there are threats from the left, and I do think that they need to be called out in their danger.
[272] But, Are they at the same level and scope and immediacy as the threat that you're describing, say, with the will to power conservatives?
[273] Yeah, again, I'm not here to say that they're equivalent.
[274] And I think that when I sort of sit down to think about where do I see the greater threat, one of the things that tips me in the direction of being more concerned about the things I'm seeing coming from the right.
[275] And one of the reasons that that has become my beat at Reason magazine to cover the conservative movement is that I look at the sort of center of gravity of the political, the larger conservative movement, and I see them more radicalized than the center of gravity on the left.
[276] I'm actually a little bit heartened when I look at like, where does the median Democratic voter come down on some of the issues of woke illiberalism that I think are real serious problems that I think in many ways the sort of elites of the Democratic Party and the progressive movement and the now Democratic socialist movement have completely lost their minds when it comes to some of these issues of, like, identity politics.
[277] But I think that the average, the average Democratic voter is not with them.
[278] And they're actually providing a break on that in a way that the average Republican voter right now is not.
[279] Well, see, then that's an important distinction.
[280] So in the primary elections, it seems that many of these really extreme progressives have been rejected by Democratic primary voters.
[281] At the same time, the Republican primary voters have been advancing the wooliest, coocious, lunatics.
[282] from the fever swamp, you know, in one state after another.
[283] So that's another form of the asymmetry.
[284] You know, for example, the defund the police folks out there.
[285] They're clearly in retreat on the left, right?
[286] I mean, they lose primaries where they're backing away from their positions, whereas on the right, it seems they are doubling down on their positions, the big lie, you know, the performative cruelty on immigration, et cetera.
[287] Yeah, I think that's fair.
[288] It's a fair analysis.
[289] Again, I do think that it ought to be, unfortunately it won't be taken, well taken as a word of warning, but it ought to be a word of warning against the left that their previous illiberal overreaches have now created a permission structure for these conservatives to say, and I reject this argument, but I hear it every single day that we must respond in kind.
[290] You know, they started it, and anything less than fighting fire with fire is a unilateral surrender, and, you know, that's what they think I stand for.
[291] So you're right.
[292] This is a very, very detailed in -depth piece.
[293] And I think there's a lot of here that's really worth considering because you argue that the energy in both parties seems to be coming from elements that have something in common, a desire to move their side in the country's a whole in an illiberal direction.
[294] On the left, a new crop of socialists hope to overthrow the liberal economic order, while the rise of intersectional identity politics has supplanted longstanding commitments to civil liberties on the the right support for free markets and free trade are more and more often derided as relics of a bygone century while quasi -theocratic ideas are gathering support.
[295] But you say what does not change is the effective polarization, right?
[296] That all of these studies are showing that Americans have significantly more negative feelings toward members of the other party than they did in decades past.
[297] So what you're describing is the sort of the cycle of polarization, the cycle of if you take an extreme position that that gives me that's a signal that I should take a more extreme position if you are not respecting liberal democratic norms why should I respect liberal democratic norms and my sense is that this is going to continue to escalate because it's that whole argument well I can't bring I can't bring a pen to a gunfight I can't bring a knife to a gunfight I have to I have to use the same cudgel that the other side uses I mean is that what you're seeing.
[298] Yeah, and I'm glad you raised this.
[299] So it's a little bit of a wonky point, but in the piece I try to draw a distinction between issue polarization or ideological polarization and what political sciences call affective polarization.
[300] So I'm pushing back against the idea that the two sides are becoming farther apart ideologically and on the issues, but I'm acknowledging that there's a way in which affective polarization really is a problem and is getting worse.
[301] That's the idea of the two sides sort of hating each other more and feeling threatened by each other.
[302] And feeling threatened by other more.
[303] So effective just refers to how, you know, how something makes you feel.
[304] And so our feelings are getting more polarized, the two sides.
[305] On the other hand, I do, I think it's important that I end this piece after, you know, 5 ,000 words of why I'm afraid, I do try to end it with a little bit of hope.
[306] And I don't think that that hope is completely ill -founded.
[307] And that is, even when you, when you dig into this effective polarization and related research, what you find is that it's still relatively small numbers of people who have this like intense visceral hate for the other side.
[308] It really is the elites who are paying a lot of attention to politics.
[309] And regular Americans are, for the most part, you know, again, the share of people who are expressing these negative, these really scary negative opinions, is growing, but it's still like in the teens, right?
[310] It's like less than one in five Americans who is saying things like, I would be really upset if my child married somebody of the opposite party.
[311] You know, it's not as pervasive.
[312] Most Americans, I think, have better things to do with their lives.
[313] And when you pull them on the things that they do care about and what their most important sort of political values are, what they want out of their country, what their priorities are, they rank individual liberty.
[314] We want to live in a society that protects individual rights and liberties as the most important thing to them for most Americans.
[315] That is still continues to be true.
[316] They say that.
[317] And by the way, I hope you're right.
[318] I, to the degree that I'm hopeful it is that there are the normal Americans out who are not locked into all of this.
[319] And if you step away from social media for even five minutes and encounter real people, it is awfully refreshing.
[320] But, you know, people will say that they are for freedom and individual liberty.
[321] But your thesis, though, is this growing illiberalism out there.
[322] And I think one of the things that's been exposed in the last several years has been how thin across, you know, some of these classical liberal beliefs have been when they're challenged in the electorate.
[323] So, for example, you walk through the areas, where the left and right elite are tracking in the same direction.
[324] So, for example, free markets under the gun from both the left and the right.
[325] Both sides are also turning on the First Amendment.
[326] We're seeing a push.
[327] It's a lot of attention to the book banning that's taking place from the right.
[328] But we also know that the left has, there are people on the left who believe that there are certain ideas that are violent, that are dangerous, that they cannot be tolerated.
[329] Both sides are pushing a rhetoric of radicalization.
[330] So, I mean, this is concerning.
[331] Just before we get to, you know, we've talked a little bit about free markets, the assault on the First Amendment, I don't know how you talk about it without talking about the illiberalism from both the right and the left.
[332] You watch some of the debates, and it feels like the people who believe in liberal tolerance and academic freedom are kind of a besieged minority.
[333] and maybe that's just that's just the perception but you know the pushback that you get from the left of or speakers on campus or certain opinions on a variety of issues including so for example transgenderism and juxtaposed with what you're seeing from the legislatures who are you know demanding that that woke books be removed from libraries this strikes me as a as a real crisis point for free speech and and and academic freedom I think that's right.
[334] I mean, I think it's fair to point that out.
[335] And that's why I spend a good chunk of the article giving the examples and how they're coming from both sides.
[336] I do think, again, that a lot of this is more an elite phenomenon than it is a mass phenomenon.
[337] And even within the college campus sort of environment, there's a lot of research to suggest that it's a small number of angry students who are sort of silencing the vast majority of students who don't care at all about these issues and who would actually probably prefer to be left alone and not be told that they have to, you know, they have to care about who's speaking on campus or they have to refuse to listen to words because words of violence or something.
[338] What we have is a small number of people who have successfully achieved enough power to shut down the larger majority.
[339] And there's this idea that, like, nobody wants to stand up against the bully.
[340] And so everybody just stays quiet.
[341] It's easier to stay quiet, even though it actually turns out are the majority of the campus, the majority of the student body is not on board with this stuff.
[342] But what the small number of students have is they have social media.
[343] They have people now in the administrations of these colleges who are willing to enforce their values.
[344] And so they are able to speak loudly and get their way.
[345] That is troubling.
[346] Absolutely.
[347] I mean, I'm disturbed by what's happening in these cases, but I just want to keep perspective about where the numbers are because that's the only way that we can think through, okay, what is the way out of this mess?
[348] And if we have actually numbers on our side, then there is at least some hope for the fever to break or for us to figure out how to unwind the situation that that doesn't actually seem that stable for a small number of people to be dictating to the larger number of people and infringing on their rights along the way.
[349] So the numbers are on our side because you think that Americans are instinctual liberals by and large, you know, not in the sense of being left to center, but in the sense of believing at a deep level that even one's fiercest opponents have rights.
[350] So the numbers are on our side.
[351] But do the numbers matter anymore?
[352] I mean, because the parties seem, what's particularly the Republican Party, seems to be held completely hostage to its loudest voices, its minority voices, the way our system is structured.
[353] We do have, you know, the voice of political, ideological minorities, the most extreme minorities is obviously amplified.
[354] And as you point out, it is the elites who, you know, have jettisoned the longstanding idea of respecting the rights of people they disagree with.
[355] Well, I mean, aren't our politics driven by the extremes and by the elite extremes?
[356] So, I mean, do numbers really matter anymore?
[357] Again, it's a fair question.
[358] And what I would say is that the more under threat people feel, the more likely they are going to be to dispense with their commitments to things like their stated commitments, their previous commitments to things like individual liberty, individual rights, I want to live in a liberal society, the more that they can be made to feel that they are facing an existential threat, the more tenuous the status quo feels, the more they're, you know, the less committed to those things they're going to be.
[359] And so I write in my piece, partisan animosity suits the authoritarian elements of both sides just fine, because their goal is to acquire power.
[360] And they have little patience for the procedural niceties that would interfere with the exercise of that power.
[361] But they know that a base whipped up into fear and fury is going to accept a lot more in terms of violations and erosions of these rights that they, that people would otherwise, you know, genuinely say are important and they believe in, but if you're whipped up into fear and fury, you're not going to be thinking rationally.
[362] And so this is why we do need to be aware of the ways in which, you know, there's this, there's this tightrope that we have to walk between raising the alarm about these authoritarian or illiberal or even fascistic things that we're seeing happening in our politics and recognizing that the more scared people feel, the more under threat, the more existential everything feels to people.
[363] Actually, the more like, they are going to be to abandon their values that we want them not to abandon.
[364] And I think we see that playing out in real time.
[365] So I'm interested in getting your views on the way the abortion debate is playing out, particularly in the short term and in the longer term.
[366] You describe yourself as a libertarian pro -lifer.
[367] So what does that mean?
[368] Yeah.
[369] No, I am.
[370] In 2015, I wrote a piece for a reason called Why I am a Pro -Life Libertarian.
[371] And I think it will probably be the most red piece I've ever written for my whole career.
[372] There's a lot of interest in this question.
[373] Can you be those two things at once?
[374] And initially I wanted to write it as a defense of Rand Paul.
[375] Yes, he can be a libertarian and be pro -life.
[376] But it ended up being more of a first -person piece about where I come down.
[377] And what I write in the piece is, look, libertarianism is a political philosophy.
[378] It tells us about the proper role of the state in society.
[379] And what is good public policy and what is bad public policy.
[380] And it says that good public policy is policy that protects people's right to life, liberty, and property, and basically leaves the rest to individuals working...
[381] on their own and in association with other individuals in a voluntary, private way.
[382] But the question of abortion requires you to first answer the question, what does the person?
[383] When does life begin?
[384] Is an abortion an act involving one human life or two human lives?
[385] And until you have answered that question, you can't apply the political philosophy of libertarianism to it.
[386] And really, libertarianism has nothing to say to help you answer the question of when life begins.
[387] It's just outside the scope of libertarianism.
[388] So you've got to answer that question for yourself.
[389] You've got to decide what is life, what is human life, and, you know, what is an abortion?
[390] And if you look at an ultrasound like I do and see a human life, then of course when you apply the libertarian political philosophy, which says one of the only roles of the state is to protect life, innocent life, then you're going to come down on one side.
[391] Meanwhile, if you look at an ultrasound and you think that's not a human life, that's a clump of cells or something, you're going to apply libertarian political philosophy and come down.
[392] in a different place.
[393] So where do you come down on this?
[394] Would you support what Lindsay Graham is proposing on the federal level?
[395] So I look forward, hopefully, to a day when abortion is illegal everywhere.
[396] But I'm a big believer that trying to impose a top -down policy solution on a country that isn't ready for it at a sort of hearts and minds level, at a cultural level, is not going to end well.
[397] It didn't end well for the other side, trying to impose its vision on a country that was half pro -life for the last 40 years.
[398] And I don't think it's probably going to go any better doing it the other way around.
[399] So I'm a little bit reluctant to look to federal answers to this question right now before we've tackled the need to rebuild a culture of life, a culture in this country, a sort of polity that recognizes when life begins, what life is, why it has inherent dignity and why it needs to be protected by law.
[400] If you try to pass the law without accomplishing that sort of, I think, precondition first, I think you're probably not going to solve the problem the way you think you will.
[401] Well, this is why it's so difficult because, you know, obviously we would like to see a culture that respects life, that respects all life.
[402] But also we're having this moment.
[403] We're debating abortion where, in a very stark term, we're getting a sense of perhaps the limits of government power over individual choice, the limits of the use of coercive legislation.
[404] And I guess I'm trying to get at what it's like being a libertarian, watching a what feels like a libertarian moment in the country that is saying, okay, I don't want politicians to make this decision.
[405] I don't want legislatures debating this very personal choice.
[406] This should be up to me. And so right now you have many people, you know, who would not be described as libertarians, really embracing a libertarian ethos when it comes to this particular issue?
[407] I think you can make that argument, but I think that it's, I would caution against drawing too many conclusions from, like, for example, one Midwestern state referendum vote.
[408] And the reason is that there has been a lot of polling done for decades on public opinion toward abortion.
[409] And what you have consistently found is that we are, our country is not at either extreme, but that most people think that there should be some limits on when an abortion can be procured.
[410] They think there is some role for the state in regulating this.
[411] That's where the average American is.
[412] So it's not ban abortion from conception, even if I think ideally that's what the law should say.
[413] And it's not like the New York state law, which allows abortion right up until the moment of delivery for any reason, you know, at any time.
[414] It's actually much closer to the first and the second, in fact.
[415] That's a thing that I think is surprising to many on the left when when you actually take the time to dig into polling numbers on this, you find that people are pretty uncomfortable with the second and third trimester abortions, certainly late -term abortions.
[416] It's horrifying to them.
[417] Even people who identify a strongly pro -choice think they're offended by the idea that you would suggest that they are in favor of this.
[418] So I don't think there is really a rejection of this idea that there should be laws or regulations or restrictions on this issue.
[419] I think that we've just found ourselves in a new political.
[420] moment.
[421] And we haven't had to think in terms of legislative remedies on this issue in so long that we're having to sort of relearn how to flex those muscles.
[422] No, I think that's right.
[423] That's why it's evolving and why some of the polls I don't think necessarily reflect where we're going on all this, because, you know, 50 years of not having to really think this through in reality terms, you know, changed overnight.
[424] So, Stephanie, thank you so much for coming on the podcast.
[425] I appreciate it very much.
[426] Thanks so much for having me. Stephanie Slade is senior editor at Reason Magazine, a fellow in liberal studies at the Acton Institute, and she wrote the cover story for the October issue of Reason.
[427] Both left and right are converging on authoritarianism, and then this week wrote, The Will to Power was front and center at NatCon 3.
[428] You can find both of them at Reason .com.
[429] Thank you all for listening to today's Bullwark podcast.
[430] I'm Charlie Sykes.
[431] We'll be back tomorrow, and we'll do this all over again.