Ross Douthat
New Left Review
https://newleftreview.org/issues/ii152/articles/ross-douthat-condition-of-america
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| NLR 152 • Mar/Apr 2025 |
Introdução
Entrevista com Ross Douthat
Alegações de que esquerda e direita, termos nascidos durante a Revolução Francesa nas divisões da Assembleia Nacional de 1789, estão se tornando, ou já são, anacronismos, têm sido um tropo político recorrente desde o século passado. Se não há mais razão para acreditar nisso agora do que havia no passado, as evidências de confusão entre os dois têm aumentado visivelmente, em um fluxo ideológico dramatizado no Brasil por Roberto Schwarz, historicizado por Christopher Clark na Grã-Bretanha e encenado diariamente nos populismos transversais da Europa e da América. Cenas como essas demonstram uma lenta erosão da ordem liberal, sem uma alternativa clara para desafiar seu domínio, cujo resultado são os discursos confusos que circulam pelas mídias sociais e pela política de radiodifusão, matéria-prima aberta para o escrutínio clínico.
O mundo das ideias propriamente dito, onde sistemas articulados de pensamento se confrontam, é outra questão. Nesse sentido, uma esquerda séria precisa responder, não com autosegregação ou afastamento de qualquer Abgrenzung próprio, mas com curiosidade de mente aberta e crítica baseada em princípios, quando necessário. Nesse espírito, iniciamos esta edição com uma entrevista com Ross Douthat, o colunista conservador que é a mente mais consistentemente original a escrever sobre política americana nas páginas do New York Times. Ao fazê-lo, o periódico dá continuidade à tradição de tratar pensadores e escritores de uma perspectiva antitética à sua com respeito — e, se merecida, admiração — que começou com Michael Oakeshott nos anos 1960 e, a partir dos anos 1990, continuou com Francis Fukuyama, Giovanni Sartori, J. G. A. Pocock, Karl-Heinz Bohrer e outros. Autor de cerca de sete livros sobre uma ampla gama de temas, abrangendo classe e cultura, demografia e religião, progresso técnico e estagnação econômica, o tema central da escrita de Douthat é a condição de seu próprio país, a América, inserida no contexto mundial. Na era vitoriana, havia equivalentes na imprensa britânica, francesa, italiana e em outros lugares, escritores de sua época que desfrutavam de significativa autoridade pública. Mas a Europa de hoje carece de uma contrapartida real, e nos próprios Estados Unidos não há jornalista com escopo imaginativo comparável. Um agitador estudantil em sua juventude — entradas incendiárias no Harvard Salient, uma salva inaugural de "Cheney para Presidente" no NYT de 2009 —, na época em que Trump concorreu às primárias de 2016, Douthat era um de seus críticos mais ferrenhos. Em nenhum momento, como parte do que se tornou a brigada "Nunca Trump", os republicanos — a filha de Cheney na liderança, juntamente com Kristol Jr. e outros — escandalizados por sua falta de consideração pelas devoções da Guerra Fria, Douthat se tornaria um dos analistas mais astutos da trajetória do atual presidente, cujas ameaças ziguezagueantes de uma guerra comercial generalizada ele julga condenadas ao fracasso. Aqui, nosso colaborador Nick Burns o questiona sobre sua formação intelectual, evolução política, horizonte internacional e os ganhos e limites de seu papel como tribuno no principal jornal dos Estados Unidos. O resultado é um retrato, talvez diferente de qualquer outro até agora disponível, de uma inteligência nada conservadora típica.
Ross Douthat
A condição da América
Entrevistado por Nick Burns
Seu primeiro livro, Privilege, é ao mesmo tempo uma demolição devastadora de Harvard, como bastião de um carreirismo elitista e autossuficiente, e uma triste carta de amor a ela. Desde então, você sempre foi inconfundivelmente um adversário do liberalismo americano, mas, de certa forma, continua a ser um beneficiário dele. Onde você se situaria — politicamente e, depois, intelectualmente — no mapa do cenário americano contemporâneo? O que há no liberalismo, além de hipocrisias óbvias, que você não gosta?
Compartilho a visão conservadora bastante convencional de que o argumento mais forte a favor do liberalismo é como uma tecnologia eficaz para gerir a paz social em uma sociedade complexa — mas que depende de fontes de significado e propósito mais profundas do que ela mesma, que luta para gerar por conta própria.
Liberalismo como alimentação de recursos morais não renováveis?
Esses recursos podem ser autorregenerativos. Não concordo plenamente com o argumento de que, com o advento de Locke, há um declínio automático rumo ao hiperindividualismo. A história americana fornece muitas evidências de que uma superestrutura liberal não impede necessariamente grandes despertares. Na medida em que o faz, é sob condições tecnológicas específicas. A justificativa da antiga crítica conservadora ao liberalismo como atomização — que parece mais potente hoje do que quando eu estava em Harvard no início dos anos 2000; e parecia mais potente naquela época do que em, digamos, 1955 — é mediada pela tecnologia. Houve tecnologias que aceleraram o individualismo, desde coisas que consideramos certas, como o sistema de rodovias interestaduais e a pílula anticoncepcional, até a internet, um acelerador específico. Como metáfora, você pode pensar na tendência do individualismo à atomização e ao desespero como um gene dentro da ordem liberal, que se expressa sob condições ambientais específicas, mas não necessariamente emerge se essas condições não estiverem presentes. Nos últimos anos, a internet, em particular, ajudou esse gene a se expressar mais plenamente do que antes.
Uma teoria alternativa do liberalismo é que ele é um modo de vida ambicioso por si só. Esse seria o argumento do meu amigo Samuel Moyn, com quem dei aulas sobre o assunto. Ele concordaria essencialmente com a crítica conservadora, mas argumentaria que isso significa que precisamos de um liberalismo que não seja apenas gerencial, mas ambicioso, prometeico, comprometido com a autocriação e a exploração. E essa forma de liberalismo, na minha opinião, está sujeita a tentações fortes e perigosas. Às vezes, são tentações necessárias — uma cultura pode precisar de um pouco de prometeísmo —, mas podem rapidamente levá-la a um erro grave. O liberalismo que descrevi em Privilege tendia a uma forma espiritualmente árida de hiperambição; não Whitman e Emerson comungando com as glórias da criação, mas: como consigo um emprego na McKinsey? Em condições de prosperidade, o liberalismo como visão de mundo havia se transmutado em uma meritocracia puramente instrumental e egoísta.
Os próprios liberais posteriormente decidiram que isso era verdade. Uma série de livros foi publicada depois de Privilege, desde "Excellence Without a Soul", de Harry Lewis — ele era reitor de Harvard quando eu estava lá; ele o escreveu assim que se aposentou — até "Excellent Sheep", de William Deresiewicz, "Meritocracy Trap", de Daniel Markovits, e "Tiranny of Merit", de Michael Sandel. Então, de certa forma, eu estava adiantado em uma crítica ao liberalismo meritocrático que muitos liberais passaram a considerar provavelmente correta. É claro que eu já estava roubando coisas de Christopher Lasch.
Quando você fala sobre a crítica conservadora tradicional ao liberalismo, isso é um conservadorismo especificamente americano ou se sobrepõe a anglo-conservadores como Oakeshott ou à direita europeia mais radical?
Há uma crítica conservadora americana específica, que está relacionada à fraqueza da esquerda nos EUA. A crítica europeia original ao projeto liberal — Oakeshott não seria o exemplo certo, ele não é rigoroso o suficiente —, mas se você ler alguém como de Maistre, a ideia liberal é entendida como uma revolução contra a ordem, contra Deus; é satânica. Essa crítica faz sentido em um cenário político onde existe um antigo regime e uma hierarquia social com os quais um tradicionalista pode se aliar, e também uma forma mais profunda de radicalismo do que a que geralmente prevalece nos EUA. O argumento reacionário contra o liberalismo na Europa encontra seu ponto mais forte na Revolução Francesa e no Comunismo Soviético — casos em que houve uma tomada de poder radical, muitas pessoas foram mortas e muitos padres também foram mortos. Os Estados Unidos nunca tiveram um antigo regime desse tipo, nem uma forma realmente potente de política radical de esquerda. Portanto, o conservadorismo nos Estados Unidos tendeu a se concentrar mais na superficialidade do liberalismo do que em seus perigos.
É claro que há momentos em que o mundo liberal é percebido como mais radical, e a crítica conservadora, por sua vez, se torna mais radical; o final dos anos 1960 foi um desses momentos, e o período que acabamos de viver seria outro. Não é coincidência que os pós-liberais tenham emergido como figuras importantes na direita americana nos últimos cinco ou dez anos, com uma crítica mais aprofundada e radical ao liberalismo, no exato momento em que o próprio liberalismo se torna mais radicalizado e agressivo em seu desejo por uma revolução cultural. Enquanto na década de 1990, com neoconservadores versus neoliberais, eles não estavam tão distantes. A crítica de George Will e Irving Kristol ao liberalismo diferia daquela de, digamos, Adrian Vermeule, que argumenta que a consciência consciente prova que o liberalismo sempre foi radical. Mas em períodos em que o liberalismo parece moderado, a crítica conservadora inevitavelmente se torna mais moderada. Quando eu estava escrevendo Privilege, não faria sentido afirmar que Harvard, em 1999, era administrada por radicais marxistas empenhados em destruir toda a hierarquia tradicional americana, porque claramente o liberalismo daquela época estava totalmente adaptado à hierarquia americana e investia na preservação do poder da elite. Então, na medida em que me sentia alienado disso, era muito mais sobre o que eu via como suas limitações morais e espirituais, em oposição às suas tendências radicais.
Como colunista do New York Times, você ocupa uma intersecção tensa no discurso público americano, encarregado de interpretar ideias e posições conservadoras para leitores liberais.
As pessoas gostam de dizer que sim — já ouvi isso antes.
Quais são as regras deste jogo? Como a sua própria formação, formada tanto nas instituições do liberalismo — Harvard, The Atlantic, The Times — quanto nas do conservadorismo americano, como a National Review, contribui para isso?
É verdade que sempre trabalhei em instituições liberais de elite. Fui estagiário na National Review e escrevi para publicações conservadoras. Mas estudei em Harvard, escrevi para a Atlantic e, desde 2009, trabalho para o New York Times. Nunca houve um momento na minha carreira em que eu estivesse fazendo outra coisa senão escrever principalmente para um público de tendência liberal, sob uma perspectiva conservadora. Nesse sentido, há maneiras em que "aqui estou, não posso fazer outra coisa". Não havia outra vocação para a qual minha trajetória profissional me tenha preparado, e, até certo ponto, pareceu natural fazer o que faço, embora seja uma posição curiosa. Parece-me algo valioso a fazer — não superestimar minha própria importância; Não olho para os Estados Unidos e acho que tive um impacto positivo no apaziguamento das guerras culturais ou algo do tipo. Mas é bom que as pessoas que se importam com ideias se envolvam com os argumentos de ambos os lados. Para que serve escrever, se não para falar com pessoas que discordam de você em algum nível? Mesmo que isso signifique que existem certos tipos de escrita que eu não consigo escrever, tipos de polêmica que evito. A realidade é que o trabalho é uma corda bamba, onde há o perigo de cair para um lado, adentrar demais no mundo conservador para conseguir voltar atrás e falar com os liberais, ou cair na outra direção e me tornar uma figura domesticada, o conservador que os liberais podem ler para confirmar sua percepção de que Trump e o Partido Republicano são ruins, desafiando-os apenas levemente. Sempre tive consciência disso.
Como você é visto pela direita intelectual nos Estados Unidos? Como um importante defensor em um veículo de comunicação tão mainstream como o Times, ou como um vacilante insuficientemente comprometido, corrompido por ter passado muito tempo entre os liberais?
Há certos conservadores que pensam mal de mim e me consideram como alguém capturado, uma figura domesticada. Mas a maioria das pessoas à minha direita, que respeito, entende o que estou fazendo e qual é o meu papel, e não me considera alguém que se vendeu ao inimigo. De certa forma, a era Trump, ao criar uma grande categoria de intelectuais conservadores que não gostavam de um presidente republicano, tornou mais fácil ocupar esse papel. Da perspectiva liberal, contanto que você estivesse do lado da oposição a Trump, você poderia dizer coisas conservadoras e manter a credibilidade. O fenômeno do "nunca-Trump" não deixou de ser uma força na política americana, mas não tenho certeza do que o futuro reserva nesse sentido.
Isso cria obstáculos do outro lado, onde as pessoas à sua direita dizem: você não gosta de Trump, portanto não entende, você não é um de nós?
Sim, muitas pessoas dizem isso. Mas aqueles que têm essa visão e desconsideram tudo o que tenho a dizer geralmente não são pessoas que eu respeito. Por outro lado, escrevi vários artigos dizendo que o novo governo Trump provavelmente vai errar e desperdiçar essa oportunidade, e a resposta que recebi de algumas pessoas da direita que respeito foi, basicamente: "Você não entendeu, está tentando se esquivar, mas isso é sobre política de poder, temos que esmagar nossos inimigos." Mas pessoas assim podem discutir comigo sem presumir que me vendi; elas simplesmente acham que estou muito interessado em que todos se deem bem. O que é um ponto justo; um aspecto da minha vida e trabalho é que gosto de pessoas dos dois lados — sempre gostei. É verdade, como você disse, que meu primeiro livro foi uma crítica mordaz a Harvard, mas a maioria dos meus amigos lá eram harvardianos liberais e simpáticos. Minha vida se formou lá; foi onde conheci minha esposa. Sou amigo de pessoas que votaram em Trump e de pessoas que acham que Trump é uma ameaça fascista à democracia americana. Talvez em algum momento isso se torne insustentável, mas espero que não.
Em alguns momentos de seus primeiros escritos, você adotou um tom polêmico ou programático — por exemplo, em "Grand New Party", seu livro de 2008 com Reihan Salam. Mas em suas colunas no Times, você tende a adotar uma abordagem analítica mais imparcial, oferecendo críticas desconcertantes em vez de prescrições conservadoras. Às vezes, você defende posições mais moderadas do que aquelas que parece defender. Isso é uma preferência pessoal ou uma acomodação a um público que não compartilha sua perspectiva?
Acho que são as duas coisas. Há valor em não queimar pontes toda vez que você escreve um artigo de 800 palavras. O papel que desempenho no Times não poderia ser desempenhado se eu estivesse constantemente queimando pontes; eu estaria apenas minando minha própria vocação e minhas obrigações profissionais como escritor. Mas a experiência me ensinou muito sobre as limitações da influência que um colunista político pode realmente ter na vida americana. Quando Reihan e eu escrevemos o Grande Novo Partido, fazíamos parte de um projeto que visava mudar o Partido Republicano, torná-lo mais favorável à classe trabalhadora — "conservadorismo reformista", como era chamado — com bastante gente envolvida. Então, em 2016, Trump chegou e vaporizou isso — ao mesmo tempo em que concretizava alguns aspectos do alcance da classe trabalhadora. Coisas que previmos aconteceram, mas não da maneira que previmos e certamente não por meio de nossos próprios esforços. Meu período de anti-Trumpismo máximo veio depois disso, durante a campanha de 2016 e em 2017, quando escrevi muitas colunas muito anti-Trump.
As pessoas no jornalismo político que mais me odeiam agora são provavelmente aquelas que concordaram comigo sobre Trump em 2016, mas que então assumiram como obrigação fazer do anti-Trumpismo sua teoria organizadora. Para alguém como Jonathan Last, do Bulwark, por exemplo, sou um símbolo das falhas da crítica conservadora em compreender o quão ruim Trump é. Talvez, ao ponderar a história trumpiana, ele se prove certo — não sei. Mas as intermináveis colunas anti-Trump pareciam estar caindo aos pedaços; vi o quão pouco efeito elas tiveram no mundo. No fim, encontrei um estilo mais frio e analítico, que, na minha opinião, tem sido mais útil para as pessoas que queriam se opor a Trump. O Partido Democrata dos últimos oito anos teria mais a ganhar me ouvindo do que aqueles escritores que nunca apoiaram Trump e se tornaram adeptos fervorosos de tudo o que Biden decidia fazer!
Havia um paralelo entre minhas colunas mais anti-Trump e minhas críticas mais veementes ao Papa Francisco. Duas coisas às quais eu era profundamente apegado — o conservadorismo americano e a Igreja Católica — estavam sendo tiradas de minhas mãos por figuras com as quais eu não me identificava: Trump era um reacionário populista, o Sumo Pontífice era um liberal. Foi um período em que eu estava fisicamente muito doente, morando na floresta em Connecticut, e muito irritado. Essa raiva foi expressa nessas colunas. Em ambos os casos, em certo momento, percebi que precisava aceitar que não estou no comando do Partido Republicano, não estou no comando da Igreja Católica Romana. Sou colunista de jornal e meu papel fundamental é tentar ajudar meus leitores a entender o mundo em que vivem. Continuei a criticar o Papa, mas tentei mudar o tom ao escrever sobre a era Francisco — escrever menos sobre isso, honestamente, e não me meter em brigas com teólogos católicos liberais, que eu os chamo de hereges. Não é que o que eu disse estivesse errado. Mas um colunista está principalmente tentando entender e descrever a história, em vez de mudá-la. Há momentos em que um colunista pode ser um ator político, mas não vivenciei muitos deles em minha passagem pelo Times. O papel descritivo é muito mais importante agora, porque estamos entrando em uma era muito diferente da era pós-1990. Talvez eu tenha coisas úteis a dizer sobre isso, em virtude de ter uma perspectiva mais peculiar sobre o assunto do que muitas pessoas. Mas ser útil no mundo exige ser imparcial, até certo ponto — ou, pelo menos, não ser visto como porta-voz de uma facção. O que não tenho sido, desde que o conservadorismo reformista morreu há dez anos. Minha noção de pertencer a uma facção simplesmente evaporou.
Seu projeto de "conservadorismo reformista" com Reihan Salam, do Grand New Party, argumentava que os republicanos deveriam se tornar algo como uma versão americana da democracia cristã, alcançando a classe trabalhadora por meio de programas sociais e políticas pró-família. Até certo ponto, o Partido Republicano modificou sua posição em questões como o Medicare. Mas os principais ganhos do Partido para a classe trabalhadora vieram da ascensão de Trump, uma figura à qual você, como disse, se opôs consistentemente. A vitória de Trump em 2024 foi conquistada pelos eleitores da classe trabalhadora, incluindo democratas da classe trabalhadora que ficaram em casa. Qual é a sua explicação para o sucesso espetacular dele em mudar o Partido Republicano e o cenário político nos Estados Unidos?
A explicação mais simples é que o libertarianismo mais rigoroso das elites republicanas nunca foi tão popular aqui, mesmo que os Estados Unidos sejam, e sempre serão, uma sociedade mais libertária, em algum grau, do que a Europa Ocidental.
É por isso que o conservadorismo reformista não funcionou?
Não, acho que estávamos razoavelmente cientes disso. Mas, para usar um estudo de caso diferente, é por isso que alguém como Sohrab Ahmari, que originalmente era muito mais libertário do que eu em economia, agora se moveu bem para a minha esquerda. Ele quer a verdadeira Democracia Cristã, ou alguma versão dela. Mas essa fusão em particular é, em certos aspectos, católica demais — não se encaixa, em última análise, na política protestante americana. Mas o mesmo acontece com o libertarianismo total, zerando o governo, cortando pensões de aposentadoria e assim por diante, e é por isso que o Tea Party bateu em um muro. Veremos onde as coisas vão dar, mas parte do que Elon Musk está fazendo pode bater nesse muro também. A busca por uma direita efetiva nos Estados Unidos é sempre pela zona intermediária. Você não está tentando ser Clement Attlee encontrando Konrad Adenauer. Você vai ser um pouco mais de direita do que isso. A outra realidade é que, como o Partido Republicano é libertário, ele sempre terá dificuldade em ser o partido que cria um sistema eficaz.
O conservadorismo reformista era mais ou menos contra o Obamacare?
Certo. Em retrospectiva, sempre foi irrealista imaginar que teríamos uma reforma bem-sucedida do sistema de saúde liderada pelos republicanos. O que acabamos tendo, que foi o Obamacare reformado por Trump, era provavelmente o caminho mais plausível, mas não um caminho que um especialista em políticas públicas em 2007 se sentaria e projetaria. Nossa visão era: os libertários estão certos de que o Medicare e a Previdência Social precisam ser reformados, mas queremos combinar isso com programas de ampliação de oportunidades no estilo Clinton. Que Paul Ryan feche um acordo sobre direitos e use a economia para fazer coisas na educação, na política familiar e assim por diante. Mas o que Trump intuiu foi que os eleitores, na verdade, querem os grandes programas existentes. É mais atraente para muitos eleitores de centro-direita, que não são libertários radicais, dizer que não vamos mexer no Medicare e na Previdência Social, vamos protegê-los. Se você mapear isso, Trump encontrou uma maneira diferente de navegar entre a Democracia Cristã e o libertarianismo radical do que aquela que estávamos tentando promover.
Em relação ao comércio e às tarifas, porém, veremos o que acontece. Nossa suposição era que essas características do sistema econômico global estavam simplesmente fixas, que a política comercial não voltaria ao século XIX. Não fazia sentido vê-las como alavancas que você acionaria para tornar o conservadorismo mais favorável à classe trabalhadora. Claramente, há pessoas em torno de Trump agora que pensam assim. O Trumpismo 1.0 era: estamos tornando o Partido Republicano mais favorável à classe trabalhadora prometendo proteger os direitos, aquecer a economia e cortar a imigração. O Trumpismo 2.0 é: ok, não podemos mais aquecer a economia por causa da inflação, e talvez tenhamos que cortar a Previdência Social e o Medicare — quem sabe? — mas seremos populistas renegociando todos os acordos comerciais dos Estados Unidos. O que, além disso, é interessante.
O que explica esse libertarianismo básico dos EUA e do Partido Republicano? Certamente, é um conjunto de ideias que teve circulação em diferentes formas ao longo da história americana. Quais são as forças materiais que lhe dão força?
Geografia americana? A psicologia do tipo de pessoa que veio para a América? Não é preciso entrar em determinismo genético para dizer que existe alguma distinção psicológica entre o tipo de pessoa que parte em uma longa viagem e depois continua rumo ao oeste, atravessando um continente, e aquelas que não o fazem. Se você passa algum tempo na Europa hoje, em comparação com os Estados Unidos, qualquer que seja a explicação que você escolha para isso, os americanos têm mais apetite por risco. A velha história de que todo americano é um milionário temporariamente envergonhado — isso é real, e é uma característica que se vê menos hoje em dia na Europa Ocidental. Há alguma interação dinâmica entre o assentamento e a fronteira, mesmo agora que a fronteira está fechada; os EUA são um sistema mais vasto, com migração mais fácil dentro dele.
Além disso, o protestantismo. O catolicismo americano é importante para a nossa história, mas os Estados Unidos são um país protestante que tem uma desconfiança teológica em relação à hierarquia e à autoridade, que se estende ao liberalismo burocrático. As pessoas perguntam: por que os evangélicos do Sul são tão hostis ao governo que faz coisas boas para os pobres? Por que os batistas do Sul não apoiam a ajuda externa? A realidade é que alguns deles o fazem — não é o caso de os conservadores cristãos serem todos libertários convictos — mas se você está se perguntando por que pessoas profundamente cristãs são tão inusitadamente hostis, para os padrões globais, à redistribuição de riqueza pelo governo, acho que isso remete a uma desconfiança protestante da igreja inferior em relação a todas as hierarquias e à autoridade moral hierárquica que exerce poder. Isso é muito profundo.
A Covid foi instrutiva nesse sentido. De acordo com a teoria padrão dos sentimentos morais, como em "A Mente Justa", de Jonathan Haidt, os liberais são cosmopolitas, enquanto os conservadores se concentram na pureza e no medo da contaminação externa. Isso levaria você a prever o que aconteceu no primeiro mês da pandemia, quando os conservadores estavam preocupados com "uma gripe vinda da China", e os liberais diziam: "Não sejam racistas! Só os caras do Vale do Silício se assustam com isso!" Mas então a situação mudou. Havia algumas razões contingentes para isso; Trump era presidente, é claro. Mas a forma como a situação se inverteu também revelou algo profundo sobre a América vermelha e sua hostilidade arraigada ao gerencialismo burocrático. Você pode pensar que ela teria mais medo de doenças, mas não: ela tem mais medo do poder burocrático; a coisa do "não pise em mim" é real, está culturalmente arraigada. Eu não previ a rapidez com que o antimáscara se tornaria uma tendência, mas tive amigos que disseram: os americanos não vão concordar em usar máscaras como as pessoas fazem no Japão e na Coreia do Sul. Eles estavam certos. Os americanos não são libertários no sentido da palavra do Cato Institute, mas são libertários populares nesse sentido de comportamento impulsivo, que é uma característica da vida americana da qual qualquer um que queira governar os Estados Unidos, democrata ou republicano, precisa estar ciente.
Você admitiria que poderia haver um componente econômico nisso? Em um país onde o estado de bem-estar social é precário, nunca atingindo as dimensões da Europa Ocidental, para uma parcela da população, fortemente representada no Partido Republicano, não seria do seu interesse racional cortar todas as regulamentações, turbinar a fronteira e buscar um resultado competitivo-darwiniano, porque eles poderiam, na verdade, ter uma chance maior de sobreviver nessas condições do que se metendo em mexidas marginais?
É do interesse de algumas pessoas na coalizão republicana. Não é difícil entender por que os republicanos da classe empresarial, os republicanos dos clubes de campo, estão interessados em cortar a regulamentação. Não acho que o argumento do interesse material se aplique tão bem aos eleitores de classe média ou média-baixa, porque a maioria das pessoas nessa posição não será John Galts, construindo grandes negócios em uma sociedade com regulamentação leve.
The car-dealership owner, yes. But the reason Republicans win elections is because they win the salesmen at car dealerships.
But they might benefit from lower taxes, selling more cars?
That’s true of America in the Reagan era, when there was inflation-linked bracket creep and higher marginal tax rates. But the us has lowered marginal tax rates to a point where a lot of Republican voters don’t benefit that much from the kind of tax cuts that the first Trump Administration passed. This was part of our argument within the party—that to win those voters, you can’t just do tax cuts, because they have a material stake in the welfare state. The left-wing argument about racial polarization—that middle-class and working-class white people don’t support welfare-state redistribution because it’s seen as going to African-Americans, or to immigrants, and away from white people—makes more sense than the frontier spirit per se as a reason why there is no socialism or social democracy in America. Immigration to the us also undermines welfare-state politics, to the extent that each new generation of immigrants is seen as suspicious or not worthy of material support; not seen as neighbours, in the way that Scandinavians traditionally see welfare beneficiaries. That argument would also help to explain why the peak of social democracy in America—from the New Deal through to the beginning of the Great Society—corresponded with an era of low immigration, when American society was seen as primarily white, with a small African-American minority.
But I would view this mostly as a supplement to the cultural argument I was making. If you look at places where there aren’t a lot of minorities, and drill down to the granular, you still find this suspicion of the welfare state. The classic example is white Appalachia. Alec MacGillis, a Times colleague, wrote about this during the Tea Party debates, showing how working-class whites in Appalachia can be very suspicious of poor whites for being on the draw, for being ‘addicted to welfare’. And these are people of the same race, the same religion, neighbours and so on. You see that elsewhere, too. Even at the peak of New Deal America, Social Security was sold as pay-as-you-go—paying in and getting something back. Even at moments in history when Americans were willing to back the welfare state, there was still the idea that you’re not getting something for nothing.
But why are Protestants in the us so sceptical of the state, when Protestants in northern Europe are not?
Because, to generalize wildly, Protestants in northern Europe belong to the established religion. Scandinavian Lutheranism was the religion of the state. In America, state-integrated Protestants, like the Episcopalians, were the elites, so they weren’t sceptical of state power. The scepticism comes from Methodists and Baptists, the dissenting, nonconformist Protestants. Now, you could say that in England, nonconformists often supported the welfare state; I don’t think it’s a necessary connection, but if you’re looking for the difference between Scandinavian Lutheran attitudes to the welfare state and Southern Baptists’ attitudes, it is partially that sense of nonconformism yielding suspicion of state power.
There’s an American tradition of writers combining, in different proportions, political analysis and cultural criticism, who come to exercise significant public influence—from Mencken and Lippmann to more recent gadfly figures like Tom Wolfe or William Buckley, or solemnizers like George Will, whom you’ve mentioned. Are there any forebears or role models for you in this company?
Fifteen years ago, I would probably have said, ‘Yes, hopefully’; much less so today. I’ve talked already about the limits of a newspaper columnist’s influence in this era. It’s especially hard for a conservative columnist for the New York Times to exercise anything like the kind of influence that, say, Lippmann or Buckley enjoyed, because each of them was writing directly for an audience who could put their ideas into effect. Unless I actually succeed in converting the readership of the Times to my idiosyncratic conservative, dynamist and Catholic views, I will always be writing for people who will never fully agree with me, while also being somewhat of an outsider to conservative politics as a whole. Generally, America is more resistant than European countries to people moving back and forth between journalism and politics. A figure like Boris Johnson is an imaginable prime minister in a way that William Buckley was not an imaginable president. It’s true that jd Vance was a journalist, but the brevity of his period as a pundit—and the sharpness of his pivot to a more Obama-like role, as a figure who narrates his own life and then turns it into a political story—seems like the exception that proves the rule. Someone who has a tv platform, like Pat Buchanan, can play a role in American politics; if Joe Rogan decided to run for president, it would get some attention. But in terms of shaping power politics directly, there are real limits to what journalists can do. So yes, I see myself in that tradition to some degree, but with a strong sense that it’s almost impossible for someone writing about politics to exert that sort of influence in this phase of our history.
What have been the major intellectual influences on you? One was clearly the Franco-American thinker Jacques Barzun, whom we’ll come to in a moment. Aside from him, who has made the biggest impression on you in the different stages of your career?
To the extent that my evolution into conservatism was distinctive, it was due to the fact that I came of age in a family who were basically liberal Democrats but became very religious and, by virtue of that, got interested in religious arguments, and so subscribed to First Things while still voting for Bill Clinton, which was not the usual way. So, I was a religious conservative before becoming any other kind. Unquestionably the most influential politically connected figure in my teenage intellectual development was Richard John Neuhaus, the editor of First Things, though I haven’t returned to his work in a long time. Predictable names like C. S. Lewis and G. K. Chesterton loomed large, but they weren’t writing about American politics and they were fifty years back. I didn’t read Jacques Maritain then, but I read writers who saw their neoconservatism as in continuity with his thinking. He was not a neoconservative, but they adapted certain Maritainian views—on church-state relations, American democracy, how Catholicism should relate to liberalism—to a neoconservative politics.
Is that broadly the First Things project?
Yes. That was a primary influence on me—but supplemented, because I had not experienced the seventies and eighties, when a certain conservative synthesis had settled in; I was always a little to the left of that. I retained more of the critique of capitalism, or globalization, than Neuhaus did. He started out as a radical, but became a real neoconservative. Still a defender of some kind of welfare state, but not anti-capitalist. In my early twenties, the chief influence was Neuhaus, plus a dose of Christopher Lasch; that’s probably how I would put it. Lasch’s later writings gave me a way of synthesizing my neoconservative scepticism of liberal elites with a suspicion of neoliberal capitalist politics, which he maintained to the end, even as he moved right—though never as far right as Neuhaus. So, Neuhaus, Lasch, even Chesterton—also a critic of capitalism, in his own way—were more important influences on me than anyone inside the movement-conservative world, whether Frank Meyer or Willmoore Kendall. I read those people later, but they were not formative influences.
The other distinctive point was that I wanted to be a novelist, not a political journalist. I majored in history and literature. I took political philosophy classes later, which was important for me. I studied with Harvey Mansfield and read his translation of Tocqueville in a seminar with him. I read Strauss and found it helpful. Without being a Straussian, I think that framework is a useful analysis of the ancients and the moderns. But even as I began a career as a journalist, the writers who were most important to me were people like Graham Greene, Evelyn Waugh and Anthony Powell; in American terms, Joan Didion and Tom Wolfe; not conventional liberals, but people who were writing critical cultural commentary for a liberal audience. Tyler Cowen once said that after reading my stuff, he thought I was interested in using narrative, in storytelling.
I don’t know if that’s true.
I don’t think it’s true of me exactly, but he was picking up on something. I don’t tell stories, I write arguments; but I may be shaped more than some political commentators by the idea of what a writer does as a story-teller. In the twentieth century, the most important Christian writers in English were novelists: Tolkien, C. S. Lewis—The Chronicles of Narnia, and then, for the deep cuts, The Space Trilogy, particularly That Hideous Strength, which is so like what we’re doing now—even Dorothy Sayers; they definitely had an influence.
Then later, Fukuyama’s End of History. I read it in the late 1990s, well after it came out, and just thought: this is right—this describes the world. In a way, my Decadent Society (2020) is a sequel to The End of History, asking what the end of history looks like twenty years on. Even if we’re maybe exiting the Fukuyamian dispensation, I’d still maintain his book was a profound account of what the world looked like after the Cold War. Peter Thiel’s essay, ‘The End of the Future’, was very influential for my thinking about decadence. I had been enough of a religious conservative to take for granted that, whatever else was happening, growth and technological change were accelerating. Without endorsing the entire Thielian world-view—God knows, it’s hard to parse what exactly that is; I’m not a Girardian, or anything like that—but some of his writing about the limits of Silicon Valley in the early 2010s was important for me in raising questions about that growth narrative.
The Decadent Society, your panoramic critique of the condition of America, draws its master concept from Jacques Barzun’s From Dawn to Decadence (2000), which traced the arc of Western culture from the creativity of the Renaissance to the catastrophe of the First World War, which left the public mind maimed and disoriented, producing the exhausted stasis of a consumerist ‘demotic society’. You take Barzun’s idea that decadence need not mean a downward fall—it can instead involve a levelling off into futile repetition—but give it a far more materialist twist, freeing it from his Kulturkritiker aversion to mass industrial society. In your account, this yields a compelling picture of economic stagnation—the long downturn, as anatomized by Robert Gordon or Tyler Cowen—combining with demographic decline, institutional sclerosis and cultural-intellectual mediocrity to produce a society that is ‘comfortably numb’. Two questions about Barzun’s influence. First, when did you encounter his work—as a student at Harvard? Second, on your differences with Barzun: he was ninety-three when he published his vast tome on decadence, you were forty-one when The Decadent Society appeared, and you took a much less hostile view of popular culture. Did that contrast matter to you, or not much?
I probably encountered Barzun’s argument when it came out and returned to it, as I returned to Fukuyama, in gathering my own thoughts on the subject in the early 2010s. In terms of contrasts, I’m just doing a very different kind of work. He was a prodigious scholar of Western culture and I’m a newspaper columnist, which meant I wouldn’t be doing his kind of sweeping cultural analysis. I tried to broaden some of the concepts that he applied primarily to culture, to encompass politics, technology, sociology and other developments—so a broadening of his basic idea, but on a shallower scale than he attempted. On popular culture, I’m not actually sure what I think of my own views on it. There is a kind of small-c conservative lament for the decline of high culture that underestimates some of the values of popular culture and I do somewhat self-consciously try to avoid being the kind of stuffy reactionary who insists that everything has been downhill since The Rite of Spring. Not that that’s what Barzun thought—
Well, he does talk about cultural stasis.
Yes, he has a more characteristically European view of the American contribution to Western culture.
Which would be negative?
It would be negative, yes. I’d concede the general point that there is a certain kind of decline going on, from the masterworks of Victorian fiction or Italian opera, to the great American novel and the high tide of Hollywood in the 1970s; some falling-off in artistic sophistication. But I do think the best of American popular culture strikes a certain balance appropriate to a democratic age, between making art that is serious and making art that is for the masses. Because of that, I would place the date of full exhaustion somewhat later than Barzun does. It might also be a symptom of a decadent age that even critics of decadence still want to insist that some forms of art in their own time are better than they actually are. Do I overrate The Sopranos because I myself am decadent? Maybe.
Surprisingly, in your first Times column after the 2024 election, you suggested that history could now be moving into a new, post-decadent era—Trump’s second win signalling that thirty years of convergent neoconservative-neoliberal government was truly over, along with social-liberal hegemony and us expansion abroad. The argument that a new era is beginning is plausible enough. But if tariffs are not a serious answer to economic slowdown, if Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency is rendering institutions more sclerotic, and if Trump himself is cultural nullity writ large, then, according to the benchmarks of The Decadent Society, doesn’t Trump’s return represent a deepening of decadence, rather than an escape from it?
There are different ways that decadence can end. One is acceleration, renaissance, dynamism. The other is that decline becomes collapse. The point of the decadence thesis is to describe a society that is neither in catastrophic crisis, nor accelerating towards a radically different future. When I wrote the book in the late 2010s, I was confident that the thesis applied to a lot of different aspects of American life, including the first Trump presidency—it was a rebellion against decadence that participated in decadence itself. Since then, some things have changed. First, there is a more radical technological breakthrough on the horizon than there has been since the internet, and arguably since the mid-twentieth century, depending on what happens with ai. If you look at technology alone, America is less decadent in 2025 than it appeared to be in 2018. We’re closer to self-driving cars, to big medical advances. In the book, I made only a passing reference to ai. Like everyone else, I don’t have a strong sense of where it’s going. But even the ai we have right now is enough to be a turning point in a lot of different ways. So, technologically, it feels like we’re exiting decadence.
Sociologically, in large parts of the world, decadence is deepening into collapse. This is the demographic question that I’m obsessed with, but I think correct to be so. When I was writing The Decadent Society, fertility rates had settled somewhere between 1.2 and 1.8 births. From my perspective, that’s a zone of sustainable stagnation—a society that gradually slows down, gets older, gets more sclerotic, but keeps going. But in the last five to ten years, there’s been a step change, for reasons that may be partly to do with Covid, but also to do with smartphones. The range is now 0.7 to 1.4 births. South Korea is the prime example, but you see it in Latin America, in Argentina and Chile. That’s a range that is heading towards collapse—nations become unsustainable in that environment. So there again, the decadence thesis no longer applies.
You’ve written a lot about falling birthrates, favouring a cultural explanation. But isn’t the political economy of the developed world a more immediate cause, pushing couples to work full-time while failing to offer them affordable childcare?
You can frame it in material terms. Modernity grants life without children more extensive pleasures than existed for most people in the past—you can take a vacation, you can summon up any movie ever made on Netflix. There’s much more that you can do instead of having kids. It also removes the strong economic incentive, the prospect that kids are going to work on your farm or run your business. There are more economic costs to having kids and fewer economic benefits. That’s not a complete explanation, but it’s a strong one. The question then is what pushes against this tendency? The left tends to say, this is a material problem and so it requires material solutions. I agree with some of that argument. But the evidence is that those policies cost a great deal. You can’t spend $2,000 per child and expect to get anywhere.
Some conservatives would say that the core issue in modern life is intentionality. There’s an interesting divide here. On the libertarian pro-natalist right, there are some who argue that people do think intentionally about having kids but they leave it too late; what’s needed is a technological solution, pushing the menopause out. For me, it’s a cultural question: you need norms and scripts that encourage people to think intentionally about having kids. Even in a world where everyone got fifteen more childbearing years, you would still need to create stronger cultural structures that encourage family formation. How you do that is, of course, an impossible question. Then there’s the reality that, as I mentioned, something has changed in the last five or ten years that is not about political economy. The Scandinavians were doing okay, and now they’re not. East Asia was doing badly, now they’re doing terribly. Maybe it’s something else, but it seems likely to be a question of technological shock. But if people are not having kids because digital life makes it impossible for the sexes to get together, then redistribution—giving them all an extra $5,000—is not going to help. And this is where I really don’t have definitive answers. But it is killing us, literally, in ways that I wouldn’t have anticipated even ten years ago. So, with technology we’re exiting decadence upwards, towards dramatic change. With demographics we’re exiting it downwards, towards collapse.
And politics?
With politics, I’m just not sure. Trump and the populist revolts have succeeded in defeating attempts to restore the status quo. With Biden’s win in 2020, Trump could appear as a spasm of resistance that had failed, and we were going back to the post-Cold War normal. We’re not in post-Cold War normal any more, and I don’t think it’s coming back. We’re in a weirder zone; and, once the left figures out what it’s doing, any left-wing politics is also going to be weirder than resistance liberalism. During Trump’s first term, the internet still acted as a tool of political consolidation and control. A few social media companies policed speech; there were some wacky outsiders, figures like Bronze Age Pervert, but they were marginal to the culture. In the last four or five years, it feels like that has broken down and the media landscape is now totally fragmented, in ways that no one can police. It’s, like, Hey, antisemitism! There’s antisemitism on Joe Rogan; you know, Luigi Mangione has a lot of fans. There is no mechanism to police that sort of weirdness. So, in that sense, politics is more destabilized than it was even in Trump’s first term.
Does that mean that a new form of politics has emerged—a post-decadent politics? If doge is tremendously successful, and Republicans sweep the 2026 midterms and consolidate a new majority, then maybe you could say that. I would not bet on it at the moment. It’s unclear what the effects of tariffs, doge, deregulation and everything else will be. But what I would bet on is more actual political instability, as opposed to fake political instability, over the next ten or twenty years. So, at the very least, decadence is being shaken. At the same time, American culture still feels decadent to me—movies, tv, everything. The internet is a tool of decadence, it traps everyone in an eternal present and kills off certain options for creativity. I don’t see anyone finding a way out of that yet. So, if you asked, what’s the most persistently decadent part of American life right now, I’d say pop culture and entertainment.
A few responses to that. First, why should ai not be as much a tool of decadence as the internet? As you know, it just takes what’s already there, in the sense of being trained on an extant digital corpus. It’s literally decadent in the sense that you only get what you already have. And in the way that the internet didn’t really grow the economy as much as everyone thought, why won’t we see the same—with the main difference being that we’ll never talk to a real person at a call centre again? Second, and more broadly, one thing you mention in The Decadent Society as a possible exit from decadence is space exploration. But what could be more tellingly decadent than a latter-day resuscitation of this burned-out dream of the American mid-century? Isn’t reviving that frontier a kind of ‘greatest-hits’ retrospective enterprise? Surely the most striking example of a nation’s emergence from decline in recent decades is that of China, which did so by incorporating elements quite foreign to its previous traditions: Soviet state socialism and Western-style capitalism. If American society were to emerge from decadence, why should we think it would do so by harking back to its own national traditions, rather than something completely different?
To work backwards: generally, escapes from decadence are remixes, they’re neither whole breaks nor whole returns. So I would argue that China’s emergence from decadence was a mixture of adopted Western elements from outside, state socialism and Western capitalism, with a revival of a particular version of Confucianism—capitalism with Confucian characteristics. That has hit some limits, but it did produce something distinctive for a while. The Renaissance itself was a merger of recovered Greco-Roman culture with new scientific advances; it looked back and it looked forward. With the space programme: if all we do is go back to the moon and potter around there—and maybe that’s all we can do—then that would seem decadent; just re-playing the greatest hits. A Mars colony doesn’t seem decadent, but the question is: can you get one?
Something similar applies to economic policy. I wrote a column at the time of Trump’s second inauguration, about Musk and Vance: the populist, protectionist Vancean impulse and the vaulting Muskian impulse of technological ambition. I argued that if conservatism was going to be successful, it would be through some new mixture of the two that would be different from the fusion of the 1950s. Now, there’s a version of that which could be unsuccessful; where tariffs slow growth and kill the stock market; where thousands of government employees get fired, everyone hates that and it fails. But if you’re looking for an escape from decadence, you’re looking for remixes, taking things from the past and marrying them to new ideas. The same would be true on the left; you would expect a new and successful left-wing politics to draw from the New Deal and Civil Rights traditions, but also import some entirely new model of politics: to be non-decadent, it would have to do something new.
On ai, I think it depends on how far the technology actually goes. If it stops where it is now, then I agree, it seems likely to resolve itself back into decadence, into internet slop—ai scriptwriters for terrible Netflix shows, no one ever speaking to a real person again, and so on. If it goes further, though, even if it has bad social effects—even if it destroys us all—it wouldn’t be decadent. If we’ve invented a robot mind capable of curing cancer, I don’t think that’s decadent any more. But there’s a related point, which gets us back to demographics. ai could deepen decadence to a point where it just yields collapse: a world of ai porn, ai girlfriends, ai entertainment, ai old-age retirement homes, and so on. That’s a world that gets everybody to South Korea really fast. It’s not a terrain of stagnation; it’s somewhere worse. Even a limited form of ai probably gets us somewhere worse than the decadence I was describing in 2018.
How does the rise of charismatic Christianity fit into this? What are its political effects? And why, in this secular age, is this extreme form of religious expression, which seems at once anti-modern and almost postmodern, so successful—in the Americas, and in Africa, as well?
You could say that it is well adapted to the landscape of religious competition, in a way that more hierarchical forms are not. It’s non-denominational, it’s start-up-oriented, it’s entrepreneurial and merges well with a gospel of upward mobility, an emphasis on getting your life in order—quit drinking, get a job, these kind of things. In that sense, it’s more nimble and individual-oriented than other forms of Christian faith. And then, in the marketplace it supplies a real proof of concept in a secular world, in that you are clearly more likely to have a religious experience in a Pentecostalist church than in most Protestant and Catholic ones. And that’s important, not just as marketing, but as a counterpoint to disenchantment. The world may seem secular and disenchanted, but you can go to church on Sunday and speak in tongues. You’re going to get a word from the Lord, the Holy Spirit will enter into you. That’s a powerful thing to offer. As a kid, I saw it happen to my own parents. That’s not the only reason that I’m religious today, but I am, in my own way, a testament to the effectiveness of charismatic Christianity as a counter to a disenchanted world.
In terms of its political effects: the problem with supernaturalism is that, as an epistemology, it lends itself to a general openness to weird beliefs in every shape and form. It’s anti-intellectual. Once you’ve accepted that the pillars of secular knowledge have various holes in them, you see the holes everywhere. This isn’t just true for religion. People who have one bad experience with the medical consensus become open to every weird idea about medicine—this is rfk Jr, all the way. Once you have accepted that the supernatural can intrude on your life, you become more open to every kind of strange theory. I think it is correct to think that the supernatural can intrude, but it does also create epistemological dangers for thinking about politics. Under decadent conditions, fewer people are going to believe in the devil; under non-decadent, revivalist conditions, more people will believe in him. But with that come big risks that don’t obtain at the end of history. The end of history is a tamer and safer world.
How would you characterize the divergent ideological families of the right and far-right clustered around the second Trump Administration? How stable is this coalition?
During Trump’s first term, there was a lot of intellectual ferment on the right, partly because there was so little content at the top that everyone could project their own theories—Oren Cass and Julius Krein versus, say, Sohrab Ahmari, Adrian Vermeule and Patrick Deneen. The second Trump Administration has more energy at the top that people want to associate with. But an unsuccessful government will quickly alienate many of the groupings that currently support it. In addition to the older tendencies, you could distinguish three new factions. First, there’s a kind of neo-neoconservatism which is really just anti-woke liberalism that’s moved right. Let’s call that the Free Press constituency. Then there is the alienated-populist masculinity constituency, the Joe Rogan constituency. The Free Press grouping is more likely to become alienated and swing politically away from maga. The Roganites are more likely to become alienated and depoliticized, or else could drift towards conspiratorialism. You see some of this already, with Rogan entertaining the podcaster Darryl Cooper, who’s into quasi-antisemitic conspiracy.
Then there is a technocratic faction, in parallel to the Ezra Klein–Derek Thompson abundance-agenda liberals, coming out of Silicon Valley. These people expected Musk to be their champion, to some degree, and are currently perturbed and disappointed by what doge is doing. They are state-capacity libertarians, very invested in the idea that the government should spend less on old-age pensions and more on scientific research. I think they are torn right now between justifying some of the things the Trump Administration is doing, and feeling that it’s all just about Elon’s obsession with headcounts in Federal agencies, which is not what they’re all about. Of the older groups, religious conservatism, which I suppose is where I belong, is adrift right now. There is a cultural interest in religion, which may be a post-decadence indicator. But religious-conservative politics doesn’t know what it’s doing right now. It’s won some victories and is playing defence around them, on abortion, for example. But it has jettisoned some of its compassionate conservatism and is subordinate to populist impulses. Religious conservatism has a lot of voters behind it, but is not a big player in the debates of the Trump Administration.
Who in your view should be regarded as the Trump Administration’s key intellectuals? Would Vance, not just as office holder but as writer and thinker, be a significant figure?
How much influence Vance will have remains to be seen. The people with the most influence over policy right now are Trump himself, Stephen Miller and perhaps the Vice President. Of course, we’re only a couple of months in, but overall I don’t think this is an administration that’s trying to translate some broader intellectual programme into policy. The things it’s doing bear some resemblance to some of the ideas that were argued about by populist and nationalist intellectuals, by the people writing for American Affairs, by Yoram Hazony. Those views have had some influence, but to understand the fundamental formula, it’s better just to think of it, so far, as an expression of Trump himself. There’s a particular vision of government reform, embraced by Musk, that dovetails with older libertarian small-government ideas. But it’s a weird fusion of that with Musk’s Silicon Valley ‘fire ten people and then rehire them’ model. I don’t think you would have predicted the doge experiment by reading the journals of the right from 2016 or 2020. You might have predicted it by combining a little Grover Norquist with what Musk did at Twitter.
There was a lot of intellectual work done on the right around the idea of how to capture and reshape institutions. If there was a through line of new-right projects and arguments, prior to Trump’s return to power, it was the idea that the gop should not just be a limited-government party—it was interested in using the tools of government to advance its own ideas. A lot of what is being done now is just a return to government cutting, but with a stronger dose of the friend-enemy distinction. It’s cutting plus trying to figure out how to purge your ideological enemies from the government. But that combination is ultimately much narrower than what my reading of the new right would have been. The ambitious thing would have been to use the Department of Education to further a conservative view of what study could be. Dismantling the Department of Education is just what Reagan wanted to do: it’s typical fiscal conservatism. The fact that we’re back to ‘if we cut this everything will work out well’ is a disappointment. Remaking the Federal bureaucracy is not what’s happening, as far as I can tell, with the National Institutes of Health cuts or Centers for Disease Control reorganizations. It’s just saying, ‘How many people can we fire without having the institution stop working?’ None of that seems like the culmination of a grand intellectual new-right project. It’s classic conservative government-cutting married to trying to eliminate wokeness and dei.
To the extent that there is a bold new set of ideas, it is arguably the policies on trade. There, you do have a group of dissident intellectuals, from Oren Cass to Robert Lighthizer and Peter Navarro, and some figures on the left, who are having their moment. The President does seem to want to reorder the global trade landscape, but even there, is it actually their ideas at work? Or is it just that Trump himself has believed that trade deficits are bad since the 1980s and now he’s in power, he’s going to do something about it? There are ways in which, even there, the intellectual argument feels stapled on to Trump’s own impulses and desires. There are these factions, there are the populists, there is the tech right; it’s hard to say where religious conservatism is going; it’s hard to say exactly where libertarianism is going. Finally, I’d just say again that we’re only two months into the Administration, so all analysis will probably look a bit foolish a year from now.
Your brief in the New York Times is essentially domestic politics and culture, but as current crises on campus show, historically not for the first time, wars abroad can generate turbulence at home. Trump and Vance have launched an unprecedented attack on the liberal-imperial ideology that has long served to hallow American overseas power, replacing its pastoral-custodial pieties with national-imperial swagger. Should one of these discursive brands of empire be regarded as preferable to the other? There have been quite a few critics of us foreign policy, many of them more conservative than radical in outlook—Barry Posen, John Mearsheimer, Christopher Caldwell, David Hendrickson, Benjamin Schwarz, Christopher Layne—with little time for either. How far do you differ from them?
I think of myself as a custodial realist rather than a custodial liberal, if that makes sense. The writers you’ve named have pungent critiques of the failings of American empire. My take on this is similar to my view on decadence: a system can be non-ideal, but you don’t just want to unwind it; you need to be careful while you’re changing it. For all its flaws, the American empire is a force for a certain kind of stability in the world. Trump is right that there are a lot of free-riders in the system but we’ve also benefited from it a lot; we’re not doing badly. I’m sceptical of attempts, left and right, to leave the empire behind. I’m attracted to the version of Trumpian foreign policy that wants to rebalance American commitments rather than abandon them. I’m sympathetic to the view that Europe needs a stronger security architecture while the us operates more in the Pacific, at least on a ten- to fifteen-year horizon, because the big challenge is managing China. But within Trumpism there is also something more like a McGovernite ‘Come Home America’ plus a dose of Monroe Doctrine imperialism—it wants to withdraw and simultaneously consolidate American power. Greenland and the Panama Canal are synecdoches for that impulse. Let the Europeans and East Asians take care of themselves, but, by God, we’re going to control our own hemisphere. I have some long-term sympathy for that vision of a greater North America, but I don’t think tariffing Canada and bullying Denmark is a good foreign-policy strategy. I would prefer the realist mode to the Jacksonian mode. But we may be getting full Jacksonianism.
How would you weigh the wars in Ukraine and Gaza, with reference to a decadent empire’s ability or inability to maintain a Pax Americana?
One could imagine a synthesis of Biden’s Ukraine policy and Trump’s impulses that would be correct. The us overextended itself in making guarantees to Ukraine that it was never going to be able to fulfil; like our failures in Afghanistan, that was an example of imperial overreach. Once Russia invaded Ukraine, it made sense to support the Ukrainians. The failure of the Biden Administration was not recognizing the moment to cut a deal—which is hard to do. But there was a window, when Ukraine had regained a certain amount of territory, when the Administration should have said, ok, this is the frontier of our empire. Ukraine is never going to be in nato, it’s not going to get all its territory back; but they could have cut a deal to end the war in a way that would have allowed Ukraine to retain territorial integrity. There are people in the Trump Administration who want to do that. But there is also an impulse to just wash our hands of this. The outcome will depend on which impulse prevails. But Russia is in a better position now than it was two years ago. A Harris Administration would have ended up pushing in a similar direction. But Trump’s wash-his-hands impulse might leave Ukraine in a more unsustainable position than it should be.
And Gaza?
There, too, there’s a version of the Trump position which says we’re broadly on the Israeli side, but we’re not letting them just set the agenda, that could be correct. But the absence of a solution for Gaza is an intractable problem. Biden was in an impossible position, caught between his own base and the Republican Party, and his own senility and inability to be an effective actor on the world stage, which made America basically a bystander. Notwithstanding rising sympathy for the Palestinians, America’s going to retain a basic pro-Israel alignment for the next twenty years, but within that it needs to exert more influence over Israel than Biden was able to do. But toward what endgame, I don’t know. If I knew that, I’d be Jared Kushner.
To describe Washington’s role in the war in Gaza as that of ‘bystander’—given that the us has supplied Israel with tens of thousands of massive bombs and the aircraft dropping them to obliterate the Strip, together with the requisite diplomatic coverage operation at the un and elsewhere—isn’t that a euphemism of the kind you otherwise tend to avoid?
‘Bystander’ in the sense of the Biden Administration not exerting any clear strategic influence over Israel, over the conduct of the war or over the larger regional drama. That largely reflected Biden himself being effectively checked out as a major actor in his own presidency. The us remains a patron of Israel and remains directly involved in the conflict. By virtue of being a hegemonic power, the us is not a bystander in any absolute sense.
So, you’d say that under Biden, the unique and extremely supportive relationship of the us to Israel went on autopilot?
Yes. It would have been very surprising if the fundamental us alliance with Israel had been adjusted negatively after the attacks of October 7th, given America’s longstanding conflict with Iran. What was notable was that the us seemed to exert no tangible influence on the war. It seemed to have no concrete sense of what it wanted strategically from Israel, or as an outcome to the conflict.
But under another leader—a President Bernie Sanders, for example—do you think the relationship would have been adjusted as the casualty toll mounted in Gaza?
A President Bernie Sanders might have exerted a stronger restraining influence to limit the scope of the war. I don’t think he would have radically changed America’s overall relationship with Israel, though this is obviously highly speculative. But just as Trump struggled in his first term, I suspect there would be more foreign-policy constraints on a President Sanders than some of his supporters imagine. I don’t think that as president he would have ended up taking an especially radical line. It would be more like one standard deviation to the left, whatever that means, of Biden’s policy. I’ll be honest, I haven’t studied all of Bernie’s pronouncements in the last six months, but he seems to me to be somewhere between the overtly pro-Palestinian campus left and the hawkishly Zionist Democratic establishment.
In 2020, you wrote that the protest wave of that summer represented a second defeat of Bernie Sanders’s attempt to return the left to its pre-seventies emphasis on class struggle, an effort that was vanquished by a more recent race-and-gender approach. At this point, do you see the movement behind Sanders as a flash-in-the-pan, or as something that will re-emerge in American politics in one way or another?
I think it will re-emerge, but material conditions are not propitious at the moment. There was a window for aggressive economic-policy ambition in the mid-2010s, created in part by an environment of persistently low interest rates, which helped give rise to both Sanders and Trumpian populism. The dilemma for the economic left now is that under inflationary conditions, where do you find the money? That’s part of the appeal of mmt: you don’t need to find the money, you can just spend it. But mmt always had a proviso, that you can spend the money until you get inflation. One of my basic beliefs about all economic-policy visions is that they can be directionally correct without being comprehensively correct. So, mmt as a descriptor of the world from 2011 to 2020 was directionally correct: there really was a lot more fiscal space than either the Tea Party right or the Obama Administration thought. But then the situation changed, and mmt doesn’t have a lot to say about an inflationary environment.
Here we can perhaps see the resilience of decadence. Just as I don’t know how Musk can actually cut Medicare and Social Security to make his libertarian transformational change, I don’t see how the Democratic Party can get Americans to sign on to the tax increases necessary for a Sanders programme. The Sanders vision worked in an environment of fiscal space, and it could make a big comeback when those conditions return—but they’re not returning yet. With this caveat: if there’s a big ai-driven step change in growth, that could create such a space, because it will create new inequalities, new sources of wealth and therefore, maybe, new demands for redistribution. But you need something like that. Sanders can’t just walk out there tomorrow and win the presidency on Medicare for All, because there is not a strong enough constituency. For that to change, you need either borrowing space, new forms of wealth that are amenable to taxation or a 2008-level economic crisis. Absent that, I don’t think you can conjure that constituency into being through the force of eloquence alone.
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