Will Liberal Democracy Survive? - with Jonah Goldberg

0:00There's never been more coverage of Israel and the Jewish world, and there's never been less of it worth trusting. That's why ARK Media exists, and our subscribers are what make this possible. Join us at arkmedia.org. And to our subscribers, thank you.

0:21You are listening to an ARK Media podcast. But I just think it's worth pointing out to people, because if people get this wrong all the time, The Protocols of Elders of Zion, which is the foundational anti-Semitic conspiracy theory, and it's a total BS conspiracy theory, one of the most successful ops the Russians have ever done. It wasn't anti-Semitic to get people to hate Jews. It was anti-Semitic to get people to hate liberalism. It was saying that if you embrace liberalism and democracy, you're going to let the Jews control everything. You're going to let them into your life, whatever. It was using existing anti-Semitism to discredit liberalism rather than the other way around.

1:14It's 1 p.m. on Tuesday, August 18th here in New York City. It's 8 p.m. on Tuesday, August 18th in Israel. Before today's episode, a quick housekeeping note. on Thursday, October 22nd, just five days ahead of the Israeli elections, Call Me Back will hold a live taping at the Stryker Center in New York City, where I'll sit down with Dan Shapiro, Dahlia Scheinlin, and Brett Stevens to discuss what's at stake in Israel's 2026 election and what its results will mean for the U.S.-Israel relationship. Tickets have just gone on sale, so if you want to join us, please follow the link in the episode description.

1:50Now, on to today's episode. About 250 years ago, around the time of the American and French revolutions, a political idea began gathering extraordinary force in the Western world. That is classical liberalism, drawing on a range of thinkers that shaped and influenced and in some cases inspired each or both of these revolutions. It elevated individual liberty, equality before the law, private property, and limits on state government power. For the Jews of Europe, this transformation was particularly consequential. The spread of liberal ideas helped, not entirely, but helped dismantle centuries of legal restrictions and opened the way to Jewish emancipation, to citizenship, political equality, and participation in societies that had long kept Jews apart.

2:39For a time, liberalism, classical liberalism, appeared to be ascendant. But in the turmoil that followed World War I, it faced powerful challenges from both directions, revolutionary socialism and communism on the left and fascism on the right. Today, some argue liberalism is under pressure again, a lot of pressure. So are we watching history repeat itself, or at least, as the old saying goes, rhyme? And what does that actually mean for the Jews, whose modern emancipation was so closely bound up with the liberal order? It is easy and often justified to focus on the ideological movements that threaten our freedom and safety.

3:17We will do that in this episode, but it is also worth asking a more difficult question. Why has classical liberalism become vulnerable in the first place? If it has, what are the structural weaknesses which have been exploited by illiberal forces? To explore these questions, I'm joined by one of the most prominent defenders and students of classical liberalism, Jonah Goldberg of The Dispatch, an author of a book that delves into a lot of these issues, Suicide of the West, which I refer to a lot on this podcast. We'll ask Jonah why Western society has lost confidence in classical liberalism, whether it can recover, and what its possible decline could mean for the Jews.

3:56My conversation with Jonah right after this short message.

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5:18Jonah Goldberg, welcome back to the podcast. Hey, Dan. It's always an honor and a pleasure to be here. This is the first podcast I think I've recorded since that. I don't know if you saw that New York magazine, that ridiculous New York magazine cover story that just came out about the food scene in New York City and certain trends from the Middle East that have really become outsized in the New York City food scene. And none of these origins of these trends have anything to do with Israel. It's all about Arab and South Asian. I haven't read it, but I've seen the chatter about it. Oh, yeah. It's amazing.

5:49I mean, one of the more amazing lines in it is it refers to Israel straightforwardly as the landmass currently called Israel. Yeah. Yeah. Anyways, we could do a whole episode on that. We won't now. I want to talk to you about a much simpler topic, which is the future of Western civilization and what it looks like if classical liberalism is under threat. Jonah, this is a topic you talk a lot about on your podcast, on The Remnant. You've written about it in your books, especially Suicide of the West, which we will link to in the show notes as well. So before we talk about the decline of classical liberalism, help us understand the baseline.

6:24What is it? What is this idea? What is this institution as you understand it? So I'll give you the conventional, generally agreed upon version of what liberalism is. We don't have to call it classical liberalism. We can just call it liberalism, right? The liberalism of liberal democratic capitalism. When we talk about liberal countries, right? The typical story is it emerges in the late 18th, early 19th century. The basic idea of liberalism is that the fundamental political unit of society is the individual, and the individual has rights that the state cannot intrude in certain ways on the individual.

6:57When you look at the Bill of Rights, right, it's a good way to think about it. The Bill of Rights is all framed in the negative. The government shall not pass this law or that law that infringes on your right to free speech, freedom of religion. the whole idea of inalienable rights is that they're prior to government and that our rights come from God, not from government. That said, there's a lot of scholarship that says there's a different version of liberalism that says it's about property rights. It's about constitutionalism. It's about the rule of law. Where it all comes from is this basic idea that the divine right of kings and the idea that nobility is heritable is going by the wayside.

7:33And to that, we do owe John Locke a great deal. And the thing is that Locke was hugely influential for his metaphysics or his epistemology, right? Basically, his idea that we're all born equal and that the only difference between all of us is basically our experience. He had a blank slate view of human nature. And that meant that a king wasn't better than you just by virtue of his birthright. All of this stuff has profoundly deep roots in Western civilization itself. Starting with the Jews, since this is a proper place to point this out. This is the ideal place. The idea of Imago Dei, the idea that we're made in the image of God, was an immensely radical idea thousands of years ago.

8:15Like if you read the Code of Hammurabi, if you read any of the pre-Jewish or non-Jewish ideas of the ancient world, the individual wasn't the sovereign unit. It was the pater familius. It was the head of a family. And so like the Code of Hammurabi, if you're building a house for me and a beam falls down and kills my son, the Code of Hammurabi says the just punishment for you is that I get to kill your son, who had nothing to do with it. Right. Because that's the whole idea is that children are just part of this corporate larger thing. Right. And the Jews, by creating this idea that the individual human is in the image of God, meant that the individual human has moral status independent of what clan or tribe they're in.

9:04And that idea takes a long time to work itself out, obviously. But that's really at the heart. The idea that we're all equal in the eyes of God and therefore we should be equal in the eyes of government really begins with the Jews. And then gets really expanded a lot by Christianity. When Jesus says, render unto Caesar what is Caesarism, to God what is God's, he's creating this space for the secular versus the religious, which is also a big part of liberalism. And so the liberalism that we see emerge in the Enlightenment in many ways is the flowering, unfolding, critical mass of a lot of older ideas.

9:39A lot of these illiberal people who think if you can just prove the philosophical tenets of liberalism are wrong in some way, then we can get back to the real Western civilization. This is the real Western civilization. Western civilization is in a really fundamental way liberal. And that's really important. But OK, so put all that aside. All liberalism in the 18th and 19th century boils down to is the idea that human beings are equal on their own merits, that the notion of equality is a real thing, that you have rights, that the government needs to be restrained in some way. So whether it's the American way or a constitutional monarchy or whatever it is where you have different spheres of authority where you don't have the absolute rule of kings.

10:25Instead, you have a government that is going to respect your rights to some extent that is going to honor contracts without sort of picking favored groups and all of these kinds of things. Or arbitrary actions or arbitrary decisions. All right. OK. Now, again, in the spirit of level setting, I assume most listeners understand it, but I just want to make it clear because we're going to be throwing around the term liberal and liberalism a lot in this conversation. I want to make sure people understand there's a distinction between what we're talking about and what we refer to as liberal politics in modern day politics.

10:55Right. It's hugely annoying. We all screwed up. Properly speaking, the libertarians should call themselves liberals. The liberals should call themselves progressives. Conservatives can call themselves conservatives. That's the way it should be. Right. And so like in Europe, neoliberals or liberals are considered on the right because they are still for like limited government and free markets and that kind of thing. I'll do this very quickly. And for the real intellectual historians who might be listening. Yeah, I know I'm skipping stuff. The revolutions of 1848 were these revolutions that swept Europe.

11:26Right. Time of mass urbanization, industrialization, lots of poor people crammed into cities, all these kinds of things. Lots of monarchies that didn't want to give the middle class any rights or privileges. Everyone's terrified it's going to be another French Revolution and there's going to be guillotines and all this kind of stuff. Up until around then, again, this is the most burning question, which remained the burning question throughout the 19th century, was what they called the social question. right because the old order was falling apart all over the place feudalism was gone away industrialism and urbanization and all these things were here and so like the question was how should we organize society right we're not going to do it with absolute kings anymore and the liberals were the ones who said we want representative government republican small r republican government we want fair courts we want it doesn't have to be the full vote but like some kind of representative system that represents our interests and that kind of thing.

12:21And then you had other people who wanted to go further left. The liberals were the ones who were asking essentially the political question. How do we organize our politics? How do we adjudicate differences? The socialists, and remember, Communist Manifesto comes out that same year in 1848, and the socialists are like, no, no, no, we need a total reorganization. It doesn't just answer the political question and answers the social question, which means radical economic equality, redistribution of wealth, interventionist state. And up until about 1848, the liberals were the radicals. And then all of a sudden, after 1848, the trend starts to become, no, the liberals were actually the ones who sold out to the existing power structures and got incremental reforms, a little more representation, a constitutional monarchy, some kinds of suffrage and elections for rich landholding white males or whatever.

13:16And the hard left was pissed and felt like they were sort of betrayed. And that schism is a schism that is why we can talk about a classical liberal being on the right. It's because the socialists, such as they were, moved crazy left. Still, in the 19th century, in the United States, and liberal going back, you know, like to the liberal of the liberal arts. Like if I have you over and I want to pour you a drink, I will give you a liberal pour of scotch. That liberal goes back to Cicero. It means generous. It means decent. It means like being open-minded and like a mensch in a lot of ways. And that was a big part of the connotation still in the United States in the 19th century.

14:00And it's one of the reasons why you could still be a conservative and a liberal because they just didn't have a political valence in the United States at that time. Not a real one. So liberal was sort of associated, yeah, on the economic side, you know, with Adam Smith and limited government. And you wouldn't divide the country between left and right in the United States in the 19th century. Those weren't concepts that really had a lot of purchase here until the 20th century. And so the place where this all goes cattywampus is FDR screws us. because what happens is during World War I, everyone on the left, the statists, called themselves progressives.

14:36They love the word progressive. They love this idea that 19th century Manchester liberalism was dying out, was going to be replaced by technocratic this and government that and all that kind of crap. And then Woodrow Wilson so pissed off this country during World War I with food rationing and censorship and throwing political prisoners in jail and a war that most Americans didn't want to get into in the first place and really pissed off a lot of German Americans who thought we were on the wrong side of that dumb war and all of this kind of stuff. The word progressive got so tainted politically that FDR, I mean, he didn't lead it by himself, but he's one of the biggest actors in this.

15:14Progressives abandoned the word progressive and started to pick up the word liberal to describe sort of FDR style, big government stuff. But then you get into 1970s, 1980s. Some of people who I think we're kind of friends with, or at least we know of, you know, political consultants get in it. And they just they do the full Jesse Helms ad campaign. He's too liberal. Right, right, right. Michael Dukakis is a card carrying liberal. And it becomes synonymous with big government stuff. OK, so that's very helpful. So just when we talk about liberal liberalism, we're not talking about the way you hear it in the contemporary political context in the U.S.

15:51Right. But I do want to ask you at a high level how the philosophical underpinnings of both the French Revolution and the American Revolution led to Jewish emancipation. Yeah. So this is a huge, important question. And I do feel a little bit like I'm bringing Coles to Newcastle, explaining Jewish stuff to you. You're not a tenured professor yet. You're just on this topic. Right. So in some ways, for good and for bad, the Jews are the archetypal beneficiaries of 19th century Enlightenment liberalism. And in fact, Judaism had its own sort of enlightenment. It's called the Haskalah. And it was basically all these Jews who read Voltaire and Rousseau and Locke.

16:28But it was this idea that we should stop speaking Yiddish. We should go to mainstream educational institutions. Modernization, integration. Right. Maintaining Jewish identity and community, but not in such a binary way in terms of how it connects to the societies in which Jews were living. Right. You know, France is the first country to recognize Jews as full citizens. Yeah. And it happens, I think, in 1791. And there's this famous Stanislaus Claremont Toner, I think is his name. And he has this famous line where he says, for the Jews as a nation, nothing. For Jews as individuals, everything. And that's seen as sort of like representative of this attitude of like, we got to stop thinking of Jews as a nation within the nation.

17:13We got to think of them as fully realized human beings. They have rights. Because up until that point, Jews were kept out of all sorts of professions. They weren't allowed to own certain kinds of property. They weren't allowed to own certain kind of land outside of certain areas. Depends on the country, you know, to the extent of all these things. They certainly couldn't go to like a lot of mainstream schools and all this. And Enlightenment liberalism said, no, you judge each person on their own merits. They should be allowed in. the problem was there's a real tension there where the Jews, we kind of are a nation within the nation.

17:44And the communal identity in Judaism is an important part of Judaism. My only point is it took some hammering out of these things, right? And you had a lot of Jews who, because they had this access all of a sudden, outside of the traditional boundaries, they could study law, secular law, like you become lawyers and all these kinds of things. So this is what happens with Karl Marx's dad. He becomes a Lutheran and has his kid baptized so he could be a lawyer. Heinrich Heine, the famous poet, he has this line where he says, conversion is the ticket to entry to Western culture. Anyway, like there's all sorts of churn going on.

18:19And I think the thing that's important to keep in mind is that a lot of modern antisemitism starts to get ignited by a lot of this because Jews are liberated. They're allowed to compete on merit in the open marketplace and they do well and they're resented for it. They're resented for it, particularly at a time when other notions of status are being erased. We can go deep in the weeds and we're not going to do Hannah Arendt, who's very controversial in what she says, all this. But I just think it's worth pointing out to people, because if people get this wrong all the time, the Protocols of Elders of Zion, which is the foundational anti-Semitic conspiracy theory.

18:53And that's a total BS conspiracy theory. One of the most successful ops the Russians have ever done. It wasn't anti-Semitic to get people to hate Jews. it was anti-semitic to get people to hate liberalism it was saying that if you embrace liberalism and democracy you're going to let the jews control everything you're going to let them into your life whatever it was using existing anti-semitism to discredit liberalism rather than the other way around so anyway emancipation was one of the greatest triumphs for jews imaginable you can't talk about the accomplishment of jews of the last 200 years but for emancipation at the same time, one of the reasons why Germany goes so nationalist is they reject the Enlightenment, which was imposed on them by Napoleon.

19:35And some of them associate that with the imposition of Jewish freedom. One other point I would just add to that is the American Revolution was different in that sense, because this hyper emphasis on the individual at the expense of communal identity was not the case of the American founding. So, right. So this is it's a good point to bring up insofar as like if you're talking about what I think liberalism is, I think one of the things that critics and fans of what we're calling liberalism get wrong is that liberalism also includes pluralism and includes pluralism of communities. And one of the most brilliant things of the Constitution, which is an expressly liberal document.

20:14The U.S. Constitution. Yeah. The U.S. Constitution is that it anticipates that people are going to want to live differently. You know, as I often put it, the pursuit of happiness is an individual right. But the most confirmed way of fulfilling the pursuit of happiness is found in groups, is that people want to live among people that they agree with on certain fundamental things. And one of the beauties of our constitutional structure is it's got flex to it and it allows for the idea that different communities are going to have a different conception of the common good. We're not going to have an established religion that imposes a one size fits all thing on everybody.

20:51One of the things that makes all the European stuff so complicated is at the exact same time as liberalism is emerging, so is nationalism. And nationalism is this thing that reduces the entire body politic into one organic whole, where the individual is subsumed into this romantic thing, right? Romanticism is the rejection of liberalism. And romanticism is what gives birth to nationalism. And so that tension in Europe of like the group versus the individual just plays out really differently than it does in the United States, where we give people room to live in coherent little nations in ways that the Europeans took a long time to kind of try and figure out.

21:34And that is one of the great sources of American strength is that we have inalienable individual rights. But after that, we let people live the way they want to live, including, for want of a better word, collectively or communally. We'll be right back. Hi, I'm Daniel Hartman, president of the Sholem Hartman Institute in Jerusalem. And I'm Yossi Klein-Halevi, senior fellow at the Sholem Hartman Institute. What's more important, to be feared by your enemies or morally true to yourself? Should Israel strive to be a nation among nations, or should it accept the fact that it is now a fortress apart?

22:09What do Israelis and diaspora Jews owe each other? If you're Jewish. Or a friend, an ally. These questions have been gnawing at you these past few years. For some of you, like for us, these questions have been keeping you up at night. And for some, they've been simmering in the background, waiting for answers. But dilemmas don't always have clear answers. What they do deserve are honest and respectful debates. And as it happens, Yossi and I love to challenge each other to get to the bottom of things. We look at current events through a lens that speaks to us most deeply. a Jewish lens. So if today's Jewish dilemmas are on your mind, tune into our conversation on For Heaven's Sake, a partnership between ARC Media and the Sholem Hartman Institute.

22:55You can find For Heaven's Sake on Apple, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. See you there. And we're back with Jonah Goldberg. So now let's talk about the decline of liberalism in recent times. What do you consider to be the economic failures that may be contributing to the, what we would say, the current decline of liberalism, or at least certainly the pressure points on liberalism as we know it? Sure. I think this is a good place to sort of remind listeners that we're still talking about liberalism as a liberal democratic capitalism, rule of law. There have been polls now for 25 years.

23:32Pew has written about this. Gallup has written about this. We're talking about it again because of the DSA Democrats. You get these polls that say young people, particularly young Democrats, like socialism. He had this very positive connotation for socialism and this very negative connotation for capitalism. They then asked the same group, what do you think about free market economics? And free market economics pulls like 40, 50 points better than socialism and capitalism. Because what Americans do, especially young Americans, particularly not to be too offensive, particularly a lot of dumb young Americans, is they associate the status quo with capitalism.

24:07And if the status quo isn't working for them, they say in their binary way of thinking about things, well, then I have to like the opposite of capitalism. And they're told that that's socialism. And so they say they like socialism, but they don't know necessarily what it means. They don't know necessarily like what it implies. They just know it's not this. And I don't blame them. Yeah. And you've made this point. You've made this point on your podcast that it's also new. Right. Young people are like into new. They actually think the ideas are new, which they're not. And part of the problem with that is in higher ed, we teach Marxism and socialism as if, well, Marxism is already close to 200 years old.

24:47And socialism, depending on how you define it, is somewhere between 400 and 4 ,000 to 400 ,000 years old. So people talk about like, oh, I got this great new idea, rent control. makes me want to like grab by lapel and you know slap him on the face with a semi-frozen flounder so the point is i don't blame people for having a problem particularly young people ai scary all sorts of things having a problem with the status quo i have a problem with them blaming it on that phrase you hear all the time unfettered capitalism there are a lot of fetters on capitalism when california got into its whole uh energy brownout crisis 20 years ago paul krogman was writing new columns, this is what you get with a unfettered capitalism.

25:29And it's like, well, have you looked at how much regulation there was in California energy markets? Right. Right. The financial crisis had a lot of reasons for it. But one of the reasons for it was the way government intervened in mortgage backed securities. And that's not unfettered capitalism. Right. But they're told every time that the status quo is unfettered capitalism. They're blind to the fetters. And then when it's not working for them, they say we need more Fedders because that's socialism. And if I looked at some of the crony capitalism stuff, you know, Trump has now taken ownership stakes in 31 companies, right?

26:01That's not free market economics. And I don't think it's capitalism, but like if it's the status quo and we're going to call a status quo capitalism, I don't blame people for disliking it. But the simple fact is, is that we've been living in a time for 30, 40, 50 years, transitioning into a time where a strong back and a good work ethic aren't enough for a middle class life. And that's sad. That is something to be sad about. I'm not sure I would do anything about it per se, but I like the idea that someone who works hard and can build roads or dig ditches or whatever, if they work hard and they put themselves to it, can have a middle class life and have a family.

26:39And like, that's something that was good about our economy. And that's harder and it's not impossible, but it's harder and harder. And so there's a certain sense of, particularly for young men, of them getting screwed in this economy. There are people who want to blame all of these changes in our society on immigration, which is another thing that freaks people out. Like this is just, you can think it's racism, you can think it's nativism, you can think it's evil, or you can just think it's a simple friggin' fact of human nature that large-scale immigration, particularly people who speak different languages and have different customs and cultures, unsettles communities.

27:12That's an issue, But it's easier to blame immigrants for certain kind of demagogical politicians than it is to blame robots. And automation has done more to change the workplace than immigration or outsourcing has. We have the same, if not slightly better, industrial output than we did 30, 40 years ago. It's just that the amount of output per worker shrinks because we're having robots do this stuff. And we're going to have more robots do this stuff. and technological change unsettles people. The birth control pill, vastly more important in terms of changing things in our society than any of the arguments from Betty Friedan or Gloria Steinem.

27:51But you can argue with Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem. It's harder to argue with the pill. And so technological change is a big part of it and it leaves people feeling unsettled and left out. Then you add in iPhones, screens, all this stuff where people are retreating into their homes. They're following politics and life through screens, not through friendships. We have to get Ben Sasse on here. You know, like the friendship crisis is real. And when you start, you know, there's a big point in the society of the West is when you start following everything through screens, you start following politics as a form of entertainment.

28:24And in entertainment, you just want the heroes to defeat the villains. And you start caring less about arguments. You start seeing the people you disagree with as abstractions. So I think that's Those are some of the reasons why liberalism is suffering. But whenever there's a big innovation wave and a creative destruction wave, the literature on it is always like this time is different. For sure. This time is different. This is the economic apocalypse. And so you're seeing that now with the debate over AI. I think what you're suggesting is we've seen at least these patterns before. That's right.

28:56And I'm worried about AI. I am not an AI super booster and I'm not an AI doomer either. I do think it could be different in all sorts of ways, but I also think it could take a while. And I mean, look, the moral of the story of the boy who cried wolf is that eventually wolf does show up. Right. You know, and so like it's entirely possible that this time it could be different. But I think the problems that liberalism has today have much more to do with that romanticism stuff than they have to do with economics. It's that we teach people that the highest moral authority are their own instincts, are their own gut.

29:28We tell them that their passions are more important than anything else. There are serious people, or allegedly serious people, who talk about giving children the vote. And you say, well, why? And they're like, well, because they have feelings. And I'm like, really? The idea that the highest moral authority is your own inner light, that just be true to yourself. That is the essence of romanticism. Right. It is not liberalism. But the way I always think about it is it is the absolute opposite of good parenting. No good parent in the history of humanity has ever said, you run with those scissors.

30:06Right. You taste that lead paint chip. Right. I got to be me, but you be you. So you stick those car keys in the electrical socket. Right. That's not what parents do. and part of liberalism was individualism rightly understood of responsibility of obligations and America the Beautiful the line is confirm thy soul in self-control John Adams thinks that the only way this system can work is if you have a morally sound informed population and this self-expression thing rather than self-discipline thing is the thing that so triggers the right wingers who now don't like liberalism. This idea that there's no limiting principle to your own personal definition of morality and self-expression gets called liberalism.

30:54And there are a lot of people who say, well, if that's liberalism, I want nothing to do with it. We've gone too far. So what you're describing here, there were signals of it. Like you could say culture, all cultures sits downstream from economics or economic forces. Can you point to any themes or trends in pop culture, film, TV, music, pick your poison, that should have served as an early warning signal to this political earthquake we now call populism? I'm kind of obsessed with this thing in pop culture, movies, television, going back the last 50 years or so of what we could call the Byronic hero, this romantic notion of a hero or the anti-hero, right?

31:35It really comes to the fore in the early 2000s, where once you start looking for it, you'll see it everywhere, of evil people being treated as heroes because they follow their own code. Breaking Bad. At least Breaking Bad ends with the villain getting his, like, at least he realizes he's a bad guy. But it's amazing. My daughter's generation, they all just think that Walter White in Breaking Bad is the hero, and he's a cool guy, right? There's a murdering drug dealer who's very charismatic, in The Wire who just simply says, I have to follow my own code. The Mountain in the Game of Thrones, follow my own code.

32:11Dexter is a serial killer who murders other serial killers because that's his code. And the only time he violates his code is when some normal person might turn him in. And they say, well, I got to kill that person too, right? Like the whole treatment of Hannibal Lecter, he became a hero. If your definition of integrity and decency is being true to yourself and you find yourself eating innocent people's livers, your math is wrong, right? You've missed a step somewhere. And I think higher education is a huge part of it. That whole woke one thing, you know, I remember there was that girl at Yale who told a professor who was trying to debate with her about free speech.

32:51And she says, I don't want to debate with you. I want you to feel my pain, right? That emphasis on feelings runs through so much of our politics. And that's how liberalism is being eroded. That's what populism is, is the organization of feelings over facts. And there's a left-wing populism that does that. And a lot of left-wing populism is based on envy. A lot of right-wing populism is based on resentment. But it's all encouraging what Julian Benda called the political organization of hatreds, rather than sort of trying to find constructive ways of figuring out how to make political decisions.

33:27Okay. So then I guess wrapping up, I would ask you two questions. One, how acute do you think the threat is to classical liberalism? And then if you do think it's acute, what do you think it would take for it to make a comeback? On your worried meter, all Jews have a worry meter. On your worry meter, where is it? Do you think it's overstated? It's an overheated analysis that says, oh my God, we're on the cusp of a complete crash of Western liberal institutions. I think there's reason for worry. I don't think there's reason for panic. You know, in public choice theory, there's this thing called the Baptist and bootleggers thing.

33:59So Baptists were for prohibition and bootleggers were for prohibition. Right. Because prohibition creates the black market that the bootleggers relied upon. And so you'd actually get bootleggers giving money to Baptist politicians who supported prohibition. Right. And there's a similar dynamic going on that the Democratic socialists want you to believe that poll that says socialism is super hot right now. And that socialism is the idea whose time has come. So does the right. And the right wants you to believe that because they both benefit from that. So I think the economic dislocations are real.

34:35But like take the socialism stuff with the DSA crowd. Those socialist ideas are bad ideas. They are like literally wrong ideas. And the thing about wrong ideas is they don't work. Rent control isn't going to do what they think it's going to do. There's a famous Swedish economist who said, second only to aerial bombing, there is no policy more proven to ruin cities than rent control. And so, like, it's just not going to work. The government grocery store stuff is not going to work. And so I have a little confidence that when Americans, even New Yorkers, see that it's not working, they're not going to stick with it for, well, it's never really been tried romantic reasons.

35:21They're going to say, screw this. You said you were going to fix this and it's not being fixed. Similarly, the post-liberal right-wing nationalists and all of these guys, what they miss is we have a liberal culture. We're just a liberal culture. And what I mean by that, I don't mean a progressive culture. What I mean is that, like, it is a natural recourse of Americans to say, screw you, you're not the boss of me. It is a natural thing for Americans to say, what do you mean I can't start a business? Right. They're just things about our culture that do not derive themselves purely from liberal doctrine and philosophical precepts.

35:56They're because starting with the American founding going forward, we are this sort of unruly, ungovernable, ornery people. Seymour Martin Lipset talks about how America and Canada at the same time were told to adopt the metric system. And the Canadians, because they come from a royalist and loyalist background, whatever that, they're like, OK. And Americans are like, what witchcraft is this? We're not doing that. Right. So Americans are a very liberal culture. We're very good at turning immigrants into small L liberals. One of the reasons they came here in the first place is because they wanted to move to a liberal culture.

36:30And I would say, look, conservatives are trying to preserve that liberal culture to a certain extent, at least the conservatism that I believe in. But Jonah, what I'm worried about, like, you know, so Mamdani in his inaugural address says he's going to replace the frigidity of rugged individualism with the warmth of collectivism. And this is his experiment, the grocery stores and the, okay, the rent control. You're right that these ideas won't work. Okay. But you quote Adam Smith all the time in your podcast, there's a great deal of ruin in a nation, meaning it could take a lot of time to work through Mamdani's experiment.

37:01And there's going to be a lot of ruin in the process and a lot of destruction. For sure. It is entirely possible that Mondami does generational damage to New York City. Right. And some of that, again, technology matters. The damage he can do now is so much easier than it was 50 or 75 years ago, because the technology of today is such that a lot of people can do what they do elsewhere. Right. I mean, you can go to Miami in a way that you couldn't where you physically needed to be near the stock exchange, right? There's all sorts of things that make the damage that Mondami can do faster and more acute and deeper.

37:43But one of the benefits of that is also be more visible more quickly. Look, there are a lot of trends one can point at on both sides of the aisle that are bad. I'm just saying that like people should have an eye towards the long game and not get into this mode of thinking the next election is going to be our last election. Right. That doesn't mean you don't protest the rampant anti-Semitism. It doesn't mean you don't protest the stupidity of all sorts of things. It doesn't mean you don't have the arguments, but have a little confidence that if you're right, the facts will eventually confirm the fact that you're right.

38:18And too many people get caught up in this catastrophization. Right. It's like this idea that Democrats and Republicans both believed for 30 years has done so much damage to America. And it's that if everybody voted, Democrats would always win. And so Democrats always believe that if we just expand the franchise enough, we make it easier and easier and easier to vote, we'll never lose an election because there is this Marxist sort of lump and proletariat reserve army of people. And if we could just get them to vote, we would always win. That's Bernie Sanders' whole worldview. Barack Obama said as much.

38:52And Republicans, because they were terrified of the masses and all this kind of garbage, they believed it too, and they would make it harder to vote. It turns out if a poll, if it's a good poll with 1 ,200 respondents, what do you think a poll with 100 million respondents is? It turns out the social science has settled on this, especially for presidential elections. If everybody voted, for the most part, the election would have been exactly the same. But now you have this thing where everybody's paranoid about the vote and the election and all this kind of stuff, and nobody trusts each other. Okay.

39:24I'm going to let you go in a minute. The book you're working on now, Is this a sequel to Suicide of the West? It's the stuff I should have shouted in Suicide of the West. People have asked me for years to write a book about conservatism, and I never really wanted to, partly for commercial reasons. I just didn't think there was a huge market for it. Plus, I didn't have a lot new to say. And then I sort of had this epiphany that, for similar reasons that I wanted to start the dispatch, is that nobody has really offered a book about conservatism, defending conservatism against the right for totally understandable reasons.

39:57Conservatism, when you and I are growing up and for totally legitimate reasons, is seen as the opposite of leftism. And that's how we think about it. That was fine with me. And I think it was accurate so long as American conservatism was conserving classical liberalism. The Constitution, the rule of law, the sovereignty of the individual, all that stuff. for it. Today, there are a whole bunch of people who want to argue, some in good faith, some really not, that real conservatism is statist, that real conservatism isn't about Milton Friedman and free market economics, that real conservatism is like the Orrin Cass project or the stuff that J.D.

40:36Vance is talking about, that real conservatism is basically using the concept of the common good the way the left use the concept of social justice. There are a lot of people on what I call the new right who have right-wing identity politics the way the left had identity politics and identity politics are fundamentally illiberal because identity politics says you judge people by the group they're in rather than as individuals. So anti-Semitism in a lot of ways is the oldest of the identity politics. But there are lots of it. So is aristocracy is a form of identity policy so that some people just by accident of their birth are better than other people.

41:10Some people, as Aristotle would say, are born slaves. That's identity politics. And today you have J.D. Vince and these people, they push these ideas about like heritage Americans. This idea that if you have more ancestors coming from the American founding, that you have more legitimacy and say about American politics than somebody whose parents just came off the boat. You have all sorts of crony capitalists picking winners and losers in the economy thing, which is now being justified as like part of, quote unquote, conservative economics and conservative governance, which I just reject. But in an era of horseshoe theory, part of my argument is that if statist politics are wrong from the left, it doesn't make them right from the right.

41:52I've been consistent on this for 25 years where I've always said that nationalism and socialism are two sides of the same coin. If you take a speech by Fidel Castro and you replace the word socialist with nationalist and you replace the word nationalist with socialist, the sentences, the meanings do not change. Right. Socialized medicine is nationalized health care. And when you nationalize an industry, you're socializing an industry. And we now have this thing where as long as you don't call it socialism, you call it nationalism or state capitalism or whatever, that somehow it's good. I call BS on that.

42:26And I think that the arguments that the new right is using to justify these policies are materially no different than the left. The left's arguments to justify them, their just conception of who the winners and losers should be are different. And that's the problem with horseshoe theory is once you stop being liberal, you're just talking about which tribe, which team you want to reward and which one you want to punish. So I'm going to just close with this point, and then I'm going to let you go, because I want to let you continue working on your book. A friend of mine, John Lewinson, said to me a couple weeks ago, he said, you know, I wish people on the left who celebrate immigrants and immigration, and it's a big theme of their politics, would understand the Jews in America are largely immigrants or the descendants of immigrants.

43:07And I wish those on the right who, as you said earlier, want to trace, you know, do you go to the Civil War? Do you go to the founding? How many generations? For an immigrant community that is in the United States, you'd be hard pressed to find another immigrant community that has been all in on the American experiment, all in and has succeeded and has contributed a ton, but yet strikes this balance between maintaining this communal identity at the same time that it is all in on America. That is like, that should also be a phenomenal outcome if you're coming from certain aspects of the right. And yet both of these extremes hate us right now.

43:43Yeah. Have you ever had Jerry Mueller on? No. He wrote a great book, Capitalism and the Jews. And one of the points he makes in there is Jews get grief for being communists and Jews get grief for being capitalists. Right. Right. Jews get grief for being champions of individualistic meritocracy and they get grief for being too clannish and tribal. And one strain of anti-Semitism is resentment of the fact that Jews have figured out the fusion of individual accomplishment and communal living in a way that arouse envy and resentment among people who don't like the individualism stuff and people who are envious of the communal part.

44:24Listeners may not know, my wife is not Jewish, and she was raised by an immigrant who literally not figuratively swan the Danube to escape the communists, spent a year in a refugee camp, incredibly successful guy, got a master's degree from Milton Freeman and then moved to Alaska and ran grocery stores. Wow. And his advice to his kids, he was like, if you're serious about this stuff and you really want to test yourself, you got to go to a university with a lot of Jews. They're the ones who take this stuff really seriously. And he meant it purely as a compliment. Totally. Right. But like the Jews figured something out and a lot of other people resent the Jews for figuring it out.

45:03And it's a problem. Thank you for doing this. And we will link to the show notes, as I often do, Suicide of the West and some of these other books you mentioned in a couple of podcast episodes of The Remnant that I referenced. Always a pleasure. Thank you for having me, sir. And until next time, thank you.

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