Ross Douthat and Ezra Klein on the Art of Persuasion

23:28I think relatively few opinion writers are actually engaged in ongoing efforts at persuasion. I think typically people who think they're doing that are engaged in ongoing efforts at affirmation. And there are things around the edges where they're sort of putting their spin on it, but it starts from a kind of locus of major agreement. and then you're sort of like shifting into one direction or another. What I think has been interesting to watch across your career is that you actually have been engaged in a very, very long effort at persuasion. You are almost always in relationship with an audience that mostly doesn't share your views.

24:07A profoundly successful exercise in persuasion. What would you say you've been most successful? What would you say you feel you have been most persuasive about?

24:18Ross Douthat:I don't honestly know exactly how to judge that. On the one hand, there's a bunch of things that have happened since I took the Times job that fulfilled my expectations to some degree about what was going to happen in American politics and where certain things would go. Above all, the sort of populist nationalist transformation of the Republican Party. It's worth noting here for people who don't know, you and your former co-blogger, Raihan, had written a book called Grand New Party. We wrote a book, but beyond the book, we were just sort of involved. So this wasn't persuasion directed at liberals, honestly.

24:59Ross Douthat:This was persuasion directed more at our fellow conservatives and saying, look, the tectonic plates under the Republican Party are shifting. The party has to deal with the fact that it has a more working class coalition, it has to adapt its policy and rhetoric, all of these kinds of things. But in fact, that vision was fulfilled in a way that had absolutely nothing to do with us. It was not the case that we wrote a bunch of columns, persuaded a bunch of Republicans to become more populist, and lo and behold, a populist version of Marco Rubio was elected president in 2016. No, obviously, our prophecies were fulfilled by Donald Trump.

25:37Ross Douthat:And the whole Trump phenomenon was just, was, and for the most part, remains pretty disconnected from the work of, you know, opinion mongers and would-be intellectuals. So there's that. That's sort of one area of success of a kind, but not the success that I looked for. I think that... Well, stop there for a second. In what way was it not, right? You put some flesh on that. So you wrote this book. You're sort of involved in an effort to say the Republican Party should not be as doctrinally libertarian. It shouldn't be all about cutting Medicare and cutting Social Security, that it had this opportunity at a time when it did not win majorities of working class voters to shift its policies in a way that would make it more appealing to them.

26:33And the kinds of shifts that you and Rahan advocated had to do with things like immigration, had to do with things like tax credits for kids, had to do with sort of shifting it to a more pro-family, more concerned with the problems of working class families from, I would say, a more traditionalist perspective maybe than the left is. So how would you describe what happened of that and then what happened that created the working class shift? Because Republicans do now win majorities of working class voters, or Trump at least does.

27:08What drove that that maybe was not in your prescription?

27:11Ross Douthat:Well, so one part of what drove it was just that Trump picked or intuited a different set of issues to focus on than Raihan and I would have favored. But generally, we were focused on sort of family policy, wage subsidies, these kind of things. And Trump was just focused on, obviously, like trade tariffs and reindustrialization in a way that I don't think we fully anticipated how much some of those arguments would resonate in 2016. I don't know how much they resonate now, but in 2016, I think a big part of the country was still getting over the shock of the opening to China. And there was just a real percentage for Trump in flying around the Midwest, going to places that had been hammered and saying, I'm just going to bring back your jobs.

28:05Ross Douthat:Right. We're going to stop businesses from leaving our country. And we are there.

28:15Ross Douthat:They are being drained out of our country, our jobs, our money, our base and our factories. We are we're going to stop it. And that was, again, a different message from saying we need to use government policy to help people form families. And I'm genuinely angry at the people who took. And I'm right. Well, that too. Right. So then there's there's a more substantial anger. There's more substantial scapegoating. They're moving to other places. A lot of them are moving to Mexico. Don't underestimate. It's like the new China on a smaller level, but like the new China. So our view wasn't that you should never cut Medicare and Social Security.

28:52Ross Douthat:It was more that if you're going to cut Medicare or reform Medicare, you should be doing it not to just pass a new upper bracket tax cut, but to free up more money to help working families, right, would be how the argument would go. And Trump just said, no, we're never cutting these things, right? And so he outflanked all of his Republican primary opponents by realizing that a big part of the Republican base wasn't on board with Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan. But what that did was basically create a kind of a more popular, but much more fiscally unsustainable, and in the end, I think sort of unproductive policy mix on the right, where the right sort of defines itself as defenders of old people's entitlements rather than people who are eager to cut it, and then has no space left for a lot of the policy ideas that we would have favored.

29:48Ross Douthat:So that's part of what happened. The other thing that happens, right, is that we were trying to sort of craft, you know, I think you use the word traditional, I would have said sort of like a kind of moderate social conservatism that was compatible with the Republican Party's sort of religious base and pro-life commitments and so on, but tried to start from there and broaden into broader support for two-parent families and marriage and these kinds of things. What actually happened was that for about 10 years, social conservatism was just routed in the US. It lost the argument over same-sex marriage most prominently, but it lost a lot of different arguments.

30:31Ross Douthat:If you just look at the trends in the 2010s on all kinds of questions from drug use all the way to polyamory. Not that the country is universally pro-polyamory, but you can see that leftward shift all over. It ends up showing up on abortion too, right? Trump comes in on the one hand as a kind of someone who speaks to that, who says to embattled social conservatives and religious conservatives, you're losing the culture and you need to live with that and just have me as the tough guy who will defend you. But then the other thing that happens is that liberalism and progressivism having won those victories then radicalize further and say, well, what happened on same-sex marriage where we sort of shift the country completely in our direction in an incredible amount of time and then declare that the other side are bigots and we don't need to talk to them anymore.

31:25Ross Douthat:We can do that with a lot of other issues too. And that gets you the woke era and then it gets you the backlash against the woke era. But like the backlash against the woke era is very far removed from a kind of stable social conservatism, like sort of building something. I mean, the backlash against the woke era is then, you know, everybody from Catholic traditionalists to pot-smoking libertarians, right, who don't like the woke. But it's not a, I don't know, it's not sort of a coherent basis for governing the country in ways that I think have become totally apparent in the second Trump term.

32:09Well, you have this famous 2016 tweet, you write, a thought sent back in time to the theocracy panic of 2005. Right. You seem like you're enjoying this interview. If you dislike the religious right, wait till you meet the post religious right. Unpack both sides of that. I mean, for people maybe who don't really remember what you're calling the theocracy panic of 05, what was that? But then the religious right versus the post religious right, I think is actually a quite significant thing. I just did this big Odyssey essay, which I would say is very much about that question in a way. So, you know, So the theocracy panic was just that George W.

32:46Ross Douthat:Bush won re-election in 2004 with the support of lots and lots of white evangelicals. Liberals were not expecting Bush to win. A bunch of liberals became obsessed with the idea that evangelicalism was taking over America and was going to build a kind of Gilead-esque evangelical theocracy. I thought that was ludicrous at the time and wrote a bunch of essays about it. Um, and then by the time you get to the mid 2010s and Trump is winning while being conspicuously non-evangelical, conspicuously non-Christian, it seems like you're in a world where everything that liberals hated and feared about George W.

33:26Ross Douthat:Bush becomes something they're, they're nostalgic for. Right. And that they see sort of and that as you kind of de-Christianize conservatism, you get more bigotry, xenophobia, these kind of things. You know, that was 10 years ago. There's a lot of different forms like a post-religious right could be. And you see versions of this, not a kind of, you know, terrifying fascist formation, but just a kind of right wing politics of, you know, sort of libertine indifference and sort of proud amoralism. And again, this is part of Trump's coalition, right, is people who just hate moralistic arguments and want to do whatever they want to do and ended up seeing Trump as an avatar for that, which is, I think, quite different from the part of the post-religious right that is literally people trying to revive kind of a pagan, non-Christian, fascist politics.

34:30Ross Douthat:But both of those things sort of exist as phenomena in the last 10 years. Tell me what you think leads to the phenomena of the more pagan formation. So the first time I heard this description of it was actually in an interview that Louise Perry, the sort of British conservative kind of critic of modern feminism, did with your new boss, Barry Weiss. And she was making this distinction between Jordan Peterson and Andrew Tate. So, you know, the really crucial difference between John Peace and Andrew Tate, there are obviously lots of differences. But the one that I think is most salient to this issue is Jordan Peterson is basically preaching a Christian message.

35:11And Andrew Tate is not. The more I think about it, the more I think that actually that's really the key dividing line if you're thinking about American culture in particular. And that a lot of the fights on the right, she sort of made this argument, are going to begin to come down to this. Are you sort of pushing towards what can be called here, at least in certain forms, a Christian ethic? Or is it about strength, about dominance, about hierarchy? Obviously, Christianity is a big phenomenon, as is Islam and Judaism. All these religions have many, many different political manifestations. So I don't want to overly—probably pagans, too.

35:51But I do think there's something to that.

35:54Ross Douthat:Well, the issue there, though, is that Jordan Peterson is not a Christian. Andrew Tate is a right-wing politics that formally rejects Christianity. Jordan Peterson is a post-Christian right-wing politics that is sort of trying. I mean, he's been ill for a while, and I don't want to characterize where he is right now. But generally, he's engaged in this sort of constant wrestling with the texts of the Old Testament and the Christian story and so on, and saying, you know, these are incredibly important and we need to, you know, preserve them without ever actually committing to Christian belief. And conservatism generally, I think, as Christianity has declined, has ended up in this weird place where it's trying to find some kind of category that includes Christianity, includes traditional religion, but isn't reducible to it.

36:52Ross Douthat:So it's like, well, we're defending Western civilization, right? You'll hear that a lot from people on the right. And often like that language is associated with people on the right who are not themselves formally committed to Christianity. But so Tate is an extreme, but even Peterson himself is sort of navigating in the kind of post-Christian landscape in his own way. So tell me a bit of how you understand the story. How do we go from the front-facing Christianity of conservatism in the Bush era to this much more post-Christian assemblage that includes Christians, as you're saying. But I would say it's fair to say Christian ethics and virtue are not demanded as a...

37:37Right.

37:37Ross Douthat:So two things happen. One is at the mass level, Christianity just declines. It declines sharply between the late 1990s and 2020. And that means that just inevitably the kinds of appeals and rhetoric and argument that are sort of normative on the right when lots of people are going to church are less normative when fewer people are going to church. And that's a very simple story, but I think it does a lot of explanatory work. As a culture gets less formally Christian, it's not surprising that its leadership would get less formally Christian. And Trump is, again, an extreme case. He takes a trend to an extreme, right, where he is just sort of nakedly transactional in his relationship to Christianity and doesn't even sort of necessarily mouth the pieties.

38:31Ross Douthat:But then at the intellectual level, right, so let's say you are a writer or thinker or would-be elite on the right looking at this landscape, looking at not just the decline of Christianity, but this sort of sweeping victory for social liberalism that I just described. Well, you're going to look at that and say, okay, we had an evangelical president in George W. Bush. We had sort of a Catholic evangelical alliance sort of defining Republican politics. And what did we get from it? We got secularization and the triumph of social liberalism. So something went wrong here. And a lot of the sort of controversy and argument and debate among younger conservatives, especially, but all over the place, is this kind of wrestling with, like, well, why did we fail, right?

39:21Ross Douthat:And there's just a lot of different impulses at work there. You have people who sort of want to leave Christianity behind entirely and say, the problem is just like this religion is sort of weak and its leaders are hapless and effete and soft and you need a harsh masculine force and so on. That's a pretty narrow group. I think what's more common is a desire among people who are connected to Christianity, who are Christian and so on, to say, well, where can we find greater strength? Where can we find greater toughness? How can we be more effective political actors? How can we defeat our enemies instead of having them vanquish us?

40:16Ross Douthat:You could call it a reaching for pagan energy that doesn't go all the way to actually becoming pagan. right and look the truth is that you know if you go back and i'm not stephen miller's not a wiccan stephen miller's not a wiccan right but there yeah there's a i mean there it's like the desire is for strength and toughness and a politics of enmity there's various versions of this that um that show up and they're connected also to the reality that you know if you look obviously historically at the expressions of political Christianity in the Western world, they are very comfortable with fighting wars and conquering enemies and all of these kinds of things.

41:05Ross Douthat:And people, conservative Christians today who are like, what happened to the crusading spirit or something like that, are not wrong. That has been part of Christian culture in the West for a long time. But you see this in the debate about the Odyssey, for instance, where Christopher Nolan takes the Odyssey and some people have said he Christianizes it. This is sort of debatable, but he certainly makes the moral vision of the story more compatible with Christianity, where it's like, okay, Odysseus has committed sins and feels guilt, and he doesn't glory in war. He doesn't sleep with Calypso and Circe and so on.

41:59But then there's clearly a group,

42:02Ross Douthat:not just of would-be neo-pagans, but sort of conservative Christians on the internet who don't like that. And they're like, where's the war? This is like losing the core of the story. And I think that that partially reflects this desire to find something that doesn't seem present in late 20th century public Christianity, the compassionate conservatism of George W. Bush. Find some kind of fighting spirit in the theory that that's what you need to overcome liberalism. It's funny. It's an odd take on George W. Bush in a way that what he lacked was a fighting spirit. Bush, who won two elections in a row against the Democrats, but also launched a large number of wars.

42:56Ross Douthat:Yes, there were some wars. Well, yes. And there is no part. There's also some of this is like a creative miss or a convenient misremembering by the right where you have like young nationalists on the right. Young would be nationalists who will say, you know, the one thing we can't do is go back to, you know, the feckless liberal internationalism of George W. Bush. But if you look at the things written in the run-up to the Iraq war, and this is maybe where my war blogger reference at the start is actually relevant, they had a lot in common with populist nationalist arguments today. There's this sort of recurring, they were like, the West has gotten soft, right?

43:38Ross Douthat:Radical Islam has taken advantage of our liberal weakness. We need to show strength and make a friend-enemy distinction in the battle for the Middle East, right? The whole national greatness conservatism, and history is filled with these fun ironies. So there were a bunch of people who were associated with what got called national greatness conservatism, which was basically a pretty hawkish form of Republican politics. who then, like Bill Kristol, who then end up as the great critics of Trumpism. Our former colleague, David Brooks. Right, our former colleague, David Brooks. He's a less extreme example.

44:29Ross Douthat:It's just really striking. If you go back, nobody hates Bill Kristol more than Trumpists, and Bill Kristol hates Trumpists. But if you go back and read the way Kristol wrote about politics and war and all these things in the late 90s and early 2000s, He has a lot in common with the way sort of the young nationalists spoiling for a fight write about politics today. It's just the focus, the focus is different. So why do you think that ended up being such a major split? Because I agree that that is one of the places where you tend to see a lot of split between Trumpists and never Trumpers, people associated with national greatness conservatism.

45:07That was an aggressive, muscular conservatism. That was a we need to defend Western civilization version of conservatism. And, you know, for all the talk about not launching new wars, it does not turn out to be the case that that is so central to Donald Trump's conception. Apparently not. Of how MAGA works. Yep. So why do you think that became such a cut in the Republican coalition?

45:32Ross Douthat:I think it was, well, it was partially a cut because even though Trump has ended up starting a new war in the Middle East, he really did pretty strongly repudiate elements of neoconservative and hawkish foreign policy. And to the extent that like if you were committed to the idea that the Iraq war had been a good idea, then Trump in 2016 was not your guy. Right. So there was that as a kind of specific breaking point. And then there also was, to make the case for the never Trump side, a kind of clear characterological argument where you could say in the early 2000s that a politics of national greatness only made sense if it was founded on character and virtue in your leaders.

46:23Ross Douthat:And I don't think George Bush was like a paragon of every single virtue, but it's fair to say that he was a more personally virtuous guy in various ways than Trump. Right. So there were people who had committed to that idea for good reasons for whom it was just like, OK, I don't care how muscular Trump is or how international greatness he is. He is just a bad guy. And I'm not I'm not going to support him. And then for younger people, like, especially after 2016, like once, you know, once Trump wins, then he just sort of resets the landscape. Right. And you sort of it's it's just like you sort of I feel like with younger people on both the left and the right, the world where we had arguments about the character of American politicians, the world where, you know, Bill Clinton's adultery was something to be litigated.

47:15Ross Douthat:All of these things is just kind of a lost world. And so it's sort of... I think it might be rediscovered soon. It might be. I think in the turning of the wheel on this. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, right. No, the next cohort, I mean, yeah, we're old now. So, you know, you can see that each cohort will have a different perspective and there may be a renewed interest in character.

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48:30It's got tons of awesome features like offline downloads, so I can download my favorite videos before I travel and watch them whenever I don't have Wi-Fi.

48:37Ross Douthat:Because we all know airplane Wi-Fi is the worst. I get ad free, I get background play, and there's like a ton more in there. You should try it. If you like YouTube, you'll love YouTube Premium. So try YouTube Premium for two months free at youtube.com slash premium. Trial eligibility varies, terms apply, cancel anytime. That's a mouthful. I'm David Marchese. And I'm Lulu Garcia Navarro. And we're the hosts of The Interview from the New York Times. David and I have spent our careers interviewing some of the most interesting and influential people in the world. Which means we know when to ask tough questions and when to just sit back and listen.

49:11And now we've teamed up to have these conversations every week. We'll try to reveal something about the people shaping our world. And we'll get some great stories from them, too. It's the interview from The New York Times.

49:22Ross Douthat:Listen wherever you get your podcasts.

49:28There's another fascinating, at least to me, shift that has taken place, which is, you know, we've described a couple times here. the centrality of evangelical Christianity to politics in, say, 2005. And now Catholics seem much more central to politics, right? Catholic thinkers, you have a lot of Catholic converts at the top of Republican Party politics, including J.D. Vance, who has just done your show, the vice president, who just released a book about his Catholic conversion. Albeit one with a Protestant church on the cover.

49:58Ross Douthat:It is an odd design choice, I agree. sort of i mean it actually is a design choice that makes a lot of sense but we can we can get into that go on what have you made of that what what does that move from like the form of christianity that seems to be driving right-wing politics was evangelical christianity to catholic thinking what is that i don't know so one i don't know how much catholic thinking can be said to be driving republican politics i i would not look at the second trump right-wing But yeah, I think it's very important in sort of right-wing intellectual culture. In the last five years, generally, after a long period of secularization, there is a renewed interest in arguments about religion, religious ideas that extends beyond conservatism, maybe even extends to you, right, Ezra?

50:51Ross Douthat:We've talked about this on this show before. and I think my own work has been in this period kind of well suited to that moment. I felt sort of more in tune with the times than I usually do in that sense. But the way that's manifested in kind of right-wing intellectual culture is that Catholicism, which has, I think it's fair to say, a stronger and deeper intellectual tradition than evangelical Christianity in the U.S. has just become like a kind of natural attractor for a lot of people who are like looking for a harbor, looking for a place to land, looking to convert or revert or anything else.

51:38Ross Douthat:But then the other thing is that, you know, Catholicism is still struggling as a mass institutional religion, right? And evangelicalism is still thriving relative to Catholicism. I mean, one argument you could make is that under sort of digital conditions, under sort of internet conditions, which are hard on, they're hard on things that don't have a clear definition that are sort of just based on kind of loose ancestral loyalties. So they've been really hard on like denominational Protestantism on people who are like, well, I'm a Methodist because my parents were a Methodist or I'm a Presbyterian because I like the pastor and so on.

52:17Ross Douthat:And they've been good for, in different ways, sort of stronger brands. And in a way, Christianity sort of polarizes into the strong brand of like liturgical religion of which Catholicism is the strongest expression. And then kind of the strong brand of mass market seeker sensitive, you know, come for our amazing, our amazing praise music concert. And those are the two strongest forms, but the Catholic form is stronger at the elite level and the evangelical form seems stronger at the mass level. That was a very long comment, but it's something obviously that I think about a lot, but it's a very, yeah, I don't know where it goes from there.

52:59Ross Douthat:Do we just have a world where it's sort of natural if you're in the elite to be Catholic the way it would have once been natural to be an Episcopalian, but that's somehow separate from like what's happening in mass trends in religion? Does an elite turn to Catholicism eventually sort of trickle down and sort of revitalize the wider Catholic institutions? I have no idea. Do you think the relationship between the left and religion has changed? Yes. I think that, again, I'm not sure where this goes, but I feel like the kind of post-Christian left is having its own kind of existential crisis of like pessimism.

53:43Ross Douthat:But I feel like there was a period when it went on the left, it was like, we are leaving traditional patriarchal cis heteronormative Christianity behind, and we're going to be great. We're going to, you know, we're going to enter the broad sunlit uplands of science. We're going to trust the science in this house and so on. And then somewhere between COVID and Trump returning and the rise of AI and various other unsettling things, I think the left started to feel like they were missing something. Did you watch the last Knives Out movie? I did. Right. So the prior Knives Out movie was a movie about how Elon Musk and billionaires are bad and evil.

54:30Ross Douthat:And this the latest Knives Out movie was a movie about how there are really awful forms of religion and there's also really good forms of religion. And we should want the really good forms to survive. and you know it's just just one movie but i thought it was an interesting sort of you could sense of like a kind of a kind of like groping around in liberal culture for sort of some kind of religious or spiritual point of connection that again i think also shows up in just kind of post-christian spirituality interest in sort of new age pagan stuff all that stuff too There's just a lot of there's a lot of groping.

55:15Well, I think you can see a couple of things happening that are at least interesting. So I agree. Knives out is one of them. We were talking about the Odyssey. We have James Tallarico, who became a kind of phenom candidate, sort of one of the only like mainstream liberal candidates who's been like a big attentional phenom of the moment. And does it by wrapping a pretty straightforward progressive politics in a very, very moralistically Christian framework? What would Jesus do about a justice system that incarcerates more people than any other country on the face of the earth? And what would Jesus do about an economic system that prioritizes profits over the health of our planet?

56:01Ross Douthat:Would he stay in his room and pray? or would he walk into the seat of power and flip over the tables of injustice? And I think people have found that exciting. It has given them a way to talk about the moment that I think feels deeper

56:20and it has tapped into something very real. I think if you're watching some of the other people coming up, this would include not just Ralph L. Warnock, but John Ossoff in Georgia. They're much more comfortable in that grammar as well. They got together, the Speaker of the House, held hands with other legislators, prayed a prayer, and then they went and cut a trillion dollars out of Medicaid. 15 million people off of their health care. They kicked veterans and seniors and children off of SNAP. And I don't understand how you read the book that I read. I'm a Matthew 25 Christian. A government transformed into a tool of one man's vengeance and enrichment.

57:08A spiritually broken president. Who digs the moral pit deeper and deeper. But Pastor Proverbs says, whoever digs a pit.

57:29Whoever digs a pit will fall into it.

57:36Ross Douthat:And scripture is full of kings brought low by their own arrogance. So in my view, something is happening. It's not necessarily the left is becoming believers in a new way, but there is a desire to sort of reconnect, I think, to traditions. Well, I mean, there was a way in which from my perspective as a skeptical outsider, the whole great awokening was this fascinating attempt to do religious energy without metaphysical commitment. Like it was it really was the case that there was kind of the energy that you associate with a moralistic revival at work in anti-racism and, you know, everything associated with that.

58:21Ross Douthat:Like you have iconoclasm, you have, you know, people enforcing new moral norms. Like these are things that we associate with periods of spiritual ferment. But quite self-consciously, like the anti-racist cause was detached from the black church in various ways. Right. And you had like our again, my former Atlantic colleague, Ta-Nehisi Coates, you know, as a kind of prophet who very explicitly rejected cosmic hope. right if anything sort of carried a kind of cosmic despair around with him i think that combination doesn't work well right you end up with a kind of a kind of politics of guilt without the possibility of redemption is a pretty dark perspective on the world and i think sort of wokeness for all its revolutionary zeal ends up itself just in some dark places again independent of what's happening with trump or on the right or anything else so some of it might be just a reaction to that too right a sense that like okay we can't moralize at people if we're also telling them that the universe is sort of empty and meaningless except for like the meaning we impose on it through ideological categories or something like you need if you're going to have progressive moralism you need to be able to claim to that it corresponds to something like out there in the cosmos that's real right i don't totally agree with that um maybe one one way to to to ground that disagreement is Pope Leo's AI encyclical.

59:49One of the things that struck me reading it was without agreeing with his metaphysics, right? I am not a Catholic. My vision of the world and its cosmology is not Catholic. I found it to be a really beautiful and moving articulation of what I would otherwise describe as liberal values, all the way down to ways of practicing politics, you know, approaches to pluralism, approaches to the human being. So now you could say, and I think this would be true, I mean, I come out of Jewish tradition and I probably have a lot of that in the way I look at the world. But I do think there is something about the emphasis there on a certain kind of human dignity and a certain kind of treatment between people that Trump has thrown into a kind of relief.

1:00:40So maybe it looks more explicitly connected to a politics I am interested in and trying to create than it would have if he had written the same thing. But Jeb Bush was president.

1:00:51Ross Douthat:Yes, maybe at this point, we have sort of moved through the Trump era to a point where liberals are saying like, OK, Trump is so corrupt and such a rotten person in all these ways. And so what if we counterpose a kind of beautiful politics of human dignity against him? But that's after trying for many years to say, and again, not you personally, maybe, but some people, right, saying Trump is rotten and corrupt and his rottenness and corruption reveals the dark racist heart of America. and the fact that we're all still in thrall to Confederate patriarchal values. And what we need is, you know, a sort of total moral reckoning with all the deep, profound evils of the United States.

1:01:39Ross Douthat:Like those are different messages. And I think the left kind of ran with the second message for a while. And again, I think ended up in some cul-de-sacs and dark places. And so now it's like, OK, now maybe we'll maybe we like that Pope Leo is linking his critique of AI to a vision of human dignity rather than a dark, just a purely dark vision where you're like, AI is bad because it is controlled by, you know, evil, evil, ruthless tech bros or something. I don't know. Or AI is bad because it's part of the horrifying structures of capitalism, which are a nightmare from which we're struggling to await.

1:02:26So I want to go back to a question I asked you a bit ago. I'd asked you what being the sort of conservative in many liberal institutions had taught you about liberals sort of answered that, but I think over time we've gotten closer on that. I don't know if I did answer that. But what about the media, right? You've been inside the media for a long time. What has it made you think about what the media does well, what it does

1:02:47Ross Douthat:poorly. When I was coming up, right, the media had its kind of self-conception where it was like, we're just telling you the truth about the world. That's it. We're just reporting the truth. And we're not partisan. And we won't even tell you if we voted for Republicans and Democrats, we're just in the truth business. And then people in our cohort came along and challenged that, right? And obviously the right had been challenging it for a long time. parts of the far left, Noam Chomsky and so on, had always had this critique. But the internet helped make those critiques much more powerful. And there was just a sense that, okay, we, you know, are moving into a landscape that is more opinion driven, as you said earlier, where we're going to acknowledge biases, we're going to accept that the New York Times seems to have a pretty liberal audience, right?

1:03:34Ross Douthat:And a lot of liberals work for it. Like we're not, you know, it's not just a view from nowhere. And Fox News is going to make, you know, it's going to be explicitly conservative and that like a future where the American media looks, you know, looks a bit more like the British newspaper business did where you have like, you know, you know that the Guardian is the liberal newspaper and, you know, the Telegraph is a more conservative newspaper that like that was sort of where America was going to go. And it was okay, right? It was, it was okay to have sort of competing media institutions that sort of own their biases in various ways.

1:04:10Ross Douthat:But, you know, we've lived in that kind of world, I think, for a while now. I don't know, the Trump era, the AI era, the COVID era, and so on, I feel like they have really undermined my own sense of sort of knowing who I think the good guys and bad guys are in any particular circumstance. And the less you feel certain about knowing who the good guys and bad guys are, the more you feel the benefit of just setting out every day to just try and describe the world and maybe become less of a persuader. I feel like I write maybe more columns like that these days. As the world gets weirder, journalism needs people and institutions that sort of refocus on just saying, we're trying to figure out what's happening here.

1:05:14Ross Douthat:Because I'm struggling to figure out exactly what's happening in a way that I don't think I was when Mitt Romney and Barack Obama were running against each other. And maybe this leads to like, you know, you wanted to ask me about going to 60 Minutes. Which is the first place you have worked in media. The Atlantic is a magazine that is opinionated at its core. It's launched initially as an abolitionist magazine. You worked on the Times opinion page. 60 Minutes is different, although it's under now Barry Weiss's management, your former colleague here. I never overlapped with Weiss here. But is that, you know, I'll ask the question straight.

1:05:54Is that part of why you're going to 60 Minutes?

1:05:55Ross Douthat:I think that so I have you have been doing interview podcasts for a long time. I've only been doing it for, you know, less less than two years. But presumably presumably I'm going to be doing a lot of interviewing. Right. That's my hope. And I find interviewing. I don't know how you find interviewing. I find it very difficult relative to writing. Writing just comes easier and more naturally to me than interviewing does. but I have found interviewing just very helpful at a moment when like what is actually going on in the world seems more opaque to me and so yeah one one reason to take a job at 60 minutes is just an opportunity to sort of do more of that for for a somewhat different audience than than the times has although of course there's overlap but um yeah this is sort of and this is yeah this seems Seems like a good time to ask questions a little bit in an open-ended way.

1:06:56Ross Douthat:And that's, I guess, you know, that's what we've both been doing with our shows, but that's sort of what I'm thinking I'll be doing there. Obviously, you're talking here in the way you often do to an audience that is more liberal than you. In spite of reading my columns all these years, Ezra, my work of persuasion. concerned about what they think Barry Weiss wants to do with 60 Minutes, what it means that you're one of the first big name hires there. What did they say they wanted? What is your sense of what 60 Minutes is trying to become? You know, with you launching with you as a marquee name.

1:07:30Ross Douthat:You would need to get Barry to come on your podcast, right, to get sort of her answer to that question. Again, I see what I want to do at 60 Minutes in the show itself, I think is in keeping with what the show has always done incredibly well, which is, yeah, help people understand what's really happening in the world and get sort of an accurate sense of reality itself through interviews, investigations, and so on. That's sort of, I think, if you had Barry here, she would say that is her formal goal, that lots and lots of media institutions have lost the trust of people who aren't politically liberal or progressive.

1:08:13And so there's a way to sort of try and have a more balanced view of the

1:08:17Ross Douthat:world and try and get those people back. My own primary sense of what 60 Minutes can do is more just capture the full messy reality of the world in 2026. And if you get that right, than exactly how many Republicans versus Democrats you're reaching is like, you know, that will sort of follow from success at the basic project of describing the world. You mentioned a minute ago, the other big change in this, which is you're moving from writing to on-camera interviewing, which you've already done a bit with Interesting Times, your podcast. This is another big shift from when you and I started, which is there is a lot of movement now towards video.

1:09:03There's a lot of people who talk about a return to more orality and culture. But is that part of it for you? I mean, do you have the sense that the center of what journalism is, the way people understand the world, is moving away from the written word?

1:09:24Ross Douthat:Yes. I think there's clearly some way in which internet conditions, digital conditions and whatever the hell is going to happen with AI are sort of weakening the hold of the written word. I've certainly kept writing while doing my show at the Times, and I intend to find ways to keep writing while I'm working for CBS. So that part of journalism is very important to me. But yeah, people, like it's not only podcasts and audio, right? Like in, you know, If you look at like what people engage with at the New York Times, they also engage with written dialogues. Like they love the feature that our colleagues, Brett Stevens and Gail Collins or David Brooks and Gail Collins did of sort of a conversation back and forth.

1:10:12Ross Douthat:They really like the features that my longtime editor, John Guida, does where he'll sort of interview someone in a written form where you're writing and people are writing, writing in response. The transcripts of our shows. Yeah. And some of it, I think, is that people want to see the person underneath the writing. And maybe this becomes more the case in the age of AI. Tyler Cowen, who, you know, you know his work well. One of his arguments about AI is that it basically is just going to increase the premium for, for instance, live performance, right? For the ability to speak in public and engage with questions and all these kind of human things will go up as AI can generate more writing.

1:10:53Ross Douthat:And I think dialogue and conversation are sort of versions of that, places where sort of writers and thinkers sort of show their own humanities maybe a little bit more than you do in a kind of voice from the mountaintop column. And then, again, maybe this is just me projecting my own perspective onto the world. But I also think people like these things because, like me, they're a little uncertain about what's happening in reality. and the kind of conversational form is a way into the news and what's going on in the world that doesn't require you to sort of accept a single authoritative take and leaves room for uncertainty and ambiguity while also introducing you to perspectives that you might not have considered.

1:11:45Ross Douthat:That's the positive case for it. I can also make the negative case and say that, you know, a world, yeah, where people read less and are less literate has various negative repercussions. I'm not trying to sort of be too Pollyannish about this change. At the very least, it's a real shift, I think. Do you think with the reporting resources of 60 Minutes behind you, you'll finally be able to crack what the UAPs are? Yeah. I mean, look, this is obviously the number one goal. And I've said, if I can't break the UFO story in, I don't want to make any promises, but yes, the subject of UFOs has come up at once or twice, maybe only from my end in conversations about stories that the media should be interested in going forward.

1:12:39You talked here about the sort of messy edges of reality and your sense of not knowing quite, of being less certain than you've been at other times. And I, you know, I bring up the UFO thing, not totally unjust. I think it actually has become an important part of your work. And to me, that and sort of a deeper skepticism of knowing who to trust, of knowing what kind of information to trust has begun to characterize your work. So when you think about navigating the boundaries of a reality whose boundaries seem less certain to you. Like, how do you think about?

1:13:18Ross Douthat:How do I think about journalism? How do I think? So when I thought of the UFO story as just a story about people who have weird experiences in the woods and come back and claim to have been abducted by UFOs, right? Like that story is interesting, but it's not intensely interesting because it's so personalized. It's like analyzing someone's religious experience. It's really interesting to do, but you're not going to get a final decisive answer. If someone describes their religious experience, there's no journalistic trick that can tell you, was that really God or not? But with UFOs, there are concrete claims made about objects that operate in physical reality that are observed by, let's say, Navy aviators.

1:14:04Ross Douthat:And there are other concrete claims about supposed secret programs that the federal government has. And those are questions that journalists should be able to answer. So I'm interested in the UFO story in particular, but also other questions like the debates that we're already having about AI consciousness, these kinds of things. Not because I think they are unknowable, but because I think that they actually do presumably have answers, right? Like maybe the AI consciousness debate will never be resolved or something, but like the question of how dangerous AI is going to be, how transformative AI is going to be, guess what?

1:14:48Ross Douthat:We're going to find out. Like I know people, smart people in Silicon Valley who talk about all human timelines now in terms of like three years, right? They're like, oh, if you don't do it in the next three years, you're not going to do it because the singularity is coming. Now, I'm skeptical of that argument, but we're going to find out right over the next three years whether those kind of singularity believers are right or not. So, yes, I'm interested in zones of uncertainty and questions that sort of don't have immediate and obvious answers and questions that touch on the supernatural or the metaphysical and so on.

1:15:26Ross Douthat:But as a journalist, I'm only interested in them insofar as you can figure out what the hell is going on. Well, I hope you do. Ross, it's been a pleasure working alongside you. It's been a pleasure, Ezra. Reading you for many, many, many years. I'll continue to watch you. I imagine we will encounter one another again after this conversation. In the singularity. And then always our final question. God, I hope not. Even in this post-literate age, what are a few books you'd recommend to the audience? I forgot about the three books question. I have been reading Speak Memory by Vladimir Nabokov, however you want to pronounce it, which is his sort of memoir, mostly of his boyhood as a Russian aristocrat before the Russian Revolution.

1:16:12Ross Douthat:I would recommend that to people who don't want to be post-literate, who want to be very, very literate indeed. I will recommend Julian Jackson's biography of Charles de Gaulle on general principles. I haven't read it recently, but just strong, strong recommend there. And I will finally recommend the most recent book that I read to my children, which is Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island. So those are three solid recommendations, and I'm happy to leave you with them. Ross Duffett, thank you very much. Ezra Klein, thank you.