White Identity Is Galvanizing the Right

21:58and you're going to walk in and give them very substantial advantages because of the color of their skin. And you actually see ADOS, American Descendants of Slaves, complaining about this in the context of, well, like Harvard admissions or something where you have a lot of these African immigrants. But beyond that, I mean, again, if a Hispanic person, again, with no history of slavery here personally or any sort of, you know, they're coming here for opportunity and they walk in and they're automatically advantaged over my kids, yeah, that creates a huge opportunity for resentment. It's one of the real important reasons to get rid of these sorts of programs, in my view.

22:36Ross Douthat:Just to pick up a point you mentioned earlier, you think that there was a sort of transformation or acceleration in anti-white discrimination in the last 10 or 15 years. Is that fair? Yeah, absolutely. What concretely changes in terms of patterns of hiring discrimination, admissions discrimination? What are we talking about? Yeah. Well, so I think, and there was a piece in Compact that got some attention, and I just all of a sudden blanked on its name. I think Jacob Savage, right? It's a piece called The Lost Generation, which is about what look like stark inequities in hiring in what you might call creative class professions, academia, media and elsewhere that are specific to the last 10 years where it suddenly just becomes really, really hard to get an entry level job in Hollywood or media if you're white or if you're a white man.

23:27Ross Douthat:That was the argument. Right. And I think also universities. Right. And he puts a lot of... Hiring for tenure track positions. Right. And for somebody like me, you know, I went Yale, Harvard, Stanford. I did all that stuff. As a white guy, I'm sort of core Gen X. I was born in 1972. There were certain things I had to navigate. There were certain things where even early on I was certainly, you know, I wasn't a beneficiary of affirmative action. But I could still do it. It was a bigger impediment to my career ultimately that I was a right winger than that my skin happened to be white. But I talked to friends of mine who were a decade or a decade and a half younger or certainly any of the 20-somethings who were some of the biggest fans of my book, and that is not the case for them.

24:06It was very, very different. They were really shut out of all of these sorts of formal prestige occupations, effectively, even no matter almost what their view. I mean, I think the interesting thing is that liberal whites, which is a subject of my next book, have become far more left wing over the last decade plus on all of these issues than actually minorities are. It's one of the fascinating elements of this discussion.

24:28Ross Douthat:Yeah, and we're going to come back to that because I want to talk about what white culture actually means in America. I have some questions about that.

25:00I'm the publisher of the New York Times. I oversee our news operations and our business. But I'm also a former reporter who has watched with a lot of alarm as our profession has shrunk and shrunk in recent years. Normally, in these ads, we talk about the importance of subscribing to The Times. I'm here today with a different message. I'm encouraging you to support any news organization that's dedicated to original reporting. If that's your local newspaper, terrific. Local newspapers in particular need your support. If that's another national newspaper, that's great, too. And if it's the New York Times, we'll use that money to send reporters out to find the facts and context that you'll never get from AI.

25:45That's it. Not asking you to click on any link. Just subscribe to a real news organization with real journalists doing firsthand, fact-based reporting. And if you already do, thank you.

26:09Ross Douthat:So that's a story of intensification in anti-white discrimination that then yields the election of Donald Trump. The Trump administration has gone much further than past Republican administrations in rolling back affirmative action, attacking DEI programs. Obviously, this follows on a Supreme Court decision that made certain kinds of affirmative action in higher education presumptively unconstitutional. Do those changes solve the problem that you're describing? Well, again, I think the team at civil rights is doing amazing work right now. They're really pushing the envelope. My hat is off to them because what they're doing is really hard.

26:49And Harmeet has often had to work with, frankly, a kind of legacy base of attorneys with a very left-wing understanding of what civil rights might look like. And so I've just been enormously impressed by what the administration has done in this area. That having been said, if you look at the 2023 Supreme Court case that made this illegal, Asian Americans were chosen as the plaintiffs for that case. There are some reasonable reasons that you might do that facially. The gap between Asian Americans and other groups on their test scores was the most of any group, more than for white Americans and other groups.

27:26Ross Douthat:This is in applications to Harvard and elite institutions generally, right? But I actually don't think that that was the primary reason they did it. I think it was because they knew the savvy plaintiffs' attorneys that boomer white Supreme Court justices were just going to be uncomfortable doing anything that looked like they were advantaging white people. And so they sort of put this more friendly Asian face on this to, like, make it acceptable to them. However, now we have a couple years of admissions data. And what's happened is Asian American percentages have gone up very significantly at these schools.

28:00White percentage, I believe, is actually down a little bit, certainly not up.

28:03Ross Douthat:I have not looked at every single case, but there is variation school to school. Yes. My sense from looking at other elite colleges, though, is that it is, in some of the cases you're describing, a matter of Asian American admissions going up and white admissions staying somewhat flat and black and Latino admissions go down and those black and Latino admissions or matriculation or whatever else go up at state schools. Right. But that suggests the dynamic where if whites are being discriminated against now, it's more in the name of Asian American applicants. Is that your view? I think that in this micro area, I would say yes.

28:42I mean, in fact, one of the things I talk about in the unprotected class is that you have both intentional and unintentional discrimination going on, right, where some of it is very specifically targeted against whites. Although they don't put it that way. It's sort of it's more we're going to be for African-Americans or Hispanics. But functionally, it's the same thing. Asian-Americans end up getting caught up in a lot of that. But there are also some things where it's just like you can't be white to apply for this scholarship and Asians get sort of folded in. So it's different on a case-by-case basis.

29:14Ross Douthat:Is there a way in which, though some of your analysis is kind of the white conservative version of disparate impact analysis, right? Like we started out with you saying it's a big problem that the law says that if you end up with a hiring pool that doesn't look like the population of applicants, that's sort of presumptively considered racial discrimination, at least in some of these cases. But it sometimes seems to me like conservatives are doing a kind of disparate impact analysis for white people. They're saying you can tell that people are discriminating against white people just because of like the mismatch.

29:52But I think the difference is I'm not claiming just because of the mismatch. It's because they have discriminated actively against white people in the immediate past. And they're on the record a million times. They don't even necessarily – it's almost without shame. They effectively say we want to continue to discriminate against white people. I think that's the difference. They don't usually utter that sentence. They don't utter that sentence, but they say, you know, we need to advantage BIPOC, you know, whatever, which means guess who black indigenous people of color for people who are not familiar with the new lingo.

30:22But guess who gets left out of that? Right. So I think the difference is there really is intent. Disparate impact was never designed to. I mean, if you have intent, if you can show that there was intent to discriminate by race, then, you know, disparate impact doesn't figure into it. It's just illegal.

30:37Ross Douthat:But like in the case of like a Hollywood screenwriting shop, right, where you go from a world where there's, you know, five white guys out of 10 to, you know, to zero. There's no like SAT score measurement and so on you can do there, right? I mean, to some degree, it seems like the conservative has to make some version of that argument to say you can tell there's discrimination there just because suddenly there aren't any white guys in the writer's room. Well, I'm not quite sure. I mean, I get what you're saying. I'm not saying there's absolutely zero to it. If I made the strongest possible version of my argument, I might grant you that.

31:12But I think we have all sorts of cases that people have said, yes, I as a white guy was told to take my name off this script that I had written because they didn't want a white screenwriter, right? And I did the work and somebody else got credit. We have enough of those stories to suggest that, like, this is a real thing that is going on. And certainly if you look at, say, the Academy Awards in which – and very few people know this, right? In the last few years, there's all sorts of explicit quotas of racial – not just racial, but all sorts of things that you have to check off. Again, I just – I think that we've got smoking guns here.

31:47It's not just I'm saying, oh, well, the number is different. Right. Okay. So it's wrong.

31:50Ross Douthat:So how does then how does your side of the argument win? Is it just a matter of having Republican administrations with Donald Trump's policies for long enough to investigate and sue enough institutions? What's the path to victory, I guess, from your perspective? Absolutely. So I mean, I think one is legal changes. And we're seeing those again, through Republican administrations. One is a cultural change. And just even being able to talk about this issue. When you used to say anti white discrimination, it was uncomfortable for me. I was talking to Chris Rufo, who's a person who's been very prominent in this, and he was one of the endorsers of my book.

32:26But when I first showed it to him, he sort of puckered a little bit because like, oh, you know, anti-white, you know, can we even say that? And that's just where the culture was. I don't have the Google Engram data yet because it's not updated. But I can tell you that the use of the term since I wrote my book of anti-white discrimination and racism of like politicians and people who will call that out by name has gone up a lot just in So you're raising awareness.

32:51Ross Douthat:You're doing call outs, right? I'm raising awareness. I'm doing call outs. I feel like I've heard this language before. But in the concrete, you need the changes that the Trump administration has made to stick over time. Yeah. So I'd say here's the key thing. You have to go back and look at civil rights law and how it actually ended up winning. And this is where I think, again, it's really important that I'm saying don't throw the baby out with the bathwater as far as civil rights law goes. Because what happened is you have Brown v. Board in 1954, okay? School desegregation doesn't fully happen probably till the late 60s.

33:28And then, of course, you have some informal resegregation that happened since then. But that's another story. What happens in the interim is you get that win at the Supreme Court, and then you had to go sue all the resistors one by one and say, you are going to comply with this. And so right now, that's kind of the phase of the battle that we're in. And so what civil rights needs to do, what right-wing groups need to do, is we need to just sue people who are breaking the law and make that painful for them. And eventually, over time, we're going to bring them into compliance because it's going to be painful for them not to obey the law.

34:01Ross Douthat:You mentioned earlier feeling like you had been, you know, suffered more professionally at times for being right wing than white. Do you feel like you have been discriminated against personally at any point in your career as a white because of your race? Well, I mean, I just think obviously, I mean, I was able to overcome it, obviously, to get into some good schools and opportunities. But just as a point of fact, obviously, I was. I don't know. Just in the sense that like affirmative action and diversity rules discriminated against you when you applied. And then, I mean, this is one of the toxic things, right?

34:31It's actually talk about things that build up in excess of unjustified white resentment. So let's say you've got 100 white guys who apply for something, right? And then it goes to something, a particular minority who, at least on paper, would be less qualified, right? then you're going to be told, you know, hey, we just we couldn't hire you because we had to have X minority in this role. Right. The reality is you might not have gotten that anyway. There might have been 30 white guys who were better than you. And so it's a little bit like handicapped parking spots where people see them empty and you're like, ah, you know, like if there weren't some handicapped person there, I would get it.

35:09No, you know, somebody else would have taken the spot.

35:12Ross Douthat:But I think that's, you know, you mentioned the sort of discomfort with the language of anti-white discrimination. Right. That when people talk about racial discrimination, they associate it with, you know, racial hostility, racial slurs, like racist interpersonal dynamics. Has America become racist against white people in any way that's comparable to, you know, sort of racial slurs against black people or Mexicans or anything else? Well, I talk about this in my entertainment chapter of the book in particular, in which the ways in which I think kind of whiteness, not a phrase I love, but I'm just kind of using it as a placeholder, has been stigmatized in our modern entertainment.

35:52And this can come from everything like Hamilton, which is a work that artistically actually like a lot, but I think can be interrogated racially, to use the left-wing term, to movies like Black Panther. And if you look at some of the racial politics around that, and again, I mean, I just, I have a lot of very specific examples I get into in the book. Now, is that the equivalent of hostility of Jim Crow South in the 1950s? No. But is it there? I do think that whiteness, again, has become culturally disfavored, at least in certain elite circles in recent years.

36:27Ross Douthat:But that doesn't seem like racial hostility. I don't want to go through 16 different examples, right, from popular culture, right? But if you go watch Gone with the Wind and you watch the portrayals of slaves in that movie, they are just racist stereotypes, right? Absolutely. I don't get that vibe watching American pop culture in the current age as regards white people. Well, as I said, I'm not saying, I mean, I just explicitly said, I don't think it's as extreme as it was in the other direction in the, say, early 20th century. On the other hand, and I cite some data from Annenberg, which is actually using it for opposite purposes of how I'm using it.

37:09they kind of look at the demographics of people in every mainstream movie and white people kind of wind up on the short end of the stick. Now, it is a big culture. Kid Rock can still go do his thing, right? Like there's certainly areas in which obviously, obviously Tom Cruise is off being the white fighter pilot hero, right? I'm not saying that doesn't exist, but I think statistically that tendency is still there and, you know, it's okay to call that out.

37:36Ross Douthat:Is there any other area in the culture where you feel like this kind of legal structure of discrimination cashes out in something that is actually like overtly oppressive, like something that would affect your kids, for instance, like in their in everyday life? — Oppressive is a pretty strong word. So I don't know that I would go that far, at least as a generality. But again, you know, as whites become another minority in America, just one of many groups, you could see the pressures pushing in that direction over time. That's not to say it's inevitable. I wrote the book because I don't want that to happen.

38:11I think if we ethnically balkanize around various racial nationalisms, it's going to be a disaster. We've got to recreate a common American culture. And I think that's frankly tricky because we've had massive amounts of immigration without enough time, in my view, to assimilate them into American wars and values. And you've got a lot of people who benefit from creating that division.

38:34Ross Douthat:All right, let's pivot there back to your nomination. To what extent do you think that your prominence and your writings on this subject influence why the Trump administration would offer you a job? Like, would they have preferred that you take a job focused on these areas, do you think? You know, I didn't get into that discussion too deeply with them. And I want to be very, very careful in not misrepresenting the administration or the State Department ever. I've had fans, just as a matter of record, in the White House, in the State Department, at senior levels who really like my work, just in general.

39:06They reached out to me, and another group has subsequently reached out to me after the hearing saying, hey, we would love to have you talk. So, I mean, I have fans in those places. I don't think they wanted me to go in to necessarily, oh, you know, like, go put your agenda vis-a-vis race. I think what they looked at is they said, okay, this guy is not afraid of shaking things up. He's not afraid to take a controversial position and stick to it. He's not afraid to, say, go into a sclerotic UN bureaucracy and say, hey, we need to do things differently. And so, at that met a sense, I think that's why I was potentially an attractive candidate.

39:42It wasn't because my view on X issue was the thing that they were looking to drive. If they were, I think I would have been working in immigration or whatever else.

40:22Ross Douthat:Okay, now I want to talk about two areas where I am skeptical of those controversial views. And I think anyone listening to this conversation can sort of intuit this already from some of my questions. But I guess I would say this just as a sort of brief editorializing interlude. I think the story that you tell is broadly correct, that there was a long period in American life in the aftermath of the civil rights era in which for a variety of reasons, some defensible, some less so, there was a kind of thumb on the scale against white people, maybe especially white men in various aspects of American life.

41:03Ross Douthat:some of that was de facto, some of it was formal. I also think that that soft thumb on the scale became much more intense in the last 10 years. So these are sort of points of broad overlap between our perspective. Where I'm skeptical is twofold. One is about scale and intensity and direness of the problem and the way that conservatives and especially white conservatives should talk about it, the kind of framing that they should use. And the other related is about like how white people and white conservatives should think about white identity, like their sense of their own identity, how they label themselves.

41:42Ross Douthat:So let's just start with the question of scale. And again, you've said you're a controversialist, right? But, you know, what came up at the Senate hearing and what, you know, sort of circulated on the internet was not just statements about the problems of disparate impact. It is phrases like cultural genocide. You gave a speech to the National Conservatism Conference in July of 2024 entitled, The Persecution of Whites in America. And one of the things you said was, American whites are victims of a cultural genocide. A cultural genocide. Where to start? Using language about replacement and the great replacement in tweets that were deleted, but I assume that they were actually your tweets.

42:29Ross Douthat:And I'll just give one more. Automatically deleted, by the way. I've always just deleted my tweets quarterly for years, had nothing to do with trying to hide anything. Okay. But just to take, you know, one of the fuller quotes, this was something you wrote after a jury convicted January 6th rioters. You said, I would rather be a black man on trial for the assault of a white man in 1930s rural Mississippi than I would be a right winger in D.C. today on trial for political crimes. I would note that even if you think that those trials were show trials and totally unfair to January 6th defendants, no one was, to my knowledge, lynched in that context.

43:09Ross Douthat:No one was executed and so on. Right. These are sort of. Can I address that particular one? We could get into it. And it's totally fair of you to bring up specifics. And a lot of things truly were taken out of context. A few were just my bad, right? They were idiocies. But for example, let's take the one on the Jim Crow one. That was definitely a statement of provocation. Now, obviously, I'm not equating in any real sense that there were some very serious miscarriages of justice. I mean, I'm using Jim Crow because it's provocative. Everybody agrees it was a horrible thing. But that's kind of in my role as a provocateur.

43:48That's the sort of thing I'm talking about. And, you know.

43:51Ross Douthat:Can you offer a similar explanation for why you would use a term like cultural genocide? Yeah. Because that's, again, a phrase that circulates widely on the internet, not just from you, but it's associated with some pretty far-right perspectives on the world. So I'll give you, again, I'm thrilled that you asked this because I've used it twice. I don't know if you're thrilled, but you're okay that I've asked it. It's great because I can show how totally disingenuous my critics have been. So the particular case that was brought up at the Senate hearing, where I'd said this at a conference, I specifically say, I'm mostly just kind of saying this, I literally say, to troll the libs.

44:28And in fact, I realized, as I was saying, well, persecution, that's kind of edgy, that in my book, I actually talk about something even perhaps more extreme, American whites as being victims of a cultural genocide. And I'm suggesting this partially, again, to troll any leftist media who might be in the room. So I was immediately taking some genuine ironic distance. I don't actually think that we are in a cultural genocide per se. However, and I talk about this in my book, Raphael Lemkin, who's the Polish Jewish lawyer who invents the term genocide and gets it recognized at the UN, had a concept of cultural genocide.

45:06But he talks about the takeover of the education system, the destruction of monuments and cultural symbols, goes on up and down the list. And a lot of those things you can point to and say, hey, a lot of this is happening at a slow motion way, which is what I talk about in my book, for white Americans today. I'm trying to kind of push people like, wow, you know, like think about this just a little bit, you know, and see how this matches up with typology of cultural genocide that was used. So I don't think that we're there yet, but I see some disquieting things going on that may be concerned about our trajectory.

45:42Ross Douthat:And just to be concrete, like you mean, you know, dismantling monuments, not just to Confederate generals, but to founding fathers. Absolutely. Like that kind of thing. Absolutely. Yeah. So this is where I'm curious what you think about this in the context of actual right wing politics in the age of Trump. Yeah. Right. Where it just seems to me that a lot of what the Trump administration, not just what they have done, but sort of the language around it, the intensity, the kind of like, you know, no enemies to the right and relatively few friends in the center mode that they've sometimes embraced reflects just this kind of extreme pessimism.

46:20Ross Douthat:Like I use the term black pill, but it just seems like there are a lot of people on the right, maybe especially young people, right, who aren't using, you know, cultural genocide just to troll the libs. Right. When they say the great replacement, they don't mean like what you were talking about earlier, the anxieties of a historically dominant majority in a diversifying country. They mean like evil elites are trying to replace us with with immigrants in this conscious scheme. Right. Like, right. There's a lot of that on the right. I believe the last thing, not evil elites, but I believe it's the conscious policy of the Democratic Party to hyper diversify the country because they perceive and we'll see whether it actually works out for them.

47:06The Hispanic vote suggests that maybe it won't.

47:08Ross Douthat:But see, that's an example. You said we'll see if it works out for them. Right. To me, yes, clearly there has been a period in Democratic Party politics where the party decided that more immigration would lead to more Democratic votes. Correct. And that was good for them. So that's what I'm saying. But that isn't actually one. One, I think that that is understandable as a sort of normal part of ethnic patronage politics, which is part of the American tradition, which you can be against. But I'm against it. But it's not like five guys, you know, sitting in a room saying we hate white people. No.

47:43Ross Douthat:And we only want Hispanics now. One. Two, it seems like the evidence of Donald Trump himself is that in the American context, this is just not how politics works. Like you end up getting a lot of Hispanics who vote for Trump because people assimilate. Right. Right. Like, shouldn't there be a little more, I guess, just sort of fundamental optimism about like where things are going than the kind of language you're using would suggest? Well, again, if you read the end of my book and I know, you know, God bless you. You've got a million things to do. I've read every single word of your book, Jeremy, and don't test me on it.

48:19Ross Douthat:But I know I am like it. It ends on a very optimistic tone. Right. But books, there's books. Right. And then there's Internet persona. Sure. And there are plenty of people on the right who have a tone in their books and then a tone on social media. But the tone on social media is a dominant tone in our culture, maybe more important than the tone on books. It just seems like the things that Democrats have plucked out and critiqued in your writings are things that are pervasive on the right, styles of speaking. Yeah, I mean, there are a few things that they dug out in their intellectual proctological exam of everything I've ever tweeted or written or said on a podcast that I was really like, you know, shouldn't have said that.

49:00My bad. It does happen. So I'm not, you know, without getting into each individual utterance, right? Like I'm not going to certainly defend everything I've said. I would also say that, frankly, as a result of this process, I have become more aware of even though I consider tweets to be a lot less important than books and articles. They're pretty important, Jeremy.

49:19Ross Douthat:I hate to tell you this. Yeah, well, so, you know, like lesson learned, right, at least in the discourse. Having said that, I want to come back to something you said earlier because I think it is important and maybe a little bit of a different point of difference for us. I actually view Trump as one of the main engines of de-radicalization, particularly of youth, because I think there were a lot of these folks, and I knew them. You were probably in group chats maybe or talked to them or whatever, maybe not. I don't know what you mean. with sort of these people who were very radicalized and blackpilled, for lack of a better term, under the previous administrations.

49:54And they sort of despaired that they could have any effect on the system at all. And then Trump has come in and just done things like do correct civil rights law, from my view, and do other things. And now these people are saying, oh, I don't need to come into some weird, esoteric, right-wing, pagan ethno-nationalism. I can just be a normal person and advocate for things I believe. So I think that's something that Trump has actually really been attacked for that I think is the opposite is true. The young people, I think, who have some of these more out there views, they're just marginal politically.

50:26Like, I don't know anybody. And I know a few people, right, like who is in an actual what I would consider a serious position of responsibility in government who I'm like, wow, you know, that person's views are just from my perspective, like way, way dangerous and outside of any sort of American mainstream. obviously some of your liberal listeners will disagree with where i'm drawing that boundary

50:46Ross Douthat:they might yes i think i think i don't know yeah i don't know i don't fully agree with that i guess i agree with you that trump himself is substantially less radical than important parts of the online right and i definitely agree with you that trump's victory had a partially de-radicalizing effect on some people. At the same time, I think there are people, we'll take an example, very concrete example, Elon Musk. Elon Musk is not in the administration right now, held a very important administration job. I read Elon Musk's tweets about issues that you're writing about race, anti-white discrimination.

51:26Ross Douthat:He clearly thinks the United States is in a kind of South African position where there is going to be this white minority on a very rapid time horizon in a state governed by non-whites, that this is the future. So one, that's a radical perspective. Two, I just think it's obviously wrong. Whatever is going to happen to the United States is not going to be what's happened in South Africa. Could not agree more, by the way. Okay, good. So tell me more about that. Our bad case is not South Africa. No, we are not going to wind up in a South Africa type situation. And I think that it is wrong and foolish to suggest that we are.

52:06Ross Douthat:Okay, good. So that brings me to my second question for your argument, right? Which is, just as a matter of political engagement or sort of self-identification, does it make sense for white conservatives, white people generally, to just think of their own identity in those terms, right? To think about white culture, for instance, another thing you were asked about in your hearing, as something that they should be attached to or associated with. You have made several statements about your worry regarding the erasure of white culture in America. In terms of broader engagement with American politics or American culture, is there anything productive in thinking about your own whiteness in those terms?

52:51Yeah, I mean, again, contrary to what was thrown at me in the Senate, I mean, I don't think I've ever used the term white culture maybe like once or twice in a million words plus of interviews. It's not that I think it's invalid. And in fact, the only good thing that came out of the hearing was there was sort of an interesting discussion from guys like Eric Kaufman, who's a very interesting scholar of race and ethnicity, who reviewed my book positively on like, do we have a white culture? Is it being discriminated against? It's not a term that I prefer. I prefer to talk, as I said at the hearing, about our common American culture, which is derived from European cultures, but it's not European and nor is it exclusively racial to white people.

53:28I think that's just a better way of looking at the problem. I would say beyond that, that the reason why you have to talk about it, it's a little bit of a bifurcated thing. And I think about this with my own kids. I sort of tell them it's like, look, you need to understand that this is out there. At the same time, you cannot use it as an excuse because it'll just destroy you. That discrimination is out there, but you can't use it as an excuse. You can't use it. You've got to sort of have a bifurcated consciousness almost where you're working against this at some level to the extent you can, but you've got to still be responsible for your own life and making your own life good.

54:01You cannot get into a victim mentality. It's just it's very toxic and self-destructive for your own totally selfish reasons. You just shouldn't do it. But having said that, right, like I have made my opinion. I've said it not once. I've said it 100 times. I'll say it 101 times here. I'm a civic nationalist. I'm not an ethnic nationalist or certainly not a racial nationalist of any type. However, I am not willing to let every other group, racial group, play racial politics and white people to sit there and be victimized by that. Let's try to focus on what unifies us as Americans and let's slow down immigration so that we can kind of reconstitute whatever our new common identity as a country is going to be and go from there.

54:44That's the way that I think is going to do that. But I'm not – I've done enough real politics that I don't think that that comes from just saying, oh, pretty, please, stop. You know, we need to show that there are going to be actual consequences for people who are discriminating against whites in America.

54:57Ross Douthat:But isn't there then, isn't there at least a certain limitation on that kind of organization imposed by the reality that white people as a category is, I mean, look, all these categories are insanely diverse, right? Right. Right. Of course. White liberals have become more radicalized on racial issues. You can see this in the polling data. Right. But what that means to me. Right. Is that there just is sort of an inherent dead end, a kind of absurdity to certain forms of white culture that I think was honestly reflected in some of the back and forth in your interview. Like, you know, again, I'm from New England.

55:35Ross Douthat:I go to Maine in the summer, just to be clear. Right. I'm not on not on a yacht. I'm not a Kennebunk port. I'm near my lobster fisherman cousins mostly. But Maine is one of the whitest states in the union. It is also an extremely progressive environment. Not the whole state. State is divided. There's white working class voters. Downstate is more progressive. Downstate is it's progressive. And that's white culture, right? Right. If there is any white culture, isn't that white culture? Well, I agree. And this is why I don't use the term, right? I mean, again, it was pinned on me at the Senate hearing.

56:12but I do think that there's some validity in it. I mean, that's kind of where I wound up in reading the subsequent internet debate, but it's not the best term. Right, there was, well, and there was, yeah. And it's not the term that I use.

56:22Ross Douthat:Because in that internet debate, there really were a bunch of people, not all, you know, in the furthest reaches of the right, who wanted to come out and sort of defend the notion that, okay, you know, historic American culture, we should describe this as white culture. And again, I followed the ins and outs of that debate. It definitely reflected, I think, yeah, a real sort of impulse on the right to respond to anti-white discrimination with a kind of more self-conscious white identity politics. Yeah. I mean, what I'm interested in most is like stopping the formal discrimination. That's what I want to stop.

56:59After that, it gets much messier. I mean, again, the book I'm working on right now has got the working title, What's the Matter with Minnesota? And I chose that a year ago, by the way. Listeners just like you will recognize that as an allusion to Thomas Frank's book, What's the Matter with Kansas? But what I'm essentially doing is looking at white liberals and white leftists and why, from my view, they've gone so insane and what the consequences are for the country. Because I really do think that they are in many ways the biggest impediment right now to coming to a more sane kind of truce on a lot of these issues.

57:33And they're not showing a lot of signs to me of putting the woke away, as they say.

57:38Ross Douthat:But there is, I think, at least some tension in the argument you're making, just in the sense that if that is reality, right, if a big part of what whiteness in America means is liberal, progressive, far-left politics, right, then guess what? You, as a white conservative, are stuck with a landscape in which your politics, your perspective, can only be instantiated if, you know, you've got a bunch of non-whites on your side. So there's a version of Jeremy Carl who would say, good news, the American culture of the 1950s, baseball, hot dogs and so on, it encompasses minorities and united this, you know, multiracial conservatism, which is just Americanism, can defeat or hold back progressivism.

58:29Ross Douthat:But at the same time, there's also a part of your argument that is extremely solicitous towards conservative white Americans for whom what they're freaked out about isn't white libs in Minnesota, white liberals in Maine, but, you know, people whose skin color is different, people whose cultures are different and so on. Can you reconcile those two views? I think you can. But, of course, it's inherently messy. And I should mention, I mean, of the young people, certainly like young white men have been huge fans of the book, but I've had tons of young minority folks come up to me and say, yes, we see the same thing.

59:04It's a problem. And, you know, we're glad that you're speaking up about it. So I actually do think this is very optimistic element. At the same time, I absolutely do have sympathy to this notion that we're changing too quickly. I've called for a net zero immigration. I'm not running away from that or apologizing for it. I think we need a long pause to reconstitute what this country is, what our new identity is going to be. The Democrats are obviously totally opposed to that in every way. And, you know, we have just a fundamental impasse. But I absolutely think that we need to have, ultimately, if we're going to succeed, a multi-ethnic coalition around American identity.

59:41And that's just going to have to happen.

59:44Ross Douthat:Is it OK if the deal that is offered to white people by that coalition is to say, number one, we are going to reduce the burden of legal discrimination that you favor? But number two, you need to not throw around terms like heritage American and be a little more chill about the realities of ethnic diversity that aren't going away? I think some element of that is going to have to be the truce that we're going to work out, hopefully. I mean, but to see that, we have to beat the left version because I think the left version is just incompatible with a peaceful civilization. I mean, it's not it's just an empirical judgment on my part.

1:00:20I'm not making a moral judgment. I just don't think that what the left wants to do is going to lead to anything other than incredible amounts of racial strife and anger and societal dislocation. So I just – what I'm hoping is a group of us beat that vision and then we're going to have to negotiate exactly along the lines of what you're saying. And I certainly do tell, especially some younger people who I see getting a little bit out of line, I'll say like – Here and there. Here and there. I'll say like – they don't always listen. But I say this is not a productive way to talk about these issues either publicly or privately.

1:00:59And I think that it is going to be that negotiation. But I think the good news is, like, that's what's going to win. I mean, either the country is going to lose as a whole or some version of what you're just talking about is going to win. Because we're not going back to the 1950s. We're going to have to reconstitute. There's a ton of patriotic people I know of every possible ethnic background who want to make that happen. And that's going to be, I hope, the negotiation for our future polity, what it's going to look like.

1:01:27Ross Douthat:Last question, then. It is the 2050s or the 2070s, you know, some future point where we have kind of achieved a greater consensus than we have now. We have a kind of restored sense of American identity that's different from the 1950s but has commonalities. What does that look like? Because we've talked a lot about American identity as distinct from white identity or racial identity. What are just like the four pillars, the non-negotiables of Americanness that you would want to see endure? So I think freedom, but within a sense of community. I mean, not sort of being out there as a libertine all by yourself, but kind of the combination of those two things.

1:02:12I think America's directness has always been a great boon. I would love to see a religious sense return much more to the mainstream of American culture. I think that that's incredibly important. And I think just a sense of patriotism. I think that the American experiment is an incredible, unique experiment. I am not just a creedal American, but I think that what we've accomplished here is incredibly unique and we should be proud of that. I want every American to be proud of that. I want us to preserve it.

1:02:43Ross Douthat:All right. Jeremy Carl, thank you for joining me. Thanks so much, Ross. A pleasure to talk to you.

1:03:11Ross Douthat:Interesting Times is produced by Sofia Alvarez Boyd, Victoria Chamberlain, and Emily Holsneck. Jordana Hochman is our executive producer and editor. Original music by Isaac Jones, Sonia Herrero, Amin Sahota, and Pat McCusker Mixing by Pat McCusker Audience strategy and operations by Shannon Busta, Christina Samulewski, Andrea Batanzos, and Emma Kelbeck Special thanks to Jonah Kessel, Alison Brusik, Marina King, Jan Kobel, and Mike Puretz And our director of opinion shows is Annie Rose Strasser Thank you.