Why Has Comedy Become So Right-Wing?

24:56I was there with my elder daughter, who much missed, and she was in the audience. And Mara had a whole bit where he was just railing on young people. And what was going on here was not just a rebellion against the wokest school. It was also something, as you say, what happens when you get older. And it's not a universal rule, because I find as I get older, and I'm a pretty materially comfortable person, and I don't like paying taxes. I do it, but I don't love it. As you get old, you also can become more sympathetic to the struggles of the young. As you get more distant from, who are you? What are you going to do on this earth?

25:33Who are you going to do it with? All those problems that you, one hopes, have settled in your life by the time you're in your 50s and 60s, you then have a little bit more scope for compassion for those who are not settled in these situations in their 20s. It's very hard not to know who you are and what you're doing and who you're going to do it with. you can go in that way too but there seemed to be sort of a mood of not going that way of being contemptuous and disdainful and i mean sometimes the young are like anybody else or i mean as we we had a big story in the atlantic but how the young in america are much more anti-semitic uh than the people over 60 that's not good but sometimes they also are telling you about new things that you need to know about whether you like it or not and it's worth listening yeah i I think you capture exactly the debate and where it is.

26:17And so you have to be very careful about picking apart what the different currents are. I do think it is probably true to say that the people who are most likely to be offended, you know, when I kind of came up, one of the big things that happened here was Jerry Springer, the musical. And the people who were protesting against that were essentially fundamentalist Christians. And then I think now when I think of stuff getting protested, actually, it's probably more likely to get protested by radical trans activists, for example, who think that perhaps you shouldn't have a cisgender actor playing a trans character or whatever it might be.

26:53And so there is a kind of, that's the feeling of balance that I think comes to the arts. You know, you had the rise of sensitivity readers, where essentially a kind of professional class of witch finders, who were all one person designated to be the representative of an entire swath of a minority group, came in and ruled on what language was acceptable and what wasn't. You had the rise of this kind of own voices in young adult literature, which was the idea that nobody really should write stories about people who weren't like them. And so I do think there was a movement where lots of artists found that their creative freedom was being impinged upon.

27:25And now maybe some of that, like you say, some of that was justified. It wasn't particularly great for American comedy when Saturday Night Live was only written by white men who'd been to three universities, right? It's actually benefited enormously from expanding the pool of its talent. but with that did came a kind of what people experience as a kind of finger-wagging censoriousness undoubtedly so and one of the things to go back to Riyadh that really struck me was that a number of people who were there taking the Saudi money were kind of the council comedians so Dave Chappelle being a really obvious example somebody who had you know a little protest outside Netflix because of of his special Kevin Hart who was ditched from hosting the Oscars because of past homophobic comments, as is Ansari, who went on one very bad date and got Me Too'd in a way that I think, you know, almost everybody now acknowledges was a massive overreaction to what actually happened, or as described by both people in that situation.

28:22So I think there was a kind of, you know, people felt that they'd been kind of exiled, and there was no way back. And actually, what was waiting for them was the warm embrace of a whole new ecosystem, particularly through YouTube, even Rumble, that was going to make them very, very, very good money. And they didn't need to ask Lorne Michaels or whoever it was for permission to be a comedian anymore. Well, we all prefer applause to criticism. That's huge. And we tend to feel more warmly toward people who applaud us than to people who don't. And that's understandable. And we can also, if we're not careful, become more like the people who are applauding us.

29:00So if the people who are applauding us are very anti-vaccine, if they are just asking questions about World War II, then we find ourselves being drawn, as some comedians have been, into the anti-vaccine crackpot world, or in some cases, outright Nazi apologetics or worse, I mean, outright pro-Naziism. And that is something that you see too in a kind of the, there's this conveyor belt from anti-woke to outright demented crazy. Yeah. And I think it was a really good example of that. What you're describing is this feeling like if people are telling you not to do something, that that itself is a reason to do it.

29:36I think that became a really toxic and poisonous thing, as is the idea that if everybody's against you and the establishment is against you, you are by default Galileo. And again, both of those are very intensely narcissistic things because they're all about putting you at the center of this. So I think what happened during COVID, again, that's kind of important to this story too, because some of the things that were Americans and British people too were being told actually didn't have a great deal of scientific reckoning behind them. They were the best guess at the time, but people experienced them as very illiberal.

30:08And that tipped over into sometimes just like actual quack stuff. But it was this kind of valorization of, as you say, that they call it jacking off, just asking questions. Well, let me just say something about Galileo. So the reason Galileo is Galileo was he was the greatest astronomer of his time. And the repressive apparatus of the church for its own reasons said, we want you to recant some of your theories. But what if Galileo were not the greatest astronomer of his time? What if he were just some guy? And all the astronomers were saying, you're out of your mind. Then it would be a different, then you're just a crank.

30:40Like it's one thing to say, I'm going to defy the government or the church on vaccines. when you say i'm going to defy everyone who knows anything about vaccines on vaccines yeah you're not a brave truth teller i mean you're somewhere on the spectrum between an antisocial menace and just a crackpot crazy person yeah i probably don't know what you're talking about you can't pass the exam in grade 10 biology and you're telling the head of the national institutes of health that he's wrong yeah yeah i mean i have a whole chapter on this in the uh in the genius myth, which you might have noticed I'm subtly advertising behind me, but in exactly this point, which is, there's a great quote from Hans Isaac about Isaac Newton.

31:20People often fancy themselves, you know, the Isaac Newton of science, and they actually find themselves the Isaac Newton of alchemy. Even very smart people do make these catastrophic errors, you know, and they have a saying in the social sciences, when you hear hoofbeats, think horses, not zebras. But that mythology that like, I am John Proctor, I'm Galileo, you know, saying still it moves. I am Ignace Semmelweis, the guy who, you know, believed in germ theory of disease and got laughed at, is so potent for a class of people who already had fairly large egos, have been through some kind of rejection or trauma by what they see as the liberal establishment.

31:56And then if you're now presented with a chance to say, you know, maybe they're all wrong and I'm the only one who's right. I think that is why so many of them went bananas during COVID. Do you follow comedians under the age of 40, the next generation? Can you make any comments about the future trends? One of the things that's really interesting is obviously the move from, sadly, well, I mean, you're embracing the brave new video world, but some of us are still very text-based. And the move from consuming text-based content on the internet to video, you know, is one of the most profound shifts of this kind of current decade we're living through.

32:29Comedy is very well placed to take care of that. So I'm going to butcher both their names, but Vittorio Angeloni, who's an Irish comedian, has become very popular through that short form video. In the US, there's a guy called Gianmarco Cerezi, who posts lots and lots of stuff online. He's incredibly popular. And the thing that's interesting about them is that they're both under 40, I think. I wouldn't classify them as either kind of woke or anti-woke comedians. They are people who are of the generation where this argument has sort of already happened for them, right? They know that Donald Trump is a menace and that's kind of taken for granted, but they also know that the kind of people who make you sit in a pronoun circle are very annoying.

33:09One of the reasons I like comedy is that it is a way of testing where people actually are. And so I don't know if you do this when you write a long feature. When I write a long feature, I always try and have one word in my mind that is the kind of uniting theme. And for Riyadh, that theme was complicity. Because when you laugh at something, you're complicit with it. If someone tells a racist joke and you laugh at it, you have signaled that that's okay, right? An anti-Semitic joke. You've laughed, you know, like the comedian has brought you into a communion with them. And then I felt the same thing about, you know, taking money from Mohammed bin Salman to kind of whitewash the reputation of his country.

33:44It's also its complicity. And that's why, you know, comedy poses these quite big ethical questions. And there's also a really good test of whether or not it's any good in a way that there isn't, you know, theater. Maybe you can rate how many people have fallen asleep by the end. But a comedian is either funny or not. And so they're either in tune with the mood of their audience at that particular time. And it dates so incredibly quickly that it's always kind of contemporary and energetic. You help me understand why I don't love it so much. I don't like the idea of being in a big hall with people and someone says something and you say, that's the signal you're all to laugh.

34:18Everybody here laugh. And I was like, you're all laughing. And maybe I'm now guilty of the same thing, the anti-woke people. I need to take my time on this and think it over. I'll laugh at what I damn well please to laugh at and not what the crowd tells me to laugh at. And so maybe that, maybe I am my own narcissistic, anti-woke monster all on my own. No, but I think that's, I think that's probably why you, not to put you on the couch and psychoanalyze you here, but I think that's why, unlike a lot of people in your intellectual milieu, you ended up being very early and very strongly anti-Trump in an uncompromising way, because you just didn't want to be one of the crowd and do things for the easy life, right?

34:53I know exactly that feeling you mean because I feel it too. I always sit there like the guy in life of Brian, you know, like we're all individuals. And I'm like, I'm not. Like that's how often how I feel about comedy. I feel like I'm sort of resistant. I'm fighting it. Which is why when it's good, I appreciate it more. Yes. So were you able to talk to any of the people who'd been at the Riyadh Festival? Did they give you their thoughts on your one word complicity? I talked to Andrew Maxwell, who I knew already. He and I both appeared on BBC shows. And he was, you know, one of the things that I always try and do for the Atlantic is give you the best version of the opposing argument.

35:31Now, I wouldn't go to Saudi Arabia and take government money in order to perform that. As a moral thing, I just wouldn't do it. But I wanted to hear in good faith from somebody who had done it what their rationale for doing it was. And clearly for some of them, it was just like, I'd like, you know, to redo my conservatory or like get a new patio or pay off my fifth ex-wife or whatever it might be. But Andrew did make a very sterling case, which was Saudi Arabia is changing fast in a more socially liberal direction. It's becoming less overtly misogynistic, for example. It is becoming a more normal Gulf Arab country within that kind of, you know, by that metric.

36:10And I want to help that process. you know I want to be part of the enlightenment I guess reaching there people hearing that actually you can you can keep pushing and pushing and pushing and push a tiny bit and push a tiny bit and maybe one day they'll be making jokes about Mohammed bin Salman over there without getting locked up it's not gonna be immediately that's for sure well that's so interesting because if they had had the Riyadh concert music festival and you were interviewing a great concert musician they could legitimately say, look, I'm an artist. I don't do politics. If people want to hear music, I will go.

36:47And I obviously have to make a living, but I also want to share the unspoken language of the arts, the non-political message of the arts. And you think, that's not a crazy thing to think. But the whole point to comedy is because it's spoken, because it's a commentary on human life, it inevitably has social and political content. And so these so-called political podcasters, These so-called comedy podcasters who we described at the beginning, inventing their knowledge, they are some of the most important political voices. And they play a double game. I think Jon Stewart invented this, where on the one hand, they're holding people to moral standards.

37:23That's their job in a kind of irreverent way. But then when anybody says, well, what about your moral standard? Oh, I'm just telling jokes. None of the rules I'm applying to others apply to me. And so you get the Joe Rogans and others who are encouraging people not to take life-saving vaccinations. And then when you say, you know, you're doing a really bad thing here. If people die of measles, you have an important part of the blame. What are you talking about? I was just asking questions or making jokes. Yeah, that's the bit where I get up on my moral high horse, definitely. You know, Red Scare, which is one of these very popular podcasts, had Nick Fuentes, you know, the Groypa leader and anti-Semite in chief on.

38:02And, you know, they said, well, we're such big fans of you. And there's this kind of nihilism, this kind of lol, nothing matters, as if this is all happening purely at the realm of discourse. And someone asked me about it, and I got into a small rant about the fact that it is only two generations since, you know, young American boys were dying on the beaches of Normandy in order to stop Europe succumbing to Nazism. Like, how unbelievably disrespectful is this to the incredibly comfortable life that you have, that you can't even hold yourself back from criticizing some weird virgin on the internet.

38:36You're not being asked to storm Normandy. You're merely being asked to not do podcasts with an avowed anti-Semite. And even that is too much to ask of you. Well, but notice something else about Nick Fuentes. He did this clip with Piers Morgan, where Piers Morgan asked him a bunch of questions about his sex life. And so when you call him a virgin, it's based on that. I don't think what Piers Morgan understood when he was doing that grilling was Nick Fuentes was playing the part of a podcast comedian. That Nick Fuentes, every time he answered him, Piers Morgan, do you think women should vote? Do you think black people should be property?

39:08You know, have you ever touched a woman? If you watched it, you realize that Fuentes was doing an ironic double spin, as if to say, maybe this is true, maybe this is not. What is happening here is I'm telling, I'm in the comedic zone where there are no moral implications to my words. And this old duffer doesn't understand the game that is being played on him. He's trying to take me as if text still mattered, as if words still mattered, when what we all know is that it's only affect that matters. Yeah, that's that Sartre quote about how difficult it is to debate with anti-Semites, right? Because they don't have to be sincere.

39:42You know, everything for them is a joke and a game. And you're the one who's left kind of trying to enforce standards and rules. When we talk about podcast comedians, I guess the sphere that I'm talking about is Joe Rogan. Lex Friedman, who was a researcher at MIT, is now a very popular podcaster. You know, that's Theo Vaughn. Yeah, Theo Vaughn. But aren't Candace Owens and Nick Fuentes basically doing comedy too? Like when Candace Owens comes before the courts of law to say, you owe the Macron family so much money for your outrageous lies. Isn't that going to be ultimately her fallback? I was engaging in satire.

40:20Yeah. You know, I spent the first 10 years of my career writing about feminism and a lot of it, there was a lot of, oh, can't you take a joke? from people who were playing that exact double game of like, you know, there was a poll like, oh, you know, get me a sandwich. And it was always kind of like, no, no, the joke's on you if you take it too seriously that we mean this seriously. But we do mean this seriously and we are trying to intimidate you out of public life. There's a huge amount of that goes on. And you're right, there's another thing that happens, which is I call it wounded baby bird syndrome, where someone like a Joe Rogan or a Lex Friedman will interview Trump, right?

40:49They both of them interviewed him in the run up to the election. So they are performing the role of a journalist interviewing a politician, but they will go on some of the most popular platforms in the world, more popular than the platform that you or I have, but they will still act like they're just in their little shed, like they're a kind of mom and pop store, right? Like this kind of like, oh, little old me, like I can't be expected to do any research or prep. Like I'm just a podcaster. I'm just a little birthday boy. And I find that so despicable as well. Like take this job seriously, take your audience seriously and be respectful to them.

41:20And don't kind of constantly you say, why is everybody attacking me? I'm just doing my best. Yes. So that's back to your one word, complicity. Yeah. Because you first make the audience complicit. Well, also there was something that was embarrassing about all that Trump podcast tour, right? Which was, it was just sort of celebrity, you know, mutual masturbation in the sense they were just excited to have Donald Trump on the show. Like I get to sit next to Donald Trump, which is, you know, as a journalist is just, I think we should really bring back that being that like that being very uncool right just being overawed by your subjects you're there to do a job you know you don't like if you're you know going to be a plumber you don't get to kind of act like this there's an audience failure too because i mean in the end the audience doesn't demand more you know because what we all thought was the check we what one would have thought in if you were on a host on 60 minutes in 1985 and you were interviewing a candidate for president or vice president, and you didn't do any research, didn't do any preparation.

42:20But now, I mean, the politician comes on, the host doesn't know anything, hasn't read anything, doesn't ask any serious questions. And the audience says, we love this. We love this a lot more than we ever did having the hard question asked. Yeah. I think it's taken as being authentic. Being amateurish is taken as being more authentic. And that is just a kind of cultural reaction against very high production, very choppy news, the intense artificiality, I think, of a lot of TV journalism, that this is seen as being more authentic. And you know what? There are things to be said for it. I will defend the Theo Von interview of Trump, because he didn't try and massively press him on his potential tariff policy.

43:02He talked to him about his overbearing, violent father and his alcoholic brother and who seemed to be quite sensitive and what effect it had on a young boy to watch his sensitive older brother get bullied by a father and then die of alcoholism and i i actually from that i understood a little bit more about the psychology of donald trump but there is look i agree with you about the artificial i mean there was in the olden days there was a lot of politician comes in and says something and then uh the interviewer using a host of recent college graduate produces the video montage that says, but you said something completely different 16 years ago in Schenectady.

43:41And you think, so what you're punishing the politician for is not saying exactly the same thing at exactly all times at exactly all places for not being even more of a robot than they already are. That's kind of a dumb gotcha and not a helpful gotcha. Because in the olden days, the host would never admit to having any standards, never believing that free trade is better than protectionism. The only way you could hold a politician to account was by discovering some inconsistency with the politician's own views. And then the response to that was become a super robot. So that was bad. And there was a point where you needed the host actually to be willing to at least implicitly say protectionism is bad and free trade is good.

44:20And that's why we're going to ask you these questions about tariffs. And if they won't do that, then it's useless. But we've now drifted into a world in which most people who get most of their information are getting it in these ways from these sort of found experiences with people who pridefully don't know anything and are often intoxicated while not knowing anything. I was really surprised, actually. I was looking at Joe Rogan's daughter's Instagram feed for various reasons. And there's a photo of her and her sister and her mom and Joe Rogan in the Oval Office. And they're all grinning because they've been invited in by Trump.

44:55And I find this kind of fascinating. And I guess it's something that as journalists, we have to reflect on what have our failures led us to this moment. But I constantly hear, you know, journalists are far too cozy with power, so cozy with power. And so we've been usurped or replaced by people who are literal friends with the people that they're reporting on. You know, the new Pentagon briefing room that's full of MAGA influencers, whose only qualification for that job is access, right, is groveling that leads to access, or the mad influencer-only briefing that Caroline Leavitt had, where she got asked kind of questions that were sort of like, you know, by how many percent is tractor production up this year, great leader?

45:36Or that incident with, speaking of complicity, where MAGA influencers came to the, I think the White House to receive binders about the Epstein, and to pretend that there had been some release when what was in the binders was old information and everybody knew it was old information. And they agreed to be props in a fake show of fake transparency by a White House that was actively engaged in covering up President Trump's connections to Epstein, about which we continue to learn more and more all the time. Yeah, that was it. I think that was quite a sobering experience for some of them because they were publicly humiliated.

46:07You know, an experience that happens to many people who come into the Trump orbit, right? Which is that they, you know, you think other people are the marks and then you discover that you're a mark as well. And sure enough, most of them just pivoted straight back to being that, you know, doing the con job themselves. Well, I've been stressing this point about audience responsibility. So what, for people who want, enjoy comedy more than I do and who enjoy these podcasts, how do you become, if you're going to keep watching them, how do you become a better consumer of them? Is it just a matter of smoking less or are there, uh, what, is there a filter you can put on the end of the cigarette to make it less harmful?

46:39I mean, I always try and consume both content and the opposition to that content. I think that's a quite a good habit that, you know, right. You want to consume the content, the popular content and the best criticisms of it. So quite a lot, what's a fascinating dynamic that's happened is if you go on Reddit, quite a lot of the subreddits, the forums that discuss these particular shows have really turned on their hosts in a way that's really quite lively and energizing. The Lex Friedman subreddit, someone who can say who moderates that incredibly in an incredibly North Korean style. So any criticism of him is removed.

47:11But the Joe Rogan subreddit is just full of people going, why are you such a sellout? We came to you because you were anti-establishment and now you're, you're sucking up to this guy. Like what's happening. So I find, you know, that's. Is that opposition or is that just intensification? You know, Joe Rogan, the problem is you're doing too much homework. No, but it's the idea is that, you know, these people thought they presented themselves as, the great challenge for all of them was that they presented themselves as anti-establishment and they become the new establishment. Right. I'm sorry. I'm asking not about them.

47:42I'm asking about their audience. Isn't the challenge for their audience to say, you know what, you're not actually going to go read the New England Journal of Medicine yourself. But if you want to know what's in it, you should get your information from people who really do take it seriously. And not that it's always right because it's often wrong. That's the nature of science. But the challenge is not to complain about Joe Rogan for not being stupid enough, not defiant enough, indifferent enough, but to say, how do I as a user connect myself to something true and deep and written by people who are not bad faith actors?

48:13Yeah. Yeah. And I think the other thing that's got to happen, and it's quite painful, and I don't know about you, but I feel quite resistant to do it, is that people who are coming from that more mainstream point of view have got to go and fight for questions that they thought maybe were long settled. I mean, I know you've written this in relation to antisemitism. I've written this in relation to the prosecution of sex crimes. Was Hitler bad? Yeah, very, very fundamental questions that you may have thought were long settled. that unfortunately, you know, do vaccines help more people than they harm?

48:46Like very simple thing. And there's a guy called Dr. Mike, who is very good at doing this and actually just fundamentally acknowledging that what we thought was settled questions aren't settled and they have to be relitigated, which for me has been a kind of painful thing to accept. But, you know, the gatekeeping is over, is broken and who has the most compelling story and is competing in the arena is going to win. So people who believe in the things that I believe have got to get into that arena? I would say the true counterculture, and I think that's a little bit why I'm doing this thing that I'm doing here today and why I wear a necktie when I'm doing it, is to say, you know, the real counterculture is to say, we have to rediscover, one of the comments on this podcast that I saw in one of the comments that I really treasure, he said, when I watch this show, I feel like it's 1963 again.

49:32And I'm not sure that he meant that in a bad way or a good way, but I understand, there's a part of me that says, I think I understand what you mean that the way we're going to deal with the theo vons and joe rogans is not by mocking them for not being ignorant enough or being too being cozy when they shouldn't be cozy so you know we want real information um and we want good faith there is a real hunger for that like everything that i've done in my career the most instantly wildly virally successful thing i've ever done was that 2018 interview i did with jordan peterson for gq something like that's seen by tens of millions of people right 70 million views on youtube last time i checked And that was like an hour and a half of two people from incredibly different perspectives having a serious, sustained, engaged podcast conversation.

50:17And sure enough, people did actually, I mean, you know, you couldn't pay me to watch. I mean, I can watch it back again. But, you know, but people craved it and they wanted it. They wanted to hear the articulation of both sides and those sides interacting. So I think there's, you know, I don't think we should write off the audience. And I also agree with you. for me about what having a good life is having having your own experiences that aren't mediated through a corporation you know that you know have friends who you're actually friends with have where you eat meals with them where you do activities with them you not everything is making somebody a profit at some point and that's you know that to me is a is a my kind of new year message of how to reclaim your life and and you know and just to kind of live actual real life rather than providing content or money for social media companies.

51:08What a great place to pause. Let that be the last word. That's fantastic. Thank you so much, Helen. Thanks for making time today. Thank you. Bye-bye.

51:21Logging off, rebuilding our attention spans, trading in smartphones for dumb phones. Why are people trying to get off their screens? And what are they really after? I'm Natalie Brennan, a producer at The Atlantic. And I'm Julie Beck. a staff writer at The Atlantic. This season, we're exploring the often fraught, always changing relationship people have with technology and examining the ways our devices affect our connection with one another. New episodes of How to Touch Grass come out every Monday. Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. A few months ago, I invited Atlantic staff writer, Charlie Worzel, onto The David Frum Show.

51:59As podcast hosts, we talked about the pressures and temptations of the medium. Outrage often gets rewarded. Nuance does not. Charlie doesn't take that bait. On his show Galaxy Brain, he covers the ways technology is changing how we think and how we live. Not just the obvious stuff, but the subtle ways it shapes what we believe, how we talk to each other, how we see ourselves and our neighbors. If you've ever wondered how smart people end up believing implausible things online, Galaxy Brain is worth your time. is thoughtful, surprising, and a little unsettling in the very best way. Find it wherever you listen or watch.

52:41Thanks so much to Helen Lewis for joining me today on The David Fromm Show. For the December 17th episode, I selected as my book of the week, Joseph Conrad's Lord Jim. Lord Jim is a novel that addressed themes of duty and courage and their failure. The selection was inspired, I said, by early eyewitness reports that Australian police had been slow or even reluctant to act against the two gunmen who carried out the anti-Semitic massacre on Sydney's Bondi Beach. I recorded the day after the massacre when information was still fragmentary. I cautioned in the episode that these eyewitness reports were collected in the immediate aftermath and must be handled with care.

53:24The world now has a fuller picture of the shooting and the police response. From beginning to end, according to Australian police reports, the shooting lasted about six or seven minutes. Multiple police officers exchanged fire with the gunman. One of the gunmen was killed by a police officer. Two police officers were seriously wounded in the gunfight. The officers were armed only with sidearms and had to aim carefully so as not to injure innocent people. It's important to do justice to the police officers who faced deadly danger that terrible day. And so I hear correct the reports I referenced in my booklet discussion of December 17th.

54:03And now this week's book, Edith Wharton's Ultra Tom. And I chose it because I anticipated that the dialogue with Helen Lewis would bring up the subject of cancellation and its consequences. And this short story is a precursor on that very theme. Ultra Tom, Other Times, is a long short story. It was originally published in 1911 in a magazine, and then it was revised and published in book form in 1916. And you'll see the, as I go, I think you'll see the relevance, but I'll circle back just to pound the point on. It tells the tale of a woman named Mrs. Lidcote, who is a wealthy expatriate New Yorker, now resident in Florence.

54:41She's been traveling the world. She's made trips to Siam and she's made trips to India. Florence is her base. We meet her on board a ship, hastening back to her native New York City, just a few days out of harbor. And she's on an emergency mission because her daughter, her only child, is in trouble, or so she believes. And she was responding to a telegram that she received that has summoned her back from her travels to go comfort her daughter. And the trouble we discover is this. Mrs. Lidcote is an expatriate because, although this is never quite made explicit in the story, 18 to 20 years before, she left her husband for another man.

55:19She never married the other man. That's why she's still Mrs. Lidcote, her name of her, the husband she ran away from. And she caused an enormous scandal in her world of upper-class, capital-esque New York society. So much so that the only thing for her to do when whatever relationship she'd entered into failed was to leave the country. Now her daughter has broken up with her husband and has remarried another man. And Mrs. Lidcote knows exactly what to expect, knows how terrible this is going to be, knows how it destroyed her own life. Here's Mrs. Lidcote on board ship as she's getting ready to meet her daughter.

55:55When she was alone, it was always the past that occupied her. She couldn't get away from it, and she didn't any longer care to. During her long years of exile, she had made her terms with it, had learned to accept the fact that it would always be there, huge, obstructing, encumbering, bigger and more dominant than anything the future could ever conjure up. And at any rate, she was sure of it. She understood it, knew how to reckon with it. She had learned to screen and manage it and protect it as one does an afflicted member of one's family. There had never been any danger of her being allowed to forget the past.

56:29It looked out at her from the face of every acquaintance. It appeared suddenly in the eyes of strangers when a word enlightened them. Yes, the Mrs. Lidcote, don't you know? But something strange begins to happen, even on ship, even before she returns to New York. There begin to appear clues that her daughter's experience, in fact, will be very different from her own. The first clue is she catches a conversation among some wealthy people who are also in first class on the boat with her. And the name of her daughter comes up and she catches one of the other Americans in first class, a snatch of conversation where this woman says of her daughter, Layla, oh, Layla's all right.

57:09That phrase all right and the implicit contrast between Layla and Mrs. Lidcote will recur again and again through the story. Layla has in fact remarried the man she ran off with and no one seems to take it amiss. And the phrase all right appears, recurs again and again through the story. Everybody says it's all right and everything is all right except for Mrs. Lidcote herself. Now Layla's new husband, Maybe this helps. Comes from a wealthy family. He's on his way to a diplomatic career, assisted by an uncle who has a place in the cabinet. And when Mrs. Lidcott is finally escorted to the couple's country house, the friend of the daughter who escorts her explains, the house is modest.

57:47It has only 10 spare bedrooms. And we learned that Layla is having her marital pearls reset and that her portrait will be painted by Sergeant. And as truth dawns on Mrs. Lidcott, she gives vent in her interior monologue to a little bit of bitterness. If such a change was to come, she thinks to herself, why had it not come sooner? Here was she, a woman not yet old, who had paid with the best years of her life for the theft of the happiness that her daughter's contemporaries were taking as their due. There was no sense, no sequence in it. She had had what she wanted, but she had had to pay too much for it.

58:20She had had to pay the last bitterest price of learning that love has a price, that it is worth so much and no more. She had known the anguish of watching the man she loved discover this first and of reading the discovery in his eyes. It was part of her history that she had not trusted herself to think of for a long time past. She always took a big turn about that haunted corner. But now at the sight of the young man downstairs, that is Layla's husband, so openly and jovially Layla's, she was overwhelmed at the senseless waste of her own adventure and wrung with the irony of perceiving that the success or failure of the deepest human experiences may hang on a matter of chronology.

58:58So other times, other customs, other ways, the world is different in 1910-ish than it was in 1880-ish or 1890-ish. And Layla gets away with what doomed the mother. Only, and here's the kicker to the story. It turns out that while Layla is forgiven, Mrs. Lidcott is not. No one anymore quite remembers why she was so scandalous. They just remember that she was so scandalous. And while visiting her daughter with all these people who are completely at ease with their daughter having left one man and married another. That company of younger people still continue to snub and slight and disapprove of Mrs.

59:32Lidcott for reasons they don't know why. The other time has not just passed in time, it also remains present. And that's the reason that I wanted to circle back to the story in light of my conversation with Helen Lewis. You know, America went through a moral panic. It's sometimes called wokeness. You can call it cancel culture. you can call it a lot of things. But over that period of time, people lost careers, were sometimes made pariahs, lost friends, lost families, for reasons that in retrospect don't seem very substantial, often seem quite outright crazy, often seem as harsh and unjust as the reasons that led to Mrs.

1:00:08Lidcote's banishment from New York society. But that change of mind doesn't change anything for them, even after the moral panic subsides. You probably know your own version of Mrs. Lidcote. Ask that person their story. You may hear a tale out of literature. Thanks so much for watching or listening to The David Frum Show today. I hope you will continue. I hope you'll subscribe and share the program on whatever platform you like best. Remember always that the best way to support this podcast is to subscribe to The Atlantic. You can support the work of all of my colleagues that way. I hope you will consider following me on social media, at David Frum on both X, Twitter, and Instagram.

1:00:46I so appreciate you being here. And I wish everyone who celebrates a very happy Christmas. Be sure to join us next week for another episode of The David Frum Show.

1:01:20This episode of The David Frum Show was produced by Nathaniel Frum and edited by Andrea Valdez. It was engineered by Dave Grine. Our theme is by Andrew M. Edwards. Claudine Abed is the executive producer of Atlantic Audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor. I'm David Frum. Thank you for listening. Logging off. Rebuilding our attention spans. Trading in smartphones for dumb phones. Why are people trying to get off their screens? And what are they really after? I'm Natalie Brennan, a producer at The Atlantic. And I'm Julie Beck, a staff writer at The Atlantic. This season, we're exploring the often fraught, always changing relationship people have with technology.

1:02:01And examining the ways our devices affect our connection with one another. New episodes of How to Touch Grass come out every Monday. Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.