Why This Conservative Wants a More Radical Republican Party

“Progressives understand that culture war means discrediting their opponents and weakening or destroying their institutions. Conservatives should approach the culture war with a similar realism,” Sohrab Ahmari writes. “To recognize that enmity is real is its own kind of moral duty.” Five years ago, Ahmari was a self-described “secular mainstream conservative” working for The Wall Street Journal. Now a contributing editor at The American Conservative and the recently departed op-ed editor at The New York Post, Ahmari has become a fierce critic of the Republican Party as it existed before the rise of Donald Trump, a champion of right-wing populist leaders like Hungary’s Viktor Orban and a devout Catholic who believes social conservatives need to take a far more aggressive posture in the culture war. Ahmari may be singular, but he is not alone. His political evolution is a microcosm for the ways the American right as a whole has been radicalized in recent decades. Many conservatives today are animated by a profound sense of anxiety about the direction of the country: A feeling that something about the American project has gone deeply, terribly wrong. A visceral fear of a “woke” progressivism with seemingly unmatched cultural power and influence. And a willingness to endorse ideas and leaders once considered fringe. But Ahmari isn’t just a critic. He’s also one of the leading conservative intellectuals trying to chart a post-Trump future for the Republican Party. One that fuses Bernie Sanders-style economic populism with an aggressive social conservatism that isn’t afraid to use the power of the state to enforce its vision of the common good. So this conversation begins with Ahmari’s religious and political journey but also explores his heterodox political vision for the Republican Party, the surprising similarities in how radical feminists and religious traditionalists understand the legacy of the sexual revolution, his view that cultural and economic deregulation has decimated the American working class, the possibility of a left-right alliance around banning pornography, and why he views the cultural left and its corporate allies as a greater threat to American democracy than anything Donald Trump can offer. Mentioned: From Fire, by Water by Sohrab Ahmari The Unbroken Thread by Sohrab Ahmari Book Recommendations: The Adventures of Tintin by Hergé The Charterhouse of Parma by Stendhal The Gnostic Religion by Hans Jonas This episode is guest-hosted by Ross Douthat, a New York Times columnist whose work focuses on politics, conservatism, religion and, more recently, chronic illness. He is the author of “The Deep Places: A Memoir of Illness and Discovery” and “The Decadent Society.” You can read his work here and follow him on Twitter @DouthatNYT. (Learn more about the other guest hosts during Ezra’s parental leave here.) You can find transcripts (posted midday) and more episodes of "The Ezra Klein Show" at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast, and you can find Ezra on Twitter @ezraklein. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs. Thoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at [email protected]. “The Ezra Klein Show” is produced by Annie Galvin, Jeff Geld and Rogé Karma; fact-checking by Mary Marge Locker and Michelle Harris; original music by Isaac Jones; mixing by Jeff Geld, audience strategy by Shannon Busta. Special thanks to Kristin Lin.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:05Ezra Klein?

  I'm Ezra Klein and this is the Ezra Klein Show.

• 0:18Ezra Klein?

  Hey, it's Ezra. While I'm on paternity leave, we've got an all-star team of guest hosts. This week, my Times opinion colleague Ross Douthat takes a helm for shows exploring chronic illness and the divisions within conservatism. I've known and admired Ross since I began in journalism, so I'm really looking forward to these. Enjoy.

• 0:42Ross Douthat?

  The last 15 years have been radicalizing for many American conservatives. The collapse of George W. Bush's presidency undercut conservative faith in the wisdom and capabilities of the Republican Party and its leaders. The Great Recession and its long opioid-haunted aftermath sow doubts about the direction of American society and American capitalism. The rise of a youthful and militant progressivism has created a sense that America's cultural institutions, and maybe the entire American future, have been captured by the left. My guest today is one of those on the right who has been radicalized in recent years.

• 1:24Ross Douthat?

  Just five years ago, Sora Abamari was a self-described mainstream conservative, working for the Wall Street Journal opinion page. But since then, his views have changed dramatically. He's become a fierce critic of the Republican Party, as it existed prior to the rise of Donald Trump, a champion of right-wing populist leaders like Trump himself and Hungary's Viktor Orban, and one of the smartest minds trying to forge a coherent alternative to the late-modern liberal order. I have my points of disagreement with Amari. Like him, I'm a social and religious conservative. Like him, I think the pre-Trump Republican Party needed to be radically overhauled.

• 2:05Ross Douthat?

  But compared to him, I'm much more skeptical of the political forms that populist conservatism has taken since. But understanding his intellectual journey and his current worldview is deeply important for understanding what animates the modern right. It's a fascinating and then at times contentious discussion. So my conversation with Sorab after the break.

• 2:41Ross Douthat?

  Sorab, thank you so much for being with me today.

• 2:44Speaker 02

  Thanks for having me, Ross.

• 2:46Ross Douthat?

  Before we dive into the fate of the late modern West and the future of conservatism, I want to talk a little bit about your personal background and biography, which is, in fact, the subject of an earlier book that you wrote, a spiritual memoir called From Fire by Water. So could you talk a little bit about where you grew up?

• 3:09Speaker 02

  Happily so. I was born and raised in Tehran, Iran, six years to the day that Ayatollah Khomeini returned from his Parisian exile to herald the Islamic Republic and oust the Shah. I grew up in a very westernized and westernizing, almost bohemian milieu. My mother was an abstract expressionist painter. My father described himself as a postmodernist architect. They had supported the Iranian revolution more out of 1968-type energies than Ayatollah Khomeini-type energies or inspirations, and almost instantly come to regret it.

• 3:52Speaker 02

  So that was the kind of world that I grew up in, a world in which, you know, at home I was, the regime, as we called it, the regime was constantly denounced, you know, and alcohol flowed freely, usually kind of a horrendous moonshine that occasionally was made using isopropyl alcohol, but nevertheless fun was had, and a world outside in which was the, you know, the Islamic Republic.

• 4:15Ross Douthat?

  And so how long did you live in Iran?

• 4:17Speaker 02

  I lived in Iran until I was about to turn 14. We knew that there was a green card on the way because my uncle, who had settled in the United States right at the time of the revolution, like many students sent abroad did, once they realized what was happening, they chose to stay where they were studying. He had applied for my mother and I to join him via the Family Preference Visa Program, AKA Chain Migration, and came to Utah, of all places.

• 4:48Ross Douthat?

  And so before you came to Utah, what did America mean to you?

• 4:53Ross Douthat?

  Eight-year-old Zorab or 12-year-old Zorab?

• 4:55Speaker 02

  You know, America meant individualism. I have this passage that I'm really fond of in my memoir where I was in to Luke Skywalker and Indiana Jones as protagonists and their protagonists who are valued for their individuality, they're valued as individuals. That's a really profound cultural difference. And I bandied about these words that I didn't understand, like secularity or rationalism and logic, and those things were Western, whereas my homeland was superstitious and backward, and backward because superstitious and religious.

• 5:31Ross Douthat?

  You were happy to come to America?

• 5:33Speaker 02

  Oh, 100%, 100%. It was my, you know, my promised land.

• 5:38Ross Douthat?

  And so you came to America and it was Utah. And what was that like?

• 5:43Speaker 02

  First of all, physically really beautiful, I mean, the natural landscape, but it was not secular. In fact, you know, alcohol was capped at 3% under secular law, but it was enacted seemingly by Mormons who dominated the state. It was communitarian in a way that I found saccharine and oppressive with like the Mormons, home church, all this stuff. I mean, I found it repulsive.

• 6:09Ross Douthat?

  And so you sort of had a double escape. You escaped from Shiite Iran and then you left Utah and basically entered the modern meritocracy and became a secular person.

• 6:22Speaker 02

  That's right. I became a college Trotskyist. Then undergrad ended, I didn't have much to do, so I did Teach for America for a couple of years in, in South Texas on the US-Mexico border, then taught for two more years at this charter school in Massachusetts. Anyway, to speed things along, I went to law school, never practiced, was hired by the Wall Street Journal Opinion Page as a, by then, ex-leftist, secular neocon or secular mainstream conservative.

• 6:52Ross Douthat?

  And you weren't happy.

• 6:54Speaker 02

  Personally, I mean, sure, I was happy. I mean, I was You were happy. Career wise, I was going from strength to strength, right? I mean, I was like, whatever, in my mid twenties and I'm an editor at the Wall Street Journal opinion pages. Then I'm shipped off to London to help run the European edition. So from the point of view of the boy who grew up in Iran and initially, when we first moved to the United States for a time, we lived in a mobile home park because, you know, we had just arrived and currency exchange was brutal. To then you're being flown around the world by, by the journal is, you're happy in that sense, but in a deeper kind of spiritual sense, I was, yes, I was unhappy. There were questions that that worldview didn't answer.

• 7:37Speaker 02

  So, yeah, I mean, all along, I should say, I had begun to read certain books. I had peeked into the Bible. The forbidden texts. The forbidden texts. I'd, I'd sat down to seriously read by this point. I'd read the Torah in a, in a beautiful translation by, by Robert Alter, Pope Benedict's books. That's the intellectual side of things. There's also a dimension of this, which is harder to talk about in a secular podcast, if you will, which is the action of the mass moved me profoundly. The idea of divine condescension, the idea that God himself

• 8:16Speaker 02

  would become man and descend to man's kind of lower depths and redeem him there. And to allow himself to be mocked, humiliated, whipped, and then ultimately killed by his own creation. There was something so beautiful about that, just even aesthetically speaking. As C.S. Lewis says, if you were, if you set out to create a religion, it would not be Christianity. It is so odd in that sense. And so, so romantic, frankly, I mean, I'm okay using that word. So I initially kind of flirted just very briefly with Anglicanism, specifically evangelical Anglicanism, but then walked into a mass at the famous Brompton Oratory, which is a church that's very famous for traditional liturgy.

• 9:00Speaker 02

  And this particular mass, it all clicked. Both the romance and beauty of what happens on the altar, of the sacrifice, but also the tradition, the continuity, the authority of the Roman church. So that by the time that mass was over, I almost ran to the oratory house, which is just where the priests live, and knocked on the door and told the first priest that opened the door that I want to become a Catholic.

• 9:25Ross Douthat?

  And so in just four years, after sort of swimming the Tiber, as we Roman Catholics say, entering the Catholic Church, you find yourself writing a book to your very young son that is in effect a warning against the kind of life and world that you had embraced and succeeded in in the 10 years prior to your conversion to Catholicism.

• 9:54Speaker 02

  Yes, yes, that's a good way to describe it.

• 9:56Ross Douthat?

  The book starts with a very arresting vision, a fearful vision that you have for your son's future. As, like you, a member of the successful secular meritocracy. What haunts you about your son's potential future as a success?

• 10:14Speaker 02

  Yeah, so I should briefly say the impetus for the book was, the immediate impetus was, there was this OkCupid campaign in 2018. And like the more recent one that's been the subject of some controversy on Twitter at least, it was incredibly vulgar, right? Like it was polyamory, like openly advertised. And I've lived most of my life in big cities. I really don't think I'm a prude. Nevertheless, I couldn't help but imagine, you know, my son asking, you know, what is some of this stuff? I mean, it's kind of BDSM even. And I thought, why do I find myself in a civilization in which my child has to ask me what BDSM might be? So that was kind of the initial. Anxiety that set me on the path to writing this book. The cheapening, right?

• 10:58Speaker 02

  The cheapening of this dimension of life that in across most of human history, across most civilization, has been held as kind of sacred, somewhat hidden. And the sort of corporate vulgarization of it bothered me, not even so much the vulgarity itself. And then I sort of started to imagine my son, growing up to be a global meritocrat, much like his, his parents. And I see him, not necessarily, I mean, God forbid, I don't think he's going to succumb to an opioid addiction. If, you know, chances are, the way our economy works, he'll probably inherit his parents' upper-middle-class status, he'll probably go to elite schools. But my fear that I describe as a kind of nightmare is that he'll come back and just sort of be a, a person of no moral purpose.

• 11:43Speaker 02

  You know, he, he is hobnobbing with sons of senators, maybe, you know, or one of his friends has gotten a Davos-type award for environmental engineering, but all they really care about is rising through the ranks, obsessed with the idea of keeping their options open, which paradoxically means that they don't really exercise their freedom, their true freedom, because they never irrevocably bind themselves to anything. So they sort of just float through life.

• 12:16Ross Douthat?

  The book, then, that comes out of this experience, this fear, this anxiety, is not really a political book. It's not a brief for a particular cultural program. It's a series of, in effect, introductions to ancient and pre-modern ideas that offer alternative ways of thinking about your obligations as a human being, how to think about your relationship to your family, how to think about your potential relationship to God, and so on. And I want to ask you to talk about a couple of those examples. One, an issue that's somewhat remote from the current culture wars, and the other,

• 13:01Ross Douthat?

  an issue that's close to the current culture wars, but where you choose sort of a surprising figure as the embodiment of traditional wisdom. So in the first case, you have a chapter entitled, "Why Would God Want You to Take a Day Off?" And I should say that the book is structured around these questions. Each chapter offers a question that people might reasonably ask about in thinking their way towards a more traditional mindset. So talk about that chapter, which is obviously about the Sabbath and the figure that you choose to sort of represent the idea of the Sabbath.

• 13:37Speaker 02

  So I'm not a theologian, I'm not a philosopher. So the way I structured the book is through biography, through storytelling, through a kind of intellectual journalism, and frankly, popularization. And the chapter on the Sabbath is reflecting on the fact that in the United States, until relatively recently, we had a tradition of what were called blue laws or sabatarian laws, the idea being that the law should enshrine one day as a day of rest, of contemplation. And it's a very old tradition, it's only, its loss is relatively recent, but it came so gradually that now it's become imperceptible to us, or invisible.

• 14:19Speaker 02

  And it comes against the backdrop of the fact that, as you know, that the share of people who identify with no religion, the so-called nuns, is large and growing. And so in that context, what meaning the Sabbath hold for us? And of course, to answer those sets of questions, I turn to Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, great Hasidic intellectual. So he wrote a book called The Sabbath, which is just one of the most beautiful pieces of biblical commentary that I've ever come across. And it's a case for the Sabbath. And the way he argues is by dividing human life into roughly two domains. One is the domain of space, of the realm of space. And that's what we do most days of the week.

• 15:02Speaker 02

  It's about conquest, it's about competition, it's about economic acquisitiveness and rivalry. And that's fine, I mean, it's good to strive after those things. But there is this other realm, Heschel says, called the realm of time. And that's really the realm of the divine. It's the realm of contemplation. It points us to infinity and kind of reminds us that those things we do the other days of the week only can find meaning in relation To this other realm of time and should be somehow limited by them. Otherwise, life is kind of out of balance. And so I, yeah, I mean, that's, that's more or less the, the Heschelian argument that I present.

• 15:43Speaker 02

  And then I'd apply it to our current conditions where the loss of the Sabbath has not meant an expansion of freedom for the ordinary worker or the ordinary family. It's really been freedom for the likes of Jeff Bezos. Amazon uses what's called algorithmic human resources scheduling. The goal is obviously be ultra efficient in the use of labor. And what that means is that a lot of his workers have no sense of regularity in their schedule. And that's on the lower end of the economic ladder. On the upper end, you know, people like you and I are constantly by this kind of ghostly blue glow of, of the smartphone. The line between work and rest has been completely erased and we're just more harried.

• 16:27Speaker 02

  And so this is a type of argument that in almost every chapter of The Unbroken Thread gets recapitulated one way or another. And that's that a lot of promises of liberal modernity are about freedom and about demolishing various barriers, either traditional barriers or natural ones that seem to hinder us. And it's only with the loss of those barriers that we see that they were somehow guaranteeing our freedom, that a life without limits is actually paradoxically less free. The loss of limits leave us, in this case, kind of restless and harried. And it also perpetuates the exploitation of workers by large employers.

• 17:07Ross Douthat?

  And so we'll pick up on the question of capitalism in a minute. But now to move to a second example from your book. By the standards of traditionalist books, this book pays relatively little attention to sex and sexuality. Not that those aren't obviously big issues. And as you say, it starts with the OkCupid ads. But you really zero in on sexual questions in a chapter whose title question is, is sex a private matter? And the figure you use is who?

• 17:38Ross Douthat?

  To illuminate this question.

• 17:39Speaker 02

  The famous traditionalist Andrea Dworkin.

• 17:42Ross Douthat?

  The noted reactionary traditionalist Andrea Dworkin, yes. So for listeners who don't know who Andrea Dworkin is, please explain the irony of that description.

• 17:53Speaker 02

  Yeah, sure. So Andrea Dworkin was a radical feminist, prominent beginning really in the 1970s and into the 80s. She died in the early 2000s, but by the late 90s or by the time she had died, she was kind of a forgotten figure. And a defeated figure because her brand of feminism was anti porn, anti prostitution feminism. And out of the struggles within the feminist movement in which she was a notable combatant. It was the quote unquote sex positive feminists who in many ways won out. And those sex positive feminists defined themselves, again, in many ways, over against Andrea Dworkin. I mean, Dworkin was their antagonist.

• 18:32Speaker 02

  So yeah, I mean, I use her for the proposition that sex is inherently public. And Dworkin is a figure obviously also broadly associated with the radical left in this country. But if you read her, her work closely, I think you will find in it mostly a critique of the sexual revolution, of what the sexual revolution of the 1960s had wrought. That in practice meant empowering or freeing a lot of Caddish men.

• 19:07Ross Douthat?

  The Hugh Hefner, Roman Polanski era, shall we say, of male liberation.

• 19:13Speaker 02

  Beautifully put, yeah.

• 19:14Ross Douthat?

  So dig a little deeper into that. What does it mean to say that sex is a public issue, a public matter? Beyond just the idea that men behave badly, Harvey Weinstein exists.

• 19:28Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, what Dorkin insisted on, and I somewhat provocatively argue that in so doing, she's an inheritor, or maybe an unconscious heir to someone like St. Augustine. St. Augustine thought that what was Wrong with Rome, with the Roman Empire, was that all of its lofty aspirations of spreading law and rationality in this kind of large imperium to the whole globe really rested on a base of domination, of lustful domination. Fast forward to the late 20th century, and Andrea Dorkin says much the same thing, that you cannot have a society that claims to, for example, value the equal dignity of men

• 20:11Speaker 02

  and women, or put so much emphasis on equality as an ideal, where at the same time, 100 million men daily switch their browsers to incognito mode and look at exploitative imagery of women and young women being slapped and so forth. So that what happens in the realm of the private, whether that's porn, pornography, but also, I mean, for Andrea Dorkin, even in just the sort of ordinary American bedroom, had public ramifications, because it undermined a lot of our claims to being a just society.

• 20:47Ross Douthat?

  But also, there's an argument here that's sort of implied or explicit, right? That capitalism plays some role here, that one of the provocative ways of reading the history of the last 50 years is that what gets called neoliberalism, right? The sort of triumph of a certain vision of globalized capitalism in the late 20th century has a financial and a sexual side, that financial deregulation and sexual deregulation are seen as, you know, one is right wing and one is left wing, but in fact, in both cases, it's sort of the transformation of either customary arrangements and traditions

• 21:32Ross Douthat?

  or customs of intimate life into this kind of free marketplace, in which then greater exploitation becomes.

• 21:41Ross Douthat?

  Kind of inevitable.

• 21:43Speaker 02

  I mean, unless Adam's here, I'm recapitulating the neoliberal argument that, well, it's all undergirded by consent. We have consent, you know, the porn actress signed 15 different forms saying that what's about to happen to her is okay. So there you go. So it's very, it's impoverishment of the, of men and women's moral capacities, whether you look at it from a traditional kind of Christian and Judeo-Christian point of view, or whether you stand in that tradition of the left that saw that, for example, labor contracts that are exploitative are not made less so, or are not morally ratified just

• 22:26Speaker 02

  because the worker signed a piece of paper saying, yes, I contractually enter into this. Across both realms, you see this sort of narrowing of a moral horizon of what you should expect of society.

• 22:38Ross Douthat?

  But then in very contemporary feminism, right, post Me Too feminism, there's been at least some partial rediscovery of Dworkin, a certain amount of skepticism about what you described as sex-positive feminism. There's an attempt to sort of say, essentially a version of what you're saying, right, which is that consent is not enough and you need a larger and more holistic picture. And on the feminist left right now, that takes the form of sort of analyses of power dynamics, sort of a range of things beyond just the bare reality of consent. But that attempt to sort of not just be neoliberals, I guess you could say, does exist, I think, in Me Too feminism right now.

• 23:23Speaker 02

  Oh, sure. Yeah.

• 23:24Ross Douthat?

  Yeah. So, you know, as you can probably tell, I'm sort of setting up this question, right, which is you, Sorab Amari, are Rather famously, for anyone who follows your career, a man of the right. And not just the right, but what is considered, maybe especially by readers of The New York Times, to be the extreme right. But the analysis that you're offering, it's compatible in certain ways with a lot of left-wing arguments, I think, about our present discontents. So why are you a man of the right and not a man of the left?

• 24:00Speaker 02

  I don't know if I'm properly called a conservative anymore. What I detest, and what I've kind of devoted my career to, is critiquing a certain conservatism. And Ross, you're familiar with it as well, and you've criticized it in various places. But a conservatism that says, you know, marriage rates are down so bad, people aren't having kids, so sad, oh, church attendance rates plummeting, terrible. But in the very same breath, promotes economic arrangements that are bound to corrode things like family, things like community, things like family formation, because it makes it so much more difficult.

• 24:43Speaker 02

  People are, as we said about the Sabbath, but there's so many other examples of this. People are harried, there's a kind of precariousness baked into American life. You're told to be an entrepreneur of the self and be a gig worker, but also, you know, health insurance only follows you through regular employment, so what if you get sick? That kind of conservatism that pays lip service to the things that we care about, but pays no attention to how to live that kind of virtuous life that conservatives celebrate. It has some material substrate. It's not just about ideas, it's not just about banging a drum and saying, "Tradition is good, get married, have kids." But people need a kind of a substrate of material safety from which to launch these

• 25:27Speaker 02

  things, like launch into a marriage or launch into having a larger family. So I'm very interested in taking down that aspect of the right. I may not be able to achieve much else, but if I can seriously critique and point out that the economic libertarian

• 25:46Speaker 02

  Type of conservatism undermines the very goods it claims to cherish, like family and community and church and so forth. If I just show that, that suffices.

• 25:57Ross Douthat?

  But so, again, for a liberal or left-wing listener to this interview, I've asked you why you're on the right and you've told me everything that you think is wrong with the right. And I think their response might be, well, why are you interested in right-wing political alternatives? And we'll talk a little bit about those specific alternatives in a minute. When Bernie Sanders is right here for you, Sorab, with concrete and tangible proposals to, for instance, spend more money to help working-class families, to sort of boost that material substrate, to regulate those Amazon warehouses, or encourage unionization in them.

• 26:42Ross Douthat?

  So what prevents you then from being on the left?

• 26:46Speaker 02

  Yeah, so I do think that there's a big problem with the existing left as well. I think a lot of its energies that appear revolutionary, if you scratch a little bit, you'll just find the neoliberalism there in a way that I think is not good for working-class people. And so I oppose that as well. So I'll give you an example. I think the idea of abolishing the police, I see that as just one more type of neoliberal privatization, the processes that began in the late 1960s and 70s and have continued to this day.

• 27:23Ross Douthat?

  So where the end game of police abolition is, rich people have private police and poor people don't have protection. That's what you mean, right?

• 27:30Speaker 02

  Right. I mean, that's just one example, but I could go down the list of you. You look at so much of the existing left and what you see is... Behind the seemingly very revolutionary rhetoric, and I know I'm not the first to point this out, you find policies that would make it easier, for example, for HR departments to fire workers for saying the slightly wrong thing. So this kind of language policing of the left, I think, is a gift to HR. I have arguments with conservatives all the time where I say, please don't say critical race theory is the new communism. Please don't say this is Marxism under a new guise. It really is. If, if these kinds of ideologies

• 28:12Speaker 02

  presented any kind of serious threat to the material interests of the Nike Corporation, of Apple, of lots and lots of elements of the American establishment, the trustees of Ivy League universities and so on, if they represented a real threat, they would snap it out like that. They would sort of suffocate it so quickly.

• 28:30Ross Douthat?

  Elaborate a little bit on that idea of a progressive establishment, because this is an idea that is just a commonplace for conservatives like you and I, that progressivism has this unprecedented dominance in American life through networks of elite institutions. And liberals tend to say, this is not actual political power. Obviously, political power has been in the hands of the Republican Party until recently. It may be soon again. And conservatives are just sort of paranoid, in effect, about the alleged power of Hollywood plus Harvard plus HR departments. Make the case that there is actually a progressive

• 29:11Ross Douthat?

  power structure in this country along the lines that you describe.

• 29:16Speaker 02

  The case that I would make is it's a very pinched and narrow account of power to think that power only resides in, let's say, the Congress. That's not where real policymaking happens in our society. Power is, is a lot more complicated than that, and it takes place in boardrooms where decisions get made about questions of labor arbitrage and how that affects, either through migration or through offshoring, how that affects people on the lower end of the socioeconomic ladder. Power takes place certainly in universities because they train and form the new Generation of elites.

• 29:56Speaker 02

  We have, for example, this enormous apparatus of unaccountable censorship taking place at big tech companies. The people who do that are engineers in a broad sense, not just tech engineers, but what they call political or safety engineers at firms like Facebook and Twitter. These people wield power. And what I'm calling for is a recognition that they wield power.

• 30:45Ross Douthat?

  So just to stay with this class of Google engineers, high-powered lawyers, the professional managerial class, right? I want to propose this to you as a reason why you are on the right rather than the left. I would say that from the perspective of the politics that you're envisioning, this sort of more thoroughgoing critique of where liberal society has ended up, there is more resistance to social and moral conservatism among this class

• 31:24Ross Douthat?

  than there is resistance to some kind of economic populism among conservatives. That seems to me to be maybe an organizing theory of why you think it's more important to oppose elite liberalism than actual existing conservatism in certain ways. Like, in the case of your own book, I can imagine a secular person who's interested in religion and feels unhappy with certain aspects of our society agreeing with many things that you say in your book, right up to the point when you say, "And..."

• 32:06Ross Douthat?

  We shouldn't just respect the Sabbath, we should have blue laws. We shouldn't just think marriage is important, we should make it hard to get a divorce. I feel like there is this just profound resistance among, in a way, our fellow elite meritocrats of anything that takes that kind of traditionalist critique and tries to turn it into policy. And I'm both curious if you think that is right, and also then if you think that there's less resistance on the right to saying, you know, the way Jeff Bezos runs his warehouses should summon up a political response.

• 32:43Speaker 02

  So to answer the first half first about the degree to which meritocrats and professional managerial classes resist, broadly speaking, cultural regulation. I mean, I think that's absolutely true. And I would increasingly say that their resistance to cultural regulation is aligned with their class interests as well. The people who push cultural deregulation, for the most part, are bourgeois elites. And it somehow works out well for them. It does not work out so well for working class people. In other words, if you look at divorce rates between low income families and those in

• 33:25Speaker 02

  the upper stratosphere, there's wide divergence on family structure and stability. So the elites push these kind of deregulatory measures. And it's working class families and middle class families that are racked by the consequences. Or you can talk about drug deregulation. It's, you know, now we have big weed, almost as big as big tobacco. And yes, there are upper class kids who dabble in drugs, but somehow, for the most part, they have these resources where if they mess up too bad, there is therapy, there is family support, and they kind of move on. But it's not the case for much of the underclass where, depending on whether you're talking

• 34:05Speaker 02

  about an urban or a regional area, you have opioid or other drugs racking the community. I'm not posing a conspiracy account, and I can't easily reconcile why it is that elites push deregulation and they just so happen to not suffer the consequences nearly as much as people toward the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder.

• 34:26Ross Douthat?

  Yeah, I mean, I I mean, I once wrote a a piece for the Times called Social Liberalism as Class Warfare that made an effective version of this argument. But the thing to recognize, right, is that there is no sort of conscious sense that we are culturally deregulating and we will be the beneficiaries. Instead, the assumption of elite liberalism is that cultural regulation is inherently, I think, crueller than economic regulation and more liable to abuse. And so the costs of more stringent laws regulating divorce are too many people stuck in unhappy and abusive marriages.

• 35:07Ross Douthat?

  The costs of, you know, regulations on pornography are, you know, too many restrictions on artists and a sort of, you know, a sort of punitive and censorious state. And I mean, to be frank, whether it's the Handmaid's Tale scenario or your own childhood experience, the automatic fear of elite liberalism is that there's no stopping point between some kind of cultural regulation and a kind of theocratic police state.

• 35:35Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, I think this is the liberal paradox that is sewn through every chapter of The Unbroken Thread to kind of use the book's title as a secondary metaphor or whatever, but that what is promised as liberation ends up working out as a kind of new and worse tyranny than the authoritative structures that it replaced. So it was possible to say maybe in the 1950s and 60s that cultural deregulation would lead to a neutral society in which no cultural account of what it means to be human or sort

• 36:18Speaker 02

  of comprehensive account of the good is enshrined and occasionally coercively enforced against individuals. I don't think you can say that now, 50, 60, 70 years later, when you see how the project of liberation itself has come to become quite coercive and censorious. So there's no escaping.

• 36:42Speaker 02

  Some account of the good being enshrined and coercively enforced in society. You cannot say that after kind of wave of university cancellations of the degree to which speech is regulated. Again, you have to agree with me that private regulation can be just as coercive as governmental authorities doing it, that the formal distinction between them is a tissue and it's not that thick of a tissue. And if that's the case, then this concern about regulation just becomes liberal saying, we want our norms to be coercively enforced, to which a more traditionalist person would say, yes, and yours are new and radical and you can see how they do harm, especially to the weak people in society.

• 37:26Speaker 02

  So, no, I disagree and I want to, I will politically oppose that.

• 37:29Ross Douthat?

  Okay, so what is a marism? You're making a case, basically, that some vision of the good will dominate in a society. There will be some kind of coercion, be it private or public. There will be some form of cultural and economic regulation. You tomorrow are graced with the opportunity to write a party platform or otherwise sort of make your ideas embodied in a political movement. What does that movement want? What is its 10-point plan for its first 10 years in power?

• 38:01Speaker 02

  The platform that would emerge would be shockingly familiar to anyone familiar, for example, with the Christian democratic tradition in Europe. And the goal would be, look, it should be possible for a family to live an ordinary life of virtue, for cultural normality to reign once again. And by the way, a big component, a huge component of being able to live an ordinary life of virtue means that it should be enough and possible to raise a family on one income in this country.

• 38:43Speaker 02

  Healthcare should not be so freaking precarious that there should be a basic right to healthcare, some sort of kind of minimal public care. And if it sounds radical, it's only because neoliberalism has drifted so far from ordinary expectations of ordinary people. The watchwords are ordinariness, normality.

• 39:06Ross Douthat?

  Fine, good. So I think I can see the economic

• 39:12Ross Douthat?

  Agenda that you're imagining. And it is, let's say, a slightly more socially conservative and bourgeois family centric version of Bernie Sanders-ism. And I think the question of political resistance is about whether people are actually interested in paying the higher taxes and/or accepting the disruptions in their existing programs and services that this would require. But again, you're on the right, not the left. So there's a cultural component of this, right? Whether it's laws about pornography and divorce, you are pro-life, as I am, so presumably

• 39:56Ross Douthat?

  your Amarist party would ban or significantly restrict abortion. What is this sort of social agenda?

• 40:03Speaker 02

  The one we've discussed, I think it's one around which you can build a pretty broad, even an elite consensus possibly, is porn. First of all, because to regulate obscenity is not at all an aberration in the American tradition. And you see it now with post-sex positive feminism, or with your former colleague Nick Kristof's work on Pornhub, that you can build a consensus to say that, no, this is not speech. The idea of women, and often children, we now know, and underage people being exploited by traffickers, and then having the videos shared by millions of people, that's not a proper account of freedom. Left and right can come together on that.

• 40:47Speaker 02

  I mean, that's a really important one. I think on abortion, that's the one where we will kind of radically disagree with. I mean, that's a profoundly squarely political question, and it would be part of the agenda. But there, I don't expect to win over many liberals as I might on the porn question. So yeah, I mean, it would be a socially conservative agenda. But it would, the, the economic component is the one where it would cause a lot of tears at the Heritage Foundation and, you know, the WSJ editorial board and so on.

• 41:22Ross Douthat?

  But let me make the case that this is a fantasy.

• 41:25Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 41:26Ross Douthat?

  Because I think you're absolutely right, that progressivism in power now seeks to impose its own set of rules and regulations on speech, on sex, on what gets put up and shared on Facebook, all of these things. But in response, the right, in the age of Donald Trump, this is the first time I think I've mentioned him in this interview, we're getting around him at the end, in the age of Donald Trump, the right is increasingly the party of screw you, I'll say what I want, the party of, you know, free speech against the progressive censors. Our mutual friend and fellow Catholic, Matthew Walther, wrote a great piece about barstool conservatives, basically defined as, it's a reference to barstool sports and

• 42:10Ross Douthat?

  its sort of pugnacious founder, David Portnoy. And basically, it's a conservatism of leave me alone, let me be a guy hanging out with the guys and say what I want. And that, it seems to me, is where a lot of the energy on the right is right now. And I'm not denying that there's, there's a lot of discomfort with pornography in our society. There is this sort of general feeling on left and right alike that maybe it would be nice to turn off your phones on Sunday. But the day that you, as the embodiment of a political coalition, say, we're going to actually have laws that enforce this, to say nothing of questions about divorce or something like that, is the day that you reap an immense

• 42:52Ross Douthat?

  political backlash, I think, in politics as I see it in my limited pundit's way right now, right? Like Donald Trump did not run as the candidate of restricting pornography. I'm curious how you get over that hurdle in making this kind of socially conservative, economically populist fusion a reality. And if you can't, then the second question would be, well, why not just do the economic stuff? Why not just do the Sanders agenda and see if that stabilizes things and wait for the religious revival to do social policy?

• 43:31Speaker 02

  So for what it's worth, I've come to the conclusion that that traditional kind of social conservatism, as it's been pursued since Roe v. Wade, has failed. We got to face up to it. I think it's failed in part, as my friend Adrian Vermeule of Harvard Law School says, because of a weak and ultimately incorrect judicial philosophy. But I don't want to get into that kind of intricate legal debate. But the bottom line is that it's failed. And I think that serious social conservatives should attend to the material base of society. In other words, we should take seriously the Marxist insight that the cultural phenomena

• 44:13Speaker 02

  that we decry have an important material component to them. Not to be vulgar Marxists and say that all culture is reducible to economics, but that there is an economic underlying component to culture and to take that seriously. And so I would absolutely lead with the economic. So I'm granting your point.

• 44:33Ross Douthat?

  Okay. But I'm just going to push you on that without getting too deep into the weeds. Part of the argument from your friend Adrian Vermeule that you referenced is that on the cultural side, conservative elites have more power to sort of direct and redirect culture than a lot of sort of free market libertarian Republicans assume. So the argument is that whether in the form of bureaucratic edicts or in the form of judicial rulings, a more conservative elite could in effect solve the problem I'm describing, the problem that most Americans don't seem to want cultural regulation by effectively, not always dramatically,

• 45:17Ross Douthat?

  but sort of imposing that regulation from above. There's an expectation that you take over the government and you can use it, as liberals have done with liberal policy, to move the country to a place, whether it's through a Supreme Court ruling, not just overturning Roe, but saying that actually unborn human beings have a right to life under the Constitution, or whether it's through administrative work that maybe brings back blue laws or something like that. Do you agree with that? Do you agree with that argument?

• 45:50Speaker 02

  Absolutely. Adrian is right about that. And all he's drawing on, honestly, is, as you know, it just goes back to Aristotle. It goes back to Cicero, to St. Thomas, where they say that the law is a teacher and you don't inculcate virtue in a population as a statesman on the classical frame is called to do. You don't do it merely by exhortations to virtue. You know, oh, please behave better, so forth. You have to use the law because it has efficacious power to coerce and discipline. So he's right about that. I think to try to bridge the gap between the two, what I would tell you is there was a point where you said, well, you get to power. And what I would suggest is that the material economic

• 46:33Speaker 02

  program is in part to help ordinary people live easier lives, and that's part of the program. But it's also, you have to, you know, first you get the power. Well, that was part of your premise. One way to do that is to address the material inequalities, the overwinning power of corporations in American life. And so that's the part that I'm focusing on. And I don't see that as intention with the idea that, yes, the law can change culture. I've seen that in the Islamic Republic of my youth, but also in the United States of my adulthood, where a shift in law changes people's perceptions almost in such a way that they don't even remember that they formerly held the contrary position because the law is a teacher.

• 47:18Speaker 02

  And so Adrian's absolutely right about that. The question is, how do you get to that point where you are in a position to do that? And I would suggest that the program of focusing on where material power lies and trying to, you know, have countervailing powers that can check, for example, the rights of employers through labor unions, whether that's existing labor unions or new ones or what have you, that's a material job. There's no other way to do it.

• 47:45Ross Douthat?

  All right, but so now let me give you what the sharpest liberal, but not only liberal critique of this kind of populist politics as it cashes out in the real world, which is that the desire to take and wield power is leading real world right wing politicians to become not post-liberal in the sense that you're describing of gentling capitalism and returning to tradition, but illiberal in the sense of violating democratic norms in order to hold on to power. And you have been a supporter of Donald Trump in American politics, and I think it's fair to say that Donald Trump's approach to his electoral

• 48:30Ross Douthat?

  defeat in 2020 was illiberal, along some version of this line. And it was focused on arguments about voter fraud, but it ended up with him entertaining arguments that basically his own vice president could pull a neat political trick and keep him in power. And then, in a somewhat different way, you and many people who are interested in these post-liberal ideas have gravitated towards interest in the government of Viktor Orban in Hungary. And Orban is, I think, a much more skillful and successful politician in many ways than

• 49:07Ross Douthat?

  Donald Trump. But there are a lot of reasonable critiques of both Orban-specific mechanisms for holding and retaining power in Hungary, and also the Orban family's self-enrichment and the extent to which Orban's post-liberal politics ends up being a corrupt, self-dealing substrate beneath this lofty rhetoric about restoring the family and resisting the ravages of globalization. And I'm just curious how much danger you see in those tendencies, which are somewhat different, but I think related in the sense that in both cases, you

• 49:47Ross Douthat?

  have a conservatism that feels itself besieged by liberalism and that is willing to push democratic norms to the breaking point in order to hold on to the kind of power that you want your amarist party to be able to wield.

• 50:05Speaker 02

  Yeah, I guess.

• 50:08Speaker 02

  I just cannot take seriously claims about illiberalism after the experience that we at the New York Post, for example, and there are many others of the kind, went through in 2020, where, you know, we have a legitimate story squarely in the public interest about the son of one of two major party candidates in a major US presidential election, an important election. And the claim was that the son, the illustrious vice presidential son, Hunter Biden, had arranged a meeting between his father, then the second most powerful man in the world, the Obama

• 50:49Speaker 02

  administration's point man on Ukraine, on the one hand, and executives from Burisma, a shady energy company from Ukraine, that was paying Hunter to be a board member despite his total lack of expertise in Eastern European energy affairs. And you had big tech companies, I still vividly remember the morning of October 14th, where the story appeared, but Facebook announced that it was reducing circulation on the story, pending fact checking, even though the previous four years, there had been a mountain of stories about Russian collusion that didn't withstand factual scrutiny and yet were not reduced in circulation by Facebook. So, for example, BuzzFeed's claim that the president had suborned perjury from Michael

• 51:33Speaker 02

  Cohen, which Robert Mueller shut down, yet you can still find that story circulating. Or the McClatchy claim that Michael Cohen had been to Prague. None of that was censored, but Facebook took steps to censor this story just before a presidential election. And then Twitter banned it from its site, but not only did it ban it from being posted publicly, but it banned it from being shared privately. And then they suspended the New York Post's account, the New York Post being America's oldest continuously published daily newspaper founded by Alexander Hamilton. And then you had 50 intelligence officials coming forward to say, although we don't have any evidence that this is Russian disinformation, nevertheless, it bears the indicia of Russian

• 52:17Speaker 02

  disinformation. And do you think the press questioned that? Is the majority of the American press inclined to ask questions when intelligence officials who can drone people out of the sky say something? No, they all repeated it like stenographers. They wrote it down. And then they said Russian intelligence officials, I mean, US intelligence officials called the Hunter Biden story an act of Russian disinformation. So that all So I want to That all having happened, that all having happened, I am not inclined to worry about conservative illiberalism. Because what you're facing there is almost a total regime. They had, obviously, the big tech. They had the media, which the New York Times, shamefully,

• 53:02Speaker 02

  even after a vast degree of substantiation, had appeared, called our story unsubstantiated. And then they ninja edited that word out of the story after an outcry, but never ran a correction. So why was it called unsubstantiated first? And then you have the intelligence apparatus, all of them working in tandem to shut down a critical story about one of two candidates ahead of a presidential election. So when you have a situation like that, these types of cranes about democratic norms being violated are, feel so tired, and frankly, feel so enraging, when you see how All right, all right, all right. Liberals spent five years after the Donald Trump election, throwing everything

• 53:45Speaker 02

  they had to try to undo the democratic outcome. Two impeachment hearings, claims by certain columnists that we should use the 25th Amendment against President Trump, you name it. That was, that was pretty bad. I agree. So after all of that, we just have to be a little bit more realistic about what type of kind of political opposition that we're facing. Do I think like one-sixth, as it's been called, as though it's been sort of sacralized into a new 9/11, is bad? It was bad. Okay. Some people acted like fools in the Capitol, and then they were, you know, they were cleared up, and that was it. Meanwhile, by the way, from the point of view of conservatives, you had Months of rioting in Seattle that was winked at by blue politicians,

• 54:28Speaker 02

  mayors, governors, members of Congress and so on. So again, the signal was sent by elites that a certain degree of political hooliganry or thuggery is okay. But then the hammer came down extremely hard on one side of the political occasion. So I'm just giving you what I think people in my camp hear when they hear about threats to democratic norms.

• 54:52Ross Douthat?

  You're proposing this as a divide. And I think it's true that probably most listeners hearing your account of whether it's the Black Lives Matter protests or the way the New York Post was treated by Facebook and Twitter and the New York Times' own coverage last fall will not agree with your interpretation. So I want to stipulate that, not in every case, but I broadly agree with your interpretation. I think that there is a threat to democratic norms from the concentration of power embodied by big internet firms. I think there's a threat from the sort of consolidation of progressive ideology as a dominant force in elite institutions.

• 55:34Ross Douthat?

  I think Facebook and Twitter behaved shamefully in the case of the New York Post story. And I think it's perfectly reasonable for conservatives, and not only conservatives, to look at how liberals reacted to violence and rioting in the summer of 2020 and see that as a fundamental problem for liberalism, that it had this sort of tolerance for real destructive violence that had serious costs, especially to low-income, working-class Americans that continue to ripple through society to this day in the form of higher murder rates in many American cities. So I have just agreed with you, Sorab.

• 56:15Ross Douthat?

  And now I want you to tell me, would it be a good thing if Mike Pence had essentially ruled out of order the popular outcomes in several states and used the US House of Representatives to make Donald Trump president for another four years? Would that have been good?

• 56:37Speaker 02

  Uh, no, and he didn't do that.

• 56:39Ross Douthat?

  No, he didn't do that, but the President of the United States, who is now the likely Republican nominee for President in 2024, believes that he should have done that, right?

• 56:50Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think, again, it comes, all of this comes-

• 56:54Ross Douthat?

  No, no, but, but is that, I just, sorry, I just want to, I just, that's what Donald Trump believes, right, that Mike Pence should have, in some way, and we can assume that Trump doesn't sweat the details, in some way, should have kept him in power.

• 57:07Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, I look, Trump is a, is in many ways a ludicrous figure. I, you know, I'm on the record saying I hope he goes away. I think we have many better candidates.

• 57:22Speaker 02

  And so I have no problem saying that, but I just think the, frankly, the hypocrisy, right? Why, why would the Trumpians, let's say, let's say, why would the Trumpians-

• 57:35Ross Douthat?

  But you're here with me, Sorab.

• 57:37Speaker 02

  Yeah, I get it.

• 57:37Ross Douthat?

  I'm not offering a defense of the aspects of the liberal establishment that you're critiquing. And indeed, I frustrate my readers weekly by arguing that, you know, there, there are, there are dangers from left and right alike, but take the case of Hungary, right?

• 57:52Speaker 02

  I think a lot of your friends, I think a lot of your friends would appreciate it if you might, for example, would you ponder writing a 25th Amendment column about Biden? I mean, he's, he, it, please, let's not call it a stutter anymore. He really struggles with, with-

• 58:05Ross Douthat?

  Well, no, I don't want, I don't want Kamala Harris to be President, whereas I did want Mike Pence to be President, Sorab. So you have to be, you have to be tactical, tactical in your calls as well.

• 58:17Speaker 02

  Yeah, but I'm just saying, I'm, I think you're like, you're like, I'm, I'm on your side. I don't think so. I think we're, we're slightly apart on these things, more than you suggest.

• 58:26Ross Douthat?

  I don't think we're on exactly the same side. I just want to press you on, or to take the case of Hungary, right? In Hungary, a plausible scenario for the, for a paper like the New York Post, which is, let's say, critical of the regime broadly understood, is not that it would be censored by Twitter and Facebook and denounced by Viktor Orban's intelligence officials. It's that a member of Viktor Orban's inner circle would buy the paper and change its editorial line, and you would be fired.

• 59:04Ross Douthat?

  And there is some difference between being censored by Twitter and having your newspaper bought by someone associated with the regime, right?

• 59:13Speaker 02

  I mean, first of all, I would say that the notion that Orban doesn't face is a meaningful opposition and that his power lies in something other than really broad popularity in Hungarian society, which came out of the post-communist era, ravaged by corrupt post-communist officials, often communists who had just rebranded themselves as now kind of Brussels-friendly liberals, having a situation in which you had mass youth unemployment. As a result of the immediate kind of post-communist era, you had a serious waves of, actually several waves of brain drains. And then you have a government that comes and through a combination of economic reforms

• 59:56Speaker 02

  and, you know, pro-family policies and taking seriously the idea that Hungarians should have a say in who comes across their border becomes very popular. It's silly to say the fact that his friends own some newspapers is why he's popular. I think if you're there on the ground, you cannot say that, especially now. If he were as effective an autocrat as you think, he's facing a serious opposition. And that serious opposition is an alliance of, on the one hand, liberals and various socialists, and on the other, Yolbik, literally antisemitic party in the Hungarian parliament. This is not the ruling party. This is not Orban's party.

• 1:00:35Speaker 02

  This is the far-right party that is now in alliance, in coalition with the liberals. So this is the kind of coalition that he's facing. I think it's very important to note because you will not hear that because Orban is so framed in the liberal media as the enemy of all that is good and just and the enemy of civilization that people tend to downplay the fact that he's now facing off. And, you know, this is his riskiest election, right? It's considered his riskiest election because thanks in part to that coalition, but not entirely, but the fact that basically all the opposition forces banded together to say that we would have one anti-Fidesz candidate in every seat. You now have a serious opposition and we'll see what happens.

• 1:01:17Speaker 02

  But the idea that you, if you go to Budapest and will not meet the opposition whispers and people are afraid is simply not the case. I mean, it's worth, worth going and, you know, I know Hungarian liberals. They hate him, but the idea that you can't find oppositional news in the media is folly. It's not the case. So, uh, but again, it's not, it's not to, uh, an instance of to quote, to say, but look at what liberals do when they feel threatened by a, by a bumbling populist like Trump. How far they're willing to go to break their own kind of liberal democratic norms. In Hungary, that means allying with, with literal kind of antisemitic far right Nazis.

• 1:02:01Speaker 02

  In the United States, it means hungering, it means censoring a newspaper founded by Alexander Hamilton. I just, what I'm saying is a lot of these kind of rhetoric about, you know, norms TM trademark and, and illiberalism versus the forces of light has just been so revealed to be bankrupt and really a mask for pretty hard, pretty sort of iron fist, not even in a velvet glove liberalism.

• 1:02:32Ross Douthat?

  But yeah, I guess what I'm, what I'm trying to say, Sorab, is that it's possible for liberalism to be bankrupt and also for conservatism to have rallied around someone who wants to plunge the country into a constitutional crisis for no reason. And in the same way, in Hungary, it's possible for the EU to be hypocritical and anti-democratic in its own way. And also for, you know, Orban to be a corrupt guy who is, you know, combining the, the art of buying up, buying up newspapers with the art of enriching his family.

• 1:03:04Speaker 02

  Right. You know, Nancy Pelosi's family.

• 1:03:06Ross Douthat?

  Yeah, right. But I'm, I'm just, I'm just, no, no, no. I'm saying, Sorab, do you agree that this is possible for the manifestation of the conservative alternative to the liberal elite to go bad?

• 1:03:20Speaker 02

  In theory, is it possible? Sure. In practice, I see the sort of the balance of corruption, oligarchy, and really, as I said, hard-fisted illiberal tactics. I see it on the part of this establishment, which happens to enjoy, not just right now, political power, but as we've talked through the podcast, it enjoys enormous amounts of private power. That is nevertheless power.

• 1:03:49Ross Douthat?

  So someone listening to the arc of this interview would say to you, Sorab, you're here arguing that the sins of the liberal order are sufficient, that we shouldn't worry as much as most liberals do, and some conservatives as well, about the problems and perils of right-wing populism. But we did start this conversation by talking about your own actual childhood in a country where a populist revolution swept to power in the year of my own birth, overthrew what everyone agreed was a rotten and corrupt regime, and set out to build a new system from the top down using elite power, as you described,

• 1:04:34Ross Douthat?

  that would combine social solidarity and moral traditionalism. And you experienced it as a tyranny.

• 1:04:42Speaker 02

  Here's what I would say. Insofar as you can draw parallels between the Iranian experience of the 20th century and the Western one, and there are so many reasons why you shouldn't draw a parallel from the fact that Iran had been this kind of decrepit, once glorious Persian empire that by the dawn of the 20th century was malaria-ridden and had its borders completely unstable and easily violated by Britain, Russia, playing the great game in which Iran was...

• 1:05:12Ross Douthat?

  It sounds like a conservative description of America today.

• 1:05:14Speaker 02

  There you go. So much different. And then you had an early constitutional revolution, which turned out disastrously for complicated reasons. Then you have the Shah, et cetera, et cetera. So all these reasons are reasons not to compare. And underdeveloped had been great. Empire to modern West, in other words, to heed the warning that if not everything, that some things are their own thing and not another thing and that these parallels and equivalences are dangerous to draw. Nevertheless, insofar as the Iranian experience is a warning, it's precisely a warning about the dangers of overweening liberalization. This is not something you'll hear from many because people think Iran, it went from

• 1:05:56Speaker 02

  an autocrat to a total kind of Islamic regime. But why did that happen is under examined? And why did that happen was precisely because the Shah's regime attempted to liberalize, by Iranian standards, liberalize things brutally and rapidly from the top, forgetting that there are a lot of people, rural people, who have suddenly found themselves, thanks to rapid industrialization, cramped in cities, especially to Iran, in unfamiliar environments with mores that shocked them. And amidst all of this, the Shah of Iran, you know, owned half the casinos in the country, ignoring the sentiments of this large chunk

• 1:06:36Speaker 02

  of the population that was more conservative and sought a degree of social stability amid rapid economic-cultural change. So insofar as there is a warning story in Iran there, it's not, oh, Sarab Amari circled back to, you know, the Ayatollah was right, but rather, how careful liberals should be with the kinds of politics that they're pursuing now? How careful they should be with forgetting that there is this yearning for tradition, at least among some parts of the American populace, that they view toppling all their heroes and establishing new ones, that they view this sort of anti-historical iconoclasm, they view it as an invasion and that the social instability caused by that is reason

• 1:07:21Speaker 02

  to maybe be willing, and I cannot imagine it anymore, Ross, but wouldn't it be nice if there was someone on the mainstream left, not like Glenn Greenwald or Matt Taibbi, but someone on the mainstream left to say, we've gone too far too, right? Let's meet the populist ferment in this country halfway or something like that and not say they're all sort of, I know there are individuals who say that, but as a force... Liberals aren't doing that.

• 1:07:48Ross Douthat?

  I agree with you for the most part. I guess all I'm saying is that it's possible to buy into that narrative and say, yes, there is a warning here and liberals should take populist discontent seriously. They should take religious belief seriously. They should, you know, not imagine themselves as running some kind of top-down revolution to say all of that and still worry a little bit about the form that the backlash can take.

• 1:08:17Speaker 02

  That's true, but there's also the fact of being an American, which I am, who has certain commitments and sees them threatened by other forces. And therefore, you have binary choices to make. And maybe I and some listeners will face that and we've made our binary choices. This is what I mean. We're in a kind of binary choice scenario. And so, again, I agree with you. I agree with it. We should be concerned about that because I'm a Christian and there is certain limits to how you do politics as a Christian, which can never be violated. And I hold firmly to that. But there are also binary choices. And as you stand back and judge these things is one thing, but being a political actor

• 1:09:01Speaker 02

  with certain commitments that are threatened also, you know, forces a certain kind of realism on you. And so I'm just honest about that.

• 1:09:09Ross Douthat?

  So let me, yeah, let me go from there to a tradition at the end of the show that we always ask our guests to recommend three books to broaden and deepen their knowledge or interests. So what recommendations do you have for us?

• 1:09:21Speaker 02

  I did a kind of, because I'm in my 30s, I picked a book per rough decade of my life. That means a lot to me. So for the first one, obviously, my childhood in Iran, Tintin was huge in my, really huge. And I really mean to write an essay about this, about how Tintin forms my politics and my ethics.

• 1:09:44Ross Douthat?

  This is, sorry, just for listeners who are not familiar, these are The Adventures of Tintin, the long-running, I guess, would we call them graphic novels?

• 1:09:54Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, that's right. Yeah. By Erjay, the great Belgian cartoonist. The second one would be Stendhal's The Charter House of Parma. First of all, because it's just compulsively.

• 1:10:11Speaker 02

  Funny, and it's a portrait of this kind of minor Italian nobleman, who is obviously from the old, kind of ancien régime of Europe, right? But he's a kind of dim-witted admirer of Napoleon and the kind of French armies. And so he attempts to join them as a warrior in the Napoleonic wars for the emperor. It's an interesting portrait, I think, of the transition between a still pre-modern world and the truly modern world. So you have this thing where he's wanted in one principality, but if he just crosses to the other one, the chase stops and the search loses its force.

• 1:10:52Speaker 02

  So there's something very funny about trying to imagine this older Europe that's still, you know, not that long ago. It's the early 19th century. And then the last one is a book that I do rely upon in The Unbroken Thread. It's just a beautiful work of scholarship. Hans Jonas is the Gnostic religion. Hans Jonas is one of the characters in The Unbroken Thread. He was a German Jewish philosopher who accidentally became the interpreter of Gnosticism of these religions in late antiquity that sprung up in the aftermath of the Alexandrian conquest of the East.

• 1:11:31Speaker 02

  It's also, in many ways, a critique of various modern philosophies, which he sees as recapitulating the Gnostic impulse, although calling it something else. Anyway, it's just as a work of scholarship is astonishing in its sweep, in its prose, in its, the amount of insight packed into every page.

• 1:11:51Ross Douthat?

  Sorab Amari, thank you so much for being with us.

• 1:11:54Speaker 02

  My pleasure.

• 1:12:06Ezra Klein?

  The Ezra Klein Show is a production of New York Times Opinion. It is produced by Jeff Geld, Rajesh Karma, and Annie Galvin. It's fact-checked by Michelle Harris, and original music by Isaac Jones. Mixing by Jeff Geld.