Ross Douthat: The Exit Interview

My colleague Ross Douthat is leaving The Times after 17 years to become a correspondent on “60 Minutes.” Before he goes, I’m asking him a few questions. Douthat has had a unique vantage point on the news media and politics over the last few decades. He’s typically held the role of explaining the right to more liberal audiences, starting as an undergrad, when he was a conservative columnist for The Harvard Crimson. Douthat has also lived through the seismic changes in the media from the both the inside and the outside: He’s made his career at legacy media institutions, but I first got to know him – and spar with him – as an early-2000s blogger (and I have the 20-year-old Bloggingheads.tv clips to prove it). So what does Douthat make of the transformations he’s lived through? How did blogging change journalism? How did a Republican Party powered by evangelical Christians become a political party dominated by Catholics and pagans? What has he learned about persuasion from writing for liberal audiences? And with the resources of “60 Minutes” behind him, will he finally crack the U. F. O. story once and for all? Mentioned: Magnifica Humanitas by Pope Leo XIV “Is It Time for a New Sexual Revolution?” with Louise Perry, Interesting Times with Ross Douthat “Christopher Nolan’s Finest Trick” by Ezra Klein Grand New Party by Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam Book Recommendations: Speak, Memory by Vladimir Nabokov De Gaulle by Julian Jackson Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson Thoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at [email protected]. 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. This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Annie Galvin, Marie Cascione and Rollin Hu. Fact-checking by Kate Sinclair, Mary Marge Locker and Julie Beer. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld, with additional mixing by Johnny Simon. Our recording engineer is Johnny Simon. Cinematography by Marina King. Video editing by Arpita Aneja and Julian Hackney. Our executive producer is Claire Gordon. The show’s production team also includes Jack McCordick, Kristin Lin and Emma Kehlbeck. Original music by Pat McCusker. Audience strategy by Shannon Busta. The director of New York Times Opinion Shows is Annie-Rose Strasser.

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

• 0:25Ezra Klein?

  I've known Ross Douthat a long time. We were bloggers back when the earth was young.

• 0:31Ross Douthat?

  Hey, Ross, how you doing? Good, I'm fine, Ezra, how are you?

• 0:34Ezra Klein?

  And then I watched him become a columnist here at The New York Times Opinion in 2009, the youngest ever New York Times Opinion columnist. About a year ago, he launched Interesting Times, which has been a great fellow podcast here in the section.

• 0:47Ross Douthat?

  What is the Antichrist?

• 0:48Ezra Klein?

  How much time do we have?

• 0:50Ross Douthat?

  We've got as long, as much time as you have to talk about the Antichrist.

• 0:55Ezra Klein?

  And then breaking all of our hearts, he announced he's going to 60 Minutes, where he's going to be a correspondent. So I wanted to talk to Ross on his way out here about how he has seen media change, how he has seen politics change, and how maybe he believes it is changing again. Ross Douthat joins me now.

• 1:19Ezra Klein?

  Ross Douthat, welcome back to the show.

• 1:21Ross Douthat?

  Thanks for having me, Ezra. It's a pleasure.

• 1:23Ezra Klein?

  What the hell, man?

• 1:24Ross Douthat?

  What do you mean?

• 1:25Ezra Klein?

  Going to 60 Minutes? You're leaving us?

• 1:27Ross Douthat?

  I mean, spiritually, you never leave any place that you love, and all things are gathered in by God for His-- but yeah, I'm going to 60 Minutes.

• 1:38Ezra Klein?

  All right, we're gonna get to going to 60 Minutes. We're gonna start with where you came from and get to where you're going. Where do you locate your own spiritual origins as a journalist, as a commentator, a pundit? I was going back. I had always thought you were like me, like an original blogger who gets absorbed by a media borg.

• 2:00Ross Douthat?

  Oh, yeah, no, it was the opposite.

• 2:01Ezra Klein?

  Yeah, you're the opposite. You started The Atlantic and become a blogger.

• 2:03Ross Douthat?

  I, you know, I was a junior, junior, junior editor. I edited the letters section at The Atlantic for a while, and I did blogging on the side. I think of myself as someone who was sort of present for both the end of an old dispensation and the beginning of a new one. So I had sort of parallel careers in my early twenties. I had the career inside The Atlantic, where I was doing junior editor work and sort of trying to work my way up the masthead at an institution where, you know, you were still doing fact checking and copy editing on these huge sheets of paper that would be printed out and circulate around the office, and 17 people would have red pen on them.

• 2:46Ross Douthat?

  And it was very much a pre-internet magazine and a pre-internet journalistic experience. And then at the same time, sort of as a side hustle, I was blogging, doing freelance writing, and sort of participating in, yeah, the kind of the world of the early 2000s internet. Those two things sort of converged, because what then happened, as you know, was that many, many traditional publications looked at that landscape and said, ah, this is the future, and we need to co-opt it, right? So at The Atlantic, that meant basically creating a mini editorial page or opinion

• 3:28Ross Douthat?

  page that consisted of prominent bloggers that The Atlantic had hired. So there was a period when they brought in Andrew Sullivan, who was then the biggest deal in blogging, but they also had Iglesias, Megan McCardle, Ta-Nehisi Coates, and then me, because I was already on staff. And I can tell you that my own traffic numbers were somewhat lower than the others. But that was sort of the path, as you know, in that era, because you followed it too, was to sort of be a kind of outsider blogger critic of the establishment, and then an

• 4:09Ross Douthat?

  establishment institution might hire you or buy your blog or bring you on board. And it was just that, in my case, I was sort of already on board when that happened.

• 4:20Ezra Klein?

  So how do you describe to somebody who was not around for that, you know, a young journalism student today, what blogging was? What made it different? What made places like The Atlantic, eventually The New York Times, think they needed part of it too?

• 4:35Ross Douthat?

  Well, so there were a couple phases, right, where there were a couple cohorts of bloggers who became a big deal. And the first wave was immediately after September 11th, and then in the run-up to the Iraq War, where you had a set of people who were, some of them were former liberals who had moved right, some of them were just right-wingers, but they got called the war bloggers, right? And these were people who were, I would say, the simplest way to put it is that something crazy had happened, something world-altering had happened, right? And we, at the exact time that the internet was emerging as a force.

• 5:16Ross Douthat?

  And so there was a huge market suddenly of people who were, you know, on their web browsers, looking at a screen all day, and wanted to hear people talking about terrorism, September 11th, Islam in the Middle East, and then, you know, Afghanistan and Iraq and so on. And it's not surprising that the people who filled that niche were mostly people who were in favor of the war on terror and then in favor of the war in Iraq. But I think it really was that the event and the demand, or the event and the technology sort of intersected to create this opening. Like, I remember being an intern at National Review in the summer before September 11th, so the summer of 2001, right?

• 6:01Ross Douthat?

  And so I think Sullivan was blogging. There were like two or three people who were-- when did you start blogging?

• 6:07Ezra Klein?

  Oh, three.

• 6:07Ross Douthat?

  Oh, three.

• 6:08Ezra Klein?

  I was a freshman at UC Santa Cruz.

• 6:10Ross Douthat?

  Right. So in 2001, you had the internet and you had a few bloggers. And I remember just sitting in, you know, the offices of, again, this like 50, 60-year-old magazine. I'm an intern, I have very little to do, and you just sort of hit refresh, right? You hit refresh on Andrew Sullivan's blog, and you see what, you know, you see if he's posted something new. Mickey Kouse, right? Kouse Files was also probably one of the initial blogs at that point. But then September 11th happens, and suddenly you just have a lot more people hitting refresh and having this kind of demand.

• 6:49Ezra Klein?

  Well, I want to go before that. So one of the things that I find interesting about this period is that this is one of these places where I think media's changed more than people really realize. There just wasn't a lot of political opinion accessible to most people. So it's like, I grew up in Orange County, California. My family subscribed to The LA Times, so we, you know, there's an op-ed page in The LA Times, which I would read sometimes. We were not a family that got, you know, small circulation, DC political--

• 7:20Ross Douthat?

  The in-flight magazine of Air Force One.

• 7:22Ezra Klein?

  Yeah, The New Republic, The American Prospect, The National Review, which is a conservative magazine that you've written a lot for, The Atlantic. There was talk radio by that time.

• 7:32Speaker 02

  The Laura Ingraham Show. Glenn Beck. And now, America's most exciting radio talk show, The Savage Nation.

• 7:43Ezra Klein?

  But even that had only been on the scene for so long, and it's sort of like post-Rush Limbaugh form.

• 7:49Ross Douthat?

  Right.

• 7:51Ezra Klein?

  You know, when I was growing up there, Fox News is beginning to roll out, but it wasn't what it would eventually become. I remember MSNBC beginning--

• 7:58Ross Douthat?

  You had Crossfire.

• 7:59Ezra Klein?

  You had Crossfire.

• 8:00Ross Douthat?

  As sort of a, like, that was what you watched.

• 8:03Ezra Klein?

  You had MSNBC originally as Microsoft NBC.

• 8:07Ross Douthat?

  Yeah.

• 8:07Ezra Klein?

  And I remember there being, it was about tech primarily, and I remember watching a show with Solidada Bryan, where she like had an animated co-host, like a clip-art co-host. And what I always saw blogging as doing is like there was an unmet demand for political opinion, and particularly after 9/11, when people were really, really interested in politics, really upset about what was happening, really uncertain about what was happening. And all of a sudden, you can get a flood of it. Like, now, there is so much more opinion between X and Instagram and, you know, Substack and everything else.

• 8:47Ross Douthat?

  Right, it's opinion all the way down.

• 8:49Ezra Klein?

  It's like the news that has been somewhat drowned out. But then it was somewhat revolutionary that all of a sudden you could be, you know, refreshing and getting just throughout the day more and more and more commentary on what was going on.

• 9:00Ross Douthat?

  But the other thing that was revolutionary was that it was opinion, but it was also just a very different kind of argument from what you would get reading op-ed pages and even like small circulation journals. Early blogging was all about this kind of ongoing, rolling debate, where you'd write 4,000 words, and someone else would come along and block quote, right?

• 9:27Ezra Klein?

  Very few people would write 4,000 words on a blog. That might have been your thing.

• 9:31Ross Douthat?

  I mean, I, yeah, all right. Someone would write.

• 9:35Ezra Klein?

  300 words.

• 9:37Ross Douthat?

  I know, I mean, I, but this was also it, right? You had more length. I mean, there were people, there were people early on. Maybe I'm thinking too much of the war bloggers and not like the war bloggers were all about like, let me give you 2,500 words on how, you know, this event in ancient Greek history totally explains George W. Bush's brilliant plan to remake the Middle East. I mean, there was, there was a lot of prolix content, but maybe some of it was just created by this kind of, you quote someone and you say why they're wrong. But people did this back and forth to each other constantly. It was hostile, but it was also, I think, at its best, sort of really interestingly respectful because you were, you were putting the other side's words on your site.

• 10:20Ross Douthat?

  Like even if you, even if you were doing it just to show what a total idiot they were and, you know, how terrible they were, you were still, you were sort of like, all right, here's 200 words I'm quoting and I'm going to go line by line and I'm going to respond to every single line. That was, I think, a really distinctive part of it, at least, at least for the first few years.

• 10:40Ezra Klein?

  It was, I thought a lot about why I think the blogosphere was healthier than what came after it and whether or not that was just, I was in my twenties and people like what was happening when they were in their twenties, right? The music was better, the, but, but I do think this was, to me, the, the reality of it, it was fundamentally conversational. You wrote things in the expectation that the people you were writing about would read them and they would answer you. And I don't think that is how a lot of media works now. Instead of talking to the people you're talking about, you talk about them, right? X or Twitter, you know, you quote tweet and.

• 11:18Ross Douthat?

  And say.

• 11:19Ezra Klein?

  Yeah, and you, you know, and dunk on them and then, you know, you look for the hearts and the retweets. It has really changed what the currency was. I mean, I remember, so I began my blog in 2003 and the only way you could get readership, I mean, there were not algorithms, you were not winning Google search results.

• 11:36Ross Douthat?

  Right.

• 11:37Ezra Klein?

  The way you got readership was through these links back and forth. And so, you know, if right now what happens is the reward and the way that audience is secured is, you know, you get people who agree with you to retweet it, to, you know, restack it, whatever it might be, then, you know, I actually wanted, I disagreed with Andrew Sullivan on all kinds of things. It was good for me if Andrew Sullivan like.

• 12:05Ross Douthat?

  Right.

• 12:05Ezra Klein?

  Block quoted me and then argued and then, you know, I would block quote him and argue back and we would go back and forth. And it wasn't that it can never be disrespectful, it was often heated. But there was still a sense that you were in relationship. People talked about the blogosphere.

• 12:19Ross Douthat?

  Right. You had a blog, you had a blog role.

• 12:21Ezra Klein?

  You had a blog role.

• 12:22Ross Douthat?

  And the people you put on your blog role.

• 12:23Ezra Klein?

  Ecosystem.

• 12:24Ross Douthat?

  Yep.

• 12:25Ezra Klein?

  Well, so we, we had a lot of arguments over the years in our, in our days as bloggers, but I thought it'd be fun to, to go back to, to one of them in particular on what I think it's fair to say is a forerunner to podcasting, which is blogging heads, the.

• 12:41Ross Douthat?

  I knew, I knew I was.

• 12:42Ezra Klein?

  Robert Wright project.

• 12:43Ross Douthat?

  Yes. Robert Wright, who is older than us, a brilliant writer and who basically invented podcasting without getting credit for it because the world was not quite ready. Story of the moment is John McCain's running the most disgraceful campaign in American history, possibly, maybe in world history.

• 13:04Ezra Klein?

  Global planetary, universal, universal history, I think, is, is where we're at, basically.

• 13:10Ross Douthat?

  Right. So it's, so it's been pretty disgraceful. So basically McCain has, there's been sort of a flurry of ads, statements, sort of back and forths that have in different ways, you know, from, from the McCain campaign, sort of shaded the truth or not shaded the truth, you know, have been outright lies and so forth.

• 13:32Ezra Klein?

  Redacted it is, I think, the word you're looking for.

• 13:33Ross Douthat?

  Right.

• 13:34Ezra Klein?

  Or often redacted the truth.

• 13:35Ross Douthat?

  Right. And so there's been, and so, you know, all of the, all the great and good observers, the sort of Joe Klein's and EJ Deans and so on have, have weighed in with, with remarks on, I think, I think Richard Cohen is the latest today. He has a column, I think it basically says, you know, I used to be in the tank for McCain, but now he's sold his soul to Satan and, you know, I'm no, I'm no longer in the tank and so on. So it's basically the final, the final divorce between John McCain and the reporters who used to love him. So I, I want to, I want to, I want to say on behalf of myself, right? That for those, for like, I'm being ironical.

• 14:15Ezra Klein?

  Yes.

• 14:16Ross Douthat?

  In that commentary.

• 14:17Ezra Klein?

  It's a much simpler time.

• 14:17Ross Douthat?

  It is a simpler time where you, Ezra Klein, were part of a vast liberal conspiracy bent on portraying the war hero John McCain as the most dangerous politician in American history.

• 14:29Ezra Klein?

  I think we're both being pretty skeptical there.

• 14:31Ross Douthat?

  I, a champion, no, I, I don't, I don't remember whether you were part of it or not, but yeah.

• 14:35Ezra Klein?

  But it, it.

• 14:36Ross Douthat?

  This is.

• 14:36Ezra Klein?

  It's kind of amazing how different that moment is when you can imagine that there were like huge eruptions over the level of negative campaigning from McCain to Obama. I always feel this way when people talk about the Obama Romney campaigning where it all just seems so banal compared to where we eventually went.

• 14:53Ross Douthat?

  Right. But this is, you know, part of, part of the argument of many of Donald Trump supporters is that it was precisely because liberals insisted that first McCain and then Mitt Romney were history's greatest monsters, that, you know, that's how you got Trump.

• 15:10Ezra Klein?

  But they're right, it was so condescending.

• 15:11Ross Douthat?

  We don't need to argue, we don't need to argue about this. This is, this is, yeah, this is my office at The Atlantic. I think that is a copy of Grand New Party back there. But in, but again, with the sense that like, the point was to, the point was that this was somewhat extracurricular and it was sort of, you know, to be Norman Mailer-esque, right? It's sort of an advertisement for yourself, right? That then, in theory, is supposed to cash out in promotions and new jobs at the existing institutions, which is what happened, again, to that cohort, which is why I ended up here at The New York Times and you ended up at The Washington Post.

• 15:50Ezra Klein?

  So you are hired as the youngest ever opinion columnist at The New York Times?

• 15:55Ross Douthat?

  Deep breath, yes.

• 15:56Ezra Klein?

  I believe this is 2009?

• 15:57Ross Douthat?

  This is 2009, yes.

• 15:59Ezra Klein?

  But, but you're also in a, in a funny part of this. So throughout your career, I think it'll continue to be the case, you are the more conservative voice at institutions that are understood as broadly more liberal, right? I think that's true for The Atlantic, I think it's true for The New York Times opinion page, people would say.

• 16:17Ross Douthat?

  I wrote, I wrote the conservative column for the Harvard Crimson.

• 16:20Ezra Klein?

  For the Harvard Crimson.

• 16:21Ross Douthat?

  It goes all the way back.

• 16:22Ezra Klein?

  I'm curious about that experience. Tell me what doing that for as many years is, writing for liberal audiences as a conservative, you know, a pro-life Catholic conservative. Let's start here. What did it teach you about liberals?

• 16:37Ross Douthat?

  So I like liberals.

• 16:39Ezra Klein?

  That was a long pause after that.

• 16:40Ross Douthat?

  No, I'm, well, it's, I spend, I mean, the, the first thing to, to be said is that I always regarded this kind of role as just an incredible opportunity, like as a baseline, right? Where you write, you write opinions in order to argue and persuade. That, that's what opinion journalism, as far as I can see, is supposed to do. And, you know, it's an illusion to imagine that anyone has their whole worldview altered by an 800-word column or anything remotely like that. But, but still, on the margins, at the very least, right?

• 17:19Ross Douthat?

  You're trying to pull readers closer to your perspective, move people to some degree, expose people to ideas they wouldn't otherwise cover. And in that sense, there's just no better way to do it than to be the person at a given publication who has heterodox views relative to their audience. And look, obviously, there's lots of conservatives who read The Atlantic when I was there, there's lots and lots of conservatives who read The New York Times. So if you're, if you're working for a big publication, you're never exclusively speaking to people who disagree with you. But yeah, clearly, clearly I'm speaking to a lot of people who do disagree with me and that's a gift.

• 18:01Ross Douthat?

  And then you have to remember that it's a gift because it's also a very stressful situation, right? The claims you make are going to be exactingly scrutinized in a way that is maybe less true of people who sort of assume that the audience is going to be on their side.

• 18:22Ezra Klein?

  Well, what have you learned about writing persuasively?

• 18:25Ross Douthat?

  I mean, this is banal advice, but it's still the fundamental thing. It is, to argue effectively, you need to understand why people you disagree with hold the views that they do. And you need to start from a version of their argument that is high-minded rather than low-minded and that is sort of the best version of the perspective that they hold. And that doesn't mean that you can't think that like secretly or subconsciously they hold their opinion for bad or wicked reasons or because they want to, you know, just destroy their enemies and salt the earth. Like, you can believe that that exists somewhere in their mind, but to argue with them, you

• 19:09Ross Douthat?

  have to actually engage with the version of the argument that they themselves would put forward as their own best defense, right? So like the obvious examples, I'll pick one from the right and one from the left, right? So if you are pro-choice and you want to argue with pro-lifers, like actually argue with them, you cannot start from a description of the pro-life position that says, the point of pro-life politics is to subjugate women and punish them for sexual immorality. You're allowed to think that that's out there and like is part of, you know, the socially conservative psyche, you're allowed to think whatever you want, but you're not going to get anywhere arguing unless you start with the fact that like pro-life people think unborn

• 19:51Ross Douthat?

  human lives are human and worthy of legal protection in terms of being human. That's just where you have to start, right? And then to take, to take an issue from the other direction, if you are a conservative opponent of liberal views on immigration, you're allowed to think that liberals are politically Machiavellian cynics who are, you know, bringing in lots of illegal immigrants to vote Democratic, but you're never going to get anywhere arguing unless you start with what liberals themselves would say, which is that, you know, immigration is a humanitarian and economic benefit to immigrants and to the country that receives them. That, you know, that's, that's like where you have to start. That's it.

• 20:36Ross Douthat?

  That's the whole, the whole secret. And again, how effective the arguments are that you end up making from that starting point, I don't know. But I, I do think generally that. The act of sort of sustained, attempted, good faith interaction does, even in totally polarized environments, yield a kind of reasonably favorable response? Like, it's not the case that you can't talk across partisan divides. It's challenging and difficult and sometimes exhausting, but people are open to it.

• 21:40Ezra Klein?

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

• 22:17Ross Douthat?

  A profoundly, profoundly successful exercise.

• 22:20Ezra Klein?

  What would you say you've been most successful? What would you say you feel you have been most persuasive about?

• 22:29Ross Douthat?

  I don't honestly know exactly how to judge that. I mean, I think that the... So, on the one hand, there's a bunch of things that have happened since I took the Times job that sort of fulfilled my expectations to some degree about like what was going to happen in American politics and where certain things would go. Above all, the sort of populist nationalist transformation of the Republican Party.

• 22:57Ezra Klein?

  It's worth noting here for people who don't know, you and your former co-blogger, Ryhan, had written a book called Grand New Party.

• 23:02Ross Douthat?

  We wrote a book, but beyond the book, we were just sort of involved. So, this wasn't persuasion directed at liberals, honestly. This was persuasion directed more at our fellow conservatives and saying, "Look, the tectonic plates under the Republican Party are shifting. The party has to deal with the fact that it has a more working-class coalition. It has to adapt its policy and rhetoric," all of these kind of things. But in fact, that vision was fulfilled in a way that had absolutely nothing to do with us. It was not the case that we wrote a bunch of columns, persuaded a bunch of Republicans to become more populist, and low and behold, a populist version of Marco Rubio was elected president in 2016.

• 23:45Ross Douthat?

  No, obviously, our prophecies were fulfilled by Donald Trump, and the whole Trump phenomenon was just, was, and for the most part, remains pretty disconnected from the work of opinion mongers and would-be intellectuals. So, there's that. That's sort of one area of success of a kind, but not the success that I looked for. I think that...

• 24:18Ezra Klein?

  Well, stop there for a second. In what way was it not right? You put some flesh on that. So, you wrote this book. You're sort of involved in an effort to say the Republican Party should not be as doctrinally libertarian. It shouldn't be all about cutting Medicare and cutting Social Security, that it had this opportunity at a time when it did not win majorities of working-class voters, to shift its policies in a way that would make it more appealing to them. And the kinds of shifts that you and Ryhan advocated had to do with things like immigration, had to do with things like tax credits for kids, had to do with sort of shifting it to a more pro-family, more concerned with the problems of working-class families from, I would say,

• 25:03Ezra Klein?

  a more traditionalist perspective maybe than the left is. So, how would you describe what happened of that? And then what happened that created the working-class shift? Because Republicans do now win majorities of working-class voters, or Trump at least does. What drove that that maybe was not in your prescription?

• 25:23Ross Douthat?

  Well, so, one, part of what drove it was just that Trump picked or intuited a different set of issues to focus on than Ryhan and I would have favored. But generally, we were focused on sort of family policy, wage subsidies, these kind of things. And Trump was just focused on, obviously, like trade tariffs and reindustrialization in a way that I don't think we, I don't think we fully anticipated how much some of those arguments would resonate in 2016. I don't know how much they resonate now. But in 2016, I think a big part of the country

• 26:06Ross Douthat?

  was still getting over the shock of the opening to China. And there was just a real percentage for Trump in flying around the Midwest, going to places that had been hammered and saying, "I'm just going to bring back your jobs," right?

• 26:18Speaker 03

  We're going to stop businesses from leaving our country. And we are, they are being... They are being drained out of our country, our jobs, our money, our base, and our factories. We are, we're going to stop it.

• 26:35Ross Douthat?

  And that was, again, a different message from saying, "We need to use government policy to help people form families."

• 26:43Ezra Klein?

  And I'm genuinely angry at the people who took...

• 26:45Ross Douthat?

  And I'm, right, well, that too, right. So, then there's a more substantial anger. There's more substantial scapegoating.

• 26:52Speaker 03

  They're moving to other places. A lot of them are moving to Mexico. Don't underestimate it. It's like the new China, on a smaller level, but like the new China.

• 27:00Ross Douthat?

  So, our view wasn't that you should never cut Medicare and Social Security. It was more that if you're going to cut Medicare or reform Medicare, you should be doing it not to just pass a new upper bracket tax cut, but to free up more money to help working families, right? Would be, would be how the argument would go. And Trump just said, "No, we're never cutting these things," right? And so, he outflanked all of his Republican primary opponents by realizing that a big part of the Republican base wasn't on board with Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan. But what that did was basically create a kind of a more popular, but much more fiscally unsustainable, and in the end, I think, sort of unproductive, policy mix on the right,

• 27:45Ross Douthat?

  where the right sort of defines itself as defenders of old people's entitlements rather than people who are eager to cut it, and then has no space left for, for a lot of the policy ideas that we would have favored. So, that's part of, part of what happened. The other thing that happens, right, is that we were trying to sort of craft, I think you used the word "traditional." I would have said sort of like a kind of moderate social conservatism that was compatible with the Republican Party's sort of religious, religious base and pro-life commitments and so on, but tried to start from there and broaden into broader support for two-parent families and marriage and these, these kind of things.

• 28:29Ross Douthat?

  What actually happened was that for about 10 years, social conservatism was just routed in the US. It lost, I mean, it lost the argument over same-sex marriage most prominently, but it lost a lot of different arguments. Like, if you just look at the trends in the 2010s on all kinds of questions from drug use all the way to like polyamory. Not that the country is universally pro-polyamory, but you can, you can see that leftward shift all over. It ends up showing up on abortion too, right? Trump comes in, on the one hand, as a kind of someone who speaks to that, who says to embattled social conservatives and religious conservatives, "You're losing the culture, and you need to live with that

• 29:12Ross Douthat?

  and just have me as like the tough guy who will defend you." But then the other, the other thing that happens is that liberalism and progressivism, having won those victories, then radicalize further and say, "Well, you know, what happened on same-sex marriage, where we sort of shift the country completely in our direction in an incredible amount of time, and then declare that the other side are bigots and we don't need to talk to them anymore?" We can do that with a lot of other issues too. And that gets you the woke era, and then it gets you the backlash against the woke era. But like, the backlash against the woke era is very far removed from a kind of stable social conservatism,

• 29:57Ross Douthat?

  like, sort of building, building something. I mean, the backlash against the woke era is then, you know, everybody from Catholic traditionalists to pot-smoking libertarians, right, who don't, who don't like the woke. But it's not a... I don't know, it's not sort of a coherent basis for governing the country in ways that I think have become totally apparent in the second Trump term.

• 30:21Ezra Klein?

  Well, you have this famous 2016 tweet, you write, "A thought sent back in time to the theocracy panic of 2005."

• 30:28Ross Douthat?

  Right.

• 30:28Ezra Klein?

  You seem like you're enjoying this interview. "If you dislike the religious right, wait till you meet the post-religious right."

• 30:34Ross Douthat?

  Mm-hmm.

• 30:35Ezra Klein?

  Unpack both sides of that. I mean, for people maybe who don't really remember what you're calling the theocracy panic of '05, what was that? But then the religious right versus the post-religious right, I think, is actually a quite significant thing. I just did this big Odyssey essay, which I would say is very much about that question in a way. So, you know.

• 30:54Ross Douthat?

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

• 31:36Ross Douthat?

  hated and feared about George W. Bush becomes something they're nostalgic for.

• 31:40Ezra Klein?

  Mm-hmm.

• 31:40Ross Douthat?

  Right? And that they see sort of, and that as you kind of de-Christianize conservatism, you get more bigotry, xenophobia, these kind of things. You know, that was 10 years ago. There's a lot of different forms, like a post-religious right could be, and you see versions of this, not a kind of, you know, terrifying fascist formation, but just a kind of right-wing politics of, you know, sort of libertine indifference and sort of proud amoralism, right? And again, this is part of Trump's coalition, right, is people

• 32:20Ross Douthat?

  who just hate moralistic arguments and want to do whatever they want to do and ended up seeing Trump as an avatar for that, which is, I think, quite different from the part of the post-religious right that is literally people trying to revive kind of a pagan, non-Christian fascist politics. But both of those things sort of exist as phenomena in the last 10 years.

• 32:46Ezra Klein?

  Tell me what you think leads to the phenomena of the more pagan formation. So, the first time I heard this description of it was actually in an interview that Louise Perry, the sort of British conservative kind of critic of modern feminism, did with your new boss, Barry Weiss. And she was making this distinction between Jordan Peterson and Andrew Tate.

• 33:07Speaker 04

  So, you know, the really crucial difference between John Peace and Andrew Tate, there are obviously lots of differences, but the one that I think is most salient to this issue is Jordan Peterson is basically preaching a Christian message and Andrew Tate is not. The more I think about it, the more I think that actually that's really the key dividing line, if you're thinking about American culture in particular.

• 33:35Ezra Klein?

  And that a lot of the fights on the right, she sort of made this argument, are going to begin to come down to this, you know, are you sort of pushing towards a, you know, what can be called here, at least in certain forms of Christian ethic? Or is it about strength, about dominance, about hierarchy? Obviously, Christianity is a big phenomenon and, you know, as is Islam and Judaism, and all these religions have many, many different

• 33:58Ross Douthat?

  It's a complicated world.

• 33:59Ezra Klein?

  Political manifestations.

• 34:00Ross Douthat?

  Yep.

• 34:00Ezra Klein?

  So, I don't want to overly, probably pagans too. But I do think there's something to that.

• 34:06Ross Douthat?

  Well, the issue there, though, is that Jordan Peterson is not a Christian. Andrew Tate is a, that is a right-wing politics that formally rejects Christianity. Jordan Peterson is a post-Christian right-wing politics that is sort of trying, I mean, he's been ill for a while, and I don't want to like sort of characterize where he is right now. But generally, he's engaged in this sort of constant, like, wrestling with the texts of the Old Testament and the Christian story and so on, and saying, you know, "These are incredibly important and we need to, you know, preserve them without ever actually

• 34:45Ross Douthat?

  committing to Christian belief." And conservatism generally, I think, as Christianity has declined, has ended up in this weird place where it's trying to find some kind of category that includes Christianity, includes traditional religion, but isn't reducible to it. So, it's like, well, we're defending Western civilization, right? You'll hear that a lot from people on the right. And often, like, that language is associated with people on the right who are not themselves formally committed to Christianity. But so Tate, Tate is an extreme, but even Peterson himself is sort of navigating in the kind of post-Christian landscape in his own way.

• 35:27Ezra Klein?

  So, tell me a bit of how you understand the story. How do we go from the front-facing Christianity of conservatism in the Bush era to this much more post-Christian assemblage that includes Christians, as you're saying? But I would say it's fair to say Christian ethics and virtue are not demanded as a...

• 35:49Ross Douthat?

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

• 36:32Ross Douthat?

  to an extreme, right, where he is just sort of nakedly transactional in his relationship to Christianity and doesn't even sort of necessarily mouth the pieties. But then, at the intellectual level, right, so let's say you are a writer or thinker or would-be elite on the right, looking at this landscape, looking at not just the decline of Christianity, but this sort of sweeping victory for social liberalism that I just described, well, you're going to look at that and say, "Okay, we had an evangelical president in George W. Bush. We had sort of a Catholic evangelical alliance sort of defining Republican politics. And what did we get from it? We got secularization and the triumph of social liberalism. So,

• 37:14Ross Douthat?

  something went wrong here." And a lot of the sort of controversy and argument and debate among younger conservatives especially, but all over the place, is this kind of wrestling with like, "Well, why did we fail?" Right? And there's just a lot of different impulses at work there. You have, you know, you have people who sort of want to leave Christianity behind entirely and say, "The problem, you know, the problem is just like, you know, this religion is sort of weak and its leaders are hapless and defeat and soft and you need,

• 37:57Ross Douthat?

  you know, a harsh, a harsh masculine force and so on." That's, that's a pretty narrow group. I think what's more common is a desire among people who are connected to Christianity, who are Christian and so on, to like, say, "Well, where can we find greater strength? Where can we find, you know, greater toughness? How can we be more effective political actors? How can we defeat our enemies instead of having them vanquish us?" You could call it a reaching for pagan energy that doesn't go all the way to actually becoming pagan, right? And look, the truth is that, you know, if you go back and look...

• 38:37Ezra Klein?

  Stephen Miller's not a Wiccan.

• 38:39Ross Douthat?

  Well, Stephen Miller's not a Wiccan, right. But there, yeah, there's a, I mean, there, it's like, the desire is for strength and toughness and a politics of enmity. There's various versions of this that, that show up. And they're connected also to the reality that, you know, if you look, obviously, historically, at the expressions of political Christianity in the Western world, they are, you know, I mean, very comfortable with fighting wars and, you know, conquering enemies and all of these kind of things. Some people, Christians, conservative Christians today who are like, you know, "What happened to the crusading

• 39:22Ross Douthat?

  spirit?" or something like that, are not wrong that, like, that, that has been part of Christian culture in the West for a long time. But, you know, you see this in the debate about like the Odyssey, for instance, right, where...

• 39:41Ross Douthat?

  Christopher Nolan takes The Odyssey and some people have said he Christianizes it, right? This is sort of debatable, but he certainly makes the moral vision of the story more compatible with Christianity, where it's like, okay, you know, Odysseus has committed sins and feels guilt, and he doesn't glory in war, he doesn't sleep with Calypso and Circe and so on. But then there's clearly a group, not just of would be neo pagans, but sort of conservative Christians on the internet who don't like that. And they're like, where's the, you know, where's the war, right?

• 40:23Ross Douthat?

  Where's the, you know, we, this is sort of, this is like losing, losing the core, the core of the story. And that's, I think that that partially reflects this desire to find something that doesn't seem present in like late 20th century to the public Christianity, the compassionate conservatism of George W. Bush, find some kind of fighting spirit in the theory that that's what you need to overcome liberalism.

• 40:54Ezra Klein?

  It's funny, it's an odd take on George W. Bush in a way, that what he lacked was a fighting spirit. Bush, who won two elections in a row against the Democrats, but also launched a large number of wars.

• 41:08Ross Douthat?

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

• 41:51Ross Douthat?

  Radical Islam has taken advantage of our liberal weakness. We need to show strength and make a friend enemy distinction in the battle for the Middle East, right? The whole like national greatness conservatism, and this runs, history is filled with these like fun ironies, right? So there were a bunch of people who were associated with what got called national greatness conservatism, which was basically a kind of, you know, pretty hawkish form of Republican politics, who then, like Bill Kristol, right? Who then end up as like the great critics of Trumpism.

• 42:35Ezra Klein?

  Our former colleague, David Brooks.

• 42:37Ross Douthat?

  Right, our former colleague, David Brooks, he's a less, he's a less extreme example. It's just really striking, if you go back, like, nobody hates Bill Kristol more than Trumpists, and Bill Kristol hates Trumpists. But if you go back and read like the way Kristol wrote about politics and war and all these things in the late 90s and early 2000s, he has a lot in common with the way sort of the young nationalists spoiling for a fight write about politics today. It's just the focus, the focus is different.

• 43:08Ezra Klein?

  So why do you think that ended up being such a major split? Because I agree that that is one of the places where you tend to see a lot of split between Trumpists and never Trumpers, people associated with national greatness conservatism. That was an aggressive, muscular conservatism.

• 43:23Ross Douthat?

  Yep.

• 43:24Ezra Klein?

  That was a, we need to defend Western civilization version of conservatism. And, you know, for all the talk about not launching new wars, it does not turn out to be the case that that is so central to Donald Trump's conception.

• 43:37Ross Douthat?

  Apparently not.

• 43:38Ezra Klein?

  Of how MAGA works.

• 43:39Ross Douthat?

  Yep.

• 43:40Ezra Klein?

  So why do you think that became such a cut in the Republican coalition?

• 43:43Ross Douthat?

  I think it was, well, it was partially a cut, because even though Trump has ended up starting a new war in the Middle East, he really did pretty strongly repudiate elements of neo conservative and hawkish foreign policy. And to the extent that, like, if you were committed to the idea that the Iraq war had been a good idea, then Trump in 2016 was not your guy, right? So there was that as a kind of specific breaking point. Then there was, there also was, you know, to make the case for the never Trump side, a kind of clear characterological argument, where you could say, you know, in, in the

• 44:23Ross Douthat?

  early 2000s, that a politics of national greatness only made sense if it was founded on character and virtue in your leaders. And I don't think George Bush was like a paragon of every single virtue, but it's fair to say that he was a more personally virtuous guy in various ways than Trump, right? So there were people who had committed to that idea for good reasons, for whom it was just like, okay, I don't care how muscular Trump is, or how international greatness he is, he's just a bad guy, and I'm not, I'm not going to support him. And then for younger people, like, especially after 2016, like, once, you know, once Trump

• 45:05Ross Douthat?

  wins, then he just sort of resets the landscape, right? And you sort of, it's, it's just like, you sort of, I feel like with younger people on both the left and the right, the world where we had arguments about the character of American politicians, the world where, you know, Bill Clinton's adultery was something to be litigated, all of these things is just kind of a lost world. And so it's sort of-

• 45:32Ezra Klein?

  I think it might be rediscovered soon.

• 45:34Ross Douthat?

  It might be.

• 45:35Ezra Klein?

  I think in the turning of the wheel on this.

• 45:37Ross Douthat?

  Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, right. No, the next cohort, I mean, yeah, we're old now, so, you know, you can, you can see that each cohort will have a different perspective, and there may be a renewed interest in character.

• 45:48Ezra Klein?

  There's another fascinating, at least to me, shift that has taken place, which is, you know, we've described a couple of times here, the centrality of evangelical Christianity to politics in, say, 2005. And now Catholics seem much more central to politics, right? Catholic thinkers, you have a lot of Catholic converts at the top of Republican Party politics, including J.D.

• 46:31Ezra Klein?

  Vance, who is just on your show, the Vice President, who just released a book about his Catholic conversion.

• 46:35Ross Douthat?

  Albeit one with a Protestant church on the cover.

• 46:39Ezra Klein?

  It is an odd design choice, I agree.

• 46:41Ross Douthat?

  Sort of. I mean, it actually is a design choice that makes a lot of sense, but we can, we can get into that, go on.

• 46:47Ezra Klein?

  What have you made of that? What does that move from, like, the form of Christianity that seems to be driving right wing politics, was evangelical Christianity to Catholic thinking? What is that?

• 47:00Ross Douthat?

  I don't know, so one, I don't know how much Catholic thinking can be said to be driving Republican politics. I would not look at the second Trump administration.

• 47:10Ezra Klein?

  Right wing intellectual trends, maybe?

• 47:11Ross Douthat?

  But yeah, I think it's, I think it's, I think it's very important in sort of right wing intellectual culture. In the last five years, generally, after a long period of secularization, there is a renewed interest in arguments about religion, religious ideas, that extends beyond conservatism, maybe even extends to you, right, Ezra? We've, we've talked about this on this show before. And I think in my own, my own work has been, in this period, kind of well suited to that moment. I felt sort of more in tune with the times than I usually do in, in that sense. But the way that's manifested in kind of right wing intellectual culture is that Catholicism,

• 47:56Ross Douthat?

  which has, I think it's fair to say, a stronger and deeper intellectual tradition than evangelical Christianity in the US, has just become like a kind of natural attractor for a lot of people who are like looking for, looking for a harbor, looking for a place to land, looking to convert or revert or anything else. But then the other thing is that- You know, Catholicism is still struggling as a mass institutional religion, right? And evangelicalism is still thriving relative to Catholicism. I mean, one argument you could make is that under sort of digital conditions, under sort

• 48:37Ross Douthat?

  of internet conditions, which are hard on, they're hard on things that don't have a clear definition, that are sort of just based on kind of loose ancestral loyalties. So they've been really hard on like denominational Protestantism, on people who are like, well, I'm a Methodist because my parents were Methodist, or I'm a Presbyterian because I like the pastor and so on. And they've been good for, in different ways, sort of stronger brands. And in a way, Christianity sort of polarizes into the strong brand of like liturgical religion, of which Catholicism is the strongest expression, and then kind of the strong brand of mass market seeker sensitive, you know, come for our amazing, our amazing praise

• 49:21Ross Douthat?

  music concert. And those are the two strongest forms, but the Catholic form is stronger at the elite level and the evangelical form seems stronger at the mass level. That was a very long comment, but it's, it's something obviously that I think about a lot, but it's a very, yeah, I don't know where it goes from, from there. Like, do we just have a world where like, it's sort of natural if you're in the elite to be Catholic, the way it would have once been natural to be an Episcopalian? But that's somehow separate from like, what's happening in mass trends in religion? Does an elite turn to Catholicism eventually sort of trickle down and sort of revitalize the wider Catholic institutions? I have no idea.

• 50:04Ezra Klein?

  Do you think the relationship between the left and religion has changed?

• 50:08Ross Douthat?

  Yes. I think that, again, I'm not sure where this goes, but I feel like the kind of post-Christian left is having its own kind of existential crisis of like pessimism. But I feel like there was a period when it, when on the left, it was like, we are leaving traditional patriarchal cis heteronormative Christianity behind, and we're going to be great. We're gonna, you know, we're gonna enter the broad sunlit uplands of science. We're going to trust the science in this house and so on. And then somewhere between COVID and Trump returning and, you know, the rise of AI and various other unsettling

• 50:51Ross Douthat?

  things, I think the left started to feel like they were missing something. You know, if you watch, did you watch the last Knives Out movie?

• 51:03Ezra Klein?

  I did.

• 51:04Ross Douthat?

  Right. So in the, in the latest, so the prior Knives Out movie was a movie about how Elon Musk and billionaires are bad and evil. And this, the latest Knives Out movie was a movie about how there are really awful forms of religion, and there's also really good forms of religion. And we should want the really good forms to survive. And, you know, it's just, it's just one movie, but I thought it was an interesting sort of sense of like, a kind of, a kind of like groping around in liberal culture for sort of some kind of religious or spiritual point of connection that, again, I think also shows

• 51:45Ross Douthat?

  up in just kind of post-Christian spirituality, interest in sort of new age pagan stuff, all that stuff, too. There's just a lot of, there's a lot of groping.

• 51:55Ezra Klein?

  Well, I think you can see a couple of things happening that are at least interesting. So I agree, Knives Out is one of them. We were talking about the Odyssey, but you have James Talarico, who became a kind of phenom candidate, sort of one of the only like mainstream liberal candidates who's been like a big attentional phenom of the moment.

• 52:16Ross Douthat?

  Yep.

• 52:16Ezra Klein?

  And does it by wrapping a pretty straightforward progressive politics in a very, very moralistically Christian.

• 52:23Ross Douthat?

  Yep.

• 52:24Ezra Klein?

  Framework.

• 52:25Speaker 05

  What would Jesus do about a justice system that incarcerates more people than any other country on the face of the earth? And what would Jesus do about an economic system that prioritizes profits over the health of our planet? Would he stay in his room and pray? Or would he walk into the seat of power and flip over the tables of injustice?

• 52:51Ezra Klein?

  And I think people have found that exciting. It has given them a way to talk about the moment that I think feels deeper. And it has tapped into something very real. I think if you're watching some of the other people coming up, this would include not just Ralph Warnock, but John Ossoff in Georgia, they're much more comfortable in that grammar as well.

• 53:13Speaker 06

  They got together, the Speaker of the House, held hands with other legislators, prayed a prayer, and then they went and cut a trillion dollars out of Medicaid. 15 million people.

• 53:26Ezra Klein?

  Right.

• 53:26Speaker 06

  Off of their healthcare. They, they kicked veterans and seniors and children off of SNAP. And I don't understand how you read the book that I read. I'm a Matthew 25 Christian.

• 53:41Speaker 07

  A government transformed into a tool of one man's vengeance and enrichment. A spiritually broken president. Who digs the moral pit deeper and deeper. But Pastor Proverbs says, whoever digs a pit. Whoever digs a pit will fall into it. And Scripture is full of kings brought low by their own arrogance.

• 54:23Ezra Klein?

  So in my view, something is happening. It's not necessarily the left is becoming believers in a, in a, in a new way, but there is a desire to sort of reconnect, I think, to traditions.

• 54:35Ross Douthat?

  Well, I mean, there was a way in which, from, from my perspective as a skeptical outsider, the whole great awakening was this fascinating attempt to do religious energy without metaphysical commitment. Like, it was, it really was the case that there was kind of the energy that you associate with a moralistic revival at work in anti-racism and, you know, everything associated with that. Like, you have iconoclasm, you have, you know, people enforcing new moral norms. Like, these are things that we associate with periods of spiritual ferment. But quite self-consciously, like, the anti-racist cause was detached from the black church in various ways, right? And you had like,

• 55:18Ross Douthat?

  our, again, my former Atlantic colleague, Ta-Nehisi Coates, you know, as a kind of prophet who very explicitly rejected cosmic hope, right? If anything, sort of carried a kind of cosmic despair around with him. I think that combination doesn't work well, right? You end up with a kind of, a kind of politics of guilt without the possibility of redemption is a pretty dark perspective on the world. And I think sort of wokeness, for all its revolutionary zeal, ends up itself just in some dark places, again, independent of what's happening with Trump or on the right or anything else. So some of it might be just a reaction to that, too, right? A sense of like, okay, we can't moralize at people

• 56:03Ross Douthat?

  if we're also telling them that the universe is sort of empty and meaningless, except for like, the meaning we impose on it through ideological categories or something. Like, you need, if you're going to have progressive moralism, you need to be able to claim to, that it corresponds to something like out there in the cosmos that's real, right?

• 56:21Ezra Klein?

  I don't totally agree with that. Maybe one, one way to, to ground that disagreement is Pope Leo's AI encyclical. One of the things that struck me reading it was, without agreeing with his metaphysics, right? I am not a Catholic. My vision of the world and its cosmology is not Catholic. I found it to be a really beautiful and moving articulation of what I would otherwise describe as liberal values. All the way down to ways of practicing politics, you know, approaches to pluralism, approaches to the human being. So now you could say, and I think this would be true, I mean, I come out of Jewish tradition, and I probably

• 57:04Ezra Klein?

  have a lot of that in the way I look at the world. But I do think there is something about the emphasis there on a certain kind of human dignity and a certain kind of treatment between people that Trump has thrown into a kind of relief. So maybe it looks more explicitly connected to a politics I am interested in and trying to create than it would have if he had written the same thing, but Jeb Bush was president.

• 57:31Ross Douthat?

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

• 58:16Ross Douthat?

  total moral reckoning with all the deep, profound evils of the United States. Like, those are different messages. And I think the left kind of ran with the second message for a while. And again, I think ended up in some cul-de-sacs and dark places. And so now it's like, okay, now maybe we'll, maybe we like that Pope Leo is linking his critique of AI to a vision of human dignity, rather than a dark, just a purely dark vision where you're like, AI is bad because it is controlled by, you know.

• 58:55Ross Douthat?

  Evil, evil ruthless tech bros or something. I don't know. Or AI is bad because it's part of the horrifying structures of capitalism, which are a nightmare from which we're struggling to await.

• 59:06Ezra Klein?

  So I want to go back to a question I asked you a bit ago. I'd asked you what being the sort of conservative in many liberal institutions had taught you about liberals. Sort of answered that, but I think over time we've gotten closer.

• 59:17Ross Douthat?

  I don't know. Yeah, I don't know if I did answer that.

• 59:18Ezra Klein?

  But what about the media, right? You've been inside the media for a long time. What has it made you think about what the media does well, what it does poorly?

• 59:29Ross Douthat?

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

• 1:00:10Ross Douthat?

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

• 1:00:51Ross Douthat?

  But, you know, we've lived in that kind of world, I think, for a while now. I don't know, the Trump era, the AI era, the COVID era and so on. They, I feel like they have really undermined my, my own sense of sort of knowing who I think the good guys and bad guys are in any particular circumstance. And the less you feel like, the less you feel certain about knowing who the good guys and bad guys are, the more you feel the benefit of just like setting out every day to just sort of try and describe the world. Like, and maybe, maybe become less of a persuader.

• 1:01:36Ross Douthat?

  I feel like I write maybe more columns like that these days. As the world gets weirder, journalism needs people and institutions that sort of refocus on just saying, we're trying to, we're trying to figure out what's happening here. Because I'm struggling to figure out exactly what's happening in a way that I don't think I was when Mitt Romney and Barack Obama were running against each other. And maybe this leads to like, you know, you wanted to ask me about.

• 1:02:09Ezra Klein?

  You're going to 60 Minutes.

• 1:02:11Ross Douthat?

  Which is the first place you have worked in media.

• 1:02:14Ezra Klein?

  That The Atlantic is a, is a magazine that is opinionated at its, at its core. It's launched initially as an abolitionist magazine. You worked on the Times opinion page. 60 Minutes is different, although it's under now Barry Weiss's management. Your former colleague here, I never overlapped with Weiss here. But is that, yeah, I'll ask the question straight. Is that part of why you're going to 60 Minutes?

• 1:02:36Ross Douthat?

  I think that, so I have, you have been doing interview podcasts for a long time. I've only been doing it for, you know, less, less than two years. But presumably, I'm going to be doing a lot of interviewing, right? That's my hope. And I, I find interviewing, I don't know how you find interviewing. I find it very difficult relative to writing. Writing just comes easier and more naturally to me than, than interviewing does. But I have found interviewing just very helpful at a moment when, like, what is actually going on in the world seems more opaque to me. And so, yeah, one, one reason to take a job at 60 Minutes is just an opportunity to sort of do more of that

• 1:03:19Ross Douthat?

  for, for a somewhat different audience than, than the Times has, although of course there's overlap. But yeah, this is sort of, and this is, yeah, this, this seems like a good time, a good time to, to ask questions a little bit in an open ended way. And that's, I guess, you know, that's what we've both been doing with our shows. But that's sort of what I'm thinking I'll be doing there.

• 1:03:43Ezra Klein?

  Obviously, you're talking here in the way you often do to an audience that is more liberal than you. And who is maybe.

• 1:03:49Ross Douthat?

  In spite of, in spite of reading my columns all these years, Ezra.

• 1:03:52Ezra Klein?

  Who is maybe concerned.

• 1:03:53Ross Douthat?

  My work of persuasion.

• 1:03:54Ezra Klein?

  Concerned about what they, they think Barry Weiss wants to do with 60 Minutes. What it means that you're one of the, the first big name hires there. What did they say they wanted? Like, what, what is your sense of what 60 Minutes is trying to become? You know, with you, launching with you as a marquee name.

• 1:04:11Ross Douthat?

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

• 1:04:54Ross Douthat?

  And so there's a way to sort of try and have a more balanced view of the world and try and get those people back. My own primary sense of what 60 Minutes can do is more just capture the full messy reality of the world in 2026. And if you get that right, then exactly how many Republicans versus Democrats you're reaching is like, you know, that, that will sort of follow from success at the basic project of describing the world.

• 1:05:24Ezra Klein?

  You mentioned a minute ago, the other big change in this, which is you're moving from writing to on camera interviewing, which you've already done a bit with Interesting Times, your podcast. This is another big shift from when you and I started, which is there is a lot of movement now towards video. There's a lot of people who talk about a return to more orality and culture. But, but is that part of it for you? I mean, do you, do you have the sense that the center of what journalism is, the way people understand the world, is moving away from the written word?

• 1:06:04Ross Douthat?

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

• 1:06:49Ross Douthat?

  or David Brooks and Gail Collins did of sort of a conversation back and forth. They really like the features that my longtime editor, John Guida, does, where he'll sort of interview someone in a, a written form, where you're writing and people are writing, writing in response.

• 1:07:03Ezra Klein?

  The transcripts of our shows.

• 1:07:05Ross Douthat?

  Yeah, and, and some of it, I think, is that people want to see the person underneath the writing. And maybe this becomes more the case in the age of AI. Tyler Cowen, who, you know, you, you know his work well. One of his arguments about AI is that it basically is just going to increase the premium for, for instance, live performance, right? For the, the ability to, to speak in public and engage with questions and all these kind of human things will go up as AI can generate more writing. And I think dialogue and conversation are sort of versions of that. Places where sort of writers and thinkers sort of show their own humanities,

• 1:07:48Ross Douthat?

  maybe a little bit more than you do in a kind of Voice from the Mountain Top column. And then, again, maybe this is just me projecting my own perspective onto the world. But I also think people like these things because, like, like me, they're a little uncertain about what's, what's happening in reality. And the kind of conversational form is a way into the news and what's going on in the world that doesn't require you to sort of accept a single authoritative take and leaves room for uncertainty and ambiguity while also introducing you to perspectives that you might not have considered. That's, that's the positive case for it. I can also make the negative case and say that, you know, a world, yeah, where people read less

• 1:08:33Ross Douthat?

  and are less literate has various negative repercussions. I'm not, I'm not trying to like, sort of be too Pollyannaish about this change. At the very least, it's a real shift, I think.

• 1:08:46Ezra Klein?

  Do you think with the reporting resources of 60 Minutes behind you, you'll finally be able to crack what the UFOs are?

• 1:08:53Ross Douthat?

  Yeah, I, I mean, look, this is obviously the number one goal. And, um, you know, I, I've said if I, if I can't break the UFO story in, I don't want to make any promises.

• 1:09:06Ross Douthat?

  But yes, the subject of UFOs has has come up at once or twice, maybe only from my end, in in conversations about stories that that the media should be interested in going forward.

• 1:09:19Ezra Klein?

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

• 1:09:58Ross Douthat?

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

• 1:10:41Ross Douthat?

  physical reality that are observed by, let's say, Navy aviators, and there are other concrete claims about supposed secret programs that the federal government has. And those are questions that journalists should be able to answer. So I'm interested in the UFO story in particular, but also other questions like, you know, the debates that we're already having about AI consciousness, these kind of things, not because I think they are unknowable, but because I think that they actually do presumably have answers, right? Like, maybe the AI consciousness debate will never be resolved or something, but like,

• 1:11:23Ross Douthat?

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

• 1:12:08Ross Douthat?

  But as a journalist, I'm only interested in them insofar as you can figure out what the hell is going on.

• 1:12:14Ezra Klein?

  Well, I hope you do. Ross, it's been a pleasure working alongside you.

• 1:12:18Ross Douthat?

  It's been a pleasure.

• 1:12:19Ezra Klein?

  Reading you for many, many, many years. I'll continue to watch you.

• 1:12:21Ross Douthat?

  I imagine we will encounter one another again after this conversation.

• 1:12:25Ezra Klein?

  In the singularity. And then always our final question.

• 1:12:27Ross Douthat?

  God, I hope not.

• 1:12:28Ezra Klein?

  Even in this post-literate age, what are your books you'd recommend to the audience?

• 1:12:33Ross Douthat?

  Ah, I forgot about the three books question. I have been reading Speak Memory by Vladimir Nabokov, Nabokov, however you want to pronounce it, which is his sort of memoir, mostly of his boyhood as a Russian aristocrat before the Russian the Russian Revolution. I would I would recommend that to people who don't want to be post-literate, who want to be very, very literate indeed. I will recommend Julian Jackson's biography of Charles de Gaulle on general principles. I haven't read it recently, but just strong, strong recommend there.

• 1:13:13Ross Douthat?

  And I will finally recommend the most recent book that I read to my children, which is Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island. So those are three solid recommendations, and I'm happy to leave you with them.

• 1:13:29Ezra Klein?

  Ross Duffett, thank you very much.

• 1:13:33Ross Douthat?

  Ezra Klein, thank you.