Just Asking Questions

Latest Episodes:

Inez Stepman: How Socialism Seduced New Yorkers Jul 03, 2025

Show notes

Is Zohran Mamdani's success in New York politics the mark of socialist resurgence or just a reflection of a deeply fractured party base? Zach Weissmueller is joined by two very concerned New Yorkers. Our own Liz Wolfe and Inez Stepman, who's a policy analyst at the Independent Women's Forum.

Stepman critiques the ideological cocktail attracting young New Yorkers to socialism. She argues that Mamdani's appeal is more cultural than it is economic, which leads to a discussion of whether libertarianism can actually be effective in combating Mamdani-esque movements.

Mentioned in the podcast:

"HSTPA Impacts Study," by the Real Estate Board of New York

"The Daily Dirt: 5 Questions With Socialist Mayoral Candidate Zohran Mamdani," by Kathryn Brenzel

"The Most Detailed Map of the N.Y.C. Mayoral Primary," by Martín González Gómez, Saurabh Datar, Matthew Bloch, Andrew Fischer, and Jon Huang

Mamdani's homeowner policy memo

Clip from Eric Adams' speech blasting socialism

Mamdani's talk at the 2021 Young Democratic Socialists of America Winter Conference

Chapters:

00:00—Podcast theme

00:24—Zohran Mamdani and the new face of the Democratic Socialists

05:12—Class resentment, college debt, and the upper-middle-class left

11:19—How socialism distorts incentives and degrades culture

17:32—The myth of New York's liberal monolith

22:53—Rent freezes, housing politics, and urban affordability myths

30:53—Are YIMBYs being misled by progressive rhetoric?

35:22—The cultural core of Mamdani's politics

41:45—Why Inez Stepman broke with libertarianism

48:54—Policing, public safety, and the stakes of a Mamdani mayoralty

57:58—Mental illness, civil liberties, and involuntary commitment

01:08:00—What Mamdani's rise means beyond New York

The post Inez Stepman: How Socialism Seduced New Yorkers appeared first on Reason Magazine.

Ro Khanna: Congress Must Take Back Its War Powers Jun 25, 2025

Show notes

Who's allowed to launch an attack on another country? Just asking questions. Rep. Ro Khanna (D–Calif.) joined Reason's Just Asking Questions podcast to discuss the War Powers Resolution he's co-sponsored with Rep. Thomas Massie (R–Ky.), which would require President Donald Trump to seek congressional approval before continuing to drop bombs in Iran. He also discussed Trump's remarks that the governments of Israel and Iran "don't know what the fuck they are doing" after they ignored his call for a ceasefire, whether or not the administration likely destroyed Iran's nuclear program, and why he's eager to work with the antiestablishment right to rein in war powers and get corrupt money out of Congress. Chapters: 00:00—Podcast theme 00:28—Introducing the War Powers Resolution and Iran airstrikes 05:19—Trump's war instincts and the MAGA anti-war base 10:10—The diplomatic alternative to military action on Iran 15:48—Israel-Iran ceasefire and Trump's response 19:30—Trump's influence over Netanyahu and Middle East peace prospects 23:05—The bipartisan push to rein in executive war powers 27:33—The Democratic Party's anti-war identity crisis 30:29—Building left-right anti-establishment alliances 34:11—Rebuilding trust in government and American purpose 39:49—Reform priorities: money in politics and war powers Transcript: This is an AI-generated transcript. Check against the original before quoting. Liz Wolfe: Who's allowed to launch an attack on another country? Just Asking Questions. Representative Ro Khanna of California is here with us today to talk about his War Powers Resolution that he's co-sponsoring with Kentucky Republican Thomas Massie, who's also been a guest on the show many times before, which would require President Trump to seek congressional approval before continuing to drop bombs in Iran. Congressman Khanna, thank you so much for coming on the show. Rep. Ro Khanna: Thank you for having me. Zach Weissmueller: So, here's the text of your resolution. It says: Directing the President pursuant to section 5(c) of the War Powers Resolution to remove United States Armed Forces from unauthorized hostilities in the Islamic Republic of Iran. And you list a few facts such as that "Congress has the sole power to declare war," "Congress has not declared war." Therefore, "forces shall be removed by the president if Congress so directs." And the kind of summary statement here is: Congress hereby directs the president to terminate the use of the United States armed forces from hostilities against the Islamic Republic of Iran unless explicitly authorized by a declaration of war or specific authorization for use of military force against Iran. So given that Trump has already dropped bombs on Iranian nuclear sites without consulting Congress, what are you worried could still transpire at this point if Congress doesn't act to pass this or the similar bill in the Senate being offered by Tim Kaine? Khanna: There's a fight for Donald Trump's decision-making here. And the fight is between the neocons—people like Lindsey Graham, who want regime change in Iran; people like Netanyahu, who want regime change in Iran; people like Brett McGurk, who have been itching for that kind of regime change, who cheer-led for the war in Iraq. And on the other side, there is the lot in the MAGA base who do not want another war in the Middle East, who do not want more of our money spent in missiles in Iran or troops in the Middle East. And we saw that Donald Trump was listening to both, in every day. Now, I believe that it was our war powers resolution and the activism of the MAGA base and other voices that convinced him not to escalate after the strikes. But he could be persuaded again to go in or say, "Well, we didn't destroy enough of the nuclear facility" or "we didn't get all the nuclear fuel." And that's why it's important that he hear from the anti-war base of his own party and from the country. Wolfe: It seems like this is kind of an opportunity to give Trump some amount of credit, if I may be so bold, because in the past, we've seen many Republican administrations that are much more firmly planted on the neocon side. Whereas it's almost like Trump has devils on his shoulders and angels on his shoulders—you know, depending on your bona fides, you can decide which side is which. But there's a real push and pull, a real tension within him as to whether the sort of neocon wing or the very anti-war wing should win out. Are you heartened to see this tension present in a Republican president right now? Khanna: I appreciate that he didn't escalate and that we have a ceasefire. I agree with you that there is a tension within his base. I do think that many people in his base felt let down that he struck initially in Iran. That's not what they voted for. It's the first time I saw any real crack in his base. I mean, the tariffs upset some of the business leaders, but this really upset people who voted for him, who said, "You're not prioritizing us. You're not prioritizing jobs here. You're engaged in the same kind of war games that other presidents have." But the place, though, that I would hope that he'd develop is that it's not enough to stay out of war. You also have to engage in top diplomacy. And the reality is I believe that we need to deny Iran a nuclear weapon. We shouldn't have gotten out, in my opinion, of the JCPOA. At the very least, we should have worked within it to strengthen it. We did get out; that led to enrichment. And now the question is, how are we going to prevent Iran from racing to the nuclear bomb? And there, I think that the president needs to engage in diplomacy that previous Republican presidents, actually, like Bush Sr. and even Ronald Reagan, had more of a commitment to. We haven't seen that from the president. Weissmueller: I want to bring up a tweet from one of your colleagues here. This is Congressman Greg Steube from Florida, he's a Republican, because I think he lays out the case for why he thinks Trump should have taken this action and why he legally is allowed to take this action. He says that: "President Trump has full constitutional authority to take military action against Iran's nuclear program without a formal declaration of war. Article II, Section 2 empowers the Commander in Chief to use the armed forces to defend national interests and respond to imminent threats. The War Powers Resolution of 1973 allows a 60-day window plus a 30-day withdrawal period as long as Congress is notified within 48 hours." Presumably he's saying that Iran having a nuclear bomb itself posed an imminent threat to U.S. security, therefore justifying this unilateral action. What's your response to that? Khanna: Well, it just didn't. I mean, even his own National Director of Intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, said it was not imminent. I don't think that any ordinary American believes that Iran was on the cusp of launching missiles against American troops or against America. If anything, now Americans are more at threat than they were. Now, he hadn't violated the War Powers Resolution. He did give notice to Congress, and now we get to vote. But his initial acts were a violation of Article I of the Constitution, in my view, but there was no reason for him to be engaged in an overseas war without first coming to Congress for a declaration of war or authorization of war. The War Powers Resolution is sort of a remedy. It's when the president engages in something that we think is unconstitutional. It says, "Ok, you now come to Congress and you have to get something resolved within 60 days." But that doesn't mean that he had the authority in the first place. And if you define the president's authority so broadly as anything in the national interest, you could go to war anywhere. That would basically deny Congress any approval. Now, what administrations have done is they basically said, "Ok, the only time they really have to get approval from Congress is if it's a dragged-out, prolonged war." Frankly, Obama made that argument in Libya. That was wrong. Biden made that argument in striking Houthi ships in the Red Sea. That was wrong. Trump's making that argument in Iran. But modern warfare is not these yearlong battles. And I don't think that the Constitution says, "Ok, give a quick military strike and no ground boots, and it's a quick war, then you don't need Congress. But if you have a long war, then you need Congress." But that's really how modern presidents have been operating. And Thomas Massie and I have called out presidents of both parties. This is not a partisan issue. What Trump did is very similar to what Obama did in Libya. And I have great admiration for President Obama. So this is about reclaiming the Constitution. Wolfe: It seems like one of the real significant strengths of this strike, using these bomb blasters in Fordow in Iran, is the fact that it was done seemingly with a lot of precision, but also very stealthily. Everybody was caught off guard by it to some degree. If Trump had sought congressional authorization, obviously that wouldn't have been the case. Do you still think that that is what he should have done? Khanna: Yes. Donald Trump is a lot of things. He's not exactly stealth. He was on Truth Social saying he wants to assassinate Khamenei. He was saying that he's going to bomb them if they don't comply. So he could have gotten Congress's authorization at any time that he put the Truth Social post up. And he could have said, "Look, I have Congress who said I can do this at any time. Right now, I'm not choosing to do it. I'm doing it in two weeks." And then he could've attacked. And it would have had the same element of surprise. If anything, it would have strengthened his hand because he would have been seen as having congressional authorization. And you know, the irony is I think he would've gotten congressional authorization. I would have opposed it, but he would've gotten it. So why didn't he come to Congress? Because he would've really heard from the anti-war MAGA base—the Tucker Carlsons, the Marjorie Taylor Greenes, the Thomas Massies. And he didn't want to split the base. He didn't want that argument out there in front of the American people. And frankly, Congress didn't want to assert itself because Congress doesn't want to vote on these things. Congress would rather the president take the blame. And this is why we've had a dysfunctional system since Iraq. Congress has basically punted on these issues. Wolfe: That makes a lot of sense to me. I am curious, though. Something that you mentioned, I think a few times publicly, is that you do believe that it is a national security priority to stop Iran from having a nuclear bomb, but that the way we're going about it—possibly starting another war in the Middle East—is not the appropriate solution. Tell me, what is the appropriate solution? Diplomacy, I think it's easy to sort of hand-wave about, and I am sympathetic to that. But what's the actual, you know, Trump was trying to hammer out a deal with Iran before this. It's not as if he hadn't attempted to exhaust the diplomacy options on the table. What was his actual recourse that would have been truly effective in stopping Iran from getting a nuclear bomb? We can dispute the timeline and how imminent it was as much as we want, but I would love just a sense of what is the optimal approach that Trump should have taken? Khanna: He was working on it. I supported him. And then Netanyahu bombed. I think Netanyahu wanted to force the hand not to let the diplomatic process play out. Look, Obama with the JCPOA showed what was possible at the time when the Iranian regime was stronger than it is now. They had agreed to not have any enriched uranium beyond 3.67 percent. They had limited it to Natanz. The IAEA did inspections up to 2018. They didn't find a single violation. Now, the criticism of the JCPOA is that it didn't go after the ballistic missiles. And you could have come in and said, "We're going to try to get further concessions on the ballistic missiles." Obama got a UN resolution, but he didn't get verification. But we could get a system of verification because we did, the JCPOA when Iran was stronger. And Iran has a lot of interests that they care about—the sanctions relief, being able to be seen as part of the international community of nations. So I do believe that Trump, with a yearlong diplomatic effort, could have achieved something. The irony is he's going to have to do the diplomacy now because Iran still has the nuclear fuel, and they still have the capability to make the bomb. So unless we're just going to allow Iran to become a nuclear power, or unless we're going to plan to strike them every six months, he's going to have to engage in diplomacy. Weissmueller: So, yeah, you're referring to the fact that they did not wipe out all of their enriched uranium. There was even a report that was leaked earlier this week that their ability to continue enriching the uranium might still be intact. So you're viewing this as something that is less than the complete success and obliteration that the administration is characterizing it as. Khanna: That's the evidence coming out from their own administration. JD Vance is saying they still have enough enriched uranium to possibly have 10 nuclear bombs. Their own Defense Intelligence Agency is saying that maybe they set the Iranians back three to four months. Plus, you can't bomb know-how. I mean, ultimately the Iranian people have the know-how. They have the scientists. So the question then is: How do you get them to not build a bomb? And the reality is you have to have independent verification—similar to the JCPOA—and you have to have a negotiation about what the characteristics and carrots are. Wolfe: I'm no war advocate here—obviously, I work for Reason Magazine—but on the topic of the know-how, I would note that part of this operation was the taking out of, what was it, like the top seven most prominent nuclear scientists who had been working on these projects within Iran. What do you think of that? Do you think that ultimately set back diplomatic efforts to such a degree that it was a foolish thing to do? Or do you think those sort of targeted assassinations probably are helpful in dismantling the nuclear program? Khanna: Well, I'm not for targeted assassinations, just in terms of what that means for a rules-based international order and the type of conflicts that it spurs. You know, the goal is that the graveyard is filled with people who thought themselves indispensable. I don't think that just getting rid of the top seven nuclear scientists in Iran is going to prevent the next generation from having the know-how. Maybe it slows them down, but it's not a decisive blow. And it's dangerous when you engage in this, because that gives license in Iran to say, "Ok, should they engage in assassination attempts against Americans or against Israelis? Should other countries be able to engage in those assassination attempts?" This is why we have a rules-based order. Now, you could argue that there are exigent circumstances where that may be violated—if there was real intelligence and information seeing that American troops would have been struck or that our cities were at risk—then the Commander in Chief could make that determination, come to Congress, declare war. But I much rathe…

Full show notes at the publisher

Paul Pillar: America Should Not Fight Israel's War Jun 19, 2025

Show notes

What's America's role in Israel's war with Iran? Just asking questions.
U.S. forces aren't directly involved in the war with Iran…yet. But those of us who remember the 2003 Iraq invasion can't help but be struck by some of the unsettling similarities: A terrorist attack acting as an inciting event a year and a half earlier, sensational but unverified claims of weapons of mass destruction imminently falling into the wrong hands, the promise of a swift and decisive victory over a cruel and corrupt regime.

There are hugely important differences between then and now, but today's guest will offer the long view. He's someone who understands first-hand how military intelligence is used and abused to justify war.

Paul Pillar was a CIA analyst for 28 years, serving as the executive assistant to the CIA director from 1989 to 1991 amid the Gulf War and later rising to become the chief analyst and deputy director of the agency's Counterterrorist Center. Today he's a nonresident senior fellow at Georgetown's Center for Security Studies and a nonresident senior fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft.

We discuss what the Trump administration knew and when about the Israeli strike on Iran, why Pillar urged President Donald Trump to "condemn" the strike, whether or not regime change is the primary goal of this war, what Trump's likely next steps are, and how the dissent of Trump supporters like Tucker Carlson and Steve Bannon is likely to affect the outcome.

Mentioned in the podcast:

"Trump says he doesn't want Israel to attack Iran, but strike 'could very well happen,'" by Lazar Berman

Statement from Secretary of State Marco Rubio

Trump on Truth Social: The U.S. had nothing to do with the attack on Iran, tonight. If we are attacked in any way, shape or form by Iran, the full strength and might of the U.S. Armed Forces will come down on you at levels never seen before. However, we can easily get a deal done between Iran and Israel, and end this bloody conflict!!!

"How Trump Shifted on Iran Under Pressure From Israel," by Jonathan Swan, Maggie Haberman, Mark Mazzetti, and Ronen Bergman

U.S. Foreign Aid to Israel: Overview and Developments since October 7, 2023

"Trump must condemn Israeli acts of illegal, naked aggression," by Paul Pillar

Trump on Truth Social: UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER!

Trump on Truth Social: We now have complete and total control of the skies over Iran. Iran had good sky trackers and other defensive equipment, and plenty of it, but it doesn't compare to American made, conceived, and manufactured "stuff." Nobody does it better than the good ol' USA.

June 10 statement for the record by General Michael "Erik" Kurilla, commander for U.S. Central Command, concerning Iran's nuclear program

Mike Huckabee's text to Trump

Fordow Fuel Enrichment Plant

"Initial US intelligence suggests Iran was surprised by the Hamas attack on Israel," by Zachary Cohen, Katie Bo Lillis, Natasha Bertrand and Jeremy Herb

The post Paul Pillar: America Should Not Fight Israel's War appeared first on Reason Magazine.

Laura Powell: Who's Most To Blame for the Latest L.A. Riots? Jun 10, 2025

Show notes

Protests and unrest erupted in Los Angeles following federal immigration raids of a Home Depot parking lot and a clothing manufacturer. President Donald Trump ordered National Guard troops, and later U.S. Marines, into Los Angeles against the wishes of Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom. Downtown Los Angeles and the communities of Paramount and Compton have been wracked by riots, looting, and the burning of autonomous Waymo vehicles.

Today's guest is a self-described "former leftist…politically homeless" Californian who says that California's political establishment has enabled the violence and destruction we're currently seeing in response to the immigration raids. Laura Powell is an attorney and founder of Californians for Good Governance, which was founded to fight government overreach during the COVID-19 era. We discuss Newsom's war of words with Trump, the claim that these riots are an "insurrection," why Powell thinks Democrats are "encouraging" the chaos, whether the use of the military is federal overreach, and the role government-funded nonprofits and unions may have played in escalating the the situation in L.A.

00:00—Introduction and ICE raid timeline
03:38—National Guard response: provocation or necessity?
07:09—Is Newsom abdicating responsibility?
10:01—Who are the protesters and what motivates them?
16:28—How California law enforcement lost control
19:42—Federal overreach, civil liberties, and states' rights
26:28—Has California learned anything from past unrest?
30:09—Political theater: Newsom vs. Trump
46:50—Union power and the David Huerta arrest
55:42—What if large-scale deportations actually happened?
59:34—How to fix California governance

Mentioned in the podcast:

Newsom on X: "One of the the cornerstones of our Nation…is that our people are governed by civil, not military rule."

LAPD statement about the deployment of 700 Marines

Newsom on X: "Don't give Donald Trump what he wants."

Laura Powell on X: "I really do not want the feds to step in and restore order by declaring martial law."

Stephen Miller on X: "An insurrection against the laws and sovereignty of the United States."

"ICE arrested a California union leader. Does Trump understand what that means?" Los Angeles Times

Laura Powell on X: "EXCLUSIVE: Taxpayer-Funded Nonprofit Behind the Anti-ICE Riots in Los Angeles."

The post Laura Powell: Who's Most To Blame for the Latest L.A. Riots? appeared first on Reason Magazine.

Debating the Science and Ethics of IVF: Emma Waters vs. Ruxandra Teslo Jun 06, 2025

Show notes

How should the government treat in vitro fertilization (IVF)? Should they regulate it more? Should they subsidize it? Just asking questions.

The above are all questions that the Trump administration is actively considering in the wake of an executive order seeking to expand access to IVF. President Donald Trump previously declared himself "the fertilization president" while speaking at a women's conference.

Today's guests have thought about a lot about reproductive technology, birth rates, and family policy, each arriving at some very different conclusions at times. Ruxandra Teslo is a genomics Ph.D. student at the University of Cambridge and writes often about fertility and technology at Ruxandra's Substack. Emma Waters is a reproductive technology and bioethics policy analyst at The Heritage Foundation. In this discussion, they debate the ethics of in vitro fertilization, discuss recent scientific advancements such as the ability to create eggs from other types of cells and three-parent embryos, and the emerging market in "embryo selection" that allows parents to choose between embryos with different genetic traits.

Mentioned in this podcast:

Fact Sheet: President Donald J. Trump Expands Access to In Vitro Fertilization (IVF)
"Total U.S. fertility rate: births per woman," by Our World in Data.
"Fertility on demand," by Ruxandra Teslo.
"Gameto Announces World's First Live Birth Using Fertilo Procedure that Matures Eggs Outside the Body," by Gameto.

Chapters

00:00 Podcast theme
00:28 Introduction and IVF Policy Context
01:49 IVF as a Solution for Ambitious Women
05:21 IVF Critiqued for Ignoring Root Causes
08:59 A Rebuttal: IVF Still Has Value Despite Limits
13:33 Egg Freezing: When, How, and Why It Works
17:18 The Motherhood Penalty in High-Pressure Careers
20:38 Reframing Motherhood as a Gift, Not a Penalty
24:27 Parenthood's Transformative Impact
27:23 Supporting Fertility Into the Late 30s
31:47 Income, Incentives, and Family Wealth Dynamics
34:48 Is IVF Reliable Enough to Justify Delaying Kids?
38:48 Innovations in Fertility and IVF Technologies
41:54 Raising Ethical Concerns About Future Reproductive Tech
44:35 Does Selection Technology Devalue Life?
48:21 IVF, Embryo Selection, and Suffering
50:52 Selection Ethics: Miscarriage vs Discarding Embryos
56:20 Grappling with the Moral Weight of Miscarriage
1:00:06 The Core Disagreement: What Is a Human Embryo?
1:06:45 IVF, Ethics, and the Boundaries of Human Life
1:10:31 Can IVF Be Practiced Without Destroying Embryos?
1:21:10 A Life-Affirming Model for IVF Treatment
1:24:56 Cultural Shifts and Valuing All Stages of Life
1:26:35 Fertility Policy: Subsidies, Research, and Cultural Norms

The post Debating the Science and Ethics of IVF: Emma Waters vs. Ruxandra Teslo appeared first on Reason Magazine.

David Stockman: Trump Is a 'Faker' on the Debt May 29, 2025

Show notes

How will we ever get the national debt under control? Just asking questions. The U.S. national debt stands at a staggering $36 trillion. And while President Donald Trump assures us he's a "fiscal hawk," the GOP's latest fiscal plan, dubbed the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, is a fiscal time bomb, says today's guest. David Stockman, the director of the Office of Management and Budget under President Ronald Reagan, joins the show to dissect the Trump administration's budget priorities and explain why tax cuts without spending reductions are a recipe for disaster. With a career spanning decades in Washington, including his role as a key architect of Reagan's economic policies, Stockman brings unmatched insight into the mechanics of federal budgeting and the political roadblocks to fiscal sanity. Mentioned in the podcast The One Big, Beautiful Bill Act Federal spending data, by the U.S. Treasury "Preliminary Analysis of the Distributional Effects of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act," by the Congressional Budget Office "CBO's First Score of House Reconciliation Bill," by the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget The Triumph of Politics: Why the Reagan Revolution Failed, by David Stockman Deficit by gross domestic product for the past 50 years, by the Congressional Budget Office CSPAN on X: President Trump on @RepThomasMassie: "I don't think Thomas Massie understands government. I think he's a grand-stander, frankly…I think he should be voted out of office." Chapters 00:29 Introduction and national debt overview 06:01 Analyzing the One Big Beautiful Bill Act 10:23 Tax cuts and deficit spending challenges 18:28 Supply-side economics and Reagan's legacy 27:33 The Federal Reserve's role in debt monetization 40:03 Consequences of a potential debt crisis 49:41 Political dynamics and opposition to Trump 56:45 Strategies for fiscal reform and recommendations by the Department of Government Efficiency 01:02:30 Lessons from past budget surpluses 01:07:43 Closing thoughts and the free lunch myth Transcript: This is an AI-generated transcript. Check against the original before quoting. Zach Weissmueller: How will we ever get the national debt under control? Just Asking Questions. David Stockman has more insight into this question than just about anyone we can think of. He was the budget chief for Ronald Reagan, so he understands both the mechanics of the federal budget and the real-world politics that make cutting spending extremely difficult. We're delighted to have him here with us today to dissect the Trump budget—known as the One Big Beautiful Bill Act—to lay out the potentially dire consequences of uncontrolled deficit spending and to offer lessons from the Reagan Revolution, which in his telling failed to deliver the smaller and more responsible government that it had promised. David Stockman, thanks for coming back on the show. David Stockman: It's great to be with you, and there's certainly a lot to talk about here. Here we are 40-years later, and I think we're in a far deeper pickle—let's say, dilemma—even catastrophe, than we thought we were battling in 1980. So there are a lot of things to talk about. There are a lot of lessons to be learned. Hopefully there are ways out of this, but it's looking increasingly bleak to me when we have a Republican Party with a mandate—really, for the first time—all three branches: the White House, the Senate, and the House. Albeit by slim majorities, but still, they have a majority for the first time in a long time. Are faced with $36 trillion of existing public debt, which is out of control. and a budget that has built in $22 trillion of additional debt over the coming 10-year horizon, which is kind of the budgeting time frame that we work with. So you would think that the conservative party—the Republican Party, which at least historically had some pretty firm commitment to fiscal rectitude—would look at that $22 trillion and say, "Our job is to shrink it, to cut it, to reduce it and minimize any further growth in the $36 trillion we already have." But instead, they've done the opposite. They've basically said, like they're at the gambling table, "We'll see your $22 trillion that's built in, and we're going to add $3 - 5 trillion more," depending on how you count the numbers. The Republican Party was supposed to be the party that defended the taxpayers and the free market and the private economy and society, and yet they can't even muster a single dime of net spending cuts over the next decade. They've set aside so many large parts of the budget that it is kind of ridiculous when you say—as Trump and the Republican leadership have said—Social Security is off limits, Medicare is off limits, veterans benefits, which are like $350 billion a year and growing rapidly, are off limits, the defense budget—which is now pegged at $1 trillion—is off limits. And of course, we have to pay the interest on the debt, which is now also $1 trillion a year. So if you put all that stuff together, you're talking about 75 percent of the budget or more that they put off limits. Zach Weissmueller: Just so people can see the visuals here of government spending by category, laid out here by the Treasury Department—you can see there Social Security, this is for fiscal year 2025—Social Security is at the top. Then interest—half a trillion dollars just in interest—and then health, Medicare, national defense, and income security. And so— David Stockman: And while we're all looking at this here, go down one more and you've got veterans benefits and services. So by the time you get through all of those bars, you're down to the little tiny microscopic bars at the bottom to find any spending cuts. But then you get to transportation, for instance, and if you can strain your eyeballs, here at $77 billion—well, a good share of that is the highway trust, the interstate highway system, which at least gas taxes allegedly pay for, in spending. So they're not going to shut down highway construction and the interstate highway program. What I'm trying to get at here is, if you just look at this chart, you realize they're painting themselves into a corner that's so tiny that it's not serious. They're basically faking it. The Republican Party has become a pretty sad sack of fakers when it comes to what their job is. Remember, the Democrat Party is the government party. The Republican Party is for the taxpayer and for private life and private enterprise. And if the taxpayer—pro-taxpayer—party, at least in theory, is throwing in the towel, we're in big trouble. Zach Weissmueller: I want to look a little more into the details of the One Big Beautiful Bill and what it is that's driving this increasing deficit spending. I believe you said you think that it might add up to $30 trillion over the next decade. David Stockman: How do I get that? Let's just start with the CBO baseline. Zach Weissmueller: Yeah, let me add that here because we've got it, yeah. David Stockman: Yeah. Well, that's the reconciliation package. But let me start with the bigger picture—the context of where we are. If you look at the CBO baseline for 10-years—which would be fiscal 2026 through 2035—we always budget on a 10-year basis. Anything more than that is in the distant future that you really can't see. Anything less than that, you can't get all the leverage you need to make the path of policy change. Now, if we look at that CBO 10-year current forecast, here's what it shows you. It shows you that revenues—if we have a GDP that grows at 4.2 percent a year, this is nominal—and 4.2 percent nominal growth is the same as we've had for the 25-years since the turn of the century. So they're not skimping on growth. In other words, we'll be lucky to replicate over the next 10- years what we had over the last 25. Well, if you do that, they end up with $67 trillion of revenue under current tax law, including assuming that all of the 2017 tax cuts expire. In other words, in that $67 trillion so-called current law or current policy baseline, they've already let the entire 2017 tax cut expire, which is about $4 trillion of added revenue that's in the numbers. So if you said, "Well, let's look at it from the way the Republicans want to look at it," well, then the revenue over that 10-year period is only $63 trillion, okay? Because I'm taking the $4 trillion out from letting the 2017 tax cut expire, assuming it is extended for the next decade. Now, what's on the spending side? Well, in round terms, it's $89 trillion. Okay? So that's what they're looking at if they say, "We're going to keep the 2017 tax cut and we look at the rest of the budget," including all of these sacred cows—Social Security, Medicare, defense, veterans, and so forth—that we've set aside. What we end up with is—if I can use round numbers here—$90 trillion of spending and $63 trillion over 10-years of revenue. That's $27 trillion in debt right there. Now, they tried to cut a little bit in Medicare, but I think when push comes to shove, maybe it's $400 or $500 million over a decade. They've done a little bit of pairing of the entitlement for food stamps—a couple hundred million. And they've repealed—and they should have—some of the ridiculous Biden green energy scams, both tax credits and spending. But if you take all of that, I really doubt whether there's $1.5 trillion of savings on the other side of the ledger in the so-called Big Beautiful Bill. Now, if you start with $27 trillion— Zach Weissmueller: Hold on. Can I ask you one thing about that? This is the CBO estimate as visualized by the Committee for a Responsible Budget. What they're showing here is that the deficit spending is very front-loaded in these early years, and then in the years after Trump leaves office, that will be reduced—presumably because the administration that succeeds him will not keep the tax cuts in place. What do you make of these kinds of assumptions? David Stockman: Well, this is what the Republicans always do. I mean, they created this problem for themselves back in 2017. See, there is a rule in the reconciliation process that says you can't increase the long-run deficit. And by that, they define it as out beyond 10-years in the future. So that's why they had the 2017 tax cut expire in 2025—because otherwise there would have been a point of order, and they never would have even got the tax bill to the Senate floor. So now they basically have the due bill coming up. In other words, who would write a tax law that creates a cliff where, at a certain date—December 2025—all of these cuts, which were over, you know, $2–3 trillion, expire? So that's what they're dealing with here. And essentially, they've done the same thing again. They have extended for 3 or 4-years—that's why you see the larger deficit impact there, $500 - 600 million a year through 2029. But then a lot of these additional tax cuts that they've added—for tips and overtime and Social Security taxes and automotive loan deductions and a lot of other things—they all expire in 2028. So in the out years, there's no deficit impact. Now, follow me on this. When we get to 2028—it's an election year—do you think all of these nice tax cuts, the guys are going to go out campaigning and tell all the workers at restaurants, "Hey, your tips are no longer tax-free. We're going to start taxing you next year." "You know, elect me, I'm going to tax you next year on your tips." Or telling industrial workers or manufacturing workers, "Next year we're going to nail you on your overtime." Ok, well, obviously it's not going to happen. What's going to happen is, as we get toward the election in late 2028, and they're going to extend all of these cuts for another 3, 4, 5-years, and all of that decline that you see in terms of the deficit impact will disappear—just like it's happening right now. The '26, '27, '28 numbers in the act back in 2017 looked like they were disappearing too—as in, the deficit impact—but now here we are, and they're extended. Now, the other thing that I think is really important to note here, it's really important—if we could just get your chart back up there. This is what we're adding to the deficit. This isn't the deficit, Ok? The result of the deficit from the $22 trillion that's built into the baseline over 10-years was about $2.5 trillion a year. Take the chart in front of you and add it on top of $2.5 trillion a year that's already there. And that's what the House Republicans are saying is a big, beautiful bill. Are they out of their minds? They're pushing the total deficit to over $3 trillion a year by the end of this period. And they have the nerve—they have the gall—to call it a big, beautiful bill. I call it a big, ugly bomb. You know, a fiscal bomb that we're going to pay for badly in the years ahead. Zach Weissmueller: So a lot of this, as you're laying out, comes down to—it seems like—cutting taxes without an equal cut in spending. Or even, there should be a more severe cut in spending if we're talking about actually reducing the deficits. This is also from the CBO. They mention that there's an increase in the federal deficit in that 10-year period of $3.8 trillion attributable to tax changes. And then they point out that there are some cuts: $698 billion less in federal subsidies to Medicaid, $267 billion less in federal spending for SNAP, which is food stamps, $64 billion less in spending on net for all other purposes. But— David Stockman: While you've got that up there, can we talk about it and put it back up? Because people need to understand—there's a lot of trickery in this. OK? The first thing is that $3.8 trillion is a big, big number. You're adding that on top of the $22 trillion that's already there, so let's not forget that. But secondly, a lot of the tax cuts are expiring in the out years, so you're not getting a true measure of the 10-year cost. Yet we know when we get to the expiration date for a tax cut—like we are right now—they're going to extend it, ok? So the real 10-year cost of what's in the bill on that first line there is down close to $5 trillion when you price it out on a 10-year basis, and not on this sort of 3 or 4-year basis that they're using as a trick. Now, the second thing is, the $698 billion of savings for Medicaid is never going to happen in a month of Sundays. And the reason for that is most of that savings is attributable to work requirements. That's good, I'm all for work requirements. But the definition of work requirements is so loophole-ridden, and there's so much opportunity for the blue states that actually administer Medicaid—that's where most of the Medicaid dollars are spent: California, New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Illinois, Minnesota, all these big spending states—they're going to rip the work requirement to shreds. And I doubt whether even half of what they've projected will actually be saved. Then we get to things like, there's an increase in spending in the bill for defense. Again, it's kind of a scam because the defense increase—which I think is $100 billion, if I remember right—is basically a down payment for a huge increase in defense spending that is going to come from Trump's golden dome air defense system and increasing the shipbuilding program in the Navy. Why in the hell are we doing that? Ships in the Navy are sittin…

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Gary Winslett: The American Dream Has Migrated South May 22, 2025

Show notes

Why did the Rust Belt really lose its manufacturing base? Middlebury College political scientist Gary Winslett has a provocative answer: It wasn't China or robots. It was Georgia, Texas, South Carolina, and Florida. In a recent Washington Post op-ed, Winslett argued that the South's pro-growth policies—not foreign competition or automation—were the real drivers behind the industrial shift. That makes for an uncomfortable narrative in a political environment where both parties have a stake in telling more convenient stories about trade and globalization. Winslett explains how factors like "right to work" laws, housing construction, regulatory efficiency, and immigration made the South more attractive to manufacturers. The conversation moves beyond nostalgia for lost factories and asks whether the American dream now lies in places like Nashville and Raleigh—and whether we're too busy looking backward to notice. Sources Referenced: "Manufacturing is thriving in the South. Here's why neither party can admit it." by Gary Winslett U.S. export share: Rust Belt vs. southern states Annual New Privately Owned Housing Units Authorized by State, by the U.S. Census Bureau "What to Know About the U.S. Trade Imbalance, in Charts," by Alana Pipe, Drew An-Pham, and Jeanne Whalen Milo Yiannopolis on X: Americans will love working in factories again Men are depressed and addicted and broken because they have nothing to do. They get no stimulation or satisfaction from BS email jobs. I'm telling you, white Americans will love working in factories again. Making things, in the image and likeness of God the Maker. — MILO (@Nero) April 4, 2025 Howard Lutnick on CNBC: You and your grandkids will work in the same factory Lutnick: It's time to train people not to do the jobs of the past, but to do the great jobs of the future. This is the new model where you work in these kinds of plants for the rest of your life, and your kids work here and your grandkids work here pic.twitter.com/dRq9aDfdgH — unusual_whales (@unusual_whales) May 3, 2025 J.D. Vance's 2024 Republican National Convention speech Chapters: 00:00 What really happened to Rust Belt jobs? 05:11 The politics of the manufacturing decline 10:22 Nostalgia and the rise of southern manufacturing 15:20 Unionization, right to work, and labor policy 20:43 How immigration and housing fueled southern growth 26:02 Why the Rust Belt didn't adapt 32:21 Permitting, regulation, and business friendliness 38:36 Trade deficits and service exports 44:05 The myth of manufacturing as America's future 50:01 Remote work and the class divide 56:26 Upward mobility and bipartisan economic failure Transcript: This is an AI-generated transcript. Check against the original before quoting. Zach Weissmueller: Today's guest recently argued in the pages of The Washington Post that it wasn't China or the robots who took most of the Midwestern jobs—it was the South. Gary Winslett is an associate professor at Middlebury College. He's here today to discuss that provocative argument and its implications with us today. Thank you for joining us, Gary. Gary Winslett: Happy to be here. Liz Wolfe: So, the proportion of exports from Rust Belt states has plunged since the '90s while rising in the Southern states. But you never hear this story about manufacturing in our political discourse. Gary, why? Gary Winslett: Because it's inconvenient politically for both parties. The Republicans love to be this party of romantic nostalgia—"take us back to the past." Under Donald Trump, they also really liked tariffs. So, they don't want to acknowledge that, in one part of the country, things are going great in terms of manufacturing. That undercuts their "everything is going to hell" kind of argument on their side. On the Democratic side, they'd rather blame greedy corporations or China because that doesn't point to some of the policy choices that Southern states have made that challenge the log rolling coalitional politics of the Democratic Party. If you're going to point out that, "Hey, Georgia has a great permitting reform where they help manufacturing firms set up shop quickly", that directly challenges the way we do things in California, where it's a nightmare to set up anything. The success of right-to-work in South Carolina directly challenges the power of organized labor that other parts of the party really like. So, it's just not convenient for either party. And like politicians tend to do, they ignore the inconvenience to sell what they'd rather be the truth. Liz Wolfe: But are we, as libertarians or libertarian-adjacent people, also doing the same thing where we're paying attention to the politically convenient narrative for us? Because in a sense, you're basically vindicating what libertarians and small-government advocates have been saying all along, which is you create a more fertile environment in your state, you attract businesses there, you make it a little harder for unions to operate, and all of a sudden, growth happens. This is a very convenient thing for us to believe. Are we succumbing to the same thing? Gary Winslett: I don't know. There are other areas where I think libertarian-adjacent people could do better. I think some of the stuff on social safety net really can be strengthened. We probably don't spend enough in this country on poor children. Universal free school lunch is something I think would be great. But on this particular topic, I think the libertarian or libertarian-adjacent approach—I consider myself a market-friendly Democrat—is right. So I don't think we need to go around apologizing on those topics where we're right. Zach Weissmueller: Yeah, and we'll get into some of the empirical data here in a second that completely validates what we've been saying for all these years. But first, I just want to ask a bigger kind of political question. When you look at the amount of people working in jobs that are directly competitive with import-heavy industries—in other words, jobs that would ideally be protected by something like tariffs—it's fairly low. I pulled this from the 2024 Trade Organization report. I've got the red arrow there pointing to: less than 2 percent of U.S. jobs are competing directly with an overseas manufacturing industry. Given that reality, why do you think this draws such political heat? Why is so much attention focused on it? Gary Winslett: The biggest thing people don't think about is how much imports are inputs into other manufactured goods. I grew up in Alabama. My dad worked in one of the steel plants in Birmingham—the kind of hard-hat job that they make political ads about, the kind protectionism is supposed to be for. They hated the Bush steel tariffs. The reason is because they imported raw steel and did all the value-added part of the process there to make specialty steel items for all kinds of American companies. Even in steel processing in Alabama, you're not actually competing with imports—you're using imports as inputs. And I think people forget that all the time. They significantly overestimate how many jobs compete with imports, rather than use imports to create higher-value-added, higher-paying American jobs—even in manufacturing. Liz Wolfe: There's also an interesting thing that I've noticed in our labor data of the last few decades which is the, sort of, the explosion of service-sector jobs. What do you make of that—that a bigger chunk of the American economy is now in the service sector compared to manufacturing? Compared to what it used to be three decades ago. Gary Winslett: That's fine. We want people to have good jobs, and we shouldn't be particularly picky about exactly which sectors those jobs are in. Here's a service-sector job that's working-class and pays well: nursing. Physician assistants, right. That's hard work, work with dignity, and it pays well. If someone's working as a nurse, I don't see why we should be upset that they're not in a ball-bearing factory. Liz Wolfe: Well, the thing I think—go ahead Zach Zach Weissmueller: I was just going to say, that sort of work is only going to become more and more prominent, especially with the demographic shifts we're projected to see in the coming years. But go ahead, Liz. Liz Wolfe: The thing that I think is interesting is that I think you're right—we should be values-neutral, sort of agnostic, about in which sectors people are choosing to seek employment. The thing that's so puzzling to me though is that our political discourse hasn't really started to reflect the changes in how employment looks in America. And so it's odd to me— do you have any sense as to why, you know, manufacturing? And you know, our industrial capacity has gripped people's imaginations and gripped our political discourse to a far greater degree than like the service sector. Gary Winslett: I don't even think it's the actual work in the factory. I don't think people, when they stop and think about it for a minute, actually want to go back to dirty, mind-numbing, difficult, dangerous work. I think what they miss is affordability. It's not always accurate, but there is something to the fact that things used to feel more affordable. You could have—usually a man— you could have one person in your household working, and the other being part-time or staying home. And you could afford that. That's what people are missing. So, if we want to actually help people out, instead of trying to make them go back into jobs that we have now robots do now anyway, which won't even work, we've got to work harder on making life more affordable. Zach Weissmueller: Yeah. And I mean, that seems to be part of the story here with the rise of the Southern states—the population influx. A lot of that seems to have a lot to do with affordability, which we'll talk about in a second. But I want to ask you one more question on this topic. Is classic political economy at play here? Where we've got these Rust Belt states—when you add them together, they are the swing states in any election. So, you've got really concentrated benefits for people yearning for their industries to be protected, even though it's kind of like the Iowa example, where every candidate goes out there and talks about how great ethanol is—even though none of us really need it as fuel in our cars. Is that a component at play here, from your vantage point? Gary Winslett: I don't think it's a component. I wouldn't chalk all of it up to that. I think that this is one of these things that has a bunch of factors going on, but I think it would be inaccurate to say that that's not playing some role here. Liz Wolfe: J.D. Vance was born in a steel town in Middletown, Ohio. At the RNC, he spent a lot of time emphasizing his Rust Belt roots. John, can we roll that? J.D. Vance (clip): "I grew up in Middletown, Ohio, a small town where people spoke their minds, built with their hands, and loved their God, their family, their community, and their country with their whole hearts. But it was also a place that had been cast aside and forgotten by America's ruling class in Washington. To the people of Middletown, Ohio, and all the forgotten communities in Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Ohio—in every corner of our nation—I promise you this: I will be a vice president who never forgets where he came from." Liz Wolfe: Obviously, this plays well. But it's not just at the RNC. The Trump administration has also spent a lot of time defending their new tariff policy, specifically saying, "This is going to revitalize Rust Belt manufacturing." Even Vance, the vice president, still lives in Ohio. Of course, it's hard to imagine that J.D. and Usha Vance would live in Ohio if it weren't for J.D. Vance''s political aspirations and him wanting to seek that Senate seat there and now ascending to the vice presidency. Do you have a sense of why is it that Rust Belt nostalgia is so baked into our politics? Gary Winslett: I think part of it is that story that was just mentioned—these are purple states. Part of it is that, for a long time, the American South didn't have the same kind of cultural power that its numbers and size might suggest it should. There are all kinds of historical reasons for that: accents, snobbery, and racism that persisted through the '60s and '70s. Liz Wolfe: The legacy of hookworm too—unironically. Zach Weissmueller: I mean if we're talking about— if we're including Texas in the South here… Gary Winslett: Sure. Zach Weissmueller:…Florida and Texas are the No. 2 and 3 most populated states, to your point. Gary Winslett: It's funny though because I remember listening to J.D. Vance say that at the RNC, and it drove me a little nuts. Because I have blue-collar roots as deep as his. I lived in a mobile home until I was 11. My dad worked in a steel mill. My uncle helped build the first auto factory in Alabama. It's very frustrating to me that the blue-collar story in Ohio has turned into "We've got to make all the toasters here—even if they cost $300." Rather than, "actually there are blue-collar people across the South who work for Toyota, and Honda, and Mercedes, and Nissan—and that's just the car industry. I could name a dozen other industries where working-class people across the South do really well. The region used to be poor, and now it's not. And globalization is a big part of that. Zach Weissmueller: You mentioned in your piece that unionization plays a big role here. Here's a map that shows union membership rates by state as of 2024. You can see this crosshatch pattern shows higher union membership in Michigan, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Illinois. And then less in Florida, Mississippi, Alabama—some of those states are below 5 percent of unionization. So, right-to-work is a red-state policy. Trump, though, is now realigning the GOP and he's aligning himself with big labor. What would happen, based on what we've seen unfold over the past decade, if Trump started pushing a federal law— a Bernie Sanders federal lie. Bernie Sanders has this law called the PRO Act where it would override state right-to-work laws? Being Trump, I could even see him issuing an executive order to that effect if he went full "boss union guy." What kind of effects would that have going forward based on what's happened in the past? Gary Winslett: It would be an economic declaration of war on the South. South Carolina's political leadership is baffled at the economic leadership of the Trump administration. Right now, both senators from Georgia are Democrats. North Carolina has trended blue. The Democratic Party —I would hope— going into 2028, knows it needs to compete hard across the Sun Belt and the South. If the Trump administration's economic policies are really, really bad on the South and the Sun Belt, that opens up a big terrain for a Bill Clinton–type of Democrat to do really well there. I think a Bill Clinton figure could take major advantage of the Trump administration doing PRO Act kind of stuff. Zach Weissmueller: On one level, it's kind of obvious that unions drive up the cost of labor—but what effect have right-to-work laws actually had? Why is that such an important component of the rise of these kinds of jobs in the South? Gary Winslett: Part of it is that right-to-work laws in the Rust Belt really drove up a lot of legacy labor costs. Pensions were very, very high, and so were many health care costs. But it's not just the cost—it's the threat of strikes and t…

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Noah Smith: I Owe Libertarians an Apology May 15, 2025

Show notes

Noah Smith, an economic commentator and Substack writer, once dismissed libertarianism as a relic of the past. But in a political climate increasingly defined by populist protectionism and authoritarian rhetoric, he's reconsidering. "There are worse monsters than the market," Smith recently wrote. With Reason's Zach Weissmueller and Liz Wolfe, Smith explores the evolution of his thinking—from criticizing "thin libertarianism" focused solely on state coercion, to advocating for a more expansive, "thick" conception of liberty that accounts for institutional and corporate constraints as well. He also discusses how libertarians might shape political discourse despite being exiled from both major parties. Sources Referenced "I owe the libertarians an apology," by Noah Smith Just Asking Questions with Derek Thompson: Democrats Must Change Just Asking Questions with Michael Beckley: China is Dangerously Weak Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer on tariffs Chapters 00:00 Reflecting on libertarianism and Donald Trump's rise 06:00 Revisiting financial regulation and the housing crisis 11:00 Thin vs. thick libertarianism 17:00 Censorship, coercion, and the role of private platforms 29:00 Tariffs, trade, and the antineoliberal left 37:00 The shifting power dynamics in the Democratic and Republican parties 45:00 Political homelessness and the libertarian intellectual wilderness 54:00 Industrial policy, mRNA vaccines, and the role of government 1:01:00 China, manufacturing, and national security 1:10:00 Argentina, Javier Milei, and libertarian governance in practice Transcript: This is an AI-generated transcript. Check against the original before quoting. Noah Smith: I didn't understand what libertarianism had arisen in response to, and now that some of those things are coming back in the form of Trump, I see that libertarianism had more of a purpose than I realized. Liz Wolfe: Were libertarians right all along? Just Asking Questions. Have you apologized to a libertarian lately? Today's guest has. "I owe the libertarians an apology," wrote pundit Noah Smith on his Substack. "It turns out there are worse monsters on the market." "I've spent years making fun of Ayn Rand novels," Smith continues. "And yet, doesn't Trump's cronyism, disdain for private businesses, and relentless instinct for government control make him the perfect Ayn Rand villain?" We're here to interrogate this mea culpa. Noah Smith, welcome to the show. Noah Smith: Thanks for having me on. Zach Weissmueller: So, Noah, you do have a deep archive of blog posts criticizing libertarianism. Now you're kind of sorry. Tell us why. Noah Smith: When I was an economics grad student in the early 2010s, I really encountered a lot of people who were deeply libertarian. People would unironically just quote Robert Nozick and talk about how much they liked Ayn Rand. So it felt very near. Everyone fights the near enemy when they're intellectuals. If you live in a liberal city and you're inclined to argue with things, you'll argue with liberalism. I lived in a libertarian city/culture, so I argued with libertarianism. At the same time, that was the Great Recession when it felt like our failure-you know, financial deregulation, and then our failure to intercede against a lot of the economic problems we were having, seemed to be causing a lot of issues in America and had really crashed the economy a lot. So it felt like a good time to beat up on libertarianism. I think those things combined were the reasons I criticized libertarianism so much. But what I didn't know— I wasn't alive during the 1960s and '70s— I didn't see the ideas that libertarianism had been a reaction to. When you come up after the fact and you don't know the history of the thought there, I mean even the history of libertarian thought, if you study it, won't teach you this. It won't teach you the cultural milieu that people were responding to. Only studying history will teach you that—and even that only teach you part of it because history is very potted and sanitized. You have to go to primary sources, see what people were talking about, what people were saying, and you have to read between the lines, and infer from what policies were being done. I mean, you look at Richard Nixon, you look at price controls and the Nixon shock and all these kinds of things. And you see libertarianism wasn't just responding to some lefty college kid challenging Milton Friedman clumsily at some town hall—which is from the famous video you can watch. It was also challenging a lot of the things Richard Nixon was doing. I think that I didn't understand what libertarianism had arisen in response to. Now that some of those things are coming back in the form of Trump, I see that libertarianism had more of a purpose to be there than I realized, in terms of balancing out other ideas that were also bad, that had mostly been conquered and submerged by the time I started criticizing libertarians. Liz Wolfe: What do you mean when you talk about the cultural milieu that libertarianism was reacting to? Which elements are you referring to? Noah Smith: The New Deal arose in response to the Great Depression and response to the general underdevelopment of America. The New Deal started as an anti-depression measure but it took on all these long-term sort of projects like building the interstate highway system, making environmental regulations, and social insurance, and all the edifice of big government that we've built. I think a lot of that edifice was great and should be kept, but if reformed and tweaked, and whatnot. But I think that what that meant is that we'd—we spent so many decades coming up with big government solutions to every problem that we had—that there was an impulse to come up with big government solutions to every problem we encountered. And so, when you saw things like inflation, the oil shocks, there was this, you know, impulse to use fiscal stimulus, which had helped us in the Depression, helped us in some small recessions after World War II. So, like, let's do that again. No—well, I guess we didn't really do much fiscal stimulus, but monetary stimulus—you know, that had been useful. And so then, that stopped being useful in the '70s. And I think that's the classic example everyone uses, but there's other examples too. So, for example, the Bretton Woods system said that the dollar is the reserve currency—the dollar equivalent to gold. It was a fake gold standard, where it really was the dollar standard. And yeah—so, when that started causing trade imbalances, you know, we responded with trying to control trade. And that was a bad idea. Instead, you know, free trade—relative to where we were—probably was a good thing for us. And it maybe wasn't a good thing with regard to China in the 2000s. Maybe it hurt us on the margin. But then, in terms of, you know, helping us in, like, the '70s, '80s, '90s—like those—I think that free trade helped us a lot compared to where we'd– Zach Weissmueller: When you're describing yourself as reacting to the city around you, in this case I assume it's kind of like the community of economics bloggers in the 2010s who's like the one sort of microculture that might skew libertarian? Noah Smith: I wouldn't say bloggers. I'd say economists and econ grad students. Economists themselves. The discipline of economics has a lot of libertarians. Zach Weissmueller: You're describing these bigger fundamental debates that have now resurfaced. What were some of the major debates of that time that now you feel have been sidelined to focus on "is trade good?" Noah Smith: Right. So, financial regulation. After the recession, we were like, "Oh my God, we deregulated finance, and then the economy crashed. Let's regulate finance. How do we do that?" And then we did Dodd-Frank, and then we stopped thinking about it—forever. Then we had a tiny little mini banking crisis. In 2023, we had the failure of Silicon Valley Bank. And then the system worked. Everything held. That was taken care of quickly, and there were no real problems. So, I think that debate over financial regulation has largely disappeared. Debate over, like, fiscal stimulus—at this point, we're thinking, "How do we prevent all this debt? How do we prevent inflation?" We're not thinking about, "How do we get everybody a job?" You know, people have a job now. And the question is, like, what do we do about this inflation? Liz Wolfe: I am curious about what you're saying about financial regulation, and you mentioned that a few times as something that's very formative on how you came to look at the world. But I'm curious—this is a very niche issue, a theory that's believed by some libertarians. I know some folks at Cato very much believe it, but I wanted to see what you think. To what degree do you attribute the current sort of housing crisis to an overregulation in the wake of the Great Recession—specifically in the form of over-tightening lending standards, basically? Noah Smith: I believe lending standards were over-tightened. How much the housing crisis is due to that is dubious because we haven't built enough housing to accommodate our growing population since the 1970s. Liz Wolfe: Well, yeah, it's definitely a multi-causal type thing, but I am curious, because I feel like the "what's the right amount to regulate in the wake of a crisis" thing is something that people, in some circles, sort of skate past. When it's like—I don't know—if that's part of why we're in such a bind with housing right now, that seems very relevant in terms of figuring out how to respond to future crises. Noah Smith: So, I do agree that Cato is right in the sense that overregulation of lending standards—which was not really new laws passed—it was really just regulators being tougher. I think that was a big… that was the deal. That's a thing and needs to be pared back— and eventually was—pared back, actually. I think some of that was pared back. Liz Wolfe: Go ahead. Noah Smith: But I'm saying also, I think a lot of the tightening of lending standards was behavioral. It wasn't regulation entirely, because I think that simply people saying, "Oh my God, subprime," after the financial crisis and the housing crisis, I think that led a lot of institutions to be extremely conservative in who they lent to. And that's just proximity bias. That's this recency bias. That's just like—if you cut your hand, you're wary around knives for a while. And that was what that was. So, I think yes, regulation had something to do with it in terms of the attitudes of regulators, but really, ultimately, the changing attitudes of regulators and the changing attitude of bankers—and lenders—both came from the same reaction to the crisis. There's this very natural reaction of, "Don't stop doing the thing that just caused this pain." And I think that there was an overreaction that needed to be overcorrected. And that it is now getting pared back. You know, sort of like… yeah, we're finding the appropriate level here. Liz Wolfe: Why do you think intellectuals—especially on the left— feel the need to be so reflexively sneering toward libertarians? Why scapegoat the libertarians? Noah Smith: Well, there's a number of reasons. One is that, you know, we have education polarization in this country, right? You don't have a lot of conservatives among the intellectual set—among college-educated people, professors, whatever, right? So you don't have a lot of people saying, like, "Christ is King" among the university professors and educated people. Who do you have on the right in intellectual circles? Well, you have some libertarians who say, "Let's leave things to the market." So, if you have progressives—and, you know, people who think that our country is too conservative—maybe they were, like, bullied for being a minority religion or being gay or something when they were a kid. I don't know. Like, they have real sort of gripes with conservative culture in America. But then they get into universities and the academic setting—or the professional setting—and they don't see a lot of traditional conservatives. And so, who do you fight? Who do you target as a conservative that you want to argue with? You know, libertarians are the sort of Trumpist, you know, like, rightist intellectuals. And we have a few of those, right? We have the tech right. But then—but I think that, you know, for a long time, libertarians were sort of the only conservatives that your average educated progressive ever met. Liz Wolfe: Yeah, that sort of makes sense to me. But the thing that I'm curious about in your piece—I was trying to really understand: What type of libertarian are you critiquing? One thing that kept jumping out to me is that it felt like you're objecting to a very specific type of libertarian—what we would call a thin libertarian. Someone who doesn't really conceive of how power and coercion can be used by institutions other than the state. They're primarily concerned with the relationship between the state and the individual. But there are also a ton of libertarians—I would count myself one of these, I think Zach does as well—who are concerned by all the different entities and institutions who can create impositions on people's freedoms. Who can make it so that people don't feel free and they're not actually truly able to exercise free choice. And so, I don't tend to conceive of it as just a thing between the state and the individual. I'm also interested—I mean, that's the most fundamental level that I am most concerned with. But then, there is another level too, that I think about frequently. You know, do you feel like you're sort of straw-manning the thick libertarians? Noah Smith: Well, one of the pieces that I wrote—one of the first sort of critiques of libertarianism that I wrote—was something called The Liberty of Local Bullies. At which point I wrote that there are mezzanine institutions in society—I just made that term up—such as companies, universities, churches, all these other things that can cause people to not feel free, even if it doesn't meet the sort of… They don't have power in terms of—they don't have a monopoly on the use of force like the government. But then, you know—so, I was critiquing what you call the thin libertarianism of Robert Nozick, and of people like that, and of many economists. You know, you look at George Stigler and Milton Friedman and their sort of libertarianism—which is the kind I encountered in the econ world—and you see that it is the thin libertarianism. It really is. Nobody's looking at the economics of how people feel constrained by companies and churches—you know, universities. Nobody's looking at that in econ. They're all looking at government policy. So that is—thin libertarianism is absolutely dominant in the econ world, when econ people think about these things. Liz Wolfe: Was Friedman really just a thin libertarian? I saw him as somebody who was very concerned with—or interested in—how is it that when we change the relationship between the state and the individual and free up markets, what other sort of, like, you know, cultural flourishing that allows people to live more freely follows from that? Noah Smith: I don't think he thought a lot about corporate power. Liz Wolfe: Well, I mean-yeah… Noah Smith: The way corporations make people feel unfree. Liz Wolfe: You're…

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Do These Libertarians Regret Voting for Donald Trump? May 09, 2025

Show notes

During the 2024 presidential election, a contingent of libertarians cast strategic, often reluctant votes for Donald Trump, arguing he was the lesser of two evils. Among them: Reason's own Liz Wolfe and J.D. Tuccille, alongside comedian and Part of the Problem host Dave Smith. Each thinks a Kamala Harris administration would have been more troubling, citing concerns about censorship, economic illiteracy, and cultural authoritarianism. More than 100 days into Trump's second presidency it's time to start asking: do you regret your vote? Reason's Zach Weissmueller, a non-voter, moderates a conversation on Trump's second term thus far. From the erosion of due process in immigration enforcement and the failure of the much-hyped Department of Government Efficiency initiative, to aggressive tariffs and erratic foreign policy gambits, Smith, Wolfe, and Tuccille dissect the trade-offs they anticipated versus what's actually happened. This episode was recorded on May 8, 2025. Sources Referenced: Just Asking Questions with Dave Smith, David Stockman, and Jacob Grier: Who is the lesser evil? Just Asking Questions with Rand Paul: Why I oppose Trump's tariffs Just Asking Questions with Vivek Ramaswamy: Will MAGA become libertarian, nationalist, or both? Just Asking Questions with Batya Ungar-Sargon: The Case for MAGA Leftism "What I Learned From Paleoism," by Lew Rockwell "Milton Friedman's Warning to DOGE," by Zach Weissmueller Bari Weiss's discussed tweet Chapters 00:00 Coming up… 00:42 Do you regret voting for Trump? 06:00 Counterfactuals and the Kamala Harris presidency 12:50 The problem with voting shaming and libertarian nuance 20:30 Immigration, deportations, and rule of law concerns 28:55 Is Trump undermining due process? 36:50 Tariffs, economic nationalism, and free trade debate 50:45 Globalization vs. protectionism: What's hurting the middle class? 59:40 The decline of affordability in America 01:11:00 Reflections on DOGE, bureaucracy, and missed opportunities 01:15:00 Trump's foreign policy: Ukraine, Iran, and Israel 01:20:00 Final reflections: best and worst of Trump's second term so far Transcript: This is an AI-generated transcript. Check against the original before quoting. Zach Weissmueller: Do you regret your Trump vote? Just asking questions. We're a little over 100 days into the second Trump administration. Though it kind of feels like more as the president came in hot with an arsenal of executive orders reshaping the immigration system, the federal bureaucracy and the global economy. You might recall that Trump made an explicit appeal to libertarians to vote for him showing up at the Libertarian Party Convention tomake his pitch. Many libertarians feeling queasy about a Kamala Harris presidency and underwhelmed by the state of the Libertarian Party decided to give Trump 2.0 a try. We've got three of them here today, including my co-host Liz Wolf and another of my Reason colleagues J.D. Tuccille. Dave Smith, host of Part of the Problem podcast, also joins us. I think it's fair to describe them all as reluctant Trump voters who had some serious reservations about various aspects of his agenda and maybe his character, but felt that the other options were worse. And so this seems like a good time to just reflect on how things are going so far from a libertarian perspective. Good to see all of you. Liz Wolfe: I see you too much. Zach Weissmueller: Yeah, yeah, you can just keep it to yourself. You each voted for Trump for slightly different reasons. So let's start there. First, Dave, we had you on before the election to talk about this a little bit, which we will link to that episode. And you told us at the time that "I might be casting the most unenthusiastic vote in the history of voting." But your reasoning was that it was purely a vote against Kamala Harris. Let's roll the tape to see exactly why you thought she deserved to lose at the time. Dave Smith:(CLIP) I've never seen anything like the Kamala Harris campaign. There's not even anything else you could compare it to where on every level it doesn't exist. Like there's nothing. She didn't win a primary. She ran for president four years ago and didn't make it to Iowa. She's walked away from every single position that she was running on four years ago without explaining why. "That was five years ago. Ha ha ha ha". That's it. But oh, by the way, she's the sitting vice president. Is she running on the current administration? No. And why not? Because I'm not Joe Biden. Hey, like, it's just nothing there. And to watch her, you know, what really did it for me was this rehabilitate the Cheney's that I just was like, what are we what are we doing here? And to me, for you know for everything the Democrats have done over the last really eight years. Um, starting with framing the sitting president for, uh, treason for these claims that he was a Russian spy, which were totally all, they produce nothing. Then they were the, um, the party of lockdowns and, uh mandates, which, okay, the Republicans were bad on too, but no question. They kind of branded themselves that then they were all in on this disastrous war in Ukraine, which has done nothing except get hundreds of thousands of people killed. And then they're gonna essentially coup the president of the United States of America who they had spent four years pretending was not in severe mental decline and and now to run somebody who's just nothing who's going around campaigning with Liz Cheney is just enough for me that you deserve to lose forever. Zach Weissmueller: Okay, so about 100 or so days in, and kind of imagine, I guess, the counterfactual Kamala Harris presidency. How are you feeling about things, Dave? Dave Smith: I'm, uh, I enjoy talking to you guys much more from home than a hotel room. That's my reflection on that. Man, I hate being in hotels all the time. Uh, yeah, I mean, you know, running the counterfactual Kamala Harris, I think is a little bit difficult, um, because I don't know, you know what, it's hard to say exactly what her presidency would have been. Like my, uh my default assumption is that it would have I don't think it would have just been a continuation of the Biden administration. I think it wouldn't have been a ramp up. And I think we also talked about on that show that one of my major motivations for supporting Trump was that I thought it would really be a death blow to the corporate media and it would be kind of like the coronation. Like this had kind of already happened, but it made it official that the alternative internet world is the mainstream and that the corporate media is dead. And, and I, I got into arguments with this, but like with some people who I think are very smart, who I respect very much. Um, I remember arguing with Robby Soave. Zach Weissmueller: Believe it or not, that's his real name, folks. Dave Smith: Robby was basically saying, which he had a fair argument for, he was like, well, look, like the first time Donald Trump won, it actually drove the ratings up for the corporate media. And my thought was that it's not going to work this time. And I thought so much of that was driven by the Russiagate stuff. And post Russiogate being exposed, and post the entire COVID narrative falling apart, I just think they had no more bullets left in the chamber. Like there was nothing they could say. That's going to actually get people to want to tune in and listen. So for now, if I'm running the counterfactual, if Kamala Harris had won. In many ways, I think that would have signaled that no, actually, the corporate media still does matter more. And that even though Donald Trump, even though Joe Rogan and Theo Von and all these guys had Trump on, that didn't move the needle as much. And so almost completely aside from the politics of it, just like on a cultural level, I think this is a lot of why so much of the woke insanity has totally receded. It's just kind of like, oh, they lost this epic battle therefore we recognize the side that's won. Almost every Democrat, I shouldn't say almost, there's a sliver of them who still want to cling to it, but almost every Democrat now recognizes that's like, oh we can't push this radical cultural agenda anymore, it's gonna cost us elections. And so for that you know, and for the reasons I laid out there, I do, I, I still feel that way. Um, I think that, you know, the Donald Trump first hundred days have been, you know like a clown show in a lot of ways, there's been some really terrible policies, um, and there's been some good ones too. But at this point, I'm not feeling like, Oh, I regret my vote. I'd, I'd still at this point, you would say, Oh thank God we dodged the bullet of Kamala Harris. Zach Weissmueller: Any reactions to that, JD or Liz, this idea that Trump was, it had to be done because there had to be a repudiation of the kind of gatekeepers that ushered us through COVID. And that is a major upside of Trump 2.0. J.D. Tuccille: Yeah, I mean, there's an element of David's thinking of what I did. I think I described at the time my first ambiguous exploration and reason for voting for Trump, but then I openly wrote for National Post that I was voting for him, but I said I was engaged in damage control and. Zach Weissmueller: I've got your reasoning right here, you said Trump, scumbag though he is, could be less bad than the empty vessel for the control freaks around her that is Kamala Harris. J.D. Tuccille: Yeah and uh… That was my attitude then. Now is the Trump 2.0 presidency perhaps a little shittier than even I anticipated yes it is uh… I can't say I regret it i knew it was a gamble at the time. I thought the choices we face were actually awful uh… I liked Chase Oliver as a candidate for the Libertarian Party was uh… Shambolic is still shambolic and rebuilding so I uh… By cut through the dice and said you know what at least if we disrupt what what is a and by administration Kamala Harris administration that is heavily integrated with the permanent government the civil service with the political class with the elite, if we disrupt that a little bit maybe we can at least get a different variety a less organized variety of all hold us for a little while and and break up what has been a bad experience with the Biden/Harris uh you know presidency uh nothing either of them were in control i don't think i think the aids around works just as much the decision-making power. So, do I regret it? I don't really regret it. I'm also not happy about my vote. It just was what it was in an effort to exercise damage, to engage in damage control in a bad situation. Zach Weissmueller: Can I ask you about one other aspect of your reasoning for voting for him? You said you were kind of standing in solidarity with your wife who felt that the left's anti-Semitism was just getting out of control. How do you feel on that front? Because there's definitely been a pivot towards combating anti-semitism, but from a libertarian perspective, it's kind of manifested in these. Crackdowns on speech on campus and even, you know, pulling visas and green cards from people for engaging in protest activities, what are your reflections on that particular point? J.D. Tuccille: Yeah, I mean, I was and am concerned about the antisemitic turn of the Democratic Party. I'm not pleased with how the Trump administration enacts even its good ideas, but the way I look at it is that we were given a choice between a nativist, economically illiterate authoritarian political party, the Republicans, and an antisemitic, economically, you know, illiterate totalitarian political party which is the Democrats. And I'm deeply concerned about antisemitism. They're really, my wife is an observant Jew. I mean, you know, that's a matter of concern for me. And there are two places in the world now that are probably safe for Jews to live. And that's the United States and Israel. You know, Jews are kind of running out of places where they can live and openly, you know, observe their faith and be visibly Jewish. Uh… Even Canada uh… Is going through a major turmoil and an open and accidentally some business tax on jewish schools and synagogues so uh… That is a major concern now is the Trump administration going about this the right way. Well I'm not gonna lose too much sleep about pulling money away from Harvard University, Columbia University depriving any of the uh… Universities of government money uh… Do I think that people ought to be busted just for writing an op-ed? No, I absolutely don't think that's the case, even if it's horrendous out there. Expressing hateful ideas. But a lot of this stuff crosses that line, like what we saw at Columbia University yesterday in the library, when two security guards were driven away in ambulances after there was a quasi-riot in the library on a pro-Hamas protest. So yeah, this is definitely part of my reasoning, is that I'm troubled by the anti-Semitic turn of the progressive wing of the Democratic Party. Which is I think still dominant now, even though the Democratic Party is going through what Republicans won through say five or eight years ago, which is kind of a re-examination of what it stands for and it's something of a breakup that may result in a coalescing new form. Zach Weissmueller: Liz let me invite you both to react to anything that they said and also read you your own words back to you Remember you asked for this It's I think you Liz Wolfe: I think doing this panel just to correct the record 100% was not my idea. It was my idea while stoned. I was literally like smoking a joint on my patio and I was like, wait a second. I'm so annoyed by people on Twitter always asking me if I regret my Trump vote. What if we just got a whole bunch of Trump voters together and explored that question. So I messaged it to Zach and naturally Zach was like okay sure whatever. Zach Weissmueller: Yeah, this is your chance to clear the air of weed smoke and also all the smoke on Twitter. This is, I mean, so what you said at the time was that the democracy subverting activities of January 6th disturbed me as did tariffs, but I'm more optimistic about the economic conditions that will arise as a result of a Trump administration. And I was pleased with his Supreme Court fix during his first term. Price controls, court packing, and massive amounts of government spending, which I expect to accompany a Harris presidency, will simply not work for me. So what do you, how, what's your reflection, how do you feel about things now? Liz Wolfe: I mean, I don't really regret my vote because I don't really spend a lot of time thinking about who I voted for. I think libertarians have historically been completely correct in basically saying your vote doesn't matter to the degree that you think. You are probably best served sitting at home. It's just really not going to turn the outcome of an election. And the fact that people spend so much time sort of shaming people over this type of thing is really, it's just such a waste of breath and energy. That said… I always saw Trump, and I think I could have articulated this better at the time, I always saw Trump as a very high upside, very high downside candidate. And I think the thing that's been really frustrating for me is that so far we've seen pretty much all downside. In the early days, I was feeling really optimistic about what DOGE could do. And I recall reading the news about the CFPB being dismantled and like sending that link to a few of my friends…

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Ross Douthat: Why Digital Life Threatens Freedom and Family May 01, 2025

Show notes

In this episode of Just Asking Questions, we're joined by New York Times columnist Ross Douthat to discuss the cultural, political, and demographic pressures reshaping the modern world. His recent essay, "An Age of Extinction Is Coming. Here's How to Survive," explores how digital life—from AI companions to algorithmic distraction—is accelerating trends toward social atomization, institutional collapse, and even plummeting birth rates. We talk with Douthat about how libertarians should respond to these changes, whether neo-traditionalism offers a credible path forward, and what it means to maintain meaning and community in the 21st century. This interview was recorded on April 29, 2025. Sources Referenced: Douthat's New York Times essay: "An Age of Extinction Is Coming. Here's How to Survive" The New York Times: "The World's Population May Peak in Your Lifetime. What Happens Next?" U.S. college enrollment decline statistics Slow Boring: "Cities aren't back" Just Asking Questions with Derek Thompson: "Democrats Must Change" Just Asking Questions with Tim Carney: "Why Aren't People Having More Kids?" An introduction to G.K. Chesterton's fences Chapters 00:00 Coming up… 00:37 Introducing Ross Douthat and the age of cultural bottlenecks 04:57 Are digital technologies disrupting cultural transmission? 09:57 How the internet reshapes politics and encourages radicalism 15:22 Digital media and the decline of institutional trust and localism 18:42 Demographic decline and the fading urgency to preserve culture 26:52 Free choice or social breakdown? The libertarian tension 34:27 Suburbs, adaptation, and the future of normie culture 41:12 Risk aversion, parenting, and the erosion of community life 47:17 Fertility, tradition, and the rise of large families as a subculture 54:07 Neo-traditionalism in a bespoke age: coping or coping well? 58:32 Can we rebuild meaningful culture in a post-traditional world? Transcript: This is an AI-generated transcript. Check against the original before quoting. Liz Wolfe: What will survive the digital apocalypse? Just asking questions. Our guest today is Ross Douthat, one of the few people living openly as a conservative at The New York Times, and one of my personal favorite writers on Catholicism, faith, and forging meaning and community in an increasingly atomized age. He wrote a piece for the Times called "An Age of Extinction Is Coming. Here's How to Survive." Welcome, Ross. Ross Douthat: It's great to be here. Thank you so much for having me. Liz Wolfe: Thank you for coming on the show. Zach Weissmueller: Yeah, it's great to have you because, I mean, every once in a while, you read one of these pieces that seems to capture something about what is in the air, what is in the ether. And this is just a really remarkable piece that we will definitely link to, and I recommend reading it to go along with the podcast. It argues that the digital age is forcing the human race into what evolutionary biologists call a bottleneck. So we can imagine this extreme, rapidly acting new evolutionary pressure, and only a tiny fraction is going to make it through that little opening in the bottleneck. So, just to set this up, what are some of the biggest telltale signs that you observe that lead you to believe we're facing an age of extinction? Ross Douthat: Sure. Well, first of all, I should say, hopefully it's more than a tiny fraction, right? You can imagine a bottle with a thinner neck or a thicker neck. One of the points of alerting people to these realities is to try to instill and encourage habits and intentions that get more people, more ways of life, more cultures through the bottleneck. But basically, the argument that I make is that digital life and digital existence are really, really hard on what we think of as normal, basic modes of cultural transmission from one generation to another—and then also the literal reproduction of the species. And these two things are actually connected. The way we live digitally tends to distract us from the forms of creation and educational transmission of literature, art, religion—all the stuff of human culture that people take for granted. It also tends to distract us and separate us from the normal, in-real-life ways of hanging around with other people—making friendships, going on dates, finding romance, having sex, and having kids—that allow for the very literal continuation of the human species. So there's a lot of things that people did sort of casually without thinking too much about it in much of human history, that people now need to do with a lot more intentionality in the landscape we're in—a landscape of constant virtual distraction. If you don't have a certain kind of intentionality about those things—whether it's the religion you're trying to pass on to your kids, or the novel reading you take for granted as what a literate person does, or again, just the literal continuation of Spain or South Korea or Italy or Taiwan as nations—that's the most urgent part of this: the connection to demographics. But all of that is not going to happen as automatically as it did in the past. You're going to have lots and lots of opportunities to live a virtual existence that doesn't have normal, real-world correlates. And this is only going to increase, presumably, in the age of AI. You don't have to assume that AI will make all work obsolete or anything like that to see this happening. You just have to assume that AI is going to be especially good at generating addictive slop on YouTube, or generating artificial companions and friendships that substitute for real ones. And that's already happening. The more it happens, the tighter the bottleneck gets. Liz Wolfe: Well, I mean, I am very sympathetic to this thesis, especially because I send Zach a replica-related rant approximately every two weeks, where I'm very worried about the chatbot girlfriends proliferating. I find it to be one of the creepiest, most dystopian things in the world. Zach is very sick of me blowing up his DMs with my worries about this. Zach Weissmueller: I agree with you that Her by Spike Jonze is our future. That's our trajectory, for sure. Liz Wolfe: Absolutely. Ross Douthat: Well, and in fact, you've probably actually created your own chatbot that now sends Zach those messages, so you don't even have to do it yourself. He's communicating with Liz Wolfe Avatar. I mean, that's the alarmism bot. All of my own dystopian tech columns are themselves written by Ross Douthat AI at this point. I should just confess that up front. Liz Wolfe: But I—OK, I want to sort of get, you know, right off the bat to the heart of what I think the libertarian objection would be to your essay, which is: Are you erroneously blaming a lot of these problems on technological shifts when, in reality, the thing that you're bemoaning is the fact that our cultural defaults have sort of gone away? Ross Douthat: I mean, yes, I am suggesting that certain cultural defaults have gone away under technological pressure— Liz Wolfe: Are they necessarily linked, though? Is your argument that the two are just intrinsically linked? Ross Douthat: I mean, I guess my general view is that you should regard technological change as causing—well, put it this way, to use a biological metaphor: Any culture contains within it multiple tendencies at any given time. Technological revolutions act on cultures. They interact with preexisting tendencies and heighten or accentuate or cause—again, "cause" is like causing a gene to be expressed. It's like saying, "OK, under certain environmental conditions, some gene in your body gets expressed." So under the conditions created by the internet and the iPhone and now AI, you get a kind of accentuation of an already existing tendency toward hyper-individualism, atomization, separation from institutions, churches, families, and so on. And again, yes, all of these trends preexist and predate the internet. I would certainly not argue that there's a monocausal story here where it's just the internet driving, say, distrust of institutions. Distrust of institutions has been rising steadily in America—with a brief shift around September 11—since the 1960s. That's a long-term trend. It's not driven by the internet alone. Is the internet an accelerant for people's alienation from institutions? Yes, I think it obviously is. But the other thing I would say is that the essay and the argument I'm making is not a kind of Luddite case for saying these technologies are bad and we need to get rid of them. The argument is more—and I probably could have put in a few more paragraphs to make this explicit—that this technological change is happening. We're not likely to have a Butlerian Jihad, Dune-style rebellion against sentient machines or something. To be clear, I can imagine futures where that happens. But where we are right now, in 2025, people are going to keep using iPhones, keep living in virtual reality, and adopt whatever the new AI technologies are to some degree. Given that we're not going to go around smashing the machines tomorrow, it's like: You need to be aware of what these new technologies are doing, and you need to focus on how human beings can master the technology rather than the other way around. How do you make the use of the iPhone, social media, digital media—all these things—fit into a world where human beings keep making great art and having families? That is the challenge. It's a case that assumes technological change. It's not trying to resist it. It's assuming the change and saying, "OK, how do we deal with this? How do we ensure that when society has fully absorbed whatever the technology is doing to us, we still have human things on the other side?" Zach Weissmueller: Yeah, it strikes me as a very McLuhanite argument. Marshall McLuhan—who I find persuasive in this day and age to a large degree, more than I would have expected—argues that technology, specifically communications technology, reorders the human senses in certain ways. Then you need to have an awareness of what those effects are in order to adapt to it. He goes as far as to say that this is really the prime mover in terms of creating new historical and cultural phenomena. I don't know if you go that far or not, but one example that you give of the way it sort of reorders the political landscape is what you call the rise of these weird, bespoke radicalisms. We've got Luigi Mangione fandom on the left, World War II revisionism on the right, and you describe it as an extinction of a certain kind of political discourse. Why are those two particular examples outgrowths of the digital age of extinction? Ross Douthat: I mean, it's partially just that the digital experience discourages norminess in all its forms, you might say. Liberal democracy historically has thrived on people being loosely engaged with politics in ways that are not bespoke. You're part of a broad coalition that is trying to get particular things done in politics and has a defined set of interests, but you're not sculpting and crafting this hyperpersonalized political identity. Now, again, this is a case where you don't want to just say this is bad, full stop. In fact, some bespoke political identities get at real truths about the world that are lost in a world of boring normie liberalism. And as someone who is not myself a normie liberal, I have a real appreciation for the ways in which the internet can enliven political argument, increase the range of available ideas, and expand political debates. So it's not as simple as saying this new world is 100 percent worse because we're all going to be living in weird fusions of Hindu nationalism, Fabian socialism, and the Black Panthers—or something. But again, you want to be aware, as a citizen engaging in politics, of the way your own political engagement is being rewired. I didn't talk about this at length in the essay, but the other thing it does is create these weird "politics as fandoms," where you're engaging with politics not by knocking on doors or canvassing or forming an institution organized around a particular issue, but more in the way people might engage with football or hockey. Clearly, the internet encourages some version of this. Social media especially encourages a version of this where it's like, what is the thing your "main character" is doing today? So many influencers, right and left, are clearly offering this kind of politics-as-fandom. And again, democratic government is not really well served by this kind of mentality. It's not how republican government is supposed to work. So it's not going away, but you want to be aware of it. You want to figure out: How do you, in your own life, avoid thinking of politics in this way? And also, how do you, as a senator or congressman or someone who takes political institutions seriously, avoid existing in that kind of landscape? Because it's a landscape where it's really hard to actually get anything done politically. I don't think it's a coincidence that the internet has accelerated the impotence of the U.S. Congress. Again, to your previous question, it's not the only reason Congress has become increasingly impotent, but internet-age politics are especially ill-suited to real-world legislative deal making. Liz Wolfe: Wait, why is that? Is it just because localism doesn't matter, and you can't sort of gin up enough support for a person who's representing a relatively small contingent? Ross Douthat: I think it's partially that local interests seem to diminish in salience dramatically. Politicians become less dependent on local interests—even when they're getting elected locally—and more dependent on national constituencies. Yuval Levin at the American Enterprise Institute has written a fair amount about this: the way in which institutions, in the digital environment, become platforms rather than common enterprises. So you see members of Congress for whom being a congressperson or senator is less about participating in this institution that exists in the real world—where you go into a building, follow particular protocols, attend meetings and committees—and more about building up your digital reality. Liz Wolfe: This is sort of exemplified by Nancy Mace's big hubbub over sharing the women's restroom in one of the congressional buildings with trans people. It felt like something that wasn't really narrowly tailored to what actually serves her constituents, but rather a means of making the name "Nancy Mace" itself more prominent and higher profile. Ross Douthat: Yes, right. But it's also that her own constituents—I think it's clear—would not reelect her if they weren't participating in this as well. So it's not just that as a congressperson you're trying to gain some national or even international audience. I think it also has to be the case that ordinary voters in a South Carolina district somehow find it more real that Nancy Mace is out there not just doing cable news hits anymore, but creating viral videos and showing up in your TikTok feed or whatever. That's somehow more real than Nancy Mace coming back to the district and saying, "Good news, guys. I added this bit of spending that benefits our district through this larger legislative compromise." I mean, it's an interesting question. There are politicians who have endured and thrived successfully in this landscape using the old model. I think it's easier for senators than for cong…

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