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

hey Ross, how are you?

Good. I'm fine, Ezra. How are you?

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

What is the Antichrist?

How much time do we have? We've got uh as long as much time as you have to talk about the Antichrist.

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

Ross Dela, welcome back to the show.

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

What the hell, man?

What? What do you mean? Going to 60 Minutes. You're leaving us?

I mean, in spiritually, I You never leave any place that that you love and all things are gathered in by God for his But yeah, I'm I'm going to 60 minutes.

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

Oh, yeah. No, it was the opposite. Yeah, you're the opposite. You start at the Atlantic and become a blogger.

I, you know, I was a a junior junior junior editor. I edited the letter section at The Atlantic for a while and I did blogging on the side. Um, I think of myself as someone who was sort of present for both the end of an old dispensation and the beginning of a new one. So, I had sort of parallel careers in my early 2s. I had the career inside the Atlantic where I was doing junior editor work and sort of trying to work my way up the masthead at an institution where, you know, you were still doing fact-checking and copy editing on these huge sheets of paper that would be printed out and circulate around the office and 17 people would have red pen on them and it was very much a pre-magazine and a pre-internet journalistic experience. And then then at the same time sort of as a side hustle I was blogging doing freelance writing and sort of participating in yeah the kind of the world of the early 2000s internet. Those two things sort of converged because what then happened as you know was that many many traditional publications looked at that landscape and said ah this is the future and we need to co-opt it. Right. So, at the Atlantic, that meant basically creating a mini uh editorial page or opinion page that consisted of prominent bloggers that The Atlantic had hired. So there was a period when they brought in Andrew Sullivan who was then the biggest deal in blogging but they also had Eglacius Megan Mardle Tanahasi Coats um and and then me because I was already on staff and I can tell you that my own traffic numbers were were somewhat lower than the others. Um but that that was sort of the path as you know in that era because you followed it too was to sort of be a kind of an outsider blogger critic of the establishment and then an establishment institution might hire you or buy your blog or or bring you on board and it was just that in my case I was sort of already on board when that happened.

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

Well, so there were a couple phases, right, where um there were a couple cohorts of bloggers who became a big deal. And the first wave was uh immediately after September 11th and then in the run-up to the Iraq war where you had a set of people who were some of them were former liberals who had moved right uh some of them were just right-wingers but they got called the war bloggers right and these these were people who were I would say the simplest way to put it is that something crazy had happened something world altering had happened right and we at the exact time that the internet was emerging as a force and so there was a huge market suddenly of people who were you know on their web browsers looking at a screen all day um and wanted to hear people talking about terrorism September 11th Islam in the Middle East and then you know Afghanistan and Iraq and so on and it's not surprising that the people who filled that niche were mostly people who were in favor of the war on terror and then in favor of the war in Iraq. But I I think it really was that the event and the demand or the event and the technology sort of intersected to create this opening. Like I remember being an intern at National Review in the summer before September 11th, so summer of 2001, right? And so I think Sullivan was blogging. There were like two or three people who were When did you start blogging?

I was a freshman at UC Santa Cruz, right? Um, so in 2001, you had the internet and you had a few bloggers and I remember just sitting in, you know, the offices of again this like 50, 60-year-old magazine. I'm an intern. I have very little to do and you just sort of hit refresh, right? You hit refresh on Andrew Sullivan's blog and you see what you know, you see you see if he's posted something new. Mickey Couse, right? Cow Files was also probably one of the initial blogs at that point. But then September 11th happens and suddenly you just have a lot more people hitting refresh and having having this kind of demand. Well, I want to go before that. So, one of the things that I find interesting about this period is that this is one of these places where I think media has changed more than people really realize. There just wasn't a lot of political opinion accessible to most people. So it's like I grew up in Orange County, California. My family subscribed to the LA Times. Uh so we, you know, there's a op-ed page in the LA Times which I would read sometimes. We were not a family that got you know small circulation DC political.

the inflight magazine of Air Force One, the American Prospect, the National Review, which is a conservative um magazine that you've written a lot for um the Atlantic. There was talk radio by that time, >> the Laura Ingram show, Glenn Beck. >> And now, America's most exciting radio talk show, The Savage Nation. >> But even that had only been on the scene for uh so long in it sort of like post Rush Limba form, >> right? >> You know, when I was growing up there, Fox News was beginning to roll out, but it wasn't what it would eventually become. I remember MSNBC beginning. >> You had Crossfire. you had Crossfire as sort of a like that was what you watch if you were >> into MSNBC originally is Microsoft NBC. Yeah. And I remember there being a it was about tech primarily and I remember watching a show with Solad O'Brien where she like had an animated co-host like a clip art co-host.

WOW. WELCOME BACK TO THE show my friends and the SITE WITH SOLIDAD O'BRIEN. I'm her co-host. Can I May I call myself that?

Sure. call yourself whatever you want.

and what I always saw blogging is doing is like there was an unmet demand for political opinion and particularly after 911 when people were really really interested in politics, really upset about what was happening, really uncertain about what was happening. And all of a sudden you can get a flood of it. Like now there is so much more opinion between X and Instagram and you know Subseek and everything else that it's like the news that has been somewhat drowned out. But but then it was somewhat revolutionary that all of a sudden you could be you know refreshing and getting just throughout the day more and more and more commentary on what was going on. But the other thing that was

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

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

Speaker A: I mean I Yeah. All right. Someone would write 300 words.

Speaker B: No, I Well, it's I spend I mean, the first thing to to be said is that I always regarded this kind of role as just an incredible opportunity like as a baseline, right? where you write you write opinions in order to argue and persuade. That that's what opinion journalism as far as I can see is supposed to do. And you know it's an illusion to imagine that anyone has their whole worldview altered by an 800-word column or anything remotely like that. But but still on the margins at the very least, right? You're trying to pull readers closer to your perspective. um move people to some degree, expose people to ideas they

Speaker A: wouldn't otherwise cover. And in that sense, there's just no better way to do it than to be the person at a given publication who has heterodox views relative to their audience. And look, obviously there's lots of conservatives who read The Atlantic when I was there. There's lots and lots of conservatives who read the New York Times. So if you're if you're working for a big publication, you're never exclusively speaking to people who disagree with you. But yeah, clearly clearly I'm speaking to a lot of people who do disagree with me. And that's a gift. And then you have to remember that it's a gift because it's also a very stressful situation, right? the claims you make are going to be exactly scrutinized in a way that is maybe less true of people who sort of assume that the audience is going to be on their side.

Speaker B: Well, what have you learned about writing persuasively?

Speaker A: I mean, this is banal advice, but it's still the fundamental thing. It is to argue effectively, you need to understand why people you disagree with hold the views that they do. And you need to start from a version of their argument that is high-minded rather than low-minded. And that is sort of the best version of the perspective that they hold. And that doesn't mean that you can't think that like secretly or subconsciously they hold their opinion for bad or wicked reasons or because they want to, you know, just destroy their enemies and salt the earth. Like you can believe that that exists somewhere in their mind. But to argue with them, you have to actually engage with the version of the argument that they themselves would put forward as their own best defense. Right? So like the obvious examples, I'll pick one from the right and one from the left. Right? So, if you are pro-choice and you want to argue with prolifers, like actually argue with them, you cannot start from a description of the pro-life position that says the point of pro-life politics is to subjugate women and punish them for sexual immorality. You're allowed to think that that's out there and like is part of, you know, the socially conservative psyche. You're allowed to think whatever you want, but you're not going to get anywhere arguing unless you start with the fact that like pro-life people think uh unborn human lives are human and worthy of legal protection in terms of being human. That's just where you have to start, right? And then to take to take an issue from the other direction, if you are a um conservative opponent of liberal views on immigration, you're allowed to think that liberals are politically machavelian cynics who are, you know, bringing in lots of illegal immigrants to vote Democratic. But you're never going to get anywhere arguing unless you start with what liberals themselves would say, which is that, you know, immigration is a humanitarian and economic benefit to immigrants and to the country that receives them. That, you know, that's that's like where you have to start. That's it. That's the the whole the whole secret. And again, how effective the arguments are that you end up making from that starting point, I don't know. But I I do think generally that the act of sort of sustained attempted good faith interaction does even in totally polarized environments yield a kind of you know reasonably favorable response. Like it's not the case that it that you can't talk across partisan divides. It's it's challenging and difficult and sometimes exhausting. Um, but people are open to it.

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

Speaker A: >> a profoundly a profoundly successful exercise. say you've been most successful. What What would you say you feel you have been most persuasive about?

Speaker B: >> I I don't honestly know exactly how to judge that. I mean, I I think that the

Speaker A: So, all right. On the one hand, there's a bunch of things that have happened since I took the Times job that sort of fulfilled my expectations to some degree about like what was going to happen in American politics and where certain things would go. uh above all the sort of populist nationalist transformation of the Republican party.

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

Speaker A: So this this wasn't persuasion directed at liberals, honestly. This was persuasion directed more at our fellow conservatives and saying, "Look, the tectonic plates under the Republican party are shifting. The party has to deal with the fact that it has a more working-class coalition. It has to adapt its policy and rhetoric, all these kind of things. But in fact, that vision was fulfilled in a way that had absolutely nothing to do with us. It was not the case that we wrote a bunch of columns, persuaded a bunch of Republicans to become more populist, and lo and behold, you know, a populist version of Marco Rubio was elected president in 2016. No, obviously our prophecies were fulfilled by Donald Trump and the whole Trump phenomenon was just was and for the most part remains pretty disconnected from the work of um you know opinion mongers and wouldbe intellectuals. So there's that. I that's that's sort of one one area of um success of a kind, but not the success that that I looked for.

Speaker B: Well, stop there for a second. In what way was it not right? You put some flesh on that. So you wrote this book. You you're sort of involved in an effort to say the Republican party should not be as doctrinally libertarian. It shouldn't be all about cutting Medicare and cutting social security. That it had this opportunity at a time when it did not win majorities of working-class voters to shift its policies in a way that would make it more appealing to them. And the kinds of shifts that you and Ryhan advocated had to do with things like immigration, had to do with things like tax credits for kids, had to do with sort of shifting it to a more pro-family um more concerned with the problems of working-class families from I would say a more traditionalist perspective maybe than the left is. So, how would you describe what happened of that and then what happened that created the the working class shift? because Republicans do now win majorities of working-class voters or Trump at least does. Um what drove that that maybe was not in your prescription? Well, so one part of what drove it was just that Trump picked or intuited a different set of issues to focus on than Ryhan and I would have would have favored. But but generally we were focused on sort of family policy, wage subsidies, these kind of things. And Trump was just focused on obviously like trade tariffs and re-industrialization um in a way that I don't think we we I don't think we fully anticipated how much some of those arguments would resonate in 2016. I don't know how much they resonate now, but in 2016, I think big part of the country was still getting over the shock of the opening to China. And there was just a real percentage for Trump in flying around the Midwest, going to places that had been hammered and saying, "I'm just going to bring back your jobs." Right?

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

Speaker B: And that was again a different message from saying we need to use government policy to help people form families.

Speaker A: And I'm genuinely angry at the people who took

Speaker B: And I'm right. Well, that too, right? So then there's there's a more substantial anger. There's more substantial scapegoating.

Speaker A: They're moving to other places.

Speaker A: lot of them are moving to Mexico. Don't underestimate. It's like the new China uh on a smaller level, but like the new China.

Speaker B: So our our view wasn't that you should never cut Medicare and Social Security.

Speaker A: It was more that if you're going to cut Medicare or reform Medicare, you should be doing it not to just pass a new upper bracket tax cut, but to free up more money to help working families, right, would be would be how the argument would go. And Trump just said, "No, you know, we're never cutting these things, right?" And so he outflanked all of his Republican primary opponents by realizing that a big part of the Republican base wasn't on board with Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan. But what that did was basically create a kind of a more popular but much more fiscally unsustainable and in the end I think sort of unproductive policy mix on the right where the right sort of defines itself as defenders of old people's entitlements rather than people who are eager to cut it and then has no space left for for a lot of the policy ideas that that we would have favored. So that's part of part of what happened.

Speaker A: The other thing that happens, right, is that we were trying to sort of craft, you know, I think you use the word traditional, I would have said sort of like a kind of moderate social conservatism that um was compatible with the Republican party's sort of religious religious base and pro-life commitments and so on, but tried to start from there and broaden into, you know, broader support for two parent families and marriage and these these kind of things.

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

Speaker A: but then that the other thing that happens is that liberalism and progressivism having won those victories then radicalize further and say well you know what happened on same-sex marriage where we sort of shift the country completely in our direction in an incredible amount of time and then declare that you know the other side are bigots and we don't need to talk to them anymore. We can do that with a lot of other issues too. And that gets you the woke era and then it gets you the backlash against the woke era. But like the backlash against the woke era is very far removed from a kind of a stable social conservatism like sort of building building something. I mean the backlash against the woke era is then you know everybody from Catholic traditionalists to pot smoking libertarians right who don't who don't like the woke but it's not a I don't know it it's not sort of a coherent basis for governing the country in ways that I think have become totally apparent in the second Trump term.

Speaker B: Well, you have this famous 2016 tweet. You write a thought sent back in time to the theocracy panic of 2005. You seem like you're enjoying this interview. If you dislike the religious right, wait till you meet the post-religious right.

Speaker A: So, you know, so the theocracy the theocracy pan the theocracy panic was just that George W. Bush won re-election in 2004 with the support of lots and lots of white evangelicals. Liberals were not expecting Bush to win, a bunch of liberals became obsessed with the idea that evangelicalism was taking over America and was going to build a kind of Gileadesque evangelical theocracy. I thought that was ludicrous at the time and wrote a bunch of essays about it. Um, and then by the time you get to the mid2010s and Trump is winning while being conspicuously non-eangelical, conspicuously non-Christian, it seems like you're in a world where everything that liberals hated and feared about George W. Bush becomes something they're they're nostalgic for, right? and that they see sort of and that as you kind of dechristianize conservatism, you get more bigotry, xenophobia, these kind of things. You know, that was 10 years ago. There's a lot of different forms like a post-religious right could be and you see versions of this not a kind of you know terrifying fascist formation but just a kind of right-wing politics of um you know sort of libertine indifference and sort of proud amoralism right and again this is part of part of Trump's coalition right is people who just hate moralistic arguments and want to do whatever they want to do and saw and ended up seeing Trump as an avatar for that which is I think quite different from the part of the post-religious right that is literally people trying to revive kind of a pagan non-Christian fascist politics but both of those things sort of exist as phenomena in the last 10 years tell me what you think leads to the phenomena of the more pagan formation so so the first time I heard this uh description of it was actually in an interview that Luis Perry, the sort of British conservative kind of critic of modern feminism did with your new boss Barry Weiss and she was making this distinction between Jordan Peterson and Andrew Tate. So, you know, the really crucial difference between Jordan Peterson and Andrew Tate. There are obviously lots of differences, but the one that I think is most salient to this issue is um Jordan Peterson is basically um preaching a Christian message and Andrew Tate is not. I the more I think about it, the more I think that actually that's really the key dividing line if you're thinking about um American culture in particular.

Speaker B: So tell me a bit of how you understand the story. How do we go from the front-facing Christianity of conservatism in the Bush era to this much

postChristian: includes Christians as you're as you're saying. But I would I would say it's fair to say Christian ethics and virtue are not demanded as a um

Speaker A: And look, the truth is that, you know, if you go back and look,

Speaker B: I'm not Steven Miller's not a Wiccan.

Speaker A: But then there's clearly a group not just of would be neopagans but sort of conservative Christians on the internet who don't like that and are like where's the you know where's the war right where's the you know we we this is sort of this is like losing losing the the core the core of the story and that's an that's I think that that partially reflects this desire to find something that doesn't seem present in like late 20th century sort of public Christianity, the compassionate conservatism of George W. Bush, find some kind of fighting spirit in the theory that that's what you need to overcome liberalism.

Speaker B: it's funny. It's an odd take on George W. Bush in a way that what he lacked was a fighting spirit. Bush, who won two elections in a row against the Democrats,

Speaker B: >> like nobody hates Bill Crystal more than Trumpists and Bill Crystal hates Trumpists but if you go back and read like the way Crystal wrote about politics and war and all these things in the late 90s and early 2000s he has a lot in common with the way sort of the young nationalists spoiling for a fight write about politics today it's just the focus the focus is is different.

Speaker B: >> So why do you think that ended up being such a major split? Because I agree that that is one of the places where you tend to see a lot of split between Trumpist and never Trumpers, people associated with national greatness conservatism.

Speaker B: >> That was an aggressive muscular conservatism.

Speaker B: And you know, for all the talk about not launching new wars, 它并没有成为对唐纳德·特朗普关于MAGA运作方式的构想如此核心的案例。是的。

Speaker B: >> So why do you think that became such a cut in the Republican coalition?

Speaker B: >> I think it was well it was partially a cut because even though Trump has ended up starting a new war in the Middle East, he really did pretty strongly repudiate elements of neoonservative and hawkish foreign policy. And to the extent that like if you were committed to the idea that the Iraq war had been a good idea then Trump in 2016 was not your guy. Right? So there was that as a kind of specific breaking point. Then there was al there also was you know to make the case for the never Trump side a kind of clear characterological argument where you could say you know in in the early 2000s that a n politics of national greatness only made sense if it was founded on character and virtue in your leaders and I don't think George Bush was like a paragon of every single virtue but it's fair to say that he was a more personally virtuous in various ways than Trump. Right? So there were people who had committed to that idea for good reasons for whom it was just like okay I don't care how muscular Trump is or how international greatness he is. He's just a bad guy and I'm not I'm not going to support him. And then for younger people like especially

Speaker A: after 2016 like once you know once Trump wins then he just sort of resets the landscape right and you sort of it's it's just like you sort of I I feel like with younger people on both the left and the right the world where we had arguments about the character of American politicians the world where you know Bill Clinton's adultery was something to be litigated all all of these is just kind of a lost world and so it's sort of

Speaker B: I think it might be rediscovered soon.

Speaker A: It might be.

Speaker A: I think in the turning of the wheel on

Speaker A: I think in the turning of the wheel on

Speaker A: albeit one with a Protestant church on cover.

Speaker B: It is an odd design choice. I agree.

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

Speaker B: What have you made of that? What what what does that move from like the form of Christianity that seems to be driving right-wing politics? Was evangelical Christianity to Catholic thinking? What is that?

Speaker A: I don't know. So, one, I don't know how much Catholic thinking can be said to be driving Republican politics. I I would not look at the second Trump intellectual trends.

Speaker A: Yeah, I think it's I think it's I think it's very important in sort of right-wing intellectual culture. In the last 5 years generally after a long period of secularization, there is a renewed interest in arguments about religion, religious ideas, um that extends beyond conservatism, maybe even extends to you, right, Ezra? We've we've talked about this on this show before. Um, and I think in my own my own work has been in this period kind of well suited to that moment. I felt sort of more in tune with the times than I usually do in that sense. But the way that's manifested in kind of right-wing intellectual culture is that Catholicism, which has, I think it's fair to say, a stronger and deeper intellectual tradition than evangelical Christianity in the US, has just become like a kind of natural attractor for a lot of people who are like looking for looking for a harbor, looking for a place to land, looking to convert or revert or anything else. But then the other thing is that you know Catholicism is still struggling as a mass institutional religion right and evangelicalism is still thriving relative to Catholicism. I mean, one argument you could make is that under sort of digital conditions, under sort of internet conditions, which are hard on they're hard on things that don't have a clear definition that are sort of just based on kind of loose ancestral loyalties. So, they've been really hard on like denominational Protestantism, on people who are like, well, I'm a Methodist cuz my parents were a Methodist, or I'm a Presbyterian cuz I like the pastor, and so on. and they've been good for in different ways sort of stronger brands and in a way Christianity sort of polarizes into the strong brand of like logical religion of which Catholicism is the strongest expression and then kind of the strong brand of mass market seeker sensitive you know come for our amazing our amazing praise music concert and th those are the two strongest forms but the Catholic form is stronger at the elite level and the evangelical form seems stronger at the mass level. That was a very long comment, but it's it's something obviously that I think about a lot, but it's a very

Speaker B: But then the other thing is that you know Catholicism is still struggling as a mass institutional religion right and evangelicalism is still thriving relative to Catholicism. I mean, one argument you could make is that under sort of digital conditions, under sort of internet conditions, which are hard on they're hard on things that don't have a clear definition that are sort of just based on kind of loose ancestral loyalties. So, they've been really hard on like denominational Protestantism, on people who are like, well, I'm a Methodist cuz my parents were a Methodist, or I'm a Presbyterian cuz I like the pastor, and so on. and they've been good for in different ways sort of stronger brands and in a way Christianity sort of polarizes into the strong brand of like logical religion of which Catholicism is the strongest expression and then kind of the strong brand of mass market seeker sensitive you know come for our amazing our amazing praise music concert and th those are the two strongest forms but the Catholic form is stronger at the elite level and the evangelical form seems stronger at the mass level. That was a very long comment, but it's it's something obviously that I think about a lot, but it's a very

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

Speaker A: Yes.

Speaker A: Right. So in the in the latest kn So the prior Knives Out movie was a movie about how Elon Musk and billionaires are bad and evil and this the latest Knives Out movie um was a movie about how uh there are really awful forms of religion and there's also really good forms of religion and we should want the really good forms to survive and you know it's just just one movie but I thought it was an interesting sort of

Speaker B: well I think you can see a couple things happening that are least interesting so I agree knives out is is one of them we were talking about the Odyssey But you have James Terico who became a kind of phenom candidate, sort of one of the only like mainstream liberal candidates who's been like a big attentional phenom of the moment and does it by wrapping a pretty straightforward progressive politics

Speaker A: in a very very moralistically Christiany framework.

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

Speaker A: And I think people have found that exciting. It has given them a way to talk about the moment that I think feels deeper and uh it has tapped into something very real. I think if you're watching some of the other people coming up, this would include not just Ralph Waro, but but John Of in Georgia, they're much more comfortable in that grammar as well. They got together, the speaker of the house, held hands with other legislators, prayed a prayer, and then they went and cut a trillion dollars out of Medicaid. 15 million people, right, off of their healthcare. They they kicked veterans and seniors and children off of SNAP. And I don't understand how you read the book that I read.

Speaker B: I'm a Matthew 25 Christian. A government transformed into a tool of one man's vengeance and enrichment. A spiritually broken president. Who digs the moral pit deeper and deeper. But pastor Proverbs says, "Whoever digs a pit, whoever digs a pit will fall into it." And scripture is full of kings brought low by their own arrogance. Uh so in my view, something is happening. It's not necessarily the left is becoming believers in a in a in a new way, but there is a desire to sort of reconnect, I think, to traditions. Well, I mean, there was a way in which from from my perspective as a skeptical outsider, the whole great awakening was this fascinating attempt to do religious energy without metaphysical commitment. Like it was it really was the case that

Speaker A: there was kind of the energy that you associate with a moralistic revival at work in anti-racism and you know everything associated with that. Like you have iconoclasm, you have you know people enforcing new moral norms. Like these are things that we associate with periods of spiritual ferment. Um but quite self-consciously like the anti-racist cause was detached from the black church in various ways, right? And you had like our again my former Atlantic colleague Tanahasi Coats, you know, as a kind of prophet who very explicitly rejected cosmic hope, right? If anything sort of carried a kind of cosmic despair around with him. I think that combination doesn't work well, right? you end up with a kind of a kind of politics of guilt without the possibility of redemption is a pretty dark perspective on the world and I think sort of wokeness for all its revolutionary zeal ends up itself just in some dark places again independent of what's happening with Trump or on the right or anything else. So some of it might be just a reaction to that too, right? a sense that like, okay, we can't moralize at people if we're also telling them that the universe is sort of empty and meaningless except for like the meaning we impose on it through ideological categories or something like you need if you're going to have progressive moralism, you need to be able to claim to that it corresponds to something like out there in the cosmos that's real, right?

Speaker B: I don't totally agree with that. Um maybe one one way to to to ground that disagreement is Pope Leo's AI and cyclical one of the things that struck me reading it was without agreeing with his metaphysics. Right? I am not a Catholic. My vision of the world and its cosmology is not Catholic. I found it to be a really beautiful and moving articulation of what I would otherwise describe as liberal values. um all the way down to ways of practicing politics uh you know approaches to pluralism, approaches to to the human being. So now you could say and I think this would be true. I mean I come out of um Jewish tradition and I probably have a lot of that in the way I look at the world. But I do think there is something about the emphasis there on a certain kind of human dignity and a certain kind of treatment between people that Trump has thrown into a kind of relief. So maybe it looks more explicitly connected to a politics I am interested in in trying to create than it would have if he had written the same thing but Jeb Jeb Bush was president.

Speaker A: Yes. Maybe at this point we have sort of moved through the Trump era to a point where um liberals are saying like okay Trump is so corrupt and such a rotten person in all these ways and so what if we counterpose a kind of beautiful politics of human dignity against him but that's after trying for many years to say and and again not you personally maybe but some some people right saying Trump is rotten and corrupt and his rottenness and corruption reveals the dark racist heart of America and the fact that we're all still enthralled to Confederate patriarchal values and what we need is, you know, a sort of total moral reckoning with all the deep profound evils of the United States. Like those are different messages. And I think the left kind of ran with the second message for a while and and again I think ended up in some culde-sacs and dark places. And so now it's like, okay, now maybe we'll maybe we like that Pope Leo is linking his critique of AI to a vision of human dignity rather than a dark just a a purely dark vision where you're like AI is bad because it is controlled by, you know, um the evil evil ruthless tech bros or something. I I don't or you or or AI is bad because it's part of the horrifying structures of capitalism which are a nightmare from which we're struggling to await.

Speaker B: So I want to go back to to a question I asked you a bit ago. that asked you what being the the sort of conservative in many liberal institutions had taught you about liberals sort of answered that but I think over time

Speaker A: So I want to go back to to a question I asked you a bit ago. that asked you what being the the sort of conservative in many liberal institutions had taught you about liberals sort of answered that but I think over time

Speaker B: I don't know yeah I don't know if I did answer that but what about the media right you you've been you know inside the media for a long time what has it made you think about what the media does well what it does poorly

Speaker A: when I was coming up right the media had its kind of self-conception where it was like we're just telling you the truth about the world that's it we're just reporting the truth and we're not partisan and we won't even tell you if we voted for Republicans and Democrats. We're just in the truth business. And then people in our cohort came along and challenged that, right? And obviously the right had been challenging it for a long time. Parts of the far left, Nam Chosky and so on had always had this critique, but the internet helped make those critiques much more powerful. And there was just a sense that okay, we you know are moving into a landscape that is more opinion driven as as you said earlier where we're going to acknowledge biases. We're going to accept that the New York Times seems to have a pretty liberal audience, right? and a lot of liberals work for it. Like we're not, you know, it's not just a view from nowhere and Fox News is going to make, you know, it's going to be explicitly conservative and that like a future where the American media looks, you know, looks a bit more like the British newspaper business did where you have like, you know, you know that the Guardian is the liberal newspaper and, you know, the Telegraph is a more conservative newspaper that like that was sort of where America was going to go and it was okay, right? right? It was it was okay to have sort of competing media institutions that sort of own their biases in various ways. Um but you know we've lived in that kind of world I think for a while now. I don't know the Trump era, the AI era, the COVID era and so on. They I I feel like they have really undermined my my own sense of sort of knowing who I think the good guys and bad guys are in any particular circumstance. And the less you feel like the less you feel certain about knowing who the good guys and bad guys are, the more you feel the benefit of just like setting out every day to just sort of try and describe the world like and maybe maybe become less of a persuader. I feel like I write maybe more columns like that these days. As the world gets weirder, journalism needs people and institutions that sort of refocus on just saying, "We're trying to we're trying to figure out what's happening here." Cuz I'm struggling to figure out exactly what's happening in a way that I don't think I was when Mitt Romney and Barack Obama were running against each other. Um, and maybe this leads to like, you know, you wanted to ask me about

Speaker B: you're going to 60 minutes, which is the first place you have worked in media that The Atlantic is a is a magazine that is opinionated at its at its core. It it's launched initially as an abolitionist magazine. You worked on the Times opinion page. 60 Minutes is different although it's under now Barry Weiss's management. Um, your former colleague here. I never over overlapped with Weiss here

Speaker A: but is that part of why you're going to 60 Minutes?

Speaker B: I think that so I have You have been doing interview podcast for a long time.

Speaker A: 我只做采访播客这么久，你知道，不到两年。但我想我将做很多采访，对吧？这是我的希望。