Speaker 1: Hi, and welcome back to Carol Markowitz Show on iHeartRadio.
Speaker 1: There was a story over the weekend about the singer
Speaker 1: Macklmore saying fuck America at his show and the crowd cheering. Now,
Speaker 1: Macklmore is well known for trashing Israel and for dressing
Speaker 1: up in a Jewish costume complete with prosthetic nose. I
Speaker 1: think it's a very easy leap from jew hater, Israel
Speaker 1: hater to America hater. These things go hand in hand.
Speaker 1: That's not what I want to talk about here. This
Speaker 1: is a man who has made riches beyond our wildest
Speaker 1: imaginations because of this country. He is among the absolute
Speaker 1: luckiest people in history because of his accident of birth.
Speaker 1: And he doesn't get it. He has no idea. Much
Speaker 1: is made of how kids don't learn civics and certainly
Speaker 1: don't have patriotism instilled in them at school. Of course
Speaker 1: that's true. I had to push my kids Brooklyn Public
Speaker 1: School when they were little to say the Pledge of
Speaker 1: Allegiance despite it being state law to say it daily.
Speaker 1: They told me the school has a lot of immigrants
Speaker 1: and we're trying to cater to that. I informed them
Speaker 1: that both my husband and I are immigrants, and we
Speaker 1: came here to be American, not to be some side
Speaker 1: nationality that never quite adjusts and doesn't get to pledge
Speaker 1: loyalty in this country. I think our decline in patriotism
Speaker 1: is by design, that we're pushed to pretend that we
Speaker 1: didn't all wake up on third base just by getting
Speaker 1: to be American, that America is not that great. Without
Speaker 1: getting too much into politics, Kamala Harris is trying to
Speaker 1: run a patriotic campaign because people do want that. Democrats
Speaker 1: get why this country is so great, but largely have
Speaker 1: to pretend otherwise to appease their leftist's flight. That's a problem.
Speaker 1: Fixing it in schools only be a first step. Think
Speaker 1: about how many generations have already been through an American
Speaker 1: hating system. They've been just seeped in it. I'm not
Speaker 1: sure what to do about that. I always think a
Speaker 1: lot of important conversations start in the home. Anyway. Are
Speaker 1: you raising your kids to understand their sheer luck of
Speaker 1: being American? Are you telling them what makes this country
Speaker 1: the best country in history? Don't be embarrassed to say
Speaker 1: that it's true, we have something special here. It's okay
Speaker 1: to say it out loud. We have to challenge the
Speaker 1: Macalmors of the world who have no problem saying their
Speaker 1: thoughts out loud. Thanks for listening. Launching tomorrow, I'm going
Speaker 1: to have a second podcast. This one is about politics,
Speaker 1: and I'll be co hosting it with my good friend
Speaker 1: Mary Catherine Ham. I'm still going to continue doing this show,
Speaker 1: which is, as you know, largely not about politics, but
Speaker 1: I needed a political outlet too, and MK and I
Speaker 1: have very similar world views. We hope to be funny
Speaker 1: and to bring you perspectives you don't hear anywhere else.
Speaker 1: The show is called Normally. It will run on the
Speaker 1: Clay Travis and Buck Sexton podcast network on iHeartRadio. It'll
Speaker 1: be posted on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and just like this show,
Speaker 1: you can hear it anywhere you get your podcasts. You
Speaker 1: could subscribe starting today. We talk about balance a lot
Speaker 1: on this show. I think it's important to take breaks
Speaker 1: from politics, as I try to do with the Carol
Speaker 1: Markowitz Show. But look, there's also a time to talk
Speaker 1: about important issues, the election, horse race, and so much more.
Speaker 1: We'll be doing that at the Normally podcast. Please go
Speaker 1: subscribe right now. Thank you so much. For listening, and
Speaker 1: I appreciate you all so much. Coming up next and
Speaker 1: interview with Noah Rothman. Join us after the break.
Speaker 2: Welcome back to the Carol Markowitz Show on iHeartRadio. My
Speaker 2: guest today is Noah Rothman. Noah is a senior writer
Speaker 2: at National Review and the author of the excellent book
Speaker 2: The Rise of the New Puritans.
Speaker 3: So nice to have you on, girl.
Speaker 4: Thank you so much for having me. It's a pleasure.
Speaker 3: So who are the New Puritans?
Speaker 5: Just out of curiosity, Well, the New Puritans as distinct
Speaker 5: from the old Puritans, both, by the way, the misconception
Speaker 5: of Puritanism as Victorianism, as sort of staid, blue nosed,
Speaker 5: condescending prudishness versus big p Puritans, you know, the sixteen hundred,
Speaker 5: seventeen hundreds mainline Protestant New England or Congregationalist New England.
Speaker 5: There's a lot of definitional.
Speaker 4: Mix up here.
Speaker 5: So the New Puritans, as I define them, are really
Speaker 5: an intellectual tradition that dates back to the old Puritanism,
Speaker 5: and its home is in progressivism. Properly understood. Progressivism arose
Speaker 5: from the ashes of the Puritan experiment in mainline New
Speaker 5: England and it was a moral crusade as as much
Speaker 5: as it was a public policy endeavor, and it had
Speaker 5: a moral element to quite quite a few of the
Speaker 5: of the public policy preferences that this movement pursued. And
Speaker 5: it was typified by an idea that all of society's
Speaker 5: engines must be harnessed to all drive in the same direction.
Speaker 5: So there could not be anything that exists outside politics. Right,
Speaker 5: every every every facet of the social contract had to
Speaker 5: be reflective of this overarching moral desire familiar. So you
Speaker 5: couldn't have entertainment products that didn't, for example, serve a
Speaker 5: useful purpose. That everything had to have a utilitarian aspect
Speaker 5: to it. Athletics had to have a martial dimension. You
Speaker 5: couldn't you couldn't have art for art's sake. You could
Speaker 5: have furniture makers or headstone designers, or people who were
Speaker 5: skilled at portraiture, because these were useful. You were leaving
Speaker 5: a record for posterity. Anything else was idle and illness
Speaker 5: as a sin. And you see this throughout the modern
Speaker 5: progressive ethos, which and part of the book maintains that
Speaker 5: on the left, the sort of the licentiousness and libertinism
Speaker 5: that typified the sexual revolution, and that left leaning tradition
Speaker 5: was an aberration and a departure really from their otherwise
Speaker 5: moralistic framework when you start to see this moralistic framework
Speaker 5: arise in this progressive left. So the book breaks this
Speaker 5: down because there is a moral dimension to this is
Speaker 5: not necessarily worth criticizing. The excesses of it are, but
Speaker 5: the remoralization of society, as Gertrude Himmelfarb would have called it,
Speaker 5: isn't necessarily something to look askance upon. So the chapters
Speaker 5: are organized in virtues, piety, prudence, austerity, temperance, harmony, and
Speaker 5: order of the fear of God. All these things are
Speaker 5: good in their properly understood dimensions. It's when they become
Speaker 5: expanded to apply to every aspect of society, even innocuous
Speaker 5: stuff like the fashion you wear in the sports you
Speaker 5: watch in your hobb these decoration and knitting and fishing
Speaker 5: and gardening and all that stuff has become adulterated so
Speaker 5: that a particular cast of people can peel back the
Speaker 5: curtain and see the hideous hidden workings of the world
Speaker 5: that they, with their exclusive sense of propriety, can see,
Speaker 5: but you can't. It's a very psychologically satisfying outlook, but
Speaker 5: it also leads you to madness. And this book identifies
Speaker 5: the madness and tries to identify ways in which you
Speaker 5: can mute the tendency that you, maybe as a progressive
Speaker 5: puritan yourself, feel to impose your moral framework on the
Speaker 5: world around you.
Speaker 3: How did you get interested in this?
Speaker 4: Like?
Speaker 3: What was the spark?
Speaker 5: So the origins of this book date back to early
Speaker 5: twenty twenty, and it was the height of the pandemic
Speaker 5: and I was just miserable. And so my job is
Speaker 5: consuming the headlines and trying to tease out, you know,
Speaker 5: thoughts and takes and what have you and publish them.
Speaker 5: We're in the same business, you know, And that was
Speaker 5: a really unsatisfying time to be doing that. So I'm
Speaker 5: sitting in the bath of my wife and we're just
Speaker 5: and I'm I'm commiserating because I'm miserable.
Speaker 3: Are you sitting in the bath with your life bathtub?
Speaker 1: Oh?
Speaker 3: With your wife?
Speaker 4: With my wife?
Speaker 3: Okayy's it.
Speaker 5: Trust me, It's not as sallacious as it sounds, because
Speaker 5: I'm just having a glass of wine and I'm miserable.
Speaker 5: And she's like, she asks me, I think you know
Speaker 5: what what would you do to make yourself happy and
Speaker 5: also drive some income in out of it so we
Speaker 5: can pay the mortgage.
Speaker 4: It's like, well, you know, if I had my.
Speaker 5: Brothers, I would spend a lot of my time talking
Speaker 5: to work in comics, professional stand ups, maybe screenwriters, and
Speaker 5: maybe people who make food for a living or talk
Speaker 5: about sports for a living. You know, stuff that is
Speaker 5: supposed to, you know, be outside the political arena. But no, no, no, no,
Speaker 5: you can't because nothing outside the political arena anymore. Everything
Speaker 5: is hyper politicized. Everything has a political dimension to it.
Speaker 5: So even that wouldn't be very fun. And she says, well,
Speaker 5: that's that's the book, isn't it. Like you go out
Speaker 5: and you talk to all these all these people who
Speaker 5: you want to talk to and about the ways in
Speaker 5: which they're a political vocation has been politicized and why
Speaker 5: it's making them miserable too.
Speaker 4: Ah, that's a good idea.
Speaker 5: So the so I spent a lot of time talking
Speaker 5: to comics when I was researching the book. Many of
Speaker 5: them don't necessarily want to be named because they're contributing
Speaker 5: to a political product. But you know, I was talking
Speaker 5: to Nolan Dorman at the Comedy Seller, who plugged me
Speaker 5: into a lot of people, Shane Gillis, who was at
Speaker 5: the time on the Ropes and it was very dimished
Speaker 5: with his time. Yeah, very generous to me, and you
Speaker 5: know a variety of others, you know, chefs and screenwriters
Speaker 5: and people in the business. But it was that was
Speaker 5: just the war on fund. The subtitle of the book
Speaker 5: is Fighting Back against Progressives, War on Fun, and so
Speaker 5: it was a litany of all the ways in which
Speaker 5: progressives are adulterating the things that you enjoy and making
Speaker 5: the political and sapping them of their enjoyment. It was
Speaker 5: my editor at HarperCollins, Eric Nelson, who helped identify the
Speaker 5: intellectual tradition of Puritanism in the book. And the thing is,
Speaker 5: this is something my dad told me a long time
Speaker 5: ago that always stuck with me, is that when the
Speaker 5: universe gives you a good idea, you can assume that
Speaker 5: it's given it to fifty thousand other people and it's
Speaker 5: just a race to get it to market.
Speaker 4: That is your job. Just get it to market as
Speaker 4: fast as possible.
Speaker 5: And there was another book almost by the same title
Speaker 5: called The New Puritans published in the UK, I think
Speaker 5: about a month after.
Speaker 3: I published my book You Real Happy.
Speaker 5: Oh that's just thrilling. I haven't finished it all the way.
Speaker 5: It's a fine book, and we all touch on very
Speaker 5: similar subjects. The competition has a little more sour note
Speaker 5: to it, like this is, you know, all depressing and
Speaker 5: awful and things are going on in the wrong direction,
Speaker 5: and my book takes a slightly different approach. It's supposed
Speaker 5: to be fun, supposed to be supposed to be humorous,
Speaker 5: because that was the mood I was in. I was
Speaker 5: the sentiment I was trying to channel for myself. This
Speaker 5: was all a very self indulgent effort to try to
Speaker 5: pick myself up out of the dulgrums of the pandemic
Speaker 5: and write about something fun and funny and make fun
Speaker 5: of these people because they are parodic.
Speaker 3: It's funny.
Speaker 5: So it struck a different tone and maybe didn't meet
Speaker 5: the moment in so far as people didn't really want
Speaker 5: to be happy, right, they were miserable like me and
Speaker 5: wanted to have their sense of fatalism confirmed. Perhaps. I
Speaker 5: mean that's something you and I think encounter very far.
Speaker 2: Yes, So it's interesting. Dave Marcus, you know, also a writer.
Speaker 2: He and I disagree on lots and lots of things,
Speaker 2: but he once said this thing that I really agree with,
Speaker 2: that comedy kind of has to be outside of woke influence.
Speaker 6: It's sort of one of the few air is that
Speaker 6: just really can't be that influenced by wokeness.
Speaker 2: I mean they try, obviously, but you know, it's either
Speaker 2: we laugh or we don't.
Speaker 3: So what do you think of that?
Speaker 4: Yeah, there's another.
Speaker 5: It dovetails with something that I once heard in I
Speaker 5: think the mid two thousands when I was working in
Speaker 5: and around comedy talk radio at the time, which is
Speaker 5: that funny and sexy can't coexist.
Speaker 3: Really.
Speaker 5: Yeah, like you, there's a self seriousness associated with the
Speaker 5: effort to seduce and seduction and pursuing a partner boldly,
Speaker 5: aggressively assertively that steals from you self deprecation and makes
Speaker 5: you a much more serious person. And serious isn't necessarily funny.
Speaker 5: In fact, it's generally not funny, not a stand up myself.
Speaker 5: When I write comedy, it's you know, it's for particular tastes.
Speaker 5: So I can't say that I have an especially a
Speaker 5: finally at tuned sense of what constitutes universally you know,
Speaker 5: universally accepted humor or something that actually appeals to a
Speaker 5: mass market when it comes to humor.
Speaker 4: But Dave's observation sounds sounds right to me.
Speaker 5: There's an element to wokeism, and we would probably have
Speaker 5: to define our terms, but let's just assume you.
Speaker 3: All know I feel like that.
Speaker 5: Yeah, yeah, there's an element of that that is very severe,
Speaker 5: very harsh, and its members fancy themselves particularly moral, righteous,
Speaker 5: upstanding people, especially in contrast to the world around them,
Speaker 5: the society around them, which just does not. And this
Speaker 5: is a very puritanical outlook too big p puritan like
Speaker 5: original Puritans, is that the mark of a morally virtuous
Speaker 5: person is someone who devotes themselves holy to addressing the
Speaker 5: ills of the world around them. If you're spending any
Speaker 5: waking moment not thinking about the ways in which other
Speaker 5: people are suffering and what you can do to alleviate
Speaker 5: that suffering, which is again in the abstract and noble philosophy,
Speaker 5: then you're indulging in a sinful almost a distance from
Speaker 5: the world around you. You've you've isolated yourself, and you've
Speaker 5: removed yourself from the existence that you should be as
Speaker 5: a as a virtuous person working to improve.
Speaker 3: Sounds very communist.
Speaker 2: Actually like you should be thinking about the party at
Speaker 2: all times, and how you can support the party and
Speaker 2: improve the party and spread the gospel of the party.
Speaker 5: And everything exists within an inside inside of party politics
Speaker 5: and nothing outside of it, because anything outside of it
Speaker 5: is uncontrolled and wild and natural, and that's dangerous. And
Speaker 5: one of the chapters in the book is about comedy.
Speaker 5: It's about stand up comedy and food. There's two things
Speaker 5: you wouldn't think would go together, save for the fact
Speaker 5: that you need you need people to buy a meal
Speaker 5: and two drinks to get out.
Speaker 4: Of the club.
Speaker 5: But the the tethering element is that these two conditions,
Speaker 5: too to to two vocations evoke in you natural reactions
Speaker 5: that are not intellectual exercises. Right when the laugh escapes
Speaker 5: your gut, right exactly when you enjoy a meal that
Speaker 5: has been culturally appropriated from natural indigenous peoples of x
Speaker 5: y z I love you just enjoyed that meal you have,
Speaker 5: you'll release a sigh of relief because you liked it,
Speaker 5: not because it's an intellectual exercise. In fact, the intellect
Speaker 5: has to intervene after you laugh, after you sigh, to say,
Speaker 5: oh maybe.
Speaker 3: I maybe maybe I shouldn't have right.
Speaker 5: And that's so, and that's why it's threatening to a
Speaker 5: particular sort of totalitarian not authoritarian totalitarian. Interesting that you
Speaker 5: know that that sort of uh, your body betrays you
Speaker 5: in those moments, and that's threatening if you intend to
Speaker 5: control people's conduct, behavior, outlook, and even what they think. Yeah,
Speaker 5: because that is that is nature intervening, right, and you.
Speaker 3: Can't do anything about that. Yeah. So what do you
Speaker 3: worry about societally?
Speaker 6: Like, what do you think is our largest cultural problem?
Speaker 4: Yes?
Speaker 5: So I've done a fair amount of thinking on this,
Speaker 5: and it's hard to narrow down, but I would say,
Speaker 5: if I had to identify one, if not the largest,
Speaker 5: but this is the largest social societal problem cultural problem,
Speaker 5: I would settle on the increase in cultural cachet that
Speaker 5: we attribute to persecution complexes. It is and conservatives properly
Speaker 5: understood the right from the intellectual tradition from which I hail,
Speaker 5: which has been under some renovation in recent years, is
Speaker 5: the victimization has a has currency to it, and it's
Speaker 5: a sort of way in which you can paper over
Speaker 5: your individual deficiencies and prop yourself up on the backs
Speaker 5: of those who have genuinely suffered or endured something resembling
Speaker 5: persecutorial conduct that gets you over the hump, that advances
Speaker 5: your career objectives, your interpersonal objectives, and it creates a
Speaker 5: popular front mentality or at least incentivizees ones which and that.
Speaker 5: So you if you all have this persecution complex, and
Speaker 5: you can paper over the problems that you as an
Speaker 5: individual have because you can lay claim to some sort
Speaker 5: of persecution narrative, then you compel somebody who would otherwise
Speaker 5: engage in basic social hygiene to subordinate that impulse, to say, Okay, well,
Speaker 5: I guess you're part of the team too, because you've
Speaker 5: got that same persecution story, and we can contribute to
Speaker 5: that persecution story by shunning you or criticizing you or
Speaker 5: correcting you. All these things steal agency both from the
Speaker 5: individual who suffers from this outlook and from the people
Speaker 5: around them who believe they have to genuflect before it
Speaker 5: and declear fealty to it. If no one is responsible
Speaker 5: for their own lots in life, then a lot of
Speaker 5: people who have made very poor decisions, who are reckless
Speaker 5: or irresponsible to created circumstances. Yeah for themselves and others.
Speaker 5: They're they're sympathetic. Now they're not they're not the authors
Speaker 5: of their own lots in life. Things have been done
Speaker 5: to them by omniscient, unseen forces we can't even really define,
Speaker 5: but you know they're out there and they're working to steal.
Speaker 4: That which is your due.
Speaker 5: It's a it's superficially empowering. People feel empowered by this outlook,
Speaker 5: but it is debilitating, robs you of your capacity to
Speaker 5: mold your environment, to navigate your environment.
Speaker 2: It's a sort of control of your destiny, really, the
Speaker 2: control of your destiny.
Speaker 5: Absolutely, it's available. It's obvious across the political spectrum on
Speaker 5: the left. I think intersectionality has has done a lot
Speaker 5: of the leg work here because it's that intersectionality, which
Speaker 5: is just this as a thought experiment, is not actually
Speaker 5: wholly invalid, just to define the terms it. Essentially, it's
Speaker 5: an academic theory posited by Kimberly Crenshaw Williams, which posits
Speaker 5: that everybody experiences different prejudices in their life, so those
Speaker 5: prejudices intersect and overlap if you are multiple things. So
Speaker 5: if you're a gay black woman, you will experience more
Speaker 5: prejudice in your life than a gay black man, because
Speaker 5: women experience more prejudice than men, et cetera. So it's
Speaker 5: just something that makes you think in stereotypes, so that
Speaker 5: ostensibly you can navigate those stereotypes. But in the end
Speaker 5: of that, at the end, if you're just thinking in stereotypes,
Speaker 5: you're still a bigot. You're you're just doing it for
Speaker 5: what you believe to be noble services, which, by the way,
Speaker 5: all bigots.
Speaker 3: Believe that, of course they do.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and there's never been a bigot who thinks that
Speaker 2: they are bad.
Speaker 6: Right, They're always trying to do good, they're always trying
Speaker 6: to help.
Speaker 5: Yeah, but this is just layering a superficial academic gloss
Speaker 5: over whether it's basically ancient tribal instincts, tribal impulses.
Speaker 4: And you see that there is.
Speaker 5: Something similar on the Trump right, the pro Trump right,
Speaker 5: where Donald Trump who has argued that he is not
Speaker 5: a conservative, that the Republican Party is not a conservative
Speaker 5: party straightforward in those terms I'm not even paraphrasing. Yeah,
Speaker 5: he has replaced that philosophy, a limited government philosophy which
Speaker 5: emphasizes individual agency and individual responsibility both for your circumstances
Speaker 5: and those around you, and replaced it with something of
Speaker 5: resembling a persecution complex that all these things are being
Speaker 5: done to us. There are all these forces around us
Speaker 5: that we can't really define, but you know they're there
Speaker 5: and they need to be crushed. There needs to be
Speaker 5: some sort of vengeance, after which we will ascend to
Speaker 5: the sunlit uplands of a world in which we can
Speaker 5: finally resume control over our lives. But you'll never get there.
Speaker 5: You'll never get to that place. You've already sacrificed the
Speaker 5: agency you need.
Speaker 4: To get there.
Speaker 6: We're going to take a quick break and be right
Speaker 6: back on the Carol Marcowitch Show.
Speaker 3: Is this solvable on either the right or the left.
Speaker 5: Yeah, it's a new innovation relatively. I mean, it's the
Speaker 5: thing is that it's an intellectual exercise. Liberalism, classical liberalism,
Speaker 5: is an intellectual exercise. It's the you know, it's it's
Speaker 5: an effort that we engage in to subordinate what these
Speaker 5: tribal instincts in order to pursue a more galitarian social compact.
Speaker 5: And if you're beholden to the egalitarian social compact, most postliberals,
Speaker 5: which are really preliberals, do not don't necessarily believe in
Speaker 5: universal egalitarianism, and they have they have their own problems
Speaker 5: with it. But if you do, if you do subscribe
Speaker 5: to that ideal as an ideal, then yeah, you've got
Speaker 5: to do a lot of thinking around it. There is
Speaker 5: a robust enterprise on both sides of the aisle dedicated
Speaker 5: to giving you license to not do that intellectual exercise,
Speaker 5: to not engage in that it is a fruitless pursuit,
Speaker 5: a flawed pursuit, something that is the sort of thing
Speaker 5: that only point the eggheads would really care about, and
Speaker 5: look at the circumstances that we're in, and all these
Speaker 5: people have delivered us to this wholly undesirable place. It
Speaker 5: is also something we're going to talk more about this
Speaker 5: because this is very There's a lot of incentives towards
Speaker 5: this line of thinking on social media, which is itself
Speaker 5: a tribal enterprise of course, but if you commit yourself
Speaker 5: to that line of thinking, you know you also risk
Speaker 5: divorcing yourself from the rest of American civilization that does
Speaker 5: not believe we have entered into the worst place we
Speaker 5: have ever been in. People who are responding to polls
Speaker 5: are very likely to say, I'm upset with my circumstances.
Speaker 5: I'm upset with the economy. I think the country is
Speaker 5: on the wrong track. These are close to universal propositions
Speaker 5: at this point. But if you were to say, as
Speaker 5: people who get really deep into this philosophy do the
Speaker 5: post liberal philosophy do, that we are in some of
Speaker 5: the worst, most unenviable circumstances that any generation before us
Speaker 5: has ever experienced. And you say that with a straight face,
Speaker 5: you are making a mockery of yourself.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 5: Of course, you were demonstrating that you have no historical reference,
Speaker 5: no historical memory.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I think the.
Speaker 6: Times might have been worse before.
Speaker 5: No, I mean, like I've had this argument with my
Speaker 5: parents who lived through nineteen sixty eight, were in were
Speaker 5: twenty or nineteen at the time, and this was these
Speaker 5: sixty eight seventy seventy one. I mean, we're talking about
Speaker 5: shockingly high crime rates, riots that erupted in every major
Speaker 5: urban center in the country, a campaign of assassination that
Speaker 5: was taking out American leaders left and right, a bombing campaign,
Speaker 5: a domestic bombing campaign in which explosives were going off
Speaker 5: in private homes, maiming and killing people.
Speaker 4: On a weekly basis. I wasn't there. I only read
Speaker 4: about it.
Speaker 3: Yeah, But to.
Speaker 5: Say that that circumstance compares unfavorably with our own today.
Speaker 5: Right seems to me kind of crazy, but it is,
Speaker 5: And I don't I put my folks on the line here,
Speaker 5: but there's everywhere not.
Speaker 2: To agree completely with the Rothmans. But you know, my
Speaker 2: thing about that is, yes, times were worse, but for
Speaker 2: example crime, we got things to a much better place,
Speaker 2: and then we threw away everything that helped us get there.
Speaker 2: We decided that all the policies that fixed a place
Speaker 2: like you know, my beloved New York City were no
Speaker 2: longer needed. And so while I totally get that, we're
Speaker 2: obviously in a much better place than nineteen sixty eight,
Speaker 2: and you know, crime rates for example, and all the
Speaker 2: different cities are lower than they were then. We got
Speaker 2: them far lower than they are now, and now we
Speaker 2: have to battle our way back to that. So it's
Speaker 2: not that it's worse. It's clearly not worse. But it
Speaker 2: concerns me in a different way because I don't think
Speaker 2: you had to talk anybody into believing crime was real
Speaker 2: in nineteen sixty eight, and now it's like acceptance is
Speaker 2: the first step and we haven't gotten there.
Speaker 5: That is, I would totally subscribe to all that, and
Speaker 5: I would probably pause it that there is a deliberate,
Speaker 5: politically motivated unlearning of history's lessons that has contributed to
Speaker 5: a lot of those factors. The way that let's just
Speaker 5: talk about crime briefly, the way that people talk about
Speaker 5: how to deliver American cities from the unrest that they're
Speaker 5: currently experiencing is as though it all needs to happen
Speaker 5: at once, and it all needs to happen from the
Speaker 5: top down, right, as though we just we elect the
Speaker 5: right mayor, we let the revity council, and everything changes,
Speaker 5: and it is not how it happened in New York
Speaker 5: City exactly. Your city was a ground up thing. I
Speaker 5: mean the first of all, a lot of it is
Speaker 5: attributable to these neighborhood associations, which block by block associations.
Speaker 5: Times Square was the last thing to be affected by
Speaker 5: this process. You know, the idea here that we could
Speaker 5: clean up the streets by dealing with quality of life crimes,
Speaker 5: as represented, for example, by the existence of smut shops.
Speaker 5: You know, that was first tried under the Queensboro Bridge
Speaker 5: and successfully before it migrated to the rest of the city.
Speaker 5: The broken windows theory promulgated by, among others, James Q.
Speaker 5: Wilson in the Manhattan Institute. Was an idea before it
Speaker 5: was adopted, before it was you know, came up from
Speaker 5: the bottom up. What we're contending with now are the
Speaker 5: fruits of ideas that have spent many years incubating in
Speaker 5: far left right campuses and intellectual salons.
Speaker 2: Yeah, don't prosecute crime, you know, it's just it's an
Speaker 2: idea that has now become implemented.
Speaker 5: And was popular in the nineteen sixties when we're talking
Speaker 5: about root causes and poverty, for example, as being the
Speaker 5: primary indicator of future criminality, which is utterly false and
Speaker 5: has been proven false. But it was a fashionable idea
Speaker 5: at the time. But that spent, you know, a decade
Speaker 5: and a half percolating before it doubled up to the
Speaker 5: surface and became public policy. We're talking now about ideas
Speaker 5: that were incubated in the late eighties, early nineties, implemented
Speaker 5: in two thousands, and are coming to fruition today. These
Speaker 5: are decades long processes. If you want to get in
Speaker 5: the ground and do the work and you know, make
Speaker 5: create consensuses on the ground that can be that are
Speaker 5: replicable and that can be duplicated and put and implement
Speaker 5: it at scale. It begins small begins small scale. It's
Speaker 5: not the sort of and it does begin with talking
Speaker 5: about it as we've been talking about it, grand ideas
Speaker 5: and grand visions, but the actual nitty gritty of implementation
Speaker 5: and creating consensuses across political coalitions to implement this sort
Speaker 5: of thing for the general good. That's a that's a
Speaker 5: laborious process and it's not why you can.
Speaker 2: Try how quickly they undid it. Yes, you're absolutely it
Speaker 2: is a long process. But like, wow, it got undid,
Speaker 2: you know, in four years.
Speaker 5: I mean just because it exploded really into twenty and
Speaker 5: with this fashionable moral panic in the George Floyd are
Speaker 5: around the notion that police were just slaughtering African Americans
Speaker 5: on it on the daily basis. I just weren't seeing it.
Speaker 5: That was the sort of thing that I mean, you
Speaker 5: can only call it a moral panic, it was, But
Speaker 5: it lit a fire under what were underlying ideas that
Speaker 5: had been attractive to a particular type of left wing
Speaker 5: social reformer for a very long time. They had the
Speaker 5: plans ready to go in the drawer, It just needed
Speaker 5: the space to implement them, which is, you know, that's
Speaker 5: something I actually lived by because it's a story about
Speaker 5: Robert Moses was this New York City, a very powerful
Speaker 5: person in New York City, was responsible for love of
Speaker 5: the infrastructure there. But the story about him is that
Speaker 5: he always had the plans ready to go. He had
Speaker 5: the legislation written, he had the plan to generate more
Speaker 5: revenue for his agency, and the construction plans.
Speaker 4: It was all laid out.
Speaker 5: Only needed was the political space to implement them. That's
Speaker 5: what conservative right needs to have is a framework, intellectual framework,
Speaker 5: and the really detailed policy paper to implement these philosophies
Speaker 5: when they're ready to go. And part of the reason
Speaker 5: why Democrats are doing so much to demonize project, which
Speaker 5: is like nine out of ten pages of that gigantic
Speaker 5: document are really anodyne. They're basic accepted conservative policy preferences,
Speaker 5: and sometimes the way they talk about them is rather comical.
Speaker 5: Democrats talk about them, it's rather comical, like, oh, my gosh,
Speaker 5: Trump wants to subordinate all executive agencies to the president?
Speaker 6: Yes, can you even imagine?
Speaker 5: But but you know, it's it's a controversial stuff around
Speaker 5: social doctrine that really generates traction with demo cratic voters.
Speaker 5: But a lot of the stuff in there that seems
Speaker 5: kind of silly to us, I think probably sounds pretty
Speaker 5: silly to most other people, like the idea that the
Speaker 5: president should be responsible for his own executive agencies.
Speaker 2: Of course, right, So, Noah, you come up with book
Speaker 2: ideas in the bathtub with your wife. You have a
Speaker 2: very nice perch at National Review, where you can write about,
Speaker 2: you know, most things that interest you.
Speaker 3: Do you feel like you've made it?
Speaker 5: So sometimes I do and sometimes I don't. The times
Speaker 5: I do are predicated on again, kind of in intellectualization
Speaker 5: of my circumstances. Because I have the family that I
Speaker 5: always wanted. That's nice, that is n the house and
Speaker 5: the community that I've always wanted. I really don't even
Speaker 5: plan on moving. Like my material circumstances are great, and
Speaker 5: I am satisfied. I have the career that I always wanted,
Speaker 5: like my I'm fulfilled in that sense, but not professionally. Professionally,
Speaker 5: I don't feel like I've I've done everything that I
Speaker 5: want to achieve, and that would be kind of awful.
Speaker 4: If you did, then what else we'd all be?
Speaker 3: Like chilling on islands?
Speaker 5: Yeah, right, No, I have some ambition. I don't think
Speaker 5: I've written enough books. I don't think I get on
Speaker 5: camera enough. I get down and depressed when the pieces
Speaker 5: that I write don't get the engagement or the shares
Speaker 5: I think they deserve.
Speaker 3: This is genius. Why don't you all see this?
Speaker 4: You know?
Speaker 5: And and when the feedback you know that you get
Speaker 5: as is negative, which is very frequently, you know, sometimes
Speaker 5: it can be a bit of a downer. So do
Speaker 5: I feel like you know I've I've I've hit all
Speaker 5: my marks in life?
Speaker 3: No?
Speaker 4: All right, well there's a lot more.
Speaker 3: Watch to see where you go next and what the.
Speaker 5: Next, but there's a lot that will be I mean,
Speaker 5: but those two things are in conflict, right. I'm not
Speaker 5: sure how you navigate that or if you experience that,
Speaker 5: but if your material circumstances are pretty well set, you
Speaker 5: risk losing ambition.
Speaker 4: Right.
Speaker 5: I don't feel any particular age urgency to write another book.
Speaker 5: I'd like to write another book about something that needs
Speaker 5: to be written, not just to write another book. Right,
Speaker 5: So looking around for whatever that overarching topic is that
Speaker 5: doesn't can't just be truncated down into an essay and
Speaker 5: would be better as an essay, and just you know,
Speaker 5: the lack of material urgency there does limit my you know,
Speaker 5: desire to pull this.
Speaker 4: Out of the universe.
Speaker 5: Like I'm looking, I'm not scouring the landscape for something
Speaker 5: because I so desperately need, you know, to get an advance.
Speaker 2: Right, absolutely, I mean I don't know. I'm a year
Speaker 2: plus past my first book, and I still say it
Speaker 2: will be the only book. I have no interest in
Speaker 2: ever doing that ever. Again, I don't know how we'll
Speaker 2: do it. Oh no, I don't know.
Speaker 3: I don't know. I just found it really hard.
Speaker 4: And it was hard. You didn't think it was rewarding.
Speaker 6: Rewarding, Yeah, I mean I it was rewarding.
Speaker 3: I don't know.
Speaker 2: I stayed on book tour a long long time, which
Speaker 2: everybody you know says is a great positive, But I
Speaker 2: just didn't love all of that.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's tough, and I love meeting the way. Yeah,
Speaker 3: selling is not great.
Speaker 6: But you know, negotiating how many books are you going
Speaker 6: to speak for?
Speaker 3: And all of that.
Speaker 6: But I love meeting people. I love having conversations with strangers.
Speaker 6: I'm all about that.
Speaker 2: But you know, I do feel like I've made it
Speaker 2: and I want to be home with my family, enjoying
Speaker 2: the you know.
Speaker 6: The things that I consider having.
Speaker 4: That's me too, and that's just poison.
Speaker 5: Anytime somebody asked me to get on a plane, really,
Speaker 5: is it worth it?
Speaker 4: Is it necessary?
Speaker 3: Now?
Speaker 4: I'd rather be hanging out in my basement.
Speaker 3: That's it. That's that's really what it's all about.
Speaker 2: So well, Noah, thank you so much for coming on
Speaker 2: and here with your best tip for my listeners on
Speaker 2: how they can improve their lives.
Speaker 5: So this is kind of tails with what we've been
Speaker 5: talking about previously, but really best for you to limit
Speaker 5: your social media intake to including getting rid of all
Speaker 5: your accounts if you don't need them. I have a
Speaker 5: Twitter account and need it for work. I don't have
Speaker 5: any other account, and I make a scrupulous effort to
Speaker 5: log the hell off really on the weekends and even
Speaker 5: at night. Sometimes I have to be on that at
Speaker 5: night because I have no idea what I'm writing about
Speaker 5: in the morning, and I just need some sort of inspiration.
Speaker 5: But if you can hack it, limit your social media
Speaker 5: exposure as much as possible. That's not just that you're
Speaker 5: absorbing all this the toxicity that this environment insensivizes, but
Speaker 5: it creates an incentive structure for you to be a liar.
Speaker 5: You lie to your audience if you want to get
Speaker 5: the kind of food pellet to drop down and give
Speaker 5: you the reward structure that you get from engagement, positive engagement,
Speaker 5: not negative engifts. So a lot of people get jazzed
Speaker 5: by negative engagement too, but those people have other psychologic.
Speaker 3: Right have problem.
Speaker 5: But if you start developing a brand for yourself, who
Speaker 5: it's the worst possible thing you could do a temptation
Speaker 5: to say things to maintain the brand you're you will
Speaker 5: be confronted with the temptation to say things you don't
Speaker 5: believe or not say things you do believe. Just by
Speaker 5: virtue of the you'll be committing sins of omission and commission,
Speaker 5: and you'll be therefore inauthentic. Your brand, such as it is,
Speaker 5: will not be worth very much because it's not real.
Speaker 5: It's just it's and risking. The backlash on social media
Speaker 5: feels very real because there's you know, hundreds, if not
Speaker 5: thousands of people telling you thought, yeah, I mean, that's
Speaker 5: psychologically taxing, it's unrewarding, it's uncomfortable. Anybody would want to
Speaker 5: avoid that circumstance and get the funds part, the fun
Speaker 5: part being, you know, the engagement, the positive feedback, the reinforcement,
Speaker 5: the sense of community that develops around that. It's all fictional,
Speaker 5: none of it's real. And if you can get out
Speaker 5: of that environment for a sustained peereriod of time a
Speaker 5: weekend for example, yeah, you get to reconnect to what
Speaker 5: is real and how and restore a sense of perspective
Speaker 5: on what these forums actually are.
Speaker 4: So my suggestion is to log off as much as possible.
Speaker 2: I like that he is Noah Rothman. He is a
Speaker 2: senior writer at National Review. Check him out there and
Speaker 2: pick up his book, The Rise of the New Puritans.
Speaker 2: Thank you so much for coming on, Noah.
Speaker 1: Thank you, Kerl, thanks so much for joining us on
Speaker 1: the Carol Marco which show. Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.