Hey, it's Anna Martin from The New York Times. What if I told you, you'll never have to hear this line again? Wherever you get your podcasts. Yeah, no, I actually can't tell you that. But you know what I can tell you?
A place I think you might want to go. It's the shows tab in The New York Times tab. The place to listen to and now watch full episodes of New York Times shows. The shows tab. Find it in The New York Times tab.
Explore the shows tab and follow a show today. I've known Rust out that a long time we were bloggers back when the Earth was young. Hey, Rust out. Good. I'm fine.
That's right. And then I watched to become a columnist here at The New York Times opinion in 2009, the youngest ever, New York Times opinion columnist. That 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 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 wanted to talk to Ross on his way out here about how he has seen media change, how he has seen politics change, and how maybe he believes it is changing again. Ross now that joins me now. Ross now that welcome back to the show.
Thanks for having me, Esther. It's a pleasure. What the hell, man? What do you mean? In spiritually, you never leave any place that you love, and all things are gathered in by God for his.
But yeah, I'm going to 60 minutes. We're going to get to go in 60 minutes. We're going to start with where you came from and get to where you're going. Where do you locate your own spiritual origins as a journalist, as a commentator, a pundit? I was going back.
I had always thought you were like me, like an original blogger who gets absorbed by a media Borg. Oh, yeah, no, it was the opposite. Yeah, you're the opposite. We started the Atlantic and become a blogger. I was a junior, junior, junior editor.
I edited the letter section at the Atlantic for a while. And I did blogging on the side. I think of myself as someone who was sort of present for both the end of an old dispensation and the beginning of a new one. So I had sort of parallel careers in my early 20s. 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 circulated around the office.
And 17 people would have red pen on them. And it was very much a pre-internet magazine and a pre-internet journalistic experience. And then at the same time, sort of as a side hustle, I was blogging, doing freelance writing and sort of participating in, yeah, the kind of the world of early 2000s internet. Those two things sort of converged because what then happened, as you know, was that many, many traditional publications looked at that landscape and said, ah, this is the future and we need to co-opt it. Right.
So at the Atlantic, that meant basically creating a mini editorial page or opinion page that consisted of prominent bloggers that the Atlantic had hired. So there was a period when they brought in Andrew Sullivan, who was then the biggest deal in blogging, but they also had Iglesias, Macon Maccartal, Tanahasi Coates, and then me because I was already on staff. And I can tell you that my own traffic numbers were somewhat lower than the others. But that was sort of the path, as you know, in that area because you followed it too, was to sort of be a kind of outsider blogger, critic of the establishment, and then an establishment institution might hire you or buy your blog or bring you on board.
And it was just that in my case, I was sort of already on board when that happened. So how do you describe to somebody who was not around for that, you know, a young journalism student today, what blogging was, what made it different, what made places like the Atlantic eventually the New York Times think they needed part of it too? Well, so there were a couple phases, right, where there were a couple cohorts of bloggers who became a big deal. And the first wave was immediately after September 11th, and then in the run up to the Iraq War, where you had a set of people who were, some of them were former liberals who had moved right, some of them were just right wingers, but they got called the war bloggers, right? And these were people who were, I would say, the simplest way to put it is that something crazy had happened, something world altering had happened, right?
And we, at the exact time that the internet was emerging as a force. And so there was a huge market suddenly of people who were, you know, on their web browsers looking at a screen all day and wanted to hear people talking about terrorism. September 11th, Islam in the Middle East, and then, you know, Afghanistan and Iraq and so on. And it's not surprising that the people who filled that niche were mostly people who were in favor of the war on terror and then in favor of the war in Iraq. But I think it really was that the event and the demand or the event and the technology sort of intersected to create this opening.
Like I remember being an intern at National Review in the summer before September 11th, so 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? Oh, three. Oh, three.
Oh, so freshman at UC Santa Cruz. Right. So in 2001, you had the internet and you had a few bloggers. And I remember just sitting in, you know, the offices of, again, this like 50, 60 year old magazine. I'm an intern.
I have very little to do. And you just sort of hit refresh, right? You hit refresh on Andrew Sullivan's blog and you see what, you know, you see, you see if he's posted something new. Mickey Couse, right? Couse Files was also probably one of the initial blogs at that point.
But then September 11th happens and suddenly you just have a lot more people hitting refresh and having this kind of demand. 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.
So we, you know, there's an up in page in the other times, which I would read sometimes. We were not a family that got, you know, small circulation, DC political. The in-flight magazine, the Fair Four, the American Prospect National Review, which is a conservative magazine that you've written a lot for the Atlantic. There was talk radio by that time. The Laura Ingram Show.
Glenn Beck. Now America's most exciting radio talk show, The Savage Nation. But even that had only been on the scene for so long and sort of like post-Russian Limbaugh form. Right. You know, when I was growing up, their Fox News is beginning to roll out, but it wasn't what it would have been to become.
Are you remember MSNBC beginning? You had Crossfire. You had Crossfire. I was sort of a like, that was what you watched. You had MSNBC eventually is Microsoft, NBC.
Yeah. And I remember there being a, it was about tech primarily. And I remember watching a show with Solidetta Brian where she like had an animated co-host, like a clip art co-host. And what I was talking is doing is like there was an unmet demand for political opinion and part of the day, I'm 11 when people were really, really interested in politics, really upset about what was happening, really uncertain about what was happening. And all of a sudden you can get a flood of it.
Like now there is so much more opinion between X and Instagram and, you know, sub-sticking everything else. It's like the news that have been somewhat drowned out. But that 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 revolutionary was that it was opinion, but it was also just a very different kind of argument from what you would get reading op-ed pages and even like small circulation journals. Early blogging was all about this kind of ongoing rolling debate where you'd write 4,000 words and someone else would come along and block quote, right?
Very few people write 4,000 words on a blog. That might have been your thing. I mean, yeah. All right. Someone would write 300 words.
No, I mean, but this was also right. You had more length. I mean, there were people early on, but maybe I'm thinking too much of the war bloggers and not like the war bloggers were all about like, let me give you 2,500 words on how, you know, this event in ancient Greek history totally explains George W. Bush's brilliant plan to remake them at least. I mean, there was, there was a lot of pro licks content, but maybe some of it was just created by this kind of, you quote someone and you say why they're wrong, but people did this back and forth to each other constantly.
It was hostile, but it was also, I think at its best sort of really interestingly respectful because you were, you were putting the other side's words on your site. Like even if you, even if you were doing it just to show what a total idiot they were and you know how terrible they were, you were still, you were sort of like, all right, here's 200 words. I'm quoting, I'm going to go line by line and I'm going to respond to every single line. That was, I think, a really distinctive part of it, at least, at least for the first few years. I think a lot about why I think the blogosphere was healthier than what came after it and whether or not that was just, I was in my 20s and people like what was happening when they were in their 20s, right?
The music was better. But I do think this was, to me, the reality of it, it was fundamentally conversational. You wrote things in the expectation that the people you were writing about would read them and they would answer you. And I don't think that is how a lot of media works now. Instead of talking to the people you're talking about, you talk about them, right?
X or Twitter, you quote tweet and say, yeah, and you know, and dunk on them and then, you know, you look for the hearts and the retweets. It is really changed what the currency was. I mean, I remember, I started being on my blog in 2003 and the only way you could get readership, I mean, there were not algorithms, you were not winning Google search results. The way you got readership was through these links back and forth. And so, you know, if right now what happens is the reward and the way that audience is secured is you get people who agree with you to retweet it, to, you know, re-stack it, whatever it might be, then, you know, I actually wanted, I distributed with Andrew Sullivan on all kinds of things.
It was good for me. And then, you know, I would block out him and argue back and we would go back and forth. And it wasn't that it could never be disrespectful. It was often heated. But there was still a sense that you were in relationship.
People talked about the blogosphere. You had a blog role. You had a blog role. You had a blog role. You had a blog role.
You had a blog role. You had a blog role. So we've had a lot of arguments over the years in our days as bloggers, but I thought it would be fun to go back to one of them in particular on what I think it's fair to say, say, for a forerunner to podcasting, which is blogging heads. The... I knew I was...
Robert Wright. Yes. Robert Wright. And who basically invented podcasting without getting credit for it because the world was not quite ready. The story of the moment is John McCain's running the most disgraceful campaign in American history, possibly.
Made in world history. Global, planetary, universal history, I think, is where we're at, basically. Right. So it's been pretty disgraceful. So basically McCain has...
There's been sort of a flurry of ad statement sort of back and forths that have been different ways from the McCain campaign sort of shaded the truth or not shaded the truth, have been outright lies. And so there's been... Right. And so there's been... And so all of the great and good observers, the sort of Joe Kline and you Jay Deons and so on have weighed in with remarks on...
I think Richard Cohen is the latest today. He has a column. I think it basically says, I used to be in the tank for McCain, but now he's sold his Zolta Satan and I'm no longer the tank and so on. So it's basically the final divorce between John McCain and the reporters who used to love him. So I want to say on behalf of myself, right, that for those...
I'm being ironical in that comment. It's a much simpler time. It is a simpler time where you as recline were part of a vast liberal conspiracy bent on portraying the war hero John McCain as the most dangerous politician in American history. I think we're both being pretty skeptical. I...
I don't remember whether you were part of it or not, but yeah. But it's kind of amazing how difficult moment is when you can imagine that there were like huge eruptions over the level of negative campaigning from McCain to Obama. I always feel this way when people talk about the Obama Romney campaigning where it all just seems so... Right. ...and all compared to where we eventually went.
Right. But this is part of the argument of many of Donald Trump's supporters is that it was precisely because liberals insisted that first McCain and then Mitt Romney were history's greatest monsters that that's how you got Trump. But the right. It was so kind of... We didn't even argue about this.
This is my office at the Atlantic. I think that's his copy of Grand New Party back there. But again, with the sense that the point was that this was somewhat extracurricular and it was sort of to be Norman Maylar as an advertisement for yourself. But then in theory, it's supposed to cash out in promotions and new jobs at the existing institutions, which is what happened again to that cohort, which is why I ended up here at the New York Times and you ended up at the Washington Post. So you are hired as the youngest ever opinion columnist at the New York Times?
Yes. I believe this is 2009. This is 2009, yes. But you're also in a funny part of this. So, right, your career, I think it'll continue to be the case.
You are the more conservative voice at institutions that are understood as broadly more liberal. Right. I think that's true for the Atlantic. I think it's true for the New York Times opinion page. People would say...
I wrote the conservative column for the Harvard Crimson. For the Harvard Crimson. It goes all the way back. I'm curious about that experience. I've been writing for liberal audiences as a conservative, a pro-life Catholic conservative.
Let's start here. What did it teach you about? Liberals. So I like liberals. That was a long pause after that.
No, I'm welcome. I spend... I mean, the first thing to be said is that I always regarded this kind of role as just an incredible opportunity, as a baseline, right? Where you write opinions in order to argue and persuade. That's what opinion journalism, as far as I can see, is supposed to do.
It's an illusion to imagine that anyone has their whole worldview altered by an 800 word column or anything remotely like that. But still, on the margins, at the very least, you're trying to pull readers closer to your perspective, move people to some degree, expose people to ideas they wouldn't otherwise cover. 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. 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 working for a big publication, you're never exclusively speaking to people who disagree with you. But yeah, 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 exactingly scrutinized in a way that is maybe less true of people who sort of assume that the audience is going to be on their side.
Well, what have you learned about writing persuasively? I mean, this has been all advice, but it's still the fundamental thing. It is to argue effectively, you need to understand why people you disagree with hold of views that they do. And you need to start from a version of their argument that is high-minded rather than low-minded and it is sort of the best version of the perspective that they hold. And that doesn't mean that you can't think that secretly or subconsciously they hold their opinion for bad or wicked reasons or because they want to 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 pro-lifers, 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 sexually morality. You're allowed to think that that's out there and is part of 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 pro-life people think unborn human lives are human and worthy of legal protection in terms of being human.
That's just where you have to start, right? Then to take an issue from the other direction, if you are a conservative opponent of liberal views on immigration, you're allowed to think that liberals are politically Machiavellian cynics who are 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 immigration is a humanitarian and economic benefit to immigrants and to the country that receives them. That's like where you have to start. That's it. That's the whole secret.
How effective the arguments are that you end up making from that starting point? I don't know, but I do think generally that the act of sustained attempted good faith interaction does, even in totally polarized environments, yield a reasonably favorable response. It's not the case that you can't talk across partisan divides. It's challenging and difficult and sometimes exhausting, but people are open to it. It's called Metro with Sarah Koenig.
Stories about New York City and its most fascinating raw material, New Yorkers. The sheer size of New York means that every kind of person is here, every kind of American weirdness, every kind of American conflict, every concern, so many stories. Each episode Metro takes the bigness of New York and makes it human scale and relevant, no matter where you live. Find it wherever you listen to your podcasts. I think relatively few opinion writers are actually engaged in ongoing efforts of persuasion.
I think typically people think they're doing that are engaged in ongoing efforts of affirmation and there are things around the edges where they're sort of putting their spin on it, but it starts from a kind of locus of major agreement and then you're sort of like shifting in one direction or another. What I think has been interesting to watch across your career is that you actually have been engaged in a very, very long effort at persuasion. You are almost always in relationship with an audience that mostly doesn't appreciate your own experience. You're profoundly successful. I'm so used to even know it's successful.
What would you say you feel you have been most persuasive about? I don't honestly know exactly how to judge that. I mean, I think that the, so on the one hand, there's a bunch of things that have happened since I took the Times job that sort of fulfilled my expectations to some degree about like what was going to happen in American politics and where certain things would go above all the sort of populist nationalist transformation of the Republican Party. It's worth noting here for people who don't know you and your former co-blocker, Ryan, had written a book called Grand New Party. We wrote a book, but beyond the book, we were just sort of involved.
So this wasn't persuasion directed at liberals, honestly. This was persuasion directed more at our fellow conservatives and saying, look, the tectonic plates under the Republican Party are shifting. The party has to deal with the fact that it has a more working-class coalition. It has to adapt its policy and rhetoric, all these kinds 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, you know, opinion mongers and would be intellectuals. So there's that. That's sort of one area of success of a kind, but not the success that I looked for. I think that- Well, it's not there for the second.
In what way was it not? You put some flush on that. So you wrote this book. You're sort of involved in an effort to say the Republican Party should not be as doctrinally libertarian. It shouldn't be all about cutting Medicare and cutting Social Security that it had this opportunity at a time when it did not win majorities of working-class voters to shift its policies in a way that would make it more appealing to them.
And the kinds of shifts that you and Ryan advocated had to do with things like immigration, had to do with things like tax credits for kids, had to do with sort of shifting it to a more pro-family, more concerned with the problems of working-class families from, I would say, a more traditionalist perspective, maybe then the left is. So how do you describe what happened to that? And then what happened that created the working-class shift because Republicans do know what majorities of working-class voters or Trump at least does? 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 Ryan and I would have favored.
But generally, we were focused on sort of family policy, wage subsidies, these kind of things, and Trump was just focused on, obviously, trade tariffs and reindustrialization in a way that 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 have been hammered and saying, I'm just going to bring back your jobs, right? We're going to stop businesses from leaving our country and we are being brained out of our country, our jobs, our money, our base and our factories.
We are going to stop it. And that was, again, a different message from saying we need to use government policy to help people form families. And I'm genuinely angry at the people who talk- And I'm right. Well, that too, right? So then there's a more substantial anger, there's more substantial scapegoating.
They're moving to other places. A lot of them are moving to Mexico. They don't underestimate this, like the new China on a smaller level, but like the new China. So our view wasn't that you should never cut Medicare in Social Security. It was more that if you're going to cut Medicare or reform Medicare, you should be doing it not to just pass a new upper bracket tax cut, but to free up more money to help working families, right?
Would be how the argument would go. And Trump just said, no, we're never cutting these things, right? And so he outflanked all of his Republican primary opponents by realizing that a big part of the Republican base wasn't on board with Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan. But what that did was basically create a kind of a more popular but much more fiscally unsustainable and in the end, I think sort of unproductive policy mix on the right, 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 a lot of the policy ideas that we would have favored. So that's part of what happened.
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 was compatible with the Republican party, 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 kind of things. 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 see that leverage shift all over.
It ends up showing up on abortion too, right? Trump comes in on the one hand as a kind of someone who speaks to that, who says to embattled social conservatives and religious conservatives, you're losing the culture and you need to live with that and just have me as like the tough guy who will defend you. But then 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 stable social conservatism, like sort of building something in the backlash against the woke era is then, you know, everybody from Catholic traditionalists to pot smoking libertarians, right, who don't who don't like the woke, but it's not a, I don't know, it's not sort of a coherent basis for governing the country in ways that I think have become totally apparent in the second Trump term. Well, you have this famous 2016 tweet, you write a thought sent back in time to the Theocracy Panic of 2005, right? You see my during the interview, if you dislike the religious right, wait till you meet the post religious right.
Unpack both sides of that. I mean, for people maybe who don't really remember what you're calling the Theocracy Panic of 2005, what was that? But then the religious right versus the post religious right, I think is actually a quite significant thing. I just did this big Odyssey essay, which I would say is very much about that question in a way. So, you know, so the Theocracy Panic was just the George W. Bush won reelection in 2004 with
the support of lots and lots of white evangelicals liberals were not expecting Bush to win. A bunch of liberals became obsessed with the idea that evangelicalism was taking over America and was going to build a kind of Gilead-esque evangelical Theocracy. I thought that was ludicrous at the time and wrote a bunch of essays about it. And then by the time you get to the mid 2010s and Trump is winning while being conspicuously non-evangelical, conspicuously non-Christian, it seems like you're in a world where everything that liberals hated and feared about George W. Bush become something they're nostalgic for.
Right. And that as you kind of decrystionize 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 terrifying fascist formation, but just a kind of right-wing politics of, you know, sort of, liberty in difference and sort of proud amoralism. Right.
And again, this is part of trans 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 the first time I heard this description of it was actually in an interview with Louise Perry, the sort of British conservative kind of critic of modern feminism did with your new boss Barry Weiss.
And she was making this distinction between Jordan Peterson and Andrew Tate. So, you know, the really crucial difference between John Peterson and Andrew Tate, there are obviously lots of differences, but the one that I think is most alien to this issue is John Peterson is basically preaching a Christian message and Andrew Tate is not. The more I think about it, the more I think that actually that's really the key dividing line if you're thinking about American culture in particular. And a lot of the fights on the right, she sort of made this argument, are going to begin to come down to this. Are you sort of pushing towards a, you know, what can be called here at least in certain forms of Christian ethic?
Or is it about strength, about dominance, about hierarchy? Obviously Christianity is a... It's a big phenomenon, you know, Islam and Judaism. All these relations have many, many different... It's a complicated world.
Political manifestation. So, I don't want to overly... Probably pagan still. But I do think there's something to that. Well, the issue there though is that Jordan Peterson is not a Christian.
Andrew Tate is a... That is a right-wing politics that formally rejects Christianity. Jordan Peterson is a post-Christian right-wing politics that is sort of trying... I mean, he's been ill for a while and I don't want to sort of characterize where he is right now. But generally, he's engaged in this sort of constant wrestling with the text of the Old Testament.
And the Christian story and so on. And saying, you know, these are incredibly important and we need to, you know, preserve them without ever actually committing to Christian belief. And conservatism generally, I think, as Christianity has declined, has ended up in this weird place where it's trying to find some kind of category that includes Christianity, includes traditional religion, but isn't reducible to it. So it's like, well, we're defending Western civilization, right? You'll hear that a lot from people on the right and often like that language is associated with people on the right who are not themselves formally committed to Christianity.
But so Tate is an extreme, but even Peterson himself is sort of navigating in the kind of post-Christian landscape in his own way. So tell me a bit of how you understand the story. How do we go from the front-facing Christianity of conservatism in the Bush era to this much more post-Christian assemblage that includes Christians, as you're saying, but I would say to say Christian ethics and virtue are not demanded as a... Right. So two things happen.
One is, at the mass level, Christianity just declines. It declines sharply between the late 1990s and 2020. And that means that just inevitably the kinds of appeals and rhetoric and argument that are sort of normative on the right when lots of people are going to church are less normative when fewer people are going to church. And that's a very simple story, but I think it does a lot of explanatory work. As a culture gets less formally Christian, it's not surprising that its leadership would get less formally Christian.
Trump is, again, an extreme case. He takes a trend to an extreme, right, where he is just sort of negatively transactional in his relationship to Christianity and doesn't even sort of necessarily mouth the pieties. But then at the intellectual level, right? So let's say you are a writer or thinker or would be elite on the right, looking at this landscape, looking at not just the decline of Christianity, but this sort of sweeping victory for social liberalism that I just described. Well, you're going to look at that and say, okay, we had an evangelical president in George W. Bush.
We had sort of a Catholic evangelical alliance sort of defining Republican politics. And what did we get from it? We got secularization in the triumph of social liberalism. So something went wrong here. And a lot of the sort of controversy and argument and debate among younger conservatives, especially, all over the place, is this kind of wrestling with like, well, why did we fail?
Right? And there's just a lot of different impulses at work there. You have people who sort of want to leave Christianity behind entirely and say the problem is just like, this religion is sort of weak and its leaders are hapless and defeat and soft and you need a harsh masculine force and so on. That's a pretty narrow group. I think what's more common is a desire among people who are connected to Christianity, who are Christian and so on, to say, well, where can we find greater strength?
Where can we find greater toughness? How can we be more effective political actors? How can we defeat our enemies instead of having them vanquish us? You could call it a reaching for pagan energy that doesn't go all the way to actually becoming pagan. Right?
And look, the truth is that if you go back and look- No, Stephen Miller's not a wickin'. Stephen Miller's not a wickin'. Right. Yeah, there's a, I mean, there it's like the desire is for strength and toughness and a politics of enmity. There's various versions of this that show up and they're connected also to the reality that if you look obviously historically at the expressions of political Christianity in the Western world, they are very comfortable with fighting wars and conquering enemies and all of these kind of things.
So people, conservative Christians today who are like, what happened to the crusading spirit or something like that are not wrong, that like that has been part of Christian culture in the West for a long time. But you know, you see this in the debate about like the Odyssey, for instance, right? Where Christopher Nolan takes the Odyssey and some people have said he Christianizes it, right? This is sort of debatable, but he certainly makes the moral vision of the story more compatible with Christianity where it's like, okay, you know, Odysseus has committed sins and feels guilt and he doesn't glory in war.
He doesn't sleep with Calypso and Cersei and so on. 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 war, right? Where's the, you know, we, this is sort of, this is like losing, losing the core of the story. And that's, I think that that partially reflects this desire to find something that doesn't seem present in like late 20th century to the public Christianity, the compassionate conservatism of George W. Bush find some kind of fighting spirit in the theory that that's what you need to overcome liberalism.
It's funny. It's an odd take on George W. Bush in a way that what he lacked was a fighting spirit, but two elections in a row against the Democrats, but also launched a large number of wars. Yes, there was some wars. Well, yes, and there is no part, there's also some of this is like a creative mis or convenient misremembering by the right where you have like young nationalists on the right, young would be nationalists who will say, you know, the one thing we can't do is go back to, you know, the feckless liberal internationalism of George W. Bush.
But if you look at the things written in the run up to the rack war, and this is maybe where my war blogger reference at the start is actually relevant, they had a lot in common with populist nationalist arguments today. There's this sort of recurring that they were like, the West has gotten soft, right? Radical Islam has taken advantage of our liberal weakness. We need to show strength and make a friend enemy distinction in the battle for the Middle East, right? The whole like national greatness conservatism.
History has filled with these like fun ironies, right? So there were a bunch of people who were associated with what got called national greatness conservatism, which was basically a kind of, you know, pretty hawkish form of Republican politics, who then like Bill Crystal, right, who then end up as like the great critics of Trump is our former colleagues are former colleagues are right, our former colleague David Brooks. He's a less he's a less extreme example. It's just really striking. If you go back, like nobody hates Bill 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 nationalist spoiling for a fight right about politics today.
It's just the focus, the focus is different. So why do you think that ended up being such a major? So I agree that that is one of the places where you tend to see a lot of split between Trumpists and never Trumpers, people associated with national greatness conservatism. That was an aggressive muscular conservatism. That was a we need to defend Western civilization version of conservatism.
And you know, for all the talk about not launching new wars, it does not turn out to be the case that that is so central to Donald Trump's conception. Apparently not of how Maggie works. Yep. So why do you think that became such a cut in the Republican coalition? 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 neoconservative 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 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 the early 2000s that a national politics of national greatness only made sense if it was founded on character and virtue in your leaders. And I don't think George Bush was like a paragon of every single virtue, but it's fair to say that he was a more personally virtuous guy in various ways than Trump, right?
So there were people who had committed to that idea for good reasons for whom it was just like, okay, I don't care how muscular Trump is or how international greatness he is. He's just a bad guy. And I'm not, I'm not going to support him. And then for younger people, like, especially after 2016, like once, you know, once Trump wins, then he just sort of resets the landscape, right? And you sort of, it's just like you sort of, I feel like with younger people on both the left and the right, the world where we had arguments about the character of American politicians, the world where, you know, Bill Clinton's adultery was something to be litigated.
All of these things is just kind of a lost world. And so it's sort of- I think it might be rediscovered soon. It might be. I think in the turning of the wheel. Oh, yeah.
Yeah. Yeah. Right. We'll have a different perspective and there may be a renewed interest in character. I'm Ray Drong.
I cover climate and the environment for the New York Times. I recently spent eight weeks on a research ship going to Antarctica, the planet's getting warmer. Ice is melting away. Sea level rise is going to change our coastal cities. It's one thing to read about what scientists have discovered when they write papers, but it's another thing entirely to be there with them.
This is what we do with the New York Times. We want to bring you closer to the biggest stories that matter for how we all live in the world. If you'd like to support this work, you can become a subscriber at nytimes.com. There's another fascinating, at least to me, shift that has taken place, which is, you know, we've described a couple of times here the centrality of evangelical Christianity to politics in say 2005. And now Catholics see much more central to politics, right?
Catholic thinkers. You have a lot of Catholic converts at the top of Republican party politics, including G.D. Vance, who has just done your show that by president who just released a book about his Catholic conversion. I'll be at one with a Protestant church on the cover. It is an odd design choice, I agree.
Sort of. I mean, it actually is a design choice that makes a lot of sense, but we can get into that. Go on. What have you made of that? What does that move from like the form of Christianity that seems to be driving right when politics was evangelical Christianity to Catholic thinking, what is that?
I don't know. So one, I don't know how much Catholic thinking can be said to be driving Republican politics. I would not look at the second trimester. Right. But yeah, I think it's, I think it's very important in sort of right wing intellectual culture.
In the last five years, generally, after a long period of secularization, there is a renewed interest in arguments about religion, religious ideas that extends beyond conservatism, maybe even extends to you, right? Ezra, we've talked about this on this show before. My own work has been in this period kind of well suited to that moment. I've 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 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 because my parents were a Methodist. I'm a Presbyterian because I like the pastor and so on.
And they've been good for in different ways, sort of stronger brands and in a way Christianity sort of polarizes into the strong brand of like liturgical religion, of which Catholicism is the strongest expression and then kind of the strong brand of mass market, seeker sensitive, come for our amazing, our amazing praise, music, concert. And those are the two strongest forms, but the Catholic form is stronger at the elite level and the evangelical form seems stronger at the mass level. That was a very long comment, but it's something obviously that I think about a lot. It's a very, yeah, I don't know where it goes from there. Do we just have a world where like it's sort of natural, if you're in the elite, to be Catholic, the way it would have once been natural to be an Episcopalian?
But that's somehow separate from like what's happening in mass trends in religion. Does an elite turn to Catholicism eventually sort of trickle down and sort of revitalize the wider Catholic institutions? I have no idea. Do you think the relationship between the left and religion has changed? Yes.
I think that, again, I'm not sure where this goes, but I feel like the kind of post-Christian left is having its own kind of existential crisis of like pessimism. But I feel like there was a period when on the left, it was like we are leaving traditional patriarchal cis-heteronormative Christianity behind, and we're going to be great. We're going to enter the broad sunlit uplands of science. We're going to trust the science in this house and so on. And then somewhere between COVID and Trump returning and the rise of AI and various other unsettling things, I think the left started to feel like they were missing something.
If you watch the Last Knives Out movie, right. So in the latest night, so the prior Knives Out movie was a movie about how Elon Musk and billionaires are bad and evil. And the latest Knives Out movie was a movie about how there are really awful forms of religion and there's also really good forms of religion. And we should want the really good forms to survive. And it's just one movie, but I thought it was an interesting sort of...
You could sense of a kind of groping around in liberal culture for some kind of religious or spiritual point of connection. But again, I think also shows up in just kind of post-Christian spirituality, interest in sort of New Age, pagan stuff, all that stuff too. There's just a lot of groping. Well, I think you can see a couple of things happening, really interesting. So I agreed Knives Out is one of them.
We were talking about the Odyssey, we have James Tallarico, who became a kind of phenom candidate, sort of one of the only mainstream liberal candidates who's been like a big, attentional phenom of the moment. And does it by wrapping a pretty straightforward progress to politics in a very, very more elistically Christian framework. 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 prophets 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? And I think people have found that exciting. It has given them a way to talk about the moment that I think feels deeper. And it has tapped into something very real. I think you're watching some of the other people coming up.
This would include not just Ralph L. Warnock, but John Ossoff 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. Fifteen million people off of their healthcare.
They kicked veterans and seniors and children off of SNAP. And I don't understand how you read the book that I read. I'm a Matthew 25 Christian. 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 Proverb 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. So in my view, something is happening. It's not so the left is becoming believers 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 my perspective as a skeptical outsider, the whole great awakening was this fascinating attempt to do religious energy without metaphysical commitment.
Like it was, it really was the case that there was kind of the energy that you associate with a moralistic revival at work in anti-racism and everything associated with that. Like you have iconoclasm, you have people enforcing new moral norms. Like these are things that we associate with periods of spiritual ferment. But quite self-consciously, like the anti-racist cause was detached from the Black church in various ways, right? And you had like, again, my former Atlantic colleague, Tanahasi Coates, 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 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 revolutionaries, you'll end 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? In a sense, 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 it that it corresponds to something like out there in the cosmos that's real, right? I totally agree with that. Maybe one way 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 the Catholic.
My vision of the world and its cosmology is not Catholic. I found it to be a really beautiful and moving articulation of what I would otherwise describe as liberal values, all the way down to ways of practicing politics, approaches to pluralism, approaches to the human being. So now you could say, and I think this would be true. I mean, I come out of Jewish tradition and I probably have a lot of that in the way I look at the world. But I do think there is something about the emphasis there on a certain kind of human dignity and a certain kind of treatment between people that Trump has thrown into a kind of relief.
So maybe it looks more explicitly connected to a politics I am interested in and trying to create than it would have if he had written the same thing, but Jeb Bush was president. Yes, maybe at this point, we have sort of moved through the Trump era to a point where liberals are saying like, OK, Trump is so corrupt and such a rotten person in all these ways. And so what if we counterpose a kind of beautiful politics of human dignity against him? But that's after trying for many years to say, and again, not you personally, maybe, but some people right saying Trump is rotten and corrupt and his rottenness and corruption reveals a darker racist heart of America.
And the fact that we're all still in for all to Confederate patriarchal values and what we need is 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 again, I think ended up in some cul-de-sacs and dark places. And so now it's like, OK, now maybe we'll maybe we like that Pope Leo is linking his critique of AI to a vision of human dignity rather than a dark, just a purely dark vision where you're like AI is bad because it is controlled by evil ruthless tech bros or something.
AI is bad because it's part of the horrifying structures of capitalism which are nightmare from which we're struggling to await. So I want to go back to question as you go. I asked you what being the sort of conservative and many liberal institutions to talk you about liberals sort of answered that. But I think over time I don't know if I did answer that. But what about the media?
You've been inside the media for a long time. What does it mean? Do you think about what the media does well, what it does poorly? When I was coming up, 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. 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. And obviously the right had been challenging it for a long time. Parts of the far left.
Chomsky and so on had always had the critiquity. But the internet helped make those critiques much more powerful. And there was just a sense that, okay, we are moving into a landscape that is more opinion-driven, as you said earlier, where we're going to acknowledge biases. We're going to accept that in your times seems to have a pretty liberal audience. And a lot of liberals work for it.
It's not just a view from nowhere. Fox News is going to be explicitly conservative and that a future where the American media looks a bit more like the British newspaper business did, where you have the Guardian is the liberal newspaper and the telegraph is a more conservative newspaper. That was where America was going to go. And it was okay to have competing media institutions that own their biases in various ways. But 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. I feel like they have really undermined my own sense of knowing who I think the good guys and bad guys are in any particular circumstance. And the less you feel certain about knowing who the good guys and bad guys are, the more you feel the benefit of just setting out every day to just try and describe the world. And maybe become less of a persuader.
I feel like I write maybe more columns like that these days. Because the world gets weirder, journalism needs people and institutions that sort of refocus on just saying we're trying to figure out what's happening here. Because I'm struggling to figure out exactly what's happening in a way that I don't think I was when Mitt Romney and Barack Obama were running against each other. And maybe this leads to like, you know, you want to ask me about going to 6 minutes. Which is the first place you have worked in media.
That the Atlantic is a magazine that is opinionated at its core. It launched initially as an abolitionist magazine. You worked on the Times opinion page. 60 minutes is different. It's under now Barry Weiss' management, your former colleague here.
I never overlapped with Weiss here. But is that, you know, awesome question. Great. Is that part of why you're going to sit next? I think that you have been doing interview podcasts for a long time.
I've only been doing it for less than two years. But presumably I'm going to be doing a lot of interviewing. That's my hope. And I find interviewing, I don't know how you find interviewing. I find it very difficult, relative to writing.
Writing just comes easier and more naturally to me than interviewing does. But I have found interviewing just very helpful at a moment when what is actually going on in the world seems more opaque to me. And so, yeah, one reason to take a job at 60 minutes is just an opportunity to sort of do more of that for a somewhat different audience than the Times has. Although of course there's overlap. But yeah, this is sort of, yeah, this seems like a good time to ask questions a little bit in an open-ended way.
And that's what we've both been doing with our shows. But that's sort of what I'm thinking I'll be doing there. Obviously you're talking here on the way you often do to an audience that is more liberal than you who is in spite of reading my columns all these years. And who has made a concern. My work of persuasion.
Concerned about what they think very wise wants to do with 60 minutes. What it means that you're one of the first big name hires there. What did they say they want it? What is your sense of what 60 minutes is trying to become with you launching with you as a new marquee name? You would need to get Barry to come on your podcast to get sort of her answer to that question.
Again, I see what I want to do at 60 minutes in the show itself I think is in keeping with what the show has always done incredibly well. Which is help people understand what's really happening in the world and get sort of an accurate sense of reality itself through interviews, investigations and so on. That sort of I think if you had Barry here she would say that is her formal goal. Lots and lots of media institutions have lost the trust of people who aren't politically liberal or progressive. And so there's a way to sort of try and have a more balanced view of the world and try and get those people back.
My own primary sense of what 60 minutes can do is more just capture the full messy reality of the world in 2026. If you get that right, then exactly how many Republicans versus Democrats you're reaching is like, you know, that will sort of follow from success at the basic project of describing the world. You mentioned a minute ago the other big change in this which is you're moving from writing to on camera interviewing, which you've already done a bit with interesting times your podcast. This is another big shift from when you and I started, which is there is a lot of movement now towards video. There's a lot of people who talk about a return to more orality in culture, but it's not part of it for you.
Do you have the sense that the center of what journalism is, the way people are understanding the world, is moving away from the written word? Yes. I think there is some, there's clearly some way in which internet conditions, digital conditions and whatever the hell is going to happen with AI are sort of weakening the hold of the written word that I've certainly kept writing while doing my show at the times. And I intend to find ways to keep writing while I'm working for CBS. So that's that part of journalism is very important to me.
But yeah, people, it's not only podcasts and audio, right? Like if you look at what people engage with at the New York Times, they also engage with written dialogues. Like they love the feature that our colleagues Brett Stevenson, Gail Collins or David Brooks and Gail Collins did of sort of conversation back and forth. They really like the features that my longtime editor, John Guida, does where he'll sort of interview someone in a written form where you're writing and people are writing in response. The transcripts of Arshos.
Yeah. And some of it I think is that people want to see the person underneath the writing and maybe this becomes more the case in the age of AI. Tyler Cowan, who you know, you know, his work well. One of his arguments about AI is that it basically is just going to increase the premium for, for instance, live performance, right? The ability to speak in public and engage with questions and all these kind of human things will go up as AI can generate more writing.
And I think dialogue and conversation are sort of versions of that, places where sort of writers and thinkers sort of show their own humanities, maybe a little bit more than you do in a kind of voice on the mountaintop column. And then again, maybe this is just projecting my own perspective onto the world. But I also think people like these things because like me, they're a little uncertain about what's happening in reality. And the kind of conversational form is a way into the news and what's going on in the world that doesn't require you to sort of accept a single authoritative take and leaves room for an uncertainty and ambiguity while also introducing you to perspectives that you might not have considered.
That's the positive case for it. I can also make the negative case and say that, you know, a world where people read less and are less literate has various negative repercussions. I'm not trying to like sort of be too polyanish about this change. At the very least is a real shift, I think. Do you think with the reporting resources of 60 minutes behind you, you'll finally be able to crack what the UFOs are?
Yeah, I mean, look, this is obviously the number one goal. And, you know, I've said if I can't break the UFO story in, I don't want to make any promises. But yes, the subject of UFOs has come up at once or twice, maybe only from my end in conversations about stories that the media should be interested in going forward. Can you talk to your about the sort of messy edges of reality and your sense of not knowing quite being less certain than you've been at other times? And I bring up the UFO thing, not totally interested.
I think it actually has become an important part of your work. And to me, that and sort of a deeper skepticism of knowing who to trust, of knowing what kind of information to trust is begun to characterize your work. So when you think about navigating the boundaries of a reality whose boundaries seem less certain to you, how do you think about how do I think about journalism? So I think, so when I thought of the UFO story as just a story about people who have weird experiences in the woods and come back and claim to have been abducted by UFOs, right? Like that story is interesting, but it's not, it's not intensely interesting because it's so personalized.
Like you're not going to get, it's like sort of analyzing someone's religious experience. It's really interesting to do, but you're not going to get a sort of final decisive answer. Like if someone describes their religious experience, there's no journalistic trick that can tell you, was that really God or not? But with UFOs, like there are concrete claims made about objects that operate in physical reality that are observed by let's say, Navy aviators and there are other concrete claims about supposed secret programs that the federal government has. And those are questions that journalists should be able to answer.
So I'm interested in the UFO story in particular, but also other questions like, you know, the debates that we're already having about AI consciousness, these kind of things, not because I think they are unknowable, but because I think that they actually do presumably have answers, right? Like maybe the AI consciousness debate will never be resolved or something, but like the question of how dangerous AI is going to be, how transformative AI is going to be. Guess what? We're going to find out. Like I know people, smart people in Silicon Valley who talk about all human timelines now in terms of like three years, right?
They're like, oh, you don't do it in the next three years. You're not, you're not going to do it because the singularity is coming. Now I'm skeptical of that argument, but we're going to find out, right? Over the next three years, whether those kind of singularity believe it or not. So yes, I'm interested in zones of uncertainty and questions that sort of don't have immediate and obvious answers and questions that touch on supernatural or the metaphysical and so on.
As a journalist, I'm only interested in them in so far as you can figure out what the hell is going on. Well, I hope you do. Ross has been a pleasure working alongside you. It's been a pleasure for many, many, many years. I'll continue to watch you.
I imagine we will encounter one another again after this conversation. In the singularity. And then always our final question. I hope not. Even in this post-literate age, what are three books you'd recommend to the audience?
I forgot about the three books question. I have been reading Speak Memory by Vladimir Nabokov, Bakhov, I forgot to pronounce it, which is his sort of memoir, mostly of his boyhood as a Russian aristocrat before the Russian revolution. I would recommend that to people who don't want to be post-literate, who want to be very, very literate indeed. I will recommend Julian Jackson's biography of Charles de Gaulle, on general principles. I haven't read it recently, but just strong, strong recommend there.
And I will finally recommend the most recent book that I read to my children, which is Robert Lewis Stevenson's Treasure Island. So those are three solid recommendations and I'm happy to leave you with them. Ross Duffer, thank you very much. As we're fine. Thank you.