Why Socialism Is Becoming Popular on The Left

Summary

Podcast Summary: The Dispatch Podcast
Episode: Why Socialism Is Becoming Popular on The Left
Date: July 31, 2026
Host: Steve Hayes
Panelists: Jonah Goldberg, Kevin Williamson, Megan McArdle

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Overview

This episode examines the rising popularity of socialism, especially among younger Americans and within the progressive wing of the Democratic Party. Through a roundtable with Dispatch editors and contributors, the panel discusses what Americans mean when they use the word "socialism," the demographic trends driving this shift, the lessons (and amnesia) regarding socialism's history, and the political implications for both parties. Notable detours touch on anthropological debates about communal societies and how the changing political landscape mirrors past American and European experiences.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

Understanding "Socialism" in the US Context

• Definition Gap:
  Kevin Williamson stresses Americans generally misunderstand "socialism," often envisioning a European-style welfare state rather than true state ownership or central planning.

  “When Americans talk about socialism, I don't think they generally know what they're talking about.” (02:50, Kevin Williamson)

• Scandinavian Wishcasting:
  Many advocates are seeking "imaginary Denmark” rather than actual socialist states, romanticizing welfare state models they haven't deeply studied.

• Democratic vs. Socialist:
  The panel notes that the "democratic" element is often taken more seriously by these groups than actual socialism, with an emphasis on removing institutional buffers and favoring direct, majoritarian governance (06:40).

Why Young People—Particularly the Educated—Are Drawn to "Socialism"

• Generational Amnesia:
  The generation that experienced the collapse of the Soviet Union and Eastern bloc is aging out. Younger Americans have little direct memory of socialism’s failures.

  "I was 16 when the Berlin Wall fell … I saw how bad socialism was. … but that was a long time ago.” (07:09, Megan McArdle)

• College Experience Analogy:
  Socialism's appeal is likened to the comfort and autonomy of elite college life: housing, food, security provided, minimal real-world demands, self-actualization prioritized.

  “Elite universities … are as close as society will ever get to Marx’s vision of the end of history, where you have everything in your life provided for you…” (15:51, Jonah Goldberg)

• Status Anxiety and Resentment:
  Many self-identified socialists are highly educated but underemployed, seeking status and meaning outside traditional market structures. The movement is not working-class rooted but led by the “over-credentialed and under-compensated.”

• Geographic Limits and Aspirations:
  Many want the cultural trappings of major cities (NYC, DC) but chafe at the economic realities, longing for the era when artists could live cheaply in grungy neighborhoods—places that now barely exist.

Is Socialism Really that Popular—or just the Language?

• Polls & Labeling:
  Polls show strong Democratic Socialist (DSA) support among younger Democrats, yet when asked about "free market economies," favorability shoots up—even among self-identified socialists.

  “Capitalism is coded as something very different than free market economy … at the level of dictionary definitions, they're synonyms.” (39:24, Jonah Goldberg)

• Socialism as Protest:
  Many “socialists” are anti-corporate, expressing cultural and status resentments rather than literal support for state ownership.

  “And I think what people hate is corporations.” (39:51, Megan McArdle)

• Populism Parallels:
  Williamson draws analogies to the Tea Party and MAGA, noting both left and right have radical factions driven more by temperament (anti-establishment, emotional satisfaction) than deep policy commitment.

The Real Policy Risks

• Radicalism is Contagious:
  Growth of the DSA and far-left platforms may force mainstream Democrats leftward—mirroring how the Tea Party turbocharged GOP radicalism.

• Policy & Party Worries:
  Even if real "socialism" seems unlikely, policies can still be damaging (e.g., pre-Thatcher UK), and intra-party confrontational styles can undermine governance.

• “Mob Rule” vs. Bolshevism:
  The panel suggests the bigger risk is majoritarian Jacobin-style politics, weakening institutions, rather than a Bolshevik takeover.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

“There’s a kind of thing with socialism, too, is like, yeah, sure, it’s failed the last 97 times, but many of those people wore funny hats. So if we do it without the hats, maybe this time will be different.”
— Megan McArdle (09:45)

"It's not the lumpen proletariat and the workers of the world ... it's the people who wrote term papers on the proletariat and the downtrodden..."
— Jonah Goldberg (16:43)

"Their milieu was college. That’s why they went back to grad school in part, is just to keep that feeling going. They’re permanent students."
— Jonah Goldberg (17:39)

"Socialists are very focused on material conditions, but in fact, the material conditions under which the norm ‘from each according to his ability, to each according to his need’ can function are where you’re extremely marginal."
— Megan McArdle (28:00)

"The DSA and the so-called socialists ... are essentially the Democrats’ Tea Party."
— Kevin Williamson (33:48)

"Americans don’t like socialism or don’t like the things that socialism generates … Americans don’t like long lines, Americans don’t like shortages, Americans don’t like waiting six months for a knee replacement."
— Jonah Goldberg (43:08)

"It's not because we're gonna have breadlines … it's because we're going to have another frigging decade of two completely hysterical, ridiculous parties playing on the fears of marginal voters about which party is the lesser evil."
— Jonah Goldberg (49:26)

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Important Segments & Timestamps

• Defining American “Socialism” – [02:50] Kevin Williamson
• Why Gen Z Loves Socialism – [07:09] Megan McArdle
• Socialism as Extended College – [15:51] Jonah Goldberg
• Evolutionary Psychology & Socialism's Appeal – [20:59] Jonah Goldberg
• Socialist Urban Status Game – [12:15] Megan McArdle
• Polling, Label Confusion, and Anti-Corporate Sentiments – [39:24] Group
• DSA’s Real Influence – Policy or Protests? – [43:39] Steve Hayes/Jonah Goldberg
• Populism Dynamics Right and Left – [33:10] Kevin Williamson
• Danger: Two Dysfunctional Parties – [49:26] Jonah Goldberg

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Sidebars & Tangents

• Anthropology of Sharing Societies:
  The panel digresses into anthropological research showing that communal resource sharing works only under very specific, marginal conditions (25:00–29:29).

  “In a large industrial economy where there are hundreds of millions of people, [reciprocal altruism] breaks down. It breaks down every time.” (28:50, Megan McArdle)

• Pop Culture & Humor:
  The group jokes about “erections and subsistence farming” as a podcast headline (30:21) and provides wry commentary on generational and class differences.

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Political Prognosis

• The rise of left-populist “socialism” mirrors right-populist Tea Party/MAGA movements in style and logic.
• Mainstream party establishments struggle to contain radical factions due to weakened party structures, social media, and changing cultural incentives.
• While “breadlines” are unlikely, the destabilizing effects of factionalism and symbolic radicalism are already distorting American politics and policy debate.

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Conclusion

The episode is a bracing, witty deep-dive into the “socialism” surge on the American left. The consensus isn’t that America is on the verge of actual socialism, but that the label serves as a catch-all for generational resentments, status anxieties, and anti-corporate feelings. The bigger threat may not be Soviet-style command economies, but the further breakdown of institutional guardrails and the rise of uncompromising, emotionally driven partisan politics.

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For full articles referenced, listen to specific timestamps above and consult Dispatch show notes for links.

Transcript

[Megan McCardle]

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[Jonah Goldberg]

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[Megan McCardle]

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[Steve Hayes]

Welcome to the Dispatch Podcast. I'm Steve Hayes. On today's roundtable, we'll cover the growing support for socialism on the left and within the Democratic Party. Why do so many gen zers support this ideology? Is this an undercover GOP operation to make Democrats look crazy? Does it have to be true socialism to represent a threat to the American experiment? Then Dr. Anthony Fauci's testimony or lack lack of testimony on Capitol Hill. And finally, not worth your time. When should we want to die? I'm joined today by the Dispatch's editor in chief, Jonah Goldberg, national correspondent Kevin Williamson, and Washington Post columnist and Dispatch contributor Megan McCardle. Let's dive right in. Welcome everyone. I want to talk about socialism today. And we have with us a panel who has between them written many, many articles about socialism over the long term, but also several articles very recently about socialism, Socialists, the rise of the Democratic Socialists of America. How worried we should be about it. The polling there is about it. So we've got a lot to discuss. Kevin, I want to start with you. You wrote a Wonderland newsletter 2ish weeks ago about socialism, about how we should understand what people mean when they say socialists today. Where it's accurate and where it's inaccurate. And about the rise of Democratic Socialists of America. Can you get us started by walking us through what you wrote?

[Kevin Williamson]

Yeah. By the way, I'm always very happy about the Fact that my little book on socialism is by far the best selling of any of my books. So I've made more money off of socialism than I have off of capitalism and other subjects. And nine tenths of the people who asked me to sign that book are buying it for a kid who's just graduated from high school and they want me to write don't believe everything your professors tell you in college next year in the dedication or some, some variation of that. So yeah, a couple things about that. When Americans talk about socialism, I don't think they generally know what they're talking about. This is. McArdle got into this stuff as well. And they don't really mean socialism. Usually Americans are pretty insular in their understanding of world politics. And that's not just limited to socialism. If you ask an American progressive what healthcare looks like in Europe, they think it's a whole bunch of single payer systems like in the uk, which is just not. But they have this kind of tendency to wishcast and think about what they would like to see and then say, well, that's how they do it in Sweden or Norway or some other nice civilized country that seems like, seems like a good place. So socialism has to do with central planning in the economy and using the state to provide what otherwise would be market provided goods. Socialism is generally characterized by things like state owned enterprises or enterprises that are actually just simply branches of the state or in some cases enterprises that are notionally sort of quasi private. But when the state is a majority stakeholder, which oddly enough is Donald Trump's favorite way of doing things, the so called golden share where he gets to act like he owns the company even if he doesn't, American progressives do not generally have very much interest in having the state take over things like housing. They don't want to live in public housing. They don't really like Zaran Mandabi's ideas for government run grocery stores and things like that very much. They have some good experiences with things like public schools, which really are a social enterprise in which the, you know, the employees are all government employees and the state owns the means of production and all that stuff. But what they really want is a larger, more generous welfare state. And of course they don't want to pay any taxes to pay for that. They think someone else can pay the taxes to you to pay for that. But they want to have something more like a Scandinavian kind of model. Now again, if you talk to American progressives about this, they think Scandinavia is still the way it was in the 1970s or the 1960s. They don't seem to realize that places like Sweden have very robust, free market, entrepreneurial, trade oriented economies, which you tend to expect of, you know, small countries often do. So it's a romantic thing. Jonah, get into this a little bit too, that socialism is what people say they want when it feels like what they think of as capitalism isn't working very well for them. So when the economy is going really well and going gangbusters and your 401k looks great and your housing values are up, if you're a homeowner or you can afford a house if you're looking for one, which these are, of course, two goals that are intentioned that we never really think about all that much. And then capitalism feels great and everyone's rah, rah, pro capitalist, and it's 1996 all over again and everyone's happy and starting their own, own Internet startup and all that stuff. And when the economy's not doing as well, or when it feels like it's not doing as well for you and you think that's capitalism, and you say to yourself, well, what's the alternative to that? It's socialism. It's not, of course, and that's not really what people mean. So in a sense, the threat of socialism per se is not really what we should worry about as much. What I got into my column today, today being Thursday, is the democratic part of their name, which I really do think they take more seriously than the socialist part of the name. And they really want to remove a lot of buffering and intervening institutions between the state and the individual and have a much more majoritarian kind of mob rule sort of thing, which is a whole other set of worms, a whole other can of worms. But these things tend to, I think, go together in ways that are obvious.

[Steve Hayes]

Megan, anything you hear from Kevin that you disagree with or want to expand on, number one. And number two, there's been a sort of a new wave of polling recently about the popularity of socialism. And it's asked that in that very sort of general way among the utes, among people under 30 years old. What do you make of that rise in the popularity of socialism?

[Megan McCardle]

So part of it is that Jonah and I grew up on the Upper west side, which was outside of Berkeley, the last redoubt of socialism. Jonah, how many people did you know who had attended socialist summer camp? This was actually a thing.

[Jonah Goldberg]

It was a thing not for my

[Megan McCardle]

generation, but the generation above us who paid for it. Not really sure. They had all Sorts. It's really funny. Like, if you would get a group of them, like three or four of them, and they were drinking at a dinner party, they would start singing their camp songs. But look, I think that part of it is just. I was 16 when the Berlin Wall fell. I knew people who had lived under socialism. I saw how bad socialism was. Like, part of it was on the Upper west side, right? You have all these people in the 80s, and they're like a blues musician with his girl, right? Like, he's just still hoping it can work. And he's coming up with all sorts of weird rationales about how maybe, maybe if she stopped drinking and stopped stealing his stuff and selling it, that this relationship could be saved. And, you know, I think PJ o' Rourke, actually, who did one of my favorite articles ever, was PJ o' Rourke, went on the Nation, had a cruise to the Soviet Union, and he went on it, and he described this experience which is really has to be read to be believed. But one thing he said was, these were people who thought everything was wonderful, everything was better in the Soviet Union, and also brought their own toilet paper. And so we saw that, and we saw the crushing of those hopes. I remember when I was in college, I was a socialist for, like, a minute and a half, just because I'm contrarian. I was also drinking Manhattans at that. In that era of my life, which was not a normal thing. Like, now everyone drinks Manhattans. I was doing this in a kind of deliberate anachronism, and you should think of my socialist commitments in the same way. And so the guy down the hall from me gave me his complete Karl Marx. And they were these, like, old cracking spine books. And I was like, are you sure you want to give me these books? He's like, no one wants them anymore. It's very sad. But so the brand was very tarnished by the revelation of just how bad things were in the Eastern Bloc before the Berlin Wall fell. But, like, that was a long time ago, you know, And I think it's a little bit like a pandemic. The pandemic where, like, I was pretty early on the pandemic, but when I would try to persuade people this was a real possibility, it was kind of like, no pandemics. Like, yeah, sure, we had one in 1918, but people wore funny hats back then. We don't wear funny hats. We don't have pandemics. And there's a kind of thing with socialism, too, is like, yeah, sure, it's failed the last 97 times we tried it, but many of those people wore funny hats. So if we do it without the hats, maybe this time we'll be different. And I also think that when you look at the movement, the thing I would expand on what Kevin is saying is that it's so clear. These are people living in cities, in high performance cities where these huge agglomeration effects, you know, huge prosperity. But there are also people who live there and who can't afford to compete with the finance Bros or the tech Bros or whatever. And the ladies, I don't want to be sexist here. There are finance and tech ladies too, that they can't compete with. And so they just want to end the system. They're looking for something where they will be in charge instead of the finance Bros and the tech Bros. Where they will have the highest status. Right. And they're kind of appropriating the working class. But this is not in any way a working class movement. If you look at the polling on this, it's all college educated and especially like postgraduate degree people who are not making a lot of money. And so they're in these super expensive cities and they are struggling as. Look, there's a reason I don't live in New York City anymore, but when I moved to D.C. you could get a room in a group house for like 400 bucks a month. And that's not a thing anymore in D.C. right. And so what they would like is a city where you can do that, where you can just go there and you don't have to compete that hard. You don't have to think about making money. You can just do your art or whatever it is that you're doing. And like, some of this can get really childish, like the number of people who are like, yeah, you know, under socialism, you won't have to have a job to pay your gritty landlord. And you're just gonna be able to like, do the thing that you're passionate about. And it's like, no, no, socialism is not college. You still have to like, collect the trash. You still have to like, you still have to do things that people want you to do. It's not like you're actually just gonna be in this one nice four year period of your life or eight year period if you get a postgraduate degree where not very much is expected of you. You have enormous autonomy and you never think about money.

[Kevin Williamson]

I've read Marx. I thought you were gonna hunt in the morning and write poetry in the afternoons.

[Megan McCardle]

Yeah, that didn't really work out. And someone sent me a funny. I think it was a tweet. I'm old. I can't remember anymore where he was like, he remembered an anarchist in college having an epiphany. He was like, yeah, I just don't see how this is gonna work in a complex economy. Like, what, I'm gonna, like, gift you 4 tons of molten aluminum?

[Kevin Williamson]

No.

[Jonah Goldberg]

Right.

[Megan McCardle]

Even the Soviet Union couldn't figure out how to get rid of prices. And the thing that they're actually mad about is scarcity. And like, I remember New York when it was grungier and when there were more places to live where you could find not like a cheap place in a safe neighborhood, but you could find a reasonably cheap place in a neighborhood that wasn't very safe and didn't have a lot of services. And those neighborhoods are, by and large now gentrified, or they're so far from downtown that it's really hard to get to anything you want to go to. And that all plays into it, too. And they don't want to look at the underlying thing. They just want to have imaginary Denmark or imaginary Vienna. I mean, it's really funny. Janice Lewis George, our socialist mayoral candidate who is going to be the next mayor of D.C. when I would read her policy platforms, I could pinpoint which Slate or Vox article she had read on the subject. And when I would ask, I reached out to the campaign to ask follow ups. And there's nothing there.

[Kevin Williamson]

Right.

[Megan McCardle]

Like, there's no additional, deeper policy thought. It's just like, Vox had an awesome article on social housing in Vienna. We should do that.

[Kevin Williamson]

You know, you actually hit on something that made me think of something that how mobility actually is part of this, where all the cheap places get, you know, taken up. Because there was a time you, like, if you were Georgia o', Keeffe, you moved out to Santa Fe because you wanted to do your art in some place that was cheap, where you could buy a house and live off very little money. And now you can't afford to live in Santa Fe, of course, so it's become.

[Megan McCardle]

Right, but you. You could afford to live in Dayton.

[Kevin Williamson]

Yeah.

[Megan McCardle]

I mean, there are, in fact, lots of places with too much housing and not enough people to put into it. They're shrinking. They're not as many of them as there used to be, but they don't want to do that. They want to live in New York City and do that.

[Kevin Williamson]

Every time I hear from someone who says, I can't afford to buy a house and I make $110,000 a year. I alert them to places like Borker, Texas, you know, where you absolutely can. You could buy three houses probably there if you wanted to. Much of Detroit, parts of Philadelphia.

[Megan McCardle]

Detroit's actually having a bit of a renaissance. It's actually a really good place to move right now if you're a starving artist. Buffalo is another one. Great place to move right now if you're a starving artist.

[Kevin Williamson]

But it's still got like 85,000 unoccupied housing units.

[Megan McCardle]

Yeah, no, that's what I'm saying is this is actually you wish that you had been able to move to the Lower east side or Alphabet City or to Brooklyn in the 90s. Guys, Detroit is the Brooklyn or the Alphabet city of the 90s. Go there, meet some other people who don't have any money and are doing art, like buy an incredibly cheap house, pay the back property taxes, and live your best life.

[Steve Hayes]

Jonah, do you buy Megan's argument that one of the reasons for the popularity of socialism, at least conceptually, among young people, is because they just haven't seen it. I mean, we're all roughly the same age, we're in the same generation anyway, and we did see it, and we read news stories about the collapse of the Soviet Union and its failed social experiments in Europe. You know, you and I were in Prague shortly after the fall of the Iron Curtain and saw what collectivism had done in the Czech Republic and elsewhere. Is it just that young people haven't been confronted with that history or hadn't read about it in their newspapers? And what do you make of. You wrote about the Echelon Insights poll this past week. What do you make of those numbers and why? It seems popular, at least on the surface.

[Jonah Goldberg]

Yeah. So to answer the first question, I think that obviously it's a factor, but it's exaggerated. Right. I think the memory of Communism goes much further in explaining the enduring hostility to communism and to social among anti Communists. Right. Among our people. That memory makes us more passionate in our antisocialism. But it's worth remembering. There's a reason why the phrase useful idiot caught on in the first place. There were lots and lots of fans of socialism, including Bernie Sanders, who honeymooned in Moscow, who could see communism at work in real time and still said it was awesome before the fall of the Berlin Wall. And their opinions were not appreciably changed after anything they learned after the fall of the Berlin Wall. And so, like, there's something else going on here. I don't want to belabor a point. I've been arguing for 20 years now. But I think Megan hit on a really important explanation for why socialism is popular with the demographic we're seeing it most popular with. It reminds them of college. I just did a great podcast with Jerusalem Dempsis from the argument yesterday where we talked about this a bit, so I don't want to repeat it too much. But, you know, elite universities, particularly for kids who do not have student loans, is as close as society will ever get to Marx's vision of the end of history, where you have everything in your life provided for you. You know, housing, food, security, healthcare. Very little is asked of you and you can get away with not doing a lot of it anyway, right? Where you're just supposed to enrich yourself, you're supposed to be yourself. The worst crimes you can commit at Brown or Kenyon or someplace like that is to hurt someone else's self esteem. You get to lean into very romantic notions of your identity. You get to play games with the malleableness of what you think your identity is. And it's fun, it's interesting. You're young and then you go out into the real world and you're like, who the hell is this FICA guy? I hate him, right? And so the nostalgia for which I think all of us felt to one extent or another, because it is natural for college when you go out into the real world is real. And so when you look at the demographic of the people who are most into the dsa, right? It's. It is not the lumpen proletariat and the workers of the world and the downtrodden and oppressed minorities. It's the people who wrote term papers on the proletariat and the downtrodden and have masters in the history of the intersectionality of being downtrodden and genderqueer. And these are the people who cannot find the kind of compensation they expected or wanted or feel entitled to in the private sector having gotten their master's or their PhDs. I mean, we all remember during Occupy Wall street the great profile of the guy who was so furious, who was a public school teacher who went back to grad school to get a master's in educational puppetry and is now finding out that the market for his skills is not what he was expecting. And so there is this. Marx writes a lot about alienation. The problem is it's the alienation of the sort of bohemian new class that is created. And these are the people, these are the shock troops of the dsa. And it makes sense Right. Their milieu was college. That's why they went back to grad school in part is just to keep that feeling going. They're permanent students. The woman who won the congressional primary in New York is like a lifetime PhD student at CUNY.

[Megan McCardle]

And Darieliza Chevalier. There you go. Yeah.

[Jonah Goldberg]

Who reads like, you know, who basically reads like a Howard Zinn word cloud. And so I think that's a big part of it.

[Kevin Williamson]

Can I say just for the record, that I want to go back to college and have the college experience that you people. Did you pamper aristocrats who apparently were just waited on hand and foot going through college. That was not what college is like for me. Just having a full time job after college seemed like a vacation.

[Jonah Goldberg]

Fair enough, but go ahead, please.

[Megan McCardle]

So I also actually just want to come in and reinforce it. When I went to Copenhagen to report on like, does Denmark work? And I think it does work. It has a lot of trade offs and it pretty much requires Danes to work. It's not going to work on America. But the thing that's really struck me, biking around Copenhagen, why people love it. It looks like a college campus, right? It's bike lanes everywhere, everything's super clean, all these pretty old buildings. And I think you also see this in, in the universal basic income discourse where the people who are in favor of it, they're like, it's going to be like college. We're all going to be doing art and like studying. It's like, no, no, it's going to be like West Virginia. That's what it would be like. Go to a town where like more than half of the people are on disability. That is the vision of ubi, the act. What would actually happen?

[Jonah Goldberg]

So I, I just want to put one other plug in for one other of my perennial points on this stuff, which is that I think there's an evolutionary psychology explanation for some of it. Like socialism feels natural and capitalism feels unnatural. And Lita Cosmodes is one of the leaders of evolutionary psychology. She basically says there are two archetypes from the evolutionary environment. One that leads to conservative or right wing, reactionary, whatever labels you want to put on right wing thinking, and one that leads to left wing thinking. Right wing thinking is in our evolutionary environment. Everyone is expected to help out, everyone is expected to do their share, bring down the mastodon, collect fruits and berries, whatever it is, and then they get to share in the provisions of the tribe. If someone doesn't do their share and is a free rider, people hate them. Our brains have an algorithm to kick in for that perception. The other one which leans codes the other way is the person who may do their share but gets more of their more than their share in return, right? They put in the work, but they get a third of the best cuts of the mastodon or the wildebeest or whatever, and they get more than they deserve. That codes left. And that's the whole billionaires discourse kind of stuff. And the only reason I bring this up is not to, like, I think there's a lot of just so stories to evolutionary psychology, but I do think that this is part of human nature that it explains. And the reason I bring it up, though, is that our culture is obsessed, particularly young people, particularly over educated young people are obsessed with what they think are new ideas. And there is something about frigging socialism that people are convinced is a new idea and it's sold as a new idea. I mean, go. Once you're. If you're obsessed with this point as much as I am, and you go and you look at like the media coverage or the rhetoric from DSA candidates or people talking about DSA candidates, it's like, this is the source of fresh new ideas in the Democratic Party, right? This is the source of, like, new thinking in the Democrat on the left. Like price controls are. Are. Are literally, not figuratively, literally older than Christianity. These are not new ideas in any way, but they feel new to young people in particular who are looking for this sort of deus ex makina like, solution to all of their problems. And someone says, have you heard the good word about Carl? And all of a sudden they're like, ding, ding, ding. And they feel like, oh, my gosh, why didn't anybody tell me about socialism before? This is the answer to everything.

[Kevin Williamson]

You know, there are these experiments they've done in experimental economics or behavioral economics where you'll have two parties, and one of them, you give some money to, like $10. And he gets to decide how it's divided up between him and the other guy. And the other guy can just blow up the deal. He can reject it and nobody gets anything. And so any division, no matter how unequal, would leave both parties better off. It's free money to both of them. But people will accept in those only a very little degree of inequality in the division. Like, they'll go like sort of 60, 40. But if it gets much worse than that, they'll just blow up the deal and get nothing, even though it leaves everyone worse off. There is something in us that is not just about maximizing our utils.

[Megan McCardle]

Altruistic punishers. And as an altruistic punisher, we provide a valuable service to society. There's actually, there's some fascinating anthropology on this. So David Graeber. Now, David Graeber kind of sometimes seems to have like, I don't know, made stuff up. So I'm not sure, but I'm told that this is basically reliable, is that there are two kinds of exchange in forager societies. And one kind of exchange is it's favor trading, reciprocal altruism, right? Like what you have with your family or your friends. I got dinner this time. You'll get me next time. But that those arrangements can be quite complicated. And then there's what you do with strangers, right? And that's where trade comes in. And you know, foragers do trade and they trade in various ways, but they do, when they trade with strangers, they use kind of the same sort of trading mentality that we have. And so I think one thing that people don't grasp is that in a large society of strangers, there's just like, you can. You can nationalism really important. You can gross up people's feelings about the tribe to surprisingly high levels, although those feelings will not be as intense as they are about your immediate circle of family and friends, but also even within forager bands. So Bart Wilson and Hillary Kaplan. Bart Wilson is an experimental economist, worked with Nobel Prize winner Vernon Smith in a lab at Chapman University. And Hillary Kaplan and I actually interviewed him for my book lo those many years ago. And they did some work about under what conditions do people do like communism? Because there are foragers who do communism. And you will often hear this reductively said, like, foragers just share. Actually, this is not quite true. It really. The material conditions of the foragers actually really matter. So it looks like basically people who were living on shellfish and fishing just this incredibly rich food source, they developed hierarchies, they had slaves. They like. It was very large and complicated societies that look actually, I mean a lot in some ways, like modern capitalism, but if you're at any subsistence ban, you are more likely to be sharing. But they actually. Kaplan actually studied the ache who really were extremely communist. They had a norm that no hunter was allowed to eat from his own kill. I forget whether the taboo was that it was going to deprive you of your ability to hunt or it was going to deprive you of your ability to get an erection. But either way, the social norm worked.

[Jonah Goldberg]

Tomato, tomato. Wait, what?

[Kevin Williamson]

I don't Know what your hunting technique is like people who were sort of

[Steve Hayes]

listening passively for a second.

[Megan McCardle]

Yes, it's right.

[Jonah Goldberg]

Wake up, folks.

[Megan McCardle]

Pay attention.

[Steve Hayes]

The Dispatch podcast brought to you by hims.

[Megan McCardle]

Have we gotten that ad yet? Because I think we have.

[Kevin Williamson]

Not bad things happening to Bambi.

[Megan McCardle]

Basically. The Ache, they there. It takes a huge amount of land to support a marginal forager band like this. Like, they need like 150 square kilometers. It's like, it's a lot. And so their territory keeps shrinking as agriculture encroaches, and eventually they're not viable. So these missions go in somewhat controversial because there's a dueling Catholic in a Protestant mission. They're lobbing accusations at each other. The atheists are getting in on the act and lobbing accusations at both of them. But they get in and they make settlements for the Ache so that they can learn to farm. So, fascinatingly, the Ache attempt to farm communally, just like the Pilgrims did. Can you guess how that worked out? Not so well. So, like, as. As Kaplan said to me, you know, they had this bell that they would ring for. For people to gather up and go out into the fields, just like they had gone out to forage and hunt, and they would ring the bell and no one would show up. So they did exactly what the Pilgrims did, which is they had to give individual families plots. And I think that this is another thing. So I guess, like, you know, socialists are very focused on material conditions, but in fact, the material conditions under which the norm from each according to his ability, to each according to his need, can function are where you're extremely marginal. The reason they do all this reciprocal altruism is that, A, you can't store anything, and B, you know, like, if you break your leg, you're going to die unless someone takes care of you. And so, like, investing a lot in these reciprocal relationships makes a huge amount of sense. In a large industrial economy where there are hundreds of millions of people, it breaks down. It breaks down every time. That's not to say that you can't have a welfare state. As I say, you can move some of these norms up at a weaker level. They don't function as strongly as they do in small groups, but you can get people to treat a city or a nation state or a state as like, an extension of their tribe, but like a tribe they don't care that much about. But it just breaks down. There is no way to have the kind of economy where we're just all voluntarily doing what we want and also have 330 million people running around managing a complicated economy, and none of them really want to go back and live in the woods and eat, like, bugs and berries.

[Kevin Williamson]

It would be great if IHA had had a really bad season and then discovered a band of pilgrims to bail them out, and then they wiped out those pilgrims and established their national holiday in their memory.

[Megan McCardle]

I mean, given the Protestant mission, they kind of did. Right.

[Kevin Williamson]

Maybe some Presbyterians out there. Yeah.

[Jonah Goldberg]

This podcast is going exactly as Steve planned.

[Steve Hayes]

Totally. This is where I thought we were going to be. DHA no, no, no digression.

[Megan McCardle]

I have all this knowledge, and there are just so few circumstances under which I can deploy my knowledge of the agriculturalization, of the ache that I felt like I had to. I had to dive in here.

[Jonah Goldberg]

This is why Kevin's poised to bait me into more Napoleon III discourse. Anyway, go ahead.

[Steve Hayes]

We usually try to avoid clickbait here, but I mean, if this isn't clickbait, I don't know what is. Right, yes.

[Jonah Goldberg]

Erections and subsistence farming.

[Kevin Williamson]

That.

[Steve Hayes]

That could be the headline. All right, we're going to take a quick break, but we'll be back soon with more from the Dispatch podcast. We're back. You're listening to the Dispatch podcast. Let's jump in. Kevin, in your big piece, everybody should take time to read these pieces because they make sometimes overlapping points, but often very different points. You sort of walk us through the proper understanding of socialism and make the argument that many of the people who are advocating socialism today in a modern American context don't actually mean socialism. They mean sort of Northern European welfare statism. And that's what they seem to prefer. If you look at the polling, this Echelon poll that I mentioned before, you have Democrats today surveyed broadly saying that they want the Democratic Socialists of America, some of whom are making arguments that we would recognize as advocating for actual socialism, that socialism properly understood, not just Sweden. When asked, Democrats favored the Democratic Socialists of America having a larger influence on their party by 46% to 21%, with roughly a third of them saying they don't know. I take the point that this has been driven by sort of, you know, highly educated, college educated, post grad people who are maybe not as upwardly mobile as they thought they would be or like to be. And they're driving some of this phenomenon. But if that feels overstated, that that sort of angry band of well educated people are driving poll results like that, this seems like a much broader phenomenon. You have Francesca Hong in Wisconsin, a Democratic Socialist of America candidate. We first talked about her on this podcast back in April. She is now in the latest poll, the Marquette University Law School poll, which is really one of the best polls in the country. Going into the Aug. 11 primary in Wisconsin, among Democratic primary voters, 38% said they will vote for her. The next candidate, Mandela Barnes, who has statewide name ID is at 16%. She sure looks like she's gonna win that primary. That's driven by more than sort of, you know, factions of Madison, Wisconsin would be socialists. How do you explain the broader uptake in this?

[Kevin Williamson]

Well, I think in both parties you see populists and kind of true believers and partisans whose core political belief is that their party never tries hard enough, that the other side is always ruthless, the other side is always doing everything it can. And we're always too accommodating, we're always too moderate. We never go out there and make a real case for our principles and things like that. And they get embarrassed by these so called establishment wings of their parties. I know I've bored you all with the story before, but I just remember this guy doing this discourse, this whole little speech about how he was against the Republican establishment and the establishment hated him and blah blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And he was a state party chairman at a dinner party being hosted by Larry Kudlow. I mean he was the establishment, right? But this anti establishment stuff is, is something that really goes deep, deep into people. So you know, those of us who kind of grew up on the right, we all knew people who were basically Republicans who were embarrassed to call themselves Republicans. Like a lot of so called libertarians are actually just Republicans who are embarrassed to call themselves Republicans or the Tea Party was a big part of that. People looking for an alternative to the Republican Party and you know, people who would say, well, I'm a conservative but not a Republican, which, I mean there's, there's some substance to that too. But it's also, it's a matter of making distinctions that, that they don't want to associate themselves with what they view as the more moderate deal making, compromising, wishy washy part of their party. And of course in the GOP you saw that that wing of the party rise up sort of through the Tea Party era and then in the Trump era take over the party. Now it is the establishment and you've got people on the left and in the Democratic Party who feel roughly the same way about their party, I think. And the DSA and the so called socialists and whatnot are essentially the Democrats Tea Party. It's for People who want a more confrontational kind of politics, a less compromising kind of politics, a more ideological and extreme kind of politics, but, but mainly, and above all, one that gives them the kind of emotional satisfaction that they want from politics. They want this kind of mood of confrontation and being uncompromising and all the rest of it. So the ideology all kind of gets filled in afterward. It's sort of secondary. And if you remember, the Tea Party was all about let's balance the budget and rate in the spending, and it ends up in the Trump era, which is like, screw balancing the budget, let's spend all the money and find some more money and make up some money and invent some money and spend that money too. And so what the policies actually look like can change from place to place, but the temperament stays very much the same. And I think that's what we're seeing over there. McCardell got a lot of grief from her readers for not distinguishing between the Eastern bloc and the more democratic kinds of socialists. And while the memory of Soviet communism and the Iron Curtain really has faded for a lot of people, I don't think Americans really ever had much of a memory of, say, pre Thatcher uk. But ask Charlie Cook sometime about what that era was like. And you know, the United Kingdom was not some Leninist hellhole, but it was a laborite, you know, social democracy for a while. And it took 16 months to get a telephone turned on. You know, you would have these endless, endless strikes that just went on forever and ever and ever. And they had just, you know, years and years and years of poor economic performance and an increase in real poverty. And these things are things that you see all the way across the board. So I think that you've got a kind of vacuum of knowledge and a vacuum of context and historical understanding. You got a vacuum of understanding of the underlying economic issues, like, you know, what a public good is and why we have government that provides things like welfare states or national defense or things like that. You hear this dumb rhetoric from so called socialists all the time that, well, if you don't like socialism, don't drive on the roads and as though the only alternative to socialism or being like some sort of Murray Rothbard anarcho capitalist, which, you know, got some sympathies that way. But it's not the only two ways of thinking about the universe. And the United States has never been a socialist country, and it's also never been an anarcho capitalist country. We've had the ability to distinguish between public goods and other sorts of things the government may do, but they want to rhetorically flatten that stuff and essentially, you know, argue that any kind of government economic action is what they mean by socialism. And so why can't we have more of that? I think it might have been Jonah who wrote this, but one of the ways you can really tell where someone's or might have been PJ o', Rourke, which is a good person to get confused with. But you'll. If you ask people, like how they feel about the word public, it'll tell you a lot about their politics, because some people, they think it means public library. And public libraries used to be pretty nice places. And we all like public libraries. Other people think public toilet, and that's, you know, you're two versions of public. And I think conservatives are basically people who hear public and think public toilet. Oh, speaking of phrases that stick in your head, McCardell writing about a quote, virgin tax base ripe for the plucking in her socialism column. This phrase is stuck in my head in an uncomfortable kind of way. And it just keeps bouncing around in there.

[Megan McCardle]

I think about virgin tax bases, right,

[Kevin Williamson]

for the plucking and brave warriors with erections.

[Jonah Goldberg]

I mean, like, there's something going on here. I think we touched on something. Steve, you mentioned the Echelon pole, right? And Kevin talks about what just an absolute case England was in the 1970s, right? And this gets at something that I just think our side, broadly speaking, from the libertarians all the way to the conservatives, what they seem to forget is that Americans don't like socialism or don't like the things that socialism generates, right? And so even the Echelon Poll, socialism scores very highly, basically only with Democrats under 50, and capitalism scores badly. Then you ask them, what's your favorability towards free market economy? And it bumps up like, what is it, 41 points or something like that. It just flies the other way right? Now, the four of us could have a very deep conversation, granular conversation, about what the difference between capitalism and free market economy is. But at the level of dictionary definitions, they're synonyms. And what this tells us is that capitalism is coded as something very different than free market economy for these people. And I don't blame them for that, right? I mean, the four of us could also have a deep conversation about how if capitalism is just defined as the status quo, which I think it is, as Kevin was losing to earlier, then it includes crony capitalism, it includes corporatism, it includes all the sort of cruddy stuff that Trump is doing Right. It includes the bureaucracy of big health care companies. And if you're gonna call that capitalism. I don't blame people for disliking capitalism. I mean, that's fine. But the fact that they like free market economy tells you that they're not really talking about capitalism.

[Megan McCardle]

And I think what people hate is corporations.

[Jonah Goldberg]

Fair.

[Kevin Williamson]

Sure.

[Megan McCardle]

And I think this is like, you know, I don't agree with that. That hot take, but I think it's really common. You see it in the polling. They're like, do anything to corporations. Corporations suck. Like, shut them down. Destroy.

[Kevin Williamson]

But they only. They only hate, like five kinds of corporations, though. It's like they hate credit card companies, they hate their health insurance company and a few other things like that. But most, most trying to cancel a gym membership's a pain in the ass. They hate their cable provider, if they still have a cable provider. But normally they're okay. Like, nobody's mad at their grocery store.

[Megan McCardle]

Yeah, no, weirdly, like, they, they love individual corporations. When you pull, like, Amazon, all of the people who are like, we need to break up Amazon. Cause that'll be popular. Like Amazon. Way more popular than any of the lefties who want to break up Amazon.

[Jonah Goldberg]

Yeah, yeah. But this gets to the point that, I mean, I don't like how everything's the culture war, but everything's the culture war. And so socialism versus capitalism is a cultural war argument masquerading as an economics argument. And some of the best evidence for that is if you actually go and read the DSA platform. I mean, just a couple quick points. One, one of the things they, you know, they just came out with this new platform. One of the things they want to get rid of is the Senate, which just tells you how stupid a political program this is. Right. But one of the other things they call for is a complete end of all boycotts, economic blockades, sanctions. And they're talking about Cuba, North Korea, and those kinds of places. I don't think they feel that way about Israel. Right.

[Megan McCardle]

No. They also want sanctions on Israel.

[Jonah Goldberg]

Right, that's my point. They hate all economic sanctions for authoritarian communist countries, but for Israel, they're fine with the BDS stuff. But more importantly, all that stuff about, like, abolish the police and defund the police. I'm just going to assert that, and I'm open for correction here. In the long history of socialism and communism, the idea that the police were something that socialists wanted to get rid of is one of the dumbest, most historically ignorant things you could possibly claim. It's sort of like they want to get rid of borders. Right. The East Germans didn't build the Berlin Wall as installation art. Right. I mean, they didn't put guards on it as sort of a theatrical mime show. Right.

[Kevin Williamson]

And when tax rates hit 92%, you need a lot of police.

[Megan McCardle]

Yeah.

[Jonah Goldberg]

Yes. Well, that's the thing is you're gonna outlaw all sorts of things. So, like. And the decarceralization, like, a lot of socialists actually believed in prisons, too. So, like, so much of this is aspirational, airy fairy. I think very stupid on a lot of it. I mean, not necessarily morally stupid. Right. I mean, there are some things there that they care about that I think we can have some sympathy for and some empathy for. Because, like, our incarceration rates are bad. Right. The lack of housing is something we should be concerned with. But these are all about descriptors. Their actual discussion of this stuff is just not about economics. And there are a lot of right wingers who want to claim that this is all about economics. And the last point is, Americans don't like long lines. Americans don't like shortages. Americans don't like waiting six months for a knee replacement. The idea that if these people got into power, they will never leave power. It's just a doppelganger of, like, the arguments you hear about the Trump people that, you know. And that's why the Trump administration is doing all this red menace, red scare thing, because they want to convince people that if DSA candidates get into Congress, it's just going to be a slippery slope and we're going to be in work camps within, you know, 10 years. It's just not true, because this country is going to chew that up and spit it out like, you know, nobody's business.

[Steve Hayes]

So I want to pick up on that point because I think you can read your LA Times column that we published on the Dispatch on Wednesday, and we'll link to all of these pieces in the show. Notes. This may be an oversimplification. It is an oversimplification. It may not be fair, but I think you could read your LA Times column as saying, yeah, this stuff is never gonna happen. They don't mean pure socialism, so we really don't need to worry about it that much. And I would just say, first of all, push back if you think that's grossly unfair description of your column. But also I would point to the two things that Kevin mentioned to push back on that claim. One, if this is just sort of the latest demonstration of frustration and exasperation by people on the left against the establishment. It's not, they don't really want socialism. They're not talking about seizing the means of production, but they're just angry and they don't know where to go. And this is where they're going. So these are the people who are sort of most potentially disruptive. So they're for them. And I think, Kevin, you make that argument in your piece as well, but then also talking about the UK and the policies that we saw in the UK when Charlie Cook was growing up there, they're tremendously damaging policies.

[Jonah Goldberg]

Yes.

[Steve Hayes]

So it's not necessarily the case that like this is all overblown. They don't really mean socialism. So this is not likely to do any real harm. I mean, you're talking about Democratic socialist mayors of major cities, you're talking about people winning primaries. You're talking about these Democratic socialists pulling the Democratic Party far to the left, even if they don't even really understand why, and even if it's not, as you say about capitalism, the potential for tremendous sort of medium and maybe even long term damage as a result of the rise of this I think is very serious.

[Jonah Goldberg]

Totally fair and I totally agree with that. I just think that's a misreading of me to say that I don't agree with that. These guys can do an enormous amount of damage. They can particularly do it in places like New York City and, you know, and Washington D.C. where they can have a freer reign to implement their ideas. Right now there's basically one DSA Senator, US Senator Bernie Sanders, so they'll get two. That could actually have the unintended consequence of pushing the Democratic Party rightward because people aren't gonna wanna be in more purple states, aren't gonna wanna be associated with the DSA caucus in the Senate. I mean, it's all unpredictable. All I'm just saying is it's not as these straight line projections are kind of ridiculous. My point is, yeah, their ideas are all bad. And I, and I'll just rephrase it a little bit. The actual DSA people, I mean the, the, not the people voting for them, but the people in that party, they really do want socialism.

[Steve Hayes]

Yeah.

[Jonah Goldberg]

Or worse. I mean, I, I, I believe I take them at the word. They are committed ideologues. I, you know, I went over the last couple weeks, went through all the DSA factions and you know, there are, there are literal Maoists as in the dsa actually, like, like not figuratively.

[Steve Hayes]

Mao is the backdrop of their photographs. Yes.

[Jonah Goldberg]

And they have, you know, fact Pages, you know, FAQs on, you know, common misunderstandings about Mao. I mean, like, they're defending Mao objectively. Happy to stipulate all that. I just think the voters voting for this stuff aren't necessarily those people because there aren't enough of those people in America. And that doesn't mean these people can't do real damage. But the bigger damage, outside of, like, these cities or towns where they can take control, the bigger damage at the national level that they're gonna do is by perpetuating the stupidity of our political era, by making the Democratic Party an even crazier party and by providing the Democratic side of the constant catastrophism that has made the Republican Party so dysfunctional. Because now we have a thing where, like, you know, the democracy is over if we elect Donald Trump or we elect JD Vance or we elect Republicans, and it's the end of. End of America, as Hannity would say in 2016, at the beginning of every radio show, it's only three or 38 more days to whether or not it's the end of America. Right? And that gave people all sorts of permission to vote for Donald Trump. Now we got a handful of clowns who have the courage of their convictions in the Democratic Party, which has very little courage and very few convictions. And so therefore, they're taking up all the oxygen in the Democratic Party, and they have all the young people on their side. And if there's one thing that center left people have an unbelievable cowardly weakness for is passionate young people. They've convinced themselves that passionate young people have to be right about frigging everything. Because in the 1960s, they were passionate young people. Most of them didn't actually show up at protests, but they watched them on TV and through the miracle of nostalgia, now think they were protesters. Regardless, they think that if the young people are going that way, they must go with them, for they are their leaders. And so they're pulling the Democratic Party in a stupid, dangerous, and radically dysfunctional way that is going to give Republican voters and independent voters the best possible excuse to vote for Republicans again, which is just incredibly stupid. You know, like a Clintonian candidate would say, the sister soldier caucus. I don't want anything to do with it. They raise some important issues, but their solutions suck. They suck. They're dangerous. I'm a different way Democratic Party is right now, with the exception of maybe Rahm Emanuel, incapable of making those arguments. And that's why this is really bad. To me, it's not because we're gonna have breadlines.

[Kevin Williamson]

Yeah.

[Jonah Goldberg]

It's because we're going to have another frigging decade of two completely hysterical, ridiculous parties playing on the fears of marginal voters about which party is the lesser evil.

[Steve Hayes]

Well, and you saw this immediately when Hakeem Jeffries, the Democratic leader in the House of Representatives, the day after these three Democratic Socialists of America candidates, one in New York, was asked about their views on CNBC by Andrew Ross Sorkin. I think it was the. The day after. And Andrew Ross Sorkin sort of read some of the particulars of the things that they not only believed, but they had actually run on. And Jeffries was sort of outraged that he would even be asked about these things. Those are absolutely not my views. That's crazy. Distance himself as much as he could from those views. And then the very next day sent a tweet saying, we welcome these candidates in the Democratic Party. And that's what I think will be a challenge for him if he's the speaker of the House in November. But you're likely to see this broader acceptance of these candidates, if not necessarily all their views in the Democratic Party in a way that I think will lead to the distortive effects. And as we've seen from the Tea Party. Look, if the Tea Party had won on the things that the Tea Party grew up on and was arguing at the outset, people like me would be very happy. We have seen instead, as Kevin points out, what the Tea Party had become. I remember at the time being so offended when you had sort of mainstream media types claiming that the Tea Party was nothing but a tantrum. This was a tantrum. This is just an expression of frustration. These people don't really believe. They don't really want smaller government. And I, in my most earnest way, would say, absolutely they do. They all believe what I believe. And that turned out not to have been true at all. And we've now seen for the last 15 years the damage that that kind of just expression of frustration can. The havoc it can wreak.

[Kevin Williamson]

One of the reasons that kind of thing is dangerous is socialism isn't the only bad idea. Right? There are ways to destroy a country with other bad ideas. And while these sort of radicals and populists in the Democratic Party may not be true believing socialists, they really are pretty friendly to what most of us, I think, would characterize as mob rule. You know, they do want an unwielder, more unwieldy or more majoritarian kind of democracy. And I think it's important to understand that they aren't Bolsheviks, they're Jacobins. Jacobins manage to do a lot of damage too.

[Jonah Goldberg]

Yeah.

[Megan McCardle]

So I, in my worst episode of writing the lead on the way to the ballpark was that I went back and forth all throughout 2016 about whether Trump could win. And then by November, I was like, he's done. All the pollsters say he's done. I had this niggling feeling he was not done. But I was like, I must be wrong. These people are also smart. And my husband and I, who were both exhausted from the campaign, we were like, look, we know who's gonna be in the Hillary Clinton administration. It's not that interesting to us. Cause none of them were gonna talk to us. We have all these airline miles, let's go to Asia for two weeks. So I wrote my column the night before, and then I had to rip it up, write another column and get on an airplane. And I was really jet lagged. And so I started writing stuff on Facebook about what had happened. And I wrote a post that I still think resonates today, which is I said, democrats, this is coming for you. And now I think I was a little wrong about the timing. And I think that's in part because Trump did hold the establishment together with its fractious base longer than otherwise would have happened. But the fundamental thing, this is structural and it's about social media and the decline of parties and a bunch of other stuff, and it is enabling fractious factions to take over and do things that are deadly both on a policy level and on a winning general elections level. And I think that was something that you saw and certainly in the 2020 primary, came back to bite Kamala with all of the, like, endorse my most radical fringe culture war position. And it wasn't just like the, you know, the trans prisoners thing. They were all on stage and they were like, who favors giving free health care to illegal immigrants? And it was like, oh, me, me, me, me, me, me, Wait, call on me, teacher, let me talk about it. And it was like, and I think that you are gonna see more of it. And you know, the, the self satisfied Democratic center left thought of this as a Republican problem. And I got a lot of you guys didn't stop this. You guys were nurturing this in your party. And then when it came, you all capitulated. And they've completely forgotten the zillion times that the Republican establishment tried to put down the Trumpian insurrection with zero success. I was on the floor when Mike Lee, who has gone based that is literally his Twitter handle now based Mike Lee. I was on the floor when he led an attempt to get the convention to nominate someone other than Donald Trump. When Ted Cruz was like, not super complimentary about Donald Trump in his speech. Right. All of that stuff happened. But there was also more organized attempts to shut this down and they failed. And Democrats are now in that same thing. You saw it with Grant Platner. Right. There was somewhat more ability to shut him out, but it was only because his poles cratered. If his polls had stayed strong, they would have rallied behind him. And because you could see them doing it. Right. He wasn't a celebrity. He hadn't already, like, he wasn't a critical. It wasn't like the presidency, which does bend people's brains more. But like, a lot of people were explaining why we should go along. So, like, you know, it was really like, you could say it's gross and it's reprehensible and that's true. And I said those things about Republicans who capitulated to Trump, and I stand by those things to this day. But it's also just understandable because you can't stop it. The parties are no longer strong enough to stop it.

[Steve Hayes]

Yeah.

[Megan McCardle]

And they're now trying to move their primary schedule around to try to empower moderate working class black voters who they think are going to help them get a Moderate nominated in 2028. Godspeed. But I think that this is sticking your finger in the dike when there is a tsunami coming.

[Steve Hayes]

Yeah. You can't see where this is going. I mean, if you buy Kevin's construct of the Tea Party and morphing into MAGA and where we are today, the Tea Party, that started out as a pretty radical in the best possible way, small government movement is now sort of core. The base of it is now supporting a president who, if you buy the old school definition of socialism that Kevin uses in his Wonderland, I would argue that Donald Trump, by taking stakes in these companies, is actually in some ways more socialist than Barack Obama, who the Republicans rose up against because he was so socialist. So, yeah, we can't determine where these things are going. Okay, we're an hour in. We need to wrap soon. But I want to invite each of you to give us a minute on what we saw on Capitol Hill Wednesday with Anthony Fauci testifying before Congress. A lot of raised voices, a lot of shouting, a lot of outrage, much of it deserved. Interested in your thoughts on Anthony Fauci and that testimony. And then we will get to a brief not Worth your time. Kevin, I'll start with you.

[Kevin Williamson]

Yeah, we have a lot of conversation about Americans distrust of experts and expertise and this sort of, you know, management class. And man, these people just seem to be intent on undermining whatever credibility they have left of their own. Although timing wise, I kind of suspect that we're in an era of our politics where Republicans, particularly those who are close to Trump, are looking for anything other than Iran to talk about. And so we're going to revisit some of these greatest hits from, you know, the COVID era and some of these other things. There are going to be all sorts of attempts over the next, between now and the next election to gin up various kinds of, you know, low stakes culture war controversies in order to not talk about the things that they don't want to talk about, which is the foundering war in Iran and the continual, the continued non abatement of inflation.

[Steve Hayes]

Megan?

[Megan McCardle]

Yeah, look, I think there's two things you can say and one is that we are going to be relitigating what happened during the pandemic, some of the culture war stuff, because people aren't done being mad. And I think you've seen this more broadly with there's been a fight over academia where there was a report from Vanderbilt and Washington University criticized the humanities for being too postmodern and too woke and letting politics infect their scholarship. And then the head of the American Anthropological association gave this incredibly bad interview in which she tried to dispel these myths and instead reaffirmed them. And people I saw, I've seen this like multiple times now where people are like, why are we still talking about this? People on the left. And it's like, cuz we're not done being mad yet, guys, we got some ways to go. And that's also true on the right. On the left, right. Like when Trump is out, there's gonna be a lot of Republicans are gonna be like, can we just put that behind us? I don't even remember this Trump bump. I'm not sure I've heard of this guy. And the Democrats are quite properly gonna be like, no, not done being mad yet. We got some time on this one. So I think that Republicans are a little overplaying their hand because this is quite an elite obsession. But I also think that Anthony Fauci is revealing exactly why people are so mad, right? This guy could not shut up. And look, I kind of like the guy. I'm not like, I'm not like a huge Fauci critic. He's like the worst and whatever. I don't think he was the worst. I think that a lot of the things are mad about, people are mad about would have happened with or without him. But the diaries are kind of embarrassingly starstruck, talking about all of the famous people who want to talk to him. Self absorbed and then deceptive. Right. Where he's doing. He's trying to play some sort of 9D chess where he doesn't tell people what he thinks because he thinks that that will, it'll be better if they. He tells them something different and then they do the thing he thinks they should do and then could not shut up for two years is all over the media everywhere. And now he's taking the fifth and he's got a pardon. Now look, maybe there's some legal complication I don't understand, but I don't really understand why, you know, like I'm foursquare in favor of fifth amendment rights against self incrimination, but like, he's not going to jail for this. So what's going on here?

[Steve Hayes]

Before we take an ad break, please consider becoming a member of the Dispatch. You'll unlock access to bonus podcast episodes and all of our exclusive newsletters and articles. You can sign [e-mail] join and if you use the promo code roundtable, you'll get a month free. And speaking of ads, if they aren't your thing, you can upgrade to a premium membership. No ads, early access to all episodes, two free gift memberships to give away, exclusive town halls with the founders, and much, much more. Okay, we'll be right back. Welcome back. Let's return to our discussion. Yeah, we didn't get, Jonah, the answers that I think many of us still want or even just to have Anthony Fauci explain the many times he contradicted himself. I mean, some of this, I think, and, and we've talked about this before. It was a difficult time. It was a novel coronavirus. It was a pandemic. There's a lot of things we didn't know. So I think you give people grace to make mistakes and to do their best in trying circumstances. But I think what's emerged about Anthony Fauci is that in many cases he was just saying things that weren't true and was saying things that weren't true. And then sometimes very shortly after saying the opposite. So he drove some of this confusion. I think he thought that these were noble lies. They turn out, I think in many cases to have been ignoble lies.

[Jonah Goldberg]

Yeah, this is one of these situations. First of all, to answer Megan's question, I think I know the answer to it, which is that not implausibly, Fauci thinks that Rand Paul or one of the other Republicans want to catch him in a perjury trap. Right. Get him to answer a question that is contradicted by something else he said somewhere or some other piece of data. And it's such a. We have to wait for the advisory opinions episode to really get into the weeds on this. It's like, can you really plead the Fifth under congressional rules for fear that you might commit perjury prospectively? I mean, that's kind of weird, but I think that's the concern in terms of all of this. I'm so angry at everybody, right? This is one of these things where I'm really pissed at Fauci because he is confirming the suspicions and accusations of some of the worst people on the Internet. Right. Who are profound hypocrites themselves. That doesn't. And so, like, you know, there's a meme on. On Twitter. Oh, the worst person in the world has made a good point. Like, some of the people who hate Fauci were total Covid hysterics at the beginning of COVID and then switched gears and memory hold their position, which was closer to Fauci's. A lot of them are like the biggest water carriers in the world for Donald Trump, who, let us recall, was the president during a lot of this

[Steve Hayes]

period and later gave Fauci an award,

[Jonah Goldberg]

gave Fauci ward and empowered Fauci to do all sorts of things. Although there's a lot of myth making about the actual power that Fauci had. But at the same time, like, I don't want to seem like I'm minimizing what a crap weasel Fauci seems like here. Right. And I think the part of the problem is that. And I've known this to happen to older people, particularly when they get caught up in media stuff. I mean, it happens to younger people, too. But, like, the grandiosity, I mean, we see it on display with the current president. But, like, the grandiosity of being mentioned in the press and being the center of attention can really mess people up, particularly of a certain age. And that is a really terrible and irresponsible and indefensible thing to happen during a pandemic to the chief spokesman of the public health sector and to have that guy completely change positions on a bunch of things, give noble lies, while also saying in. I mean, I think there's Actually, a quote of him saying, I am the science, you know, like, I am science. I am the oracle of capital S science and the goddess Athena, you know, and that kind of thing that. Sorry, I have Odyssey brain. And so that is unforgivable to me. And I think part of the problem we have is that we never really just got real clarity about the origins of COVID And it is one of these things that the absence of good information has created a great market for bad information. And they're trying to scapegoat Fauci, and he's got a lot of it coming. And so, like, the cynicism, you know, Rand Paul's running for president, and he's gonna use this as his issue. I am amazed. Like, it's a kind of a fascinating thing to me, historically. No one seems particularly concerned about how we got his personal diary, you know, and that they're just airing out some dude's personal diary to humiliate him. You know, you can frame a guilty man. Like, the stuff in the diary is really damning, but it's just a very strange situation. And it's very difficult for me to find anybody directly involved in the politics of this that I am not enraged by.

[Kevin Williamson]

You may not want him to be a scapegoat, but, you know, he is a goat.

[Steve Hayes]

Finally reading this week about one Jose Flores, a 119-year-old from Costa Rica who experts are trying to validate as the world's current oldest living human being. And it made me want to ask you a question. Two questions, really. One, would you want to live to 119 years old? Actually, three questions. That's one. Two, is there anything you're currently doing to extend your life with the purpose of extending your life living longer? And three, I don't remember what three was. So just answer those two questions. Megan, I'll start with you.

[Megan McCardle]

You know, my grandmother lived to be over 100. President Obama sent her a card. I did not look at that and think, you know, that's what I want. She lost the ability to speak. She lost the ability to recognize people. She was living on these diets that they give old people so they won't choke, where they have to solidify your water. So you basically get water jello. I mean, it did not look great to me. Now, look, if it was, like, a healthy lifespan. Yes. I had a fun conversation once with a guy who had some plan to, like, turn people into class

[Jonah Goldberg]

or.

[Megan McCardle]

Or it was some weird thing like that. Like, it was not just freezing your head and he Was like, well, don't you want to live forever? And I said, yes, but I'm planning to do it the old fashioned way. And that, that got me a, it got me a funny look. But not a lot of, not a lot of Catholics wandering around Silicon Valley. I don't know, I, I feel like at some point it's enough, right. In part because like, you lose your ability to do great stuff and you, you end up kind of housebound and watching cable news all day. But also because like, you know, you gotta give everyone else a shot too. We need people. It would be sad if no one ever died. I think a lot about, like, why does death exist? Because it didn't have to evolve, right? There are single cell organisms, can, some of them can just keep going forever. So why do we have death? Well, death is what enables change. If we were all hanging around forever, no society would be able to change. Organisms wouldn't be able to evolve. Right. It's really, really important to have death in the world. Like, look, I am now, I'm in my 50s, I'm doing all the stuff that everyone else is trying to do to extend their life. Like, I should eat less sodium, I need to cut back on the carbs because my A1C is rising. Just like my dad's dated at this age, I gotta like all that stuff. But am I like fixating on microdosing supplements and you know, stuff like this Brian Johnson guy? Yeah, you know, it's funny, like he talks about it and his life seems so joyless because he is focused on the mechanics of getting eking out another few days rather than the mechanics of making the most of the days he has?

[Steve Hayes]

Kevin, is there an optimal age at which you would like to leave this earth and usher in the change that Megan is talking about?

[Kevin Williamson]

You know, if my kids wait as long as I did to have kids, I'm not gonna have any grandchildren until I'm 99, so I may want a little time with them. Jonah's buddy over at Reason, who he did a podcast with the other day, whose name escapes me.

[Jonah Goldberg]

Ron Bailey.

[Kevin Williamson]

Yeah, Ron Bailey. Thank you. If I can live to 125 and be like, you know, healthy and happy through that time, that'd be fine. Am I doing things to extend my life? Well, fairly visibly, I think. You know, as I tell people, there are good carbs and there are bad carbs, and it turns out that like a liter of Wild Turkey every day wasn't one of the good ones. And so having cut that out seems to have made a huge difference in my quality of living. But no, God, I'm. I'm. I'm lucky to have made it this far. So I'm just going to keep rolling the dice.

[Steve Hayes]

Jonah, Jose Flores is apparently pretty healthy. He's described as healthy in this El Pais article that I was reading about him. Would you want to live to 125? And are you doing anything to live to? Well, he's 119.

[Jonah Goldberg]

Well, I mean, I think inherent in the question is, are we compos mentis? Right? Cause like, I don't think any of us want to be drooling liabilities to our families for years on end, right. Without any enjoyment or quality of life.

[Megan McCardle]

I mean, you're describing my life now, Jonah.

[Steve Hayes]

So that's exactly the opening was there to take it to you, Jonah, and I did not.

[Jonah Goldberg]

Well, it's funny, the phrase drooling liability, why it comes so easily to me is that when was the name of

[Kevin Williamson]

your band in high school, whenever my

[Jonah Goldberg]

dad was asked when he wanted to retire, he would say, when I'm a drooling liability to the company. So I want to live a long life or longish life. I don't know that I need to go through that far. I think maintaining the kind of health where you can still walk around, do things is, like, important. My mom basically spent the last three or four years essentially like one of the old folks in the beginning of Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, just in bed for the most part. And I think that it creates its own cycle of decline. And it's very depressing. And am I doing anything about it? Well, now you'll all be shocked to learn since I've moved, I've made it a point to walk at least 10,000 steps a day. And my average over the last six weeks is like 9,980 steps a day. And that's hard for me to do in the summer because I sweat like a fat man in an all you can eat pasta bar. But I'm doing it. And I think Megan's point is right about, you know, we need death, but we could adjust if we all got older. You know, fertility rates are declining and all that kind of stuff. I think there are adjustments to be made. I think it's very sad that a lot of people are going to be taken care of by robots in our future. But that's a subject for another day. But I am not obsessed with this. I mean, I know people who are obsessed with this stuff, and I think that's a great way to avoid enjoying the quality of life you have now, being worried about the quality of life you're going to have in your last few years or overly worried. So, you know, it would be nice to live a while and be healthy and be able to, you know, do stuff. But it's not, it's, it's not my top priority. If it were, as Steve can attest, more than anyone else here, my lifestyle would be much different.

[Steve Hayes]

Well, if we all live to be as old as Jose Flores is today, 119, none of us will have yet hit the halfway point in our life, which is pretty amazing thing to consider.

[Jonah Goldberg]

And unlikely.

[Steve Hayes]

Yeah, unlikely. All I know is my joints are so bad right now at 55, I can't even imagine and what they would be in 50 years.

[Kevin Williamson]

Do you remember that French woman who lived to be like 120 something? She was the oldest person in the world for a long time. She had known Vincent Van Gogh when she was young and she quit smoking when she was like 110 or something like that. But it was basically just because her eyesight was failing and she couldn't see well enough to light her own cigarettes. And she was vain about it.

[Jonah Goldberg]

My grandmother, when she got rid of her pickup truck and got a Cadillac at like 85 because after her stroke she needed to be able to drive one handed and needed power steering.

[Kevin Williamson]

My mother, who drove a great big old Cadillac, the heavy kind that you kill people with, did not have a right leg.

[Jonah Goldberg]

Nice.

[Kevin Williamson]

But she drove with her prosthesis. And so she was, you know, not able to feel the accelerator or the pedal. And she also had a largely paralyzed right arm. So she was not the most calming presence in the driver's seat.

[Steve Hayes]

There are always when you have these news articles about people who have lived to 114 or 119, there's almost always one either sentence or paragraph that says and so and so drank a Dr. Pepper every day or and so and so did shots of Uzo. You know, at there's something. Those are the things that I always latch onto. I can keep doing the things that I'm doing just in, in moderation and continue to live a long life. That's it. Thanks for joining us. Talk to you soon. Finally, if you want to support what we're doing here, you can rate, review and subscribe to the show on your podcast player of choice to help new listeners find it us. And speaking of support, here's a shout out to a few folks who recently joined as founding Lifetime members. Jonathan Fisher, Debbie McQueen and Jenny Murray, we're glad to have you aboard. One quick note, we're ending our founding lifetime membership offer at the end of August. If you're interested in supporting the Dispatch and enjoying a lifetime of Dispatch editorial goodness, please join us as a Dispatch founding Lifetime member to as always, if you've got questions, comments, concerns or corrections, you can email [e-mail] we read everything, even the emails we get from people who are well over 100 years of age. That's going to do it for today's show. Thanks so much for tuning in. And thank you to the folks behind the scenes who made this episode possible. Noah Hickey and Peter Bonaventure. Thanks again for listening. Please join us next time.

[Jonah Goldberg]

Sam.