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- [00:00]
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- [00:50]
Ross Douthat
And now the good fight with Yasha Monk.
- [00:58]
Seth Moskowitz
My name is Seth Moskowit and I'm an associate editor at Persuasion. I recently wrote a piece for Persuasion called Commercial Interests Aren't Enough to Save Free Speech, and the piece is all about what happened at Netflix after the company released Dave Chappelle's new stand up special called the Closer. In the show, Chappelle makes jokes about pretty much every identity group, including Jewish people, black people, white people, and gay people. But activists were most angry at his jokes about transgender people, to the point where some were actually calling on Netflix to take the special down from their streaming service. In response to those demands, Netflix's co CEO Ted Sarandos sent out a memo that rejected these activists demands, and that statement does highlight the company's commitment to creative freedom. But it also makes it clear that Netflix is defending Dave Chappelle largely because of the financial interests that it has to do that. Sornandos wrote in the memo that Chappelle is one of the most popular stand up comedians today and we have a long standing deal with him. His last special, Sticks and Stones, also Controversial, is our most watched, stickiest and most award winning stand up special to date. But if Chappelle weren't one of the country's most popular comedians and his special wasn't doing so well, would it be okay to censor his work and take it down then? That is the focus of my piece. Of course. It's gratifying when what's good for business is also good for free expression, and that makes it sometimes tempting to let the defense of free speech rest on popular opinion or commercial incentives. But my piece argues that that would be a mistake because profit incentives can be fleeting and it would be naive to think that business incentives and profit motives will always support open discourse. Some of our most important knowledge building institutions have seen this, including academia and journalism, which face fundamentally illiberal market pressures and they often actually cave to them. That's why it's not especially surprising. But of course it's concerning when the New York Times pushes controversial journalists out of the newsroom or when the University of North Carolina denies tenure to progressive professor, seemingly because they they were pressured by a conservative donor to do that. It's not that hard to imagine a world where Netflix would face this kind of pressure and would be rewarded financially for removing content like the Chappelle Special if it were actually truly unpopular and people weren't watching it and were upset by it. Of course, liberals can celebrate when profit incentives and the defense of free expression align like they did this time. But we shouldn't convince ourselves that business interests will always or even usually be a sufficient bulwark against liberalism. And that is why we have to continue making the public case for liberalism, because ultimately the only true safeguard against censorship will be a principled commitment to free speech that's embedded in our culture and in our institutions. I hope you give the article a read and enjoy.
- [04:06]
Persuasion Podcast Host
Seth Moskowitz piece called Commercial Interests Aren't Enough to Save Free Speech was published by Persuasion. To learn more about the community we're building at Persuasion and to get similar articles directly into your inbox, head to www. Persuasion.community
- [04:27]
Podcast Host (interviewer)
My guest today is Ross Douthat. Ross, of course, is a columnist for the New York Times, and in my mind, one of the most intellectually and ideologically surprising writers, somebody whose writing comes from a consistent set of principles and values, but who often surprises you with his choice of topics, with his choice of takes. And that, to me, is something truly refreshing in this deeply ideological and polarized moment. Ross has a new book out called the Deep A Memoir of Illness and Discovery, a story of his long struggle with Lyme disease. And it served us as an opening point to to a really searching conversation, I think, about the role of peace, when to trust it and when not to trust it. What widespread skepticism about the role of experts and establishment institutions has to do with populism. And of course, a perennial favorite, how dangerous Donald Trump and how dangerous another presidency by Donald Trump would be. I hope you enjoyed the conversation. Ross Staufetch, welcome to the podcast.
- [05:32]
Ross Douthat
Thank you so much for having me. It's a pleasure.
- [05:34]
Podcast Host (interviewer)
So you've just written a book that I have to say, astounded me because it shared with a wide audience the fact that you've been very sick for a number of years, of which I, as a regular reader of your column, had absolutely no inkling. So I'm in awe of your productivity. But one of the interesting things I found in it was this sort of slow discovery of the limits, often establishment consensus, and this sort of finding yourself in this situation of having to rethink what the consensus view is. And I have to say that if I've changed my mind about something over the last four or five years, it is sort of the extent to which I defer to the prevailing opinion on any number of issues. So I guess I'd love to hear a little bit about your experience and perhaps particularly from the angle of what that was like, to start by trusting off what the first doctor you meet tell you and becoming increasingly skeptical that that is, in fact, the best road to recovery.
- [06:34]
Ross Douthat
Yes, I think there's a very interesting, in my case, somewhat painful education that you can get in the dynamics of consensus and expertise from having a mysterious chronic illness that nobody knows how to treat. And it's a zone of human experience that is less political than most of the things that you and I write about. Obviously, in the age of COVID arguments about disease and treatment have become more political. And, you know, of course, that tends to happen whenever you have a novel disease or a new epidemic. It obviously happened with the AIDS epidemic in the US but things like chronic illness sort of exist a little more in a zone outside the sphere that pundits write about, which is one reason why I didn't write about it that much while it was at its worst. There were plenty of reasons why I didn't write about it when it was at its worst, but that was one of them. But, yeah, I mean, basically, almost seven years ago in the spring, my family and I were moving from Washington, D.C. to a house in the countryside of Connecticut in the northeast of the United States. And while we were sort of in the process of making the move, I became very, very sick. And in a way that was extremely mysterious. I was having terrible body pain, phantom heart attacks, crippling insomnia, sleeping one hour a night, this whole very extraordinary range of symptoms all around my body. And there was nothing showing up on any kind of blood test to say what was actually wrong with me. And at a certain point, after months and months of this, and after we had finally made this move to Connecticut, somehow I basically figured out that I had what a lot of people in the northeast of the United States know well, which is this condition called Lyme disease that is named for Lyme and Old Lyme, these very nice coastal towns in Connecticut that happen to be inhabited by the deer tick, which is this tiny creature that piggybacks on deer and chipmunks and human beings, among others, and spreads a bacteria that can cause devastating illness. But it's a devastating illness and also an incredibly controversial one because most people who get sick with it take four to six weeks of antibiotics and feel much better and go on with their lives. And then some contested percentage, anywhere from 5 to 25%, don't get better. And officially at that point, the American medical establishment has very little to offer them.
- [09:12]
Podcast Host (interviewer)
And not only does it have little to offer them, but often it doubts that it is in fact the bacterium that caused the illness. Right. So there's a sort of either prevailing consensus or at least a really widespread belief that this is psychosomatic in some kind of way.
- [09:27]
Ross Douthat
Right. There are a bunch of different competing theories of what is going on. There is a sort of more scientifically grounded theory that says it's not an infection itself, it's just your over triggered immune system that has cleared the infection, but can't stop freaking out. So in that sense, chronic Lyme disease would be seen as an autoimmune disease. But then there's also, I think, a more casual and widespread view that says this is psychosomatic. These are people who have sort of talked themselves into the idea that they have an illness that they don't really have. So as you move through the medical system, and I saw a lot of doctors over the course of first figuring out what this was and then figuring out how to, to treat it, you get both, all kinds of different responses from differing doctors, but also this sort of confidence in a medical consensus that in both my research that you end up doing when you have a condition like this one, but also just my personal experience of being treated and trying to treat myself, the consensus is just wrong, basically, is sort of the simple and crude way to put it. But there is in fact lots of solid scientific evidence to think that Lyme disease, like other infections, can persist in a human body, can sort of be suppressed and flare up and be suppressed and flare up. And the reality is that there isn't a sort of clear cut way to treat that kind of condition. But the doctors who do treat chronic Lyme disease essentially use a mixture of antibiotics and other things over extremely long periods of time. They treat for months or even years. And, and this is what I ended up doing. And in fact, over this very long period of time, I went from being largely incapacitated, except as you very kindly pointed out, my mind still worked well enough that I continued to write newspaper columns for better or worse.
- [11:28]
Podcast Host (interviewer)
That's a pretty big caveat right there. But yes, yes, right.
- [11:31]
Ross Douthat
Well, and this was one of the many strange things about this experience was that There was this very long period of time where I was being simultaneously told that my body was fine and my mind was causing my illness, when it was perfectly clear to me that my body was not fine and my mind was the only part of me that still worked. Of course, that's not incompatible with certain psychosomatic theories of disease. You can imagine someone who is capable of writing newspaper columns even as their mind is causing them problems in other ways. But in practice, the experience was a convincing lesson, a very convincing lesson in the fact that there are situations where something happens in life, you very quickly reach the edge of expert knowledge, the edge of medical consensus. And in this very sharp and direct way where you're dealing with a disease that is literally destroying your life day by day, you just have to go beyond that consensus in order to figure out what to do and how to get better. And of course, then the challenge is, and this I think has obvious applications for all kinds of debates, right? Is that once you go beyond that consensus, the temptation is to assume that everything in the consensus is wrong and everything you find on the outside, beyond the fringe is true. And I feel like what is true of Lyme disease and chronic illness is true in many, many debates where people feel like they have to choose between the idea that they are defending this symb settled establishment that holds to rigorous standards of evidence and is being besieged by quacks and frauds and paranoid people. So you either have to be all in for the establishment or you think the establishment is so corrupt that anything it says, whether it's about economic policy or vaccine efficacy, is completely wrong. And anything that the cranks are saying is probably true. And the political takeaway from my medical experience, I guess, is that somewhere between those two impulses lies a healthier balance for thinking about the limits of expertise, but also the reality that in fact, experts still get things right. And Lyme is a really interesting case because the treatment for Lyme disease, the fundamental treatment that the more maverick ish doctors are offering, is still antibiotics, right? I mean, I did a lot of things that were stranger than antibiotics. But throughout this whole process, I was taking modern science's most effective and successful drug. I wasn't throwing it out, I was just taking unusually large doses.
- [14:17]
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- [15:10]
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- [15:18]
Podcast Host (interviewer)
So I think it's an important question how you can develop a healthy skepticism of the prevailing consensus when there's good reason or good evidence to doubt it, but not throw out the baby with a bathwater, not to go the whole hog in the other direction and doubt everything. And I think part of what might prepare the path for that is to have an analysis of why it is that the consensus ends up going wrong in certain kind of areas. So in this as in other areas, I think your experience of Lyme is a really interesting window into these larger dynamics. So what do you think explains why the medical establishment ended up holding on to a set of views about the nature of a causes or the nature of a treatment that you believe to have been wrong.
- [16:09]
Ross Douthat
Yeah, I mean, and I've obviously sort of thought about that a lot and I think there are a few dynamics at work. Right. And I guess to work backwards, one is essentially an effect of the pattern I was just talking about where once you've established any kind of establishment versus outsider narrative, it tends to be self reinforcing. So the kind of people who leave the consensus behind tend to be eccentric people. They tend to be the kind of people who are attracted to a wide variety of fringe ideas and assumptions. Right. And so if, if you're inside the establishment looking at the kind of people who are telling you that you're wrong about this particular issue, you will see exactly the kind of people you would expect to be telling you you're wrong and you will be inclined to dismiss them. Right. So the doctors that I ended up seeing, some of them were incredibly rigorous and thoughtful and serious scientists, I think, who are effectively trying to forge a new consensus on this disease. But many of them had what in my previous life I would have considered crankish tendencies or views they might have, a somewhat conspiratorial view of big pharma, things like that. So the self selection for being an outsider makes it easier for insiders to look at the kind of people who are outsiders and dismiss their arguments out of hand, preemptively. That's one dynamic. But how you get to this point initially in medicine, I think part of it is in certain ways a really healthy desire for simplicity and parsimony. So if you're trying to come up with diagnostic criteria for a disease, you don't want to have a six page booklet with 27 different potential symptoms listed. You want a narrow set of things that you can identify and say, if we follow these criteria, we're not going to get a lot of false positives and we're not going to over treat people. And medical science has, for good reason, the motto, first do no harm as one of its founding principles. From that founding principle, you have the desire to not over treat patients, not over diagnose patients, and to have a relatively narrow set of criteria that you use when you test for and diagnose a disease. And that can work very well with some conditions. But when you're dealing with conditions that sort of manifest themselves with a wide array of symptomology, as Lyme disease does. You know, it's not the only condition that does this. Lots of infections, when they become chronic, can manifest themselves all over the body. Something that we've seen with COVID just in the last year. Right. When that happens, then the maxim that you want to sort of limit your list of things you're using to diagnose and limit your list of things you're using to treat get you into trouble pretty quickly because you end up excluding anything that doesn't fit a relatively narrow mold. And then because medical science is bureaucratized, that then has downstream consequences. If you narrow the range of things that you're saying count as a particular disease, then you narrow the range of things that people apply for to study this disease. Cases that insurance companies are willing to cover. There are all of these feedback loops between the decisions the CDC makes, the decisions that individual doctors make, the decisions that insurance companies make, and they tend to ratify each other and become a enclosed circle of accepted knowledge. But then also there are just these generational dynamics which you also see in politics, where there's a set of doctors who treat Lyme disease who settled on this initial consensus that you should only treat it for four to six weeks, and they became influential figures. And a lot of people who I know and talk to who want to change the way Lyme disease is treated, assume that it basically changes with generational Turnover and in 20 years the landscape will look different.
- [20:24]
Podcast Host (interviewer)
And that's a point about the history of science that Thomas Kuhn first observed in the structure of scientific revolution, where within a research paradigm that can explain a lot of things, you start to get this rise of particular anomalies, particular things that you can't explain, which in this case, I suppose would be people like you who don't get better after four, six weeks and keep being sick for longer. And as I recall, the two main points that Kuhn makes is, number one, that you can only displace those wrong views if you have an alternative theory that actually explains the overall thing better. And so you can continue with this, not quite with this consensus doesn't quite add up for a very long time because nobody has managed to come up with an alternative interpretive framework that can actually supersede it. And, and the second point, exactly as you're saying, is that it is rarely the people who believed in this thing for 30 years who changed their mind. And out of new evidence, it is new generations of, in this case scientists, or in other cases, doctors or whoever who sort of come up and that starts to change how they think about things. So it's interesting, but the way you describe this to me sounds exactly like a vindication of that sort of classic text, right?
- [21:32]
Ross Douthat
That science advances one obituary at a time. Right. Or something like that. No. And that first point about the need for an alternative pair paradigm, not just with Lyme disease, but with a range of chronic illnesses, chronic fatigue syndrome, probably long term, Covid soon enough, one of the challenges for treating them is that you have that alternative paradigm diagnostically, I think you have a very compelling scientific account of how these diseases persist in people's systems long after initial treatment. That alternative is there. What you don't have is a definitive treatment. And so that too, I think, shores up the consensus. If the consensus is four to six weeks of antibiotics and nothing after, that works, and the rival school is saying, well, actually we have something else works, but it's two years of treatment with these 16 different things. And by the way, you have to tailor it to every patient because every patient is different and every experience is different. It's too complex an alternative to displace the simplicity of the current consensus view, I think.
- [22:45]
Podcast Host (interviewer)
What about the institutions? So you mentioned the motto, which is first do no harm. And then of course you mentioned the CDC and so on. And it seems to me that when I look at our response to the COVID pandemic, both of those did a lot of damage. It's still striking to me how long it took us to do human challenge trials early in 2020. Now, in the end, we're quite lucky with our vaccines and we managed to develop them reasonably quickly. But that could have cost months and months of time and tens of hundreds of thousands of lives.
- [23:20]
Ross Douthat
Yes, absolutely. And it's a strange dynamic with the vaccination debate because on the one hand, we gained the vaccine so incredibly quickly relative to what the conventional wisdom was a few months into the pandemic, that in part you have to stress just how fortunate and how lucky we were and how well parts of institutional science worked in terms of actually getting them. That being said, there are pretty clearly ways, in hindsight, since the vaccine itself was literally developed, it didn't take a year, it took weeks for the first MRNA vaccines to be developed in some form. You can imagine both things like human challenge trials. And also just even in the last few weeks before the vaccines were approved, just expedited FDA procedures that could have delivered us vaccination a month early, two months early. And given what ended up happening with the delta variant, for instance, that could have headed off not just last winter's wave, but part of the delta wave as well. And that too very clearly reflects safety oriented bureaucratic healthcare procedures. And it's, you know, the difference with Lyme versus Covid, right, Is that Covid is obviously a often fatal disease, whereas chronic Lyme disease can lead to diminished quality of life in ways that lead to early death, but it's not fatal the way Covid is fatal. But in both cases there's this hesitancy about trying things in the face of real suffering in the case of Lyme, real peril of immediate death in the case of COVID That just sort of reflects the systems of institutional science which are set up for understandable reasons for the sake of safety, but which struggle to deal with, I think, things that are sort of outside the conventional run of illnesses.
- [25:18]
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- [25:48]
Podcast Host (interviewer)
want to run something past you here which you may take exception to. You know, I've been thinking a lot about the usefulness and the limitations of utilitarian political thought or broadly consequentialist political thought. But I'm not ultimately a utilitarian, because I think there's lots of values in the world that aren't easily reduced to just maximizing the good consequences or maximizing the balance of pleasure over pain. But I also think that in a lot of moral decisions, and certainly in a lot of how you set up political institutions, a consequentialist outlook is the first presumption that needs to be defeated. I think often it's very easy to lose out of sight the terrible consequences of various principles or laws, and they need to, at the very least, have a very compelling reason if they are in fact going to lead to an increase in the number of deaths. I feel that way about arguments about organ selling. I don't know empirically whether buying and selling organs we will reduce the number of deaths in the United States by as much as some libertarian economists claim, for example. But if that is the case, then the right way to value an organ seems like a pretty big thing to put on. Well, let's just tolerate 10,000 more deaths over the course of a year. And I wonder whether this sort of deontological principle of don't do any harm, first of all, of safety first, is sometimes in danger of losing out of sight. This more straightforward consequentialist utilitarian consideration of, well, look, every human challenge trial might do some harm. It might kill some people who voluntarily agreed to take part in it, who otherwise would not have been harmed. But predictably, it will save the life of thousands, tens of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands. Then we should be able to do that and say, oh, no. But that goes against this sort of abstract principle of the first duty of a doctor is not to do any harm. That principle can't bear the weight of hundreds of thousands of more deaths in this particular circumstance. That doesn't mean that any principle will always be defeated by the fact that it'll lead to more deaths. But the principle is going to be pretty damn solid. There's going to be a very strong moral intuition behind it. For us to deviate that outlook. Now, I think some of what you've been saying seems sympathetic to that point of view. But I also take you to be somebody in general in your outlook about politics and other things, who's not especially consequentialist. So I'd love to hear how you grapple with that.
- [28:22]
Ross Douthat
Yeah, I mean, it's a very interesting question and I guess a couple different thoughts. One is that I'm definitely not a hard utilitarian in the sense of taking the greatest good for the greatest number as a fundamental trumping principle for ethics. At the same time, I think there's a way in which a kind of soft utilitarianism is just an inevitable part of political decision making. You sort of can't avoid a kind of generalized like, how many people does this help versus how many people does it hurt calculus in politics. So the question then becomes, when does that general principle bump up against my objection to it? Right? Which is that some things are sort of intrinsic evils and can't be tolerated even if they are saving an extra hundred thousand lives. And my feeling is that the safety first principle is not actually that kind of principle. It's more its own form of utilitarianism, in a sense. I guess I'd be open to argument and persuasion on this point.
- [29:30]
Podcast Host (interviewer)
So there's an important distinction in trinitarian thought between act utilitarianism and rule utilitarianism. So act actualitarians want to say you should measure whether to do an action by the direct consequences of that act itself. I mean, I would say, well, yeah, but, you know, perhaps the doctor can save five lives by killing you and harvesting your organs, but people stop going to the doctor. So utilitarians can still have an objection to doctors doing that on the sort of rule utilitarian grounds, right? If the rule that the doctor adopts in acting this way has these really bad consequences, usually therapists can still reject it, right? And what may be going on with something like safety first or something like the doctor should never do any harm is that it's actually kind of rarefied rule utilitarian instinct, right? That the first important thing is if a doctor never does any harm because otherwise people won't trust doctors, and that'll actually undermine the whole enterprise. And so therefore that should become our absolute first principle. But then you no longer look at, well, but in the middle of a pandemic, when people have completely been informed about the risks and the voluntarily taking part in this vaccine trial as what they're taking to be A great contribution to mankind to then say, oh, but this broad principle that we formulated, and that's sort of perhaps ill applying in this case, makes it impossible. So therefore, no, it's kind of rare fight utilitarian instinct.
- [30:49]
Ross Douthat
Well, right. And one of the issues around challenge trials is that when I read sort of the bioethical objections to challenge trials, and I don't share them, but I can understand where they're coming from, right. Like the idea of the government paying people to potentially harm themselves is obviously morally questionable territory. At the same time, the same people who hold those views tend to be extremely supportive of all kinds of other forms of COVID era interventions, Right. That severely limit the liberties of other people and do potential damage of various kinds to people who don't have any say in the matter. Right. So all of these ethical debates, people tend to move back and forth between different philosophical worldviews depending on which policy they want to defend. Not you and I, we're perfectly consistent. Just other people. Right. But it seems to me intuitively implausible that it is wrong to pay a healthy person to try a vaccine in the context of a global pandemic, but that it is fine to, for instance, close my children's school for nine months. Right. With all the potential damage that that inflicts on many, many people's lives for the same general goal of reducing overall death rates during the pandemic. And yeah, you can come up with some kind of ontological system that justifies one limit but not the other. Well, the experience of being really sick and not finding it easy to get better, you're obviously in a different position than the patient volunteering for the challenge trial. The patient volunteering for the challenge trial is healthy and taking a risk that they will become unhealthy, whereas the person asking for a treatment that the doctor doesn't want to give them is. Is unhealthy and wants to take a risk to become healthy. So there are differences there, but there is some similarity in that if you favor challenge trials and favor, as I do, for instance, right. To try medical rules where if you have a terminal illness, you can try a drug that hasn't been approved for the illness, that kind of thing, I suppose what unites them, I think, is maybe a greater confidence in trusting the individual with their own body, in effect, which I do place limits on that. I think suicide, for instance, is absolutely wrong. But I don't think taking a wider range of compounds in certain situations when it seems necessary is ontologically wrong. I think it's all contextual.
- [33:38]
Persuasion Podcast Host
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- [33:58]
Podcast Host (interviewer)
So let's talk about how all of this plays out beyond the sphere of medicine, whether it's in the case of Lyme disease and other chronic diseases or in the case of we do seem to be in an era in which the belief in consensus and science in the political establishment, in fact checking, is becoming increasingly polarized. And we do seem to have a tribe of people who say we must always trust the prevailing consensus in a way that actually can itself be unscientific. And then the people who say, I don't believe anything and I'm not going to take vaccines, you know, and in fact, an authority saying something will make me more skeptical of it being true. How do you suggest to people, you know, taking the liberty to think through things themselves and to deviate from consensus? But. Well, you know, bearing in mind the very important point that there will be people who are very smart who thought about this very hard, and for the great majority of issues, you will not have done that. And this is a question that's personal to me in a way, because I have become, I think, more attuned to some of the failings of institutions and expert consensus over the course of the pandemic and for a number of other reasons over the last five or six years. But I'm also aware that there's this huge danger to everybody starting to sort of freelance epistemically making up their own views on the basis of much more limited evidence and much less time and investment than experts will usually have done in those topics.
- [35:35]
Ross Douthat
It's a really, really hard problem, and I feel like we witness the challenge of resolving it every day on the Internet. And I'm not going to claim to have some perfect solution. Here are a couple ideas, though. One idea is you want there to be sort of a distinction that people bear in mind between theoretical and practical knowledge. Maybe those are the wrong terms, but let me try and draw out the distinction, right? So take something like the COVID lab leak hypothesis, right? Which for a long time was considered something that was bizarre conspiracy theory that social media networks were supposed to censor if anyone brought it up. And then suddenly it swung and it became sort of an acceptable part of the discourse Right. So there is a form of expertise about the nature of viruses and what kind of virus looks like it might have been engineered in a laboratory versus what kind of virus looks like it was just transmitted from a bat or a pangolin to a human being that I, as a decently educated generalist, am never going to have unless I, like, you know, literally shift sort of all of my focus to just trying to understand that particular issue. So on a question like does COVID 19 look at a molecular level like it was made in the laboratory? You have to defer to some kind of expertise. That is an expert question. Now, if experts disagree right, then you may not necessarily be able to choose between them. But that is the question that requires expert knowledge. The question of whether the pattern by which COVID 19 entered the world in Wuhan and spread from Wuhan to China and the rest of the world, whether that pattern looks kind of suspicious, that's not a question that you need a degree in molecular biology to assess. The fact that you had this outbreak happen next door to a research facility that is conducting research on these kind of diseases and also a long way away from the places where the most likely animal to human transmission would have happened, and the fact that the Chinese government has behaved really suspiciously around it and so on, like all of that is knowledge that is readily available to, you know, a reasonably thoughtful layperson looking at the world. And so the second kind of question is just a question that has to be open for debate. And you can't say, you know, we have to defer to the experts on the suspiciousness of the situation, because the suspiciousness of the situation doesn't require molecular biology expertise to assess. And I feel like throughout the pandemic, there would be these situations where the questions of statesmanship, right, like what is the political strategy that you need to persuade people to take Covid seriously? Or moral and ethical dilemmas of the kind. You and I were just wrestling with those kind of questions. You would have people who had expertise as epidemiologists trying to lay claim to expertise as questions of statesmanship or questions of morality, and then complaining that dangerous populists were rejecting their expertise. And again, epidemiology is a subject that I am not an expert in. And I do not write columns claiming to be an expert in exactly the way that an infectious disease spreads. But as a generalist and a citizen and all these things, I still have the right to opinions about how do you strike the balance between liberty and safety and those kind of things.
- [39:18]
Podcast Host (interviewer)
There's a few Things. One is, what kind of questions do you need to be able to answer in order to come to a reasoned view about a complicated question like the origin of a virus? And another then is, well, do only experts get to speak to how to respond to a societal emergency? And what struck me as very odd back in February and March of 2020 was the claim that was very widespread at the time, but only certified epistemologists should get to. How do we balance the risks and the rewards of various containment strategies? How do we balance our desire to reduce transmission of this virus against the need for society to keep functioning in
- [40:00]
Ross Douthat
some kind of way?
- [40:01]
Podcast Host (interviewer)
How do we balance the economic consequences of other things? So there's a huge over expansion where suddenly the idea was that epidemiologists who have a very specific set of important technical skills are the only ones who can legitimately speak to those inherently normative and moral trade offs. And that's, I think, one of the sort of really odd things that went wrong by debate and that was quickly rectified. I mean, I'm struck by the fact that when I wrote this, Peel's course cancel everything in the Atlantic that went quite viral In March of 2020, I got tremendous pushback from faculty members of my university and others basically saying you have no right to speak about. And I think at this point the idea that it is inappropriate for somebody who's not an epidemiologist to speak about right or wrong social containment measures against Covid would seem quite strange. So I think we've gotten quite far in this debate, actually. I've been thinking for the last few minutes of this conversation about Michael Gove's famous line in the run up of the Brexit referendum. I believe it was, the people of this country have had enough of experts. He was much mocked for that, I have to say. But when I reflect back on that statement right now, I have to say, somewhat to my own shame, that he actually had a good point, which is to say that I was then and Remain now a staunch advocate of the Remain side. I think it has been a mistake for the United Kingdom to leave the European Union, but the claims that the Remain was making, that a vote for Remain would have this sort of instant and catastrophic economic consequences for Britain have not in fact materialized. And so in a way, Michael Gove's response to his arguments that, look, people don't trust these experts anymore has in a certain weird kind of way, I think, been vindicated. And I have trouble admitting that since I'm on the other side of A debate on the whole.
- [41:47]
Ross Douthat
But part of that, too, right, is just that medicine is complex in one way. History is just insanely complex. Right. And so one of the challenges of expertise is figuring out a way to say, all things being equal, policy X is the best policy. But we have to recognize that all things aren't always equal. And so sometimes you need to adapt. Right? So it can both be the case that, all things being equal, Brexit was the wrong policy for the United Kingdom to take. But in the context of everything from a global pandemic that nobody saw coming, right, to whatever the contingent politics of the European continent are, through a long list of contingencies, you could get to a point where you say the experts were right in general, but there were specific things that made them wrong.
- [42:45]
Podcast Host (interviewer)
You can take the worst course of action, that has a much higher risk of going wrong, but you get really lucky and it turns out that it's okay.
- [42:53]
Ross Douthat
We call this the Boris Johnson phenomenon.
- [42:56]
Podcast Host (interviewer)
Well, exactly. I mean, look, it seems unwise for me to go rob a bank tomorrow without preparation, but if I pull it off and I suddenly have money to no longer have any stupid duties in life and just be able to focus on reading and writing, that would be lovely. So perhaps my bad decision turns up aces. That's perfectly possible. I sometimes think about whether there's many historical junctures like that where political leaders are retrospectively judged by the success or failure of their course of action, but it may be that they took an unjustifiable risk, which just happened to turn out fine. I don't know that that is the accurate description of something like armament campaign that Ronald Reagan pushed in the 1980s or something like that. But you could imagine that having that kind of structure where perhaps that introduced a 5% chance, let's say, or 1% chance of atomic war of the Soviet Union. And that might have been an unacceptable risk to take, but Quite predictably, a 95%, 99% scenario worked out, and that was a wonderful and great thing. But perhaps the fact that we can observe a good outcome doesn't mean in retrospect, that the decision was in fact the right one.
- [44:07]
Ross Douthat
Well, that's especially true with the long tail risks. You can see this with the case of Donald Trump in the United States. Many of the arguments among conservatives, those who supported him and those who opposed him, took versions of that form where people who were against Trump would say, okay, the Republic is probably going to be okay, but you don't want to take this 2% chance. Right? But then in the event, a 2% chance will only happen 2% of the time. So their odds of being vindicated in that fear were low. But the other thing is, we're just assigning probabilities here. When it comes to, like, the dangers of Donald Trump. There's no sort of Harry Seldon psychohistorical analysis that can actually tell you what the statistical dangers of Donald Trump were.
- [44:55]
Podcast Host (interviewer)
And so then our perception of what the risk distribution likely was is obviously influenced by the outcome in ways that makes it even harder to then assess how to think about the original decision. I want to get back to a question about the experts, though, which is how strong a role do you think that skepticism of experts has played in something like the Brexit vote and the rise of Donald Trump and rise of people like Bolsonaro in Brazil or Modi in India? Because there's two sort of versions of this story, one in which the experts did get a lot of important things wrong, and there was something sort of truly mistaken about how the elites fought about a set of important topics, and that's what gave the opening to those kinds of protest votes or to those kinds of ways of trying to rebel against the status quo. And then there's a slightly different way of thinking about this which rejects that there is any amount of serious sort of elite establishment failure in the causal model that helps to explain the strange political convulsions we've gone through over the last decade in so many different countries. So I'd love to hear where you fall between those camps or on the spectrum between them.
- [46:07]
Ross Douthat
Yeah, I mean, I'm very, very much in the first camp, and I think the second camp you get different versions of the argument, ranging from figures like Tom Nichols to Anne Applebaum that tend to stress the idea that there's a kind of resentment of meritocracy, resentment of intelligence, resentment of experts. That's sort of an eradicable part of human nature. And it's just sort of happened to leverage some contingent events in order to seize power in places from Hungary to Washington, D.C. and I agree with that view that even in a perfectly run technocracy, there will be resentment of experts that will feed into politics in some way and create the possibility for convulsions. But the truth of the matter is that I went to college in the late 1990s. So I came of age in an era of sort of a kind of post Cold War peak expert confidence, you might say, where you went to college, and you had the sense you didn't even have to take an economics class because Robert Rubin and Alan Greenspan had figured out how to manage the global economy, right? And there was this unipolar moment where the world was gradually democratizing and getting richer and American military power could sort of help push countries along that path when necessary. There was just a lot of expert confidence. And in the context of the late 90s, when the US economy was doing really well, the Cold War had been won, and US military interventions under Bill Clinton had seemed to go reasonably well, you could understand where that confidence came from. And then the 15 years of my adulthood featured a disastrous response to 911 that could be pinned on a particular faction of conservatives if you wanted to, but really had a lot of support from parts of the expert class, more so in Washington, D.C. than in academia, I should stress, but had a certain amount of expert support. Then you had the global financial crisis, which there were some experts who saw it coming, but not very many. And then in European politics, you had the Eurozone convulsions that followed the financial crisis, where the consensus of a lot of experts about fiscal and monetary policy seem to be disproven by events. And those are all the big historical moments of the last 15 years, I think, in the developed world, 911 and its aftermath, the Great Recession and the various forms of European crisis. And then lurking behind them, you had, especially in the American context, you had this expert blessed opening to China that was supposed to deliver liberalization to China and greater prosperity for both the US and East Asia. And in the event it didn't deliver liberalization to China, it delivered increased geopolitical power without liberalization. And in the US it turned out that while there were winners and losers from the opening to China, the losers were more numerous than a lot of economists had perceived. But that's, I would say, a fair catalog of major problems and crises of the last 15 years where the expert consensus was not a reliable guide to what was going to happen and what could go wrong. And I think it's not surprising at all that out of that you would get a populist reaction. And the fact that you have had this populist reaction in so many places, the Internet plays a big role in this too. But the fact that you have so much similarity between certain forms of populist politics in Western Europe and the US despite significant differences in the social and economic situations across the Atlantic, I think says something about the importance of these macro level failures to creating whatever the hell we've been living through for the last five or six years.
- [50:14]
Podcast Host (interviewer)
So Now, I think in an odd way, we really are right back to the beginning of the conversation, which is to say to this question of, well, how do you hold experts, established institutions, politicians to account? How do you free yourself from the assumption that there's adults in the room and they'll tend to get things right most of the time, and let's defer to what they're doing, be overly critical? All of which has gone wrong in ways you point out without jumping to the opposite conclusion, which is all of these people are corrupt and in it for themselves or for various outsiders and the enemies of the people. And we need somebody who can come in and just throw all of them out and not be bound by any form of expertise, because that seems to be the polls of politics that we're currently stuck in. So I guess what hope do you have that we might be able to make up for the failings of experts and political elites? But I agree with you on without veering into the kind of what I would at least describe as virulently anti expertise and chaotic politics that the populace want to put in its place.
- [51:27]
Ross Douthat
Yeah, I mean, I'm not particularly optimistic about this. I think that we are in part sort of living through this dynamic that was, I think very accurately predicted by the British writer Michael Young, who coined the term meritocracy originally, where he wrote this somewhat satirical book called the Rise of the Meritocracy, that imagined a future where you have politics polarized between, in his case, it was some mix of standardized testing and eugenics. Right. That sort of really hardened lines of IQ and class and intelligence and so on in ways that go well beyond what we've seen. But he envisioned this world of this sort of technically very intelligent but out of touch technocratic elite and this populist alternative that had legitimate grievances but couldn't find basically the leadership it expressed itself effectively, let alone to govern the country. And I think that really is the dynamic of Western politics in some cases very literally. You have these movements like the Gilets Jaune in France that have no leaders at all, seemingly right, and have this sort of array of grievances that span the political spectrum, many of which are reasonable, but which don't condense into a governing program. Or you have figures like Trump and other leaders of populism who sometimes manage to take power but are fundamentally grifters rather than figures trying to translate populist grievance into governance. So I think, honestly, I was joking about the luck of Boris Johnson, but I think right now you would have to say that Johnson has been the most effective Western politician in terms of trying to channel populism without being consumed by it. And I know that by saying that I guarantee that in three months supply chain problems in Britain will bring down his government or something. But it's hard to see figures who embody or seem really capable of embodying a populist alternative while also channeling it back towards effective governance. One reason that conservatives like Viktor Orban in Hungary so much is that he seems really ruthlessly effective in a way that other populist leaders aren't. The problem is he's also, as far as I can tell, terribly, terribly corrupt. So where is the non corrupt, highly competent, civic minded populist leader in the Western world? I don't have an answer for you.
- [54:10]
Podcast Host (interviewer)
Yeah, and I think that there is the beginning of an interesting development here. I've been somebody who not only has emphasized how dangerous populace and can be to democracy for many years, but also somebody who I think was quite pessimistic about the ability of various countries to keep them out of office. And by and large that has proven to be right over the last six or so years. I think at this point I'm actually starting to be a little bit more more optimistic about the ability to push back against populists in a number of countries. We've seen that a little bit in a few recent elections. In the Czech Republic, Babi has just been thrown out of office. In the Italian local elections, the populist did very poorly. In the German federal elections, populist did badly. It is now unclear what's going to happen in the Philippines. Rodrigo Duterte does not look like he's sure to hold on to power in any I have a direct or indirect way. Bolsonaro is quite weak in Brazil. Putin and Erdogan are both quite unpopular domestically. They have become dictators to such an extent that is not going to lead to them leaving office imminently, but it is still an interesting sign. All of that I think is related to your point, which is that they all have been very bad at governing in ways that don't matter in the first few years. But once you've been in office for a while and your country is not in a good way, people start to get restless and start to want to punish the people in charge. And so I think in an odd way the chickens are coming home to roost, at least for some populists in some places. In a way that's making me a little bit more optimistic but you're also seeing in the United States that even when that happens, and I certainly think, for example, Donald Trump's very poor handling of a Covid crisis is one of the reasons why he ended up losing in 2020. Once they're out of office, they can still remain this incredibly powerful force in politics and potentially present more danger to it. So just to sort of come back to the United States towards the end of our conversations, Ross, how do you assess the American political situation now? And how dangerous do you think Donald Trump is to American democracy? At this point?
- [56:18]
Ross Douthat
I have this position that I represent where I'm the guy in the pages of the New York Times saying Trump is dangerous, but not as dangerous as you think, which is this sort of inherently unstable position to take. But my basic view is that the way that Trump's sort of narrative of voter fraud has played out and taken hold means that in spite of having lost the election to Joe Biden, he is clearly the front runner for the Republican nomination next time. And the biggest danger with Trump is the one that is a more extreme version of what we saw play out in the last electoral interregnum in the US where he loses the next election very, very closely and he finds a way or Republicans to support him, find a way to basically pitch the country into a constitutional crisis where a state refuses to report its electors or sends dueling slates of electors to Congress. And. And you have essentially a version of what last happened in the United states in the 1870s where you have this kind of congressional deadlock over who the President is. And that's to go back to the tail risk point. Right. I don't think that's at all the most likely scenario for 2024. I think it's more likely either that the Democrats win easily enough that this isn't an issue, or I think it's perfectly likely that actually Trump runs again and wins. And I even think there's a scenario where someone else is the Republican nominee. Right. So there's lots of scenarios in play. This is the constitutional crisis is a tail risk scenario, but it's a real risk, and you have to take it seriously. What I struggle with in these arguments is that I feel like a lot of my peers who are more sort of pro establishment and less populist sympathizing than I am, leap from that real risk to say, and if this happens, American democracy will collapse and Trump will become, at the very least, an Orban or Erdogan style figure, if not a worse dictator, and America will become a fascist country. And all of these things. And those scenarios still strike me as very, very remote. I think that Trump is a fascinating but weak figure in many ways relative to other populist strongmen who have taken power. And I think that liberals tend to underestimate their own power. In part, this sort of degree of soft power that liberalism in its current form exerts throughout American institutions seems to me unprecedented, too. The other thing that has shifted over the last five years, especially in Anglo America, especially in the U.S. less so on the European continent. Right. Is more zealous. Progressivism has gained a lot of influence that it didn't have before across elite institutions, and that in weird ways also strengthens populism, because there's a reaction against that. But the power of that progressivism is real and would exert itself in any scenario where Trump and the Republican Party were trying to literally play some kind of 1930s scenario. So how's that for a rambling, semi balanced account of the situation?
- [59:44]
Podcast Host (interviewer)
It's really interesting. I think the one question that he started to answer towards the very end of it, but somewhat skirted, and it's the last one that I'm going to ask you, if only to wake up and shock all of the listeners to this podcast, is, well, so what would a second Trump term in office actually look like? You addressed primarily the serious tail end risk of a constitutional crisis, and I think I share your view on that. But you didn't fully answer, well, what would it look like if Trump got back into office? And I suppose I share some of your instincts on this. I share that Trump is in many ways a weaker political figure than people like Orbano Modi, a less professional political figure, even after four years of experience office. I share the point that America is both a very federal country and incredibly rich country with a very active civil society, with media institutions and universities that are in no temptation to follow the lead of Mr. Trump. And all of that, I think, provides a bulwark that many of the countries that have veered towards authoritarianism do not have. At the same time, I think him winning again would give him a greater legitimacy perceived by the public. I think that he now has control of his own political party and would have a cadre of devoted ideologues in a way that he did not at all have in 2016, when he essentially had to staff his government with people, with at least some people whose main goal was actually to slow down the crazier things he wanted to do. And all of that would seem to me to make him more dangerous than he was in 2016. So I'm a little bit torn in imagining what 2024-2028 might look like if Trump came back.
- [61:38]
Ross Douthat
So my, I guess, maximally provocative view is that Trump is more dangerous to American democracy, losing the election incredibly narrowly in 2024 than he is winning it. That is to say, I find the constitutional crisis scenario in certain ways more worrisome than another four Trump years, which may be totally naive and foolish of me, but I think that what we saw from the Trump presidency is that in a way that distinguishes him from many of those other conservative populist, whatever you want to call them, leaders, Trump didn't really have a program that he wanted to pursue. Yes, he had sort of certain ideas on trade and immigration and so on that he would sort of reach for, but Trump mostly wanted to be president and just sort of exist and occupy the presidency and dominate the media conversation. And look, don't get me wrong, if he was elected again, there would be this kind of cultural meltdown in America that would be very dangerous, and I definitely don't want to live through it. But in terms of consolidating power in an illiberal manner, Trump was already president during the greatest opportunity for consolidating illiberal presidential power that anyone's had since 9 11, which was a global pandemic that started in China. Trump's alleged great enemy. That wasn't really his great enemy, but that's a separate issue. Right. And instead he just sort of followed the libertarian wing of his party and basically just sort of downplayed it and tried not to take emergency measures. And it doesn't seem to me that an aging, instant lame duck Trump, who would undoubtedly lose the House and the Senate in the next midterm election, would have this appetite for consolidating illiberal power that he did not actually successfully manifest during his first four years. I guess you'd have to tell me more about who his vice president is, who his key advisors are. In that scenario, could there be illiberal leaning Republicans who use a second Trump term to consolidate their own position as leaders of the party? And that, I think, would be the more important place to focus. I mean, Trump is not going to pass a constitutional amendment to allow himself to run for a third term. Right. Like, there are things that are just not going to happen in a second Trump term that could happen in a different country in a different context like that. So I don't know. I'm sure I haven't persuaded you, not to worry, but I hope that's a provocative place to end.
- [64:29]
Podcast Host (interviewer)
I'm not sure you've entirely persuaded me, but perhaps you allow me to sleep a little bit more soundly tonight than I would otherwise. So, Ross, thank you so much for coming on the podcast.
- [64:38]
Ross Douthat
You're very welcome. Thank you for having me. Asha. It was a pleasure.
- [64:45]
Podcast Host (interviewer)
Thank you so much for listening to the Good Fight. Lots of listeners have been spreading the word about the show. If you two have been enjoying the podcast, please be liked. Rate the show on itunes, tell your friends all about it, share it on Facebook or Twitter. And finally, please mail suggestions for great guests or comments about the show to goodfightpodmail.com that's goodfightpodmail.com
- [65:13]
Ross Douthat
this recording carries a Creative Commons 4.0 International License. Thanks to Silent Partner for their song Chess Pieces.
- [65:29]
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