Is America broken?

Summary

Podcast Summary

Episode Overview

Podcast: The Gray Area with Sean Illing (Vox)
Episode: Is America broken?
Date: February 10, 2025
Guest: Alana Newhouse (Editor-in-Chief, Tablet)
Topic: A nuanced exploration of "brokenism"—the idea that the defining political divide in the US is now between those who want to repair institutions (“status quoists”) and those who want to replace them (“brokenists”). Sean Illing and Alana Newhouse discuss the origins, implications, and limits of this framework, drawing on Newhouse’s essay and personal experiences.

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Main Discussion Points and Insights

1. The Core Divide: Brokenists vs. Status Quoists

• Not Just Left vs. Right: The episode frames the most vital American debate as not between traditional political lines (left/right, Democrat/Republican), but about attitudes toward core institutions.
• Definitions:
  • Brokenists: People who see institutions (government, health care, education, etc.) as so decayed or dysfunctional that they are beyond repair. Their energy is better spent building replacements.
    • "For many brokenists, there's a feeling that...they're not reformable and that we would be better off spending our energy building new replacements rather than trying to reform them." —Alana Newhouse (06:45)
  • Status Quoists: People who, despite acknowledging institutional problems, argue for preserving and fixing what exists rather than risking a collapse or chaotic rebuild.
    • "My sense of the status quoist argument is that they feel...we have a lot of institutions...that create safety and predictability and opportunity for a lot of people." —Alana Newhouse (05:38)

2. Personal Stories and Broader Resonance

• The Story of Ryan: Newhouse describes feedback from Ryan, a third-generation Black Army veteran from Ohio who resonated deeply with her essay. Ryan says the only meaningful difference between people is how they see institutions’ health, not their political tribe.

  • "Sometimes they're people who see themselves as on the right, sometimes...on the left. The thing that determines whether or not I can talk to them is actually how they think about institutions." —Alana Newhouse (08:31)

• The Importance of Lived Experience: When talking to someone about "what's broken," starting with their own frustrations—especially around soft points like education, health care, or disability—is the fastest way to diagnose perceptions of brokenness.

  • "All I have to do...is find a vulnerability or a soft point in any person's life...whether they remember their parents having...the same difficulty...for many people, the answer is no. My life feels much harder." —Alana Newhouse (12:49)

3. The Role of Technology and Social Change

• Technology as a Breaker: Newhouse posits that a technological revolution (like the Industrial Revolution) raised expectations and made slow, legacy institutions seem intolerable.
  • "...It's technology. We had an economic revolution...these revolutions are comprehensive and they change every aspect of our lives...all these institutions...they're all facing the same challenge." —Alana Newhouse (17:23)
• Perception vs. Reality: Illing wonders whether things appear more broken than before because modern media exposes problems more constantly—yet acknowledges that real cracks exist.
  • "Is it possible that things really aren't as broken as they seem?...Maybe it just feels that way 'cause we're more aware of the brokenness that was always there and we're just confronted with it all the time." —Sean Illing (19:30)

4. The Horseshoe Theory and Shifting Political Categories

• Growing Uselessness of Left/Right: Both speakers agree that the old left-right framework does not capture present realities.
  • "I'm not so sure that the left right framework is useful anymore. I don't think it helps anyone understand anything..." —Alana Newhouse (31:52)
• Horseshoe to Circle:
  • "...Instead of it being a horseshoe with extremes on both sides, it's just a new circle. And there are two sides...extremes of both...and...centrists." —Alana Newhouse (30:40)
• Dogmatism and Destruction: The far left and far right may not want the same world, but both tend toward a "burn it all down" posture that aligns them more with each other than with moderates.
  • "...A certain kind of dogmatism leads to the same posture in people, regardless of where they start out ideologically." —Sean Illing (31:18)

5. The Problem of Trust and Community

• Collapse of Trust: Declining confidence in media, government, and corporations is both a symptom and a cause of institutional breakdown.
  • "...This collapse of trust in authority in mainstream institutions like media is a major red flag." —Sean Illing (34:45)
• From Local to National: Loss of local elites, industries, and communities rooted trust is part of what’s unraveled American society.
  • "The trust has broken down all throughout the pyramid of our lives. If we don't have local life in this country that feels generative and enriching...a lot of what we're trying to build...will come apart." —Alana Newhouse (37:12)

6. Jewish Historical Perspective & The Value of Noticing the Cracks

• Newhouse reflects on the Jewish tradition’s vigilance for signs of crumbling societies, and the cultural imperative to both see and act on cracks before collapse.
  • "To see the cracks in the building before it collapses, that's a Jewish experience...To find a way to somehow invent an entirely new building, that's a Jewish act." —Alana Newhouse (37:45)
• "Part of the key to Jewish history has been being able to engage with the world around us richly and creatively and smoothly, but also to be honest about it." —Alana Newhouse (40:29)

7. Should We Be Careful About What We Wish For?

• The Dangers of Collapse: Illing warns that institutional collapse is usually violent, messy, and that we should be wary of advocating for full-scale abandonment.
  • "I'm not sure you can rebuild society, really, until the prevailing order has collapsed. And the transition...is usually really violent and bumpy and ugly." —Sean Illing (42:49)
• Incremental Brokenism: Newhouse distinguishes between throwing everything out at once and incremental, creative reimagining (e.g., states removing degree requirements for government jobs).
  • "Nobody shut down all the colleges overnight...What quietly happened and is happening is that some people are saying, what if we don't think about things the way that we've always thought about them?" —Alana Newhouse (43:46)

8. What Comes After "Brokenism"?

• Beyond Negation: Both question whether the language of brokenism is too fatalistic. Newhouse suggests friends have proposed "buildism" or "we-founders" as more optimistic alternatives.
  • "A friend of mine said, you know, you actually don't mean brokenist. You mean we founders...Or...buildist. Like, I want to build stuff." —Alana Newhouse (46:42)
• The Duty to Imagine and Build: The ultimate challenge is to avoid nihilism—to pivot from diagnosis and frustration to construction and imagination.
  • "When a reader looks at me and says, thank you for articulating my frustration...now what?...So hopefully...everyone just moved right into an optimistic building phase. So I now have what to hope for." —Alana Newhouse (47:14)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments with Timestamps

• "The two sides that I saw emerging, I roughly call brokenists and status quoists...And I hope that I express sympathy and interest in both arguments because I feel drawn to both sides." —Alana Newhouse [05:02]
• "I feel that American society is so broken, and I don't understand why..." —Ryan, as recounted by Alana Newhouse [07:56]
• "If you can maintain having both brokenist and status quoist ways of looking at the world...what that allows you to do is judge things at a local level, which is where I think all things are gonna get built or fixed anyway." —Alana Newhouse [21:32]
• "America has, at least historically, been fertile ground for pretty radical change...like, you want to throw out all of the Ivy Leagues...America will be fine. It will just make a new thing. And it's brutal. It can be violent. But that ability to simply replace what needs to get thrown in the garbage..." —Alana Newhouse [24:01]
• "We are forever the United States of Amnesia...We learn nothing because we remember nothing." —Sean Illing, quoting Gore Vidal [28:44]
• "I'm not so sure that the left right framework is useful anymore. I don't think it helps anyone understand anything, let alone convince anyone." —Alana Newhouse [31:52]
• "To see the cracks in the building before it collapses, that's a Jewish experience. To argue about whether the building can be saved or has to be evacuated, that's a Jewish debate." —Alana Newhouse [37:45]
• "Maybe we'll move really quickly through brokenism into buildism, and nobody will remember my term because it was such a flash in the pan, and everyone just moved right into an optimistic building phase. So I now have what to hope for." —Alana Newhouse [47:14]

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Key Segment Timestamps

• [04:50] — Alana summarizes her Brokenism thesis.
• [07:14] — The story of Ryan, and the shift from traditional politics to attitudes about institutions.
• [17:12] — Why are so many institutions decaying at once? Technology as a root cause.
• [19:40] — Perception versus reality: Are things really more broken, or do we just see more?
• [27:57] — “United States of Amnesia” and the horseshoe/circle theory of political extremes.
• [31:52] — Is the left/right framework still useful?
• [37:45] — Jewish historical perspective on noticing society’s cracks.
• [42:27] — What’s the real risk of institutional collapse? Should we fear brokenism?
• [43:46] — Incremental “brokenist” moves and the example of government jobs dropping degree requirements.
• [46:42] — Moving from “brokenism” to alternatives like “buildism.”

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Tone and Style

• The tone is reflective, searching, and intellectually generous. Both Illing and Newhouse strive for nuance, skepticism of easy answers, and a blend of personal candor with historical and philosophical perspective.
• Memorable moments include humor (the closet-cleaning analogy [21:30]), critique of American amnesia, and a spirit of wanting to offer a new, clarifying political vocabulary for a confusing time.

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Final Takeaways

• Brokenism offers a useful, if imperfect, language for understanding American polarization as less about "sides" and more about attitudes toward a perceived institutional decay.
• The left/right divide is growing functionally meaningless for many, with the real cleavage surrounding the legitimacy and reformability of major institutions.
• Technological change and community breakdown have accelerated disillusionment.
• The challenge: move from merely diagnosing brokenness to constructively building alternatives, without collapsing into nihilism or reckless destruction.

Are you a brokenist, a status quoist, or a buildist? The episode leaves this as a personal question, meant to spark deeper reflection on our shared future.

Transcript

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[Jorge Just]

Hi, I'm Jorge Just I'm the editor of the Gray Area and I'm taking a very short break from my new hobbies of doom scrolling and disaster. Refreshing to tell you about this week's episode. It's a conversation between Sean and Alana Newhouse from two Februarys ago, and at least for me, it helps put into context all the chaos and cluster effery that's taken over the United States government the last couple of weeks. In the episode, Newhouse uses a concept that she calls brokenism. She uses it to argue that the most important political divide in the country is not between the left and the right, but rather between those who want to repair America's institutions and those who want to destroy them. It's a real eye opener. After listening, I kind of wanted to go back in time to when it was first published so I could play it for everyone, tell people, pay attention this might be coming. But that is impossible. So instead we've brought the episode forward in time to now to play it for everyone, to tell people, pay attention this might be happening. Okay, here's the show.

[Sean Elling]

If this country doesn't give us what we want, then we will burn down this system and replace it. There's a lot of outrage across the country right now. Often it's hard to define, but it's rooted in a fundamental belief that the country is broken, that our institutions are rotten and dysfunctional.

[Alana Newhouse]

Let's talk about how Joe Biden said his build back better agenda cost zero American tax dollars. This union representing more than 4,000 Columbus.

[Sean Elling]

Teachers and staff striking for the first time in roughly 50 years assigned, experts.

[Alana Newhouse]

Say of mounting frustration nationwide.

[Sean Elling]

This outrage is one of the very few things that people on the left and right share, and it's a source of widespread pessimism about our future. Of course, there will always be many cleavages in the country, but maybe the Biggest, most salient division right now is between those who want to fix the institutions we have and those who want to burn it all down and start fresh. I'm Sean Elling, and this is the gray area. My guest today is Alana Newhouse. She's the editor in chief of an online magazine called Tablet, and she's the author of a recent essay for the site called Brokenism. Brokenism isn't just the title of her piece, it's also a term she's coined. And while I'm still not entirely sure what I think of her broader thesis, Newhouse did something valuable in that piece. She gave me a new language for thinking about this political moment. This distinction between what she calls brokenness, the people who think we need a total reset, and the status quoist, the people who think we can reform our current order, is certainly provocative. And even if you reject her basic framework, it's very much worth wrestling with. So I invited Alana onto the show to talk about it. Alana Newhouse, welcome to the show.

[Alana Newhouse]

Thanks so much.

[Sean Elling]

So we're here to talk about your essay on Brokenism, which I have to say really landed for me. And I'm still working out what I think about it, frankly. But I just wanted to start by.

[Alana Newhouse]

Saying that I'm still working it out, too, so maybe we can work it out together.

[Sean Elling]

Let's try. So let's actually just start with you summing up your thesis in that piece. Tell me about what you think is now the most vital debate in America.

[Alana Newhouse]

The debate that I find the most interesting and that I think is going to be the one that is going to take us through the Next, call it five to 10 years, isn't a debate between Republicans or Democrats or between the left and the right or even between progressives and conservatives. The debate that I find myself most drawn to and that I think a lot of other people increasingly want to participate in, is a debate about our institutions and about the viability of them and the health of them. The two sides that I saw emerging, I roughly call brokenness and status quoists. And in the piece, I try to articulate the vision that each side has. And I hope that I express sympathy and interest in both arguments because I feel drawn to both sides. My sense of the status quoist argument is that they feel with a lot of validity that we have a lot of institutions in American life that took many, many years to build, that actually create safety and predictability and opportunity for a lot of people, and that there's an almost nihilistic Burn it all down. Energy that they feel coming from other people in American life, because inevitably they see problems in those institutions and they want to fix them. On the other side, there are people who I call broken nests. And those are people for whom the broken aspect of the big blocks of institutional life that they have to interact with, whether that's a university, whether it's their health insurance, whether it's a government entity. What they're feeling in almost in a 360 way, is a sense of decay and a sense that these things simply don't work anymore. And that I think, in the case of many brokenness, there's a feeling that not only do those institutions not work, but that they're not reformable and that we would be better off spending our energy building new replacements for them rather than trying to reform them. So the tension is between those two sides.

[Sean Elling]

Yes. And I think you really do a service here in giving us that language. It's a very useful distinction. There's a man you quote in the piece. He's a reader who reached out to you. His name is Ryan, and he said some very relatable things for me. And his perspective, his frustration, really serves as a kind of anchor for your essay. Can you say a bit about him and what he articulated to you?

[Alana Newhouse]

Yes. I met Ryan because two years ago I wrote a piece called Everything is Broken, which was my personal credit corps, about the broken aspects of American society that were affecting my life. And in the wake of that essay, I got hundreds of emails and DMs and texts from people. One of them was from a man named Brian, who was about my age, lives in Ohio, former vet, actually, third generation African American veteran. And Ryan reached out and said, this piece spoke to me so deeply because this is what I feel, too. I feel that American society is so broken, and I don't understand why we ended up actually becoming friends. We had a lot more in common than I think either of us expected when he reached out. And over the course of a year of texting and sharing articles and just becoming friends, we were having conversations about how our thought was developing. And one day Ryan said on the phone with me, you know, I realize I'm having conversations with people. Sometimes they're people who see themselves as on the right, sometimes they're people who see themselves on the left. And the thing that determines whether or not I can talk to them is actually how they think about institutions. I don't care whether they come from the left or come from the right, whether they're a Libertarian or socialist, I care whether or not they look at these institutions and they think they're remotely healthy. Because if they do, I think they're nuts. And if they don't, I can have a conversation.

[Sean Elling]

Yeah, you know, I need to be honest about my ambivalence here. You know, I mean, I think of myself as an old school leftist. I guess I'm a class warrior, for lack of a better phrase, see that not only as the most important axis of power, but also the most politically potent. But you may be right that deep down the real debate now is between brokenness and status quoist. I mean, I guess I would say, in the interest of maybe trying to push a little bit against both of our instincts, that sometimes there's a tendency for the most engaged, politically conscious types like you and me to assume that the rest of the country feels the way we do. You know what I mean? When the reality is that I think a lot of people are just living their lives. And while they may be caught up in the general polarized atmosphere, I'm not sure they have very deep ideological commitments or even very strong opinions. I just think a lot of people are very alienated from all of it. But then again, maybe that kind of widespread detachment is itself a symptom of the brokenness.

[Alana Newhouse]

The reason why I like the frame is because as a reporter, it actually allows me to hear people and hear their concerns differently. It takes me out of rubrics that are familiar and allows me to really listen. And so you brought up the issues of class and of economic concerns. I hear them more clearly and loudly when I see them through the dichotomy of how our institutions are serving people. Let's talk about Medicaid. Can Medicaid actually properly get people the support that they need? That's a class issue. Right? But it's also a health of the institution issue. And maybe if we take it out of the left right dichotomy, we can have the conversation that we want to have because it doesn't get people rooted in their defenses and their biases. It allows us to say, well, wait a minute, what if we say instead of whether or not we believe in Medicaid or don't believe in Medicaid, believe in a social safety net. What if we talk about the effectiveness of the social safety net? How is ours working? And as long as we have it, can we improve it? Is it possible? Even because if it isn't, that starts a whole new conversation for me that's generative and that feels exciting because it also feels future oriented.

[Sean Elling]

So let's take just a quick step back here because I want to make sure that this is as non abstract as possible. So if you were floating this thesis to an intelligent person who maybe isn't super political, who doesn't follow the news that closely, and they just asked you, like, what exactly is broken? What institutions is it public education, the Congress, the courts, whatever, what would you say for someone who was looking for concrete specificity when you talk about the brokenness of institutions?

[Alana Newhouse]

What I would say is that a brokenness would be willing to play with the idea that the frustrations that you feel aren't normal. So I might ask the person a little bit about their life and I may find out that they have a child with special needs. And if they have a child with special needs, I am willing to bet, unless they're a billionaire, that within 10 minutes they will start to talk to me about everything they had to pay for out of pocket, about all the things they couldn't afford, all the worries they have about the future, all the ways in which they do not feel that American society has been set up to make it possible for them to not be afraid for their future, it will take me, if it takes me 10 minutes, I'd be surprised. So all I have to do, frankly, is find a vulnerability or a soft point in any person's life and ask them how hard it is for them to manage that soft point and whether or not they remember their parents having a similar soft point and whether or not they imagined or recall their parents having the same difficulty that they had. And for many people, the answer is no. My life feels much harder. And the institutions that I have to wend my way through feel like, as one reader said to me, half the time they feel like concrete and half the time they feel like molasses. That's not a functioning and well organized society.

[Sean Elling]

Coming up after the break, are things really broken beyond repair? The Civil war, reconstruction, the 60s. We've been through a lot in this country's history. What is so special about today?

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[Alana Newhouse]

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[Sean Elling]

A lot of things are in a bad way, no question. And as you know, to say that American institutions are broken is not to say that they are unfixable. What makes you so sure, or mostly sure, if that's more accurate, that it's the latter and not the former? Because I mean, even as you acknowledge in your piece, right, we've we survived a civil war and reconstruction and the Industrial Revolution and the chaos and violence of the 60s, and somehow we always emerged on the other side of that stuff, right?

[Alana Newhouse]

So I had a friend who read my piece who said it doesn't make sense. Like how did everything break at the same time? What's your theory about how is that possible? All these institutions started different times in history and they all just decayed simultaneously. So what's your smart explanation for that? Which of course is the easiest question to answer. Because it's technology. We had an economic revolution and I think we all thought we were just going to get email or something like it was just going to make our lives easier. But just like with the Industrial Revolution, these revolutions are comprehensive and they change every aspect of our lives. That change has a cascading effect. And what technology did to all of those institutions, it forced a coming to terms with how modern it could be. Which meant if you create basically a new goalpost, now all of a sudden you can judge how far everything is from that goalpost. So you create a new technology and you say every system has to be immediately responsive. Every system is going to try to become immediately responsive. Some of them will be able to get to the standard you just set. A lot of them are going to fall apart on their way, racing toward their new goalpost. So to me, it seems kind of obvious that technology created this demand and it set up a new system that all of these institutions were going to have to be a part of, and some of them are going to make it, and a lot of them are not going to. And I have no idea which ones are and aren't. What I feel, though, is they're all facing the same challenge. And that's what I think is interesting to look at.

[Sean Elling]

You talk about following the cracks in the foundation of society the way a seismologist tracks slips in the tectonic plates. And I still don't really know where the cracks are or where they lead. I mean, I guess I have vague ideas, but it's very hard to isolate causes. And precisely because of some of these technological changes, I worry all the time about getting a distorted picture of the world by viewing it through the funhouse mirror that is the Internet. Is it possible that things really aren't as broken as they seem?

[Alana Newhouse]

Yes.

[Sean Elling]

Maybe it just feels that way because we're more aware of the brokenness that was always there and we're just confronted with it all the time.

[Alana Newhouse]

Yes, absolutely. You know the same parent I just described, parent of a special needs child who could tell you everything that's broken about the health insurance landscape, about Medicaid, about everything in the same sentence that they will say Medicaid is deeply broken. They will also say, and don't you dare take it away, I need it desperately. Right. The imperative for those of us who want to think about these things is also, even if it's not fixable, we probably have the responsibility to create its replacement before we burn the original down to the ground. Because if not, we might as well live with this half or mostly broken system. It's better than nothing. I mean, just in terms of your question about the cracks, that's kind of the reason why it's really important to stick with seeing what those cracks are and to talk to the people who tell you they're falling into them, because they're the only ones who know. They're the only ones who can help you walk that crack back to its origin point.

[Sean Elling]

I have some brokenness and some status quo tendencies I can be either, depending on the day you ask me. I don't know what the hell that makes me. I guess if I'm hearing you, it makes me like a lot of people.

[Alana Newhouse]

Right.

[Sean Elling]

You know, somewhere in the middle, I was probably at my most brokenness in the throes of the pandemic.

[Alana Newhouse]

Yeah.

[Sean Elling]

The experience of watching even that be so easily and neatly subsumed by our partisan rancor, that was a kind of tipping point for me and a realization that the information environment now, in conjunction with all these other forces, has really combined to create an incredibly unstable situation that I do not think is sustainable.

[Alana Newhouse]

I think if you can maintain having both brokenness and status quoist ways of looking at the world where you can feel comfortable with either one of them or both, what that allows you to do is judge things at a local level, which is where I think all things are gonna get built or fixed anyway. It's a little bit like cleaning out your closet. So there's a bunch of stuff that you're gonna take and you're gonna throw it away, but not every item of clothing. Then there are a bunch of things that you're gonna take and be like, these are really important to me. I'm gonna get them fixed. And then there are things that work great, they do great for you, so you keep those. If you have a philosophy about your closet, you're going to end up with a bad closet. If you're like, nothing here has to change. We're not changing anything. You're just going to end up with a bunch of stuff you can't use and a bunch of stuff that doesn't look good on you. Right. And if you walk in and you're like, we're throwing everything out, you may lose something that was really important to you, that actually worked really well, that maybe was from your grandmother. Like, you don't want that. And I think that American society right now is at a place where it would be amazing if we could almost assess everything, look at everything, and say, how can we make this better for more people? How can we make this work better and help more people and make better, safer, more enriching lives for more of us.

[Sean Elling]

You're not a fence sitter though, right? You're a brokenist. Right. I mean, although you do say there's this caveat. Maybe I should ask you about that. The way you say it in the piece is to say that you're a brokenness with respect to American institutions, but not with respect to America itself. I'm not exactly sure. What that really means. I don't know what America is if not a bundle of institutions girded by a culture. I suppose. So maybe you can just unpack that and explain your staunch brokenism.

[Alana Newhouse]

I wouldn't say it's staunch.

[Sean Elling]

I took some liberties there.

[Alana Newhouse]

Right. I think that I have a hot hand with my brokenness, meaning I'm not slow to look at something and say it's broken beyond repair. That's a difference between me and I think some of my more status quo as friends is that their default is to say, can we fix this? And to take that conversation, I think sometimes too far past the point of usability and past the point of the legitimate use of anyone's time and resources and energy. So I see too many people throwing too many resources down what I think is just an abyss of institutions that seem like they're obviously failing and shouldn't be given those kinds of resources. So I am quicker than a lot of other people I know to consign things to the dustbin of history now. So that's what I mean when I say I tend to be brokenness in my impulses. In terms of sort of the America question. I mean, here's where I get a little woo woo. I guess I think one of the best things about America and one of the most gruesome in some ways things about America is its ability to forget the past. To almost like forget the past the minute it happens. Which is responsible, I think, for both its capacity to be so future oriented that it constantly morphs, like it molts almost, but also then brings trauma with it, like drags its own trauma with it constantly into the future because it won't deal with it. But for me, what that means though, is that America has, at least historically, been fertile ground for pretty radical change. And because America's been very open to the idea of, well, why don't we just all wake up tomorrow and do something else? I feel excited about the idea that we could fix stuff and maybe replace stuff. And again, I'm not European. I was on British radio and the interviewer said to me, so do you, you believe that maybe that the British government's gonna fix everything? Right? That they could fix it and we could all be okay? I was like, I have no idea. I don't feel super hopeful about that, but I have no idea. Europe is different. And Europe in some senses lives in its own past. America doesn't. And so when I talk about feeling like I immediately will consign an American institution to the dustbin of history. It's almost because America doesn't mind. Like you want to throw out all of the Ivy Leagues. Literally just throw them in the middle of the ocean. America will be fine. It will just make a new thing. And it's brutal. It can be violent. But that ability to simply replace what needs to get thrown in the garbage means that I feel like there's going to be something new in 20 years, whether we can see it now or not.

[Sean Elling]

So before we put this episode in the dustbin of history, can we talk about why things have gotten so extreme on the right and left? Alana and I discuss after one more quick break. Hey, it's Ryan Reynolds here for Mint Mobile. Now, I was looking for fun ways to tell you that Mint's offer of unlimited Premium Wireless for $15 a month is back. So I thought it would be fun if we made $15 bills, but it turns out that's very illegal. So there goes my big idea for the commercial. Give it a [e-mail] Switch upfront payment.

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[Sean Elling]

Oh, come on.

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Whatever.

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[Alana Newhouse]

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[Sean Elling]

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[Sean Elling]

You remind me of that great Gore Vidal line. We are forever the United States of Amnesia. We learn nothing because we remember nothing. I think there's a lot of truth to that one. Perhaps symptom of some of this brokenness, for you at least, is the fact that our conventional ideological categories are sort of meaningless now. Like, I don't even know what the hell the left and the right really even refers to at this point, which is why you invoke something that's called the horseshoe theory.

[Alana Newhouse]

Yeah, the horseshoe theory is the idea that the extremes are closer to each other than they are to the mainstream cohorts on their own side. So you go so far right that you sound like the left. You go so far left that you start to sound like the right. And of course, that's a perfect status quoist argument because you basically say the extremes are ignorable. Both of them are fringe, and moderate centrists on both sides need to come together, and we're the adults in the room. On the one hand, I'm sympathetic to that idea because it's very hard to look around American politics and not see examples of horseshoe theory. And I mentioned some of them in the piece. You see Glenn Greenwald on Tucker Carlson. Glenn is a historic leftist now he's on Tucker Carlson, which is obviously a right wing program with a right wing host. And we see these elements happening all the time now. And so you do see this coming together of voices and platforms that feel like they're taking the extremes of the left and the right and they're combining them. So it's hard not to see that status quoists are right when they identify that coming together. On the other hand, the point of the horseshoe theory, which is rhetorical, is to tell you to dismiss them. That's where I feel it starts to actually be its own political argument, which you can then disagree with or not. Now, it's not actually about who's legitimate in politics, but it's just. That's just not your side. So the way that I see it is that instead of it being a horseshoe with extremes on both sides, it's just a new circle. And there are two sides to the new circle. One side are people who would be considered on the far extremes of both of their respective teams, and on the other side are people who are centrists.

[Sean Elling]

Yeah, I mean, in some way there's an alignment. Really, the horseshoe theory sort of folds into your framework. For me at least, to say that horseshoe theory is correct is not to say that the far left and the far right share the same beliefs. Instead, I think it's about how a certain kind of dogmatism leads to the same posture in people, regardless of where they start out ideologically. So, yeah, the far left and the far right may want to build very different worlds if they want to build anything at all. But they both probably agree that the system should be burned down. And in that sense, they may have more in common with each other than normie centrist types do on the left and the right. And that, I think, is instructive.

[Alana Newhouse]

To me, these frameworks are only useful if they actually help us understand what's happening in society. And I'm not so sure that the left right framework is useful anymore. I don't think it helps anyone understand anything, let alone convince anyone. Let's even put aside convincing other people as a goal. Right. I don't even think it makes it clear to anyone. But when I start talking to people about the health of institutions, all of a sudden they come alive in both directions. People want to defend the institutions that they feel are central to their lives, and they want to make them better. Other people want to destroy the institutions that they see as obstacles to them leading good lives. But that becomes a great, exciting, generative conversation. And the conversations around that, that I'm in, people leave feeling good because they feel like they thought about something and they kind of have marching orders that are different.

[Sean Elling]

Yeah, I think that's part of the problem. We've inherited this language, really, from the 20th century, this kind of left, right, liberal, conservative that just doesn't really map neatly onto the political reality now. And we just don't really have a new language that does. And so we're in this interregnum or whatever, this in between space that makes conversation really difficult and makes situating yourself in this political space difficult. I mean, I even struggle with. I mean, I still very much think of myself as of the left, but it's not so simple anymore. And it's because of this scrambledness that's even a real word.

[Alana Newhouse]

No, that's right. And the thing that I tried in the piece to basically talk about, I think I used this metaphor of when I was in gym class in elementary school. Our teacher at some point, you know, we had two volleyball teams, and our teacher at some point split both teams, and then we combined them to create new teams. And that kind of is what I feel like is happening now. There are still two teams. They just look different, and they're sussing themselves out in unusual ways. And as a result, a bunch of people who are standing in the middle are trying to figure out which side they belong to because they're in flux. And we are clearly in a cataclysmic time of change. The question, I think, for us is how do we get out of it with the most possibility for a better future?

[Sean Elling]

I don't know. I guess I find it easier to talk about the symptoms and the indicators than I do about the solutions. And something you definitely touch on. And it's a recurring theme for me in the show and in some of my writing. This collapse of trust in authority in mainstream institutions like media is a major red flag. And if you're looking for symptoms of the brokenness, that's a really good one. But I also think it's important to be honest and acknowledge that that collapse of trust is not just a result of people being blinkered by misinformation online. Right. That there is an actual cultural divide and it is playing out in our dominant institutions. Like the conversation, for instance, about woke capitalism. What's interesting about that to me is that it illustrates this gap between elites and a lot of the public. And I'm setting aside here ideological questions about, you know, what's right or wrong or good or bad or whatever. The relevant point here for me is that the intellectual and political culture in a lot of our dominant institutions, from media to academia to corporate America, often doesn't reflect the ideological diversity of the country. And that's true. Even if you think part of the problem is that huge chunks in the country are just deeply wrong about deeply important questions and they believe awful things. Maybe that's true, but the existence of this cultural divide is generating a lot of tension. And if you're a status quoist, that's not helping your cause.

[Alana Newhouse]

Yeah, you see it on these massive corporations and you start to think to yourself, it's something about it makes me feel uneasy. And I think that you're right, that on some level we're playing out mistrust with these institutions. I might take us one step back and say, I'm not trying to be. Although I feel sympathy with Luddites, I'm not actually a Luddite. But it's hard not to look at the past and say like local communities were high trust communities. And a lot of things emerged from local communities, even American. The American elite used to be geographically organized. So we had a Midwest elite, we had a Southern elite, we had a Eastern Seaboard elite, we had a West coast elite. And those elites were connected to the non elites in their region. They're invested in living in the same region. It's high trust. And then they had corporations that were rooted in those geographical areas. If you lived around IBM, IBM is a major multinational corporation. But you also, it was your local industry. These things created trust. The trust has broken down all throughout the pyramid of our lives. If we don't have local life in this country, that feels Generative and enriching and potentially a place of opportunity for people. I think a large part of what we're trying to build on top of that will come apart.

[Sean Elling]

You wrote something that was, I think, very important and very powerful in your piece, and now I'm quoting. To see the cracks in the building before it collapses, that's a Jewish experience. To argue about whether the building can be saved or has to be evacuated, that's a Jewish debate. To find a way to somehow invent an entirely new building, that's a Jewish act. To dismiss the cracks as unimportant and suppress questions so that the next day's news shocks you all over again. I wish you luck in your efforts, but don't confuse your approach with the values of Jewish engagement. That's a lovely piece of writing, and there's a lot going on there. And I am not Jewish, and I don't have any connection with what you're describing, really. So I want to give you space to explain what that passage really means. Because to the extent I do think I understand what you're saying, it's important.

[Alana Newhouse]

I talked a little bit about America's brutal and terrifying and kind of magical ability to live outside of history or to forget the past the minute it happens. For me, the dynamic part of the reason why I can live inside of that country and access that without it feeling almost inhuman is because I'm also rooted in another tradition, which is deeply historical and actually demands constant remembering almost in a daily way. For me, the dynamic between those two has been very useful. I feel that I can understand many sides and many arguments about the health of a society, because I both feel the imperative of the past and the pull of the future. The argument that I was trying to make in that paragraph was that Jews historically have lived in lots of societies that have come apart. And they either came apart internally or externally. Usually they expelled their Jews or they murdered them. Sometimes they came apart in ways that allowed the Jews to leave before that happened, but that was rarer. So the point is, is that we have a diasporic history that has demanded that we study our surroundings and that we watch for signs of decay or danger. And that we not take for granted the notion that just because the society has been around for a little while, that it's going to be around forever. So what I was encouraging my readers, not just Jewish readers, but all readers, to do sort of take that from the Jewish playbook and start to ask yourself, what looks healthy here? What looks like it could use a little Firming up what looks like a building that's about to fall down on my head. Be honest with yourself, because your loved ones are in that building with you. Part of the key to Jewish history has been in being able to engage with the world around us richly and creatively and smoothly, but also to be honest about it.

[Sean Elling]

You've talked about it in this conversation. You talk about it in the essay itself, how we're in this cataclysmic period of flux, something like that. And I just worry that there is an impulse, a temptation to exaggerate the stakes or to exaggerate the level of brokenness in order to imbue the moment with a historical weight that maybe doesn't quite merit, which is just a really stuffy way of saying maybe things aren't really that bad, comparatively speaking. They're actually maybe as good as they've ever been. You know what I mean? And part of it is I just. I continue to believe that it's just really, really hard to even determine what cleavages are real and unbridgeable and what cleavages are being manufactured and in some ways are just sort of byproducts of our cultural and technological environment, which doesn't make them inconsequential. Right. But it does sort of make them contingent. You know what I mean?

[Alana Newhouse]

I suspect, particularly in this country, I don't think that there's a huge threat of us throwing in the garbage institutions that are working really well for a majority of the people they're meant to serve. I think I would ask you to ask yourself, or maybe I would just ask you, what's the worst that could happen?

[Sean Elling]

I'm thinking about your question. Honestly, it's a good one, and I don't know what the answer is. I suspect that whatever the worst that can happen is not just worse than we imagine. It may be worse than we can imagine. And I guess I would say one thing. I don't think you quite do in the piece. And if you think I'm wrong about this, please tell me. But I'm not sure you really reckon with what it would mean. And this gets at what you're asking me, what it would mean, materially and politically, to reject or abandon our institutions. I'm not sure you can rebuild society, really, until the prevailing order has collapsed. And the transition, at least historically, from one order to another is usually really violent and bumpy and ugly. Which is why I think a committed brokenness. And as I said, on some days I feel like I am. One should really think long and Hard about what would come after and about how hard it was to build the society we have, however screwed up and flawed it might be, and no doubt.

[Alana Newhouse]

Is, we're not making a movie here. We're actually talking about how things work in life. And I think that the second state, maybe at this point there are three of them, has just undone its requirement for a college degree in order to work for the government. That is a move to quietly reimagine the importance of a college degree in the American economy moving forward. That's a brokenness move. Nobody shut down all the colleges overnight. Nobody decided that people with college degrees were going to be prejudiced against, that they couldn't get jobs. Right. What quietly happened and is happening is that some people are saying, what if we don't think about things the way that we've always thought about them? What if we imagine that we add a second way of thinking about it? To me, that's what I see happening and that's what I want to encourage. I don't want to encourage people just taking things and throwing them in the middle of the ocean, especially not before they've created some viable soil on the ground to build something new. But I don't even think they should do it then. I think we should be making moves like that, reimagining a future where maybe people don't have to go into massive debt in order to have jobs.

[Sean Elling]

Yeah.

[Alana Newhouse]

And so when I talk about brokenism, I don't mean that we should burn things to the ground. I mean, we should imagine more. Imagine that there's more opportunity. Imagine there were more options. Imagine there were more ways of getting people better, safe, happier, richer, in whatever way you want to think about it, lives. And what if the roots that we've created right now, what if we just make more of them? That's how I think of it.

[Sean Elling]

I like that you went there. I mean, in some ways I'm talking to myself as much as I'm talking to you. I'm someone who, if I'm being honest and I try to be, I incline towards cynicism. And I'm working really hard to resist that. And what I was getting at was maybe speaking to the brokenness out there and to the brokenness in me that to be a brokenness maybe isn't necessarily to be a fatalist or even worse, a nihilist. And I think we're seeing this a lot, and I think we're seeing more of it on the right than the left, with all the caveats that that implies. But, you know, a politics of contempt for the present order, however justified, can become just pure negation in the absence of any coherent alternative vision. And that is the road to ruin. That I worry we're on, particularly for people who are feeling more like brokenness, because it's like, what the hell's the next step after that? If things are broken, then it's like you pack up your shit and you go home. You wait for the apocalypse. But politically, that's a dead end, and I don't want to stop there.

[Alana Newhouse]

Yeah, I think that this is the challenge with the piece, actually, which is that the language is at once evocative, but it's also a little wrong. A friend of mine said, you know, you actually don't mean brokenness. You mean we founders. Or another friend was like, I'm a brokenness, but I call myself a buildist. Like, I want to build stuff.

[Sean Elling]

I like that.

[Alana Newhouse]

I like that you like buildist. Okay, we'll put you down.

[Sean Elling]

Yeah, I mean, it's a little clunky, but I like the sentiment.

[Alana Newhouse]

Right. The challenge for me, of course, is that I feel like what I was trying to do because I'm sort of a newspaper girl at heart. I believe in the idea of mirroring back to readers what I feel they're telling me. And so I was trying to mirror back the feeling that I feel right now in this moment, which is a feeling of frustration. And I was just trying to sit with people with their frustration. But you are right that after you sit for a little bit with your frustration, the question for me then is, well, then, what? What do we do? When a reader looks at me and says, thank you for articulating my frustration, I realize you're right. I am exasperated. I do want something new now. What? And that's where I think the term will start to fall apart a little bit. So hopefully it'll capture its moment. Maybe we'll move really quickly through brokenism into buildism, and nobody will remember my term because it was such a flash in the pan, and everyone just moved right into an optimistic building phase. So I now have what to hope for.

[Sean Elling]

I think that brought us to a natural conclusion. I guess I'll just end by echoing what I said earlier, which is, I think you did a public service by framing the debate in this way. Regardless of how I feel, which, as I said, varies by the day, I do think it's really important to have a language, to have terms that capture a moment and clarify the stakes. And I think you did that in this piece and for that I commend you.

[Alana Newhouse]

Thanks for this conversation. It was really thought provoking and challenging and maybe I'll write about it next.

[Sean Elling]

Eleanor Newhouse, thank you so much for being here.

[Alana Newhouse]

Thank you so much.

[Sean Elling]

Eric Janikas is our producer. Patrick Boyd engineered this episode. It was edited by a.m. hall and Alex Overington wrote our theme music. I really enjoyed that conversation. As I told Alana at the beginning and at the end, I still don't really know if I'm a brokenist or a status quoist, and I suspect that's where a lot of people are as well. But that language, that distinction, is genuinely useful and it did give me a new way to just think about what's wrong and where the real fault lines are. Let us know what you think about this one. Are you a brokenist or are you a status quoist? Drop us a line at the gray [e-mail] and if you appreciated this episode, please as always, share it with your friends on all the socials making films.

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