Latest / Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps / "Is Polarisation Good?" with Shadi Hamid

Transcript

"Is Polarisation Good?" with Shadi Hamid · Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps

• 0:00
  G'day humans, welcome in a safe space with dangerous ideas.
• 0:05
  I am back in Australia on Terraform.
• 0:08
  This is the first episode that I've recorded since my big adventures off to the Middle
• 0:13
  East and West Africa a little bit of time in Europe and Asia on the way home.
• 0:19
  Someone asked me what it's like to be back in civilization, which I thought was a delightfully
• 0:24
  politically incorrect and sort of 1950s or even earlier, perhaps imperial attitude towards
• 0:31
  things.
• 0:32
  Here we are in civilization.
• 0:34
  What is it like to be in the uncivilized world where people wander around without so
• 0:39
  much as clothes on their person?
• 0:42
  So it is nice to be back in civilization, in the civilized world, a rich country, should
• 0:48
  we say.
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  We're things function.
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  That's why we escaped the prison of poverty and destitution and dysfunction that we
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  had endured, low these many millennia.
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  And we invented civilization.
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  And now we're here.
• 1:03
  It has upsides, also downsides.
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  And it was very nice to check out, for a while, it was very nice to spend days where
• 1:11
  I wasn't looking at a watch, I wasn't looking at a clock because there were no watches
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  and there were no clocks and there were no phones.
• 1:17
  It was just me and the sea and a bit of cholera.
• 1:22
  And no, I didn't catch it, I didn't get it, but it was there.
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  And the breeze and the feces in the streets.
• 1:29
  There's a lot to love and a little bit not to love about the uncivilized countries,
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  any who I'm back.
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  So let's talk to Shadi Hamid, whose today's guest, Shadi's fascinating.
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  Just came to my attention in that whole period after 9-11 when we were doing a lot of hand-ringing
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  about globalization, Islam, what's happening to the future of civilization and so on.
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  And Shadi as an American Muslim, as a person born in America of Egyptian ancestry and a
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  political thinker, had lots of interesting takes on Islam, on Islam, on jihadism, and
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  has subsequently become just a generally thoughtful person about the political crises that we
• 2:16
  find ourselves in, about Trump, about workness, about the culture wars.
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  He's got a good head on his shoulders.
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  One of his books was named by foreign affairs as the best book of 2014, which is called
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  Temptations of Power, Islamists and Illiberal Democracy in a New Middle East.
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  His most recent book now is The Problem of Democracy, America the Middle East and the
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  Rise and Fall of an Idea.
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  He's a senior fellow in the Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution.
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  He's an assistant research professor in his Islamic studies at Fuller Seminary.
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  We really don't talk much about Islam.
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  I want to talk more about consensus and partisanship and division because in a strange way,
• 3:01
  Shadi is not as much of a fan of consensus as I am.
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  My whole stick here on this show and in much of my life is like, let's find ways of having
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  people talk to each other in ways that are more reasonable, that are more rational, where
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  they can find common ground.
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  Shadi is like, maybe a certain amount of hostility and partisanship and hatred of the
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  other is just natural to the functioning of democracy and we shouldn't try to suppress
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  it.
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  So here he is with that radical and uncomfortable idea, I hope you enjoy this combo as much
• 3:32
  as I did.
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  The one and only, Shadi Hamid.
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  I love your piece recently about consensus and the case against consensus and polarisation,
• 3:52
  which I think would be an interesting place to start.
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  Maybe.
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  I mean, you talk about how in almost every major democracy nowadays, citizens dislike
• 4:02
  each other and you don't think that's a problem.
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  Why not?
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  Yeah, yeah, that is a kind of I guess a weird view that we can talk about for sure.
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  Yeah.
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  I mean, go for it.
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  Why don't you think that's a problem because I think it's widely diagnosed as being
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  probably the problem of our time, like whether people blame social media or blame the
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  culture wars or blame cancel culture or blame conservative trolling, there tends to be
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  a general acceptance that we're not getting along as well as we should be.
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  Why is that not a problem for you?
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  Well, I think part of it is that we have these disagreements because we disagree on profound
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  issues.
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  And we're not talking about policy differences where you can sort of split the middle.
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  So I think there was a time when some of the divides in America, but also in other major
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  democracies were policy oriented.
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  So debates around universal healthcare, budget deficits, marginal tax rates were no longer
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  in that period.
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  We're debating foundational questions about what it means to be an American, the nature of
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  the American founding, the role of Christianity or lack thereof in public life, the future of
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  the republic as we know it.
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  So I think those are things that are not amenable to resolution or consensus.
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  And I wouldn't want to ask my fellow Americans to suppress their deepest convictions in the
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  name of consensus because they should believe what they believe if that's important to
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  them, if their relationship with their God or as part of their communities or religious
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  traditions believes something that I don't like at all, that doesn't mean they should move
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  over to me.
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  They can persist with their belief regardless of how I feel about it, if it's important
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  to them.
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  I mean, there are things that are settled, that are beyond discussion or debate, for
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  example, slavery.
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  I mean, if someone comes and says, well, shadi, slavery is important to me, that's part
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  of my deepest convictions, you know, you have to draw a line somewhere.
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  So there are certain things that even I, like I try to be like pretty open to alternative
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  perspectives, but you know, we all have our limits.
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  That's one thing.
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  And then I would say that polarization has its benefits.
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  We want our democracy to be alive and vibrant.
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  And that means we have to accept some degree of messiness.
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  And I worry sometimes that people want to get rid of that messiness, but then we lose
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  a kind of creative chaos.
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  And I think America is good with creative chaos.
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  Obviously, I mean, there's too much of that.
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  And I think one can easily argue that, you know, sometimes it really feels like we've
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  gone way too far in a particular direction, but I wouldn't want to, you know, return
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  to some kind of approach of uniformity of where we try to suppress those, those very
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  real differences.
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  I think we lose quite a lot as a country.
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  I have noticed, I mean, I did one of the things that one does notice coming from a much
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  more informal parliamentary democracy to the United States is that when I was living
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  there, it was kind of exhausting the amount of pomp and formality and ceremony that goes
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  along with American politics, the my good friends across the aisle and, you know, someone
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  so from the great state of bloody blah and, you know, the shock and horror when someone
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  during a state of the union speech said, you lie to the president that became like a
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  foundational to the new cycle for months thereafter.
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  I mean, in Australian parliament, of course, people say you lie all the time, even if
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  it's, you know, question time or whatever.
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  You can roll with the punches.
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  And so I take what you mean about there being, I think the US could probably, you know,
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  turn the dial up towards creative, amicable disagreement and informality somewhat.
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  But I'm curious what you think the foundational disagreements that don't need to be papered
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  over are because, I mean, when you say about the role of Catholicism in public life or
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  what America should be, a lot of what I see and I think the counter argument to yours is
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  that we think we're fighting about big things, but we're actually fighting meaningless proxy
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  wars that tap into some deeper sense of like, I don't know, home made apple pie and
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  all of everything that we find to be, to hold dear, but in actual fact, we don't disagree
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  about those things.
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  Most Americans don't disagree about whether or not the country should be a democratic
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  republic moving forward and whether or not it should remain a secular state or become
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  a religious theocracy.
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  They don't disagree about foundational stuff.
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  They're just arguing about transgender people in bathrooms because they think that that's
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  a proxy war for something bigger, but it's actually not.
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  Well, on the issue of something like the Trans-Dibbed in America and I'm not sure how
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  charged it is in other major democracies, but I think that that is actually foundational
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  in a way.
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  It depends what's ultimately animating people and you're right that a lot of these things
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  seem like proxies, but even if they're proxies, they're proxies for something deeper because
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  we don't know how to maybe give voice to our deepest fears and convictions.
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  We're not encouraged to talk about those openly and then so we tend to fall back into partisanship
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  and tribalism because that's a language that is common now and that's what we're encouraged
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  to do by our politicians.
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  We're not talking about deep philosophical questions.
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  That would be my preference that we talk about the nature of the human person, the existence
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  of God and how that relates to how we view the individual.
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  Those are those when I think about first principles and the kind of basic moral intuitions
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  that animate human beings, that's what registers for me.
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  Obviously most ordinary Americans are either not thinking at that level or don't want
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  to and I don't mean to sound like an elitist, but I don't think it's realistic to
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  expect people to kind of engage in deep philosophy when they have a lot of other things to worry
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  about, but I think that you can bring people out on those deeper convictions because those
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  are personal to them and that is something people can share.
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  I don't think we encourage that and so instead we don't even really know what we're debating,
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  but the transgender issue I think is one good example of this, you know, when we talk
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  about gender identity and gender fluidity and how these basic conceptions of gender are
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  changing quite rapidly in a way that people certainly weren't expecting as recently as
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  five or six years ago, people are fearful, but then we have to ask ourselves what is underneath
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  that fear and that's where we get to I think deeper contentions around religion because at least
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  the three, you know, major monotheistic faiths do have very particular views on gender, on sex,
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  on the nature of the human person and that, so there is a link there and so when people are
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  worried about public education, what their kids are being taught at school and they're worried
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  about hyper-wovenness or whatever we want to call it, I mean gender identity always seems to come
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  up because even if people don't realize it, they feel that this speaks to something deeper about
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  one's fundamental worldview. Right, but it isn't the question, don't we need to, in order to determine
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  whether or not the polarization and partisanship and mutual dislike that has evolved between
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  segments of the citizenry is constructive or not, we need to touch on whether or not the
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  squabbles about these kinds of cultural war issues are actually leading to productive conversations
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  about the deepest things that we care about, or are they just in flaming and aggravating
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  superficial differences without actually ever quite reaching to the crux of the things that we do
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  care about, like our identity in the world and the role of public education and our lives and
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  the meaning of, you know, leading spiritual life. Yeah, totally agree, that would be my preference
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  and you know, in my own work, I always try to get back to this question of why do we believe what
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  we believe and as someone who does a lot of work on the intersection of religion and politics,
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  you know, I think, I think most people are animated by what might be called religious impulses,
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  even if they're not themselves religious, that we as human beings are in a constant search
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  for meaning, belonging, and identity. So I think at some level, if we allow ourselves to just go
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  a little bit, you know, deeper in our own consciousness, there are things that we care
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  passionately about that are foundational and if we can find ways to bring those out by being
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  more intentional, you know, there's, it's a long, I suppose, like a difficult,
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  difficult conversation about how to get there and there's a number of, I think, paths forward on
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  that. Some of it has to do with elites, so-called elites in media and politics and they set the tone
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  to some degree. So if you have politicians who are always exacerbating and intensifying superficial
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  partisan or tribal divides, then obviously their supporters are going to follow suit and the media
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  plays a role because politicians respond to what the New York Times is saying on a regular basis.
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  So if the New York Times is very engaged in culture wars, politicians are going to follow suit,
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  their supporters are going to be outraged about whatever woke controversy there is. So I mean,
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  I think there's a kind of broader ecosystem that contributes to the superficiality and I don't
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  have a kind of catch all solution except to say that we as individuals have agency in our own
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  families and communities and the kinds of ecosystems that we're part of and if we realize this is
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  the problem, we can do more on our own and, you know, you're doing precisely this with, you know,
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  with your podcast, Josh. So, you know, and that does have an impact. So that's what we all have to
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  do and the hope that over time more people come to their senses because I think most Americans,
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  and I would suspect also, not that I know a lot about Australian people and their sensibilities,
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  but I think I think people generally tend to get exhausted by superficiality if there's too much of
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  it and it might be thrilling for a while and that's why people come to Twitter for their dopamine
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  rush to get outraged about the next outrage. But my sense is that Americans are exhausted to various
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  degrees and if they knew there were other options, they probably want to live a little bit differently
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  when it comes to how they consume politics and the news around them. What are the other options?
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  The other options on on how we could live, like you were saying, if Americans knew that they
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  were other options about how to engage with each other, then they would take them. Yeah. Okay, so
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  one example, I wrote a piece about this in the Atlantic a few weeks back. The title was something
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  like you're better off not knowing where I basically made the case for, you know, ignorance is
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  bliss. Obviously, in a more nuanced way, I mean, I'm not saying that people should deliberately
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  be ignorant, but I do advocate for a news-free diet to some extent or what might be called
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  slow news. And this was also in the context of the Trump indictment story and one thing that I said,
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  you know, repeatedly, and I think I've tried to live up to this is do not read any new stories
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  about the Trump indictment. It will serve no benefit to you. It will not make you smarter. It will
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  have no effect on the world around you unless you're actually working in the corner of the legal
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  system that is directly involved in the Trump indictment process. Okay, you probably should know
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  it because it relates to your work. But if you're just an ordinary American, you will gain nothing
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  from following this. And I think that could actually be extended for a lot of the Trump-related
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  news, which is, I'm actually not sure. I know some people might make the argument that,
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  oh, well, we have to know it. We have to know what's going on with Trump because of X or Y reason.
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  And I tend to challenge that because if you know Trump is bad already, then, you know,
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  this is just going to be a confirmation of what you already know. It's not adding something to
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  your knowledge of the world around you. And it's doing precisely what we've been saying people
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  should avoid, which is it focuses us on a kind of superficial horse race, kind of politics,
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  instead of the deeper questions of what is important to you in terms of your values, for example.
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  Yeah. The Trump is a particularly noxious case of this because you're able to pursue the most
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  prurient and self-absorbed version of news consumption at the same time as telling yourself that
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  it's deeply important that you can stay across it because of his importance as a public figure.
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  So I think the only reason to follow the Trump indictment would be the same reason as you might
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  follow the Johnny Depp amber herd case. Exactly. Basically, you're interested, like, you know, you're
• 18:28
  want to be a fly on the wall. You think it's a cool thing way to pass your time to, like,
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  to be a voyeur of that thing. But you're able to couch the Donald Trump case in a loftier
• 18:41
  purpose than just pissing on the bed with amber herd and Johnny Depp. Yeah, I mean, I'm
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  really on the whole news cycle thing. I've been arguing for years that really if a story doesn't
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  make it into the weekend New York Times or the economist, you didn't need to know about it in the
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  first place. Sorry. You know, I just leave it until the weekend and then catch up.
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  Yeah, not a bad rule of thumb. But I'd even say for those who want to follow something
• 19:08
  Trumpy for the entertainment purpose, I think that can be okay in theory, but in practice,
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  we can't help but be either, like, moved by outraged by, especially if you're obviously
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  if you're an opponent of Trump and you're following the indictment news because you think it's
• 19:25
  entertaining, that's going to bring out a negative side of your personality. It's going to make
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  you feel outraged about Trump's badness and the fact that he's gotten away with it for all of this
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  time. And so I think that there has to be a preemptive approach to the news that even if you're like,
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  oh, I really want to hear about this story because I think it'll be fun. You know, maybe it's best
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  to take a moment and preemptively decide that you're going to have a red line. So I'm very
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  much a believer in, you know, structure and one reason why I think religions are good even if you
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  don't believe in God is because they provide a structure and once we commit to that structure,
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  we kind of remove our own choice. And I think one of the predicaments of our time is unlimited
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  choice or the perception of unlimited choice. So people have to sort of take the first step to create
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  to create boundaries and structure for themselves because we're weak. We're weak as human beings
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  we're mere mortals and we're going to be led astray if we're not careful. That's one of the reasons
• 20:34
  that I bought like one of those cell phone lock boxes because people say, well, Shady, just don't
• 20:38
  look at your phone. But I can't be trusted on such matters. So I buy a box to lock my phone in
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  there and then I don't have a choice solved. Did you really get one of those? Yeah,
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  no, that's serious. That's not like a metaphor. How do you set it and how do you open it again?
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  You can choose your own time. So, you know, it can be reasonable on that. But some of these phone
• 21:05
  lock boxes have a little opening in case you need to like see something for like emergencies. But
• 21:12
  some like there's no way to open the box at all or even look at your phone. You know, so there's
• 21:19
  there's there's different, you know, there's different ways to do it. But generally speaking,
• 21:24
  the box itself cannot be broken. You have maybe like two or three emergency times that are allowed
• 21:30
  and that after that you can never open the box. You would have to maybe like get a hammer and smash
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  it. But these are available on Amazon. So it's actually something that is like accessible to people.
• 21:42
  And what was your thinking when you decided to finally get the box? What like had you tried to
• 21:47
  self-motorite? Yeah, I've tried and you know, I have systems for my laptop. So I use a freedom
• 21:56
  restriction app that's actually not a bad way to describe it. It's called freedom. Sorry,
• 22:03
  it's called freedom. And there's another one called cold turkey that I sometimes use. But that
• 22:09
  so that's a similar idea. You put a timer on your laptop for say like two hours in those two
• 22:15
  hours. There's no way to override it and you can't go on Twitter. But you choose the websites
• 22:20
  that are restricted. And yeah, so I think this is a laptop. Sorry, you can restart your laptop.
• 22:28
  Oh, actually, I'm I'm pretty sure with the with freedom, which is the one that I use restarting
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  doesn't work. Or maybe I'm just under the illusion that restarting doesn't work.
• 22:40
  Jay, do I I don't even want to know? I mean, let's pretend it's just ignorance is bliss.
• 22:44
  Better not to know. That's right. Okay. Sure. Sure, Shady, you can restart it as many times
• 22:49
  as you want. You can get a whole new computer and it still won't connect to the internet as long
• 22:53
  as it knows that you previously had freedom on your other computer. Right. So quick. Yeah, that's
• 22:59
  interesting. So you and was there a point at which you had tried to set rules around phone use
• 23:06
  and then gave up and we're like, I'm going to get this stupid box. Yeah, I mean, part of my problem
• 23:11
  isn't so much what I'm working, but even things that I that are important to me that I just can't
• 23:16
  focus on that much anymore reading novels. If my phone is in the same room, even if it's far away,
• 23:23
  there is going to be that temptation. So I don't even want to have to wonder, oh, Shady, you know,
• 23:28
  it's okay this one time you've been reading through 15 minutes. Go across the room and take a
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  very quick look. I need to remove that consideration entirely if I'm watching a classic movie. So
• 23:40
  I have the criterion channel and I try to watch classic movies on a regular basis. I mean,
• 23:45
  the great films of all time just and you know, when the pandemic started, I actually had an
• 23:51
  Engbar Bergman marathon, the great Swedish director. I'd always heard pretentious people talking
• 23:58
  about him, but I didn't really know what they were talking about. So I thought to myself, well,
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  should I be watching Bergman films and seeing if there's something profound and beautiful? And
• 24:08
  in fact, there is something profound and beautiful. But when you watch movies and you read novels,
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  I think we're sort of at this point, a lot of us in this present reality where we don't know
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  how to focus for long enough periods of time to really enjoy what we're experiencing.
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  And I think it's worse with the youth if the younger generation. And I feel bad for them. Like,
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  it's bad enough for me. I can't imagine them and I have a younger brother and the people who's
• 24:39
  eight years younger than me and even the people who are younger than him. I sometimes see how they
• 24:43
  use their phones and it's getting worse, not better. So we got to take action and I think we
• 24:49
  got to be proactive. I was just at a water park. I was on holiday and went to one of these big water
• 24:56
  slide parks. And there was a group of, I guess, probably about like eight to 10 year old boys. And
• 25:03
  one of them had a phone in a waterproof like sleeve around his neck. And the whole time while his
• 25:11
  friends were like joling each other waiting in line. And one of these big long lines to give
• 25:14
  the water slide like getting bored, having fun with each other, teasing each other. He was on
• 25:21
  his phone the whole time. And then taking photos of everything and videoing everything and seemingly
• 25:27
  uploading all of the experience that he wasn't having to YouTube to document the experience that
• 25:34
  we're supposedly having. Yeah, I don't know, YouTube or Instagram. But yeah, it's like I felt
• 25:40
  like such an old buddy daddy of being like kids these days wagging my finger at them. But like your
• 25:45
  friends are here having fun. You're having a kind of fun, I suppose. I mean, I don't know what he's
• 25:51
  looking at. He might be looking at something that's more fun than whatever his friends are doing.
• 25:54
  But he's certainly not present. Whatever fun he's having is and whatever community he's part of.
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  It's not it's not a flesh and blood one. You know, and it's just like even here where he's doing
• 26:06
  supposedly the most fun thing that Nate Roll can do, which is go to a water park and ride down
• 26:12
  water slide, go down water slides with your friend. You're still that the I don't know the dopamine
• 26:19
  hit of the device is still more than that. Yep, it is hard to resist. And I think that that's one of
• 26:27
  the great things about going to the beach and swimming in the water. I was going to say just being
• 26:31
  on the beach. But of course, people can have their phones like when they're on the sand. But
• 26:34
  there are very few moments in our lives now where there is no way to have a phone. And I think
• 26:40
  swimming in the beach, especially if it's a, you know, a place you haven't been to before foreign
• 26:46
  country, whatever it might be, that gives you a kind of total freedom because you're in the water.
• 26:52
  And until I knew about this waterproof device that you put around your neck, it didn't
• 26:56
  occur to me that there was a way to bring your phone while swimming in the beach. So they've even
• 27:01
  come up with that. And obviously that's unfortunate. And I almost long for the times where
• 27:06
  you'd have a long airplane ride like six, seven hours and Wi-Fi wasn't even an option. So you
• 27:13
  literally had no choice. You had to be as an interesting cultural phenomenon here, which is that
• 27:20
  Qantas, the Australian, the Australian National L.I. has consistently dragged its feet on
• 27:26
  in flight Wi-Fi, for exactly this reason, because Aussies don't tend to want it when they need it.
• 27:34
  All their business travelers, unlike Americans, Australians like the excuse to tune out.
• 27:41
  You know, people don't want to be pinging all over the place. And especially Australians who
• 27:47
  have come to get used to having 14 to 22 hour journeys to go to business meetings in Los Angeles
• 27:55
  or Europe, it's nice having that day when no one can reach you. And then you land, you have a shower,
• 28:03
  then you open your email, you see what's been going on. But the idea of being expected to spend
• 28:07
  those 14 hours also connected just feels louder. Yeah, you guys seem so chill.
• 28:13
  Well, not. But I think that's just an interesting, that is one interesting way in which we've
• 28:18
  been at a certain level of chillness or perspective. Yeah. And I've been thinking about this a lot
• 28:27
  because I have been preoccupied with productivity for much of my life. So even when you said a 14-hour
• 28:36
  flight without in flight Wi-Fi, for me, I was like, oh, I could maybe handle three to four hours.
• 28:42
  I'm not trying to go overboard here. But Josh is talking about 14 hours. Like I get a little bit
• 28:48
  jittery because I think about the lost productivity as an American who is, you know, somewhat ambitious.
• 28:57
  Like many of us are and we care a lot about our careers and our writing and all that.
• 29:02
  Like I have come to the point in my life where I think it is a pretty serious problem. But it's also
• 29:10
  one that's difficult to fix if you've been oriented to view your work as a calling. And, you know,
• 29:16
  I love what I do and I love writing. So it becomes difficult for me to separate between what's
• 29:23
  called work and what's called life. And sometimes I wonder like what would it be like to have like
• 29:29
  a normal nine to five day job where you can just come home and put everything to the side and be
• 29:35
  totally present for your family and friends. I think with the kind of. Those don't really exist
• 29:39
  anymore either. I mean, unless you're working with your hands, any even the most boring nine to
• 29:47
  five rudimentary office job, it still carries with it an expectation that you're going to be
• 29:51
  available to respond to emails usually after hours. But it's interesting that you say that
• 29:57
  productivity for you is tied up in the idea of being connected because of course you could spend
• 30:02
  the 14 hours in flight writing. Of course you could write. You just couldn't Google. So it depends how
• 30:12
  it like part of the problem, part of the challenge for me. And I think the problem for knowledge
• 30:16
  workers at the moment is what is the productivity that we're pursuing even? Like I mean, if the
• 30:22
  productivity is catching up on a backlog of emails, I mean, I don't know who said it, but like your
• 30:29
  inbox is a to do list written by other people. You don't need to be doing that. You know, you could be
• 30:35
  watching the in flight entertainment for those 14 hours and and your life would be just as good
• 30:40
  not having gotten on top of your productivity hacks. But if you want to spend the 14 hours doing
• 30:44
  true, deep, creative work, well, then nobody needs an internet for that. Yeah. You're right.
• 30:52
  You're right. That's a good reminder for me. I mean, I find that after an hour or two, there's
• 30:58
  an article I have to search for or I'm trying to think about the other things that they just do
• 31:04
  tend to be things where it's like, oh, I need to find out about this or I need to check this fact
• 31:10
  or let me run this by a friend who specializes in this particular topic. But you're right
• 31:15
  that if we force ourselves, like it's probably for the best and there is a way to write and get very
• 31:21
  deep into that without distractions and it is a reminder to think for that way. Yeah. And if you
• 31:28
  don't know it, then you put a little parenthetical in saying anecdotes about history of dental care
• 31:35
  in Utah, question mark, and then you come back to it when you're alive when you need to ask
• 31:39
  somebody about it. Yeah. It's interesting. So now you've made me jealous of your little blocks.
• 31:44
  I need to get a little box to put my phone in. If I'm going to be present with my kids, I have
• 31:48
  five-year-old twins now who, and I do notice just how engulfing the device can be when you just
• 31:57
  go to it to check one particular fact. And then, you know, you blink and 17 minutes later,
• 32:03
  it has occupied your attention while they're watching TV.
• 32:07
  Yeah. I think when you have kids, I mean, I don't have kids personally, and I think then
• 32:14
  some of this stuff becomes more urgent because there is a lot at stake when you have, you know,
• 32:19
  when you're around your kids, my presumption is that you want to be as present as possible,
• 32:24
  particularly when they're young. I think for those of us who live alone and have supposedly
• 32:32
  a lot of free time, or at least we have a lot of choice with our time, we can maybe afford
• 32:38
  to not be present. It's still not a good thing, but I think there's maybe more leeway.
• 32:45
  But I think that when you're around other people, and I try to make a rule of this myself,
• 32:48
  like when I'm having dinner with someone or dinner with friends or when I'm with my parents,
• 32:54
  there's a no-phone rule. Like, we don't bring out our phones,
• 32:58
  and you just kind of, that just becomes a structural part of how you approach social interaction.
• 33:04
  And again, like I'm surprised about how younger folks tend to bring out their phones a lot
• 33:11
  when they're with people in real life. And that to me, when you're around other people,
• 33:17
  like, that's pretty important. Like, even if you don't fully realize it,
• 33:22
  like, the people around us should matter, or you should try to find a way to realize that
• 33:27
  as quickly as possible. And they matter even when they're boring or annoying,
• 33:32
  which I think is the problem that the phone is big thing, right? Nobody looks at their phone
• 33:37
  when they're having a fantastic engaging conversation with someone that's really crying.
• 33:42
  You pull the phone or you glance down at the phone or you tap the screen to see if there are any
• 33:46
  messages when things have gotten boring. And when you say that, if you have kids, you assume
• 33:51
  that you want to speak, be as present with them as possible. I mean, that's true in the abstract,
• 33:56
  but in the practical, you want to spend 15 to 20 minutes with kids. You don't want to spend
• 34:02
  three hours with kids. I mean, you've met kids. Right. You don't have, like, yes. They're really
• 34:09
  interesting, but giling and intriguing for approximately 12 to 17 minutes. And then they're
• 34:14
  annoying and boring. And you'd rather know what Shari is saying about this or that on his blog,
• 34:21
  than talking yet again to a five-year-old about flowers. So the challenge is in, I think, working
• 34:31
  through or pushing through rather from the easy and detaining components of human interaction
• 34:38
  and human life to the more challenging bits, either because you've found that your devices
• 34:47
  and escape from the more annoying aspects of parenting or an escape from the duller moments of
• 34:54
  friendship or an escape from the boredom of your own lived reality. If you don't have anyone
• 35:00
  else in the room with you and you're just trying to escape your own head. Yeah, I don't know where
• 35:06
  that's going, but maybe you just, do you want to just have a final comment about devices before
• 35:09
  we move on to culture more broadly? Yeah, because I mean, intrigued by the fact that you went
• 35:13
  and you're clear on buying the box. Yeah, yeah. Well, I guess the final comment would be, I mean,
• 35:18
  this is tied to broader cultural questions, the state of our society. And there's been a lot of
• 35:25
  writing recently about the depression epidemic among, especially young teenage girls in the US.
• 35:34
  And the levels of suicidal ideation, for example, are in the stratosphere. I think the recent CDC
• 35:40
  support report came out with something like one out of every three teenage girls in America have
• 35:47
  contemplated suicide or something to that effect. And there is a crisis here and it's on monocosal,
• 35:55
  but certainly it has the role of phones does seem to be a contributing factor.
• 36:03
  And the role of phones, smartphones, is tied to other things. It's tied to not being as social
• 36:12
  in the real world with the people that we care about or not even having enough people to care
• 36:16
  about in the first place. I mean, there is a loneliness epidemic as well where a growing number of
• 36:22
  Americans have a relatively small number of friends and sometimes don't even have a friend they
• 36:31
  consider close enough to say that to a polster, really just shocking numbers all the way around.
• 36:37
  So when we talk about devices, there's a way to kind of treat it in a, it can be like a fun topic
• 36:43
  to discuss, but it also speaks to something quite deeper in our society where we feel that something
• 36:49
  isn't quite right. And I think so many of us feel that now that like it's hard to live well.
• 36:56
  And that's true on the individual level, but it also seems to seep into
• 37:02
  the community level and also the national level. And all of these things are interconnected
• 37:08
  in complex ways. But you know, a lot of Americans feel like something is fundamentally wrong in
• 37:13
  their own lives, but also in the life of their country, so to speak. And when you talk about what's
• 37:20
  wrong in the life of the country, I mean, you said earlier when we were talking about polarization
• 37:26
  and consensus that certain things are settled that we don't want to disagree on, but there are
• 37:32
  legitimate major disagreements, nonetheless, that we don't want to paper over in misguided attempt
• 37:39
  to draw greater consensus than actually exists. But some people would say that a lot of the things
• 37:45
  that are settled and now being unsettled and the things that we had taken for granted are being
• 37:50
  questioned again. So the peaceful transfer of power during an election, you know, the left would
• 37:56
  say that the right is giving up on the notion of having faith in democratic institutions,
• 38:02
  the loser of an election, you know, graciously yielding to the winner regardless of any irregularities
• 38:09
  that they might believe there was in the election, that that's a time on a tradition of American
• 38:14
  democracy that's being overturned. And then I guess on the other side, the right would probably say
• 38:20
  that America's traditional faith in the ability of the public square to boisterously hash out
• 38:28
  different ideas is being undermined by a cancel culture and the woke left who are trying to
• 38:35
  constrain what you can say. And so I, yeah, I wonder what you think about there being previously
• 38:44
  settled issues that we all agreed on now up for grabs. Yeah, so the democracy part of it is
• 38:53
  is obviously crucial. And I think this is in some sense the fundamental question that a lot of
• 39:00
  Americans are contending with, which is what do we do when democracy produces bad outcomes.
• 39:06
  And actually, you know, my most recent book was partly about trying to answer this question,
• 39:12
  and I called it the problem of democracy precisely because I do think this is the problem
• 39:18
  that not just Americans are contending with, but also across the globe. I mean, if you look at
• 39:24
  India, you know, India, Israel, Italy, Sweden, most of our major democracies in the world today
• 39:32
  are the politics in these countries are feeling extremely existential. It feels like everything is at
• 39:40
  stake that each election is the most important election and everything hangs in the balance.
• 39:48
  And you have the rise to power of parties or candidates that have radical views in one direction
• 39:55
  or another and are challenging norms and the way that we looked at our democracies until
• 40:02
  fairly recently, we thought that there was a triumph of the end of history of liberal democracy
• 40:09
  and so forth. And now we're finding out that a lot of things are being contested in a way they
• 40:16
  hadn't been previously. And some of the examples are obvious, you know, immigration 10 to 15 years ago
• 40:23
  wasn't as live of an issue in many Western democracies. And it was seen as, you know,
• 40:30
  there's an establishment consensus and let's stick with it. And obviously that wasn't sustainable.
• 40:36
  And at the end of the day, people said, well, even if it's unfashionable or quote unquote bad,
• 40:42
  we want to vote about our preferences on this particular issue instead of leaving it up to
• 40:47
  experts or technocrats who are unelected and so forth. So I think that, you know, democracy is
• 40:57
  really the question of how do we live with outcomes that we don't like? And there was a time when
• 41:05
  the outcomes weren't that bad, you know, when I was growing up in the 1990s, you know,
• 41:11
  elections didn't seem like the end of the world. If anything, they seemed like they didn't matter
• 41:16
  much at all. And you might recall some of this discourse around, oh, well, Republicans and
• 41:20
  Democrats aren't that different, you know, Bush versus Al Gore. Oh, you know, they're just two
• 41:26
  sides of the same coin and that sort of thing. If only we could kind of, we long for those times
• 41:32
  now looking back, because now the, the, the differences between candidates really seem stark.
• 41:40
  Just take obviously, you still have that rhetoric. You still have the, the tweedle-domin,
• 41:44
  tweedle-the rhetoric. It's funny. No matter how far apart the, the policies become, I mean,
• 41:50
  Tucker Carlson just released his first video after having been fired in which he's saying that
• 41:56
  no one in mainstream media is having real conversations about the biggest issues that we
• 42:01
  face because everyone is forced to talk about a consensus. So, you know, you hear Russell Brand
• 42:07
  on Joe Rogan's show and they're all talking about how, you know, it doesn't matter who you vote for
• 42:12
  because ultimately everything is controlled by big farmer and a global elite. Like that's becoming
• 42:18
  I think an increasingly fashionable view in the online sort of discourse, if not in the elite
• 42:25
  media, mainstream media discourse. Yeah. Yeah. It's an interesting point and, you know,
• 42:31
  as someone who doesn't follow the Russell Brands of the world all that closely, but, you know,
• 42:36
  I have gotten a sense of it here and there in certain corners of the internet. So it is remarkable
• 42:41
  that even with the profound differences that we see between say Trump and Joe Biden in 2024.
• 42:48
  I mean, I think that's a pretty wide gap in terms of potential directions for the country,
• 42:53
  but you're right. There are still people out there who are saying it doesn't really matter.
• 42:58
  I think it's become harder to make that case unless people buy into it compared to
• 43:03
  that kind of, you know, prosperous, peaceful era, the late 90s, early 2000s, at least before 9-11.
• 43:11
  I think it was a piece that I think Jonah Goldberg
• 43:14
  wrote in his sort of center right commentator who has a newsletter called The Dispatch.
• 43:24
  And I think he, yeah, that's right. I'm just finding it now. He teases Tucker Carlson for saying
• 43:30
  that nobody talks about any of the big issues by saying, by conducting a thought experiment and
• 43:35
  saying, imagine that you have like one specific quirky issue that you wish everybody would focus
• 43:40
  on like you think that the Habsburg monarchy should be restored and that America should become an
• 43:46
  imperial holding of the Habsburg empire. So every time someone complains about taxes being too high
• 43:52
  or dog owners not cleaning up after their dogs, you say that such problems won't exist under the
• 43:57
  new regime. Once you get Carl von Habsburg on the throne, then there won't be a problem anymore.
• 44:03
  And he likens this idea that like nobody's talking about the big issues to be basically the
• 44:09
  rantings of a person whose definition of big issues is just skewed away from what most people
• 44:16
  care about. Like if you're a one trick, if you're Tucker Carlson or Russell Brand, you may just
• 44:23
  be agitated by things that most other people don't care about hearing debated. Like whether or not
• 44:30
  constitutional democracies are the best way to sort out our differences. And you know,
• 44:37
  like most of us regard that as falling into the category of things that you were talking about as
• 44:41
  being settled earlier in the conversation. And you can put on a cloak of kind of brave question
• 44:49
  asker by trying to poke holes in things that the rest of us have all taken for granted and saying
• 44:54
  like, nobody else is having these conversations, man, I'm the only person who's brave enough to
• 44:57
  have these conversations. But maybe it's not that we're cowards. Maybe we just agree on a lot more
• 45:02
  than the people who are saying that they're brave to.
• 45:06
  Yeah, I think part of it is that we don't even have a baseline on what constitutes a big issue.
• 45:11
  And that brings us back to the whole Trump indictment story. Some Americans clearly think this
• 45:16
  is a really big deal. I don't. And there would be no obvious way for us to resolve that. And at the end
• 45:23
  of the day, they should be free. They're free to think whatever they want about what matters to them.
• 45:27
  I mean, that's an intensely personal choice. And I think there's some wisdom in
• 45:33
  learning to let go. First of all, if you're so worked up about politics in the kind of
• 45:38
  Russell Brandish way that you just, you know, you're just outlined, you know, that's, to me,
• 45:46
  that speaks of, I don't know what Russell Brand's life is like. But, you know, there should be
• 45:53
  a fullness in people's lives that takes them away from politics. And sometimes I've talked about
• 45:58
  the core four. And I didn't make this up. I just probably like, you know, found it from someone
• 46:03
  else and repurposed it slightly. But I think a lot of people talk about, you know, faith,
• 46:08
  family, community, and friendship. And I think I, you know, maybe the order should be a little bit
• 46:13
  different depending on what you prioritize. But there is something to be said. And maybe I'm
• 46:19
  a little bit of a traditionalist in that regard. And, you know, people see that as a little bit
• 46:24
  old fashioned to focus on those things. But I think there is a wisdom in not seeing politics
• 46:33
  as what orients your life. And I think because Americans, but also in most major democracies,
• 46:40
  the level of educational attainment has gone up significantly. That doesn't mean that people
• 46:45
  are necessarily smarter or more wise. But it does mean that a growing number of Americans
• 46:51
  are aware of political debates around them. Like, it's very hard to resist. Like most people
• 47:00
  will be vaguely aware of some Trump related debate, even if they're not otherwise
• 47:06
  that engaged in various political topics. It's very hard to avoid. But now what that means is that
• 47:13
  everyone is aware of things in a way that, in a way that makes it very hard to let go. And very
• 47:23
  hard to take a step back and focus attention on your own small circle locally. Everything
• 47:31
  becomes nationalized. And even local elections become nationalized. That if Trump talks about
• 47:37
  some issue, then the local candidate for dog catcher is talking about Trump talking about that
• 47:44
  issue. And it becomes very hard to kind of get out of that cycle. But I think this is a scale that
• 47:51
  all of us should nurture, which is learning to let go of politics in some way. And that would require
• 48:00
  also accepting that many of our fellow Americans are never going to be convinced of what we're
• 48:05
  convinced of. I mean, there were 74 million Trump supporters. They're not going to go away.
• 48:11
  You're not going to be able to persuade them. They are part of the fabric of this country.
• 48:18
  And for those Americans on the left who believe that Trump supporters have to be defeated,
• 48:24
  they have to be just brought under heel. That to me is a fundamentally anti-democratic spirit.
• 48:31
  I mean, maybe they're not as bad as the folks who believe in the big lie of 2020 that the
• 48:37
  election was stolen from Donald Trump. And certainly not the people, you know, the much smaller
• 48:42
  number who participated in the January 6th insurrection. But it's all part, I think, of a similar
• 48:50
  impulse to not be comfortable with people who are fundamentally different than you. I mean,
• 48:56
  there are only two parties in America. If you think that Democrats should win every single
• 49:01
  election for the rest of your life because they're the only good party and the Republican party is
• 49:07
  something close to evil or neo-fascist or whatever it might be, then you don't actually believe in
• 49:13
  living in a democracy because sooner or later the other party will win. Maybe it could have been
• 49:20
  different in a multi-party democracy where you had 10 choices, but we only have two real ones in
• 49:25
  America. So you better hope that at some point the Republican party wins because if they never win,
• 49:32
  then we're probably no longer living in a democratic society.
• 49:37
  Right, but what's the limiting principle to how the other party can behave while still
• 49:42
  deserving your endorsement of democracy? I mean, just take the thought experiment of them,
• 49:47
  of the GOP becoming a genuinely fascist regime, let's suppose, let's imagine that the darkest
• 49:54
  imaginings of the left come to fruition in the form of Richard Spencer and Tucker Carlson
• 50:00
  together on a populist ticket that sort of smells a bit like, I don't know, Turkey or somewhere like
• 50:07
  that. Then wouldn't your highest allegiance to small liberal principles be to make sure that
• 50:13
  that party never gets into power even at the expense of democratic instincts?
• 50:20
  Yes, so I'm a small D Democrat, so when democracy and liberalism are intention,
• 50:26
  I tend to prioritize the democracy part of it. And here I'm not talking about liberals in the
• 50:32
  kind of modern American parlance, but the classical liberal tradition. Unfortunately, a growing number
• 50:39
  of Americans are not small liberals. They want to, they're interested in non-liberal
• 50:48
  alternatives. And of course, we've seen that elsewhere across the globe, whether it's far
• 50:53
  right Hindu nationalism in India, the far right in Israel, I mean, the whole list of places.
• 50:59
  And of course, as someone who lived in the Middle East during the Arab Spring and someone who
• 51:04
  does a lot of work on Middle East related issues, in the Middle East, we've had situations where
• 51:10
  there are free elections. And who wins? Islamist parties. In other words, parties that believe that
• 51:16
  Islam or Islamic law should play a central role in public life. Now, we have two, we have a couple
• 51:22
  different options when we have situations like this. We can say that these parties are beyond the
• 51:28
  pale and they have to be somehow suppressed or prevented from participating or the military has
• 51:36
  to step in and counter them. And that's obviously specific to the Middle East context where we've had
• 51:43
  military coups against democratically elected governments that were seen as too religiously
• 51:49
  oriented or too quote unquote Islamist. So I think that this is actually, you know, it's really
• 51:55
  a fundamental dilemma. And because I see, I think at some level democracy is about
• 52:04
  respecting that individuals, voters have agency. And if voters want to collectively choose a path
• 52:14
  that we consider illiberal or Islamist or communist or socialist, think about whatever bad outcome
• 52:21
  you don't like. And Trump for Americans would be the obvious example for 2024. You mentioned Tucker
• 52:27
  Carlson, if Tucker Carlson decides to run for the Republican nomination and he ends up winning
• 52:34
  fair and square against Joe Biden. I mean, God forbid, I hope it doesn't happen. But if it did,
• 52:39
  and it was a free and fair election, we would have no choice in my view as Americans, but to respect
• 52:45
  that outcome. And then our task ahead of us would be to live to fight another day through the
• 52:51
  ballot box to wait for the subsequent election and to try to undo a bad decision on the part of
• 53:00
  our fellow. You know, you know, I'm sure you've encountered this criticism a million times
• 53:06
  since the Arab Spring because you've quoted controversy in, you know, your opinion. But at least
• 53:11
  issues and Arab issues by being such a pro by being even more of a Democrat than people who think
• 53:16
  of themselves as being Democrats like myself are comfortable being like. And if you go to the
• 53:21
  extreme of the Islamist party of the, you know, the teasing parody of Arab democracy that you
• 53:28
  sometimes hear, which is one person, one vote, one time. And then once you're in power, you don't
• 53:34
  hold any more elections. If you take that, if you take Hamas or some other Islamist party as an
• 53:40
  example, what do you do when you're in a democratic situation where either, I guess, let's take two
• 53:46
  scenarios, either the party that's been democratically elected tries to systematically undermine the
• 53:53
  levers of democracy to give it an unfair advantage and let it stay in power. So maybe it doesn't
• 53:58
  not hold elections, but the elections become something like elections in Russia have become.
• 54:03
  Or alternatively, it's so enthusiastic about imposing its vision of what civil society is on
• 54:11
  the country that you end up dramatically infringing the rights of individual human beings or
• 54:16
  of some communities. You know, in Islamist theocracies, that might be the way that gaze or women
• 54:22
  or Jews are persecuted. If it were to take a Western democratic form, it may be in the way that
• 54:28
  again, gaze or, well, again, Jews, perhaps. But, you know, to take the left wing character, maybe
• 54:34
  it would be the way that they treat Muslims in America or the way that they try to crack down on
• 54:38
  religious, or sorry, rather on imposed their religious views on women's abortion rights or
• 54:45
  whatever it might be. Like how far does the party have to stray from the ideals of either democracy
• 54:50
  or liberalism for it to no longer be playing a game worth upholding? Yeah. Well, this is actually
• 54:57
  I think the fundamental question and, you know, it depends where you draw the line. So I draw the
• 55:03
  line in a different place than a lot of people. So I tend to make a distinction between the means of
• 55:10
  democracy and the ends. So I'm very adamant about protecting, for example, the right to protest,
• 55:17
  the right to form a political party, the right to criticize the government, access to the media,
• 55:23
  because without those things, you don't have alternation of power. The opposition has to have a
• 55:29
  realistic shot of winning. That, to me, is a fundamental concern. So when you start to have a
• 55:35
  ruling party that is elected, but then makes it extremely difficult, if not impossible, for the
• 55:43
  opposition to win, then that's crossing an unacceptable line. Because my basic principle
• 55:50
  is that people have to have the right to change their minds and to vote differently. They have to have
• 55:56
  some right to recourse. They have to have some way of bringing about different electoral outcomes
• 56:04
  and subsequent elections. That's absolutely critical to me. But I may I distinguish between that
• 56:10
  and the ends of politics, which deal more with cultural and religious and identity-based issues. So
• 56:16
  for example, if an Islamist party comes to power in Egypt through free and fair elections,
• 56:22
  and wants to Islamize the educational curriculum, restrict alcohol consumption, have sex segregation
• 56:29
  at some levels of public schooling, you know, devor making divorce proceedings, more difficult
• 56:40
  for, you know, for women, let's say, these are things that I find bad and I would never want to live
• 56:46
  under a government that pursuits those ends. And in the American case, we can add access to abortion.
• 56:53
  I mean, I'm, I'm pro-choice, at least for, you know, in the reasonable sense of, you know, the
• 56:59
  first 12 to, you know, 16 weeks or something like that. And, but there are examples even here in
• 57:07
  the US where elected majorities on the state level are saying, actually, you know what, we're going
• 57:12
  to restrict abortion access. But I see that basket of issues as being about the fundamental
• 57:20
  questions of the nature of the good. And I think that individual voters should have the right to pursue
• 57:28
  illiberal, let's say, ends in that regard. You know, or, you know, in the case of Muslim
• 57:35
  majority countries in the Middle East, not blasphemy laws are another one that comes up. So if you
• 57:41
  have a party that wants to, for example, make illegal insulting divine texts or demeaning the
• 57:51
  Quran or something like that, I'm just coming up with examples that I think people can get their
• 57:55
  head around. I want what I want to say is you don't have to like that. You can think to yourself,
• 58:00
  that's, oh my god, wow, that is terrible. I can't imagine that. But ultimately, I do believe
• 58:07
  there has to be some deference to elected majorities as long as the Constitution in a given country
• 58:15
  isn't being violated. Because we're not talking about blank slate politics. And any of these
• 58:19
  contexts, parties are operating within an existing legal and constitutional framework.
• 58:26
  So obviously they can't do illegal things. I mean, you would hope, and it's not always a case,
• 58:31
  obviously, but in theory, you'll have a judicial branch, at least to some degree, even if it's a
• 58:37
  relatively weak democracy, that can, you know, provide some checks on that. But I'm much more
• 58:44
  permissive in what I think majorities should be able to pursue. And that includes if they want to
• 58:50
  pursue Tucker Carlson's vision of an anti-immigrant anti-Muslim society. And I'd have to, as an
• 58:57
  American Muslim myself, contend with the consequences of that. And the Muslim ban under Trump,
• 59:04
  which I was very much opposed to and thought was pretty damn scary. Ultimately, I think that was
• 59:09
  under the jurisdiction of the executive branch to pursue at least a version of that Muslim ban.
• 59:15
  And so all I had left was to say, well, you know, we're going to have to find a way to live with
• 59:21
  this. But we're going to fight hard to push back into protest and to speak out and to hope that
• 59:29
  enough Americans come to their senses and move away from this kind of politics.
• 59:34
  It's interesting that you mentioned the executive branch because one whole mark of American
• 59:39
  politics that's different from politics in most other liberal democracies is the reliance on
• 59:44
  the judicial system instead of the executive or especially instead of the legislative branches
• 59:50
  to do people's bidding in America. I mean, the intensity around the wars over the Supreme Court
• 59:59
  and the aggressiveness of the Supreme Court in imposing completely different interpretations of
• 1:00:06
  the same pieces of text, depending on what justices are there, is really unparalleled and is
• 1:00:13
  seems bizarre to people outside it where justices with a selection of justices is much less
• 1:00:18
  partisan than is than they regard their roles as being much more humble and functional.
• 1:00:25
  And most of the policies around things like women's reproductive rights and so on are hashed out
• 1:00:31
  by legislators in parliaments and congresses and that that's where decisions get made not by
• 1:00:38
  nine people in robes as the cliche goes. Yeah, totally agree. And you know, I think that
• 1:00:46
  to take Roe v Wade, for example, if I could kind of redo history, you know, I think that I'd wonder
• 1:00:56
  how things would have turned out if instead of imposing a particular outcome through judicial
• 1:01:04
  fiat that America experienced something more similar to advanced European democracies where abortion
• 1:01:11
  access was guaranteed but not through a Supreme Court but through as you alluded to parliaments
• 1:01:20
  passing legislation. And that's a big debate on its own, but I do think we have to ask ourselves
• 1:01:27
  whether it is an appropriate role for unelected judges or to be honest, like anyone who's
• 1:01:34
  unelected and we can talk about technocrats and bureaucracies who make decisions and are
• 1:01:42
  unaccountable in some way. But some of these issues are important enough for them to be subject
• 1:01:50
  to voter preferences. Americans should have a say on foundational questions around the nature
• 1:01:57
  of the human person. I mean, abortion is dealing with something that is very dear to a lot of
• 1:02:02
  Americans on both sides, regardless, you know, people who think it is a non-negotiable right,
• 1:02:07
  but people on the other side who think that it's non-negotiable in the sense of abortion shouldn't
• 1:02:14
  be allowed because it's tantamount to murder. I mean, those are both very, I don't want to say that
• 1:02:18
  they're morally equivalent. I'm just trying to say that they're both deeply held convictions that
• 1:02:25
  relate to fundamental values. Like, should we really want to set the precedent of courts deciding those
• 1:02:33
  questions on behalf of the people? And because Roe v. Wade was, let's say, rightly decided if you're
• 1:02:39
  a pro-choice person, but what we've found out is that what the court give it, it can take it the
• 1:02:45
  way. You know, that's part of the issue here. Be careful what you wish for. If you really empower
• 1:02:50
  a court to make decisions in place of an elected congress or parliament, you're playing with fire
• 1:02:58
  because you have no way of guaranteeing what those nine judges are going to do 20 or 30 years
• 1:03:05
  down the road when different judges are appointed. And especially on an issue, which is so vague
• 1:03:12
  as, you know, as Roe was. I mean, I think you say Roe was rightly decided if you're on the right
• 1:03:17
  side of it, but many pro-choice people like me have been critical of Roe for a long time in the
• 1:03:24
  sense that I just don't understand it. I don't understand how you how you find in the constitution
• 1:03:28
  a right to privacy and then conclude that because people have a right to privacy, they also have a
• 1:03:33
  right to kill very small babies. Like, if you're on the, and I don't believe that it is wrong to kill
• 1:03:39
  very small babies in the womb, but if you're on the side of morality that thinks that it is,
• 1:03:43
  it hardly settles the question to say, well, because women have a right to privacy, they have a right,
• 1:03:49
  I mean, you don't, the right to privacy doesn't give you a right to go into a room and in private,
• 1:03:54
  kill somebody. Like, if the, the substantive question here about abortion is whether or not it's okay
• 1:04:00
  to kill a tiny little baby at a woman's tummy. And I mean, maybe this is a way to wrap things up
• 1:04:05
  and bring it back to this, your idea is about consensus and polarization because this is one issue
• 1:04:11
  where it's totally infuriating to people on both sides the way that the other side characterizes
• 1:04:18
  the issue. The overturning of row has caused lots of conversations about abortion access in America.
• 1:04:26
  You wouldn't know it from listening to the left who talk exclusively about health care
• 1:04:32
  and women's reproductive rights and women's access to health care, which of course is infuriating
• 1:04:37
  if you think that you're protecting babies from being murdered because you're not talking about
• 1:04:41
  the woman's right to, to health care, you're talking about her right to do something to another member
• 1:04:47
  of the species homo sapiens. And if you believe that all members of the species homo sapiens have
• 1:04:52
  a right to the sanctity of their own individual lives regardless of how tiny they are, then it's a
• 1:04:59
  dodge. It's just a dodge to talk about women's health care. And then obviously if you're pro-choice,
• 1:05:05
  then people constantly talking about being killing babies is infuriating because as far as you're
• 1:05:12
  concerned, it's not a baby when it's a blast assist, the size of a pinhead, which is often what
• 1:05:18
  we're talking about. So where does that leave you? I mean, it strikes me as deeply unedifying
• 1:05:25
  the lack of consensus. It'd be great if I had faith that your articulation of partisanship and
• 1:05:34
  mutual distrust and hostility among the populace, if I had faith that your vision was true,
• 1:05:40
  what is being disagreed upon are deep foundational questions. But it strikes me that you've just
• 1:05:45
  got people talking across each other and never actually landing on the fundamental question,
• 1:05:49
  which is, okay, we almost all agree that it's wrong to kill a baby that's just about to be born.
• 1:05:57
  And we almost all agree that it's okay under some circumstances to kill a fetus blast assist
• 1:06:04
  that's one day old. So shall we hash out something in the middle here somewhere? Like there's not
• 1:06:09
  a lot of that going on. And if that was the lack of consensus, I would agree with you that
• 1:06:15
  phony consensus is bad. But to some extent, I want more phony or not phony consensus around at least
• 1:06:22
  the contours of the things that we actually disagree about instead of just using our own caricatures
• 1:06:26
  of our enemies to talk past one another. Yeah, that does sound nice when you describe it that way.
• 1:06:34
  I mean, so here's what I'd say is part of the issue here and it applies to the abortion debate,
• 1:06:41
  but also to any of these really stark cultural issues is I think that Americans, but also extending
• 1:06:52
  this elsewhere to various degrees. Folks have moved away from everyone as a consequentialist.
• 1:06:58
  They like democracy when it produces the outcomes that they prefer. And it's just amazing,
• 1:07:04
  like the lack of principle that we see in, you know, right out there, people don't even try to hide
• 1:07:11
  it anymore. And this outcomes oriented approach to democracy is part of what I try to push back
• 1:07:17
  against in my own work that we have to commit to the means of democracy and then suspend our
• 1:07:24
  judgment on the ends. I mean, obviously as individuals, we can feel strongly about whatever we feel
• 1:07:29
  strongly about, but we have to, we have to avoid this sense that the democratic process will ever
• 1:07:37
  conclusively lead to a final answer on a lot of these contested issues. I mean, I don't really see
• 1:07:44
  much likelihood that in the coming years, perhaps even decades, we're going to find a resolution
• 1:07:51
  as Americans on the trans issue or gender identity or abortion. I think there's just too many
• 1:07:58
  Americans who believe you're right that maybe, you know, at some basic level, you could maybe try
• 1:08:04
  to split the middle. And, you know, there's a lot of polls that suggest that, oh, well, most people
• 1:08:09
  are actually okay with the middle ground of allowing abortion in the first 12 weeks, but not
• 1:08:15
  thereafter. That might be true in some abstract sense on the national level, but when you look at
• 1:08:22
  more conservative states on the local level, you find that there are, there are in practice a lot of
• 1:08:30
  people who are not even comfortable with the 12 week first trimester allowance. And then the
• 1:08:37
  question is, if they're participating in elections and they win elections, do they not have the
• 1:08:42
  right to channel their preferences if they're doing so peacefully and legally? And at some basic
• 1:08:49
  level, the only thing that we have left is to say what the democratic process produces is what the
• 1:08:55
  democratic process produces. Again, as long as there are no, like, um, constitutional violations,
• 1:09:03
  and again, like, thank God in America, we, we do have, we do have the courts playing
• 1:09:08
  enough of a role. And here I'm not just talking about the Supreme Court, but we have a judicial
• 1:09:11
  structure that does step in when certain clear red lines are crossed. And, you know, that's part
• 1:09:17
  of why I am more optimistic because our system has been resilient. And this is especially true,
• 1:09:24
  obviously, for established democracies. Younger democracies, obviously, it's a little bit more
• 1:09:30
  difficult, but there should be faith in the democratic process in a country like America.
• 1:09:36
  And we shouldn't see the election of someone like Donald Trump in 2024 as the end of the
• 1:09:42
  republic as we know it. I'm pretty confident that election, maybe I shouldn't say that. I don't
• 1:09:48
  want people to come back in like 10 years when America's a fascist state and be like, oh,
• 1:09:53
  Shady was on Josh's podcast, uncomfortable conversations in 2023. Did you see what he said?
• 1:10:00
  So I, you know, I, look, I don't know what's going to happen, but I don't, I'm not a doomer in
• 1:10:05
  that respect. And I do think there is a lot to believe in and a lot to be proud of in many of
• 1:10:11
  our democracies and certainly in my own right here in America. So I just think it would be better
• 1:10:19
  if left-leaning Americans instead of complaining about disinformation and how Trump supporters are
• 1:10:25
  irredeemable and all of this to actually work on the arts of persuasion to actually try to persuade
• 1:10:33
  more ordinary Americans to like the democratic party. And that can be done by, you know, for example,
• 1:10:41
  not being super woke all the time on these very, you know, these lightning rod culture war
• 1:10:47
  issues that don't actually have broad support in society or something like people care about crime.
• 1:10:53
  Don't gaslight people and tell them that their worries about crime are a figment of their
• 1:11:00
  imagination and giving them charts telling them that they're better off now than it was in the 1990s.
• 1:11:07
  I mean, you know, there's there's things that you can do to persuade people. And that's where I
• 1:11:12
  think the democratic process becomes almost beautiful in a way that at some level it forces people
• 1:11:20
  to actually go out there and do the work of maybe persuasion is in the right word, but you at
• 1:11:25
  least have to have faith in your fellow citizens. And I worry sometimes that it's, but you know,
• 1:11:32
  someone who identifies as vaguely center left, but heterodox like I want the party that I almost
• 1:11:40
  always actually, you know, either I've not voted or voted for the democratic party. I haven't
• 1:11:45
  yet voted for a Republican, but I would want my own, my own party, the democratic party to be more
• 1:11:51
  responsive, more responsive to broad sentiments around these issues that people care about and not
• 1:11:59
  just ignore them and tell people that they're wrong in this patronizing style. That to me is a
• 1:12:05
  better answer than creating a lot of fear about the at democracy dying in 2024, which is still,
• 1:12:13
  you know, largely a speculative thing that people bring up. Look, I don't know exactly what's
• 1:12:18
  going to happen in 2024, but I do know that our democratic process still works and that you should
• 1:12:24
  try your best to prepare for 2024 so that your side can win instead of imagine, you know, saying,
• 1:12:33
  well, oh, you know, Trump, this Trump that, which I think is a distraction from, you know,
• 1:12:38
  what really matters most. It's interesting. And even, I mean, I would add to that as you persuade me
• 1:12:44
  back to off the, I was on, I would add to that that even if you think it's a lost cause to
• 1:12:51
  persuade your political opponents of what you believe, the act of attempting to do so will refine
• 1:12:57
  your own beliefs and will hone your own case and will make you even more persuasive to people who
• 1:13:03
  kind of already agree with you, but aren't quite sure why or aren't 100% on the fence or aren't
• 1:13:08
  exercised enough to bother going out and persuading other people to vote or even voting themselves.
• 1:13:17
  So yeah, the exercise of persuasion is a good and its own right, even if no one ends up being
• 1:13:22
  persuaded. Shaddyk, I want to ask you some first date questions, which I always end with,
• 1:13:28
  these are kind of Rorschach questions, okay, firstly, if you had, you don't have to, don't have to
• 1:13:33
  overthink the answers. What's happening now that in 20 years people will look back on and laugh about?
• 1:13:40
  What's happening now? Yeah. Okay. I think some of the hyperwoke stuff looking back, I think,
• 1:13:54
  you know, people are going to say, maybe they won't laugh. Well, it depends if it's passed,
• 1:13:58
  like if people come to their senses, then maybe they'll laugh and retrospect and say, oh my god,
• 1:14:04
  those Americans in the 2020s really got into some like crazy shit when it came to
• 1:14:11
  like wokeness and that was kind of ridiculous and they might laugh about that.
• 1:14:17
  Maybe also the fact that we love football so much, that's what I'm told, like Americans love
• 1:14:21
  American football, you know, I'm not a good man. And you know, maybe people maybe will like be the
• 1:14:27
  kind of country that's into the real kind of football, which is in other words soccer in 30 years,
• 1:14:33
  you know, God willing, but, you know, I can't see. I'm not going to have to break it to you.
• 1:14:39
  I'm going to persist in Gridiron. What's the best time of day and the best time of night for you?
• 1:14:49
  When do you enjoy being there? That was just a little taste of our first day questions,
• 1:14:53
  which you'll be able to hear all of if you subscribe to uncomfortable conversations. Not just
• 1:14:58
  the questions, but of course, all of our banter around them, which become a subsequent little
• 1:15:02
  episode of themselves. If you do subscribe, you will not only hear that, but you'll also hear no ads
• 1:15:07
  on any episode ever. And you'll get additional content including opportunities to connect directly
• 1:15:13
  with me. You can subscribe at uncomfortableconversations.substac.com or follow the links
• 1:15:19
  in the podcast description. Otherwise, I'll see you next time.