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Jonathan Haidt is a social psychologist at New York University’s Stern School of Business. He is the author of The Anxious Generation and The Happiness Hypothesis, which has just been reissued in a twentieth-anniversary edition.

In this week’s conversation, Yascha Mounk and Jonathan Haidt discuss what ancient wisdom and modern psychology teach us about how to live a happy life, how the movement to keep children off smartphones and social media is faring, and why artificial intelligence could threaten the very sources of human meaning.

This transcript has been condensed and slightly edited for clarity.

Yascha Mounk: Well, I’m excited to talk to you about many things and the remarkable success that The Anxious Generation has continued to have since our last conversation. But I wanted to start the conversation with the book of yours that is perhaps the least well known because you wrote it early in your career, called The Happiness Hypothesis, which has just been re-released for a twentieth anniversary edition.

It’s a book I really loved. It is trying to speak in a way to the deepest question you tackled, which is how to be happy, how to have a meaningful life. What do you conclude?

Jonathan Haidt: Well, I wrote the book in 2006. It came out of my teaching Psych 101 at the University of Virginia. But actually it just occurs to me the real backstory here is that I had an existential depression when I was sixteen or seventeen years old after reading Waiting for Godot in my high school English class, and I was already an atheist by that time and just thinking, if there’s no God, there’s no meaning to life—if the whole earth is destroyed, it doesn’t matter.

So I decided to major in philosophy because I wanted to know what’s the meaning of life. So I went to Yale, studied philosophy, and it had almost nothing to do with the meaning of life. It was very analytical. But I took a psychology class, and I took English classes, and those were much more relevant. Those sort of help you think, like, what are we doing here? What is a good life? So that’s the long background. Then at UVA, when I was teaching Psych 101, I would put quotations up from the ancients, from Shakespeare, and it looked like, wow, there’s a bunch of insights that every literate society has passed down to us, and they’re really good.

So I decided if I don’t get tenure at UVA, rather than transferring to a lower-ranked university, I would try to just support myself by writing a trade book. So it turns out I did get tenure, just by a couple of votes. I happen to know my tenure vote because the secretary made a clerical error and revealed to me the vote. But I did get tenure. I decided to write the book anyway. It was really fun to write. I guess you might say it’s my last really, really positive book, because things get darker after 2006-2007. But the book is a collection of ten ancient ideas that you find east and west across the millennia.

So just for example, the first chapter is the divided self—one quote from Ovid is: “I see the right way and approve it. Alas, I follow the wrong.” So how can that be? If you approve something, why don’t you just do it? So there’s all kinds of stuff about the divided self, system one, system two, the faults of others. Chapter four is the one on moral psychology—we’re all hypocrites, why do you complain about the speck in your neighbor’s eye? So in each chapter I go into quotes from multiple cultures, then I go into the psychology. We always find that, yes, they’re correct, they’re true, but there are all kinds of interesting qualifications, nuances. What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger in general, but there’s also PTSD and adverse childhood experiences. So it’s not quite that simple, but it is an incredibly important principle for young people especially—anti-fragility. What doesn’t kill you usually does make you stronger. So that’s what the book is about, and that’s where it came from.

Mounk: I think one of the pleasures of reading the book for me is that I can see the germs of your later work. One of the themes is about the ways in which we think we are totally in control of our actions, but actually in many ways it is our emotional reactions that drive us, and that becomes a big theme in The Righteous Mind. The anti-fragility stuff you’re talking about becomes a big theme in The Coddling of the American Mind.

Obviously I think that’s an interesting connection between all of this and your most recent work about social media. The way you present it at the moment, it feels like ten sort of slightly different topics, but it feels to me like there is a central debate that is going through the book and through these different traditions about how you lead a happy or meaningful life. Do you focus on achieving the things that you want to achieve—you want to accomplish something in the world, you want to acquire skills, you want to get the approbation of your fellow human beings, you want to find a spouse that you’re excited about, perhaps you want to build a family and so on? Or is it by working on yourself—by saying, for example, in the tradition of Buddha or the tradition of the Stoics, that you don’t care about the outside world, that even the philosopher on the rack, in the process of being tortured, can be happy irrespective of these external circumstances?

Haidt: Right—Boethius, yes. Now that’s a perfect way to set it up, because the original title of the book—the original title I proposed—was Twelve Great Truths: Insights into Mind and Heart from Ancient Cultures and Modern Psychology, because that’s exactly what the book was gonna be. Then I got a contract, I was writing the book, I was behind schedule, the deadline was approaching, so I changed the title to Ten Great Truths: Insights into Mind and Heart from Ancient Cultures. Then they changed the title from Ten Great Truths to The Happiness Hypothesis. I said, I don’t know what that is—there’s ten chapters here, there’s not like one hypothesis. But as I was revising the book, I realized, whoa, actually, the first two are exactly what you just said.

So the first happiness hypothesis is happiness comes from getting what you want. You set goals, you want a spouse, you want a degree, whatever you want—if you get them, you’re happy. That is easily shown to be false, because the psychology of goal pursuit is such that your focus—the left frontal cortex has circuits specialized for approach, hunting, tracking, achieving—and the progress is really pleasurable. Then when you get what you were going for, you don’t get spectacular pleasure. You actually get release. You get relief. It feels good for sure, but it doesn’t last that long. So just getting what you want, we quickly habituate. So that doesn’t work.

The ancients generally proposed the second one, what you just said, that no, no, no, you’ll never fix the world. Stop trying to do that. Work on yourself. This is the heart of Buddhism, of Stoicism, of a lot of pop psychology. So it’s a better hypothesis that happiness comes from within. You’ve got to work on yourself—CBT, change your appraisals. So all of this is very, very compatible. There’s a lot of truth to it. It’s much better. But the one sort of original thing I think that I contributed to this literature is to say there’s an even better hypothesis.

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The third one is that happiness comes from between. It’s not from getting what you want. It’s not from outside, it’s not from within, it’s from between. That is getting the right kind of embeddedness—this is the word I use a lot now, embeddedness—in three ways. Look, Freud said love and work. That’s the famous formulation, that’s the foundation of positive psychology. Love and work are the two domains where if you’re not doing well in those, you’re not doing well. Work doesn’t mean paid work. Work just means you’re doing something productive that matters to others, which will be a good segue when we talk about your book. So if you get the right kind of embeddedness in dense networks of trust with others, that’s love, broadly speaking. That’s essential for happiness. That’s probably the biggest factor in happiness, the modern research shows. The second factor is between yourself and your work.

You get deeper into it—lots of people have a job, they don’t really care about the work, it’s just for a paycheck, and they’re able to find meaning and purpose elsewhere in their life. Amy Wrzesniewski’s research is all on jobs versus careers versus calling. But for those of us who get a lot of pleasure from our work, it’s because we become so engaged in it, we’re fascinated by it. We read on the weekends and at night because we really want to figure this thing out, let’s say. So if you get the right relationship between yourself and your work, it’s really energizing and engaging, you have a sense of progress. If your work does useful things for others, you have a real sense that you matter. This is a lot of where a sense of meaning comes from, because you do matter.

Then the third factor is between yourself and something larger than yourself. Sometimes you get that through your work or through love, but it’s about being part of a moral community where you feel that we together are doing something important, whether that be in a religion, whether that be in an army, whether that be a team of doctors, whether that be anything where you feel that it’s not just all about you, that it’s one for all, all for one, or we’re all connected, things like that. So if you get those three betweens, then you’re gonna be as happy as you’re biologically capable of being, because happiness is to some extent genetic, as every trait is, but it’s not a point. It’s not like you’re destined by your genes to be at a point. There’s a whole range. Some people their range is shifted up and they’ll move around up. But for all of us, if you get those three betweens correct, you’re going to be at the top end of your range for happiness.

Mounk: I want to go back to this idea of a happiness point and how you’re sort of varying on it a little bit, but to take a step back to bring out sort of what these three in-betweens are really in conversation with, I want to sort of play out the original argument again and see how your in-between is distinguished from that.

So the first kind of insight that lots of different thinkers have had in lots of different forms is that a lot of us are naturally quite driven by external validation. Human beings crave external validation. We often crave material things. This is something that from Thomas Hobbes to Arthur Schopenhauer to many others—really important philosophers in our tradition—have put at the basic premise of our work. It is going to be very hard to get happy that way, because only one person can be at the top of the roost, only one person can be the richest man in the world, and he doesn’t appear to be particularly happy to me. Only one person can get the most beautiful girl in high school or whatever. So that’s just an element of competition, which means that many people are going to be failing to get the rewards. Secondly, as you pointed out, a lot of the time when you get that reward, it turns out that you’re disappointed with it.

You think, if only I could make the basketball team, the cheerleading squad, if only I could get this job, if only I could get this promotion, if only I could make six figures, then I’m gonna be happy. You manage to achieve that, and you have a brief fleeting moment of triumph, of satisfaction. After a few weeks you’ll realize it doesn’t actually solve your problems. So there’s a counter-tradition which says that’s why you have to learn to not go seek the world. That obviously has lots of different forms as well. My friend Shira Telushkin has a book coming out, which is all about the monastic tradition of people who just completely forsake the world—just go off and not engage in society at all. The very different tradition is the Stoic tradition, which has been very popular since your book was published 20 years ago. There’s a huge kind of boomlet in Stoic self-help books, which are saying you need to learn to be indifferent to everybody.

If you love somebody, then their love for you, their well-being, is going to determine your happiness. So the safest thing to do is not to love somebody too much, is to disengage from other people, because otherwise your well-being is bound up with theirs. So that seems like a really smart, deep response to the material striving that you also worry about today—a huge percentage of people in Europe, I recently read, wanting to be influencers as their life choice, because that’s what gives you admiration and adulation and money and free stays at fancy hotels. So it feels to me like this: no, no, search within, don’t be dependent on the outside world. Seems like really good advice as a response, but you think, no, that actually also is missing something, that’s also getting something wrong. So why do we need these in-betweens? Why shouldn’t we cast our lot in with Buddha and the Stoics?

Haidt: Sure. First let’s look at what is it that people want. You say they want prestige, they want material things. I would say once you get up above a certain level of material safety, you want material things because of the prestige. You want a high salary like on Wall Street—the competition for salaries—because that’s a marker of your success, of your prestige. As a social psychologist, I think this is completely legitimate, but our modern society exploits that desire for prestige in ways that leave us worse off and just extract a lot of money from us.

For example, money is correlated with happiness. This was debated a lot in the nineties and early 2000s. Rich people are happier, but it depends in part on how you got there. If you win the lottery, that often destroys your life. People don’t respect you for it. They think you owe them something. But as Arthur Brooks always points out, if you work hard and build something—you build a business or whatever it is you do—and then you achieve success by hard work, that is incredibly satisfying. That’s a beautiful kind of satisfaction. And if that is in part measured in money, I think that’s fine.

Now, of course, what social media has done is it said you can achieve prestige without actually having done anything excellent. It’s just a battle to get up on top, get more likes, get more followers. So we have this ancient psychology of prestige, and there are even quotes from—what’s his name, one of the founders of Facebook, not Zuckerberg, whoever it was—that says we hacked into this, we took the desire for prestige and we hacked it. So the need for respect from others within your community is very legitimate, very important for a good life, and I endorse it for modern Westerners.

Now, one thing I realized in writing the book is that, until a hundred or two hundred years ago, people lived in a world where they could all die tomorrow, or their children could die tomorrow, and nobody saved for retirement. They didn’t understand the world and they couldn’t control the threats. Something really changes when you have a very long time horizon. So that’s one thing. There’s less need for us to brace, because most of us are not going to experience the death of a child. Some people still do, and that’s perhaps even more painful for us nowadays than it used to be when they expected it. I don’t know. But we live in a very different world.

Mounk: The idea here is that the ancient advice of the Stoics, of Buddha, made sense in a world in which you had to expect unimaginable heartbreak. You had to expect not just that your parents die before you, but perhaps that your child dies before you. You had to expect that you might starve to death, you had to expect that you might end up in a terrible war. Perhaps learning to affect this attitude of “I’m not gonna care too much about the world” is a kind of sensible precaution to take when the likelihood of that kind of tragedy striking you is really high.

Haidt: Exactly. The conclusion I came to in the book—one of the few places where I disagreed with the ancients—was the Buddhist notion of making yourself indifferent to the ups and downs, to whatever happens. I was very positively disposed to that. I loved Buddhism. I took a course in college. I’ve always been interested in it. So when I started the book, I expected that Buddha would be the winner, in the sense of having the best psychology. I knew a little about Stoicism at the time, and over time I came to see that Stoicism was a little better, because Stoics are perfectly fine with you loving your children and being attached to them and your spouse and all of that. But you do have to do practices to prepare yourself that you might lose them. When you lose them—it’s not that you need to be indifferent to them so that it doesn’t hurt. It’s that you need to develop these practices to shut off the negative emotions. Stoics are much more okay with positive emotions, as I understand it.

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So I do think that the Buddhist view is maybe a little less appropriate. Look, we’re gonna hear from a lot of angry Buddhists—although maybe there’s not really supposed to be any angry Buddhists, since if they’re angry, they’re not Buddhists. So just to be clear: Buddhism is a huge tradition, and there are some strands that are really monastic withdrawal, no emotions, and there are others that are much softer.

I don’t mean to in any way impugn the whole thing. I just mean that the view I came to is that for Americans, or for modern Westerners, I think the vision of a good life brings in a bit more of the ancient heroic ideas of a good life. That is, if my son is twenty years old, and if he were to become a Buddhist and meditate and develop equanimity, I’d be really disappointed, and I think that would not be a good life. I want him to commit to things, do hard things, try big things. I want him to fail sometimes. I want him to fall in love and have his heart broken and find love again. All those things that you need to do if you’re anti-fragile. So this is not a vision of just a person pursuing calm. This is a vision of a person pursuing experience.

That’s what the Buddha did before his enlightenment. He goes out, he has love, he experiences life. So that’s what I’ll just say—these ancient insights into flourishing are incredibly helpful, and we’re losing touch with them. Overall, they’re amazing, and we do well to listen to them. But that was one of the few places where I felt like, you know what, the way we live now, we really can throw ourselves in. Now, of course, we might actually be back to a time when we have no idea if we’ll all be dead in a year or two, according to the people who say that AI might well kill us very soon. So maybe we should go back to some of the older traditions.

Mounk: Well, part of the attraction of those ideas was that we might all be dead tomorrow, we might individually be dead tomorrow. But part of it was just a world that on the whole felt very unpredictable and chaotic. So there are good questions about whether artificial intelligence will make our world sufficiently chaotic and unpredictable that people are going to want similar forms of comfort, whether that’s in the form of Buddhism or Stoicism, or it’s just in the form of all kinds of traditional religions that also give you a sense of: if your life goes terribly on earth, well, as long as you live by these precepts, you go off to heaven and you’re rewarded for it in the afterlife, which is also, I think, a form of comfort that religion has historically offered to people who live through unpredictable times.

I want to come back to that, just one more thing on this. You evoked the idea of the happiness fixed point, or there are different terms for it, and this is interesting because I think it’s something that the ancients didn’t fully understand. According to the best empirical research we have today, people really do tend to get up in the morning and be on a particular kind of point of a one-to-ten scale. There are some people who get up and most mornings they’re an eight out of ten—they’re like, I love life, bring it on. There are other people who get up most mornings and they feel a two or three out of ten, and they feel life is really hard, and so on. Obviously, if you’re normally an eight out of ten but you’re living in a war zone, or you’re starving, you’re gonna be a lot less happy than your biology primes you to be. If you’re normally a two out of ten but you’ve just fallen in love or you’ve just gotten a huge promotion, you might be having an eight-out-of-ten day. But that is what usually happens.

That feels quite disempowering in a way. It suggests that if you’re lucky enough to be an eight out of ten, congratulations. If you’re unlucky enough to be a two out of ten, not much to be done. But as you implied, you think it’s not quite as straightforward as that. So how can we use the teachings from this whole tradition, the way that you’ve reflected on them in this book, in order to—I don’t know what the right term is—improve, optimize our happiness fixed point? That’s the language you’re not going to choose.

Haidt: To go just a little deeper into what we learned about heritability, I’d say possibly one of the biggest discoveries in all of psychology was when the behavior genetics studies started coming in the eighties. When you look at identical twins reared apart—it often used to be that twins were separated for adoption, so in America and in Sweden, or Scandinavia, there were large studies, or somewhat large studies, of twins who either were raised together or raised apart. When we’re talking about personality traits, it doesn’t seem to matter much.

Even politics—this is one of the amazing discoveries—politics and religiosity: your parents pick the religion that you’re going to be, but how religious you are is going to be similar to your identical twin, not to your parents. So our genes make the brain, the brain has all kinds of desires and wants and attractions, and almost everything is heritable between 0.4 and 0.7. But nothing is heritable at like 0.9. No psychological trait is at 0.9. There’s always variation. So that was an incredible discovery in the eighties and nineties, debated for a long time about what it means. Happiness seems to be at the higher end of the heritability scale.

Mounk: But Jon, help me understand the connection here, because heritability is a really interesting discussion—we could do a whole podcast episode about heritability. But the question of whether or not we have a happiness fixed point isn’t identical to the question of how heritable it is. It might be that—I think we all know that children have very different personalities from each other, and every person who’s a parent, or who is an uncle or aunt, or who has experience with little children, knows that.

There’s a question about what exactly governs that. Why is it that one sibling is like this and the other sibling is like that? I broadly agree with your summary of the heritability literature, but the fact that, say, this child is really outgoing, this child is really shy, can be baked in for whatever reason—whether that’s socialization, whether that’s the vitamins that the mother took when the baby was in the womb, whatever it is—that might still be there.

Haidt: I see what you’re saying. No, that’s right. It could be set by things in childhood. It could be set by chemicals or medicines that you’re exposed to. That’s all true. So let’s just go with that. It doesn’t matter where it’s from. We do tend to have a happiness set point, and this is sort of the average around which—and that word was used a lot in the nineties, I think, the “set point,” like a thermostat that will return. But over time it’s come to be understood more as a set range.

Some people—you know, one person I know, I said, I think you’d be really happy if you moved to this new city, and she said, no, I could be unhappy anywhere. She sort of understood that, of course, she varies, she fluctuates, but she was basically saying, I am set low. But with that, whatever the cause of that, all of us have better times and worse times. All of us can think back to times when we were especially happy. So the fact that there’s such variation within a single life means that we can do this inquiry: okay, when were you at your best? When were you at your happiest?

With young people it’ll often be, you know, I did this summer program with all these kids, and we just formed a gang, and it was so exciting—there’s a sense of both connection and also growth, exploration. Those things tend to create a time that glows, that feels like it glows, and they remember it. So there’s a lot of variation. What I tell my students—I teach a course at NYU called Flourishing—what we work on is getting your habits right: to make yourself smarter, which is getting your attention back, being able to focus; stronger, which is emotionally stronger—Stoicism, Buddhism, CBT; and more sociable—we read Dale Carnegie, we practice starting conversations with people.

If you can become smarter, stronger, and more sociable, then you will, on average, be more successful in love and in work. You’ll be better at dating, you’ll be better at getting married, at staying married, you’ll be a better employee. These are business students—I teach at NYU Stern, so these are ambitious business students. What I tell them is: work on your habits, work on your systems, get those right, and then you’ll become smarter, stronger, and more sociable. If you’re more successful in love and work, then you will be happier. That’s guaranteed. Whoever you are, whatever your set point is, if things are going really well in love and in work, you’re gonna be on the high end. If they’re not going well in both of those domains, or even one, you’re gonna be on the low end. As for how wide it is, I don’t know—we don’t know. But it’s certainly big enough to work on.

Mounk: All right, so that is excellent advice, derived from deep wisdom in the tradition and in your book summarizing it. You envisaged all kinds of threats to people’s ability to pursue and realize happiness 20 years ago, but the nature of those threats have changed, and obviously you think that one of the most important threats to it is social media. To bridge to some of your more recent concerns: it’s interesting that in new material for the book you argue that social media and the digital environment we live in today might impede the transmission of some of that wisdom from generation to generation—that in a kind of systematic way, social media might lead us to disregard what our ancestors learned about how to end up at the top rather than the bottom range of their happiness set point.

Haidt: There’s so much that we can talk about regarding the way that social media is blocking the development of young people and harming people of all ages. But what you just mentioned is a really interesting one that I don’t talk enough about, but I think is really important, which is the transmission of knowledge and culture. I spent a lot of time in cultural psychology and anthropology, cross-cultural work, and I’m just really interested in the transmission of culture.

Culture is passed down from generation to generation with variation. People like Joe Henrich and many others look at cultural evolution as a twisting strand with biological evolution. These are some of the most interesting and important ideas in the social sciences, I think. So if we think about culture being passed down, it’s always been passed down from generation to generation, always, until around 2012. Then what happens is—it was one thing when kids were on a computer, you had early Facebook, you had to be sitting at a desk on your parents’ computer, and then you could log on to Facebook. But once the iPhone comes out—and the iPhone comes out literally the year after The Happiness Hypothesis comes out, my book is out in 2006, Steve Jobs stands on a stage in San Francisco in 2007—sometimes a new product comes along that changes everything, and boy was he right.

By 2012, most young people have traded in their flip phone for a smartphone with social media. Social media has just gotten more and more addictive ever since, especially the switch to short videos. Short videos are the worst of the worst. I think it’s really the biggest single driver of the declining ability to read books or pay attention. If you think about a young person’s brain, the whole middle to late childhood is a period of extended slow growth early on to allow for cultural learning. Kids are supposed to turn their attention away from their parents and towards the broader world, especially adults of their gender—boys are looking at older boys and men, girls are looking at older girls and women—and everyone is getting culture from the previous generation with variation. That’s always been the case. But once everyone plugs in, what they’re bringing in now is gigabytes of new stuff into their eyes and ears, hundreds of times more information than when you and I were young.

I’m 63, I’m older than you, but you also had an analog childhood where there were limits on the stuff coming in. When you and I were young, almost none of what we took in was made by other children. A lot of it was made not just by our parents’ generation, a lot was made by our grandparents’ generation, or even our great-grandparents. The TV shows that I watched as a kid were made by my grandparents’ generation. So there used to be a lot of transmission from generation to generation. Even TV changed things a lot, but it still transmitted culture. Social media doesn’t. It floods you with little bits—just little bits that can’t be assembled into anything. You scroll through them, and people say that at the end of three hours of scrolling, they don’t even remember what they saw.

So what’s gonna happen at the end of 15 years of scrolling? Kids are getting on TikTok by eight or nine, and by the time they graduate from college, they’ve seen millions and millions of short videos. They haven’t read very many books, and increasingly those short videos will be made by AI. So if we imagine humanity suddenly cut off from everything we’ve ever learned, that’s pretty scary. This is why I’m so firm on saying just set a minimum age. Don’t dicker around with well, what if we can do better filtering of content, what if we can cut out 99% of the suicide videos, what if we can cut out 99% of the sexual predators. No, it’s not enough. Social media is an intrinsically adult activity. Kids need to learn the basics, they need to learn their culture, they need to meet and follow and interact with people in their community. Social media has so many effects on human development, and they’re almost all bad.

Mounk: Let’s talk about social media. We had you on the podcast early on. We’ve talked privately as well as you were setting out to write The Anxious Generation, and I was sure that it was going to be a big success. I had trouble imagining that it was going to be as enormous a success as it has been. I don’t know whether it really is the best-selling book of the last three or four years, but I suspect it must be, if not the most best-selling nonfiction book of the last three or four years, been among the top three or top five. It’s been on the New York Times bestseller list in continuation for years since it came out. It’s obviously also had a huge impact, not just on public opinion, but on public policy as well. At the same time, it obviously feels like the social media wave is only continuing to build. On the one hand, you’ve had about as much success as a writer, and as a policymaker, or as a policy advocate, as you can have. At the same time, it’s probably a drop in the ocean relative to the underlying trends, which make young people even more addicted to TikTok and other short-form video content, that are continuing to erode the kind of analog, play-based childhood and pushing people towards the digital world. Stepping back and surveying the last few years, how do you assess where we are today relative to two or three years ago?

Haidt: I am so excited. The progress is extraordinary. It’s not a drop in the ocean, and here’s why. If we think about this as multiple battlefields, let’s start with the four norms that I suggested in The Anxious Generation. Once you understand that it’s a collective action problem, that every kid has to be on it, not because they want to, but because everyone else is on it, and you can’t get off, otherwise you’re alone, once you understand that, then I proposed four norms.

They are: no smartphone till high school. Before then, just give your kid a flip phone, or in elementary school a landline. No smartphone before high school, no social media before sixteen, just delay it till sixteen. There’s plenty they can do online, they can communicate in all kinds of ways before sixteen without an algorithm-driven social media platform extracting their attention. The third is phone-free schools, which is just a no-brainer. There’s no reason that kids should have their phones, could be looking at their phones, during school hours. The fourth is far more independence, free play, and responsibility in the real world, that’s the free-range kids idea. One of those is super duper easy to implement, because phone-free schools, you just do it at the district level, the school level, or the state level. It’s not federal, there’s no federal policy here, it can’t be, but because there’s a high level of difficulty with the others.

When I wrote the book, I assumed we’re gonna get no help from the government, because our Congress is broken and Meta is able to control the House with its very large donations to one party, which might well change after today. Here we are talking on election day. I thought we’d get no help from Congress, and that’s been true. Congress has never done a single thing ever to protect children online.

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Not a single thing. But what I didn’t understand was that the governors are amazing, most of them, and almost all of them are parents. Something about what I found is that almost everybody in politics is a family person. They have children, they’re committed to making the world better. I’ve really just been impressed by the way the governors jumped into action, totally bipartisan, no red state, blue state difference. Same thing with international leaders, so many nations. Brazil got it done in 2024. Some mothers read the book, they organized, they got it through the Congress by the end of 2024. If you look at Battlefield Number One, phone-free schools, this was like Operation Desert Storm from 1991. We just rolled into Baghdad, as it were. Maybe I’m older than most people in the audience here.

Mounk: I’m not sure you want to liken your crusade to the Iraq War, but I guess it’s the first Iraq War you’re talking about.

Haidt: The first Iraq War, that’s right. The first Iraq War was a spectacular, quick success. That’s not a drop in the bucket. The fact that it’s working so well—effects on test scores are slow to materialize. Some studies show increases, some don’t. Test scores are a lagging indicator. But teachers love it, the students actually like it.

My kids go to New York City public schools. My daughter said, “Dad, lunchtime is so much better.” This is two weeks in, last September. “Lunchtime is so much better. We’re talking to each other, we’re making up games, we’re playing cards.” I hear this everywhere. Phone-free schools are working spectacularly well. That shows, wait a second, we can do something. That’s battle number one, we’re winning in a route. There’s no real opposition.

Battle number two is to get kids off social media, at least to delay it till 16. A number of states have done it. Florida actually did it even before my book came out. Of course, they’re all held up in the courts, so nothing’s been implemented. But Australia implemented their law. Implementation started very loose, very soft, because it wasn’t the government’s job, it was the platform’s job. Guess what—they didn’t do very much. That’s going to take a little time. Of course, Meta and others are pushing the story that it failed: see, you can’t do it, the kids are still on. Well, yeah, of course they’re still on.

Now they can say, okay, you platforms, you ten platforms, you did a terrible job, here’s a fine, do it better. The technology is increasing so quickly that it’s going to work. It’ll take a little time, and many other countries are in the process of following. That’s not a drop in the ocean. This is a major national-level change in a dozen countries. The EU recently committed to doing something. We’re debating whether they want a parental consent exemption, whether they want to go down to age fourteen. But this is gonna happen.

Battlefield number two, it’s gonna take a couple more years, but we’re gonna win. We are gonna win. It’s gonna be recognized. In ten years, people are gonna say, what the hell were they thinking back then, letting eight-year-olds talk with strangers on TikTok and Snapchat? It’s completely insane. Delaying smartphones is also very hard, and there’s no law, I don’t want Congress passing a law saying you can’t give your ten-year-old a smartphone. But I think norms are changing.

The iPad babies are coming out really damaged, the kids who are given an iPad very early. It’s very, very common, especially in less educated circles. There’s a big class difference here, unfortunately. The kids who had an iPad in their hands from the time they were one are showing up at preschool with language delays, behavioral problems. There seems to be a real change in neural development. That’s extremely serious, and we’ve got to get moving on that. In 2024, when my book came out, people said the train’s left the station, it’s too late, the technology’s here to stay, this is the world they’re going into, they have to learn it. There was a resignation, there was a sense of hopelessness, and now there isn’t. Now it’s clear, whoa, if we work together, especially when it’s a nonpartisan issue, and it has remained, thank God, a nonpartisan issue, it’s a parents’ issue, it’s a kids’ issue, I’m actually optimistic. Now, AI is a whole new set of problems that are much bigger. But I do think we’re gonna win on social media. I think we’re gonna win on ed tech, we’re gonna get computers out of school. College professors are banning laptops right and left all over the country. Our students can’t learn if there’s a multifunction entertainment device on their desk. If college students can’t learn, how the hell do we expect first graders to learn with a computer on their desk? I think we’re gonna win on that too.

Mounk: I want to get to AI in a moment. Let me stick to social media for a second. There’s a whole empirical debate about exactly how strong the evidence is, and that differs from point to point. Perhaps some other time I can have you back on and go in depth on that debate, that would be really fascinating to do. I don’t want to do that today. I was teaching excerpts from The Anxious Generation just a couple days ago, and we had a great discussion on the basis of the book, and it was in the context of a policy school. One of the things that I wanted students to think about is, donning the hat of a policymaker, how do you figure out what policy to pass when the evidence is obviously in certain ways incomplete? That’s going to be something that’s always going to be the case for policymakers, you’re always going to be in a fog of decision-making. One of the things that I try to emphasize is that you certainly don’t want to require absolute proof before you do something.

If a recreational drug came out tomorrow, and there’s good reasons to suspect that it was gonna be really bad for people’s brains and other things, and perhaps there’s some doubt about it, and some smart people arguing that actually perhaps the worries are overstated, it would be a very strange approach to say, let people become totally addicted in the millions to this recreational drug, and in 20 years, we might have absolutely ironclad proof that it’s bad, and then we can ban it. That would be a really bad approach. But of course, whether or not we should ban it also depends on things on the other side of a moral ledger. In the case of a recreational drug, people can live fine without recreational drugs, so that’s not very much on that side.

Applying that framework to the different points you were talking about, it seems to me that phone-free schools, I don’t have any hesitation. As you’re pointing out, I don’t see what the potential harm is in making sure that kids don’t have their phones in their pockets from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. Perhaps it turns out it’s not necessary because you’ve misread the evidence and other people are right about it. I’m not sure that’s the case, but whatever, no harm done. When it comes to things like banning social media for people under sixteen, I feel a little bit more torn about what’s on the other side of a ledger. I assume that you do too.

Haidt: Tell me what they are missing. If we keep them off till sixteen, what is it that they can’t do with the rest of the internet?

Mounk: Well, so for one, you’re somebody who cares about free speech, as do I. One of the impacts of that is that in those countries, in order to access all kinds of content, you then need to prove that you’re above the age of sixteen, which basically means that you’re closed off from huge swathes of the internet unless you give the government your identity.

Haidt: Just stop. Hold on. There’s a lot of problems with that. First, you’re not closed off from information. Australian kids are free to look up “how do I kill myself” on YouTube, and YouTube will show them how to kill themselves. The Australia bill does not ban content. It does not ban access to content. It says that before you can sign the terms of service and have a commercial relationship with a corporation that is telling you, we’re going to take all of your data, we own it, we own everything you make, your parents have no say here, we’re taking it from you, as long as you tell us you’re 13, even if you’re nine, we don’t care, we’re taking it, we’re saying, how about, given that kids can’t sign contracts, how about we at least raise that to 16? That’s the first thing. Kids in Australia can still get all the content they want on YouTube, but if a girl asks for dieting advice, there’s no algorithm that’s going to get to know her over the weeks and eventually feed her eating disorder stuff. That’s the first thing, there’s not a block on content.

On Snapchat or Instagram there are limits, but that’s the platform’s decision to do it. Secondly, this is a myth that you can’t get on without giving the government your identity. These laws are not about identity, you don’t need identity verification. In fact, the Australia law was specifically written, it says there that the platforms are responsible for enforcing their own age limits, and they can’t only do it by asking for a government ID. If you want to buy liquor online or drugs, you have to show your driver’s license. That’s one way of doing it, and there you are giving a lot of information. But Pornhub has said all along, we don’t want to know people’s names, we just want to know are they old enough, and if you give us device-based verification, we’d be happy. That’s what Apple and Google are now doing. Apple and Google know how old you are, and if you want proof, they’ve each made it so you can upload your driver’s license to Apple and Google. You have a relationship with them, it’s a relationship of trust. If a kid goes to Pornhub, Pornhub doesn’t say, what’s your address, what’s your birthday? They don’t say any of that. They just send a ping down, yes or no, that’s all I want to know, over this age limit. Age verification is not identity authentication. This is being pushed by critics of it, it’s just not true.

Mounk: I have my producer texting me here, and this is partially what I was basing this on. Maybe in part because platforms aren’t implementing this in the best possible way, or they’re not making the right kind of choices, but members of our team who are based in Britain, including the producer of this podcast, Leo, had to provide her ID. What she was telling me is that she was trying to access her DMs on Substack [Ed note: for work-related reasons!] where if you have a UK IP address, it now requires you to upload your ID in order to see the messages that people are trying to send to her there.

Haidt: Okay, I don’t support that. I’m opposed to that. You and I share a lot of free speech concerns. Of course we’re both friends with Greg Lukianoff, and I wrote a book with him. Britain is a particular case that has implemented things badly, in that they put people in jail for tweets. I definitely grant that a government could take this issue and they could use it to control the content and punish the content. All along, me and my team, we’ve said: do not focus on content. Content always raises free speech issues. Okay, yes, CSAM, child sexual—there’s a couple of very narrow kinds of content that we do already ban. But beyond that, content that promotes hate, my God, how do you interpret that? That is going to lead to censorship. I am opposed to content-based restrictions and regulations, and I am opposed to age verification methods, or mandating age verification methods that also give more about your identity, when all we need is age. There are increasing numbers of techniques that just give you age.

Mounk: I think it’s both true that obviously at the beginning the methods of age verification might be quite crude, and over time better ones are going to be implemented. And that if governments want excuses to regulate content, they’re going to find excuses, and the fact that we might latch on to this as an excuse, if you’re clearly opposing it, is not a good argument not to do that.

Haidt: Let me just add one other argument that I haven’t really made before. Look, Australia’s doing something big, we’re doing something new here. Yes, there are obstacles on the way, but I just want to put a stake on the ground and say the status quo is horrific. The status quo is the destruction of a generation, not just their mental health, but their education. The PISA test shows declining reading ability around the world. Nobody can say let’s keep it as it is. That’s just a non-starter. We have to do something. If someone has an idea other than age limits, if someone has an idea to take out the intrinsic problems of social media, which I think are inherent to the product, let’s talk about it. But we have to do something big.

In the rest of this conversation, Yascha and Jonathan discuss whether artificial intelligence will worsen the impact of social media, how to live meaningful lives in an immersively digital age—and explore the recent revelations that Meta employees discussed how to damage Jonathan’s reputation. This part of the conversation is reserved for paying subscribers…

I’m very happy to announce that Mike McFaul and Larry Diamond have agreed to become regular columnists for American Purpose.

Mike is currently Ken Olivier and Angela Nomellini Professor of International Studies in the Department of Political Science at Stanford University, and a senior fellow at Stanford’s Freeman Spogli Institute (FSI) and Hoover Institution. He was also a former U.S. ambassador to Russia and NSC staff member.

Larry is Mosbacher Senior Fellow in Global Democracy, also at FSI, and Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution. He is one of the world’s leading experts on global democracy.

We welcome Mike and Larry to the American Purpose family, and look forward to their future regular contributions.

– Frank Fukuyama on behalf of American Purpose at Persuasion.

At a recent conference held in Prague by Forum 2000, the organization co-founded by Vaclav Havel in 1996 to discuss the challenges facing mankind on the threshold of a new millennium, special attention was paid to Havel’s legacy, since the event coincided with the 90th anniversary of his birth. That legacy is especially important today when the future of democracy, which Havel believed was essential to the preservation of human well-being and world peace, is more threatened than at any time in the last 30 years.

When the Journal of Democracy published a collection of tributes to Havel after his death in 2011, it referred to him as “probably the most revered democratic leader and thinker of our time”—and so he was. He was not just a national leader and democratic intellectual of global stature, but also a renowned playwright, a political dissident, and a global democracy activist. He continued to be all of these things until his very last days, when he issued a statement of solidarity with political prisoners in Belarus and received his friend the Dalai Lama, who said after Havel’s death that the best way to remember him was to promote his legacy.

There are several components of Havel’s legacy that can help to guide us in addressing the challenges we now face. He was, first of all, an unrivalled democracy strategist. His actions—such as nominating for the Nobel Peace Prize brave democratic leaders —were always calculated to strengthen activists at the forefront of the struggle for democracy and to give them hope.

American Purpose at Persuasion is a registered nonprofit that relies on reader support to pay our staff and keep our content free for everyone. If you value our work and want to fight for liberal values wherever they are threatened, please become a paying subscriber today!

Charter 77, the civic initiative he co-founded and helped lead, not only revived the dissident movement in Czechoslovakia after the 1968 Soviet invasion, but also inspired dissidents in China three decades later to create Charter 08, which was signed by over 10,000 Chinese democrats. Havel’s Chinese friends said after his death: “Your Charter 77 and our Charter 08 are iron cousins.” Soon after Oswaldo Paya’s Varela Project had created the first democratic opening in Cuba since the revolution, Havel told him that “each democrat who opposes a totalitarian regime should behave today as if power were to be handed over tomorrow.” This spurred Paya to initiate a secret national dialogue among more than 10,000 citizens in totalitarian Cuba that led to the drafting of an “All-Cuban Plan” that Paya called “a bridge between our current situation and democracy.”

I’m very happy to announce that Mike McFaul and Larry Diamond have agreed to become regular columnists for American Purpose.

Mike is currently Ken Olivier and Angela Nomellini Professor of International Studies in the Department of Political Science at Stanford University, and a senior fellow at Stanford’s Freeman Spogli Institute (FSI) and Hoover Institution. He was also a former U.S. ambassador to Russia and NSC staff member.

Larry is Mosbacher Senior Fellow in Global Democracy, also at FSI, and Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution. He is one of the world’s leading experts on global democracy.

We welcome Mike and Larry to the American Purpose family, and look forward to their future regular contributions.

Clear here to read Mike’s recent essay on America after the midterms.

Click here to read Larry’s recent essay on why America needs democratic reform.

– Frank Fukuyama on behalf of American Purpose at Persuasion.

Follow Persuasion on X, Instagram, LinkedIn, and YouTube to keep up with our latest articles, podcasts, and events, as well as updates from excellent writers across our network.

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• Our next London pub meet will be on Friday, December 11 at 6:30pm at Ye Olde Mitre in Holborn. Please email me at [email protected] if you’d like to att…

On November 2—the day before the 2026 midterm elections—Vice President JD Vance posted an upbeat message on X, “We got your back, New York!”, accompanied by an infographic detailing how “The Trump Admin Delivers for New York.” Within 24 hours, it had received 10,000 likes.

Eight hours later, New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani took to social media to mock Vance’s post with a well-known meme of a young man on a subway platform pretending to slow down a train and open the doors. The message was unmistakable: Vance was taking credit for developments that had little to do with the Trump administration’s policies. Mamdani’s post took less than a day to rack up over a million likes, and on Election Day itself, the vice president was brutally ratioed.

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The contrast to the Trump campaign’s online dominance during the 2024 election couldn’t be more stark. Following his debate against a visibly ailing President Biden, Trump put out an Instagram montage of Biden babbling incoherently that quickly reached some 13 million views and 850,000 likes. Trump also won the endorsement of impactful podcasters, influencers, and tech billionaires like Joe Rogan, Jake Paul, and Elon Musk—contributing to the so-called rightward “vibe shift” the country was said to be undergoing.

This rapid change of the Republicans’ fortunes on social media challenges deeply held assumptions about our digital age. Experts, legacy media, and establishment politicians have long claimed that the business model of social media—optimizing for outrage, sensationalism, and conflict—favors illiberal populists. And many have proposed crackdowns to deal with the supposed pernicious influence of social media.

In his January 2025 farewell address, Joe Biden claimed that “We must hold the social platforms accountable” in order to protect our “very democracy from the abuse of power.” In September 2025, Nobel Peace Prize laureate Maria Ressa declared that “Technology platforms have become weapons of mass destruction to democracy.” In 2026, France’s Emmanuel Macron accused social media of “damaging” democracy, while Brazil’s President Lula warned of the “harm” it causes.

It’s now clear that this narrative significantly exaggerates the harms and undervalues the benefits of our online age. In democracies with reasonably free and fair elections, and some degree of online free speech, social media tends to disfavor incumbents no matter where on the political spectrum they sit. In particular, it works against those who fail to address the deep social or economic concerns of the electorate, behave egregiously while in office, or deflect from criticism of their shortcomings through lies and propaganda.

In 2024, for example, Democrats paid the price for failing to acknowledge genuine concerns about immigration, inflation, and censorial identity politics, and for gaslighting the American people by insisting that Biden was fit for office when it was obvious that his cognitive abilities had declined alarmingly. This paved the way for a slew of negative messaging, memes, and mockery that helped Trump win resoundingly against Kamala Harris.

But winning the internet is a fleeting triumph. It turns out that beating a failing incumbent did not make Trump immune to the same dynamics that hurt Biden. Where right-wing podcasters triumphed in 2024, progressive digital media and influencers such as Mehdi Hasan’s “Zeteo,” Ben Meiselas’ MeidasTouch, and the hosts of the “I’ve Had It” podcast built huge audiences during the recent midterms through relentless criticism of Trump and Republicans. Moreover, Joe Rogan, Tucker Carlson, and even Nick Fuentes all turned on Trump, as the administration’s unpopular policies, lies, cruelty, and corruption was exposed.

Persuasion is a registered nonprofit that relies on reader support to pay our staff and keep our content free for everyone. If you value our work and want to fight for liberal values wherever they are threatened, please become a paying subscriber today!

Likewise, Republicans’ perceived indifference to rising costs of living became a real liability on social media. When Mississippi’s Republican Senator Cindy Hyde-Smith suggested that voters concerned about the price of beef should choose another protein, the campaign of her Democratic challenger Scott Colom fired back in a video viewed more than 20 million times on social media: “Pick another protein? I’d rather pick another senator.” Colom is set to become Mississippi’s first black senator since Reconstruction.

The United States is not the only country where these dynamics have played out. In April, Péter Magyar’s Tisza party won a two-thirds supermajority in the Hungarian parliament. Sixteen years of Viktor Orbán’s illiberal rule was swept away in a single election.

In theory, this should not have been possible. Orbán controlled 80 percent of Hungarian media. His government had passed laws targeting the media, protests, minorities, and civil society. But there was one thing Orbán did not control: the internet. It was small, fearless online outlets that broke the story that forced Orbán’s president to resign in 2024. It was a viral YouTube interview that launched Magyar’s political career. It was social media that allowed Tisza’s messaging to outcompete Fidesz’s well-funded propaganda machine in the general election.

Likewise, a decentralized, self-organized, and collectively-led Students’ List defeated longtime leader Aleksandar Vučić in Serbia last month. With television coverage tilted toward the government, social media gave the students a way to mobilize citizens. By the final weeks of the campaign, the students’ central Instagram account had more than 930,000 followers. They used online ads to promote their policies, solicit donations, and recruit election monitors. “Social media saved us,” said one student activist who had been detained and placed under house arrest.

Perhaps the most ironic case of the internet turning the tide against populism is Brazil. Since 2019, Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes has led an investigation into “fake news” in the country, ordering arrests, blocking social media accounts, and suppressing criticism of the court itself. The campaign against fake news and illegal content has only grown in scope since then—electoral judges regularly police political speech and opinions in Brazil. These measures have been defended by Brazil’s left-wing president, Lula da Silva.

Yet the same platforms Lula accused of damaging democracy helped mobilize supporters for his reelection victory over Flávio Bolsonaro this October. In particular, a WhatsApp channel called “Exército do Lula” grew from roughly 50,000 followers after the first round to more than 10.8 million by election night, spreading campaign material and urging supporters to act. The channel itself was twice suspended during the runoff after a complaint from Bolsonaro’s campaign before being restored.

As we approach the end of 2026, there are fresh reasons to be optimistic about the ability of democracy to resist hostile takeovers by illiberal and authoritarian governments. The same tools that too many defenders of democracy want to put under government control are the very same tools that have, in the past few months, helped defeat illiberal and populist incumbents and challengers across three continents.

It turns out that free online speech, far from being democracy’s fatal flaw, may be one of its greatest strengths.

Jacob Mchangama, a contributing writer at Persuasion, is the Executive Director of The Future of Free Speech, a research professor at Vanderbilt University, and a Senior Fellow at The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression. His latest book, co-authored with Jeff Kosseff, is The Future of Free Speech.

Follow Persuasion on X, Instagram, LinkedIn, and YouTube to keep up with our latest articles, podcasts, and events, as well as updates from excellent writers across our network.

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We’re delighted to feature this article as part of our new series, “What Universities Are For.” The series, made possible by the generous support of the Mike and Sofia Segal Foundation, will explore the affirmative case for universities as essential institutions of a free society, include rigorous debate about what kind of reform is needed and how to achieve it, and spotlight the institutions, initiatives, and campus leaders that are doing it well.

Ask an academic what they dislike most about their universities and the first answer will most likely be: administrative bloat. This is especially acute in the humanities. As we sit in our classrooms, our students holding paperbacks, sitting in rickety old chairs, and do nothing more than talk for three hours a week, we inevitably ask ourselves: why does this cost so much?

The cost of higher education, especially in the United States, is out of control. Parents, legislators, and students are rightly looking at price tags trending to half a million dollars for a four-year degree and wondering whether it’s worth it. In Canada, we’ve done a much better job of keeping costs down. But affordability has its price, too. Salaries are lower, making it harder to recruit top talent, there are far fewer nice new buildings around, and class sizes are big. Don’t get me started on the chairs.

A host of grassroots “humanities institutes” have begun to emerge to respond to this problem. Organizations like the Catherine Project rely on volunteers to teach upwards of 2,000 people per year with free or low-cost classes on great books. (I taught an evening class on the art of the short story for them to a small group of dedicated adults one semester. It was incredibly rewarding.) Halifax Humanities 101 has been going for 20 years and offers eight-month Great Books courses for free to anyone in Halifax below the poverty line. Professors from local universities volunteer to teach in the program. The Brooklyn Institute offers shorter courses for less money (around $350 for a four-week session), where teachers are paid a gig rate, not a full salary.

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However well-intentioned, these efforts necessarily rely on volunteer or contingent labor and/or donations. What they don’t do is provide a model for a stand-alone humanities institution, where students can get the equivalent of a four-year degree and professors are paid full academic salaries.

Like so many of my peers, I’ve been wondering what it would be like to just start over. Get rid of all the admin and focus on the core purpose: teach and do research. To see what the costs for something like this might actually be, I decided to turn to Claude.

Rather than ask it how to remove the bloat (you’d need one of those subway tunnel borers to even make a dent), I decided to approach it the other way around. What would a minimalist humanities-only university (or college or institute) cost? Just a room, some chairs and a table, a professor, and some students. No deans, no dining halls, no dorms, no wellness centers, no gyms, no counseling services, not even... wait for it... a library.

The problem is, the math doesn’t add up. You can check it out for yourself.

Here’s what I did.

I asked Claude: “I’d like you to mock-up the costs of a bare bones ‘humanities institute’ or ‘humanities college.’” I then gave it a bunch of parameters, asked it to do research on things like average salaries, building lease costs, and the all-important “what costs am I not thinking about?” Claude loved that last one. It really enjoyed showing me how smart it was.

The headline number I arrived at was $20,389/year. This includes average professorial salaries of $125,000/year, three courses per semester for faculty, seminar caps at 30 students, a total enrollment of 120 students and eight professors, three credit courses, four courses per semester, 120 total credits for a degree, and leasing space in a city.

You can quibble about every single one of these numbers. Claude built a dashboard that allows you to tweak each of them to your liking. You think professors should be paid less? $100K salaries gets the number down to $18K/year. You think professors should teach less? A two courses per semester load, standard for research universities, brings it to $27K/year. A seminar of 30 students sounds too big to you (even though that is the standard where I teach)? That one’s going to bite, as the AI likes to say. Bring it down to 20 students and you’re back at $27K. A two courses per semester load with 20 students at an R1 salary? You’ve ballooned to $37K/year, heading towards private college costs. What about increasing enrollments to gain the benefits of scale? Doubling to 240 only brings the number down to $18.7K/year. This likely hides a higher administrative burden to manage more students and faculty.

There are also so many numbers that I hadn’t even thought of. And many that are still missing. Payroll tax and benefits: $300K. Leave coverage: $36K. (“Someone will have a baby or throw out their back,” Claude told me.) A registrar: $84K. (“Somebody has to manage transcripts.”) Legal counsel: $22K! (“You will get sued,” said Claude.) And $18K/year for counseling: “Contracted, not staffed—but eighteen-year-olds have crises and you are liable.” The list goes on.

This article is brought to you by American Purpose, the magazine and community founded by Francis Fukuyama in 2020, which is proudly part of the Persuasion family.

Donald Trump’s reelection in 2024 triggered the greatest challenge to American democracy in my lifetime and one of the biggest assaults on American democratic institutions in the history of the republic. Last week’s Election Day, however, marked a turning point in a two-year campaign of democratic resistance to Trump’s autocratic ways. His autocratic project is now winding down. The Democratic Party’s massive victory in the House of Representatives, the Senate, and governorships around the country now ensures that any future Trump attempts to undermine democratic institutions over the next two years will fail. Democracy in America bent but did not break. One week on, it’s clear that a new era of democratic renewal has begun.

During his first term, Trump tried to undermine many democratic practices in the United States, culminating most tragically in the events of January 6, 2021, when he incited his loyal followers to storm the Capitol and deploy violence to try to interrupt the certification of the presidential election that he lost. To this day, Trump continues to falsely claim that he won the 2020 election.

When Trump won reelection in 2024—complete with Republican majorities in the House and Senate, and a Supreme Court stacked with conservative justices (three of whom were Trump appointees)—the future of American democracy seemed bleaker than ever. Trump tried to leverage his electoral mandate and deference from the legislative and judicial branches to ignore democratic norms. He launched aggressive assaults against the media, the courts, law firms, and universities. Instead of the rule of law, Trump preferred rule by law, most shockingly trying to remove Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook, indicting former FBI Director James Comey, and seeking criminal charges against former CIA Director John Brennan.

Trump’s administration also executed purges of personnel in the military, the State Department, the FBI, and the Department of Justice that more closely resembled the practices of the authoritarian regimes in China and Russia than those of a democratic government. In a bid to stay on the right side of Trump, big business—especially the CEOs of many (not all) major tech companies—acquiesced to or eagerly embraced his authoritarian agenda, giving him gifts measured in millions of dollars for his inauguration parties and vanity projects such as building a ballroom at the White House. As Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way, two of the most respected democracy scholars in the world, wrote in the Journal of Democracy last month, “The United States crossed the line into competitive authoritarianism during Donald Trump’s second presidency.”

Not everyone, however, went along with Trump’s authoritarian project. Many Americans—millions and millions of them—resisted. Their mobilized resistance helped create the permissive conditions for the free, fair, and peaceful elections this month. And when given the chance to ratify Trump’s agenda or reject it, American voters said enough was enough. In a blue tsunami, they overwhelmingly rejected Trump and his Republican Party candidates. That’s how it’s supposed to work. That is democracy in action.

Several institutions and individuals played an important role in protecting American democracy and safeguarding the electoral process.

First were the courts. Courts challenged many of the steps Trump took toward autocratic rule. And let’s not use the passive voice here. Fighters for democracy like Norm Eisen and his Democracy Defenders Fund, or Ian Bassin and his organization, Protect Democracy, the ACLU, and many, many others brought these fights to the courts, and then independent judges defended the rule of law and the Constitution. Importantly, several of the Trump administration’s attempts to subvert the electoral process were rebuffed—including by the Supreme Court, which rejected an emergency request to set aside 20,000 ballots in California that the administration alleged were cast by noncitizens.

Second was the free press. Trump went hard against journalists and news organizations who challenged him, calling them collectively “fake media,” and restricting White House access to news outlets he didn’t like, such as CNN, Politico, and MS Now. CNN has since been acquired as part of Paramount’s massive merger with Warner Bros. Discovery, led by David Ellison, son of longtime Trump donor Larry Ellison. Trump publicly welcomed the deal, which gives the Ellison family significant influence over American news media. At his basest, Trump has also resorted to ridiculing and name-calling journalists, particularly women, who dared to ask him tough questions.

But Trump’s broader campaign of intimidation and subjugation has not worked. Instead, journalists and commentators remained relentless in their reporting of Trump’s autocratic actions, as well as allegations of corruption involving Trump and his close associates. Amazingly, corruption emerged as a top concern for voters in the midterm elections, thanks in part to the work of those journalists who brought these allegations to light. I say amazingly because corruption is hard for journalists to investigate and harder for voters to track. It has rarely been such a prominent electoral issue in the United States—but it was last week.

Third was civil society. Over the last two years, countless acts of non-violent civic resistance sprouted, often spontaneously, in reaction to Trump’s agenda. Citizens organized protests outside Tesla stores in response to Elon Musk’s efforts to slash federal spending during his time at DOGE. Millions of Americans joined successive nationwide “No Kings” protests, including more than 3,000 rallies across 50 states in March, according to organizers. Most courageously, the citizens of Minneapolis mobilized to resist the occupation of their city by ICE agents. Tragically, ICE officers killed two of these protesters, Renée Good and Alex Pretti, in January 2026. For me, these wrongful deaths marked the darkest moment in America’s democratic backslide during the second Trump term. It seemed like authoritarianism was winning. I had seen this movie before in other countries I have lived in and now study as a professor. But then the tide turned, first in Minneapolis and then in other cities. Mass mobilization to defend democracy worked.

The most recent manifestation of civil society strength was the Get Out the Vote (GOTV) efforts, organized by groups such as America Votes, the NAACP, Indivisible, MomsRising, Black Voters Matter, and the Vamos a Votar coalition. Although the final figures are not yet available, Michael McDonald of the University of Florida’s respected Election Lab estimates that the election saw one of the highest turnouts for the midterms in more than a century, surpassed only by the 50.05% turnout recorded in the 2018 midterms. Incidentally, the 2018 elections were also widely regarded as a referendum on Trump’s first two years in office.

Fourth was election administration. Thankfully, the American system for administering elections is very decentralized, making it hard for Washington to manipulate election results. Last week, there were some problems, as there always would be in a country with over 200 million registered voters. But more impressively, this election was administered in a peaceful, normal manner and is now being counted mostly the same way. All the worst-case scenarios that analysts discussed with deep anxiety in the run-up to these elections—ICE intimidation at polling stations, violence to disrupt the voting and counting process, lawsuits to contest the winners in courts—have not happened. And the Democratic Party’s margins of victory are so overwhelming that Trump’s planned action of contesting the results in the Senate race in Alaska no longer matters. Nor will we have to anxiously wait to see if the House clerk will seat those who won. (That was a scenario that I heard discussed numerous times in the last several weeks). The scale of the Democratic win—winning 255 seats in the House of Representatives—eliminates any potential for such shenanigans.

The United States is not a dictatorship. The United States remains a democracy. The ability to hold free and fair elections, despite Trump and his team’s efforts to disrupt them, is overwhelming evidence of the resilience of American democratic institutions.

Of course, big challenges remain. Trump is now a lame duck president, but some fear he will keep fighting—and the promotion of the hardline Stephen Miller to White House Chief of Staff is a sign he may be choosing the latter option. The damage done to American democratic practices during the last two years, especially the erosion of voting rights, will take years to reverse. Moreover, the deeper flaws in liberal democratic rule in the United States that I wrote about in Autocrats vs Democrats remain.

American Purpose at Persuasion is a registered nonprofit that relies on reader support to pay our staff and keep our content free for everyone. If you value our work and want to fight for liberal democratic values wherever they are threatened, please consider becoming a paying subscriber today!

But the specter of democratic collapse and autocratic rule haunting America over the last two years has receded. Last week’s voting process and election results delivered the autocratic project a devastating blow. American democratic institutions bent but did not break. Americans across the political spectrum committed to democratic principles proved stronger than their autocratic challengers, a coalition led by the president of the United States and his billionaire backers. For those like me who want deeper democratic renewal in the United States, much more work remains in the coming weeks, months, and years.

But for now, let’s celebrate this victory for democracy!

Michael McFaul is a professor of political science and a senior fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute and Hoover Institution, all at Stanford University. He served as U.S. Ambassador to Russia from 2012 to 2014 and is the author of Autocrats vs. Democrats (2025). He writes at McFaul’s World on Substack.

A version of this piece was originally published on Michael McFaul’s Substack, McFaul’s World.

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A faculty group calling itself “Uncivil” recently criticized the people leading civility and pluralism programs that encourage college students to engage constructively across lines of difference on campus.

I’m one of those program leaders. As the founder of the nation’s largest interfaith organization, Interfaith America, I’ve visited over 200 college campuses promoting pluralism—the conviction that people with different identities and divergent ideologies can respect one another, build relationships, and cooperate for the common good. The students we serve span the ideological spectrum. They might disagree profoundly about the Middle East, abortion, and religion, but they can still agree to work alongside people whose convictions differ from their own.

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Yet in a recent report on the “Civility Industrial Complex,” and across their website, this “consortium of scholars and researchers” attempts to portray the growing pluralism movement [editor’s note: including Persuasion!] not as an effort to cultivate essential democratic skills, but as something sinister: a billionaire-backed campaign to silence dissent, gaining momentum on the back of the Trump administration’s crackdown on campus protest.

Campuses were once a proud laboratory for pluralism—and we need more of it, not less. Consider the experience the journalist Jonathan Rauch shares in his recent book Cross Purposes. Rauch entered college as a self-described “militant atheist.” He was assigned a devout Christian roommate (they had both checked the box for classical music on an intake form). Rauch had good reason to be wary of religion. He had grown up Jewish and gay in an era when vocal Christian leaders publicly condemned his identity.

But Mark, Rauch’s roommate, didn’t fit the stereotype. An active College Republican and a leader in a Christian campus ministry, Mark was a model of integrity, kindness, and intelligence. He was also one of the first people to sign gay rights petitions on campus because it was God’s place, not his, to judge.

Rauch has remained a gay Jewish atheist, but he learned a lesson about grace from Mark’s Christian faith. In my view, that is a perfect example of pluralism: Take pride in your own identity and learn some things about people who are different from you.

Unfortunately, that kind of transformational encounter is less likely to happen on a college campus today, which is why pluralism programs are needed now more than ever.

As sociologist Neil Gross writes in his new book What Happened to College, “politics—meaning where students stand ideologically—has become the central organizing principle of the undergraduate experience.” Drawing on interviews with more than 100 undergraduates and recent alumni, along with survey data from thousands of students, Gross shows how politics influences where students decide to attend college, who they become friends with and date once they arrive, what clubs they join, and what they study.

Shadi Hamid is a columnist at The Washington Post and a senior fellow at Georgetown University’s Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding, where he co-directs the Faith and Future of Democracy Initiative. He is the co-author, with Matthew Kaemingk, of Can Religion Save Democracy?: How More Faith—Not Less—Can Heal Our Public Life.

Matthew Kaemingk is Professor of Public Theology at Theological University Utrecht and a senior fellow at Georgetown University where he co-directs the Faith and Future of Democracy Initiative.

In this week’s conversation, Yascha Mounk, Matthew Kaemingk, and Shadi Hamid discuss why the decline of religion has turned American politics into a kind of holy war, whether the Democratic Party can make room for voters with traditional religious convictions, and how secular European societies should accommodate their conservative Muslim minorities.

Note: This episode was recorded on September 29, 2026.

This transcript has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.

Yascha Mounk: I’m really interested to talk about your new book. A lot of people are blaming religion for a lot of problems in the world. When you look around the world, you see religious wars. When you look at people who are intolerant within Western democracy, sometimes it is people who have deep religious faith who may be threatened by people of other religions, or think that they may lead people to the wrong beliefs. You’re saying that religion is actually very important for democracy, and that, in fact, the decline of religion is maybe one of the reasons for the problems we face today. Give me the argument.

Matthew Kaemingk: I’ll jump in on this one. I think the big-time argument here is, democratic theorists for many years imagined that the more rationality. Fundamentally, religion was a problem for democracy, that it was divisive, and that as we walked away from our religious institutions that divided us—that was the belief—we would become more cohesive as nations, we would come together. What we’re finding in the United States, which is our context, is that’s just not the case, that polarization has grown as religious identity has diminished.

There’s a variety of reasons for this, which we posit. But one of the primary things that we’re looking at here is that while in the past people found their identity and their purpose and meaning in religion, as they walk away from religion, they are increasingly finding their identity in politics, in sort of tribal political identities. These political identities provide them with a sense of meaning and purpose. It also tells them who the good guys are, who the bad guys are, and there’s a bit of a spiritual thrill in political warfare that you can find. With this post-religious loneliness and disaffection, it has drawn people into a form of politics that’s almost apocalyptic, in which people are constantly saying, “This right here is the most important election of our lifetime.” So what we’re touching on in the opening of this book is this paradox at the heart of secular democracy: that as politics becomes more secular, it is actually becoming more religious. It’s having a sense of holy war to it.

Mounk: What do you mean by that? There’s a different argument made by Eitan Hersh that politics has become a kind of sport, where we have this kind of attitude towards that, like we’re cheering on a football team? Is that sort of what you mean, where we have these kinds of quasi-religious attachments to particular political figures or movements?

Shadi Hamid: Well, I think that maybe the starting assumption here that we’re operating under is that all of us have a religious impulse. If you believe in God, then presumably God instilled within us a desire for transcendence. It’s only a question of how that yearning or longing is expressed. If it’s not going to be expressed through traditional religion, it will then be expressed in other ways, through politics. So when we say that politics is becoming more spiritual, it means that these kinds of deep passions and longings are being pushed into something we don’t think they should be pushed into. We don’t think politics should be the place where you find or search for your deepest longings and yearnings. That can be dangerous. Politics can’t really contain that level of intensity.

Mounk: Let me try and understand this claim. Eitan Hersh calls it political hobbyism. He says that there’s a kind of politics that’s like a form of hobbyism, where it takes the space in your life that a different kind of hobby, or an allegiance to a sports team, may have done. Rather than responding rationally to politics, or trying to accomplish rational means within politics, rather than saying, “I’m trying to defend my economic interests,” or “I have some kind of value and I’m trying to promote it,” you’re really saying this is the content of my life, it’s the focus of my activities.

Is the claim you’re making similar, but somewhat parallel, in the sense that when you go to church, or you go to mosque, or you go to synagogue, what you’re hoping for is some kind of transcendence? What you’re hoping for is a promise of deliverance, a promise of salvation. If you lose your religion, then you might invest all of those hopes into politics. You don’t just want politicians to solve the problems of Social Security, or to avoid stupid wars—you want them to make you feel part of a world-historical movement. You want to recognize in the next political candidate the Messiah. Is that the claim you’re making?

Hamid: Yeah, that is, I think, part of what we’re arguing. So the energies are being transferred, and people are finding their full identity in politics, and we don’t think politics is really the right thing for that. Politics should be a little bit more mundane. It shouldn’t be about the ultimate.

I think that you see this in other parts of the world too, and it’s not just an American thing—the rise of the far right in Europe. When people lose that kind of cultural background of Christianity, it’s sort of like a “be careful what you wish for” thing. You think that losing religion will make you more rational, but in fact it just leads to these energies being transferred elsewhere in dangerous ways. That could be expressed through white nativism, ethno-nationalism, ultra-wokeness on the left.

I think it makes sort of intuitive sense that if all you have is the here and now, and you don’t believe in an afterlife, you don’t have that longer time horizon, then you’ll invest more of your energy in a kind of immediate gratification in politics, because that’s all you have. Whereas a religious person can kind of be like, “Well, we tried our best in politics, things didn’t work out. At least I have my religion, my faith, my community.” They have hopes for salvation, and they have that deeper institutional architecture that they’re part of. So politics doesn’t have to give them everything.

Kaemingk: I can sympathize with the argument that politics is becoming a hobby, or politics is becoming a sport in which you cheer for things. I think for people who are perhaps lonely or bored or looking for community, politics can provide that sort of hobby outlet, or that sports outlet. But again, we’re arguing it’s something more than that. It’s not just a hobby—it has a certain spiritual vigor, and it really does feel much more like a holy war, in which the stakes are ramped up to the nth degree. Yes, politics does deal with serious things, but there seems to be a spiritual intensity that is only increasing as religious identity goes down. That’s interesting to us.

Mounk: What element of religiosity do you think it is that had these positive features? I can think of at least three that have implicitly or explicitly come up in the course of this conversation. The first is simply that the church, the mosque, other forms of religious institutions had an institutional quality—they’re institutions. That means they follow a particular kind of doctrine, that they have authority figures, that they involve sermons—they involve an authority figure speaking to the people listening and giving them kind of moral guidance. All of that constrains people’s views and ideas in various ways, which may be unhelpful when it comes to a gradual acceptance of homosexuality, which may have been an impediment for a long time, or something like that. But it can also be very helpful when it comes to impeding people from jumping onto all kinds of terrible beliefs, or all kinds of fads, all kinds of moral panics. So it may just be one of many forms in which traditional institutions that structure society and guide people have declined over the past decades.

A second kind of thing that you may be talking about is a kind of quietism—that if you are secular, if you don’t believe in God, you think that the here and now is the only thing there is. An injustice isn’t tolerable, because if you suffer your whole life under an injustice, there’s no recompense for it afterwards. Whereas if you believe in an afterlife, if you believe in heaven and hell, then you might think, “Well, that’s not great, and part of my conception of religion” is perhaps to fight against these kinds of injustices. “But you know what? If I live a good life, I’m going to go to heaven.” So somehow you can tolerate injustice more, which may have some bad consequences, may have some good consequences, because it doesn’t make politics like a holy war, as he said.

Then the third may just be a kind of psychological interpretation, where you’re saying people just have a need for some kind of feeling of transcendence, for some kind of feeling of being in the presence of a divine. If religion is not going to give you that, then you’re going to invest that into the exciting primary campaign of Barack Obama, or into the claim of Donald Trump to be a godlike figure who alone can redeem American politics. You get these kinds of moments of intense enthusiasm, some perhaps better justified than others, that then lead to deep disappointment and anger, and an unwillingness to see the flaws of your own candidate and so on. Is it all three of those? Is it one or the other? Did I miss any out?

Kaemingk: There’s so much more, but I think you touched on a number of really important ones. Let’s start with something the three of us would agree on, which is idolatry. Our faith traditions don’t like idols. For those people who are not religious at all, an idol is taking something of normal life and lifting it up to godlike status. As simple and ancient as a belief as that might feel to listeners, it has tremendous political consequences: for people who want to avoid idolatry, you want to be very careful about making the mundane aspects of life ultimate.

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That is really what we’re talking about when we’re talking about political conflict—you take an election and you say, “This right here is the most important election.” Or you take a politician and you say, “This politician right here can save our country.” Or, as Obama would say, “We are the people that we’ve been waiting for.” That is one of the fundamental gifts of traditional monotheism: that it radically secularizes politics, in the best way, that Judaism, Islam, and Christianity take politics down three notches—or at least it should. That’s a really important aspect.

Hamid:I think that the point you raised, Yascha, about the afterlife—we have a whole chapter in the book called “The Case for Hell,” where we try to bring hell back, hopefully in a helpful, constructive way. The point there is, we’re not arguing for quietism, although obviously some religious people can end up there. You should do the best you can to make the world more just, but you probably won’t be able to achieve full justice or full accountability. You’re still going to have dictators and bad leaders who do awful things, and at some point it’s going to be beyond your control. But there is some kind of solace in knowing that there is going to be a final accounting in the next life—that Donald Trump, or pick your least favorite leader in the world, or dictator. Not having to have a final victory in the here and now can be liberating. It allows us to chill, ideally, and be more relaxed about our politics.

It’s no accident that the most destructive movements of the twentieth century were largely secular. The communist dream was one about literally achieving heaven on earth, and you can sort of understand why that impulse would be there. If you have an atheistic ideology, it would make sense—if you can’t have heaven in the next life, why not try to achieve it in this life? I think the kind of argument we often hear, that religion is the primary cause of violence—it is really worth remembering that the twentieth century is a century of secular ideologies killing tens of millions of people: Mao’s Cultural Revolution, Nazism was anti-Christian at its core. The list goes on, and we don’t think those things are an accident.

Mounk: To be fair, there have also been very extreme religious movements, including in the recent past, from Al Qaeda to the Iranian Revolution and so on.

Hamid: Yes, of course. But I think that’s relatively well known—that there are religious extremists, that’s a risk that can happen. We’re not saying that religion is always good. But if we look at the kind of broader picture of the twentieth century, I think oftentimes secularism gets a pass, and I just think it’s worth noting that secular ideologies have been very destructive too.

Mounk: No, I think that’s fair, and I think the point that both fascism and communism were deeply secular ideologies, and that they did the most damage in the twentieth century, is very well taken. I wonder what your notion of human nature is, and to what extent that notion is itself a religiously inflected one, or whether my secular listeners are able to get on board with it.

Earlier there was a kind of hint of saying, “If we have a longing for transcendence, then that must be because God wanted it to be there.” Is it possible to put your point about human nature, and the role that religion plays in speaking to those aspects of human nature, in a way that my secular listeners will agree with, that I will potentially agree with? Or do you think that you have to in some way be a person of faith to get on board with the anthropology that is at the basis of your book?

Kaemingk: Not at all. I think that there are many arguments that we’re making here that are very accessible to those who would describe themselves as secular. Basically, that human beings are longing for meaning—they’re longing for some kind of story about what the world is, what’s going on in the world. They want to belong to a group. You yourself have written a lot about the tribal nature of human beings, that we want to belong, and that helps us articulate what the good life is, the bad life is, who the good guys and the bad guys are. All of that, I think, is very accessible, whether you describe yourself as religious or secular.

What we are trying to push on for those who would describe themselves as secular is that they too live by some sort of faith or code, whether they’ve examined it or not. One of our important encouragements for those who describe themselves as secular is that democracy is filled with diverse faith commitments, and they too are a part of that—they have not transcended faith. One of the more dangerous things that we argue about the secular citizen is that sometimes they can believe, “I have transcended all of these religious minorities. I have become enlightened, I have become woke,” and they can sort of look down on their fellow citizens and diagnose all of their problems because they have transcended them. So that would be our push, or our gentle encouragement.

Mounk: Yeah, there’s different versions of that point. My favorite one is from Tom Lehrer, in the song “National Brotherhood Week”—the introduction to it, where he says, “It’s very important to love your fellow human being. And there’s some people who do not love fellow human beings, and I hate people like that.” I think Jonathan Haidt has a version of that in The Righteous Mind, where he talks about all the people with “Coexist” stickers on their cars, when he teaches at UVA in the 2000s, and the deep hatred of anybody who doesn’t have a “Coexist” sticker, or something along those lines.

Let me set out my understanding of human nature as it relates to this, and it makes me sympathetic to your argument, for perhaps it doesn’t get me all of the way there. My sense is that human beings have evolved over time to cooperate with the in-group, but also to be capable of significant cruelty towards the out-group. When you look at the most heroic acts of humans, the most beautiful feats that humans have accomplished in our history, it is often in the service of some kind of in-group, or indeed in the glorification of the beliefs of the in-group, including secular, including religious music and works of art and so on. When you look at some of the most heinous things that human beings have done, it has nearly always been because they were being done to somebody considered an out-group.

I think when you look at the history of the world, and particularly European history, there is a strong argument that religion often does terrible damage. For thousands of years, a lot of the worst wars and civil wars and forms of persecution and exclusion were on the grounds of religion. It’s tempting, as some of the “four horsemen of atheism” did in the 2000s, to say that is because of religion—religion is the but-for cause of these conflicts. If religion hadn’t existed, we wouldn’t have had the terrible wars between Catholics and Protestants in 16th-, 17th-century Europe, for example.

Well, I think that if you have the view of human nature that I’ve come to embrace over the course of my life, it’s a little bit more complicated than that. Because I think religion is one of the kinds of things that can structure the conflict between in-group and out-group. In societies in which religion is the primary thing that structures the conflict between in-groups and out-groups, you often get terrible forms of religious conflict. We’re aware of that in the Christian world, we’re aware of that in the Muslim world, but it’s true of every religion. Buddhists often have a reputation as a very peaceful religion, but in some of the societies, like Myanmar, where there’s deep divisions between Buddhists and non-Buddhists, you have pogroms perpetrated by monks in Buddhist robes. So this is clearly something that every religion is in some way capable of.

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Now, I also think that in the absence of religion, that instinct of human nature wouldn’t have gone away. When I had Sam Harris on the podcast, we had a great discussion, and I pushed him on this, saying, look, for thousands of years of European history, religion inspired people to do terrible things, as well as some good things, of course. But in the absence of religion, it may have been a proto-form of nationalism, or it may have been “my village against yours,” or it may have been something else entirely. The question of whether religion inspired peace or conflict in that time is this incredibly complicated counterfactual question about what would have taken the place of religion—if it hadn’t been there, what would have filled that void? Would it have been comparatively better or comparatively worse? I think answering that question is basically impossible. Where do you agree with me here? Where do you disagree with me here, Shadi?

Hamid: I think that it’s likely that people would have still found ways to fight each other in the absence of religion. I think you’re exactly right that, because religion was the primary currency and the primary identity, then naturally religion is going to play a role in conflict in the pre-modern period. But before the Abrahamic faiths, people were in regular conflict. Then, as we mentioned, in the twentieth century, with the decline of religion, people found ways to kill each other more efficiently and in a more destructive way.

I think we have to be very careful about drawing the causal link between religion itself and conflict, and the very essence of conflict. But I think that when we’re talking about the modern period, we have to switch the analysis a little bit, because we’ve moved so much in the other direction of secularization. So now religion plays a little bit of a different role, in tempering the excesses of secularization.

Kaemingk: Okay, I just want to cut in here real quick on two things. One thing, Yascha, I’d love to add to your analysis there: not seeing religion always as the primary influencer, but sometimes as the follower—that authoritarian leaders throughout history have been very good at manipulating religion for their political purposes or their economic purposes. As much as I would love religion to be a very powerful force, it is often a follower. Even in those “wars of religion” in Europe, many scholars have looked back upon that history and seen that actually, in large part, what was going on there was a contest of different power brokers within Europe who were able to manipulate and use Catholic and Protestant tensions for their own political ends. I would commend the book The Myth of Religious Violence by William Cavanaugh, who specifically looks at those wars of religion, because those are so commonly used by European secularists as the case for why religion can’t be a part of public life, because Europe was torn apart by “religion.”

The second thing I would say here is: when it comes to in-group and out-group tensions, which you talk about, and I completely agree with you that’s core to human nature—then the next question we have to ask is, if we are tribal, and if that tribalism is never going to go away, the question is not how do you get rid of tribalism. The question is how do you develop a form of tribalism that is capable of some level of hospitality, some level of patience, some level of generosity with outsiders. What is that technology for dealing with the outsider?

Our argument is that Islam has spent centuries thinking about that question, and Christianity likewise, and Jews likewise have thought for centuries about how you deal with outsiders. The sort of history that the only thing Muslims and Jews and Christians have been thinking about is how to excommunicate people is just a terrible history. These are moral communities that have been thinking hard about how to stop a war, or how to reconcile someone that they have excommunicated. Even earlier you talked about a church with a sort of religious leader providing a moral vision—well, I would just say that a church is so much more than that. Within a church, you have a lot of democratic processes going on. It’s very rare to have an authoritarian church; it’s actually quite much more common for a church to have a group of elders that are meant to check the pastor, to hire and fire the pastor. You have a wide variety of ways inside of your church to have its own polity of democratic discourse and debate.

Similarly, within a mosque—these are what Alexis de Tocqueville would call the schools of democracy. If you look at the primary charities in the United States that are focused on refugees and immigrants, as much press as there is about Christians who don’t like refugees and immigrants, all of the primary charities are the Catholics, the Lutherans, the Evangelicals. They are the ones who are taking in the refugees, who are feeding and clothing them and finding them jobs. So there are these moral communities within our democratic life that are thinking about that question that you’re asking, which is how can a tribe become somewhat interested in outsiders? This is critical to democracy.

Mounk: I think that there’s a version of that argument that I, as a secular person, find attractive, and a version of that argument where you have to do some more convincing of me. The version of that argument that I find attractive is that we have this tendency towards dividing ourselves into in-groups and out-groups. One of the dangerous things—my colleague Lilliana Mason at Johns Hopkins has made a version of that point—is when all of our identities become overlapping.

Not only do I have Jewish heritage—I’m not religious—and Shadi is Muslim, but also I’m a Democrat and Shadi is a Republican, and whatever the seven next things are. And so there’s just nothing that the two of us have in common, and so we just see each other as enemies. Whereas in a more healthy polity, we might have some things that sever us and some things that bridge us at the same time. So I have Jewish heritage, Shadi is Muslim, but also we both happen to vote for the same political party, and also we both see ourselves as public intellectuals with a certain kind of inclination towards an open mind and talking earnestly with people who might have different points of view.

What allows us to retain civic friendship, even as we have some of these important salient differences, is where we have important similarities on other things. So what you might say is that religion plays an important role in that respect—that in a society in which nowadays, actually, the main division, according to who’s happy to be friends with whom and so on in society, is no longer race, though it’s obviously an important one; is no longer class, though it’s obviously an important one; is often partisan identity, where parents, at least in opinion polls, are more likely to say “I’m going to be upset if my daughter marries a Republican” if they’re a Democrat, or a Democrat if they’re a Republican, than they are to say “I’ll be upset if my daughter marries somebody of a different race.” Religion can be one of the things that is cross-cutting and cross-partisan.

Now, unfortunately, religion in America tends to be quite racially segregated, most of it. But when you look at the Catholic faith, when you look at some of these Protestant congregations, they’re very multiracial. Islam, by its nature, is quite multiracial, including in the United States. So it can be one of the important things that is a counterbastion to just “I’m a Democrat and I hate Republicans,” and that clash between these two factions that Madison tried to avoid in Federalist No. 10 is not totally defining our country.

So I, as a secular person, have a lot of sympathy for the ways in which religion can be a bridging identity between people who otherwise have many dissimilarities, in a way that helps against all of these identities collapsing in on each other and completely separating us. That comes easily to me. Is religion different in nature than other kinds of things that might accomplish that? Is it just helpful because it’s one more thing that does that? I think you want to make a claim that goes beyond that.

Kaemingk: Right. The Washington football team, or the New York Giants can bring the city together in some really beautiful way, but it’s not the same.

Mounk: Yeah, and by the way, I don’t want to dominate, but my mom hates sports, because she associates sports with a collective enthusiasm of a form that she—understandably, given her history—associates with fascism and communism and so on. To her, crowds of people cheering something on feel dangerous. Whereas to me, I see that precisely as a healthy outlet for something that might otherwise find an unhealthy outlet.

Kaemingk: Yeah, we’ve seen beautiful ways in which sports have brought things together, but I think, for Shadi and me, religion is categorically different from cheering for a sports team. It’s wonderful that religion can bring people together as well, but I think the categorical difference here is that I go to church not because I’m a fan of Jesus—I go to church because I fundamentally believe it’s true, about the whole world, and I orient my whole life towards it. I think sometimes democratic theorists—and you might hold to this, Yascha—believe that, okay, yes, we can have all of these tribal identities, but it’s important we not take any of them very seriously. Because if we have a belief that we take really seriously, then we will be dangerous, then we will be violent. So it’s okay for Shadi to be a Muslim as long as he doesn’t take it too seriously—because if he takes it too seriously, then he won’t be a good democratic citizen. I think that’s a contention that we would really want to push on.

Hamid: I would just add something, Yascha, about the bridging nature of religion. I think what’s unfortunate now is that religion is mapping onto partisan divides. If you meet a white Christian person who’s outward in their faith, you can probably guess that they’re going to be Republican. If you meet a white liberal, or a white secular person, they’re probably going to be a Democrat.

One thing that we kind of touch on in the book is religion—the left and progressives should not concede the religious ground to the right. It should be more of this bridging capital that all Americans can share. I think one of the unfortunate results of the Democratic Party becoming less hospitable to people of faith is that religion and partisanship are now closely associated, and that’s dangerous for our democracy.

Mounk: What do you think it would take for Democrats to become more hospitable to people of faith? I’d be interested, in that context, to hear about your views on somebody like James Talarico, who I don’t know that much about. I mean, I obviously follow the news and have a sense of him as the Democratic candidate for Senate in Texas. He seems to have an actual chance of flipping Texas—there’s supposedly a chance for Democrats to flip Texas every year, but this year is likely to be a particularly blue wave, and the Republican Senate candidate is particularly unappealing. So he may in fact win the Senate race.

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I’ve heard very different things about him. He is, I said, a pastor, a very religious person, but who grew up in a kind of very progressive form of Christianity. In his past, in 2020, when everybody said things that we now want to forget, he has invoked religion to justify political positions in a way that, my understanding is, many Christians actually found to be off-putting. One argument could be that, a little bit like Graham Platner was kind of the upper-middle-class voter’s idea of a working-class person, I’ve heard that James Talarico is sort of the secular man’s idea of a progressive Christian, but that actually that would make him even more off-putting to many Christians. I’m aware that I don’t understand that world nearly enough to be able to assess whether or not that claim is true. But what do you think? Do you think that somebody who’s arguing for these pretty progressive positions on questions of abortion and trans questions and so on, cloaking it in that Christian language, is a way of reaching Christians, or in fact, is that just going to be off-putting? And if a Democratic Party wants to be more hospitable to people of faith, then it actually needs to at least be willing to tolerate, for example, within its tradition, within its tent, people who are strongly pro-life.

Hamid: I think James Talarico—some of his conclusions might be off-putting to more conservative Christians, but I think the major point here is that he’s comfortable speaking about his faith, and he seems genuinely sincere. I think that’s something that’s become increasingly rare in the Democratic Party. Just bringing that back as a kind of starting point: that it’s okay to bring your faith into public discussions.

For a party that claims to be the moral party, that has moral conviction and moral leadership, I think it’s difficult to express morality if you don’t also have a kind of religious language, or at least appeals to religious language. So I think it’s a good thing that Talarico is doing what he’s doing, and I would just hope that it spreads a little bit in the Democratic Party, if for no other reason than that we just need to have faith being something people are comfortable with on both sides of the aisle. Again, I think the point here is we’re not telling people that they have to believe. I think what we’re saying is that it’s important for people to accept that religion can play a positive role in our discourse.

So those are two separate propositions. You can be an atheist but still agree with us that religion can be morally inspiring. It can make people more civically engaged. Religion is associated with higher levels of happiness, of giving, of charity, of not cutting in line. There’s been a lot of studies on this that show the kind of positive elements of religion. So I think there’s a way to have a kind of practical, consequentialist approach to this that is separate from the question of belief.

Mounk: Do you think that, to put it slightly deprecatingly, and that may not be fair, sort of dressing up the Democratic Party platform in the language of a devout man is going to be enough to broaden the Democratic Party’s appeal among people who are religious? Or do you think it will take, if not a change in the stated positions of the Democratic Party platform, at least a kind of willingness to embrace, within the broader tent of the party, people who have clearly diverging opinions on questions around abortion, around the participation of trans people who’ve gone through male puberty in female sports—whatever other issues you might want to talk about—that have a high religious salience to some religious people, at least.

Kaemingk: I would say that religion is prickly and strange as a social and political force, and the modern political party does not appreciate things that are prickly and strange. They want candidates that will fit in with the party platform, and that’s an issue for Republicans and Democrats to deal with. Historically, I would say that the Republican Party has been more comfortable with the prickly and strange nature of religion and religious actors within their big tent than the Democratic Party. The one sort of exception to this would be the Black church in the Democratic Party—you have Barack Obama singing “Amazing Grace” in public in a way that other white Democrats would not quite be able to pull off.

With James Talarico, my concern is that he is too smoothly a Democrat. He doesn’t have—he’s not strangely Christian. His Christianity just falls perfectly in line with the Democratic Party. Similarly with Mamdani and other Muslim candidates within the Democratic Party, they fall very smoothly within the Democratic Party. Shadi and I might have a little disagreement on this, but I’m just concerned with the sorts of Muslims who are promoted within the Democratic Party—they tend to have fallen in line with the Democratic Party platform. I would love to see the Democratic Party elect a Muslim who openly has Muslim views on gender and sexuality.

Mounk: What do you mean by Muslim views on gender and sexuality?

Kaemingk: Well, I’ll have Shadi define what those things are, but I would just say, confidently, they don’t fit in perfectly with the Democratic Party’s party line. For the Democratic Party to say, “Look, we respect real disagreement within our party, and Islam—we don’t just want to tokenize Muslims who wear a headscarf, but who actually have meaningful religious convictions—and we have space in our party for differences on questions of gender and sexuality.” They don’t, right now.

Mounk: I love some drama between co-authors on the podcast. Shadi, do you wish to denounce your co-author?

Hamid: No, I think Matt’s bringing up an important point: that there’s been a kind of ethnicization of Muslims. To be an American Muslim in public life now, it’s kind of an identity marker instead of a container of faith or religious conviction. I like Zohran, and I like Abdul, but it is interesting that they don’t really talk about the content of their faith as much. They emphasize the fact that to be Muslim means to be marginalized, or to be victims of Islamophobia, or that it’s about being a minority in America similar to other minorities.

But there are orthodox views in Islam that are limiting sexual freedom in some way, that are not accepting of the full panoply of transgender activism, the arguments that are made on behalf of that—especially, as you mentioned, Yascha, in sports, that kind of flashpoint. So I guess that’s concerning to me: that Muslims are sort of accepted in the Democratic Party only insofar as they accept the Democratic Party’s positions on gender and sexuality. I would like to see people like Abdul and Zohran pushing a little bit and adopting more, maybe let’s say, socially conservative views on certain moral questions, and that might actually help them in expanding the electorate, appealing to a larger number of voters, especially in a place like Michigan, where someone like Abdul El-Sayed has to appeal to disaffected Republicans and independents.

Mounk: To what extent do you think they hold those views? I don’t want to claim that either of them is misrepresenting their true beliefs, but of course every politician does in certain ways. I would be surprised if Zohran held those more conservative views, in part because of his upbringing and the kind of bubble of Columbia University and the heart of New York City, and his mother being a Hollywood movie director and so on. I’d be less surprised if Abdul held some of those views but decided, out of political calculation, that he can’t loudly speak about them. But I don’t know, Shadi, whether you have a view.

Hamid: Yeah, I think you’re right about Zohran. But I think Abdul is a little bit of a different case—someone who did grow up in a more religious family, and in the context of Michigan, where religious conservatism in the Muslim community is sort of the norm. Abdul has given a couple of interviews where he’s alluded a little bit to maybe having more socially conservative views on things like porn and gambling and so forth. But it seems to me that he’s pulling back, that he’s being very careful, and he’s so concerned about alienating members of the progressive base that he’s just not willing to go there. My sense, and also kind of knowing people who know him, is that he does have that in him. But look, you never know exactly what’s in people’s hearts. I do think that it would be nice for the Democratic Party to be a bigger tent when it comes to these moral questions.

There’s really no reason the Democratic Party has to be the secular party, and it wasn’t always that way. Forty, fifty years ago it was quite different, where there were still white evangelicals in the party, and famously Jimmy Carter was one of them. So this is really a kind of recent phenomenon of the last several decades, and it’s just a major missed opportunity for Democrats. They’re narrowing their tent when they need to enlarge it.

In the rest of this conversation, Yascha, Matthew, and Shadi discuss the different attitudes to religion in Europe compared with the United States, how to balance conflicting values, and whether religious people really are happier. This part of the conversation is reserved for paying subscribers…