The Reason Interview With Nick Gillespie

Reason's Nick Gillespie talked with one of the great pioneers of podcasting, Dan Carlin, the host of Dan Carlin's Hardcore History. Carlin has been putting his thoughts out there for all to hear since the aughts. His deeply researched and urgently delivered takes on everything from Julius Caesar's wars on the Celtic tribes of Gaul to 20th century Imperial Japan's horrific conquest of Asia are downloaded by the millions.

They discussed Carlin's upcoming live tour, how he would update his 2019 book The End Is Always Near: Apocalyptic Moments From the Bronze Age Collapse to Nuclear Near Misses in light of COVID-19, and whether he believes we can really learn meaningful lessons from history.

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This interview has been condensed and edited for style and clarity.

Nick Gillespie: You're going on tour. What can fans of Hardcore History expect at a live show?

Dan Carlin: I always call them listeners. Fans seems a little self-aggrandizing to me. It's sort of a mini tour, testing the waters here. We'll see what people think of the final product. Rather than give some sort of a presentation that's the same everywhere, I opted to do a sort of a question-and-answer with, for lack of a better word, a moderator, on stage and then open it up to the audience for questions. I figure that does two things: One, it means that no show is like any other show, and it also assures that we're going to talk about what people want to hear as opposed to me assuming that they're going to like something I do on stage and maybe have some people walk away displeased with what they got. So I hope it works out like I'm assuming. We'll see.

Gillespie: You're going to Los Angeles, Salt Lake, Portland, and New York. So you're really hitting very different kinds of demographics, right?

Carlin: Yeah. So they asked me when we were talking about getting the tour started, they wanted to sample some places and just see what the reaction was, and they said, "Well, where do you go already?" I said, "Well, those four places are places I find myself for various reasons anyway." So they said, "Great. Those are four very different places, and we'll get a good idea of what the demand is in those four areas."

Gillespie: Hardcore History gets downloaded by the millions. Do you have a sense of where your listeners are? As we used to talk about in the rock mag business a thousand years ago when I was involved in that, the psychographic. Who are your listeners and what do you think they're getting out of the show?

Carlin: Well, forever we've been told in all the reputable advisement magazines or whatever's out there that we need to do more demographic research. But coming from my perspective that I've always had, I don't like when people do that to me, and so I don't like the idea of doing it to them. So I don't ask them questions about themselves or delve into who they are or what they make or where they live and then how old they are and what their religious beliefs are. But the podcasting tools that are out there now give us more information than they used to, and so you can say certain things, like you can say what states they're listening to you in the United States, what countries they're listening to you in and those kinds of things.

Basically, when we started, I feel like it was much more U.S.-centric, and now the international audience is growing more. Obviously, the big population centers, you have more people listening than in Wyoming, but that's not because people don't like you in Wyoming. It's just there's less people in Wyoming. So to give you a real answer though, no, I don't know a ton about the listeners and I don't want to. I feel like their privacy is valuable to them like mine is to me, and I feel like what the podcasting services give us is enough.

Gillespie: It's interesting, Brian Lamb, the true radical who invented C-SPAN and turned a surveillance camera on Congress and whatnot, he stepped down a few years ago, but he said that they never did ratings because they don't want to start playing to the audience, and that even if you aren't under pressure to do that, once you know who your audience is, you'll start playing to it. You've been doing this for well over a decade, almost 20 years now, right? Do you feel that way?

Carlin: Well, part of it is an advertising thing, right? So advertisers want to know that information. I mean, we do a tiny bit sometimes, but most of our shows don't have any ads at all because, to be honest, I don't like being a pitch man very much. I had to do it when I was in radio. You don't have a choice. But I always felt a little dirty unless I really liked the product. And then when you start doing the podcast, I had the advantage of being able to just say, well, if I don't either use it for real or if I don't like it, [then I don't have to promote it]. We did Audible, the audiobooks for a while, and I'm a big proponent of reading, so it was easy. We always read the reviews to make sure that even if you like the concept behind the business, that they're treating the customers well.

So I'm happy to do those kinds of things. But we don't do much advertising, so it's a luxury for me to be able to say, "We don't care about the demographics because we don't care and the advertisers that might care we really don't deal with very much." So that was easy. I see your point about the playing to the audience, but I have a different attitude about that. I feel like we self-select our audience. Somebody told me a long time ago that if you just do the shows that interests you, the people that don't like the things that interest you will eventually go away and the people that stay with you you can reliably assume like the same things you do, and so when you pick something you want to talk about, the audience has sort of already been self-selected. I don't know if that's true, but that's what I go with.

Gillespie: Not since you've been doing Hardcore History, but back in your radio days, what was the worst product that you pitched for that you were just throwing up a little bit in your mouth as you were announcing it?

Carlin: Oh God, that's a long time ago now. Off the top of my head, I can't remember, but it was a lot of restaurants. I wasn't a national show, so we didn't get those kind of national commercials. But it's funny though, I mean, I don't feel like they were too terrible because everybody on the station had to read the same ads. They weren't specifically buying from me, so it didn't sound like I'm endorsing it, but I always did prefer if they would just run an advertisement on the show rather than me do what's called a live read where you had to sound like you were endorsing something.

Gillespie: But that's what everybody wants, right?

Carlin: That is what everybody wants. Exactly.

Gillespie: In 2019, and you came on this podcast to talk about it, you published The End is Always Near: Apocalyptic Moments, from the Bronze Age Collapse to Nuclear Near Misses. This book came out just a few months before COVID became the latest apocalyptic moment. Did you feel like you were conjuring up material for the paperback or something?

Carlin: With the podcast, obviously, we have no release dates and the reason they take so long is because I really am always trying to do a better job. But when you deal with a book contract, they want their book when they think they're going to get their book. So it turned out I felt a little rushed at the end with that book, but they pushed and pushed and pushed. And then when COVID hit three or four months after the book came out, I remember thinking to myself, "Well, shoot, had it been up to me, I would've missed that because the book would've come out two months after COVID hit and that whole chapter would've been ruined."

There were no warm fuzzy feelings about having thought about that before it happened because millions of people were being affected. To be honest, I know the standard technique is to claim credit for all these things, but I mean, really I was one of the last people on the bandwagon of saying we're vulnerable to another pandemic. I mean, there were a lot of people running around for years saying, "Warning, warning, warning." We had near misses. We had avian flu and we had things a lot worse. So it didn't take a genius to see that coming. I do think the timing was just a little weird.

Gillespie: I remember when COVID hit and the lockdown started, it seemed at first that the market for podcasts seemed to collapse a little bit because people weren't commuting to work anymore. I mean, were people more interested in what you were talking about during the pandemic or less, or did you notice any difference?

Carlin: I think it's binge watching on TV. Again, this sounds awful. We did well during the COVID thing, and we've seen a drop-off since, but I think it's because people are back at work working and things like that. I think we had a time period where people were stuck in the house with nothing to do. When we're doing audio podcasts, one of the real benefits of audio over video is that you don't have to watch something and you could be mowing the lawn or ironing a shirt or making dinner and still have the ability to multitask. So I feel like during COVID, people took the opportunity to listen to what we were doing while they were doing something else, or just we were a good time waster, right? My shows are long.

Gillespie: Is history the story of massive forces that sweep over whole periods of time, or is it about heroic individuals who actually changed the course of history?

Carlin: Well, I was reading something that historian Adrian Goldsworthy wrote recently where he was talking a little about that and he was saying that while it's kind of discredited to think about individuals having such an outsized role on history, he said, "All we have to do though is look at current events and see how much the personalities of single individuals seem to be important to how current events play out to understand that this would've been the dynamic in the past also." 

Now, I think we all understand that there's an interplay between these people and the opportunities that they have because of what's going on in the world, the times we live in and all these other things for them to do what they do. So if you get an outsized personality on the scene and they're driving a lot of events, I think it's fair to ask yourself, "Would this person have been able to do this with the conditions we were living under 30 or 40 years ago?"

So I think there's a little bit of an axis of two lines crossing. One line is the personality of the people involved, and the other axis are the events, the trends, the forces of the times we live in. When those things intersect, I think that's when you hit that sweet spot where all of a sudden you're looking at some personality and you go, "If not for that person…." I always try to imagine as a way of trying to get some perspective plugging somebody else in that role, right? If Richard Nixon wins the '60 election and he's the one handling the Cuban missile crisis, does it go the same or does it go differently? Or better yet, what if the Cuban missile crisis happens a few years earlier and you have Gen. [Dwight D.] Eisenhower in the White House?

Those are fun ways in my mind of trying to game this out to get a little bit of perspective about what's more important here, the trends in the forces or the individual involved, because if you say, "It would've turned out the same with Nixon or Eisenhower as it did with [John F.] Kennedy," then you start to think maybe it's more of a trends and forces ascendant moment. But if you say, "Hmm, I don't think it does turn out the same with those other people," well, then you can I think actively say that having Kennedy in the White House at that place in time and under those circumstances actually made history go in a different direction than it otherwise would.

Gillespie: Do you have historical figures that you consider heroes? And if so, what are your criteria? 

Carlin: Oh man, I should have a ready answer to a question like that, shouldn't I? It's funny, but off the top of my head, no one comes immediately to mind, but that's not because there aren't people that I greatly admire. I think personality-wise, I am not much of a hero worshiper. First of all, sometimes I look at people and I just wonder if I could have done what they did. So for example, you look at people like in the civil rights struggle in the 1950s and 1960s, when you look at the death threats that those people got, I always ask myself, "Would I have forged ahead knowing that people are talking about hurting my kids or firebombing my house or those kinds of things?" To me, rather than the hero side of it, which is not really part of my personality, sometimes I measure myself against these other people and just say, "Man, I might be craven or cowardly or selfish." I'm not sure I do. So I mean, there's admiration there, but not hero worship, if that makes sense.

Gillespie: Not too long ago, a guy named Daniel Akst wrote a book called War by Other Means, which was a study of conscientious objectors during World War II. I don't necessarily agree with them at all on the question of conscientious objection to World War II, but looking at those guys and what they put up with, I mean, it was like being under a mile underwater with the pressure on you to just cave. It's pretty remarkable. I think we tend to think that we're going to be the person who stands out in a crowd, but we're probably kidding ourselves.

Carlin: Well, if nothing else, it's the old line of these are the times that try men's souls. I mean, you look at these kinds of things and you just go, "Hmm, would I have been the one to shelter a Jewish person in occupied Europe?" Of course, those are the tests. You don't know until you get there. But I do feel like when I read these stories, rather than hero worship, I sometimes feel a little shamed by the whole thing and worried about how I might react in the same situation. So there's admiration, for sure.

Gillespie: You define yourself as a pessimist—and maybe that's not right, maybe you're a realist—but one of the things that your podcast shows again and again is that all societies collapse. All civilizations end at some point. I also hear you talking about how things get better or different and things like that. When you think about something like COVID happening, do you feel like we've gotten to a better place, or are you a long-term pessimist but a short-term optimist? Are you a mid-range person? How do you define yourself and how do you apply the lessons of history that you analyze and dig out in your podcasts into your life span?

Carlin: To me, that's kind of a macro-micro question because I think on a micro level, like an individual human level, there are always bad places to find yourself: bottom of the economic scale, trapped in a murderous dictatorship like North Korea. I mean, I feel like on an individual level, there's awful places to be in any period in history, and they're probably equally terrible to some degree or another. 

On a macro level, there are obviously times and places that are better than others, right? So I think that sometimes you're lucky to find yourself in a nation that's technologically sophisticated and wealthy on the macro level of things, [where there's] health care if you get hurt [and] not too many invasions during your lifetime. Things like that.

I do think not so much that it's cyclical, because I think that brings up certain theories of history that are arguable, but I do think you feel like nothing lasts forever, whether it's good times or bad times. So I think sometimes this idea that we're living in a particularly good time or a particularly bad time isn't so much pessimistic. Listen, I'm 58 years old right now, and life is good, but you can't help but notice that when you're 58, life isn't going to be good forever, right? So I don't think that's being pessimistic to just know that all good things must pass and hopefully all bad things must pass because change is inevitable. If things are good, what does change mean, right?

So I do think that maybe from the perspective where we're looking at this—20th century or 21st century American citizen, for example, in the grand historical scheme—you're living in one of the best times and best places to ever be around. So the likelihood of that getting better vs. the likelihood of that getting worse would seem to indicate that change is likely to bring a lessening of the good things just because we've had it so good so long, but it doesn't mean it has to happen. It's an odds game, right? Maybe the odds are just 70/30 against wonderful things continuing, but people have made money in Vegas with odds worse than that.

Gillespie: Yeah. I think it was in an episode or an interview that you did with Rick Rubin, the record producer, where you mentioned that your father was a Korean War vet.

Carlin: As he would say, he was in the Navy, so it doesn't quite count the same as being at the Chosin Reservoir or something like that. He was eating ice cream on an aircraft carrier.

Gillespie: Also, he grew up pretty poor, right?

Carlin: Yeah, really poor.

Gillespie: So I'm a couple years older than you and my father served in World War II, was an infantry man, and I feel in a profound way that I lucked out tremendously by escaping a lot of history. Do you think we'll go back to a world that is like the ones that our parents might have grown up in where there is grinding poverty and where war is taken for granted? I think back a lot to my parents who were both born in the '20s. They were the children of immigrants and they grew up during the Depression, then there was World War II. And then when World War II ended, they were like, "OK. Well, it's good. People aren't being killed as much anymore, but we're still going to be poor." And then something happened and they stopped being poor. Do you think we might see a reversal like that in our lifetimes?

Carlin: Well, I think that's macro-micro also. In the macro sense, look, from an international relations standpoint, you don't have to be a genius to see the situation. Let me back up and say that I always think about things in much longer time frames than most people just because that's how I try to make sense of history. It's not better, it's not worse, it's just how I do it. So I always imagine 50 or 60 or 70 years not being all that long in the grand scheme of things. If you look at it through that sort of a time frame, we've been living in the post–Second World War, dual superpower, the United States being the only country with a really functioning economy and not hurt in the Second World War among all the great powers. That's a temporary situation.

Now, if it's a 70-year temporary situation, that's a lifetime. So it seems like a long time to my mom, [who was] born in 1938. All she can really remember is that era. But we're exiting that era now and returning to what they would've probably called in the 1920s a return to normalcy in an international relations sense, not hegemony, but a multipower world. I mean, look at the number of powers you had before both World Wars. It's between four and six major powers. That's much more normal than having two hegemonic powers facing off against each other with their alliance systems.

So I think from a military macro standpoint, international relations, I think you're going to see things we haven't seen in a while and I think we already see things we haven't seen in a while, including a real change in warfare, which is going to upset things, what they call an RMA, a revolution in military affairs. People don't always notice these things so much when they're happening, but I mean, for example, look at how drones in the war between Russia and Ukraine have sunk ships. That's going to be such a huge thing.

There was a piece in The Wall Street Journal today about the mixing of drones, mass swarms of drones with future artificial intelligence capabilities, getting them to work together and what that would mean for things like big, expensive surface ships. Well, those are the kind of things that change the world. I mean, they don't seem like that big of a thing, but if all of a sudden a $13 billion aircraft carrier is a vulnerable piece of floating hardware and you can't use those anymore, and if something like the United States' power projection is based on a weapon system like that, well, then you can see how all of a sudden that makes things topsy-turvy.

The funny thing that most people don't understand necessarily is how this sort of military question actually resonates and pings off a lot of nonmilitary things that affect our lives. Now, in the micro sense of the word, when you get away from these big power changes that we were talking about, I don't know. "I don't know" is the answer. Rephrase the question for me. I'll see if I can frame it in more micro terms.

Gillespie: I guess I might want to stick with the idea of what happens when we go back to a world that has half a dozen or a dozen powers because that does seem to be where we're headed. The fact is Japan is still a major power. Russia is still a major power even if the Soviet Union doesn't exist, but then you throw in China and whatnot. But is world history ultimately military history or is it the history of trade? Is it the history of migration? Where do you see those lines intersecting?

Carlin: Well, I often talk about this when I'm talking about why people are interested in history, whether they know it or not, and that's because history is everything that's ever happened. Sometimes I'll do speaking engagements with schools, and you'll have middle school students or high school students that really don't want to hear some guy talk to them about history. What I try to teach them is that because of the way history has to be segmented into so-called important events or important dates, that's a construct of historians. What choice do they have? I mean, imagine writing the history book of everything. You can't do that, right? So the main thing that historians try to do is find out what's important. I mean, even these chapters where we decide one era has ended and another began is part of the human construct of just trying to organize everything that's ever happened.

So what I tell students is that the truth is that you don't necessarily have to understand when Columbus stumbled upon the Americas. That's an important event according to somebody else. If you're interested in motorcycles or fashion or dentistry or dogs or whatever you are interested in, there is a history of that and that's part of the past too. The actual idea is that there is no rule about what's important in the past. What's important in the past is what is important to you, and then it has a past. The most important thing in my mind, and this is what I tell the students, is context and understanding how things go from where they were to how they are.

So what I always tell these kids, I say, "If you're interested in motorcycles, find the first motorcycle ever built and find the one that just came out yesterday and then trace the development from one to the other, right? So you start to see the process of change in historical development and how things move over a course of decades or whatever, and that teaches you the idea of the history of moving events." And then ask yourself when you're looking at these different motorcycles over the different eras, why they are the way they are, right? I mean, is this the engine that they're using at the time and why did a new engine come? It teaches you the context that creates the circumstances about how these new motorcycles get developed, why they have these new features, these new parts.

So between the two of them, the context and the idea of historical change, you are getting the most important part. People are going to forget 1492, most of them, the minute the test is over and they leave the classroom, but they're not going to forget the important parts of context and the historical change process if they learn it with something that they're already interested in and that has a past that's as much a part of the grand history of things as anything else is.

Gillespie: It's interesting when you're talking, I find that completely convincing. I notice that you don't say the word "progress." Do you believe in progress or do you think that that's kind of a badly value-laden term that obfuscates as much as it clarifies?

Carlin: Maybe the latter, only because progress is an "in the eye of the beholder" thing, first of all. Second of all, I think progress assumes that it's sort of a one-way street. There's a book called Global Catastrophic Risks that I fell in love with. It's edited by a guy named Nick Bostrom who works at the the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford or whatever. Every chapter of the book is written by a different expert, and every chapter is sort of a way the world could end. It's a fascinating book, but in the introduction of the book, Bostrom writes about what he calls existential threat. I was always taught that existential threat means elimination, right? So an existential threat to humanity means humanity just goes away, disappears, the last person dies and it's over, but he has a different definition of it.

One of the definitions of existential threat [is] that everybody goes away, one, but it also includes if humanity gets knocked backward in terms of capabilities and never again reaches its former abilities. So if you imagine that we have a nuclear war and that we lose the ability to put a man on the moon and we never get that back, to him, that's an existential outcome. In your question about progress, that implies that we're never going to move backward, and I think that history has shown over and over that, well, it doesn't mean you that you will, but it means you can, right? I mean, look at the post-Roman empire when you've got crumbling aqueducts and you can't replace them. Well, that's a little like the thing we said about not being able to go back to the moon when you've already been or losing an internet and never getting one back.

To me, progress implies an ever-moving single direction toward bigger, better things and improved capabilities, and I think that that's not a given. I think it's like striking a match; it's possible that, for example, the Roman Empire or China at its height in earlier eras was striking a match and having it snuffed out before we finally got the roaring fire going for good. Maybe having a global world environment prevents a collapse of one segment of the globe. For example, had the Roman Empire been in contact with the rest of the world during that time period, maybe that would've prevented things from going backward because there's a China to relight the pilot lights, so to speak. I don't know. But to me, there's a teleological aspect to progress that I'm not sure I buy into. But look, I'm always hoping for better things, but I'm not sure it's a given that things are always going to get better. I think just maybe that's the pessimism you talked about earlier.

Gillespie: I don't believe in golden ages really, but to the extent that they are defensible, we're in a golden age of people being able to dig into the past of their own making, of creating their own usable past. The past is kind of an infinite attic or a cellar where you can rummage through and construct a lot of different stories that help you make sense of where you are and who you want to be and where you want to go both on an individual level as well as on a societal level. Do you feel like people are cognizant of that? 

Carlin: I don't know how to answer that because I don't know what people are doing. This is always a problem, it's not like this is new, but it's specifically something that I notice now and maybe it just grates on me more. I feel like we've never been more likely to judge people from the past by current modern moral sensibilities, which is always something that I feel like obscures the past rather than illuminates it. I had a professor once who was so good at trying to get us to put ourselves in the shoes of people from the past and ask the question, "When they do things that we think are despicable now, was that their goal? Were they trying to do despicable things?"

I think, going from memory here, we were talking about people who tried to convert natives to Christianity, and the current line of thinking at the time was that this was an awful thing to do. We were destroying native cultures and their belief systems and forcibly taking them away from their families and teaching them the white man's religion. We can determine now that that was a huge loss in terms of what those people could have preserved, their native culture and belief system, and passed on to their children and all these kinds of things, but was that the goal at the time, to do something negative? He said, "No." He said, "You have to look at the way those people who did the converting saw the world."

You could see it with the Spanish when they came to the New World. If you literally believe that your view of religion is correct and that there is a fiery place called Hell that you will go to if you don't believe what they tell you to believe or what they believe, and then they convert somebody to believing that, then they think they've done a good thing. Now, that doesn't mean they have done a good thing. But when we look back on the past and judge people, I hate the judging thing, but when we judge people, we do so because every generation before us has done the exact same thing. We judge people based on our own modern sensibilities whenever modern is, and I think then we infuse people in the past sometimes with sort of evil overtones that if you could bring them back in a time machine would confuse and befuddle them, not because they didn't do something that we could objectively look at today and say is bad, but because that wasn't their goal at all. They thought they were doing good.

The reason I bring this up is because it's very, very, very possible, in fact, almost inevitable, that the same thing is going to happen with us. It's down the road in the future, they're going to look back on us and absolutely demonize us for any number of things that we couldn't possibly know. I mean, airplane travel, eating meat, experimentation on animals.

Gillespie: There was a book that was very popular about antebellum America by a popular writer named Lydia Maria Child. She was writing before Nathaniel Hawthorne, really, but she writes a story that's set in colonial Salem, Massachusetts. She talks about how we now look at the Puritans as ridiculously closed-minded, horrible people, and we should understand them in context. I'm going to ruin it for people. It was published 170 years ago, so I feel like the statute of limitations has expired on spoiler alerts, but it ends with a Native American who the main character has a child with disappearing and just being literally and figuratively written out of the story.

You read the book now, and she's trying to make a point that you just made. From a modern sensibility today, you're like, "Oh my God, this is an incredibly racist book that depends on the erasure of Native Americans." So, we're always like that. I think it was in an addendum episode with The Rest Is History guys, where you were talking about Thomas Jefferson, who obviously is a morally complex and in many ways just a compromised character, but that he also gave rise to a matrix of rights that were used by people like Frederick Douglass and others to argue for their rights. So history is much more complex than we ever really want it to be at any given moment.

Carlin: I come from a family tradition. I had a grandfather that was very big on "Don't judge other people until you've walked a mile in their shoes." This was really hammered into us, and it turned out to be a really good tool when I got into history as a history major. The funny thing is you can go back to the ancient Romans. I mean, you read their "histories." Go read ancient Greeks like Plutarch. Plutarch's entire work on Lives, which is his famous book, is comparing historical figures to each other, this person against that person, this person. What he's trying to do is make moral judgments even then. This is ingrained in us somehow to want to say, "This person's bad. This person's good," but the criteria we're using is the criteria of whatever time we're doing the assessment in, and that is an inherently flawed problem because that's a moving target, right?

The moral sensibilities are always changing, which is why you can look at a lot of historical figures who's…. I mean, look at Alexander the Great. Depending on the era you're assessing that guy in, he comes off as awesome or terrible and then sometimes back again. To me, that's not a bug though, that's a feature because I think that makes history much more interesting than if we have evil figures and good figures, and those figures are permanently in stone in their positions. History is a moving target. 

This I tell people all the time too, they don't realize that history is not like math, right? It's not two plus two equals four. There's a Fox News version of history and an MSNBC version of history. Depending on which source you grab from which era, you're going to get a completely different spin on the events, how they occurred, who's responsible, and what they mean.

Gillespie: Somebody like Winston Churchill. Depending on if you're raised in America or England, you love Winston Churchill. It's not complicated. He was the man who saved the West. But if you're from the Indian subcontinent, you have a radically different view of Winston Churchill. We shouldn't pretend as if one side or the other doesn't exist. We should really sit with the complications and try and work things out rather than dismiss that, which makes us have to work to understand things better.

Carlin: Sometimes I ask myself, "What's realistic to imagine someone doing?" Now, we should point out that someone like Churchill lived long enough and was involved in politics. He didn't die until 1965. He was born in the 19th century and was active politically almost that whole time. So we're talking about a figure that spanned the British Empire at its height to the post-war British coming down from imperial heights. So this is a person that in the whole second half of his career was somewhat of a political dinosaur. So contextually speaking, he had detractors during his lifetime and political career. Before the Second World War broke out, there were a lot of people that thought he was a warmonger.

So that's a wonderful example of what we were talking about earlier, when the axis gets crossed between the individual meeting the proper time and place. And Churchill knew it. I think he said something like if he could go back in time, he would always choose May 1940. That was his moment, and he knew it. 

But to me, someone like Churchill, you have to ask yourself how much that guy could have been different given where he came from, his influences growing up. Again, to me, that's a little like what we talked about earlier, where you're judging the Spanish priest for what he's doing, trying to save people from Hell. How much did that guy have any agency in thinking any differently?

So I don't want to write off good and evil in the past because I think that if you take this too far the wrong way, it makes you not able to judge [Adolf] Hitler or not able to judge [Joseph] Stalin. So we have to be careful, but at the same time, I do try to sit there and go, "OK, these people are all products of their time and political and social environment and the civilization they came from, and we have to take that into account too." 

Gillespie: How do you decide what you're going to get into, or do your topics find you? I mentioned "Supernova in the East," which is a real achievement. I mean, just of you being able to sustain that level of intensity and engagement with the topic. The "Celtic Holocaust" series is amazing too, but do you go looking for just these horrifying episodes in the past, or do they find you?

Carlin: Well, first of all, you're really kind. I appreciate that. I'm not always as easy on myself as you are on me, right? Well, thankfully, the "it's not me" thing though is part of the motivation. I mean, a lot of these stories, that's what makes me think of them as interesting, right? Oh my God, can you imagine being here and these people in this time period? I mentioned self-selection of the topics earlier. If I'm interested in it, that right there is requirement No.1, because we don't have scripts for these shows. So I don't read them and then think, "I'll write a script for this and then I'll record it." I just go in and record it. So it's based on inspiration. So if I'm not into the topic, it just doesn't work. You would hear it in my voice, right?

It's also why I can't talk about certain things. I'll get requests from people like, "Can you please talk about 17th century India?" I'll have to say no. I said, "Because I don't know anything about 17th century India, and I couldn't learn enough about it in the short span of…." It's funny, the listeners think it's forever between shows, but if you're trying to educate yourself from ground zero, it's a short amount of time. So all of these topics we choose, the No.1 requirement is that I have to be interested in them. No. 2 requirement is I have to have some foundation of knowledge that we can then build upon. So all these topics that we do shows on, I knew something about before we did them.

And then a lot of what I'm learning is what I've gotten wrong by reading histories from a long time ago, because a lot of these stories, there's a lot of new histories that I haven't read since the last time I was heavily into the topic, and that turns the tables on a lot of the old ideas about what really happened and who was responsible. Sometimes secrets come out that were not available. There's a lot of stuff in the Second World War we know now that even when I was a kid growing up we didn't know. Enigma machines, for example. Stuff like that. So I have to know something about it. I have to be interested in it.

As far as what I'm interested in, well, a lot of these stories you may have noticed have what we call here when I'm doing them spines, philosophical spines. The ancient historian Thucydides said once that history is philosophy taught by example. That's another one of those things that gets a lot of flack today, because in some senses it's wrong, but in some senses it's not. In the sense that it's not wrong, we try to find some deeper philosophical question that the story highlights.

So we did one called the "Destroyer of Worlds," which was about the early years of trying to live with nuclear weapons. The spine in that one is, can human beings learn to live with the power of their ever-evolving weapons system? So even if you manage to live with what we have today and design systems and safeguards and everything, what happens when you invent the next most powerful weapons system after that? So that's an idea, a philosophical question that runs through the entire show.

Most of the shows we do, not all of them, I don't want to ever have a formula or slip into a rut or have a format, so sometimes we switch it up just to be different and get out of the sameness of it all, but most of the shows have a philosophical throughput idea that we're trying to explore. A lot of times that's the first thing that makes me go, "Aha. Well, this would be a good thing to talk about because exploring that philosophical throughput idea would be interesting." Those are the many things that have to cross together to make me go, "Ah, that would be a fun show."

And then the last thing is more of a practical thing. I will look at the shows that we've recently done, and I try to look at the archives the same way I look at history, trying to imagine it 10 or 15 or 20 years from now and ask, "Do we have a nice mix?" Because we usually keep about 10 shows free, and then we move them to the paid archive after four or five years. I try to make sure we have enough diversity, subject matter diversity in the 10 or so free shows so that if you didn't like "Supernova in the East," which was about the Second World War in the Pacific and Asian theater, and we have six maybe shows on that, do I have a couple shows then from widely differing periods? So you could go, "Oh, I'm really not interested in that. Oh, but I like the idea of the Romans and the Celtic people, so I'll listen to that show." So there are some attempts to try to switch it up a little bit in terms of historical periods or throughput ideas or that kind of thing.

Gillespie: What would you say is the happiest show that you've done?

Carlin: Oh, that's a trick question, isn't it? I did one once called "The Organization of Peace" that was about the League of Nations. The whole League of Nations thing is this almost rainbows and unicorns attempt to try to imagine a better world through a shared understanding that we had just been through the worst war in the history of the world and we never want to go through that again. There were so many fun aspects of it, like the idea…. It was a minor idea. It was never this major League of Nations proposal, but the idea of Esperanto and the idea that we have to have human beings communicate better if we want to avoid the kinds of things that happened before. So we all need to speak the same language, right? So there's a lot of hopeful stuff in that show because the League of Nations itself was almost a naive attempt to hope for a better world and try to figure out what the heck would be involved in working toward it. So that might be the most hopeful one.

Gillespie: What's the function of history for you?

Carlin: I truthfully look at it more like the past is there to teach us what can happen, right? So it's a little showing you the Black Swan phenomenon in terms of examples. So when you say something like, "Well, how could this go sideways on us?" You have examples you can point to in terms of the worst case scenario. I mean, what the past doesn't teach are the kinds of lessons that most people want it to teach. So for example, you'll often hear someone say something like, "Well, we know appeasement doesn't work because look what happened with Hitler in the 1930s." But that's not what history teaches you because you're not taking into account the variables, right? First of all, Hitler's a person. All dictators are not exactly the same, and all circumstances aren't exactly the same. So you can't turn around and say, "Well, we learned from Munich that you can't appease dictators, therefore we shouldn't appease Saddam Hussein because he's going to act exactly like Hitler acted. We know that because Hitler acted that way." It doesn't work like that.

Now, what it can show you is what a worst case scenario might look like if things go sideways like they did in the late 1930s. What history really teaches you is how contextually things get involved. When we see, for example, rights being taken away from people in a society, like political parties being banned or safeguards that keep people from being able to be thrown into prison without any sort of due process, I think history teaches you what's going to follow next in most of those cases. Usually, it's benign, but that doesn't teach you anything specifically. It teaches you generalities, but I do think it's useful in that sense.

Now, the [George] Santayana quote about if you did not learn from history, you're doomed to repeat it, I think, one, it doesn't work that way because we take the wrong lessons. You can't use dictators because of Munich. I also think that people use history to have it prove what they want it to prove, you have these ideas that you could go back and construct it in ways, or you can choose historical approaches in ways that lets you say two plus two equals five, if you want it to. There's an old line that even the devil can quote scripture for his purpose, and history is far more subject to that than biblical narratives are, right? So that's why I think you have to be careful about this idea about history teaching X, Y, or Z and become suspicious of the teacher that teaches you that.

There are things to learn, but they're much more amorphous and much less specific. So that's what I would say. And then the idea that it could hurt you to learn from the past, well, it can, depending on what they're trying to teach you. Especially give it a sideways glance and ask what the person trying to teach you about the past is trying to get you to understand. But for broader generalizations that we talked about earlier, about how I talked to kids about context and how things evolve, I think those are really valuable lessons, but they're not very useful necessarily in applying specifically to individual cases. 

• Audio Production: Ian Keyser

The post Hardcore History's Dan Carlin: 'History Is Not Like Math' appeared first on Reason.com.

Few individuals have had a bigger impact on the libertarian movement than David Boaz, the longtime executive vice president of the Cato Institute. Boaz recently turned 70 and gave a keynote address at LibertyCon, the annual gathering of Students for Liberty, in Washington, D.C. Reason's Nick Gillespie caught up with Boaz to discuss the disarray in the libertarian movement, why he thinks the nonaggression principle and cosmopolitanism form the core of the movement, why libertarians can never seem to take wins when they get them, and whether there's anything to look forward to in a rematch of Presidents Donald Trump and Joe Biden.

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This interview has been condensed and edited for style and clarity.

Reason: Having been in the libertarian movement for nearly half a century, how do you assess the current state of libertarian ideas and the broader libertarian movement?

Boaz: I think there are a lot more libertarian ideas. When I was in college and thought of myself as a libertarian—but also thought of libertarians as part of the conservative movement—who did we have as intellectuals? [Friedrich] Hayek and [Milton] Friedman and [Ludwig von] Mises.

It was kind of a good set of years there, because Hayek won the Nobel Prize in '74—which was stunning to us, because even as naive college students we knew nobody like that had won a Nobel Prize before. Then in 1975, [Robert] Nozick won the National Book Award, which really helped to put libertarianism on the map of political philosophers. Then in 1976, Friedman won the Nobel Prize. I was out of college then, but that period really boosted libertarian academic credentials.

These days, just like everybody says, we have nobody like [Ronald] Reagan and [Margaret] Thatcher. But in the time of Reagan and Thatcher, they said, "Where are the people like [Winston] Churchill and [Franklin] Roosevelt?" I look back and say, "Wow, weren't those great? And who is that today?" But at least one answer is there's a lot more libertarian intellectuals today. Maybe nobody is a Hayek these days, but there's definitely a lot more libertarianism in the academy, more libertarian intellectuals, more people reading those people. Some of them even get published by major publishers. There's more of that, and I think that means there's more people who think of themselves as libertarians.

What's the essence of libertarianism for you?

To me, the essence of libertarianism is the nonaggression principle. You have no right to initiate force against people who have not initiated force against you. From that comes freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom of property and markets, ideally within an ethos of cosmopolitanism and pluralism and tolerance. At that point, we're kind of talking about liberalism, and these days I'm worried not just about libertarianism, but about liberalism.

Cosmopolitanism, tolerance, pluralism—where do those come from and why should those be interconnected? If we compare the nonaggression principle to the core of a nuclear reactor, why should the surrounding framework be akin to cosmopolitanism?

I think libertarianism is set within classical liberalism, and I think of libertarianism as the intellectual core of liberalism, the intellectual vanguard. I often say I'd like to be part of a libertarian intellectual vanguard leading a broader liberal movement. And for my whole career, we haven't had that. We've had liberals divided into people who emphasize free markets and people who emphasize civil liberties and tolerance and equality under the law for all. Libertarians have not had a great record on equality under the law for all, although I think it's clearly inherent in what we believe. But you didn't see many libertarians involved in the Civil Rights Movement, critical of Jim Crow, and they should have been, and they should have been out there.

The Cato Institute, where you've spent most of your career, was founded in 1977 in San Francisco. How did it come into being?

Ed Crane was in Washington running the MacBride for President campaign in 1976, and he observed that [the American Enterprise Institute] and Brookings had a significant influence on limited budgets. And he said, "There ought to be a libertarian think tank, one representing the values of the American Revolution." So he talked to Charles Koch, who had money to help. And Charles said, "OK, I'll put some money up if you'll run it." And he said, "Well, you don't want me to run it because it needs to be in Washington, and I'm going back to San Francisco." And, as he used to tell it, "Charles was smarter than I was, and he knew if I started this, I would in a few years realize it should be in Washington."

The idea was to set up a think tank that was neither liberal nor conservative, and that would put libertarian ideas on the policy map, as well as just the pure theory map.

What were the big issues in the 1970s that you guys were obsessed with?

The big influences in the early '70s were Vietnam, Watergate, and stagflation. I used that trio often to explain why there was an efflorescence of libertarians in the 1970s. The government had just accomplished Vietnam, Watergate, and stagflation, which gave people a very different view of a government that they perceived as having solved the Depression and won World War II. It was a different generation that was coming up.

What were the main issues? The answer is they're kind of the same issues over and over. History is not a bunch of new things. It's one damn thing, over and over. For Cato, the original agenda was, "Well, we're going to take on Social Security, the linchpin of the welfare state. We're going to take on school choice, which underlies so many problems. And we're going to take on the foreign interventionist state." Early on, we were writing about all of those things. Our first real book was about an alternative to Social Security, how to get out of it. At least one of our first papers was on Social Security, but we had a very early pro-immigration paper. We had a very early paper on conscription, which was a live issue at that time.

Is Social Security unstoppable at this point? 

That seems to be the observation all over the world. We've made a lot of progress on free trade. We've made a lot of progress on human rights, civil rights, women's rights, gay rights. We've made some progress on some microregulation issues. We're making some now on housing. We repealed a lot of the New Deal regulations in the 1978 to '81 era. When people say we're on the road to serfdom, I tell them about all these things. We ended conscription, we ended the [Civil Aeronautics Board], we ended the [Interstate Commerce Commission]. We created a structure that continuously brought tariffs down. All those things were progress. There was significant progress, and people still say, "Yes, but what about all this government spending and everything?" I think the answer there is once you create a program that people think they're getting benefits from, it's very hard to take those benefits away.

We can argue that Social Security is not, on net, benefiting people, but there's a huge constituency of people who paid money in and they don't want it taken away from them. That's true for every program. It's true for the farm program. That's one of the reasons that we always say it is so important to stop a new entitlement in the beginning. Because Medicare was expected to cost a billion dollars a year, 10 years after it was founded. That was crazy. It was much more than that. You've got to stop it.

In the '80s, what was your attitude towards Ronald Reagan? A lot of libertarians, or people leaning libertarian, would say he was really good. Is that right or is that wrong? 

My own trajectory with Reagan was in the '70s. I was in [Young Americans for Freedom] and I went to the 1976 convention on behalf of Reagan, not as a delegate, but just there to cheer him on and everything. I liked Reagan, and I was actually a delegate to the state convention or maybe the county convention for Reagan.

Then in 1978, I got hired to work on the Clark for Governor campaign, and that shifted my allegiance. Ed Clark for governor, California 1978—the first big Libertarian Party campaign that actually had some money and a professional staff of me and one other guy [laughs].

While Reagan was president, I was a libertarian, and we were pretty much critical of everything he did. Well, not everything, but many things he did. As time went on, and we saw other presidents, I think we got nostalgic for the Reagan-Thatcher era—two people who, even if they didn't always live up to it, did enunciate a lot of libertarian rhetoric. I think Thatcher in England revived British entrepreneurship and appreciation for enterprise. Reagan did some of that too. I think to a great extent, Reagan's speeches about freedom revived the American spirit, maybe as much as his tax cuts did.

How disastrous was the George W. Bush administration for America and for libertarian advances?

That was pretty bad. And we were sort of optimistic when he came in! We didn't like Republicans. They did a lot of bad things. But Bush had told Ed Crane that Cato's Social Security plan was on the right track, and he wanted to do something like that. Early in his administration, he appointed a commission, which we were sort of opposed to because a commission is usually the way to put an idea to bed. But it turned out he appointed a commission of Republicans and Democrats that was stacked in favor of some kind of privatization. So that was good.

But then 9/11 happened, and Bush got distracted from everything else. Then he gets reelected, and he says, "I'm going to use my political capital on reforming Social Security." It turns out, somehow he got reelected but everybody hated him. We did a poll at the time, and we said, "Would you support an idea that would allow you to put your own money into retirement and then not take Social Security at the end?" And 60 percent said, "Yeah, that sounds good." When we said, "President Bush has a plan," it got 40 percent approval. So that kind of killed it.

How bad was the war on terror and the USA PATRIOT Act, for libertarian ideas?

It was definitely bad that we got the PATRIOT Act, but also, just the general [feeling that] we have to respond with war. We even have to invade Iraq, which had nothing to do with 9/11. And the PATRIOT Act and the surveillance state that was created—very bad for the country, bad for libertarians too, although it gave us a lot of targets to complain about. But we didn't get very far in aiming at those targets.

Was Barack Obama particularly bad? While there were overblown accusations, such as him attempting "to destroy America as we know it," is there validity to the idea that he was putting us on a particularly terrible path?

How did Donald Trump scramble the libertarian movement? There are people who claim that "Trump is the most libertarian president ever." What do you think people mean when they say something like that?

Yes, there were. I had lots of fights. I blocked more people that year on Facebook than ever before. I had a lot of fights with old friends who said, "He's the most libertarian president." I mean, when he was running…he said he would cut taxes. Any Republican that year would've been campaigning on tax cuts. He said he would cut regulation. He did campaign against immigration and against trade. I never did understand. I guess he said, "Drill, baby, drill." So libertarians who thought of American energy independence, or at least production, liked it.

I think a lot of libertarians, certainly a lot of conservatives, liked the fact that he fights, he stands up, he calls the left a bunch of dickheads. I think in the subsequent five years, it occurred to me that the people conservatives and some libertarians are gravitating to are not necessarily the ones who are most conservative, certainly not the ones who are making the most compelling cases; they're the ones who are the most anti-left.

Sean Hannity on Fox: He's just partisan, anti-left all the time. Tucker Carlson. Charlie Kirk with Turning Point USA. Charlie Kirk had been kind of "Free market! Socialism sucks"—that was his organization. And then he just went all in for Trump. Then I saw other people going all in for Trump. The defense of Trump now, as the most libertarian president, I think would be tax cuts, and conservative Supreme Court justices who many libertarians think are better than liberal Supreme Court justices. And they'll say deregulation. There wasn't that much deregulation, but there was less regulation than in a Democratic administration.

What's the case against President Joe Biden?

The case against Biden is he is a bankrupt spender. I think Trump may have spent more in four years than Obama did. Biden then comes in and says, "I'll see you and raise you." So there's certainly that.

The best case I heard for Trump is from one of my colleagues. He was saying, "Hillary will bring 4,000 dedicated regulators to Washington. I don't know who Trump's going to appoint—Republican hacks, [former president of the Heritage Foundation] Ed Feulner's list, his cronies—but they won't be dedicated regulators." I think that's definitely happened with Biden. He campaigned as a moderate, and compared to either [Sen.] Elizabeth Warren or Trump he seemed centrist. But he has empowered an administration that wants to regulate everything.

Some of it is woke regulation: sexual harassment on campus, hate speech, all that kind of stuff. Some of it is just pure economic regulation, and you see it every day. "The Biden administration is going to require…" "The Biden administration is going to ban…" One of the problems there, of course, is abuse of presidential power. Every time I see one of those, I'm like, "Where in the Constitution does it say the president can do that?" Of course, it doesn't anywhere.

Going back to what I said in the beginning about cosmopolitanism and tolerance: Obama comes in, campaigns. He's black; he's the first president to welcome gay people into his administration, even though he's not for gay marriage until right before the 2012 election. But he looks like somebody who believes that everybody is part of America. Trump is obviously the exact opposite of that. And with Biden, it's gone way beyond that.

Now we are looking at another Trump vs. Biden. Neither of these people, neither of these parties, are in any way committed to libertarian principles. What are libertarians to do? How do we maneuver a political landscape such as this?

That's a good question these days. Some people tried in 2016 to run a presidential ticket composed of two governors, Gary Johnson and Bill Weld, both well-respected, against the two worst candidates in history, and they got three and a half percent of the vote. That didn't seem to work out very well.

Now the Libertarian Party has fallen apart, so they're not going to do that. I guess you have to pick the party you believe in. I would love to see a fiscally conservative, socially liberal centrist party. I do believe there are millions of voters who think that way, maybe a plurality of voters who think that way. But the two parties are controlled by, more or less, their extremes, and how do you break into that? My [former] colleague Andy Craig has thought a lot about election reforms. I never thought much about them. I always figured if there's enough libertarians, they'll make themselves felt within whatever political system. But maybe something like ranked choice voting, not so much that it would help libertarians, but that it might hurt extremists and get more of a consensus candidate.

And hey, when I was a young guy, I didn't ever think I'd be looking for a consensus centrist country.

Although we are more free as individuals, certainly to express ourselves and to live the way we want to, many don't really feel that way. Can you talk about a culture of libertarian freedom and cosmopolitanism, and how it aligns to our contemporary experiences?

I think that's partly because people always have this nostalgia. On Twitter, there's all these things: "Remember when a man with one income could afford this house?" Then economists come along and say, "Adjust for inflation and adjust for house size and things, this is not true." Plus you have all the knowledge in the history of the world in your pocket right now. Nobody had that. David Rockefeller didn't have it in 1990.

Part of it is just that we always look back and think, "Oh, things were better and now they're worse." But I do think a lot of people know they're freer because they're black people who are allowed to aspire to things. I'll tell you, when Karine Jean-Pierre was appointed press secretary, I wrote a blog post and said, "This is a sign of progress. A black lesbian could not have been the president's press secretary even maybe five or 10 years ago. This is a sign that we're a more open and accepting society." And I got a lot of blowback from alleged libertarians saying, "She's an affirmative action appointee. You're endorsing diversity, affirmative action." I said, "Look, I don't know if she'll be any good, but I'll tell you this: There are positions in your administration you would put diversity hires in, I don't believe you make the most visible face in your administration an affirmative action hire. It's important how she speaks on behalf of your administration. Whether she's good or not, I don't know, but I think they think she is."

We see more black people, more women being able to rise in corporations and politics. And of course, as a gay person in high school in the '60s, now living in a world where I can live with a longtime partner and my friends can get married, all of this is pretty much taken for granted, even among conservatives.

There's a huge surge in illiberalism both on the left and on the right. Where is that coming from, and where does that leave libertarianism?

That's a good question. I've been writing about this, not so much about libertarianism, but about liberalism. We live in a liberal world. Brian Doherty wrote in his history of the libertarian movement [Radicals for Capitalism], "a world that…runs on approximately libertarian principles." You look at that first and say, "What?" And then you think, "Well, yes, the United States, Europe, and more parts of the world are generally based on free markets and private property, and on free speech and freedom of religion, and expanding human rights to people to whom they were denied." All of that is basic libertarian principles.

OK, we're arguing about gay marriage, and OK, we spend too much money. There's all those things, but we do live in a liberal world. And yet we have these big sets of illiberals on both left and right, in the United States, and in other countries, in countries like Hungary and Turkey and India. We're moving away. It's not just Russia, China, Mexico.

My question is: Liberalism works so well! Have you looked around? Do you realize what your grandparents, your great-grandparents had, even your parents? My parents had a black and white TV for a long time. I have four televisions in my house of two people.

A critique of liberalism is that while it gives material resources, it lacks deeper meaning. Critics say it does not reward true believers with a unifying faith, goal, God, or mission. Is this a legitimate critique of liberalism?

To some extent, yes, it's a legitimate critique. Liberalism is a philosophy of individual autonomy. No established church, no established ideas. [Chinese Communist Party leader] Mao [Zedong] said, "Let a thousand ideas bloom," but liberalism actually did that. It's a significant critique, but it's a good thing. We should defend the liberalism that allows people to find meaning in their own lives. Preachers and teachers and authors may want to help guide people to find meaning in their own lives, but we're not all going to find the same meaning. What we want is people being able to choose their own churches, or no church, choose their own ideas and so on. We don't want the church, the king, the Vatican, the government imposing a meaning on everybody. That's what the liberal revolution was about. It was in great part a revolution against the established churches.

There's all these illiberals on the left, there's all these illiberals on the right, and yet liberalism endures. We do mostly live in a liberal country, in a liberal world. Something is attractive enough about liberalism to resist most of these assaults. I think it is that most people, at least in the United States, do want a world of private property and free markets and free speech and human rights and freedom of abortion and women's rights and to choose jobs. They resist the real impositions.

This interview has been condensed and edited for style and clarity.

• Video Editor: Adam Czarnecki
• Audio Production: Ian Keyser

The post David Boaz: Libertarianism Is the Intellectual Core of Liberalism appeared first on Reason.com.

Pano Kanelos is the president of the University of Austin, which will be admitting its first class of 100 students this fall. The college was founded in 2021 as an antidote to left-wing monoculture in academia and is committed to free speech and the pursuit of truth. Reason's Nick Gillespie spoke with Kanelos, a Shakespeare scholar and first-generation college kid who grew up in a Greek diner in Chicago, about how the University of Austin will be different from virtually every other college around, why the humanities have virtually disappeared from higher education, and how a chance encounter with Nobel laureate Saul Bellow changed his life. He also does a quick, improvised close reading of the poem "Ovid in the Third Reich," by Geoffrey Hill, one of his major intellectual influences.

• Audio Production: Ian Keyser

The post Pano Kanelos: 'Ideology Is the Death of Ideas' appeared first on Reason.com.

Did you know that a mere 44,000 votes spread across Georgia, Arizona, and Wisconsin kept Joe Biden and Donald Trump from an Electoral College tie in 2020? That was even tighter than in 2016, when 80,000 votes in three states gave Trump a decisive Electoral College win. 

Patrick Ruffini is a Republican pollster at Echelon Insights and author of Party of the People: Inside the Multiracial Populist Coalition Remaking the GOP. Reason's Nick Gillespie talked with Ruffini about why the major parties continue to leak market share, why 2024 is going to be another super-close presidential race, and whether small-l libertarian voters will make the difference in November.

This interview has been condensed and edited for style and clarity.

Nick Gillespie: What's the elevator pitch for your book, Party of the People: Inside the Multiracial Populist Coalition Remaking the GOP?

Patrick Ruffini: I think that it's no secret to anyone that there have been quite a few changes in our politics over the last decade or so. Specifically, a lot of those involve changes in who's voting for the parties and, fundamentally, who the parties are for. What do they seem to stand for? I go back to my early days in politics, which were at the tail end of an era in which Democrats were primarily pitching themselves to voters and receiving the votes of people who were in the working class. They really seemed to hold the moral high ground when it came to issues of who's really going to care about someone like me, an average person in this country. And [Democrats] would routinely pillory Republicans as the party of the rich, as the party of the well-to-do, the disconnected elite. 

I think what we've seen is that has largely flipped. Specifically, it flipped after 2016, when Democrats really seemed to [begin to] have a lot of trouble holding on to the broad mass of working-class voters, which are today defined as voters without college degrees. Sixty-four percent of voters do not have college degrees. We obviously saw in 2016 how they lost some of those blue wall states—Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin—largely because Trump was able to appeal to this electorate in a way that no Republican had before and flipped states that no Republican had won since 1988.

Gillespie: Early on in the book, you write, "I had egg on my face in 2016." Can you talk a little bit about why you had egg on your face? Of course, it wasn't just you. It's virtually all pollsters, strategists, and activists.

Ruffini: The presumption, I think, heading into the 2016 election was that Trump was a sure loser in the election. If not in the Republican primary, then he's a sure loser in the general election. There is always a question of, "Will he succeed in this hostile takeover of the Republican Party?" Initially, I was skeptical, but not long after, it was very clear he was the odds-on favorite because he had really captured a large chunk of the electorate. Everyone else was squabbling for scraps at the table. Even if only at 35 percent, no one else was higher than 10 percent, practically speaking, at the time. But the idea was [that] maybe he can win the Republican nomination, but he's a sure loser in the general election based on just his off-color commentary, his unhinged rally speeches. Everything that was really conventional wisdom among political observers in 2016 [pointed to] a Trump victory—a victory of somebody who just flouted political norms as he did—being flat out unthinkable. 

I was part of that conventional wisdom. Hillary Clinton seemed to be doing herself no favors. I didn't completely discount that. A lesson that I learned after that is voters also don't really care about the integrity of political norms as a whole. There are some segments of voters that absolutely deeply care about them. But in terms of the center of the electorate, I don't think most voters are saying, "Oh, politics is this noble thing that Donald Trump is degrading." I think they see politics as something that's down and dirty, dishonest, corrupt in large measure. Lots of people see it that way.

Gillespie: It's an interesting kind of issue, because one of the reasons why Hillary Clinton was so vulnerable was because she was seen as almost uniquely corrupt and in bed with all sorts of bad interests.

Ruffini: The idea is that for people like me who work in politics, and particularly for a political class, that are just trying to see the people we work with as basically well-intentioned people who are trying to make a positive difference for the country—it turns out just very few people actually see it that way. And Hillary Clinton was absolutely somebody who was painted that way.

I write about the parallels between Trump and Bill Clinton. Because Bill Clinton too was kind of viewed as this unsavory, seedy type of figure during his campaigns and his presidency. He was Slick Willy. He could get away with anything. In the same way, Trump was somebody who maybe had disreputable things, both that he had said and that he had done in his past, and he always seemed to evade accountability. I think that there's something to the idea that you can succeed in this environment if people view you as sort of being authentically that rascally, scoundrel-like figure who is in some way honest with voters about what they're getting. It's when you've got people who are trying to portray themselves as Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts and then don't live up to that image, that they get in trouble.

Gillespie: Trump, the billionaire who was born with a silver spoon in his mouth and was a TV star, was talking about the forgotten man. He spoke for the forgotten man. Whereas Biden—who is not working class—talked about [the working class] incessantly and coming from Scranton, Pennsylvania, etc. He's dumped a ton of money into the country, but that doesn't seem to be resonating with voters, does it?

Ruffini: I think it's ultimately who does the working class identify with? Somebody who is not fundamentally a creature of Washington, D.C., and not fundamentally a creature of this dirty, unsavory political game—I think that's what they saw in Trump. They saw a certain authenticity, and they saw somebody who spoke like them, somebody who was angry at the same people that they were angry at. I think that carried the day, ultimately.

Gillespie: It's worth pointing out that he squeaked into office with a historically low popular vote. Clinton in '92 got in with a smaller amount, and about the same amount or a little bit more in '96. 

I want to zero in on what working class means. Biden carried voters who made less than $50,000. He carried households making between $50,000 to $100,000. Trump took those making over $100,000. What you say in the book is that the key divide is education, and maybe also geography, instead of economic class. It's socioeconomic status or education level. How is that functioning differently than just the amount of money that a household is bringing it? 

Ruffini: It's true that at some level, the amount of money that you have in your bank account does actually dictate a lot about the way you view the world. There may still be some truth to that. 

But the point I'm making is that, in terms of what manifests politically and what we're seeing happen politically in the country, education is by far the better variable that predicts everything that's happened, and particularly what's happened among white voters. So I put in the book the caveat that non-white voters don't necessarily act the same way in terms of there not being a class divide. There's more of a different pattern of behavior.

Gillespie: What percentage of the electorate is white? Is it still a vast majority?

Ruffini: In 2024, it's mid-70 percent.

Gillespie: So votes by white Americans are going to comprise the vast majority of ballots cast.

Ruffini: I would say whatever 70 percent is, if it's the vast majority, but it's still a pretty strong majority. But increasingly that white vote does not really behave as a unit, does not really matter in terms of anything politically. You're really talking about white voters without a college degree and white voters with a college degree, that used to be back in the '90s very similar in how they voted. You could kind of talk about there being a "white vote" in the 1990s. Today, you can't talk about it that way. The 40 percent of voters are going to be white non-college and the 30 percent of voters who are going to be white with a college degree. Those used to vote very similarly, and are [now] 40 points apart on the margin in who they're voting for.

Gillespie: Then you talk about the distinction between cosmopolitans and traditionalists. What does that mean?

Ruffini: It maps pretty cleanly onto this idea of white college, white non-college. I'm really interested in where things are moving. Because even though, as you cited some statistics, Biden is still winning some of those lower income voters, but what's happening there is that you still have quite a few low income minority voters in that pool of people. So Biden wins. But that gap between sort of the low income and high income voters, it is nowhere near where it was in 1996, 2000—it's just a completely different ballgame there. 

When I say that, it means, who is a group of voters that is uniquely motivated by these sort of more abstract ideals of protecting democratic norms? Those are the same groups of voters, who live in cities, embrace ideas about diversity, are just generally more progressive or liberal in their outlook, but are uniquely motivated by these questions of social equality. 

Then you've got a large group of voters that are not motivated by those issues. They're either motivated on the other side by a more traditional cosmopolitan view. But when it comes to some of these minority voter communities that still vote Democratic, what you find is, they are very much the conservative wing of the Democratic Party in terms of their views on social issues. They don't really place any sort of prioritization on these animating issues behind the Democratic coalition today on this Dobbs [v. Jackson Women's Health Organization] and Democracy message. Their allegiance to the Democratic Party is more historic. It was rooted in this identity of the Democratic Party as the party of the working class, of the marginalized minority communities.

Gillespie: So as the faces of the Democratic Party become more of a multiracial coalition or a rainbow coalition, they are actually losing touch with the very people they claim to be representing more directly?

Ruffini: In the revealed preferences of voters, what you actually don't find is either Hispanic or Latino voters being motivated by identity politics. In 2016, you had Trump throw every insult in the book at Mexicans, saying they're rapists, bringing crime, drugs over the border. He didn't really seem to lose a whole lot of Latino support. I mean, you would think he would. Similarly, you had Trump after the [Black Lives Matter] protests in 2020 sort of behaving badly in that context, saying that police should shoot looters and all those things. He gained support among black voters in 2020. The revealed preferences of these voters are not that they are uniquely motivated by this kind of racial identity rhetoric that is coming from the left.

Gillespie: How much of the swing from Democrats to Republicans is Trump appealing to people? How much of it is Democrats not addressing people whose votes they're taking for granted?

Ruffini: Absolutely, you can't write Donald Trump out of the story completely. You have a catalyst for the shifts we've seen. It appears that he's obviously very, very highly likely to be the Republican nominee. When you look at polling for 2024, we're seeing a further shift of African-American and Latino voters in his direction. In fact, that's most of the gains that he's been getting in the polls. To the extent that those partly materialize in 2024, what I think we're going to see is this realignment that he helped bring into being. The question is what happens if and when Donald Trump fades from the scene, and whether or not we believe we will see some sort of return to the old coalition line, to a more Romney 2012-style coalition. 

The entire history of our politics suggests that that's not going to happen. I think you'll see some mean reversion. I think if Nikki Haley were the nominee—very unlikely to happen—you'd certainly see her do better in the suburbs. You'd probably see her frankly do better overall in the election. Not quite as polarizing a figure, but I don't think you would ever see a return back. And there's a good reason for that. That's because this kind of thing is happening throughout Western democracies, where the working class sort of is aligning itself more and more with the parties of the right. The more highly educated voters are aligning themselves more and more with parties on the left. Those countries don't necessarily have a Donald Trump. But this does seem to be something that is naturally occurring—was to some extent occurring before Donald Trump. So I don't think it's exclusively on him, but he was a catalyst for accelerating.

Gillespie: Is any of this generational in nature? Overwhelmingly younger people voted for Democrats, at least in presidential elections.

Ruffini: This is a big issue. This is a big debate right now. Are you actually going to see people as they grow older becoming more conservative? That's what we've seen in generations past. But there's a lot of discussion that millennials aren't quite following that same trajectory. Partly the big generational divide that I really talk about is that we now have an electorate that is entirely passed through the education sorting machine, in terms of when they were coming up and they were young, they had the opportunity to go to college or not go to college, and that was a legitimate choice, as opposed to maybe for those in the silent generation where most people just didn't go to college. 

As a result, you've just got much more education polarization because more people have made the decision. If you have made that decision, "Yeah, I'm going to leave my hometown and kind of not pursue knowledge and, maybe move to a big city after college and really be part of this knowledge economy," that's just fundamentally a different kind of person than the person who stays closer to the people in places they knew growing up. I think that's part of the generational story. 

I also think the generational story can't be separated from the question of race, because you just have a younger generation that is much, much more diverse. The silent generation and boomers are just much more white. You actually do see that they are more liberal and traditionally have been much more liberal as a result in the younger generation. But it's really a function of race, I think that that's true. I write about the ways that's changing. 

I don't really tackle this question of generations directly because I do think it's downstream of race. I think that to the extent that younger Hispanics are not tied to the voting patterns of their parents, younger African Americans are not tied to the same voting patterns of their parents—what you're actually going to see is more of them voting Republican. You see it as a whole, diverse, younger generation that is going to be more politically balanced.

Gillespie: You point out the fact that the country is more mixed than ever. There is a huge amount of what would count by various measures as desegregation going on—younger generations, millennials, and Gen-Z are more multi-ethnic. How do you consider yourself, if let's say, you're a third-generation Puerto Rican who married an Asian woman, then you divorce them and marry a black person? What are your kids? I think we're seeing an attempt to kind of keep two or three categories intact when the social reality is just vastly outstripping that.

Ruffini: As of today, the number of voters who are genuinely more than one race—it's actually a pretty small number. But when you look at the children born in the United States, one in five children being born today are of some kind of mixed racial background, and that doesn't even count Hispanics, because we don't have a really good way of actually accounting for Hispanics because of the way the census collects data. 

I do think that this assumption we've had about non-white groups being a loyal Democratic bloc, especially within the African-American community, was predicated on the idea that this was a marginalized, discriminated-against group that needed to organize under the banner of one political party to advance their interests. What happens when that identity is no longer salient? That identity of, "I don't view myself as a victim." I don't view myself as somebody who is going to be discriminated against as a result of my skin color, and that's just fundamentally not who I am. I am many different things. I am potentially of many different races. But I also live in a suburb with people of all different sorts of racial and ethnic backgrounds. I think that's fundamentally, in one way or the other, just going to change voting patterns over time.

Gillespie: The idea that Trump actually was getting more minority votes than somebody like a Mitt Romney or a John McCain…What was the swing in black support for Trump? It's still low, even historically going back to somebody like [Dwight D.] Eisenhower. But what's the swing? What are the issues that black voters—if we can talk about a median black vote—care about?

Ruffini: There's different data sources on this. If you look at precinct data, there's something like a 5 to 6 point swing on the margin from a very low base. But that means in some cases, you had precincts where there were literally zero voters and they go to, all right, maybe Trump gets five voters or ten voters in 2016 or 2020. 

Gillespie: But he did particularly well among black men, right?

Ruffini: Yeah. In general, you've seen a little bit of recovery and some other data sources have it as much as 10 or 12 points among black voters, from 2016 to 2020, when you had a swing of about 18 points among Hispanic voters. So you're right. That was something that kind of blew my mind too early on. But when you kind of start to see that this is actually part of the same trend of white working class voters. The vast majority of Hispanic and African-American people in this country are working class in terms of not having a college degree. It's a part of the working class shift more broadly, even as college educated shifted to Democrats, the non-college educated are shifting Republican. I do think that that has been the shift. 

I think that particularly Trump—a lot of it goes back to his personal demeanor, which I think if you talk to people along the coast, people like us would say that's a liability. But it turns out that's not a liability to a lot of people in the country. In fact, it's something that attracts a lot of people to him, including some unexpected voters. So when it comes to, again, these younger minority men, who I think are a key group, kind of heading into this election cycle, who themselves speak pretty bluntly and forthrightly, this idea of somebody who does not necessarily adhere to the genteel mannerisms of political discourse is, on balance, more appealing than somebody who does.

Gillespie: If Trump's appeal to blacks is growing and that's partly powered by an appeal to non-college-educated black men who like blunt speaking, what is it with Hispanics? 

Ruffini: I think number one, it's the economy. This is an upwardly mobile, striving community. It's a community where that old historic pattern of if you have more money, if you've made it in the country, you actually are voting more Republican. It just turns out there's a pretty good upward trajectory and upward trend in Hispanic incomes over the last few generations. You actually do see a lot more loyalty to the Democratic Party in the sort of lower income first generation communities that you see moved to second and third generation communities.

Gillespie: As you point out in your book, your name ends in a vowel. It is Italian. I am Italian on my mother's side, who grew up in Waterbury, Connecticut, not far from where you grew up. Michael Barone, 25 years ago wrote The New Americans: How the Melting Pot Can Work Again, and likened the Mexican-American experience to the Italian-American experience. Part of his argument was that two or three generations in, they are indistinguishable from native-born people. 

Yet we fail to grasp that because Latino or Hispanic immigrants keep coming to the country. We keep thinking everybody is here for six months or a couple of years. And we don't recognize that since Reagan's second administration, if not longer, Latinos, particularly Mexicans, have been here, and now they're in their second or third generation. So they're really as American as Italians, right? 

Ruffini: That's right. I think there's a big divide by generation in terms of partisanship. But you mentioned that the group is not a monolith. There's no shared unique experience among Latinos in America. You've got Mexican Americans, got Puerto Ricans, got Cuban Americans. All the different [groups] came from incredibly different contexts. When you look at the issue of why does Trump actually make gains after he elevates the issue of immigration? It's because Hispanics who are already in the voting public, do they see the people coming across the border today as people like them or do they see them as fundamentally different from them? I think they see them as more different than they do similar. If you're voting and if you show up in these election statistics that I talk about, you've probably been here for a while. You're a citizen of the United States. You are a legal immigrant to the United States, if you have immigrated at all to the United States. It's just a fundamentally different experience. 

In particular in the polling, in the work I've done on the southern border, it's very clear that the people down there do not see the people crossing as being one of them, especially in the current wave. What you see also increasingly is, the people here in those communities tend to be more Mexican-American. And what you see is people from Venezuela, but you're also seeing non-Latino people crossing. You're seeing people from Haiti, the Caribbean and further afield, who are part of this migrant crisis. It's just fundamentally different. A typical Latino voter is as far apart from the people crossing today than a typical white. And that's the reality.

Gillespie: Has immigration been defined by the chaos at the border or the inability to control the border?

Ruffini: There is no question that this situation on the southern border has overshadowed and dominated the whole question of immigration, such that when you even bring up the question of immigration in this survey, people see it as an issue that is a liability for the Biden administration. People want to go back to something like the Trump administration policies. But you did see increasingly, post-2016, there was a backlash among Democrats to what was seen as Trump's xenophobia, intolerance of immigrants, and so they, as a result, putting on their jerseys to some extent, decided to be a party that was openly advocating for immigration, whereas you wouldn't have seen that in the Democratic Party of yesteryear, which was where labor was a big factor. Labor, in and of itself through the 1990s, was very skeptical of open immigration.

I think that the old populist Democratic Party went away. As a result, Biden had to commit to a much more open set of border policies that has invited political disaster for him.

Gillespie: At the same time, Bill Clinton in '96 spent a huge chunk of his renomination speech saying he was going to get rid of illegal immigrants. He was going to remove them from the country.

Ruffini: That is a really good point. I think there's a world of difference between Bill Clinton and what Joe Biden is going to do. You don't really see Biden touting the fact that he is now tough on the border, like he is the one who was tough and wants to get something done on the border, in such a way that it would register with voters. 

The other day on Twitter, I imagined, what would a Bill Clinton-style ad look like about the current border crisis? I know he'd be talking about the Biden border plan to crack down on illegals. If you were rerunning the Bill Clinton 1996 playbook, which, by the way, I think that would work, I think that would still work today. But you won't see him do it because the climate within his own party has just dramatically changed when it comes to anything that's adjacent to diversity or anything like that. It's just unimaginable that he would do something like that.

Gillespie: Let's talk about Asian Americans. How do they factor into the multiracial coalition that might remake the GOP? How bad is it to characterize all Asian Americans as peas in a pod? But then what is the highest-salience set of issues for them?

Ruffini: This is a very bifurcated community because about half of the Asian electorate is college-educated and votes in many ways similar to the white, college-educated electorate. You have a large number of Asians in California, which is a very blue state. They started out from a very democratic baseline. But if you look at the Asian American professionals in one of the major metro areas, they're pretty indistinguishable, actually, from a white educated professional. 

In terms of the places where you have an identifiably Asian voting bloc—places like Little Saigon in Orange County or in San Jose, California, or places in Queens, which have received a lot of attention over the last couple election cycles—those are oftentimes first generation immigrant communities where a lot of people speak the original language. These voters are very different from this professional class that you've seen a shift in? You actually start to see more of a class divide in the Asian community. 

But you look at places like in New York City—and particularly this realignment kind of gained steam in 2022—[former Rep.] Lee Zeldin [R–N.Y.] won a lot of those voters. You had three Asian American Republicans getting elected as Assembly people in Brooklyn, when no one was really expecting that. It is a very different community. You really see it particularly among Koreans, among Vietnamese, to some extent Chinese Americans. Less so among Indian Americans, I don't think you see it as much there. But there's a huge divide by education.

Gillespie: What about groups like Chinese and Japanese, who might be a very small population? Do you see the same kind of pattern where if they've been here for three generations or more they have become indistinguishable from white voters or native-born Americans?

Ruffini: It depends on the context of what are they moving to. To some extent, the Hispanic working-class voter is essentially this generation's version of the white working-class voter of yesteryear. They're moving into places like Northeast Philly, which was a traditionally more conservative place. We had a pretty conservative white electorate. But they're living a solidly middle-class existence. This is not like, "Oh, we're living in the barrio." We are living a solidly middle-class existence. There's a pathway where you can see how they're becoming more Republican. 

Look at the Asian American voter. It's a little bit more complicated because you mentioned The New Americans by Michael Barone, where he drew these parallels. The parallel he draws with Asians, is if Hispanics were the new Italians, Asians are the new Jews, in terms of they seem to be a very highly educated group, with very high levels of educational attainment, very high levels of rising up the income ladder, almost in a very steep pattern where they're leapfrogging every other group. There is a sense that that has led to a more Democratic outlook among a newer generation or people entering the professional class. You see that more and more among Asian voters. 

But to some extent, the Democratic Party has spurned the Asian American vote. The progressive movement has spurned the Asian-American voter in the push for diversity, ironically, in higher education, where it's really Asian-Americans who are the losers. If you de-emphasized merit in higher education—I'd love to see your Republicans actually do more to seize upon that issue in Asian communities.

Gillespie: We all know that the 2016 election was unbelievably close. It was as tight as it could get. But in 2020, Joe Biden won overwhelmingly in the popular vote as a percentage and in the Electoral College. But how close was that election? Was it a blowout, or was it actually pretty close to 2016 when you factor in things?

Ruffini: I'm smiling because actually the perception that it wasn't a close election, it's just completely wrong. It's actually, technically speaking, closer than 2016 when you look at the number of votes needed to have flipped in the Electoral College. People forget how close Trump came to winning the election—just a shift of 0.7 percent in the popular vote spread uniformly across the country would have won. That means he would have been the president, squeaking by with 6 million fewer popular votes than Biden. Why is that? Partly it's due to this working-class coalition. 

The working class is concentrated in states that are more just electorally significant to the outcome of the election. Part of the reason that this realignment really is the best avenue and bet for Republicans to win elections moving forward is because they're overrepresented in the electoral college. Now, we'll see if that happens again in 2024. But, it was a very, very close election, and particularly compared to the polls going into the election, which Biden I think was up by eight points in the last polling average. He only wins by four and barely squeaks by in a way that allows Trump to make an argument to his voters that it was stolen from him. 

Gillespie: Do you believe that or are you saying that Trump made that argument?

Ruffini: No, I don't believe it was stolen from him. But I do think that had we seen Biden actually win the election by as much as he should have won the election, as much as polls were saying, and was expected to win the election, then I think Trump would have just had a much harder time convincing people. 

Gillespie: Assuming the 2024 election is Trump vs. Biden and assuming each of them is brain damaged in their own unique, special ways, is it totally up for grabs?

Ruffini: I think that it would be. It's a fair assumption about any election, no matter what the polls say at this point. You start from the prior that it's a jump ball. But, it's a very different election right now. Right now, Trump is polling ahead and that's been very consistent, no matter what the economic numbers seem to do. I don't think you could ignore that. It's not a fundamentally different election from the standpoint of pre-election polling than it was in 2020. That said, I think we will likely still see a very, very close election. But, right now, Trump seems to be doing a lot better than he was at this point in 2020. 

Gillespie: The economy compared to 2020 is doing relatively well. Inflation was a big issue then. Despite Biden being terrible on the economy, things for most people are doing pretty well. Is that because voters don't really care about the actual reality?

Ruffini: I wouldn't say the results are reality and the ground doesn't matter. If the economic situation kind of quiets down, he'd rather have that than the alternative. But a perception has set in particularly as it relates to Biden's fitness and his age that is very hard to recover from, unless something dramatic happens, either in the form of a Trump conviction or in the form of Trump has his own health crisis, that does seem to be something that is weighing down Biden pretty heavily, independently of the state of the economy. But also just a pretty deep-seated perception that the grass was greener on the other side of the street. 

Even if Biden is able to somehow recover on the economy, and maybe make it a little bit more of a draw, does he still win the debate with Trump over who best is able to manage the economy? They still win that retrospective look back, I was better off. The perception that set in, that things were at least under control on the global stage when Trump was president, I seem to be making more money.

Gillespie: Towards the end of your book Party of the People, you say, "I come to tell the younger me that the libertarian dream of smaller government is debt." You also talk a fair amount when you're looking at the future of politics about a quadrant chart that Lee Trotman put together, which shows that what used to be called the libertarian quadrant—the shorthand is fiscally conservative, socially liberal—there are no voters there. How do you justify that?

Ruffini: That's something your colleague Stephanie Slade tackled very aptly in a feature piece at Reason recently. Growing up, I very much drank the Kool-Aid, supply-side economics and a lot of, not just maybe a more libertarian economics, but the whole Reagan view of, let's say, limited government. The reality is that not a lot of voters are motivated by those sorts of questions in the real world. You see both parties increasingly motivated on cultural questions and activated on cultural questions. That's particularly true of Republican voters, and particularly around the issue of immigration. We saw that very clearly with Trump in 2016. I also don't think that a whole lot of voters are motivated by a left-wing ideological critique of the Reagan era or support for social democracy. 

I think that the questions that actually motivate voters on a real level are fundamentally different from the ones that motivate activists, and the ones that motivate people like me growing up—we're very invested in these economic ideologies. Trump really kind of pulled that back and said this isn't really at a fundamental gut level what's moving people, even though they do have. I write this in the book that it's not like Republicans should just become a party that supports social programs, and that's how you win working-class voters. They do have this gut-level identification with capitalist or free enterprise, or business and hard work as a way of working your way up. But they're just not quite as invested in reading Milton Friedman as maybe that younger version of me was thinking.

Gillespie: If the Republican Party no longer seems to be courting libertarians in a way that they were at the end of the aughts to the beginning of the 2000 teens, it doesn't mean that libertarian voters have disappeared. Emily Ekins and David Boaz at the Cato Institute, using various measures that are alternative to some of the ones that you and Lee Trotman use, hypothesize that 10 percent to 20 percent of voters pretty reliably vote socially liberal and fiscally conservative. 

Where do those voters go, assuming they're not completely just making that up? In an election like the one that we're going to have now, in an election like in 2022 or 2016, where are those libertarian voters and who do you think they would be going for in something like this?

Ruffini: You're right that even if a group is smaller in the electorate, it turns out they matter quite a lot. And I think Joe Biden doesn't win in 2020 without all the third party voters from 2016 who primarily backed him. But when you talk about how we define that socially, more moderate, or liberal and fiscally conservative voter, I think we are used to viewing that libertarian vote as adjacent to the Republican vote. As something that belongs to Republicans. What we'll be actually seeing more and more is more of a crossover between libertarians and Democrats recently. Because those cultural issues seem to be the tie-breaker. They seem to matter more. 

Number one, Trump isn't fiscally conservative. He's not really standing up for that side of the argument. But you also just see social issues and cultural issues kind of matter more. I'm not talking about the hardcore Libertarian Party voter, I am talking about that sort of voter in the northeast corridor, that likes to say they're socially more moderate and fiscally conservative. What you've seen more recently, in a more recent election cycle is that those voters go more Democratic. Whereas that moderate voter again, that's the Obama-Trump voter. That's the voter in Michigan. That's the old autoworker. That's pro-life. They see a role for the government in the economy. Those voters have been moving in completely the opposite directions.

Gillespie: What are the signs to look for going into the election, and then after that will there be a long-lived realignment of the parties?

Ruffini: We don't necessarily know after 2024 if this new coalition survives. Certainly, there's a case for the shifts that we've seen, particularly as it relates to non-white voters continuing, you're seeing that in the polls right now. There's also a case to be made that this is more of a long-term process. In the book, I write about looking ahead. Let's actually conduct a thought experiment that if this actually happens, what does 2036 look like? What would the election of 2036 look like? 

Overwhelmingly, because we have a pretty good idea of what the demographics are going to be in that year. We know the country is just getting more non-white. What would the breakdown need to look like? It would need to look something like this: Republicans draw pretty even among Hispanics, they're winning about maybe 40 percent of Asian voters, and they're winning almost a quarter of the African-American vote. What's interesting is there's polls out there that show that's happening in 2024. It could be that I'm way too conservative. But I think you really have to view this over a long-term trajectory and not election to election, which is very noisy. I think that subject to all sorts of factors that are specific to the cycle. 

Right now we have this tendency to view Ronald Reagan as this golden era of Republican normalcy, as somebody who is moderate on immigration and for free trade and for internationalism and global leadership. Certainly, that's true, but I think it understates the extent to which Reagan himself was a disruptive figure in the Republican Party in the '70s and '80s, where he was fundamentally—in the same way Trump is disrupting the existing Republican order—disrupting challenger Gerald Ford from the right. As a result, the party moves, the party shifts, and it becomes a really unambiguously conservative party after Reagan. 

In some way, I think the party will become an unambiguously more populist party. Now, whether or not we have somebody who is quite as much of an avatar of that as Donald Trump in the future, I'm not sure. I think he is somewhat sui generis. I think you will, by default, have somebody more "normal" in the future, particularly someone who can get elected president. But, I think that just the baseline has shifted. It shifted with Reagan and I think it's now shifted with Trump. 

Gillespie: Where do you think the Democratic Party is shifting to? Are they undergoing a similar process, if they are now appealing to educated cosmopolitan voters? 

Ruffini: It's a coalition that is shifted in terms of the voters it's appealed to significantly. It's really openly making the case on cultural issues, openly making the case for a more open society, really talking up these sort of more abstract concepts of democracy as opposed to the kind of campaign we saw as recently as 2012 when Obama was railing against Mitt Romney as the scion of private equity. You didn't care about people like you. You just don't seem to see that kind of rhetoric anymore, even though that remains part of the party's policy commitment. I don't necessarily think they're going to go conservative on economic issues.

Gillespie: Medicare and Social Security appear to be completely inviolate at this point. It is beyond the third rail of American politics now. To even invoke it, other than to say you are going to keep it forever and maybe make it shinier, is complete political death. Is there any way that that's going to change? 

Ruffini: What's going to change, if nothing else, are the actuarial realities of these programs that are going to impose upon everybody's tidy the political notions and ideas. What you would say now is that it is absolute political death for anybody to touch that entitlement reform. Particularly when you frame the question as cuts to entitlement programs. I think you're absolutely passing that rubicon of we're no longer able to pay out benefits at the state level. It's going to fundamentally be another major disruption, akin to but somewhat I think much greater than what we saw in the last three years with 20 percent inflation. I think that that is going to be in and of itself going to upend a lot of our politics. 

But, Trump intuited, not incorrectly, that this was not a political winner for Republicans and he was actually willing to—and I think probably others had intuited that beforehand—make the argument, which have made it overall very much more difficult for any political party that is calling out for some kind of solution.

Gillespie: Are there new ways to talk about entitlement spending that casts it in a more populist sensibility, because it's clear that Social Security and Medicare both take money from relatively young people and relatively poor people and give it to relatively old and relatively rich people. Former Speaker of the House Paul Ryan failed because he didn't make the commercial throwing grandma off a cliff. He should have owned that and said,

Ruffini: It's fundamentally different for a lot of people. You'll have Hispanic voters really voicing the sentiment around, "We don't want welfare cheats." And frankly, that's a real, palpable sentiment. They completely exclude Social Security and Medicare from that calculation.

 Whereas for a lot of people, when people take offense to the idea that these are quote-unquote entitlements—aka welfare programs—when the technical definition of an entitlement is you're entitled to it because you theoretically paid into it. Fundamentally, this is actually the political consensus in the working class, is anti-welfare and pro-Social Security. They're making the distinction based on the fact that they believe they paid into these programs, and they're just getting out what they have already paid in. Which is not reality, but that's a very strongly held belief.

This interview has been condensed and edited for style and clarity.

Photo Credit: Wennphotostwo121965

• Video Editor: Adam Czarnecki
• Audio Production: Ian Keyser

The post Patrick Ruffini: Why Blacks and Hispanics Are Turning to Trump appeared first on Reason.com.

Journalist Nate Silver burst onto the national scene in 2008, when he correctly predicted 49 out of 50 states in that year's election, outstripping all other analysts. His former website FiveThirtyEight became a must-visit stop for anyone interested in political forecasting and helped mainstream the concept of "data journalism," which utilizes the same sort of hard-core modeling and probabilistic thinking that helped Silver succeed as a professional poker player and a staffer at the legendary Baseball Prospectus. Reason's Nick Gillespie talked to Silver about the 2024 election, why libertarian defenses of free speech are gaining ground among liberals, his take on the "crisis" in legacy media, and his forthcoming book, On The Edge: The Art of Risking Everything.

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Watch the full video here and find a condensed transcript below.

Gillespie: Your Substack is called Silver Bulletin. You've put a lot of work into that title, didn't you?

Silver: No, I took about three seconds doing it, and now it has some brand equity, for better or worse. I'm afraid to change it.

Gillespie: You're like American poet and writer Allen Ginsberg. First thought, best thought?

Silver: It's hokey and stupid and I like that. It's unpretentious, right? I've workshopped internally better names that some corporate branding consultant would prefer, but I just like the cheesiness of it.

Gillespie: On November 8, you had a fantastic discussion where you used Friedrich Hayek's libertarian cri de coeur "Why I'm not a conservative" to talk about a crack up on the left side of the political spectrum. Friedrich Hayek wrote "Why I'm Not a Conservative" as a postscript to The Constitution of Liberty. In it, he talked about how in America, the terms conservative and liberal didn't quite make sense the way they did in a European context. Classical liberals or libertarians over there were often in America coded as conservatives, whereas they were quite liberal in a European context, pretty revolutionary and radical. 

With that as a backdrop, you applied that Hayekian framework to contemporary U.S. politics after the October 7th attacks on Israel to your piece titled "Why Liberalism and Leftism Are Increasingly at Odds: The Progressive Coalition is Splitting Over Israel and Identity Politics." Can you talk about that?

Silver: There are a lot of dimensions to it. One thing I did internal that helped is that I asked our friend ChatGPT—not the woke one, not Google Gemini—to define liberalism, leftism, progressivism, libertarianism, and "wokeism," which is a term that is not as commonly used as others. If you break that down, issue by issue, you realize that…liberalism is kind of closer to libertarianism than it is to leftism or to more woke modern variants of that.

Gillespie: Why did it take an event like the October 7th attacks to make that visible? 

Silver: I went to the University of Chicago and London School of Economics, and I took all the European Enlightenment history classes, and read a lot of political philosophy. To me, it's always been rattling around in the back of my head. I think journalists should take more political philosophy classes. These ideas remain very important and very pertinent to many debates that we're having today. But if you write a Substack, it might seem off the cuff, but you always have a lot of ideas rattling around in your head. 

I had half-drafted versions of this post, and an event like October 7th—I'm not super polarized on Israel or anything like that—but you have a news hook, you have a moment which is like an emperor has no clothes moment where these university presidents are so clearly out of touch with the American mainstream, and people feel like they have permission to say this now after holding their tongue in a lot of previous events. 

It's a news peg or a news hook about things I think a lot of people had observed for a long time, which is the kind of Hayek triangle between what I call liberalism—but you can call it classical liberalism or libertarianism—and then what was socialism but might be now more social justice leftism, and then what was conservatism is now more like MAGA-fied, particularly illiberal conservatism.

Gillespie: Is progressivism, or wokeism, or identity politics the same as socialism minus economics? Then you're left with identity politics, or what's the defining attribute of that cluster?

Silver: No, I think reorienting the leftist critique around issues having to do with identity, particularly race and gender, as opposed to class, is interesting. I don't get into every detail of every debate, but when you have The New York Times at the 1619 project, the traditional crusty socialists didn't like that very much. That was a sign as an anthropologist about how even leftism and the new form of leftism are different in important respects.

Gillespie: Where are conservatives on this? If there's a crack up on the left between what might have been called liberals—for lack of a better term—and progressives, there's MAGA on the right. What's the non-MAGA right? Is that analogous to what's going on on the left?

Silver: As you pointed out earlier and as Hayek points out, America's weird in that we were the first country founded in Enlightenment values: the rule of law and free speech and individualism. The market economy is something that comes along right at this time. The Industrial Revolution and the Enlightenment are very closely tied together historically. So if you are appealing to traditional American values, you're appealing to values that are fairly lowercase libertarian, certainly liberal values. [Sen.] Mitt Romney [R–Utah], a Republican, says he likes liberal democracy and uses that term correctly like people should. It is weird in that they are traditional American values. 

I'm not a fan of almost anything about Donald Trump. I don't think it's the most constructive form of conservatism. And I do believe in technological and societal and economic progress. I think it's very important. It feels like there aren't very many people who do believe in progress anymore. One of the fundamental factors in all of world history is that for many, many centuries, millennia, human [Gross Domestic Product] GDP grew at 0.1 percent per year. You kept up with population growth, barely, if that. The beginning of the late 18th century, there was a take off toward growth. That coincided with both the Enlightenment and Industrial Revolution. Which came first is a big debate in economic history. But there was progress when there hadn't been before. People don't know that basic history.

Gillespie: Every year, our cars get a little bit better, our phones transform from something that was plugged into the wall to something you carry around in your pocket, everything is getting better. Yet, we are in kind of a dank mode right now, where people on the right and the left think we have material progress but everything else is terrible, or we don't even have that. What's driving that?

Silver: There are good data driven arguments for secular stagnation.

Gillespie: Can you define that?

Silver: The way it's used informally is to mean that progress is slowing down or maybe not really happening very much at all, or that there are a lot of headwinds. There's a more [former U.S. Secretary of the Treasury] Larry Summers technical definition. But GDP in the Western world grows now at 1.5 percent per year, whereas it peaked at 3.5 percent in the 1960s for example. Life expectancy in the U.S. has stagnated. That's not very good. IQ is a contentious topic, but IQ has stagnated. Mental well-being has declined by various measures. Many European countries have not seen their economy grow substantially in many years. There is lower fertility around the world, which I think is something that the left doesn't like to talk about, but is certainly an important dimension. Political dysfunction is on the rise. 

That thesis is actually fairly well constructed in some ways. But the constant doomerism on all sides—if you have a political quadrant, everybody has something they're deeply worried about. A certain type of person thinks that AI is going to destroy the world, which by the way, I take somewhat seriously. That's a different debate. I had dinner with a group last night and they're like, why would you bring children into this world because of climate change. I think that view is wrong.

Gillespie: How do you think these intra-ideological issues on the right, the left—and that's not particularly among libertarians, we don't want to talk about a right-left spectrum because it tends to leave us out—but how do you think break up on the left and the right is going to play out in the election season coming up?

Silver: In the short term Democrats have going for them is that Trump unites both the liberals and the left. That left-liberal coalition, which partly formed under [Barack] Obama in 2008, in part because people were sick of [George W.] Bush, carried forward unsuccessfully with [Bill] Clinton in 2016 and then [President Joe] Biden successfully in 2020. 

Trump really unites people who would otherwise be at loggerheads over many issues. But this time, I'm not sure. I am not trying to articulate an editorial position on Israel-Gaza stuff. But if you have terms that are being tossed around like genocide, that's a sign that people [are] very serious. That's not in the bluffing stage. Maybe I won't vote for Biden, who by the way is 81 years old.

Gillespie: He presents as like 79 or 80.

Silver: He's doing above average for an 81 year old. I don't really want a 78 year old president either.

Gillespie: Are we finally seeing a kind of breakdown—not of the two-party system, because it's always going to be two parties—of the way Republicans and Democrats talk about the constellation of issues that define them. Is this the end of the road for that iteration?

Silver: When the end comes, it will come more quickly than people think. But I wouldn't bet on it happening in like the next five or ten years. In some ways, the parties have become more efficient about building their electoral coalition. It's a remarkable fact that in American politics, each party gets about half the vote. If you get 48 percent versus 52 percent, it's almost considered a landslide these days.

Gillespie: In 2016, it was about 80,000 votes across three states that changed, and it was about 40,000 votes across three states in 2020.

Silver: In a country of 300 million people. Its remarkable elections are that close. It has to do with the efficiency in some ways of the political system. They do it by enforcing more and more orthodoxy. There's no a priori reason why your view on taxation, and abortion, and Gaza, and marijuana legalization, and ten other issues needs to be tied together. But you flatten out this multi-dimensional space into two parties. One difference now versus a couple of decades ago is that the public intellectuals, maybe it's too generous a term, but the pundits are more partisan than the voters. They're the ones who enforce partisan orthodoxy. I'm basically a good center-left liberal. In some rooms in New York, I feel like I'm the more conservative person in this room, probably one of the most woke. 

Gillespie: You're practically a stooge of the Soviet Union here.

Silver: Yeah, exactly. But if you break from Orthodoxy, there's a very efficient policing of people who piss inside the tent and dissent from the coalition, and have the credibility to say that out loud. Because you can influence people if you're willing to just speak your mind. It helps to be established where you're not afraid of anything.

Gillespie: A couple of weeks ago, we saw an outpouring of anger that Vice magazine—which up until about two weeks ago had been seen as a charnel house of sexual harassment—suddenly went bankrupt. People were saying, "I can't believe we lost the last outpost of great journalism." Similar things have happened before: when Sports Illustrated finally went belly up, the Los Angeles Times, a newspaper that nobody read, is cutting staff. What's going on with the legacy media? Is that in any way tied to what's going on in the political identity space?

Silver: In an effort to be nuanced and textured, I think it's 80 percent secular economic forces where you have this advertising bundle that was very powerful in that probably wasn't a natural occurrence per se. It was a form of economic rent, more or less, that subsidized the industry. My parents would walk down to the store and buy The New York Times, even growing up in Michigan. I respect traditional journalism, but I think it's mostly an economic story. It's hard because I think journalism does create, in theory, social utility. I'm not sure I think that journalism should be funded by governments, though it is in many countries.

Gillespie: When you say you're not sure, do you mean you know it shouldn't be?

Silver: Here's my idea, which I'm stealing for one of my future Substack posts. I think universities should run—maybe it's a bad idea. I don't know. It sounds like a bad idea. What if universities bought newspapers? Because newspapers are categorically more useful than academic papers. 

Gillespie: Because they have comic sections.

Silver: But they are producing journalism in real-time. They're the first draft of history. They're read much more widely. The writing is much, much, much better. Harvard, you take the fact that members can actually write and communicate with the public and have them write for The Boston Globe instead of for some obscure journal. 

Gillespie: University of Miami or a party school could take over Vice. It's a brand extension, for God's sake.

Silver: For once, as the most left-wing person in the room, we could agree probably on the many things I think journalists do wrong. I think it's not great that local journalism has been hit so badly. I'm a big fan of Substack. I make money from it. You realize your marginal revenue product a little bit more explicitly. There is always an implicit deal where if you go report from the front lines of Ukraine, that's not actually going to be narrowly profitable. You always had subsidization of enterprise reporting and foreign reporting from cooking and homes. The editorial section, where you pay pretty well. They get lots and lots of clicks, or Wordle or whatever games. If that bundle breaks down, The New York Times has been doing well.

Gillespie: You created FiveThirtyEight. Could you walk through the stages of death that went along with it. When FiveThirtyEight launched, it was a phenomenal resource that was doing things that other sites weren't doing. You ended up moving to The New York Times with it, and then to ABC and Disney.

Silver: We were under license to The New York Times. We got hired by The Times for three years, and then I sold FiveThirtyEight to Disney/ESPN in 2014, which intercompany transferred to ABC News.

Gillespie: Within a little bit more than ten years, you went from starting something fundamentally new that made a major impact on legacy media into giant news organizations, and now is in its Biden years, let's say, where it's taking the afternoons off. 

Is that a tragedy or will something else come up? Is it the fact that you could do that because there's so much more possibility and capacity for new things? Are you better or worse off being at Substack for the moment?

Silver: The latter question is easier. I feel much better off. I just have like a little extra pep in my step being independent again. You're probably making the same income, it might be from six different sources of the texts that are more complicated, but it's very nice to have an incentive. If you write a good Substack post, people will subscribe to your blog and you get money in your bank account. That actually feels good, to have actual incentives to work hard and to develop an audience. 

The problem with ABC News and Disney is that it was basically run like a socialist economy. Obviously, this is a well-run business in some ways, but we were so small relative to their scale that they didn't care one way or the other. If you make $5 million or lose $5 million, why do they care? It's like one day of theme park receipts at one theme park somewhere in the world. It's actually really bad, though. It makes you kind of a client of the regime. Your capacity to stay there depends on the goodwill of people who are able to kind of write off an x million dollar loss a year. 

We had good economics for a subscriber business. We have loyal, high-net-worth readers who have a differentiated willingness to pay, and who have been around FiveThirtyEight for a long time. It could have been a good subscription business, but Disney was literally like, "Well, we are launching Hulu Plus. Therefore this would interfere with that." No, it wouldn't. But when you're in a very large corporation and you're some subdivision of a subdivision of subdivision, it's not run very efficiently. Disney is not one of these cultures, like a friend who works for Amazon. Amazon will micromanage everything. It can be good or bad in different ways. 

But Disney is all about scale, scale, scale. You know, the National Football League and theme parks and nine-figure budget movies. If you're like a little tiny barnacle on the Disney whale, you'll just get ignored till the politics change, and they have to cut staff and wear this division that no one ever even tried to make a profit with. I think we could have. Of course, at some point, you get cut.

Gillespie: Is it an absolute loss when The LA Times shrinks? Or are you confident that new things will crop up that will perform either the same function or the function as it needs to be done now, rather than what a daily newspaper did in 1970 or 1980?

Silver: Substack is great. Social media has, although complicated, democratized things in a lot of ways. It's the upper middle class, like a lot of things, it's gotten quite squeezed. Things like local reporting, the fact that the very obvious and kind of comical, like George Santos story, didn't get a lot of pick up, for example, like things like that are going by the wayside a bit. I think we can have a few more blind spots: Is it like in my list of ten biggest problems in America right now? No. Top 25? Okay, maybe. I think it's bad. People have a desire to express themselves. There are some outlets, like The New York Times that are still doing very well. 

Gillespie:  You wrote in a November essay that free speech is in trouble. Young liberals are abandoning it—and other groups are too comfortable with tit-for-tat hypocrisy. Why are young liberals abandoning free speech?

Silver: What I would call Enlightenment liberalism are still relatively new ideas. They've been with us for a few centuries and not more than that. In some ways, they're counterintuitive ideas. The notion is that if we are a little bit more laissez faire, and let people do what they want, the free hand of the market will generate more wealth, and we'll all be collectively better off. It sounds too good to be true, except it mostly is true, empirically over a long period. 

But, there are a couple of things: One, which is relevant to my book, is that for the first time in history, the younger generation is more risk averse than older people. They're having less sex. They're doing fewer drugs. Less can be good or bad, I don't know.

Gillespie: It's so bad, they're having less sex than Joe Biden.

Silver: He apparently is doing quite well. I am not somebody who says that there are never any tangible harms from controversial speech. Look at [novelist] Salman Rushdie, free speech can actually have effects. It's a powerful thing. But if you're so risk averse, you just want to maintain harmony. I think that's part of it. Right. Also, these are not people who grew up with the memory of the Cold War or certainly not of World War II. 

Gillespie: Or mass censorship. When you think back to the idea that books like Lady Chatterley's Lover, or Tropic of Cancer, or Ulysses really weren't legally published in America until the late '50s, early '60s?

Silver: If you're like 23 or something, even dumb stuff like the Dixie Chicks in the Bush years. People even forget about that kind of thing.

Gillespie: Why do you think other people—not woke progressives, but conservatives who constantly talk about the Constitution, or perhaps even libertarians in certain circumstances—think "let's be hypocritical in order to own the libs." What's going on there?

Silver: One of the universal truths about everything in life is that if you have a longer time horizon, you almost always benefit from that. People are trying to win the argument to feel satisfaction in that immediate moment or that hour. They think, "If I get into the left on things, not the left actually, it's kind of more kind of center-left partisan Democrats about Biden's age," and they think, "Well, if I can dunk on Nate Silver about Biden's age, then I'll win the argument." But the problem is, it's not an argument between you or me. Seventy percent of the American electorate thinks Biden is too old, very reasonably so I might add. Eighty is just above the threshold anyone should be commander in chief. But they're trying to win the argument and not win the war.

Gillespie: This might be an impossible question to answer. It's kind of a chicken or egg thing, but are we more talking about present short-term things? Because that's the infrastructure. That's social media. That's the way cable news operates now. Or have we conjured those things in order to win quick arguments in the idea that that will transform society?

Silver: It's three things. It's partly human nature, partly the nature of modern media, and partly the fact that people are not in politics for truth-seeking reasons. They're in politics to win partisan arguments and to enforce orthodoxy because you have two parties that are taking this 20-dimensional space and trying to collapse it all down into two coalitions that may not actually have all that much in common if you start to pick apart differences. You need useful idiots to enforce those hierarchies.

Gillespie: Why are you different? Your entire career, going back to your work on Baseball Prospectus and elsewhere, you've been more data-driven. Data will tell you whatever you need it to tell you, right? Why aren't there more journalists like you who are trying to ascertain reality and then tease out trends and meaning, as opposed to those who bulldoze things into what they want it to be.

Silver: It's funny because now I feel like I'm more of a traditionalist. When I went to The New York Times in 2010, they were very concerned that I said I had voted for Obama in 2008, which I thought was just a matter of basic transparency. I would make the same vote again, to be sure, but that was a big problem that I had been open about my political views at all. It comes full circle now, where if you don't kind of express your view on every issue, then you're seen as being suspect potentially. But the world is dynamic, so it's possible to overcorrect. I think there was or is truth in the left critique of both-sides journalism. The truth is certainly not always, especially for a libertarian, just somewhere in the middle. You people aren't centrist. It's a different dimension. 

Gillespie: It's a very different dimension that some people will claim doesn't even really exist. You certainly can't find it on any map. 

Silver: I think even some of the more woke versions of it—at least I think that it's to some approximation true that white men have a lot of power in the media and, of course, that's absolutely true. But when you don't give people credit for being willing to adapt, if you read The New York Times today and compare it to 2013 or something, it's a vastly different paper now and you have to adjust to that moving target and not to the same standard. Give people credit for being. This is part of why the free market is right: it gives people credit for being intelligent and within their domain, relatively rational. I'm the only smart person in the room. 

[Similar to the] COVID-19 stuff. The early dialogue about masks where [former Chief Medical Advisor Anthony] Fauci [says] "Later on where I tell people masks are worthwhile, but let's say they don't really do anything. We need them for essential workers." People don't really notice that we're telling a good, noble lie. That shows contempt for people. 

If you play poker, then you know that, although bluffing is a part of poker, if you're inconsistent, you're allowing yourself to be exploited by your opponent. Your opponent's smart. If you were only playing a certain hand a certain way with a bluff or with a strong hand, then you will be exploited by your opponent, as opposed to treating them as intelligent and adaptable and more sophisticated. You should treat people as being intelligent. It's a much more robust strategy than to assume that you're the only worthwhile and smart person in the room.

Gillespie: Can you talk about your book On the Edge, which comes out in August. What's it about?

Silver: The book is called On the Edge. It's a book about gambling and risk. It covers a lot of territory. It follows my journey where before we ever covered politics, I played poker online for a period of time in the mid-2000s. It starts out in the poker world.

Gillespie: Why did you stop that?

Silver: Because the government passed a law called the [Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act], which is what piqued my interest in politics. It was tucked into some unrelated security legislation at the end of 2006. I wanted the bastards who pass legislation, who are mostly Republicans, to lose. And they did. Democrats had a good midterm in 2006. And well, they fucking took away my livelihood. What am I going to do now? I wound up starting to write about politics.

Gillespie: And now you are simping for Trump. What a strange world. To write On The Edge you did a phenomenal amount of interviews and research. Can you talk a little bit about the scope of that?

Silver: It starts out in poker and sports betting but gets into areas like venture capital, gets into crypto—I talked to our friend [FTX founder] Sam Bankman-Fried quite a bit—gets into effective altruism, gets into a lot of the AI stuff. It's a fundamental book about a certain type of nerd. 

Gillespie: It's an autobiography. 

Silver: Sort of. But they're taking over the world in a lot of ways. They're the ones who run tech and finance. Tech and finance are eating the world. It's an insider's tour about how people like that think. There were like 200 interviews. I did a lot of trips to Vegas, which was fun. 

You're trying to immerse people in the topic and get people a front-row seat. I'm not a big network access guy, but I'm flattering myself here, because I think I am fair. I think people will talk to me that would not talk to other people. I am talking to some of the top Silicon Valley [venture capitalists] VCs on their own terms and unguarded ways because I'm not coming in with an agenda apart from trying to understand them. The book is very critical of some things. But I think it's fair. It didn't preconceive what it wanted to say before I actually did the reporting, the interviewing. I think that'll be reflected in the work.

Gillespie: To go back to Hayek, my favorite work by Hayek is The Counter-Revolution of Science: Studies on the Abuse of Reason. He worried that the French Enlightenment got everything too mathematized, and ultimately, people were just data points in other people's grand theories and you erased them if they mess up your equation. Are we too quantified in this world? 

Silver: There are a few dimensions of this. One is like the dubious claims to have scientific authority and say, "Oh, we are just doing what the data tells us." You saw this during like COVID-19 and whatnot. You see this with the concept of misinformation, which is often entirely subjective. That's one dimension. The book also gets into utilitarianism a little bit and effective altruism, where they try to quantify everything and you run into problems with that. 

First of all, I build models for a living. I build sports models and election models, tried to bet on them myself and in a sense, a game theory of poker strategy is kind of a model. Building a model is pretty hard. There are lots of ways to screw up. There are lots of omitted variable biases. It might be another overcorrection thing where like 20 years ago the world needed to become more data-driven. Now it's become like a little bit of a, when you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail kind of problem.

This interview has been condensed and edited for style and clarity.

Photo Credits: Brian Cahn/ZUMA Press/Newscom; Sandy Carson/ZUMA Press/Newscom; 157014269 © Ilnur Khisamutdinov

• Video Editor: Adam Czarnecki
• Audio Production: Ian Keyser

The post Nate Silver: Libertarians Are the Real Liberals appeared first on Reason.com.

You probably already know that the national debt is bigger than our whole economy. But relax, because things can always get worse! And they will, regardless of whether Biden or Trump gets elected in the fall. Each has a proven track record of spending like a drunken sailor and most projections show that debt will grow to between 181 percent and 340 percent of GDP over the next few decades. Reason's Nick Gillespie discussed all of this and more with Brian Riedl, a budget expert at the Manhattan Institute. Riedl explains why massive and growing debt is really bad, why reducing it is really hard but really important, and why young people should be really pissed.

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Watch the full video here and find a condensed transcript below.

Gillespie: We know who the candidates are going to be. It's going to be Biden vs. Trump. They both have track records that you have been tracking as a policy analyst at the Manhattan Institute talking about debt and deficits. You, last fall, released a big book of charts and doom and deficits. The Congressional Budget Office [CBO] is projecting $119 trillion worth of deficits over the next 30 years. And that's optimistic. 

You note that we have gone from the national debt being $3 trillion in the year 2000 to $27 trillion in the past quarter century. According to the CBO calculations, depending on what happens, debt will be between 181 percent and 340 percent of gross domestic product [GDP] in another 30 years. So we got a lot of debt floating around here. Why are debt and deficits bad?

Riedl: Modest and sustainable deficits are not bad. It's like any sort of borrowing. It's OK to go into debt for your mortgage. It's OK to borrow for school. I am not a balanced budget absolutist. 

Every year's deficit adds up to the national debt. Modest borrowing is not bad. It doesn't raise interest rates very much. It doesn't cost taxpayers much. The problem is debt gets out of control when it grows faster than the economy forever. It's just like a family. If your debt is growing faster than your income forever, it's not sustainable. And for most of the period after World War II, the debt was about 40 percent of GDP, which most economists considered sustainable. It didn't raise interest rates very high, and the interest costs as a share of federal spending were manageable. 

The problem is now we've gone from 40 percent to 100 percent, and we're going much higher. If that happens, the dangers are, in a basic macroeconomic angle, higher interest rates. Because the more savings the government borrows, the less savings are available for everyone else to borrow. And that'll bid up interest rates and reduce investment. But what becomes even a bigger issue is how Washington's even going to be able to borrow that much money. Is there enough savings for Washington to even lend? And if they are able to borrow it, are the interest costs going to be so high that we could have a situation where 50 percent or 80 percent of your federal taxes are just paying interest on the debt rather than getting anything of value?

Gillespie: What about the idea that long, persistent, and growing national debt decreases long term economic growth?

Riedl: Absolutely. Again, modest debt doesn't make much of a difference. But, if you think of it, there is a certain pool of savings in America and in the global economy. That savings usually would be borrowed for home loans, car loans, business loans, investment to grow the economy. But the more the government borrows this money, the more they soak up the savings. And instead of spending on investment, they spend it on consumption. They're going to give it to seniors to consume. 

There's going to be fewer money for home loans, car loans, student loans, and business loans. Ultimately, because investment is the lifeblood that drives the economy, when you starve the economy of investment dollars, you're going to get less business investment. It's going to create fewer jobs. There's going to be lower wages and lower growth. And you could argue we've already seen this. Japan has a debt of 200 percent of GDP. Their economy has been a basket case for 30 years.

Gillespie: Both the federal government and the Federal Reserve System are ostensibly independent. They've just said, "OK, well, we're just going to keep printing money. We're going to create money out of thin air." Is that also unsustainable?

Riedl: Yes. In fact, of the growth in debt over the past decade or so, about $4 trillion to $5 trillion of it has essentially been funded by the printing press. The Federal Reserve's holding of Treasury bills, which they essentially buy with printed money, has gone up $4 trillion to $5 trillion. The Fed is actually looking to unload that $4 trillion to $5 trillion. But if they didn't, let's say they keep printing money, you're just going to get hyperinflation. 

The [Modern Monetary Theory] MMT crowd says you can always just print more money and the debt goes away. You can't expand the money supply by tens of trillions of dollars without creating significant inflation. My worry is long term. There's going to be a lot of pressure in Congress to go that direction. [It's] what's called fiscal dominance, when interest rates are set more to keep borrowing costs low than to stabilize the economy. That's my worry.

Gillespie: What is driving the debt? What is driving persistent deficits?

Riedl: The debt up until now has been driven by all sorts of factors. When you go from $3 trillion to $27 trillion, there's going to be a lot of blame to go around. We've had Social Security and Medicare costs rise. There have been wars, tax cuts, just yearly runaway spending. The pandemic cost about $5 trillion. But moving forward from where we are now, there's one answer: Social Security and Medicare. Over the next 30 years, the Social Security and Medicare systems will run a shortfall of a $116 trillion.

Gillespie: As we mentioned, we're looking over the next 30 years at $119 trillion in total deficits. It's all Social Security and Medicare.

Riedl: The long term budget is roughly balanced if you take out Social Security and Medicare deficits. We do not really have a budget problem. We have a Social Security and Medicare problem.

Gillespie: In your book you mention that there are specific episodes where things cost a lot of money. It's fascinating. After 9/11, there wasn't the type of spike there was after the 2008 financial crisis. There was a massive blowout of debt finance spending. And then there was, of course, COVID. Broadly speaking from 1960 to 2022, spending was 20.4 percent of GDP. 

So the government is spending 20.4 percent of the equivalent to the economy; revenue average over that same time was 17.4 percent. So that explains where we're at now. But you're saying going forward, it's going to get worse. And it's almost all because of old age entitlement.

Riedl: Right. You mentioned revenue has averaged 17.4 percent of the economy since 1960. It's projected to rise above that depending on whether or not we extend the 2017 tax cuts. Revenues are going to be 18 percent or 19 percent of the economy over the next 30 years. That's above average. 

The problem is spending is going to jump all the way to 30 percent of the economy under the rosiest scenarios that the CBO can come up with. So people can have their own value judgments, like, "Well, I think revenues are lower than they should be." But if you're just looking at the moving variable driving deficits, it is 100 percent above average spending. There is no below average revenues projected for the next 30 years. We're going to have the highest sustained revenues in American history under the baseline. But it can't keep up with spending jumping 10 percent of GDP.

Gillespie: One of the things that you talk about in your book of charts—you have a piece  recently at The Dispatch that talked about this—is that this is not a Republican or Democratic issue. It is both parties. How do Democrats tend to spend money? And then how do Republicans tend to spend money?

Riedl: Democrats like to do big bursts when they get a new presidency. For instance, Barack Obama came in, spent trillions of dollars on stimulus, then did Obamacare. The next year, you get this big burst of activity. And then it was similar with Joe Biden. Biden comes in, spends $4.8 trillion in new legislation in 20 months, which is remarkable.

Gillespie: And as remarkable as that is, he came in promising $11 trillion in new spending. So he got halfway there.

Riedl: He got halfway there in 20 months. And, who knows, had the Democrats had a good election year in Congress, they could have gone further. Democrats not only do these bursts, but Democrats also are the defenders of the status quo with entitlement costs. The quiet driver of deficits is Social Security and health care costs rising 6 percent or 7 percent a year. And Democrats are the adamant party that says we can never touch that. So even if they weren't passing their bills, that Social Security and Medicare 6 percent or 7 percent a year buries us.

Gillespie: So what about Republicans? How do they jack up spending?

Riedl: Republicans talk a good game. But if you take a look at 2017 and 2018, Republicans had the trifecta. They had the House, the Senate, and the presidency. They didn't reform entitlements at all. There was a little bit of push to repeal Obamacare that failed. There was no Social Security reform, no Medicare reform, no Medicaid reform. Instead, they came in, cut taxes, and busted the discretionary spending caps with a 13 percent hike in one year. 

When Republicans get the trifecta, when Republicans control the government, the first thing they want to do is reward their constituents. They're not thinking in terms of deficit reduction. They're thinking in terms of handing out benefits to constituents, whether it's big defense hikes, big discretionary hikes, or tax cuts. You don't get the fiscal spinach from Republicans when they control everything. They consider it time to party. Republicans need to be judged by their actions, not their rhetoric. You listen to Republicans give speeches, "We're going to balance the budget. We're going to reduce wasteful spending, and we're going to cut waste, fraud, and abuse." It's all empty rhetoric. If you look at Republicans, not only is their past record terrible, but their current proposals to reduce the deficit don't even reduce the deficit. Every Republican presidential candidate has an economic plan that increases deficits, every one of them.

The House Budget Committee released a budget blueprint that was entirely gimmicks. The Freedom Caucus, for all their talk, has released no actual blueprint to how to balance the budget. In fact, Republicans take 75 percent of spending off the table. They say, "We're not going to touch Social Security, Medicare, defense, veterans, and interest." They immediately take 75 percent off the table. So it's hard to trust a party that cuts taxes, increases spending, and then moving forward takes 75 percent of the spending off the table and won't tell us where they'd cut the other 25 percent. I think you need to judge them by their actions, not their empty balance the budget rhetoric.

Gillespie: Are there Democrats who are more serious about fiscal responsibility?

Riedl: There are some. What are the modern equivalent of blue dog democrats? The blue dogs were wiped out under Obama. There is a quiet group of Democrats, about two or three dozen of them in the House, that are trying to work with Republicans kind of under the table on budget process reform, Social Security and Medicare reform. They're very quiet about it. 

In the Senate, you have [Sens.] Joe Manchin [(R–W.Va.)], Michael Bennet [(D–Colo.)], and Mark Warner [(D–Va.)]. There are some Democrats who at least talk a better game than even Republicans. But there hasn't been, of course, much action. The Democrats who are reasonable on this issue are unfortunately overshadowed by the loud progressives who cost their party any credibility when you have [Sen. Elizabeth] Warren [(D–Mass.)], [Sen. Bernie] Sanders [(I-Vt.)] and [Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D–N.Y.)] demanding $40 trillion in spending.

Gillespie: How important is the presidency when it comes to increases or decreases in spending? 

Riedl: The president cannot cut spending himself or herself. The president does not have the full power of the purse. And that's why I think sometimes presidents get too much blame when spending rises. When they tried to cut spending, Congress wouldn't cut it. That being said, you can't cut spending without the president being involved. The president has to sign the bills. And the president also has the bully pulpit to frame the issue. If presidents would actually invest political capital in spending cuts, they can create the framework in order to help us get there. They can't do it themselves. But again, the problem is we haven't really had a serious fiscal conservative president in memory. Not only are they not a help, they're usually a barrier to spending cuts.

Gillespie: The budgeting process that comes out of Congress was reformed in the mid-'70s or early '70s. People in Congress don't follow it. Is that part of the problem?

Riedl: The 1974 Budget Act has been neutered into oblivion. One way to think about how it works is every year Congress is supposed to pass a budget. They never do.

Gillespie: And they're supposed to pass a budget before that budget year starts.

Riedl: Right, they're supposed to pass the budget in March for the following October 1. 

Gillespie: How many times does that happen?

Riedl: Rarely. And then after that, you're supposed to pass 12 appropriations bills that actually fund the programs. The first problem is the appropriations bills only fund discretionary spending, which is 30 percent of the government. The budget process takes 70 percent of spending on autopilot out of the process. We're talking Social Security, Medicare, anti-poverty programs, Medicaid, farm subsidies. They're not even part of the budget process. They're just set aside on permanent autopilot. 

Congress spends all year tearing itself apart over the remaining 30 percent that's discretionary spending. And then you have situations like now where we're almost six months into the next fiscal year, and we still don't have discretionary appropriations for this year. We're still just running last year's numbers on autopilot. So the '74 Budget Act simply doesn't work anymore. If its goal is to help Congress set priorities, make tradeoffs, and shape a holistic view of the budget, it's nonfunctional.

Gillespie: What gave rise to the '74 Budget Act? And does that have any lessons for how we might reform things today?

Riedl: The '74 Budget Act resulted primarily from Nixon trying to impound money. There was a huge constitutional crisis under Nixon, where he was trying to impound money that had been already appropriated by Congress. Impoundment means the spending has already been signed into law and the president says, as chief executive, I'm not spending the money. 

Gillespie: What was he trying to not spend money on?

Riedl: That I do not know right now. But the Supreme Court essentially shot down impoundment and said, if the law says to spend it, the president doesn't have a choice. That's why the Budget Act was called the Budget and Impoundment Act. But also what was happening back then is the budget was expanding. We were just past the Great Society. You had huge new government programs and a totally unwieldy process. It was just kind of all funded on an ad hoc basis. So the combination of the Great Society and impoundment drove the '74 Budget Act.

Gillespie: Is there anything that might spark a reform of the budgeting process?

Riedl: The challenge right now is everybody in Congress knows the process is broken. The debt limit, the government shutdowns, that often motivates members to say that this is no way to run a country. We keep having debt limit crises. We keep having government shutdown crises. The problem with budget reform that we've run into is there have been a lot of commissions in Congress and a lot of working groups and a lot of special blue ribbon lawmaker commissions. Nearly every reform they come up with dies because somebody's ox gets gored. Some committee is going to lose power, whether it's that the Appropriations Committee is going to lose to the Budget Committee or that the Budget Committee is going to have to give power to Appropriations, or the Ways and Means [Committee] is going to lose some authority over some of their entitlement programs. 

Budget process starts out idealistic and good government, and it ends up devolving into a turf war between members over who can control what, and the whole system falls apart. One way of doing it, potentially, is enact reforms that don't go into effect for five, seven, eight years so that members who are voting on it don't have to worry that they won't be the committee chairman anymore.

Gillespie: What's the role then of public opinion? In your theory of social change, does it come from people protesting bad budget processing and things like that?

Riedl: You know, I have a sign up in my office. I believe it's a quote that says, "Do not think that public opinion doesn't matter in the long run. It's the only thing that does matter." And ultimately, I have worked 20 years trying to adjust public opinion because when I worked on the Hill, I worked for six years in the Senate as chief economist of Sen. Rob Portman [(R–Ohio]). And when you're working in Congress and you talk to lawmakers, they will tell you the same thing. We know all these problems. We know it's unsustainable. But if I try to do anything about it, the voters will kill me. 

So one of the reasons I left the Senate was I'm like, "OK, if everything comes down to public opinion because lawmakers are just weather vanes, we have to fix public opinion." The challenge addressing public opinion on deficits is nobody believes it and nobody feels it. And they've been hearing concerns of deficits for a long time. But they don't feel it as much. I mean, there's been a little bit with interest rates. My fear is that we're not going to get real budget reform until the pain starts to hit us hard enough that people feel it.

Gillespie: And that will be inflation. 

Riedl: Inflation, rising interest rates, the bond market cutting us off, stock markets falling, and the danger, of course, is by the time you've gotten to that point, it's too late to fix it in any way that's not totally brutal. But I have spent 25 years trying to motivate people, even looking for a Ross Perot type or something to motivate people. 

One of the reasons it's harder to get people motivated on the deficit now than, say, in the 1990s is in the 1990s, the deficit was smaller, and you could fix it by reforming programs that didn't matter as much. Today, the deficit is $2 trillion and driven almost entirely by Social Security and Medicare. It's really hard to motivate people to address the deficit when they realize that's the ox that's going to be gored. It's going to be Social Security, Medicare, and middle-class taxes. You're not going to be able to tweak your way to this like you did in the 1990s.

Gillespie: Before we go into what is to be done—and I want to talk about some of the proposals that you've articulated over the years—let's talk a little bit about Trump and Biden. 

By the time George W. Bush left office, he ended up adding $10.3 trillion in deficits, beyond what was expected. Obama added $4.6 trillion in a 10-year budget window. Trump in four years had $3.9 trillion extra budget deficits that he added to the baseline. Biden, I guess, in his first 20 months, because it's still going on, added $5 trillion. So does that tell us anything essential about these people or the parties they represent?

Riedl: You don't just want to look at what the deficit was when they arrived and when they left because you might inherit a budget where everything is on autopilot getting better or everything's on autopilot getting worse. But you can further divide up these changes between legislation vs. the economy. And if you do that, Trump comes out a lot worse. Trump actually added $7.8 trillion in deficits, but he was able to save $3.9 trillion through faster economic growth, which cut the impact in half.

Gillespie: Obama came in with a terrible economy, and I think we would both agree that the actions that came after him slowed down the recovery. But by the time Trump came into office, things were picking up.

Riedl: Sure, exactly. Especially in those first three years, the economy overperformed. 

Gillespie: And Biden also inherited a bad economy.

Riedl: So if you go by just legislation and you further take out the economy, Bush's legislation added $7 trillion in borrowing, Obama $5 trillion in borrowing, and Trump nearly $8 trillion in just four years. So what you see is that Bush and Trump added more than Obama, and much of Obama's debt was actually extending the Bush tax cuts. But Biden really came in all guns blazing. Like I said, he added $4.8 trillion in 20 months. He added as much debt in 20 months legislatively as Obama did in eight years. And so I think things are getting worse. That's why I'm concerned about a Trump-Biden rematch, because you have two presidents with two of the worst fiscal records of the past 100 years.

Gillespie: What is the option beyond despair when we look at the 2024 election? 

Riedl: I think one hope you can have on spending in deficits is gridlock. I think if you get a full Republican government or a full Democratic government, you're going to see massive deficits. If you get gridlock, you might have some hope that even if neither side cares about the deficit, they don't want to increase the deficit the other way. Republicans don't want spending hikes. Democrats don't want tax cuts. 

But other than that, the real danger coming up after this election is we have an epic fiscal cliff coming next year. Next year, the tax cuts expire and are up for renewal. That's about $4 trillion over 10 years. The recent Obamacare expansion that Biden signed expires. The discretionary spending caps expire. The infrastructure bill expires, and we hit the debt limit. So it's going to be interesting to see whether we have a unified or divided government in a situation where we have $6 trillion or $7 trillion in renewals coming, and whether or not they're going to try to constrain or blow this out of the water.

Gillespie: Talk a bit about how gridlock has operated in the 21st century. Because Bush came in and ultimately, by 2004, he had a united government. But in 2006, he lost control of the House and the spending slowed down toward the end of his term. Obama, as we discussed, basically elected a Republican Congress. There was a massive increase and then a kind of flatlining. It didn't quite work that way with Trump, although he also managed to fracture control of Congress. But is gridlock viable and is it good? 

Riedl: Historically, gridlock is the only thing that has reduced spending and deficits. I can go a little earlier to the 1990s when President [Bill] Clinton came in and spent his first two years trying to nationalize health care. It was a disaster. Newt Gingrich comes in 1994, and all of the sudden, the entire debate is over how to balance the budget. And four years later, the budget was balanced. Clinton was dragged kicking and screaming by Republicans into this. Similarly, as you mentioned, Obama in the first two years did about $1.5 trillion in stimulus bills plus Obamacare. And it was after Republicans took the House in 2011, the next six years were six of the best years we've had. There was very little expensive legislation passing. It was Boehner and Obama at each other's throats on spending, and you had legitimate deficit reduction. 

It kind of fell apart under Trump after Trump lost in 2020 because you had the pandemic. And also, the Trump Republican Party had changed so much that they were happy to team up with Nancy Pelosi to increase spending, even outside the pandemic. Like I said, even when Republicans had unified government, that version of the Republican Party was happy to make deals with Democrats that said, if you give us a 10 percent hike in defense, we'll give you a 10 percent hike in domestic discretionary spending. So, we went off the rails there. But historically, the GOP has worked really hard to constrain Democratic presidents. That's probably been the top formula for spending restraint: a Republican Congress constraining a Democratic president.

Gillespie: Let's talk about the '90s, because we managed to have balanced budgets for three years in a row? 

Riedl: '98 through '01.

Gillespie: So, what happened there and how did that come about?

Riedl: There's a lot of mythology about the 1990s balanced budgets. There is a certain view that it was a massive amount of fiscal consolidation. The fiscal consolidation was actually pretty minor.

Gillespie: What do you mean by fiscal consolidation?

Riedl: Policies to reduce the deficit. You had President Clinton raise taxes in 1993, but it was only about half a percent of GDP out of a deficit that was about 5 percent of GDP. You had some modest spending restraint. But the real reason the budget got balanced and balanced faster than anybody predicted was, a) the end of the Cold War created a defense dividend. Defense spending absolutely plummeted from about 5 percent or 6 percent of GDP down to 3 percent of GDP. 

At the same time, you had a big revenue bubble in the late '90s when the stock market was on fire. The defense savings and that temporary revenue bubble provided about 90 percent of the deficit reduction in the late '90s. If you want to give Clinton and Gingrich credit, it was basically staying out of the way. They didn't pass big, expensive bills. They didn't do big tax cuts. They didn't do big spending hikes. They stayed out of the way and let the defense savings happen and the revenue bubble happen.

Gillespie: And Gingrich never talked about that partly because he didn't want to be seen as 

cutting defense spending.

Riedl: Right. He didn't mention that. But, you wonder then, why did the budget become unbalanced in 2001? Well, all the savings were due to a revenue bubble and defense cuts, and then you have the revenue bubble burst and then you have 9/11. The revenue bump went away at the same time the defense savings went away. You were suddenly right back to where you were 10 years earlier.

Gillespie: And then you have the added kind of secret future costs by expanding Medicare.

Riedl: And then the Bush spending spree. I think one thing that gets lost on a lot of individuals is when Bush ran on compassionate conservatism in 2000, that theme was a repudiation of Newt Gingrich. Because there was a concern that Republicans were being too aggressive cutting spending, even though they really didn't successfully cut that much.

Gillespie: Yeah, but they cut defense spending.

Riedl: Right, they didn't cut social programs at all. But there were government shutdowns. So Bush was trying to repudiate that. Bush was announcing in 2000, unlike meanspirited Newt Gingrich, I'm compassionate and I'm going to increase spending. And he did. We had no Child Left Behind, farm subsidies, a huge highway bill. Domestic discretionary spending was rising about 8 percent or 9 percent per year in addition to the defense programs. So Bush made it clear at the outset in 2000 that he was going to be a big spender. 

And then 9/11 just kind of put it on the acceleration. Even if there were some fiscal conservatives in the Bush White House, the prioritization of 9/11 defense funding meant that they didn't really didn't have much leeway to play hardball with Democratic spenders. In fact, when you talk to people from the Bush White House, they will tell you, we didn't want to increase discretionary spending as much as we did. But we needed our Homeland Security and defense funding from Democrats, and we had to give them what they wanted.

Budgeting is about tradeoffs. It kind of always reminds me of [the saying], "If we can afford to go to the moon, we can afford to do something else." No, because if you do A, you cannot afford to do B.

Gillespie: In 2021, we were spending $59,188 per household. Currently it's at about $48,000. So it's come down from the peak, but not that far.

Riedl: [It's] still much higher than before the pandemic.

Gillespie: Yeah. And then it's projected in another 10 years or so to be up to $55,000. That kind of figure, does that crystallize for people that government spending is out of control?

Riedl: It does. When I talk to audiences, they can't believe the numbers. I say the government is spending at the peak of the pandemic $59,000 per household and right now about nearly $50,000 per household. And I frame it to audiences [like this]: Imagine what you could do if you were able to keep even a fraction of that money for yourself in the first place without sending it to Washington. And that crystallizes it for people just how big it's gotten. I remember when George H.W. Bush was president, we were spending $27,000 per household. That seemed high. And that's all adjusted for inflation. 

But I think that should crystallize it for people. And it reminds me of a report and Wall Street Journal op-ed by my colleague at the Manhattan Institute, Judge Glock, who showed how much of people's taxes come back to the same household in benefits. I think he was estimating around 20 percent directly come back to the same household and much of the rest of it indirectly comes back to the same household. And it's really kind of dumb to send this money to Washington, have them cut an administrative haircut, and then send it right back to you.

Gillespie: This is current spending, the way the federal budget is split up: 34 percent currently goes to Social Security or Medicare, 19 percent goes to anti-poverty programs, 13 percent to defense, 10 percent to interest, and then there's 23 percent in another category. What are some of those?

Riedl: The other category? Basically education, infrastructure, border security, health research, housing. All that kind of stuff.

Gillespie: This is only going to get bigger, but a third of federal spending is Social Security and Medicare.

Riedl: And that's going to go way up. 

Gillespie: And interest will likely go up if interest rates continue to climb and things like that. In the early '60s, defense spending was close to half of federal spending. And it's not so much anymore because we spend less proportionately on defense, but it's also because we spend so much on everything else.

Riedl: We've gone from one-half to one-eighth of the budget on defense. 

Gillespie: What do we do in order to pay for this type of spending? Can we tax our way out of it?

Riedl: It is mathematically impossible to tax our way out of this. In order to stabilize that long term, you need non-interest savings that gradually rise to about 6 percent of GDP outside of interest. I did a report last year on taxing the rich that showed that, realistically, you can only get about 1 percent of GDP and higher revenues. If you set all upper income taxes at the highest possible rate at the revenue maximizing level, and you adjusted for the economic damage that would create, you get 1 percent to 2 percent of GDP. 

Just to put a finer point on this, if you seized every dollar of every billionaire's wealth in America, their home, their car, their stocks, their vacation houses, their yachts, their businesses, you could fund the government one time for nine months. That's it. If you assessed 100 percent tax rates over $500,000 a year, you still wouldn't balance the budget. So taxing the rich should be on the table because everything needs to be on the table, but when I hear lawmakers say all we have to do is tax the rich and it'll pay for everything, that is spectacularly, mathematically false.

Gillespie: In your book you show actually that according to data from the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD)—and the OECD are advanced economies. The United States actually has the most progressive tax code. We are taxing the rich. The rich pay a higher percentage of government revenue in the U.S. than in any other country. 

Riedl: Substantially more. And it's because we tax the rich at a similar level as other countries. In fact, our highest rates are actually higher for other countries. But we tax the nonwealthy so much less than other countries that it makes us more progressive.

Gillespie: The upper 10 percent of income earners in the U.S. pay about 90 percent of the taxes.

Riedl: The highest 20 percent of earners pay 90 percent of all income taxes. The bottom half collectively pays zero.

Gillespie: So does that mean in order to balance the budget, we have to tax the middle class or we have to tax a wider range of income earners?

Riedl: Here's the part that makes me really unpopular with all our audiences. If you try to build a stable budget for the next 30 years—and I don't mean stable, I don't mean balance the budget, I mean just one small enough deficit that the debt share of GDP stays at about 100 percent—you can't really get there on spending cuts alone. You have to cut that 5.5 percent of GDP. You can't really find 5.5 percent of GDP in reasonable cuts. You're going to have to have some revenue. And if taxing the rich is limited, there's going to be higher middle-class taxes. This is just a mathematical reality. 

As I explained in my Dispatch article, you can't stabilize the debt with revenues at 17 percent of GDP. Spending is going to 30 [percent]. You're not going to get spending all the way down that low. And you can't get there from taxing the rich. So, middle-class taxes are going to rise.

Gillespie: Yeah, so what's the median household income now? $76,000? Something like that? What will they be paying in taxes 10 years down the road vs. now?

Riedl: It remains to be seen. I can't give a number. I think people are surprised to hear, though, that the median earning family in America today pays an effective income tax rate of 2 percent. And people say I pay more than that. 

If you actually adjust for what they actually pay with the child credit, and sometimes the [Earned Income Tax Credit], the middle earning family pays an effective income tax rate of 2 percent. And then they pay an effective payroll tax of about 10 percent when you count the employer portion. So they do pay payroll, but it's going to go up from that. And the question eventually is, are we going to do most of this through payroll taxes and a value added tax, which is like a national sales tax, or through income taxes?

Gillespie: And in Europe, that is everything, right?

Riedl: We are the only country in the OECD that does not have a value added tax. I would like to keep it that way.

Gillespie: Why? What's bad about a value added tax?

Riedl: Value added taxes are actually more efficient than income taxes, if you're starting a government from scratch, because you're taxing consumption. The danger, though, is value added taxes are a cash cow. Once you start with a 1 percent rate, it's so easy to raise it to higher rates and collect a huge amount of revenue. And my concern is, I wouldn't mind replacing the income tax with a value added tax, but I don't want to get to the point where families are paying large income taxes and large value added taxes because then you're burying families. A lot of conservatives have said if we're going to switch to a consumption tax, the income tax needs to be destroyed, burned, and salted the Earth first.

Gillespie: The income tax is not that old, right? In a way, we could conceivably do that.

Riedl: It's 100 years old, the income tax. But yeah, if you're starting a government from scratch, your bets are better. 

Gillespie: Can we grow our way out of this?

Riedl: No. And this might be news to Vivek Ramaswamy, who said that he was going to balance the budget by growing the economy 6 percent per year, which was absolutely absurd. 

The first challenge is, we can't get that much additional economic growth, because when you look at the economic growth rates of the '50s, '60s, and '70s, most of that was rising population. The population is set to pretty much level off for the next 30 years. We're going to have almost zero growth of the work force population, which means all the growth is going to have to come from productivity. You're not going to get 4 percent, 5 percent, or 6 percent growth entirely from productivity. Mathematically, that doesn't work. You would need to do it like we did in the past with people. But the other side is, while economic growth does reduce the deficit, it also increases Social Security, Medicare and Interest costs. 

Your Social Security payment is tied to your lifetime wages. The faster the economy grows, the more your wages grow, the bigger benefits you get. On Medicare, higher income is associated with higher health care consumption. Also, faster economic growth typically brings higher interest rates. And when you're in debt that much, every point interest rates rise has an enormous effect on deficits. So don't get me wrong, faster economic growth is very good and it can modestly reduce the deficit. But as long as entitlement spending and interest costs rise alongside, you're not going to get a huge deficit reduction.

Gillespie: So why don't we just cut Social Security and Medicare? Social Security was a New Deal program. It was a Depression-era program. Medicare was called the last act of the New Deal by President Lyndon Johnson. Those are programs that were designed for an economy in which you were more likely to be poor if you were an old person, if you were past retirement age. You also didn't live as long. Wouldn't it make sense to say, OK, what needs to be on the table, first and foremost, is this massive growing blob of space?

Riedl: Mathematically, it's going to have to come from Social Security and Medicare. Thirty years from now, Social Security and Medicare are going to be running a deficit of 12 percent of GDP. Just these two programs are going to be running a deficit of 12 percent of GDP if you count the interest costs that they create in the budget. 

You can't raise other taxes and cut other spending enough to close 12 percent of GDP gap. The challenge, of course, is even if everything is on the table, most savings are going to have to go with the actual policy driving it. The problem is the politics. You have Republicans even tripping over themselves to say they won't touch Social Security and Medicare because the voters will kill them, because there is this perception that you're just getting back what you paid into the system, which is absurdly, patently false.

Gillespie: How is that false? Are you getting more back?

Riedl: Social Security benefits are designed to become substantially more generous each generation, even adjusted for inflation. On Medicare, it's even a bigger gap. The typical retiring couple today gets back triple what they paid into Medicare. And that's after you've adjusted in the net present value. So you can't say, "Oh, [it's because of] inflation and interest." No, even adjusted for all that, you get triple. But there is this perception that there's a savings account for me in Washington that is just going to send me back by money. 

The reality is seniors get back more than they paid in. The programs are becoming more generous every generation. And baby boomers today are the richest generation, the richest age group, in the richest country in the world in the richest time in history. As a matter of fact, retiree income over the last couple decades has grown four times faster than the income of workers paying the benefits. So, Social Security and Medicare right now largely redistribute money up the income ladder, not down. Yes, some seniors struggle and you can design reforms. And I've designed reforms that protect struggling seniors. But it's really absurd that seniors making $1 million a year after retirement are still getting generous benefits.

Gillespie: This was also an issue with COVID relief. You had families making up to $400,000 cashing checks from various benefits for COVID. We've completely lost the distinction between even just median income families, much less struggling families, and people who can afford it. 

Riedl: Right. And keep in mind, when we're talking about senior income, seniors making half a million a year or $400,000 a year after they retired, this isn't even wage income. This is interest and Social Security income. These are net worths far into the millions.

Gillespie: But, the youngest boomers are 59, I guess, right? So, they're moving into retirement and they will die. And I think about that on an almost daily basis as a boomer myself. But they're going to give a lot of that money back to people, right? They have so much, they're going to leave it to their kids. Does that affect these calculations?

Riedl: It can, over time. I mean, if you assume a certain degree of inheritance, especially simply housing values. Boomers have so much home equity, and frankly, they're hanging on to the home equity a little too much to make the housing market difficult for their kids. But eventually, when they go, those are going to be inherited by their kids. And those huge 401(k)s are going to be inherited by their kids. That should make it a little easier. I'm Gen X. That should make it easier for Gen X and millennials to get by with less. And I've been telling people for years, if you're a Gen X or a millennial and you're assuming that Social Security is going to be there forever in its current form with no savings, you're just not paying attention. You should save as if Social Security and Medicare are a bonus because the programs will exist, don't get me wrong, but I wouldn't take the little mailing you get from Social Security with your future benefits too literally.

Gillespie: How do we activate Gen X, but especially millennials and Gen Z, to get motivated about this? How do we reach them to start creating that movement for social change on this policy?

Riedl: That is the million dollar question. It's kind of remarkable that we are facing the largest intergenerational transfer of wealth in world history. And while young people are often voting on the trendy issues of the day or not voting at all, seniors are going to the polls in record numbers and robbing them blind. And young people are completely oblivious to the fact that seniors are robbing you blind while you're voting on side issues. You have to get their attention. And one thing that I try to point out to younger progressives, and I haven't had a lot of luck, is whatever priorities you have in the future—not having your taxes go up, family leave, child care, health care, climate safety net—you're going to get squeezed. 

There is no way we can pay for any of the priorities you have. If we're giving $116 trillion in extra benefits to senior citizens, the math doesn't work. One thing that a lot of conservatives think about with motivating young people is climate change. Young people are so focused on climate change, even though it's something that's 30 to 40 years off—you don't feel it now, and some years it gets a little better and some years it gets worse—but young people are totally attuned to these long term climate projections and their effect. 

And conservatives are often asking, well, how do we get them to focus on long-term debt projections, which is a danger to them—I don't want to say just as much as climate. I don't want to get into that debate, but it's real. And the costs that are in the system are not theoretical projections. The seniors walk among us and they have the letters saying how much they get. If there's a way we could motivate them the same way they're motivated on climate, that would be a success. But we haven't had much luck.

Gillespie: What about younger conservatives? And to be honest, I don't care about progressives or conservatives. I care more about libertarians, and they seem to be somewhat in sync with these ideas. If you're right of center, and you're not as suspicious of capitalism, or you're not as motivated by climate change, what works to grab people?

Riedl: If I knew, I would have grabbed them by now. I think there is a certain perception, at least among right-of-center young people, that Social Security and Medicare are unsustainable. I don't think you have to really convince them of that. I think you have to get them to care about it though. And when I talk to young people on the right, to be honest, they're a little too focused on Twitter, the culture war, and Trump owning the libs that you can't really get much policy focus. They get it, but they're just not motivated on it yet. And again, if I knew a way to reach them better, I'd love to do it.

Gillespie: How do you reach your own generation of Gen X? It was very popular in the '90s, as I recall, that members of Gen X were more likely to believe in UFOs than that they were going to get collective security or Medicare. Are they still keeping the faith or are they lost in the hurly burly of everyday life?

Riedl: I think Gen X now has it in their DNA to be skeptical that Social Security and Medicare are going to be there for them. When I talk to people in my generation, they're not necessarily motivated to do anything about it, because I think when you talk to Gen Xers, there's bigger things going on in the world that are getting their attention politically. There is Trump, Biden, all the culture war stuff. That's what they're voting on. But they're aware that we're facing problems.

Gillespie: The leading edge of Gen X is really going to be in the pinch point when all of this blows up. 

Riedl: We're going to be the ones hit with the drastic changes when you have to do it. But you mentioned the '90s with Social Security. That was the time to fix it. You know, the reason to fix Social Security in the '90s was not because the program was going to go bankrupt in the '90s. It was always going to go bankrupt around 2030. 

But that was the time to phase in the reforms while people were young. And we missed the window in the '90s and early 2000s to gradually phase in reforms for boomers. And because we didn't, now we're going to have to do the more drastic reforms. And as you mentioned, when there's a ratchet of benefits, we're going to be the ones being ratcheted because we didn't do the reform 20, 30 years ago when we were warned to do it.

Gillespie: Do you think we'll be in a better place fiscally, or in terms of budget, a year from now, five years from now, 10 years from now?

Riedl: We're going to be in a worse place just because I think deficits are looking to get much bigger—$2 to $3 trillion deficits. I don't see Congress going in the other direction. Things are going to get worse until either voters wake up or the financial markets cut us off. I'm really hoping it's the first option, that voters wake up, but I'm just not seeing it.

This interview has been condensed and edited for style and clarity.

• Video Editor: Adam Czarnecki
• Audio Production: Ian Keyser

The post Brian Riedl: Who Bankrupted Us More—Trump or Biden? appeared first on Reason.com.

Just 15 percent of Americans approve of the job Congress is doing. But why is it broken and how do we fix it? Those are just two of the questions that Reason's Nick Gillespie asked Justin Amash, the former five-term congressman from Michigan who is currently exploring a Senate run.

Elected as part of the Tea Party wave in 2010, Amash helped create the House Freedom Caucus but became an increasingly lonely, principled voice for limiting the size, scope, and spending of the federal government. After voting to impeach Donald Trump, he resigned from the GOP, became an independent, and then joined the Libertarian Party in 2020, making him the only Libertarian to serve in Congress.

They talked about the 2024 presidential election and the country's political and cultural polarization that seems to be growing with every passing day. And about how his parents' experiences as a Christian refugee from Palestine and an immigrant from Syria inform his views on foreign policy, entrepreneurship, and American exceptionalism.

This Q&A took place on the final day of LibertyCon, the annual event for Students for Liberty that took place recently in Washington, D.C.

Today's sponsor:

Watch the full video here and find a condensed transcript below.

Nick Gillespie: Why is Congress broken and how do we fix that?

Justin Amash: We can take up the whole 30 minutes talking about that if we wanted to. We don't know exactly how Congress got to where it is, but today it is highly centralized, where a few people at the top control everything. And that has a lot of negative consequences for our country. Among them is that the president has an unbelievable amount of power because the president now only has to negotiate with really a few people. You have to negotiate with the speaker of the House. You have to negotiate with the Senate majority leader and maybe some of the minority leaders. But it's really a small subset of people that you have to negotiate with. And when that happens, it gives the president so much leverage. 

So when we talk about things like going to war without authorization, as long as the speaker of the House isn't going to hold the president accountable and the Senate majority leader is not going to, the president is just going to do what he wants to do. And when it comes to spending, as long as the president only has to negotiate with a couple of people, the president's going to do whatever the president wants to do. So it's super easy in the system for the president to essentially bully Congress and dictate the outcomes. 

But there's a deeper problem with all of this, which is that representative government is supposed to be a discovery process. You elect people to represent you. You send them to Washington, and then the outcomes are supposed to be discovered by these representatives through discussions and debates, and the introduction of legislation, and amendments. You're supposed to have lots of votes, where the votes freely reflect your will representing the people back home. But instead, in Congress today, a few leaders are deciding what the final product is and then they're not bringing it to the floor until they know they have the votes. So there's no actual discovery process. Nancy Pelosi used to brag about this; she wouldn't bring a bill to the floor unless she knew it was going to pass. Which is the opposite of how Congress should work.

Gillespie: What are some of the ways to decentralize power within Congress? When you were in Congress, you founded the Freedom Caucus, which was supposed to be kind of a redoubt of people who believed in limited government and libertarian and conservative principles and actually even some liberal principles, but decentralizing authority. You got kicked out of the Freedom Caucus, right?

Amash: Well, I resigned from it.

Gillespie: Well, you were asked to leave. The police sirens were coming, and it's like, "Hey, you know what? I'm going to go," right? But even places like that, that were explicitly designed to act as a countervailing force to this unified Congress, how can that happen? What can you do or what can somebody do to make that happen?

Amash: Well, it does take people with strong will. I think that when we go to vote for our elected officials, when you go to vote for a representative, when you go to vote for a senator, you have to know that that person is willing to stand up to the leadership team. And if that person's not willing to break from the leadership team on a consistent basis—and this doesn't mean they have to be mean or anything like that; it just means that they have to be independent enough where you know they're willing to break from their leadership team. If they're not willing to do that, it doesn't matter how much they agree with you on the issues, don't vote for them because that person is going to sell out. There's no chance they're going to stand up for you when it counts. I think you need to have people who have a strong will, who are going to go there and actually represent you and are willing to stand up to the leaders.

Gillespie: If you are interested in Congressman Amash's commentary on contemporary issues, go to his substack Justin Amash. The tagline is: "A former congressman spills on Congress and makes the practical case for the principles of liberty." It's a great read, particularly on issues you mentioned.

Can you tell us how you discovered libertarian ideas? You got elected in 2010, which was a wave election. It was part of the Tea Party reaction to eight years of Bush, and more problems during the financial crisis and the reaction of the government to that. Where did you first encounter the ideas of liberty, and how did that motivate you to get into Congress?

Amash: The ideas of liberty are something that have been with me since I was a child. It's hard to pinpoint exactly where they came from. I think they came from my parents' immigrant experience, coming to the United States. My dad came here as a refugee from Palestine. He was born in Palestine in 1940. And when the state of Israel was created in '48, he became a refugee. My mom is a Syrian immigrant. 

When my parents came here, they weren't wealthy. My dad was a very poor refugee. He was so poor that the Palestinians made fun of him. So that's really poor. When he came here, he didn't have much, but he felt he had an opportunity. He felt he had a chance to start a new life, a chance to make it, even though he came from a different background from a lot of people, even though his English wasn't great compared to a lot of people. So he came here and he worked hard, and he built a business. When we were young, he used to tell us that America is the greatest place on earth, where someone can come here as a refugee like he did and start a new life and have the chance to be successful. It doesn't matter what your background is. It doesn't matter what obstacles you face. You have a chance here and you don't have that chance in so many places around the world. 

I think that's where that spirit of liberty came from. It was from my dad's experience especially, my mom as well, coming here as a young immigrant. So I was always a little bit anti-authoritarian as a child. I rebelled against teachers at times. I didn't like arbitrary authority, let's put it that way. When someone would just make up a rule, like this is the rule, "I just say so." Well, tell me why. 

Gillespie: Have you rethought that as a parent?

Amash: No, I mean, I let my kids think very freely.

Gillespie: As long as they follow the rules.

Amash: I don't mind when they are a little bit rebellious. I think it doesn't hurt for kids to have some independence. I encourage them to challenge their teachers, even when they think the teacher is wrong about something. I think that it's a good thing for people to go out there and not just accept everything as it is.

Gillespie: You famously, as a congressman, explained all of your votes on Facebook, which is a rare concession by authority to say, okay, this is why I did what I did.

Amash: Yeah. Actually, a lot of the people in leadership and in Congress didn't like that I was doing that because I was giving people at home the power to challenge them. Instead of just being told this is the way it is, now I was revealing what was going on.

Gillespie: You grew up in Michigan. You went to the University of Michigan as an undergrad and for law school. Was it there that you started coming across names like Hayek, and Mises, and Friedman, Rand, and Rothbard?

Amash: Not really, no. My background is in economics, my degree is in economics. I did well in economics at Michigan, but we sure didn't study Austrian economics. We didn't study Hayek. I think he might have been mentioned in one class. Very briefly he was mentioned, like there was one day where he was mentioned. But I'd say that what happened is, as I went through my economics degree, and then I got a law degree at Michigan as well, I started to realize that I had a lot of differences from other people who were otherwise aligned with me. I was a Republican. I aligned with them on a lot of things, but there were a number of issues where we didn't align— some of the foreign policy issues, but certainly a lot of civil liberties issues. 

I started to wonder, what am I? What's going on here? I just thought of myself as a Republican, and I would read the platform and hear what they're saying. They believe in limited government, economic freedom, and individual liberty. 

But when push came to shove on a lot of issues, they didn't believe those things. They'd say they believe those things, but they didn't. I've told this story before, I just typed some of my views into a Google search, and up popped Hayek's Wikipedia page. Literally, it was like the top thing on Google. So I clicked on that, started reading about them, and I was already in my mid-20s at this time. And I was like, yes, this is what I believe.

Gillespie: It is interesting because you would have been coming of age during a time when the Republicans were ascendant. But they were the war party. And we were told after 9/11 that you should not speak freely. That was kind of a problem, right?

Amash: Yeah, sure. Throughout my life, I believed in freedom of speech, freedom of thought, and freedom of expression. These are critical values. Maybe they're the essence of everything that makes this country work. The idea that we come from a lot of places—there's an incredible amount of diversity in the United States. I think diversity is always treated or often treated like a bad word these days. But it's a blessing to our country that we have people who come from so many backgrounds. Actually, the principle of liberty is about utilizing that diversity.

It's in centrally planned systems where diversity is not utilized, where someone at the top dictates to everyone else and doesn't take advantage of any of the diversity. They say no, a few of us at the top, we know everything. It doesn't matter. All of your backgrounds, all of your skills, all of your talents, that doesn't matter. What matters is we've got a few people in a room somewhere, and they're going to decide everything. And they know best because they're experts.

Gillespie: You came into office in 2011, and it seemed like there was a real libertarian insurgency within the Republican Party. But more nationally in discourse, people were tired of continued centralization, and government secrecy—famously, a lot of Bush's activities and particularly war spending early on was done in supplemental and emergency preparations, not really open to full discussions.

All of the stuff coming out of the Patriot Act, somebody like Dick Cheney kind of saying we're in control. But then Obama also promised the most transparent administration ever and plainly did not deliver on that. 

That energy pushing back on centralization and government power and government secrecy that helped bring you and other people like you to Congress seems to have dissipated. Do you agree with that? And if so, what took that away?

Amash: Yeah, I agree with that. When I was running for office, both for State House in 2009 and when I got to Congress in 2011, there was a lot of energy behind a limited government, libertarian-ish republicanism. I felt like libertarianism was really rising. There was a chance for libertarian ideals to get a lot of traction. A lot of people who used to be more like Bush conservatives were coming around to the libertarian way. 

I felt really good about where things were heading. And for the first, I'd say three or four years that I was in Congress, I felt like we continued to move in the right direction. The creation of the Freedom Caucus was kind of a dream of bringing people together to challenge the leadership. They weren't all libertarians or anything like that. There are a few who are libertarian-leaning, but the idea that a group of Republican members—it wasn't determined that it was going to be only Republicans, but it ended up being Republicans—got together and said, "Hey, we're going to challenge the status quo. We're going to challenge the establishment." That was kind of a dream that had come together. 

Then when Donald Trump came on the scene, I think a lot of that just fell apart because he's such a strong personality and character, and had so much hold over a lot of the public, especially on the Republican side, that it was very hard for my colleagues to be able to challenge him. 

Gillespie: What's the essential appeal of Trump? Is it his personality? Is that that he said he could win and he ended up doing that at least once? Is it a cult of personality? What's the core of his appeal to you?

Amash: I think he is definitely a unique character. He has a certain charisma that is probably unmatched in politics. I don't think I've ever seen someone who campaigns as effectively as he does. It doesn't mean you have to agree with all of the ethics of what he does or any of that, or the substance. 

Gillespie: To keep it in Michigan, he's a rock star. He's Iggy Pop. You may not like what he's doing on the stage, but you can't take your eyes off it.

Amash: That's right. He holds court. When he's out there, people pay attention. He really understands the essence of campaigning, and how to win a campaign. He understands how to effectively go after opponents. Now, again, I'm not saying that all of these things are necessarily ethical or that other people should do the same things, but he really understands how to lead a populist movement. 

Gillespie: How important do you think in his appeal is a politics of resentment, that somehow he is going to get back what was taken from you?

Amash: The whole Make America Great Again, there's a whole idea there of "someone is destroying your life, and I'm going to get it back for you." That's a very powerful thing to a lot of people. For a lot of people out there, it is more important to get back at others than necessarily to have some kind of vision of how this is all going to work going forward. It's not appealing to me because I understand, we live in one country. We have people of all sorts of backgrounds. And if you're going to persuade people, you have to be able to live with them and work with them, regardless of your differences. It doesn't mean that you can't be upset, be angry about what some other people are doing or saying. But there has to be an effort to live together here as one country. We have too much in common in this country.

Gillespie: Michigan was a massive swing state when he won the election. You voted to impeach Donald Trump. What went into that calculation? What was the reaction like to that? That's a profile in courage.

Amash: Well, I don't think that's my most courageous vote, not even by a long shot. 

Gillespie: What was? Naming the post office after your father?

Amash: I didn't name any post offices after my father, to be clear. I think that the courageous votes are the ones where everyone is against you. And I don't mean just one party. It's one thing to vote for impeachment and half the country loves what you did and half the country doesn't like what you did. That's, in my mind, not that challenging or difficult. It's when you take a vote and you know that 99 percent of the public is going to misconstrue this, misunderstand it, be against it. The vote is going to be something like 433 to 1 in the House or something like that. Those are the tough votes. And there are plenty of those votes out there, where you're taking a principled stand and you're doing it to protect people's rights. But it's not the typical narrative. 

Gillespie: Is there an example that, in your legislative record, you would put forth for that?

Amash: One of the ones I've talked about before is, they tried to pass some anti-lynching legislation at the federal level and everyone's against lynching, obviously, but the legislation itself was bad and would actually harm a lot of people, including harming a lot of black Americans. There was this idea that this legislation was good and parroted by a lot of people in the media. They didn't read the legislation. In fact, I complained about it and it mysteriously did not pass both houses of Congress after I pointed out all the problems with it. It did pass the House of Representatives. Did not pass both Houses and get signed by the president. Mysteriously, the next Congress, they reintroduced it and rewrote it in a way that took into consideration all of my complaints, and they tried to pass it off like they were just reintroducing the same legislation. I pointed out: They actually saw that there was a problem here and then tried to pretend like, "Oh, we're just passing it again." Those kinds of votes are tough because when you take the vote, everyone thinks you're wrong. Everyone. And you have to go home and you have to explain it. Those are the ones that are tricky. 

Back to the impeachment point. Look, I'd impeach every president. Let's be clear. I'm not the kind of person who's going to introduce impeachment legislation over every little thing that a president does wrong. When you introduce legislation to impeach a president, you have to have some backing for it. It can't just be one person saying, let's impeach. 

For example, I would definitely impeach President Biden over these unconstitutional wars 100 percent. But the idea of introducing impeachment legislation suggests there's other people who will join you. Otherwise, it's just an exercise in futility. You introduce it. It doesn't go anywhere. It just sits there. If we're going to impeach people, there has to be some public backing, which is why I try to make the case all the time for these impeachable offenses, why some legislation should be brought forth. But you've got to get the public behind you on that kind of stuff. I think that every president should be impeached, every recent president at least. 

Gillespie: If Trump's populism, national conservatism, and politics of resentment are sucking up a lot of energy on the right, how do we deal with the rise of identity politics and a kind of woke progressivism on the left? Where is that coming from? And what is the best way to combat that?

Amash: I think a lot of it is just repackaged socialist ideas, collectivist ideas. The idea of equity, for example, is really like a perversion of the idea of equality. In most respects, when people say equity, they mean the opposite of equality. It means you're going to have the government or some central authority decide what the outcomes should be, how much each person should have, rather than some system of equality before the law, where the government is not some kind of arbiter of who deserves what. When you think about it, there is no way for the government to do this. There's no way for the government to properly assess all of our lives. This is in many ways the point of diversity: we're all so different. There's no way that a central authority can decide how to manage all that. 

For many of the people on the woke left who say they care about diversity, they don't care about diversity if they're talking about equity. These things are in conflict with each other. The idea that you're going to decide that someone is more deserving than another based on some superficial characteristics. As an example—I've talked about this and I've talked about this earlier in this conversation—my dad came here with nothing as a poor refugee. Yet, in a lot of cases, he might be classified as just a white American. Even though he came here as an extremely poor Palestinian refugee. The New York Times, for example, classifies me as white. They might classify someone else who's Middle Eastern as a person of color.

I think a lot of this is just, someone is making decisions at the top saying, "Well, we think this person is more like this or that, and we're going to decide they're more deserving." But they don't know our backgrounds. They don't know anything about us. They don't know who deserves this or who deserves that. No central authority could figure that out. The best thing we can do is have a system of equality before the law, where the law treats everyone the same. It doesn't give an advantage to any person over another person. It may not be fair in some sense to some people. Some people might say, "well, that's not fair." 

Some people, instead of having a dad who's a Palestinian refugee, their dad was some Silicon Valley billionaire. Some person might have a dad who was a professor. Another person might have a dad who worked at a fast-food restaurant. You don't know what the differences are. The government can't figure all of this out and say who is more deserving than someone else. So I really think that the woke left, when they pushed this idea of equity, they're really pushing against diversity. They're saying, a few people at the top are gonna decide who's valuable and who's not valuable, and they're not going to actually take into consideration any of our differences, because no central authority could take it into consideration.

Gillespie: You are a libertarian, not an anarchist. You believe there is a role for government, but it should be obviously much more limited. You are also an Orthodox Christian. Could you talk a little bit about how in a world of limited government, a libertarian world, the government wouldn't be doing everything for everybody, but placing organizations and institutions like the church or other types of intervening, countervailing, mediating institutions would help to fill the gaps that are left by the government?

Amash: The place for these organizations is to help society, not to have government deciding it. When you have some central authority deciding it, you are really limiting the opportunities for the public. You're limiting the opportunities for assisting people. You're deciding that a few people are going to make all the decisions, rather than having a lot of organizations and a lot of individuals making decisions. 

When you centralize it all, there are a lot of people who are going to be missed, a lot of people who are going to be ignored. When you let the marketplace work this out, when you let private organizations work this out, there is a lot more opportunity for people who need help to get help. I think that's really important.

Gillespie: There was a libertarian wave—I like to call it a libertarian moment—which I think we're still living in, but we don't understand, rhetoric aside. What are the best ways to get libertarian ideas and sensibilities in front of young people, to really energize Gen Z? The world is getting young again. How do we make sure that these people are hearing and understanding and maybe being persuaded by libertarian ideas?

Amash: For one thing, we have to meet them where they are. I spend a lot of time, for example, asking my kids, which social media kids use these days? They're in a lot of places that the adults aren't. We might be on Facebook—I mean, my generation, your generation. Other people are on X or Twitter. And there are other people on TikTok. 

You have to meet them where they are and if they're not on X and—it's still weird to call it X—if they're not on X and you are, well, they're not hearing your message. That's an issue. That's something we all have to work on. I'm probably reaching primarily Gen X and millennial people on X, and I'm probably not reaching Gen Z people as well. I think we need to work on getting them in those places.

Also, I think people who have libertarian instincts, people who want to present libertarianism and have an opportunity, go speak to students at schools. I used to do this as a member of Congress. I used that opportunity as much as I could. When schools would invite me, I'd say, "Yes, I'd be happy to come to the school to speak to the students" and take all their questions and be open about being a libertarian. Tell them frankly that your philosophy is libertarianism and talk to them about it. I think it's great. A lot of teachers end up surprised. I've had many teachers walk up to me and whisper to me, "I think I'm a libertarian, too," after having the conversation because they have stereotypes about what it might mean to be a libertarian and you have the opportunity to change their mind.

Gillespie: I have seen a lot of chatter. I have actually helped publish a lot of chatter that you may be running for the U.S. Senate from the mediocre state of Michigan. Do you have an announcement that you would like to make?

Amash: As a part of the national championship-winning state of Michigan this year, I am exploring a run for Senate. The [Federal Election Commission] FEC requires me to state that I am not a candidate for Senate, but I am exploring a run for Senate. 

If you're interested in checking it out, go to https://exploratory.justinamash.com/. I'm giving it serious thought. I think that there is an opportunity for libertarians this year, and there's an opportunity to win a Republican Senate seat this year. So I'm looking at the Republican primary. I think this is probably the best shot libertarians have had in a long time in the state of Michigan.

This interview has been condensed and edited for style and clarity.

Photo Credits: Bill Clark/CQ Roll Call/Newscom; BONNIE CASH/UPI/Newscom

• Video Editor: Adam Czarnecki
• Audio Production: Ian Keyser
• Motion Graphics: Isaac Reese
• Cameras: Students For Liberty

The post Justin Amash: 'I'd Impeach Every President' appeared first on Reason.com.

In January, the Senate Judiciary Committee dragged the heads of Meta, TikTok, and X, formally known as Twitter, to Washington to charge them with exploiting children by allegedly addicting them to social media that sexually harms them, drives them to eating disorders, and even kills them. The Spanish Inquisition vibe of the proceedings reached a crescendo when Sen. Josh Hawley (R–Mo.) demanded that Mark Zuckerberg apologize to the families of children for the "harms" supposedly caused by Facebook and pay compensation out of his personal fortune.

But is social media really that bad for kids? And is the solution being pushed by Democrats and Republicans alike—universal age verification for all users of the internet—even technically feasible without shredding the First Amendment, destroying privacy, and creating major security issues? The answer is a resounding no, according to Shoshana Weissmann, director of digital media at R Street, a free market think tank, and author of "The Fundamental Problems with Social Media Age-Verification Legislation." Reason's Nick Gillespie interviewed Weissmann in Washington, D.C., in early February.

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Nick Gillespie: So we're talking right at the start of February. And two interesting things related to this question of social media, its effects on kids, and the need to verify the ages of who's using social media, etc., just happened. 

One is that the state of Utah, which had passed a law mandating age verification, pulled it after being threatened with lawsuits from a couple of groups. And the other was a spectacular Senate hearing about trying to protect kids from online exploitation and things like that that ended up at one point in a series of shouting matches, including Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg arguing with Sen. Josh Hawley [R–Mo.]. What was your sense of that Senate hearing? And does it encapsulate something important about the way this general debate happens?

Shoshana Weissmann: For people who watch a lot of Senate hearings in general, you'll know that they're getting a little bit less professional. They'll ask them yes-or-no questions that are impossible to answer. If you understand that nuance is a part of law, it's really disappointing. And I've watched a lot, but this was the worst I've seen. It was just so wildly unprofessional and about a serious issue, so it should have been professional. 

I don't blame the audience for cheering, but I blame the senators and Senate staff for not stopping that from happening. Hawley is often unprofessional, and he was extremely unprofessional demanding that Zuckerberg pay for the people who have faced harm here. It was just so bizarre. It was just weird, really. And that doesn't solve anything. He's not solving any problems. He's not approaching the issue with any seriousness. People say a lot that it's all about sound bites, but you could really, really see that's all this was.

Gillespie: Zuckerberg did not come off well in that either, did he?

Weissmann: No, I didn't care for how he came off. I think he could have done better in the hearing at a lot of points. I mean, I don't think that companies are perfect by any means. But Zuckerberg, I think, came off kind of strange at some points.

Gillespie: What about the Utah law? This is not a right or left issue. Both Republicans and Democrats, conservatives and liberals and progressives are talking about stopping the internet from exploiting children in all sorts of ways. Utah was applauded for this law. But then it was going to be challenged. And they yanked the age-verification law.

Weissmann: It's really, really bad. Everyone warned them—the senators, the governor. I love the governor. I adore Spencer Cox. But it's crazy to me that he's getting behind this stuff because it's so unconstitutional. I mean, you can have your policy disagreements, but this is objectively very, very unconstitutional.

Gillespie: How was it unconstitutional?

Weissmann: Oh, man, so many ways. So, the First Amendment [includes the] right to anonymous speech. If you have age verification, you have face scans, you have to show your government ID. I actually just submitted seven pages of comments on the new proposed rules to accompany the law before I found out that it was going to be pulled. So I'm like, "Oh, well, I have this already, I'll submit it. It'll be useful."

[The law] said you can use the last four digits of your social. You can require people to scan their faces and get their government IDs. Just really invasive stuff. I mean, America's in a really bad cybersecurity position. Everyone is hacked all the time. But even if it wasn't, if you're submitting that stuff online, you have reason to believe your speech is no longer anonymous, because that's the government enforcing that. That harms our right to anonymous free speech, which has been upheld many, many times at the Supreme Court.

Also, there's a compelled speech issue that's a little bit smaller. But if you're going to go online and say, "Hey, I'm not happy in my marriage. I want to see what people know about divorce, marriage counseling." And then you think your spouse might realize who you are, posting about that, you're not going to want to do that. Or if you think you have a rare disease or HIV or something, you might not want to have your name tied to that.

Gillespie: That is part of the larger question; in trying to childproof the internet, we end up shutting down all kinds of speech. Very few people would challenge that. But again, to go back to the '90s, The Simpsons had a running gag. In almost every conversation, somebody would shout, "Will someone please think of the children?" It's kind of come back to that in internet discussions because people are sour about social media. Everybody's down on Facebook and Instagram and Twitter. These are hellscapes that are killing kids, exploiting kids, and making the rest of us miserable. So, it seems like the scope for regulating them—the speech, the content, and the business models—has really changed. And this is really where the social media age-verification push is coming from. And people like Brian Schatz, the senator from Hawaii, have joined it and a bunch of other people in the Democratic Party or even the progressive left have joined with Republican conservatives to say this is a good thing. 

Before we go into your work on it, Schatz is a big fan of the Protecting Kids on Social Media Act. And this is kind of similar to all of this stuff going on. It would set a minimum age of 13 to use social media apps and would require parental consent for 13- through 17-year-olds. It would also prevent social media companies from feeding content using algorithms to users under the age of 18. So that's kind of the legal landscape that's playing out at the federal level and at the local level. 

You have written a series of pieces over the past year that are grouped at RStreet's website: "The Fundamental Problems with Social Media Age Verification Legislation." I want to ask you as a starting point—a lot of this legislation is premised on the idea that people under 18 are suffering vast, obvious, measurable harms from being online. Is that really incontrovertible? Or is that a question?

Weissmann:  It's definitely a question. Especially because the evidence is mixed. And kids are individuals. Some kids use tools. Some kids don't. And it depends on the tool too. You always have to work with your kid to figure out what's healthy for them and what's not. Some kids are doing unhealthy things on social media, and that's parenting. The government can't solve that. Someone using social media for five hours might be building a business or showing local businesses how to put themselves out on social media. Or they might just be depressed and something else might be going on. But so much of the stuff going on right now resembles the video game debates, the TV debates. Kids should be probably behind screens less, but that comes down to parenting and getting them engaged in other things. But there's definitely a mix. 

As a kid, I used social media to find out I had fibromyalgia. I only know that because I found an online forum where someone said, "Hey, you're getting sick all the time and you have endometriosis. You might have fibromyalgia." And I also started my career online, by adding elected officials on Facebook, which sounds funny now, but that's actually how I started my career. And I'm terrified of closing the door behind me, of saying to the next generation, "You can't make what you want out of life because elected officials want to treat you all the same." That's really wrong to me.

Gillespie: A number of major psychological groups have said that it is not clear that being on social media is harmful to young people. But let's pretend that it is for the remainder of our conversation because you have written pretty powerfully about the fundamental problems with social media age-verification legislation. And let's just start with part one of your series. The headline of the article is, "The Technology To Verify Your Age Without Violating Your Privacy Does Not Exist." What do you mean? How do you know that? What are the implications of that?

Weissmann: So I looked through it. I even had age verifiers reach out to me because they didn't like what I was saying. So I'm like, "OK, tell me about your software. Tell me how it's different." They're like, "Oh, we'll just scan your face." Uh, what? So every time you want to post free speech online, you have to have your face scanned.

Gillespie: This kind of reminds me of when people say, "Well, you know what? If immigrants just carried their work papers with them, then we wouldn't have to worry about illegal immigration." But when you require anybody to carry papers, everybody has to carry papers.

Weissmann: Right. The way they find out if you're underage is by checking your age and your credentials. Basically, the way that age verifiers seem to want to do this is some sort of government ID plus face scans. And it can't be a static picture, it has to be a live picture. So, every time you want to post free speech criticizing the government, asking about marital problems, asking about disease, whatever it is, you're going to have to have your government ID, and the internet's going to have to scan your face, which is really, really, really invasive. Because obviously, everyone lies with a checkbox.

With government IDs or credit cards alone, you could just fake your parents. There's a great Simpsons line where Bart's like, "Hey, Lisa, is this dad's credit card number?" And she's like, "You know it is." Kids memorize that stuff. And they would with government IDs if that was all that's required, [like] social security numbers, which are also not secure. They're leaked everywhere. So it just creates massive cyber risk. None of these are safe. None of these protect your privacy. And this massive, massive risk is all to verify the age of children where parents could just not give them phones or give them phones with very, very limited access or block stuff on their computer. There are ways around this that put the parents in charge.

Gillespie: In a different section of your series, you write that if you are requiring this type of data to be put together, then it's going to be in a database somewhere that foreign governments or enemies of America can get it. Because we're in a panic over TikTok, right? Every new dance craze goes directly to the Beijing basement of the Communist Party in China. So this obviously presents a massive risk because you're pulling data, which then is hackable. There's a related concept that you've written about called data minimization. How does that factor into this?

Weissmann: I love data minimization. This is the kind of person I am now where this excites me. Just less of your stuff online. The less stuff you share, the safer it is. So I don't always like that platforms require as much information as they do, but sometimes they're doing it in pursuit of something like giving you a better product or whatever it is, but forcing them to require this is nuts. And like you were saying with TikTok, in Utah, Gov. Cox had said that he thought TikTok was a real security threat, but his law would have required them to collect face scans and IDs and Social Security numbers. And whether you think other governments are an issue or our own is an issue, you should be like, "Hey, maybe we don't create this massive risk for other people to get our data." And that's part of data minimization. The less that you put out there, that you share around, the less worry you have to have. It's a simple principle, but it's a really important one when everyone is hacked constantly. I've been in so many data breaches. We all have.

Gillespie: What does it mean that we're being hacked all the time, but it doesn't really seem to change what we do?

Weissmann: It's kind of bad. I think we as a society need to figure it out a little bit more. But basically people can log into your stuff, so you should have two-factor authentication. It's not perfect, but if you have one of those code generators, that's the best method. And it stops people from logging into stuff. I know that people keep trying to log into my Instagram, and then [Instagram] will email me saying, "Hey, if you want to change your password, here's the link." And they don't have access to my email. So that's good. So I can handle it there. World cyber security isn't in a great place. And all this stuff puts it in a worse place. But you want to try to make things safer in the environment we live in. Put less of your information out there, especially sensitive stuff about your location. IDs are super sensitive. Social Security numbers, you really don't want to share those with everyone. 

Gillespie: Although, social security numbers, it's kind of amazing. If you go back to the '50s and '60s, people mostly on the right—paranoid people who turned out to be kind of correct—believed the Social Security number was going to become effectively a national ID; it's required everywhere. And you can buy them by the boatload, right?

Weissmann: Oh, yeah. I think mine was leaked in the D.C. health breach. So, I'm screwed there. Like, that's not nothing for me. And you can find databases of them online, unfortunately, pretty easily.

Gillespie: Some of the articles that you've written talk about how age-verification methods in their current forms threaten our First Amendment right to anonymity. I think on some level, those of us who remember our history classes from grammar school or read something about The Federalist Papers, we understand that in a profound way, America was founded on anonymous speech. But nobody likes anonymous speech now, right? Anonymous speech is bad, right? So why should we care about our right to anonymity?

Weissmann: It terrifies me that there are so many lawmakers saying—even Nikki Haley has said this—"Oh, you know, every user should have to verify their identity online." OK, so we don't get whistleblowers anymore. No more whistleblowers. We're opposed to that. The Federalist Papers, like you're saying, are anonymous. The NAACP, their members were anonymous, back when everyone hated black people. And that was a really, really dark part of history. But thankfully, the First Amendment protected them. And they had a right to anonymous association. 

And it's important for the same reason today: The government doesn't like when people disagree with it. And sometimes you have to do so anonymously in order to avoid certain levels of scrutiny there. Not to say you shouldn't be held accountable for your opinions or whatever, but anonymous speech has always been an important part of American history. And there are centuries of precedent saying that, yes, we have the right to anonymous speech under the First Amendment. So if you infringe upon it—it's not saying you can never infringe upon it—but you have to have a really, really good reason. It has to be narrowly tailored. And these means just aren't.

Gillespie: It's fascinating to me, again, thinking back to the '90s, because the parallels are ominous and disturbing and ubiquitous, but AOL was popular. America Online, when it was on its move to becoming the largest ISP, its whole selling point was that you could come up with a handle that was kind of your name or you could make something up. And they really pushed back against attempts to crack the anonymity of their users. AOL was great because it was anonymous.

Weissmann: The history there is so interesting. I love Jeff Kosseff's book on anonymity. I learned so much through that. I did not realize the extent to which we have precedent here. And also the way it worked with AOL trying to not unmask users and trying to protect users—I don't want to get too nerdy—but the internet history around this stuff is really, really fascinating about how big a deal it was back then. We shirk a bit about anonymous speech, but it is really important. Sure, some people use it wrong, but there are studies that show that some people actually use it better, and they're using anonymity in actually really healthy ways. So our gut assumptions on it aren't always right. 

Gillespie: I wrote a piece for Reason about this in the late '90s called "Child Proofing the World." And one of the metaphors I use—and I had young kids at the time—was, just because I have to childproof my house doesn't mean the world has to change everything because I have kids. And that may sound callous, but it really isn't.

You also have talked about how the age-verification methods threaten our First Amendment rights beyond anonymity. So how do they cut down on our free expression rights?

Weissmann: So a big thing is chilling speech, because you have the pure anonymity issue where you're actually not anonymous. They took my ID, they took my face scan. Let's say their cybersecurity is immaculate. If you don't believe that, you're still not going to want to post the stuff that you would otherwise anonymously. So there's a chilling speech issue. Kids have First Amendment rights, and most content on social media is First Amendment–protected in a way that would apply to kids too. It's not narrowly tailored just for the stuff that we say kids maybe can't look at. It's really, really, really broadly tailored. 

There's also the First Amendment right for content to be seen by users. People might think it's silly. "Oh, Twitter doesn't have a right to be seen by people who want to access it." OK, well, what about someone criticizing the government? The government could just say, "Oh, well, they don't have the First Amendment right to be seen by people." And then you can kind of see why that's a dangerous perspective and why it's not supported by First Amendment jurisprudence. There's a First Amendment right of parents who don't care about what their kids are doing online, or are OK with what their kids are doing online, to not have to deal with those barriers to speech. So it's just up and down. It violates the First Amendment.

Gillespie: One of the most powerful parts of your work in this series is simply the headline "Age Verification Legislation Doesn't Do What Legislators Say It Will." Summarize that article.

Weissmann: So when I talk to people about age-verification law, there's a lot of different issues they bring up. One is exploitation. They're worried about predators reaching out to children, and that's very reasonable.

Gillespie: But is the internet mostly a child exploitation racket?

Weissmann: Definitely not, but it's there. There are definitely people who want to try to do that stuff. It's not to say the government doesn't have a role there, but parents really do need to work with kids to make sure they understand the risk and what to say, what not to say. It's silly, but when I was on Neopets and chatting with people, my dad was like, "Never tell them where you live." And I was like, "Haha, I'm saying I'm in Texas. They'll never know where I am." But maybe that wasn't the most ingenious thing, but it was still a good perspective to have, to just be a little bit more careful about that stuff.

Gillespie: We hear a lot about sex trafficking and about child sex trafficking, and it obviously happens, and that is horrible. And we need to figure out ways to minimize that or get rid of it completely. But is there a reason to believe that child exploitation, however you define it, is large and growing on the internet?

Weissmann: I'm not sure, exactly. The reports are up, but I know that a lot of it is duplicative. Which is good, that there are more reports of the same thing. That's not an issue. It's just hard to measure with a lot of unlawful content in general. I'm not sure about how sexting for kids rose or where it's at, but I think that that did make it harder, especially when online girlfriends became a thing. Then you really didn't know who was behind the screen. So I think it is something to combat, and I'm not sure exactly how it's growing, but there does seem to be somewhat of an increase of it especially from kids who don't know what to predict, who never lived through the Nigerian prince era, that kind of stuff.

Gillespie: But you say age-verification legislation won't do what legislators say it will. What do legislators say it will do, and how does it fall short?

Weissmann: So what I was saying was that the big reason that legislators and other people just want to stop kids from using social media is exploitation. Another issue is that they just don't want kids posting, that they think that they'll become addicted. The last piece is they don't want them to access content that they don't want them to, whether it's liberal content or too conservative content. 

But here's the thing: None of these laws prevent kids from viewing anything. They just prevent kids from posting. So [for platforms that don't allow] kids under 13 or that have age verification, it doesn't stop them from viewing the content. So if you think they're addicted to scrolling, that's not going to solve anything. And if you think that they shouldn't be viewing the content there, it also doesn't solve anything. So they'll say it's kicking kids offline. But really, you don't have to log into a lot of these platforms to see stuff. I don't ever log in to Reddit, and I read constantly on Reddit. TikTok, you don't need to log in. It makes it a little easier for you.

Gillespie: And, if we may—the cameramen are the ones who gave me this information—on Pornhub, you don't have to log in to view it. 

Weissmann: That's a good point. It's true. You don't have to login, and they're not blocking you from accessing these sites in the homepage way or in the clicking-through way. Tons of these sites you don't have to log into, and you're still viewing the content from any sites you'd like. So they're saying it's going to stop kids from using social media without parental approval, but it really doesn't. 

Gillespie: A lot of regulation is supposed to be about content, but then it ends up moving into business models. And this was certainly true of proponents of net neutrality. Ultimately, we're trying to say that phone companies and ISPs had to do business in a particular way. So it's really kind of a business issue. 

A lot of this legislation says, "Kids under 13 can't use social media. We're going to ban them somehow." But then it will say for kids under 18, sites can't serve up content to them using algorithms. And algorithms have kind of replaced Satan as the vague, sinister, ubiquitous spirit that is threatening our world. Why is it wrong to tell websites or service providers that you can't use algorithms in general? And then why is it misguided that you can't use algorithms for kids under 18?

Weissmann: So there have been a few less popular proposals that completely banned algorithms. You can't do that. Time order is an algorithm. [Those proposals assert that] the only way to keep people safe is raw data. Even an RSS is ordered. 

Gillespie: I mean, that would just turn us all schizophrenic. We would be like in A Beautiful Mind, where it would just be a display of data flowing around us.

Weissmann: That's scary. That's going to be harmful. They don't understand how algorithms work. And then it's like, well maybe time ordered is OK. And then you have to remind them, what about reverse time order? Oh, I guess that's OK too. And it gets really, really silly. They even don't want to target kids through algorithms with their interests—so if a kid likes soccer, you can't show him soccer stuff? That's stupid. If a kid wants to learn more about math, you can't target based on their interest in math. It's just ridiculous. 

I think people overestimate the issues with algorithms. I know one issue is that if you're into unlawful stuff or bad stuff, that it'll show you more of that too. And I think it's good that platforms are working on mitigating that because even, oddly enough, on Tosh.0, there's a segment about that, about a series of videos that were basically showing young girls doing cutesy things. And then you realize it wasn't made for other young girls. So, of course, YouTube should not show people those kinds of content when they realize what it's really about, even just from a normative standpoint. But in most cases, the algorithm just knows I like marmots. So hey, here are marmots, Shoshana.

Gillespie: And there was an earlier fear—this is going back maybe a decade—that "I started out watching puppy videos and then 15 minutes later, I signed up for ISIS." And most studies that looked into that did not actually bear out the idea that there's a quick or even long-term radicalization algorithm that is being widely applied or used or people are falling into. 

Weissmann: People seek out the stuff they want to seek out, and the algorithm just helps them seek it out more. Algorithms are math. When you're mad at it, you're mad at math. And it's silly to me. 

Gillespie: You also write that regimes that run age verification through the government would allow prosecutors to make children federal criminals if they lie about their age.

Weissmann: Oh, this was fun. That was the Schatz bill, the [Protecting Kids on Social Media Act]. And I do respect Schatz a lot. I think he's trying to do the right thing. I don't think he's doing it right, but I think he's trying. And a lot of what I've seen that he's saying, I kind of respect more than I do from other elected officials, but it's really bad.

I mean, when you lie to the government, like that can be a federal crime. He thought, maybe as a better way to protect data, it would be better for the government to handle age verification. But that means if kids lie to that entity, whether it's run through a government contractor or an agency, you can be a federal criminal because you're lying to the government. And sure, we don't prosecute kids a lot, but government sometimes starts enforcing stuff that it didn't used to enforce. And you don't want to add a new law to the books that makes it possible for kids to become federal criminals for trying to login to YouTube. That's not wise policy.

Gillespie: At the same time, services should be free to demand whatever they want from people, right?

Weissmann: Sure. I don't like when they want a lot of my information, but if that's what they want, they can suffer the business consequences.

Gillespie: For people watching this on video, they may have seen I was drinking out of a 7-Eleven cup. I went to 7-Eleven to get coffee this morning, and they asked for my phone number. I was like, "No, I don't want to give you my phone number." And I was going to walk away, but they were eventually like "OK." I understand why they're doing that. And I also understand the power of getting more personal information. One of the things that sites can do more than regular businesses is tailor more stuff directly to you. But that's a negotiation.

Weissmann: You have some say there, and it's not mandatory. And some companies realize that users don't want that. So they try to step away. 

Gillespie: With age-verification systems, you mentioned Neopets. My younger son was really big into Club Penguin. It no longer exists. But it was kind of a social media, a very walled garden for kids to use to do stuff and interact and have online adventures. Were there services that did a really good job that are directed toward kids that protect that? And are there examples to be learned there from how we might change the way kids interact with the internet?

Weissmann: Yeah, I liked Neopets a lot. I actually made a few internet friends, and my friends were into it. I forget the names of [my pets] and they're dead now. They're all dead. I haven't fed them in so long. I haven't even dug their graves.

I like the way Neopets operated. I always felt pretty safe there. I'm sure they could have actually done some more nudges like, "Hey, remember not to give up personal information to strangers," but overall they did good. Club Penguin is a really good example because I remember the big trend of trying to get banned from Club Penguin, but they did a good job of banning people being inappropriate, and then it became a meme. So it was a bit of a Barbara Streisand effect. I know Instagram wanted to do Instagram kids, and then everyone flipped out over it so they couldn't. But I actually think that's a good idea. Some safer areas where you still warn kids about stuff, but maybe there's a little bit less risk for them.

Gillespie: What's the role of the companies here? Broadly, people who are offering goods and services, have they fallen down on their job to kind of proactively preempt this type of legislation? What do they need to be doing better?

Weissmann: I think the big thing is that they should be coordinating to make parental controls easier. Genuinely, I think that's the big lesson here. I'm not sure it would have stopped the legislation, even. I know that parents are sometimes overwhelmed by all the choices, but it would be nice if parents had one set of controls that made it a little bit easier, because you can't have device-level filters, platform-level filters, app store filters. But it would be nice to give something to parents that's a little bit easier here just to manage, just to show them how stuff works. Because just like with any technology, it gets complex. I'm online way too much, so I know how all this stuff works, but make it easier for parents. I'm not sure that companies have exactly failed, but they really could be doing better. 

Gillespie: And a clear part of this is kind of a public relations war. Again, going back to the '90s, cable TV didn't really become a fully national phenomenon until the late '80s and the early '90s. And then, under Bill Clinton, Janet Reno, the attorney general, went on a jihad against cable TV because it was showing too much sex and violence. And it obviously wasn't, but out of these sets of concerns came things like the VHS, which was a technology mandated into every new TV. And then the idea was that we're going to rate TV programs and then parents will set their TVs to a certain level so the kids can't block it. Nobody used it. 

But it seems like companies now could do a better job of combating the negativity. But they're part of the problem, aren't they? Both in terms of not seeming to care, (maybe, maybe not), but also colluding with the government. One of the things that is very different now from the '90s is in the wake of revelations about Twitter and Facebook and other companies not just relying on the government or rolling over for the government but asking the government to say, "Hey, would you moderate our content?"

Weissmann: It's disgusting. It's regulatory capture. And they know what they're doing violates the First Amendment, but it benefits their business. I do understand on a level: You're a business, your job isn't always to fight for freedom. But at the very least, you shouldn't be proactively fighting against freedom. I get if government pressures you too much, you might have to roll over a bit. But rolling over is different than what a lot of these companies are doing. 

I was very grossed out by how Snapchat and Facebook were just like, "Oh, please regulate us" and put it sort of on other people. And it's just silly. Snapchat, I also personally have never had a lot of respect for. They used to tell politicians to go on Snapchat, that's where the kids are. But [Snapchat] knew that's not where you're going to reach people for politics. That was just not ethical business.

Gillespie: You're a woman. Instagram has gotten a lot of heat, partly because of reports that were leaked from within Facebook saying it has a problem with certain types of adolescent female image issues. Do you buy that? Is that a serious threat to the idea that free speech should dominate the internet? 

Weissmann: So what's wild to me is people flip out over this. As a kid, all my friends had eating disorders. Every friend. And it wasn't because of Instagram. It was because of models and magazines and TV.

We were all always worried about being thin enough, and social media didn't exist then. It was all because of the images we were shown. Whereas now there's a lot of heavier women on Instagram who look great, and they're showing, "Hey, you don't have to be perfect." It's not about weight and cellulite. It's actually really nice to see that there are girls showing, "Hey, if you look like I do, here's how to dress, here's how to feel good about yourself."

Gillespie: One of the great celebratory points of the '90s was the end of the mainstream. And particularly there was a lot of discussion about ideals of female beauty. You know, ideals of male beauty don't get the same kind of attention. But in both cases they expanded vastly. So instead of saying, "OK, you can be Raquel Welch or Twiggy," there's an infinite gradient of beauty and of being comfortable with yourself. And we seem to be occupying that world in reality now. And people are like, "We've got to shut this down. Something's gone terribly wrong."

Weissmann: Yeah. Instagram's tried to get rid of a lot of the eating disorders stuff, but there's a lot of really good, healthy content. There's unhealthy content too. But the mix is way better than it was when I was a kid. If there was a heavy woman on TV, everyone noted that she was heavy, and that was the end of it. Everyone had the same body shape, they didn't have many curves. And when they did, it had to be Britney Spears or nothing. You couldn't have too much of a waist and you couldn't have too much of a butt. But now, online, it's really proliferated. All different kinds of women showing, "Look how I'm beautiful." I think that's really nice. 

Gillespie: Do you think perhaps that's the problem? Not that certain new forms of hegemonic body types are shown, but that actually anybody can do anything and that's what's freaking people out?

Weissmann: Oh, I'm sure that there's a level of that, of, "It's not like when I was a kid." I think there's a real aspect of that in here. But in general, it just baffles me that everyone's worried about body positivity online when that wasn't a thing when I was growing up. Every young girl was worried about being thin enough from the time we were like 8 years old. All our friends talked about being thin, and I'm sure that there are still issues like that, but the people they have to look up to are a lot broader. I just have to think that a piece of this is people not understanding that, or people thinking this is different from when I was a kid.

Gillespie: One of the other things you write about is how age-verification laws don't exempt VPN traffic. But that traffic can't always be detected. Explain what a VPN is and why these are important.

Weissmann: So people can use VPNs to make it seem like they're in a different place. So me in D.C., I could be like, I'm in Iceland or I'm in Utah.

Gillespie: One of the things that everybody talked about when VPNs happened, it meant that if you're a political person in China or in Iran or whatever, you can use VPNs in order to actually kind of access the internet and speak freely. 

Weissmann: Totally. There are a lot of great use cases, like to evade bad government and oppressive government. The case isn't anonymity that the normal person uses it for. It's for Netflix. It's definitely Netflix. Or to just try to avoid a little bit of extra tracking. You're not trying to be anonymous. You're just trying to have less stuff acquired.

Gillespie: And I've noticed too VPNs are something that went from being kind of celebrated because this is how we're going to help people in authoritarian countries find freedom in the internet and speak to evade what used to be called the great firewall of China and stuff like that. Then it became, "OK, this is kind of cool because I can watch Netflix anywhere around the world from the U.S. feed." And now it's that the only reason to use a VPN is to engage in some kind of criminal or sexually perverse behavior.

Weissmann: Exactly. Meanwhile, my friend's fiancé is a normal guy; he doesn't do politics. He's a trainer, and he likes VPNs because he's just like, "I don't want stuff tracking me." And so that's the normie use of it in America. 

Gillespie: So these age-verification laws don't exempt VPNs. Why is that a problem?

Weissmann: So this is a really fun rabbit hole because it makes these laws impossible. So, VPNs can convincingly make it seem like I'm in Iceland or Utah or wherever. You can detect a lot of VPNs. Not all, but you can detect a chunk of VPNs and realize, OK, this is a VPN. So in those cases, if you're in Utah and you're a social media company that operates there, what you would have to do to comply with the law is say, "You're using a VPN. We need to verify your age. I know this is just a Utah law, but to be on the safe side, in case you're in Utah trying to get around the law, we have to verify your age." That would violate California law because in California, if you treat VPN traffic differently, you're in violation of the law. So there's impossible compliance at that level.

Let's say you really can't detect it, like you're using acceptable methods. And I talked to different VPN blockers and VPN providers, and they basically said you're not going to be able to detect all VPN traffic. So let's say I'm in Utah. They're supposed to verify my age. And they think I'm in Arkansas or maybe someplace without one of these laws. Maybe I'm in Maine. So it appears that I'm in Maine. I'm really in Utah. I get around the law. They don't verify my age, and I'm a child. In that case, the social media company that failed to verify my age would be liable. That's nuts. It's impossible to comply with that. And there's just this sense of, "Oh, sure, you can figure it out," but no.

Even worse, the law applies to Utah residents. How the heck do you know if someone's a Utah resident? You literally have to verify everyone's age. Because if a child in Utah is in D.C. now and logging on, well, the IP address is D.C., or the D.C.-area because IPs aren't exact either. So they don't verify the age, and now they're liable. You create just absolutely impossible compliance. 

And to drive the point home too, with Netflix, they fail to detect a lot of VPNs. Netflix has massive incentive because of its licensing agreements with various companies and various shows. Basically, it's really bad for them if people can get around these. So that's why they block VPNs to make sure that they're upholding their licensing agreements. So if even those guys can't do it, then how the heck are all these social media companies going to be able to do it when the incentive is even higher to use VPNs to get around these laws?

Gillespie: Let's talk a little bit about R Street, the place where you work, and your journey to what you do and how you think. What is R Street?

Weissmann: So R Street is a free market think tank. We were founded on insurance policy, which is fun. I actually really enjoy talking flood insurance now, but we do everything from energy to cyber security, tech policy, obviously, licensing reform, a lot of justice reform. I love my job. It's a lot of fun.

Gillespie: When you say free market, what does that mean? 

Weissmann: So, a lot of people think libertarian, but we're not always libertarian, and we don't mind government if it solves a problem narrowly tailored. Or if the government's already involved with something, we're not going to let the perfect be the enemy of the good. We're fine with incremental reforms, and we're fine with turning a bad system into a better one. 

Gillespie: What's a place where government is working well, where the government regulations or structures in place are delivering a good product or service?

Weissmann: That's a very good question. I think that government really does have a role in things. I just don't think it often executes well, like with cyber security. I think there are legitimate roles for government. I just don't know that it's doing well. There are different standards across different agencies. It doesn't help businesses know what they should be doing. It even sometimes creates adverse incentives not to report breaches. So we want to fix that. We want to make sure that people feel comfortable reporting breaches and that even if they're penalized, that we're not harming them for telling the truth there. 

In justice reform, I mean, we need police but there are ways it could be working better. So we like justice reform. We like bail reform. And, there are a lot of places experimenting with different models to figure out what works better. But we have important rights that are often violated by police. We want to try to stop that and give police the tools they need. 

Gillespie: When you think about the whole suite of what R Street and other free market groups are talking about, in many ways there are issues that were not being talked about 20 years ago en masse or 30 years ago, things like occupational licensing reform, zoning reform, things like that. This seems to be a kind of golden age. These are being seen as useless, or whatever good they might have provided, they're now really choking down the economy as we live today. Do you think that's accurate, that there are reasons to be very optimistic about a certain type of policy reform change? 

Weissmann: Oh, yeah. It's been crazy to me to see the broad interest in licensing reform from everyone across the political spectrum. And they're excited about it. Like when I go to Congress to talk about it, they're like, "Yeah, let's talk licensing reform." That's crazy, I love it. Or even energy permitting reform. It's really exciting that that's a thing. And they might be messing it up a little bit in Congress.

Gillespie: With occupational licensing, one of the things is that, say, in Ohio, you have to do 2,400 hours of barber college. But you only have to get six hours of training to be a cop. Nobody responds to that by saying we should make the cops do 2,400 hours. It's more like we just need to rethink how we license and certify people and whether or not, in many cases, that's a role for the state or for private organizations.

Weissmann: I just love that there are so many elected officials interested in this. I mean, [former] Gov. Doug Ducey and I, in Arizona, we became friends because of this, because he was really big into licensing reform. And we hit it off. And we've been friends for like seven years because of it, which is just such a funny thought to have that there's elected officials like really, really interested in narrow regulatory reforms.

Gillespie: Is there a generational component to the conversations that R Street is involved in like tech policy and online policy? And at that tech hearing or the child exploitation hearing we heard, there are always these moments when people like Lindsey Graham, who clearly has never dialed a telephone or used a cellphone or been online or driven his own car for decades, is railing about technology. And it's just kind of like "OK, boomer" moment. But it's not that easy, right? It's not just, old people are the problem and they have to get out of the way for young people. How do these issues of regulatory control of common use media play out? 

Weissmann: So it's actually really varied across issues. One interesting thing is that with licensing reform, it's very Gen X and younger more interested in it. And even older than that, not that they're not interested, it's just not their thing. But with tech policy, the lines are all over. Like, [Sen.] Ron Wyden [D–Ore.] is one of the best people on this, and I adore Ron. 

Gillespie: Ron Wyden, the Oregon senator, is one of the authors of Section 230. You mentioned Jeff Kosseff. His work we respect in common. He wrote a book about Section 230 as well as anonymous speech and then, most recently, defending misinformation. I'm just very curious to see where he goes next.

Weissmann: Oh, I know. He keeps ruining things though, because when he writes about it, it becomes a thing. And I'm like, just stop writing. He's older, but he's really smart and he knows what he's doing, and he's thoughtful. And I don't always agree with him, but I get where he's coming from. But then you have younger members like Hawley, who is atrocious. I mean, he's not even trying. There are other younger members who just don't know what they're doing. I actually once had a meeting with a staffer for [former Rep.] Madison Cawthorn [R–N.C.] on licensing, and he's like, "We want to force the states to do what we want on licensing." And I was like, "Hey, there are a lot of constitutional issues here, a lot of functional issues." He's like, "Yeah, but we just want to force this." And I'm like, "OK, this isn't going to work." But it's not a young or old thing. It's how deep are you going to get into the issue. There are members who are more serious and less serious on this stuff, and it's really just not an age thing.

Gillespie: At Reason, in the '90s and beyond, we used to talk about the real axis being control and choice. I guess that still exists. Somewhat related to that is the sense that we've gotten to a point where the Republican Party or the Democratic Party win an election because the other party had just been in control. People are like, "I don't want that. We'll try this." 

There's a real breakdown of consensus it seems in many aspects. You see that in presidential elections that tend to be very close. You see that in control of different parts of Congress going back and forth. Is that what is really being expressed in these debates over how we control social media? Is that really what is being talked about without being acknowledged, that my side can't control the conversation so we want to figure out ways to do that?

Weissmann: I know what you mean. But I'll push back on the control vs. choice thing, because some of the best regulatory reformers in general are some of the worst people on social media regulation, which I don't fully understand. But I think it gets to this point where I think the bigger dynamic is just moral panic, that people are freaking out and then they lose their principles and their sense on certain things. Which is why some of the people I adore the most—I love Gov. Spencer Cox in Utah. He's done great, great things, but he's really, really wrong here.

Gillespie: What is he good on? When you say he's done great, great things, what are those things?

Weissmann: Just every little thing. He's a very good governance guy. He pushed for a lot of Utah state government people to be able to work from home to save money and to make it easier on families. And that's some nice common sense stuff. And he does a lot like that. He's great on licensing reform. His first executive order was licensing reform. And now the Utah Department of Commerce has a guy whose whole job is figuring out the best way to make licensing work, where it's working, where it's not, if we need more licensing, but it's very objective and very thorough and very thoughtful. And it's incredible.

This isn't due to Cox, but there's a Utah regulatory sandbox for lawyer licensing reform. And Cox is in on all this stuff. He's really, really good at what he does. But man, when it comes to social media regulation, I don't know where his brain is going on this. I don't understand, except if it's moral panic. And he thinks that the freakout and what he's feeling and what he's thinking here is just more important than all the other principles.

Gillespie: I'm thinking of somebody like Taylor Lorenz, who's now at The Washington Post. She's been at The Atlantic, The New York Times, etc. She recently wrote a book that's really interesting. And generally she's very pro–social media or new forms of media that allow younger people to express what they're thinking. I interviewed her for Reason years ago, and it was great. 

But she and other people have been talking—this is something on the right and the left—about how the problem is that big corporations or big internet companies are able to manipulate your feeds, are able to make you want certain things or to see certain things, that they have become this vast reality distortion machine, so that when you're online—and we're increasingly online—you're not seeing the real world. 

Again, this goes back to certain debates in the '90s and even in the '50s where there was a critique, broadly speaking, of unregulated capitalism, that it allowed Madison Avenue and the hidden persuaders, the mad men. The mad men of Madison Avenue who were using psychology and science to make you buy appliances every year, even though you didn't need them, and to buy this car rather than that car. That seems to be kind of flourishing again. How does one engage that or combat that idea that we are not in control of our social media feeds?

Weissmann: It's funny. I just think it's one of the most toxic ideas out there. I think understanding and empowering autonomy is probably the most important thing in life. If you don't believe you're in control of your own destiny, then what do morals matter? If everyone else is controlling you, then nothing you do matters and you have full license to be as awful a person and do as bad things as you want. I have like almost 70,000 followers, and they love regulatory reform. They love slobs and marmots and regulatory reform. How do we even live in an age where that's possible? I spend so much time on all trails and so much time offline hiking, and it's only possible because of our current age. Because, one, I have enough treatments for all my diseases, and I'm up to 11, which is fantastic.

With hiking, even women traveling alone is kind of a recent thing in a lot of ways. Not a century ago, that wasn't much of a thing. Knowing where the trails are, having people review and tell you, "Oh, there's a bear here. There's a wolf here," stuff like that. Being able to create community with the people I meet—I meet people on trails. Then we follow each other on Instagram and meet up next time we're in the same place. The stuff that's possible, the levels of autonomy that are possible, and the power to choose your own life that are possible are often because of social media. 

Like I said before, finding out I had fibromyalgia, not through the almost 30 doctors I had seen by that time but by one internet forum after Googling, that's incredible. I just think it's the most empowering thing. All these different mediums we have, all this information. Sure, some of it's wrong, but you can research. I went to a doctor to figure out if I had fibromyalgia. I've been led down rabbit holes that solve problems that I didn't even realize I had. And I just think that's the proper way to see this. Sure, there are problems, and sure, you can just kind of get lazy. But I know people who are lazy and just play video games all day. We're not railing against that screen time. For some reason, it's the dumb dances on TikTok that freak everyone out. 

Gillespie: So, what you're saying is that the world that we live in is a mix of online and off. We have much more information now, and that doesn't alleviate our need to be critical thinkers and critical learners and things like that. But it gives us many more opportunities to find out what we are, who we are, and how we want to live?

Weissmann: It empowers autonomy in just incredible ways. Not everyone will embrace it. My close group of friends, almost everyone is insane about exercise. We love exercising. They want to run. I'm not much of a runner yet, but I want to hike farther than everyone. They want to run faster than they ever have before, and I don't think that was as big a thing. People went to the gym. But the competition, the excitement, the empowerment for each other online, the level of community you can find, even the people I stay in touch with all over the world because we have hobbies in common. I know that I can be a little bit more extroverted than a lot of people, but there's really this way to find community that's never existed before, so people can get together and come up with ideas and, like you said, find out who they are and what they are. But it's about finding out who you are and what you are, not letting things shape you and everything shapes you to a degree. But now way more positive things can than could before.

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Reason's Nick Gillespie interviews Rachel Nuwer, author of I Feel Love: MDMA and the Quest for Connection in a Fractured World. The book is a history of the drug known as molly and ecstasy that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is currently evaluating as an aid in fighting PTSD.

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Watch the full video here and find a condensed transcript below.

Nick Gillespie: Why did you write I Feel Love? 

Rachel Nuwer: There are really two answers to that. The first is a sort of common good answer, which is, there wasn't a book about MDMA. It's this huge cultural phenomenon. We're probably going to see it—well, hopefully see it—approved by the [Food and Drug Administration] for PTSD treatment within the next year. Yet, there wasn't a resource that brought all the information about this complex, nuanced drug together in one place. People needed to have that touchstone. There are just so many misconceptions about MDMA that I wanted to dispel those, not just for readers but also for myself. 

The other part of that answer is a more personal one. It was the height of the pandemic. Like many people, I was kind of having a crisis. What am I doing with my life? Am I going in the right direction? And for me, that was really manifesting in worries over my career. I'd spent about a decade reporting about illegal wildlife trade, which is not a cheery topic. We're talking slaughtered rhinos and elephants. And there just weren't many hopeful stories there. And I really realized that I was looking for a change of pace, for a new intellectual and personal challenge, and MDMA turned out to be the answer. 

Gillespie: And that helps explain the subtitle of the book, right? Which is? 

Nuwer: "MDMA and the Quest for Connection in a Fractured World." 

Gillespie: So this is like your pandemic baby?

Nuwer: This is exactly that. It's kept me very occupied in the pandemic. And my last book, I went to 12 countries to report it, but this one I could very easily do from the phone, right here in the good ol' U.S.A.—and a quick hop over the pond to the U.K. 

Gillespie: We talk about the psychedelic renaissance at Reason and obviously other people do, but that might be one thing the pandemic really helped because you couldn't travel out. So travel in. 

Nuwer: Exactly, yeah. And I say this in the beginning of the book, so it's not a surprise. But the idea for the book came to me while I was on MDMA, but not in a club, which is my preferred environment for this. I was just sitting on my couch at home at 7 p.m. on a Friday night. 

Gillespie: Before we get into the conversation about the history of MDMA, I'm struck by you saying, "This came to me while I was on MDMA." As a broad cultural background, how old are you? 

Nuwer: I am—let's see, what am I now? 38. Keeps changing. 

Gillespie: Have you always felt comfortable saying, "I use drugs that are technically or still openly illegal." Have you always felt comfortable doing that? Or is there a shift going on in our society? 

Nuwer: I was definitely not always the person who was like, "I use drugs. I like drugs." I was a D.A.R.E. kid from the '80s. 

I completely swallowed that message. I internalized it. If I heard of friends doing drugs, whether it was weed or ecstasy, I looked down on them. I judged them. I thought people who do drugs are looking for an escape, or they're burnouts, or they're going to frazzle their brains. Wasn't for me. That began to change in college. I had a friend who introduced me to mushrooms, but I didn't really know anything about them. It didn't have the stigma attached to it like ecstasy did. So I was like, "Sure, I'll try a new thing." I love new experiences. And that was great. I really enjoyed it, but it didn't open my eyes to MDMA at all. I still had this negative connotation. 

Gillespie: Is it because MDMA is engineered? MDMA is a pharmaceutical of some sort. It's a pill. It's not a naturally occurring thing. 

Nuwer: I think for a lot of people that is absolutely the case. For me, I had a personal negative connotation. In my freshman year of college, a friend's brother committed suicide. And this is in my small town in Mississippi, and everyone blamed his use of ecstasy. They specifically said, "Chris, he was taking all this ecstasy. It made him so depressed, and he killed himself." So instead of looking at the underlying drivers of what led him to make that decision, everyone just pointed out the drug. My D.A.R.E. kid self said, "It must be this awful ecstasy thing. I'm never going to touch that." 

Gillespie: Let's talk about the rediscovery of MDMA in the late '60s, early '70s. Lay out the history of MDMA. And for the people out there—you might know it as molly or ecstasy. But what is MDMA, and where did it come from? 

Nuwer: That's a great disclaimer for everyone out there. Molly and ecstasy are the same thing. And they refer to what is supposed to be MDMA. Whether your street-bought molly or ecstasy is MDMA is another question. But they refer to the same thing. It's just a branding tactic. So, the history part of the book, surprisingly, was one of my favorite parts to write. My mom's a historian, but I'm not a history person myself, and I just really got into it cause there were so many unexpected twists and turns. 

So, first of all, MDMA is a lot older than most people think. It was first patented, let's say, on Christmas Eve 1912 by the German pharmaceutical company Merck—a respected group. And they weren't looking for something to change people's brains. They were looking for a blood clotting agent, and MDMA was just a chemical intermediary on the steps they needed to get there.

Whether or not anyone at Merck actually tried it, we don't know. They've been really cagey about letting people into their archives. It seems like maybe they did. There are little hints here and there of chemists being like, "Hey, this is pretty interesting. Let's take a closer look." Fast forward to the 1950s. MDMA pops up in the U.S. for the first time. This is during the U.S. government's search for a chemical truth serum. So, let's figure out how we can control the minds of our enemies by conducting experiments on U.S. citizens to see how this goes. 

Gillespie: So this is part of MKUltra, and it's the epiphenomenon of that?

Nuwer: It wasn't MKUltra itself, but yeah, it was the army's version of the CIA trials. Again, we don't have the sort of smoking gun evidence that MDMA was ever given to anyone under this experiment. But there's a lot of circumstantial evidence. People who have had more time than I have to pursue the Freedom of Information Act process have gotten really close to revealing that, indeed, the U.S. Army did do this. 

A student named Nicholas Dunham—I think he's gotten his Ph.D. now, so, Dr. Nicholas Dunham—tracked down a document that pointed to Tulane University in New Orleans as having contracted with the army, and MDMA was on their list of drugs. But when Nick asked for the specific document from the U.S. government that would show whether or not it was actually given to anyone, they said, "Oh, we lost it".

So MDMA pops up again in police records of seizures in around 1970–1971, which probably just points to the fact that the Controlled Substances Act had just come out and had criminalized MDA—which is a closely related molecule—and entrepreneurial chemists were probably just looking for a way to get around the law by sticking an extra methyl group. Poof:  MDMA. So, the police even thought that they were seizing MDA. But we don't know anything about those chemists. We don't know who their customers were. We don't know who was using it for what. What we do know is that MDMA comes up again in 1975 when a Ph.D. student at Berkeley named Carl Resnikoff got with his mentor there, a guy named Alexander Shulgin. Everyone calls him Sasha, a famous psychedelic chemist. And they were working on a summer project together. 

Gillespie: And Shulgin is kind of the Thomas Edison of psychedelics. 

Nuwer: That's the correct way of putting it. Incredible chemist. Invented, like, 20 molecules. He would test them on himself and his wife if they were interesting and share them with friends. Young Carl was really enamored with Shulgin and his work, because Carl had tried LSD when he was in eighth grade. He was all about it. And Shulgin said, "OK, you need to do a summer project. What do you want to do?" And Carl was a big fan of MDA—as we were talking about earlier—and thought, "OK, methamphetamine is more euphoric than plain amphetamine. The difference is this methyl group. Why don't I just stick the same methyl group onto MDA and see what happens?" It's pretty logical and Shulgin's like, "That's a great idea. Let's do it." So they hole up in the summer of 1975 at U.C. Berkeley and synthesized MDMA together, and Shulgin took most of it home. But he gave Carl a little baggie, measured out just perfectly. I think it was like 125 mg. Two doses. And Carl and his girlfriend Judith wound up taking it on a beautiful September day on a boat ride across the San Francisco Bay to Sausalito. 

Gillespie: Sometimes MDMA is that drug you do by yourself or with a loved one or somebody you want to connect with. And when I say intimate, not necessarily sexual, but like a deep bond. And then, it becomes the ultimate rave. Well, actually, club drug first. And then rave drug. How does it start shifting out from that? 

Nuwer: Well, back up just a step before that. So Shulgin did try MDMA after Carl reported back with very positive experiences in '76, and he realized this molecule's potential for therapy. He introduced it to a therapist friend of his who became sort of this—I guess people say the Johnny Appleseed of MDMA in the therapeutic community. So, it quietly started spreading among first Bay Area therapists and then broader around the U.S. and even internationally. But people were keeping really quiet about it, because a lot of these therapists had either worked with LSD in the preceding decades or knew exactly what had happened with LSD being criminalized. So, they knew that if word got out about this new psychoactive drug, it would absolutely be criminalized, just like LSD. And they didn't want that to happen because they were seeing such powerful results. 

Gillespie: How did they use it in a therapeutic context? 

Nuwer: There are some early studies from [George Greer and his wife Requa Tolbert] out of New Mexico. And at first, it's kind of funny, they were following the LSD model, but they were kind of just experimenting themselves with what worked and what didn't work. And, in those original trials, they would actually take MDMA with their clients, but they realized, "OK, we need to not be high on MDMA because we need to focus on you and not make this about us." So that stopped. But they would—kind of like the trials today—bring people to their house, give them a low or whatever dose they thought would be appropriate, and just let them work through whatever issue they were trying to work through. 

Gillespie The idea is that it opens people up. It allows them to be in touch with their feelings and feel connected.

Nuwer: Exactly. Shulgin used the word "window." So it opens this window on yourself where you can find answers to questions you're asking your own self or partners, without fear, without anxiety, without the typical neuroses or clutter of our brain that gets in the way. 

So yeah, people used it for all kinds of things, from couples counseling to just "I'm having this trouble at work. I want to work through that" to "I want to know myself deeper" to more serious things like trauma. So that was all going on through the '70s. But, as you said earlier, MDMA did make this jump from the therapist's couch to the dance floor. And, the Greers said to me at one point of the interview that it was inevitable that this was going to happen. It's a drug that makes you feel good. People want to take drugs that make you feel good. And there was a lot of tension between the recreational and the therapeutic community, just as there was with LSD years before. 

Gillespie: We should point out that LSD, particularly during the '50s and early '60s to some degree, was being used widely by therapists, just to help treat things like alcoholism. Yesterday—while we're taping this—was Cary Grant's birthday. And Cary Grant is probably the best-known kind of celebrity who took LSD and publicly extolled its virtues, saying it made him feel alive again, etc. So MDMA is kind of an echo of that. 

Nuwer: Exactly. It was really the LSD therapists that paved the way for MDMA to then just slot right into this empty pool that had been left by LSD being criminalized. And the thing is, at this time, MDMA is completely legal. The government isn't aware of it. So the therapeutic community, many of them wanted to keep it a secret, only a thing that friends tell friends. You can't, like, just spread it around a club. But there's also a different contingent of people who wanted to just release it on the world and also make a nice profit in doing so. 

So the sort of figurehead of the recreational scene at this time was a guy named Michael Clegg. He ran a group that came to be known as the Texas Group because a lot of them were operating out of Dallas. And Michael Clegg just wanted to churn out as much MDMA as possible, as quickly as possible, making a lot of money. But he wasn't the typical drug lord that you think of, like, "I'm just going to get everyone hooked and make money." He had these ideas of himself as enlightened, wanting to serve a bigger purpose in the world and wanting to help people be saved, whatever that means to them. So that was Michael Clegg. He really spread MDMA across Texas, California, and the United States. And that is what attracted the attention of the U.S. government. 

Gillespie: Right. So then what happened? 

Nuwer: Well, the [Drug Enforcement Administration] moved to schedule MDMA. In the summer of '85—which is when I was born, coincidentally—MDMA was put on the emergency Schedule I list, and that meant that it was illegal. Well, the DEA, what they did not see coming—they thought this would just be a normal scheduling—is that there were all these therapists, professors at Harvard, who believed in MDMA and thought it was worthy of study and worthy of use. So this group of therapists, including Sasha Shulgin, put together a case to bring the DEA to court and say, "Hey, this is a drug with medical purpose, so it can't be Schedule I because Schedule I is defined as no medical purpose. It should be Schedule III. Allow us to work with it, allow us to study it, control it, but, you know, come on." And the really fascinating thing is they actually won that trial. The administrative law judge sided with them and said, "Yeah, you guys have shown that MDMA does indeed have value as a medicinal tool. It's being used by therapists. It should be Schedule III." But because of whatever bureaucracy—I don't understand the federal system—MDMA was put on Schedule I because that judge's determination was only a suggestion. So the DEA just did what they wanted to do the whole time. 

Gillespie: I am old enough to have taken MDMA before it was illegal and after. I have a strong memory of it being—in the early '80s, before it was illegal—more of a reflective, introspective drug. 

Post-prohibition, the biggest thing that was a problem about it was that it made you dangerously social, where you would go out and dance all night and kill yourself. Like you couldn't stop, you were part of a hive mind, which is just kind of bizarre. 

So, talk about MAPS—the nonprofit that's been working since the '80s to bring MDMA-assisted psychotherapy for PTSD. How did they get involved and what role did they play in this world where MDMA has been banned? 

Nuwer: So I'll say that we would not be where we are today in terms of MDMA-assisted therapy being on the cusp of potential federal approval if it were not for MAPS—the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies. MAPS was founded in 1986 by a guy named Rick Doblin. Rick was this kid who grew up outside Chicago, raised on stories around the family dinner table of the Holocaust. So Rick was this kid who was afraid that at any moment, all the people around him could just break out in like a maniacal genocide mode. And Rick really made it his mission in life—he's a strange kid, apparently—to find a solution for that. Just a strange guy, a very interesting and unique character. Rick wound up at New College in Florida, where he was introduced to drugs, and he thought that doing mind-melting doses of LSD was the way to enlightenment. He did not find the answers that route. But through those connections, he found his way to MDMA. And at first he thought it was like, "How profound could this drug be if you can still talk on it?" But he quickly realized for himself the utility of just being able to communicate with people in the open way we were talking about earlier, and he thought, "Huh, maybe this drug is the answer for getting people to set aside their differences and seeing that we're all just human. We all want love. We all want the same thing. We have more in common than we have different." Rick got involved in that DEA trial. He was one of the three younger people that was sort of spearheading the organizational effort: getting the money, getting a lawyer, and getting everyone to write letters. 

After the trial, everyone gave up. Most people stopped using MDMA in their practice because they didn't want to lose their license. Rick was the one person who did not give up, and everybody thought, "You're an idiot. You're wasting your time. You're wasting your money. It's just a matter of time until you too see the writing on the wall. This is not coming back." But Rick just is very hardheaded, I guess, like the most tenacious person ever. And there was something that Rick actually learned at the trial. He was talking with one of the DEA agents who was representing the government and this guy, Frank Sapienza, told Rick, "Look, kid, there might be something to this MDMA thing, but you are never going to get anywhere with it unless you go through the federal route. You need to get approval. You need to do FDA trials, clinical trials, that's the way you have got to do it." And Rick really took that to heart. So he founded MAPS to see that through. And, you know, it's taken like 38-plus years

Gillespie: Where are they now for FDA approval of MDMA-assisted psychotherapy?

Nuwer: So, clinical trials have to have three phases. Phase one is just to show like, OK, this isn't going to kill like a bunch of rats and people. Phase two is more about efficacy and safety. And then phase three is the more rigorous, like, OK, does this work and is it safe? They have just completed the end of the phase three section. And again, this has taken literally 20-plus years. Rick was doing this all on fundraising, and it costs millions literally to do clinical trials. And also just jumping through all the paperwork and permission hoops of the government. 

So the last phase three trial is done, and MAPS' Public Benefit Corporation, which has now become a pharmaceutical company, just submitted an application to the FDA at the end of December asking for a new drug approval for MDMA-assisted therapy for PTSD. So the FDA has a certain amount of time to respond. But long story short, hopefully there'll be some sort of answer by mid-2024. That's the year we are in now. 

Gillespie: Parallel to MAPS trying to get MDMA in certain circumstances approved—what happened in the '80s and '90s and the aughts with MDMA? Timothy Leary once famously talked about how LSD escaped the CIA labs and went into the mainstream. MDMA certainly escaped any kind of lockdown on it. What was going on there?

Nuwer: A lot was going on. So in the late '80s, MDMA made its way to the U.K., which basically created raves because people wanted to keep partying after clubs closed, and hence raves. And raves in turn led to the multibillion-dollar electronic dance music industry that we have today. MDMA through that rave pathway became a global phenomenon. So like tons of people doing MDMA, mostly youngsters [at] warehouses, clubs, potentially dangerous environments. And we started to see our first MDMA deaths. Nothing like the number of alcohol deaths we see or [deaths we see from] other drugs, but a few deaths that would be overly covered in the news.

Gillespie: And this is from people taking too much and having cardiac events or dehydrating and kind of dancing themselves to death. 

Nuwer: I mean, hyperthermia was the main one. Overheating. So MDMA became this hysterical news story. "Ecstasy is killing our children." It was seen as this threat to sort of puritanical American and likewise British values. So there were tons of just really severe laws that came down banning it.

Gillespie: Joe Biden was involved in the Rave Act.

Nuwer: Oh, yeah. Trying to criminalize pacifiers and glow sticks as drug paraphernalia, for example. But what that did is it really tarnished MDMA's reputation. Almost in the same way as LSD's reputation was tarnished by being attached to the counterculture. It was like a political strategy to try to take this drug down. And, at the same time, the U.S. government especially was pumping money into studies to prove that MDMA was neurotoxic, that it impacted the brain in a detrimental way. Millions of dollars of federal funding went into labs literally trying to prove this. And in the end, they didn't approve it because MDMA really isn't neurotoxic. It, of course, can be dangerous if you take too much. But, the lasting effect of that, from the late '80s and through the '90s and even early aughts, was that MDMA's reputation was really tainted. Any public understanding or awareness of its therapeutic value was completely paved over by this negative connotation. And it's that kind of connotation that I grew up with in the '80s. 

Gillespie: It's kind of flipped, right? Because there was that story, but then people were like, you know what? I feel really good on this or I've had good experiences. When did things seem to start tipping away?

Nuwer: Yeah, I absolutely agree. Well, I can tell you my personal experience of when I flipped. So I wrote this book proposal during the pandemic, like I told you, and my agent sent it out to a bunch of editors, and we got all no's. People were saying Michael Pollan already wrote this book, because they just don't understand the difference between a mushroom and MDMA or whatever. Other people were saying this book looks too positive about ecstasy. Why isn't this about the negative effects of ecstasy? And others were saying there's just not enough there to say anything about ecstasy; this isn't a book project. Then the first MAPS phase three study came out. I wrote about it for The New York Times. Suddenly, the conversation just shifted in this really significant way. I started getting interest in the book proposal. I really think that that trial kind of legitimized MDMA and put it out there in the broader public understanding in a way that wasn't present before.

Gillespie: What are the benefits of the MAPS approach, of going through FDA approval and showing that this is a medicine?

Nuwer: I have heard people who are more part of the underground scene, and they're afraid that, oh, this is going to make MDMA less cool if it's suddenly this medicine or, oh, we're sterilizing the industry. I'm just remembering a comment from Ben Sessa, who is a psychiatrist in the U.K. and also works with MDMA and other drugs like this. He's like, "You know, I can put on my white coat and then I can go to a rave, you know, whatever. It doesn't make MDMA less cool, but this is what we have to do to legitimize it, to eventually move toward hopefully legality, not just for therapeutic uses but also for recreational uses or whatever people want to do." And that's going to make these things safer in the end, because then we're going to know where we're getting our drugs. We're going to know how to take them. We're going to have education about how to use them properly. 

Gillespie: This is almost always the case with what the government calls illicit drugs—not even illegal, they're immoral—not knowing what's in them, which is hard to do in black markets because dealers don't spend a lot of time putting labels on stuff.  What's the role of the rave culture in kind of popularizing ecstasy?

Nuwer: I think hearing your friends or people you trust say, "Hey, I tried this thing and not only was it the most fun night I've ever had, it also was a profoundly beautiful experience." That's actually how I found my way to this drug. My now husband was a '90s raver kid in Colorado going out to warehouses. And when I met him, I still had these negative connotations about ecstasy. And then hearing his stories—and he was by no means trying to push me into this, he was done with MDMA—I was finally just like, I want to try this too. It sounds really fun. And I think that we really look over or we don't give the rave scene its due credit. Millions and millions of people around the world have tried MDMA. Millions of them have had profound, beautiful, wonderful experiences on it. Yet there's very little rigorous attention paid to them by the scientific community. There's just no funding or interest to study them. Because the government is providing them most of the funding. And people aren't dying en masse like they are with meth or some other drug. So I think there's just so many interesting questions to be mined there and stories to be heard. 

Gillespie: And then you have kind of underground movements that come above ground. Burning Man is not certainly exclusively about MDMA, but that's part of the culture and the rave element of that or the Electric Daisy Carnival.

Nuwer: Definitely. I mean, I think it really serves the purpose of these gatherings in the past that we could rely on from religion or mystical gatherings or whatever that we're really missing today. And people are seeking that out. I know that's why I like to go to raves. In terms of what it's actually doing, I mean, massive dumps of serotonin. It not only blocks your receptors in your brain from taking up serotonin, which is the sort of jack-of-all-trades neurotransmitter, it does all kinds of things. But, your neurons actually dump out their stores of serotonin. Something like 80 percent of your serotonin floods your brain on a night of MDMA, or a day. Oxytocin gets triggered as well. So there's just this whole chemical formula that's going on in your brain to produce that feeling. 

Gillespie: How do you think MDMA specifically fits into the larger kind of resurgence of psychedelics?

Nuwer: Well, I do think that MDMA is paving the way through this potential FDA approval. I think all things look good for MDMA to be the first psychedelic over that finish line. So that is absolutely major. You know, returning to that stigma and that taint we talked about in the '90s and 2000s, I think that was a really big obstacle to overcome, in a way that mushrooms didn't have to overcome because they just didn't have that same negative connotation that MDMA or LSD had. I mean, you never hear anything about LSD. Hardly at all. MDMA I hear less about than I hear mushrooms. I was reading U.C. Berkeley's newsletter today, The Microdose. It's like, oh, Indiana's moving to invest dollars in psilocybin research on PTSD and this and that. But the states aren't as eager to do MDMA—I think it is the connotations, the stigma from earlier decades. And also referring back to that synthetic issue that you mentioned, for some reason people are more comfortable with a natural substance than one that was made.

Gillespie: Legalizing nature, there are a lot of movements to just save plant-based entheogens or certain types of psychedelics. Maybe it's that they're harder to regulate because they could grow anywhere. I think it's an artificial distinction between nature and artifice.

Nuwer: Yeah, I 100 percent agree with that. But, at the same time, I think MDMA is just such a useful and powerful tool for therapy just because it's such an easier medicine to work with. 

Gillespie: Why does there seem to be so much interest in this? I mean, it's definitely changing. The laws seem to be changing, and there's a cultural moment where a lot of serious people are talking about this. 

Nuwer: I think it's a complex mix. So I think people are just fed up with the war on drugs. They're beginning to realize just how idiotic it was, that there's no way to win this war, just what a waste of money and lives and environment, the list goes on. 

I think people also have come to realize that the quick chemical fix that we were hoping would come through psychiatric drugs isn't working. There are more and more people suffering from things like depression, anxiety, trauma. So we're looking for other answers. And then a little bit more cynically, I think people like the idea of this magic wand cure-all. And they're just like, "Psychedelics are going to rid me of all my problems."

Gillespie: They're going to do what Prozac failed to do.

Nuwer: Exactly. And people want to believe in these magic cures. And it's not going to be that for most people. 

Gillespie: A parallel with MAPS, they're a bit behind, but Compass Pathways, a pharmaceutical company, is pushing psilocybin trials for depression and anxiety with the FDA. Is that a good sign or a bad sign that the big pharmaceutical companies are kind of starting to circle around this?

Nuwer: I think, unfortunately, it was just inevitable. It's great that they're pushing trials through to get these medications to people. The monetization of it isn't great, but this is the system we live in. And I don't think that psychedelics were ever going to be able to reform the system.

Rick Doblin was hoping that he could get MDMA over the finish line with charity alone. And I mean, incredibly, he raised $140 million in donations. And then he even says himself that he was sort of a victim of his own success because by helping bring the psychedelic renaissance about through MAPS, suddenly we have these companies like Compass popping up that are for-profit. And then donors are like, why would I give you free money that I'm not going to see a return on when I can make an investment over here? So MAPS isn't going to make it over the finish line with MDMA as a philanthropy-funded product. They just spun out a pharmaceutical arm that is for-profit. They have a board. They have investors. They tried really hard not to. But this is just the system that we live in.

Gillespie: Do you see any big obstacles in the next couple of years to the medicalization or legalization of these substances?

Nuwer: I'm sure there's going to be some kind of bureaucratic whatever. I mean, there's a lot of positive signs from the federal government that they're into this. Biden released a memo about it. There's language in a new bill about veterans for investigating this. But the government is very, very conservative. So I can see there being all kinds of hitches that delay this, like, years.

This interview has been condensed and edited for style and clarity.

• Audio Production: Ian Keyser
• Video Editor: Adam Czarnecki

The post Rachel Nuwer: MDMA Is On the Cusp of Legalization appeared first on Reason.com.

As Ronald Reagan's first budget director, former Michigan congressman David Stockman led the charge to cut the size, scope, and spending of the federal government in the early 1980s. He made enemies among Democrats by pushing hard for cuts to welfare programs—and he ultimately made enemies among his fellow Republicans by pushing equally hard to slash defense spending. His memoir of the era, The Triumph of Politics: Why the Reagan Revolution Failed, is a legendary account of how libertarian principles got sacrificed on the altar of political expediency.

Stockman's new book is Trump's War on Capitalism, and it takes a blowtorch to the former president's time in office. "When it comes to what the GOP's core mission should be…standing up for the free markets, fiscal rectitude, sound money, personal liberty, and small government at home and non-intervention abroad," he writes, "Donald Trump has overwhelmingly come down on the wrong side of the issues."

At a Reason Speakeasy event in New York City, I talked with Stockman about his political journey from being a member of Students for a Democratic Society who protested the Vietnam War to being one of Reagan's main advisers to his denunciation of Donald Trump and his hope that Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s candidacy helps throw the 2024 election into the House of Representatives.

Stockman also explains how Trump led the disastrous charge on COVID-19 lockdowns, got rolled by Wall Street and the Federal Reserve, and why his nativist views on immigration are inimical both to freedom and economic growth.

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The post David Stockman: Trump's War on Capitalism and Freedom appeared first on Reason.com.