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On today episode, Aaron Ross Powell is joined by guest Richard Rothstein, a Distinguished Fellow of the Economic Policy Institute and a Senior Fellow (emeritus) at the Thurgood Marshall Institute of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. He is the author of The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America. His latest book is Just Action: How to Challenge Segregation Enacted Under the Color of Law.
He and Aaron discuss the root of America's modern segregation, the role of the Supreme Court in its development, and what we can do to remedy it. We hope you enjoy it.
This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.theunpopulist.net -
On today’s episode, Aaron Powell interviews Rachel Kleinfeld, a senior fellow in the Democracy, Conflict, and Governance Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a member of the Board of Directors at the National Endowment for Democracy, and a trustee of Freedom House.
She recently authored a piece at The UnPopulist titled, “Right-Wing Populists Are Just as Bad for Business as Left-Wing Ones,” in which she outlines the folly and falsehoods that form the foundation of populist economics.
In today’s discussion, they cover the story populists tell their followers about economics, how that same narrative has taken root in America, and what it takes to resist falling under the populist spell. Enjoy.
This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.theunpopulist.net -
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On today’s episode, The UnPopulist’s editor-in-chief Shikha Dalmia and senior editor Berny Belvedere are joined by Matt Yglesias. Matt is a journalist, blogger, and podcaster who’s written for The Atlantic and Slate. He’s also a co-founder of Vox and now writes his daily Substack newsletter Slow Boring, which is dedicated to realizing a better world through rigorous conversations and a spirit of pragmatism.
Matt joins us to discuss the media’s adversarial role in politics, how polarization and populism foster conflict, and what both the left and right can do to make sure our politics are more productive moving forward. Enjoy.
This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.theunpopulist.net -
It’s official: NATO has officially grown yet again. The international alliance now boasts 32 member states following the most recent additions of Finland and, as of this week, Sweden. But what are these Nordic neighbors getting into?
Today we have the pleasure of bringing you a conversation between our Editor in Chief Shikha Dalmia and Senior Editor Berny Belvedere. While they have different positions on the benefits of NATO, this episode is less of a debate and more a conversation discussing the merits and drawbacks of arguments for and against it. With historical grounding and moral reasoning, they tease out nuanced and complex reasons for both positions, often with one another’s help.
This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.theunpopulist.net -
On our last episode, we heard from UnPopulist columnist and Director of Election Policy the Rainey Center Andy Craig on why he believes removing Donald Trump from the 2024 presidential ballot is, in fact, not anti-democratic. Today, we wanted to give you the opportunity to hear a counter-argument.
Today’s debate, which features both Andy and, for the opposition, the Washington Post’s Jason Willick, is not filled with bad-faith interruptions, name-calling, or any of the other shallow chaos associated with modern debates. Andy and Jason discuss whether or not January 6th was an insurrection, the merits of the argument that the President is not an “officer”, and what we can expect from the Supreme Court’s soon to be released decision.
Further Reading:
Allowing Trump on the Ballot Is What Is Truly Anti-Democratic by Andy Craig
On Ballot Access, Trump Shouldn’t be Treated as More Equal than Others by Andy Craig
What a 1790s Rebellion Shows About the Campaign to Disqualify Trump by Jason Willick
The Antislavery Giant at the Center of the Trump Disqualification Case by Jason Willick
This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.theunpopulist.net -
At the very end of last year, Donald Trump's presidential campaign hit a large roadblock when the Colorado State Supreme Court ruled him ineligible for the office under Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, also known as the Insurrection Clause, due to his actions during January 6th. While many of his opponents praised this decision as justice finally taking course, there has of course been backlash.
A major complaint about the decision to take him off the ballot is that doing so would be anti-democratic, a circumvention of the people's will by unelected politicians in robes. Exercising judicial power to remove a candidate who has on occasion been leading in the polls does seem remarkably anti-democratic. Even some liberals have expressed some qualms about such a course like this. But are they justified in their worries?
Today is our Editor’s Roundtable. Host Landry Ayres is joined by The UnPopulist's Shikha Dalmia and Berny Belvedere, as well as Director of Election Policy at the Rainey Center and an adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute, Andy Craig.
Read Andy’s piece for The UnPopulist here.
This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.theunpopulist.net -
The Institute for the Study of Modern Authoritarianism, the nonprofit parent organization of The UnPopulist, recently fielded a survey to measure populist attitudes among Americans. The poll of 1,000 respondents was administered nationwide from November 17th to the 27th 2023, as a supplement to the weekly America's Political Pulse Survey conducted by the Dartmouth-based Polarization Research Lab.
Last week, The UnPopulist published its findings, and they're fascinating. On today's episode, host Aaron Ross Powell is joined by the survey's author, Tom Shull, Polling Director at ISMA. They dig into how the survey was designed, what it tells us about the state of American populism, and what questions still need answers.
This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.theunpopulist.net -
Aaron Ross Powell: Welcome to Zooming In, a project of The UnPopulist. I'm Aaron Ross Powell. I'm joined today by my colleagues, Shikha Dalmia and Akiva Malamet for our editors' round table. Recent reporting has uncovered plans by Trump allies, and Trumpist think tanks, and other organizations to deconstruct the administrative state.
A transcript of today’s podcast appears below. It has been edited for flow and clarity.
Aaron Ross Powell: I think all of us agree that the administrative state is unaccountable and too large, so what's wrong with Trump's plans to reform it?
Shikha Dalmia: Good morning, Aaron and Akiva. We haven't done this in a while, right? We are getting together in this format after a long time, but I'm surprised, Aaron, you didn't use the word “deep state,” because that's the term of art these days, right? What's wrong with the “deep state?” There are actually plenty of things wrong with the deep state, but we actually in the US don't really have a deep state.
Deep state is an idea that was originally meant to describe the kind of bureaucracy we had in countries like Turkey and Egypt, which was controlled by the military and security forces. They engaged in all kinds of machinations behind the scenes to control civilian authorities and the populace at large. Their functioning was completely opaque and the subject of all kinds of conspiracy theories in the Middle East.
That's not what we have here in the United States. What we have in the United States is a problematic situation, where those of us who believe in government of limited size and scope, the federal government is very large. It performs functions far beyond what, I think it's fair to say, the Founders originally visualized and the bureaucratic state, the administrative state, has grown apace.
Now, if you talk to my friend Frank Fukuyama, he will tell you that actually, the bureaucracy is not large enough because the federal government's functions have grown far, far more than the bureaucracy has, and the bureaucracy simply can't keep up with providing the kinds of professional and efficient execution that it was meant to do. Now, regardless of what you think about that view, I think from our point of view, an administrative state that in its current form is quite problematic, but it is part of a bigger problem with the federal government.
As the federal government was originally envisualized in this country, each branch had very specific role, and had very specific powers and functions. Each side was supposed to guard that, guard their functions in a very, very jealous way. The idea was that would allow the public at large to keep each government branch publicly accountable, and at the same time, each branch would provide a check on the other.
Now, that actually has not how things have worked out in the United States. Over a period of time, Congress has delegated too much of its authority to both the president and the executive agencies under the president. If you think of the War Powers Act, it was supposed to curtail the president's war-making ability. But Congress has got used to giving very large authorization of power to wage all kinds of wars in all kinds of countries post 9/11. That was one huge usurpation of power by the executive, not intentionally, but in effect from Congress.
Congress also writes very broad and vague legislations and then lets the administrative branch define them in any way it wants to. That essentially means, this is the critique of the administrative state, is that therefore the administrative branches have very sweeping legislative powers through their powers of interpretation that nobody can really control. Congress can't control the executive agencies and the president can't control the executive agencies either, because many of these people are civil servants and bureaucrats and they are protected by rules of a professional bureaucracy. So they become largely unaccountable.
If you are listening to our conservative friends, there's an additional problem, which is that the civil servants tend to be somewhat leftist in their biases. They have an ideological agenda…to promote environmental legislation or equity legislation and what have you. All that becomes a problem for them.
Now, I would be in favor of limiting the size and scope of the administrative branch if it was part of broader reform of government, where the Congress took back its legislative powers and therefore the administrative branches had to do less in terms of interpretation and execution. Then you could shrink the size of the administrative state too. But that's not what Trump is proposing.
What Trump and the Republicans are proposing is not, in my view, a deconstruction, which is a term of art, or the rationalization of the administrative state. They want to co-opt and take over the administrative state for their own ends. Their ends are essentially twofold: To punish their enemies and rewards their friends. That's what the right has been saying it wants to do for a very long time.
“What Trump and the Republicans are proposing is not, in my view, a deconstruction, which is a term of art, or the rationalization of the administrative state. They want to co-opt and take over the administrative state for their own ends. Their ends are essentially twofold: To punish their enemies and rewards their friends.”
— Shikha Dalmia
In Trump's case, it means punishing enemies means not just ideological enemies, which is certainly a part of it, but actually, his personal enemies who have tried to hold him accountable for things like calling a mob to ransack the Capitol. He wants to go after Biden and Hunter Biden for purely political purposes. That's not really a reform of the administrative state. That's a co-optation of the of the administrative state.
Now, how is he planning to do that? He's got a three-part plan to do this. The first part is that all presidents get to appoint 4,000 political appointments across federal agencies. That is not something that Trump alone would do, every president does that. What is different in this case is that most presidents will look for people who have expertise and merit, have some kind of claim to merit to run the agencies. That's not what they want to do. Heritage Foundation and America First Policy Institute and then Steve Miller's, I think it's America First Legal. They have a plan to install loyalist—Trump loyalists in these positions. That's a problem.
The second part that they want to do is there are 50,000 employees who are Schedule F employees, and they are off-limits to the political branches in a certain sense. Trump wants to re-up his old executive order, which will essentially make them at-will employees and allow him to fire them. Again, if he was planning to do this in order to streamline and rationalize the administrative state, that would be one thing. That's not what it is. He [Trump] wants to flatten the points of resistance that he encountered in his initial first term that prevented him from implementing unconstitutional plans, many of which he still managed to do. For instance, on immigration and what have you. That's what he's trying to do. That's why it's all problematic from our point of view. Even though we want a smaller administrative state, we want a well-defined government with specific roles. This is not what that is.
“He [Trump] wants to flatten the points of resistance that he encountered in his initial first term that prevented him from implementing unconstitutional plans … That's why it's all problematic from our point of view. Even though we want a smaller administrative state, we want a well-defined government with specific roles.”
— Shikha Dalmia
Akiva: I think those are excellent points, Shikha. I think one of the things that's important to emphasize here is the idea that there is a distinction between harnessing government for your own ends and making government smaller in general. That really the function of what Trump wants to do is to make government a tool of his own ends. One of the things that I think is critical here is that he doesn't really have a plan for what he wants to do in society. What he does is he has certain temperaments about who he likes, who he doesn't like, who his friends are, who his enemies are, and then follows those as a almost random or not random, but very disorganized set of policies to—what he wants to do is in a very disorganized way, punish his friends and reward his enemies and rather than enact any comprehensive plan of reform. In general, what he wants to do is change institutions wholesale so that they no longer serve the so-called “liberal elites” that he's so constantly in favor of attacking.
Now, this resembles in many cases a similar plan that has been enacted in many European populist contexts in Hungary, Turkey, Poland, and so on, where there's no real plan for what government should or shouldn't do. There's an idea that there are certain people in power who we don't like, certain outgroups, social outgroups—liberals, feminists, gay rights advocates, and so on. We want them out of power. Instead, we want to put in our own socially conservative, hardline, nationalist stormtroopers. In essence, what we have is a cultural fight over which culture should the institutions of government be wielded. Should they be wielded in favor of a progressive "woke agenda" or they should be wielded in favor of a socially conservative, regressive, reactionary agenda? Of course, independent of whether you're on one side or another, there's one question which neither side has asked, which is should the institutions of government be wielded for these purposes at all? It's clear that what Trump is doing is simply agreeing with the progressives that the institutions of government should be wielded in order to force people into certain modes of action and modes of being but he wants to do it on behalf of his own conservative, reactionary forces rather than progressive ones.
“There's one question which neither side has asked, which is should the institutions of government be wielded for these purposes at all? It's clear that what Trump is doing is simply agreeing with the progressives that the institutions of government should be wielded in order to force people into certain modes of action and modes of being but he wants to do it on behalf of his own conservative, reactionary forces rather than progressive ones.”
— Akiva Malamet
Aaron: That seems like that describes Trump who is just pure id without much in the way of ideological grounding or even conceptual coherence. He has a sense that there are people who are obsequious to him and he likes those people and people who aren't and he doesn't like those people. Does that describe the broader plan here?
When the Heritage Foundation is putting out its 900-page proposal for policies, their Project 2025, I think it's called, or when they're vetting people to take over all of these roles in the administrative state that Trump will make vacant through these various machinations, it feels like those sorts of organizations and people like Stephen Miller do have a more coherent view of what they want society to look like, why they are doing this. They're using Trump as the way to gain power, and then these mechanisms are a way to further assert power because Trump has a certain sort of popularity with a distressingly large portion of the population and we can leverage that, but this feels much more calculated than what you're describing, Akiva.
I agree, the Viktor Orban analogies, I think, hold, that there is this sense that we just-- what we want is what we, meaning the people advancing these plans, not me, want is a society that holds to a certain set of conservative views and values and uses the oppressive power of the state to stamp out feminism and LGBT identities and wokeism, whatever they happen to mean by that, and doesn't make white people uncomfortable by teaching the history of racism, and so on.
It doesn't feel like just we want to change the culture of the institutions. It feels much more like there is a specific end goal of remaking society to look like a certain thing in mind.
Shikha: No, I think that's exactly right. In Trump's first term, there was a disconnect, right? The existing conservative establishment had, which reflected the Reagan era consensus of a certain fealty to limited government principles … at least it offered lip service to those principles, and also wanted certain limitations on the power of the state. They may have had a cultural agenda, just as the left had a cultural agenda, but they had a higher loyalty to these sort of other principles. And they felt that if Trump came along, they could use the Federalist Society to put such jurists in courts and who were not primarily—who were originalists, limited government types, textualists, and what have you, first, and culture warriors second.
Trump came along on a populist agenda. His was a populist mandate. He got elected as a culture warrior. Now, one can debate whether Trump is truly a culture warrior or not, it doesn't matter, but he got elected on a culture warrior agenda. That was combined with a certain taste for power in him. To the extent that the courts, the bureaucratic branches, the Republican Party was populated with these other kinds of conservatives, there was a mismatch in what he wanted, and his mandate, and what they wanted, and their long-standing, loyalties and commitments.
That has all shifted now. Now there is a harmony in the mandate that Trump wants to get elected on and what the right-wing establishment wants to do. That's where the Heritage Foundations of the world come in. Heritage now looks very different. Heritage was never to my taste, but the Heritage of today is very different from the Heritage of pre-Trump. Now it's in it for the power. The whole idea of a limited government because you at least worry about what your opponents are going to do when they come to power is gone through the window. They want to amass as much power to cram as much of their culture war agenda as they possibly can. Trump, they see, will play ball on that. There will be no tension between that agenda and what Trump wants to accomplish.
Trump's added need is for loyalty. Trump's added need is for personal power which they are just happy to go along with because in this case, his power will, in fact, serve their ideological goals.
“The right is arguably the most radical political contingent in the United States right now, has abandoned conservatism and doesn't hold at all to a desire to maintain governing institutions but instead…is simply a political movement for exercising heavy power in the service of creating or reestablishing certain hierarchies that they see as having eroded under liberalism.”
—Aaaron Ross Powell
Aaron: It seems like we are seeing then in the way that you describe it, something of a broader version of a longtime hobby horse of mine that I've written about, which is we, especially United States, tend to treat the right and conservatism as synonyms. They both just mean the same thing. If you're on the right, you're a conservative, if you're a conservative, you're on the right and their political projects are identical. It feels like what's happening now and what was recognized in the first Trump administration with the kinds of people, they appointed a lot of conservatives to positions of power.
What they didn't get from that was a sufficient quantity of people who were the necessary degree of being on “the right” to do the things that they wanted. That these people had conservative commitments to institutions and principles and so on that got in the way of a far-right agenda. A second Trump term and this split in the Heritage Foundation, the Heritage Foundation used to be a conservative organization. Now it is a far-right organization that is not conservative. That there is this real decoupling and that the right is arguably the most radical political contingent in the United States right now, has abandoned conservatism and doesn't hold at all to a desire to maintain governing institutions but instead, it ties back to what the right has traditionally meant, is simply a political movement for exercising heavy power in the service of creating or reestablishing certain hierarchies that they see as having eroded under liberalism.
Akiva: Yes, I think that's right. I think what's happened is we've had a destruction of the idea of conservatism, not just in the sense of small government, but in the sense of conserving institutions, in the sense of there being checks and balances and balance to power and preserving a certain liberal legacy of America's founding documents and a shift towards trying to exercise power for its own sake and to exercising power on behalf of certain culturally conservative ends. We have a shift from conservatism in the sense of conservation or conservatism in the sense of limited government to conservatism as revolutionary.
“We've had a destruction of the idea of conservatism, not just in the sense of small government, but in the sense of conserving institutions, in the sense of there being checks and balances and balance to power and preserving a certain liberal legacy of America's founding documents and a shift towards trying to exercise power for its own sake and to exercising power on behalf of certain culturally conservative ends.”
— Akiva Malamet
This is something that Tom Palmer talks about in an unpublished paper that he delivered to the Mont Pelerin Society about the idea of a conservative revolutionary. This is something that the conservative revolutionary in the original sense were actually the predecessors to the Nazi regime in Germany. These were people who saw the whole business of democratic politics, of the give and take of democratic politics as impeding their ability to enact their will on the populace and to impose their social conservative agenda, and to revive the cult of the nation, and so on.
Describe themselves very much as conservative, but not in the sense of everlasting principles and certain code of ethics and so on, but conservative in the sense of being right wing and right wing in the sense of being nationalist, being socially conservative, and so on. We see this repeat itself in the Trump administration to a greater extent and which is trying to follow in the lead of contemporary populists like Viktor Orban, like the former prime minister of Poland, like Giorgia Meloni in Italy and so on, and who see their role as agents of the right and the right being defined in a revolutionary way to transform society into an organ of their own making. An organ that is suffused and constructed to favor certain social classes and hierarchies to defend traditional gender roles, to defend the traditional family unit, to be anti-LGBT and so on.
Shikha: Right. Yes, I think, Tom Palmer's piece on the conservative revolution was actually sort of eye-opening because it was so historically grounded, right? If you don't like the so-called liberal radicals, wait till you get the conservative radicals who get their hands on the levers of the state. It is pretty terrifying what they would want to do. If you look at some of like the blueprints of what the Heritage Foundation and Steve Miller have in mind, it's downright chilling.
Steve Miller, his immigration agenda, and he has said that, he's openly mocking immigration advocates right now and saying, wait till our second term, you won't know what's hit you. The kinds of things he wants to do, not only will he re-up everything he did in his first term, he has plans to build all kinds of huge detention camps to throw immigrants, undocumented immigrants and anybody else coming into the country. There will be deportation raids galore. Beyond that, plans to take away, deport people who are openly pro-Palestinian or anti-Israel. At least this is Steve Miller's agenda.
There will be litmus tests on the immigrants who are coming into the country to make sure they actually tow sort of like a right-wing line. Now, this kind of meddling, trying to socially engineer a public to serve the state ends of the right is kind of scary and not where this country has gone before, as best as I know, even under the worst of circumstances. Yes, so sort of the idea is to have some a conservative revolution in which you use the levers of the state to cram as much of the conservative social agenda as possible and then to hell with the next, the Democratic government once it comes into power. My fear is not just that, what conservatives are doing will end with conservatives, but then it will be picked up by progressives in future administrations to push their own, draconian ends. It's a downward spiral.
I don't think we want to do is become cheerleaders for the administrative state in the way that in the early Trump administration and throughout the Trump administration, you suddenly saw progressives embracing the FBI as this force for preserving and protecting democracy and our freedoms.
—Aaron Ross Powell
Aaron: We have a situation where you have a past president who hopes to be a future president who wants to come in and re-engineer the state along essentially to be what Polemicus thought of as justice, which as we've mentioned, is punishing your enemies and rewarding your friends. Married to these conservative intellectuals who want to take those urges and use them in the service of re-engineering society towards far-right ends.
A lot of this is being spoken about is, to go back to our opening remarks, a lot of this is being spoken about in the language of reforming the federal bureaucracy, shrinking the administrative state, making it accountable, making career bureaucrats easier to fire so that we can get turnover and we can get accountability. All of these are things that classical liberals have talked about for decades, right? These are, we need to reform the administrative state. We need to figure out how to reform the administrative state. We need to figure out how to make it more accountable. We need to shrink it. We need to return lawmaking power to Congress or demand that Congress retake lawmaking power instead of writing this legislation that's like, this bill will, tasks the EPA with making the environment better and then lets the EPA fill in all the details of what making the environment better means and so on.
All of that sounds very classical liberal, but is now being co-opted for decidedly anti-liberal, if not, outright authoritarian ends. What do we do about that? Because what I don't think we want to do is become cheerleaders for the administrative state in the way that in the early Trump administration and throughout the Trump administration, you suddenly saw progressives embracing the FBI as this force for preserving and protecting democracy and our freedoms. Shikha, when you were saying at the beginning that you didn't think there ever was a deep state in the US, the one counter example I could think of is like J. Edgar Hoover's FBI was about as close to what you were describing as I think, as far as big institutions go.
We don't want to just become Pollyannish about the administrative state because all of those classical liberal critiques still hold, right? What do we, what do we do about this current situation? How do we fight back against misuse of administrative state reform without giving up on the real need to reform this for liberal ends?
Shikha: One of the things that the Trump era did was to make me re-evaluate my positions about the administrative state. I think I've mentioned to you guys, I grew up in the India of the License Raj and the Yes Minister BBC series. The License Raj was this hidebound bureaucracy which controlled the lives of citizens because it had these powers to extract rents in the form of bribes from them for everything that an ordinary citizen wanted to do. You want to build a house? You're not going to get clearance from the bureaucrats till you give them a hefty bribe. There was so much corruption in India due to the administrative state that the reform of the administrative state was something that appeals to me inherently. The one thing that the administrative state in the US has done well—and I take your example of J. Edgar Hoover, Aaron completely, not just that he was going after Martin Luther King, they were going after Martin Luther King, the FBI was, and infiltrating civil rights groups for the worst possible ends—but that said, by and large, the administrative state has done a pretty good job of keeping public corruption at bay in this country.
American bureaucracy and American government, at least at the federal level, is really not all that corrupt. I can't overstate just how much stability and trust that builds in institutions when you have institutions that at least don't have this one big vice, which is corruption.
In the Trump era, the administrative state performed quite well, I think. It provided advice to him and provided resistance to his worst possible designs. Things on immigration would have been a whole lot worse if there hadn't been bureaucrats within the Department of Homeland Security telling Trump, no, you can't throw people into concentration camps, essentially, right?
“American bureaucracy and American government, at least at the federal level, is really not all that corrupt. I can't overstate just how much stability and trust that builds in institutions when you have institutions that at least don't have this one big vice, which is corruption. In the Trump era, the administrative state performed quite well, I think. It provided advice to him and provided resistance to his worst possible designs.”
— Shikha Dalmia
You can't simply go around taking funds from the military and putting them towards the wall, although Trump tried to do it via an executive order. The one role that the administrative, and this is where I agree with Frank Fukuyama, is there is a need to defend a certain amount of independence of the administrative state so that it can provide a check on the nefarious designs of government officials who wield a whole lot of power and ensure that they are wielding this power in a responsible and a non-corrupt way. How do we give some autonomy to the administrative state to provide this check on public corruption, while at the same time, not becoming monstrous and a bane on the public itself is a difficult question.
What you don't do, you don't do is flatten these points of internal resistance so that a populist demagogue can simply come in and do exactly what he pleases, regardless of whether it fits in with the broader constitutional design or not. I don't know, that doesn't answer your question, but I think, the issue is to get the incentives right within the administrative state rather than to simply throw out the baby with the bathwater.
Akiva: Yes, I agree with that. I think one of the things that classical liberals often overlook is that they may not want much of a state, but those parts of a state that they do want to function, have to function well. Even if you wanted a really small state, a night watchman state even, you need the courts to be not corrupt. You need the bureaucracy to be non-corrupt, to be accountable to people. One form of accountability is avoiding awarding political office on the basis of patronage, on the basis of nepotism, on the basis of special connections, because of bribes, and so on.
“Even if you wanted a really small state, a night watchman state even, you need the courts to be not corrupt. You need the bureaucracy to be non-corrupt, to be accountable to people. One form of accountability is avoiding awarding political office on the basis of patronage, on the basis of nepotism, on the basis of special connections, because of bribes, and so on.”
— Akiva Malamet
You want a culture of meritocracy to exist so that you have a set of people in these agencies who are loyal to the agency and to upholding the rule of law and to upholding norms of impartiality rather than worrying about whether they're friends with their boss or whether their boss is friends with the president and so on.
You want to avoid these kinds of norms of corruption that are so common in so many parts of the world in which the deep state is really unaccountable and in which you really don't have the kinds of checks and balances between the legislature, the executive, and the administrative state that you do in the United States.
Aaron: Thank you for listening to Zooming In at The UnPopulist. If you enjoy this show, please take a moment to review us and Apple Podcasts and also check out ReImagining Liberty, our sister podcast at The UnPopulist, where I explore the emancipatory and cosmopolitan case for radical social, political, and economic freedom. Zooming In is a project of The UnPopulist.
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Aaron: Welcome to Zooming In, a project of The UnPopulist. I'm Aaron Ross Powell. Repressive regimes don't like critics, and they aren't satisfied to let their repression stop at the border. When they set their sights on threatening, coercing, or even killing critics who have fled to other countries, it's called transnational repression. My guest today is Annie Boyajian, Vice President of Policy and Advocacy at Freedom House, which tracks instances of transnational repression and helps governments prevent it.
A transcript of today’s podcast appears below. It has been edited for flow and clarity.
Aaron: What happened to [Saudi Arabian journalist] Jamal Khashoggi?
Annie: Great question. We would say that the murder of Jamal Khashoggi is an emblematic case of transnational repression, which is when governments reach beyond their own borders to target critics in an effort to silence dissent. For Mr. Khashoggi, he was lured into a consulate in Istanbul where he was suffocated and dismembered in what is still one of the most shocking cases of transnational repression that we have heard. He was, of course, lured into the Saudi consulate as he was a citizen of Saudi Arabia and a well-known journalist and regime critic.
Aaron: The response to this, I think, speaks to a lot of the issues that you raise in the article that you wrote for The UnPopulist because there seemed to be a lot of anger about this from U.S. citizens, shocked that someone who was a U.S. resident, that this would happen to them from journalists because he was a Washington Post journalist. Then nothing really happened. The perpetrators, the ultimate perpetrators, skated. There were no consequences. Why not?
Annie: I would say it's the age-old answer to why things don't happen to other human rights abusers or corrupt actors, and it's because there are politics at play. On the one hand, I would say you did see something happen that was unusual, right? The FBI did an investigation and report that you had senators talk about publicly. That is certainly unusual. There were sanctions of varying levels of strength that were imposed on some of the individuals involved. To your point, the Crown Prince himself, the well-known architect of this, according to reports, nothing has happened to him and he's continued to be a player on the world stage.
I think part of the reason that this issue shocked people and captured everyone's focus and attention is, one, it was incredibly egregious, but two, it really showed how human rights abuses in a country can have an impact, a global impact, in a way that other human rights issues don't necessarily show. It's just so evident because of the reaching into another country, because of the violation of sovereignty, how the security and human rights issues interact and interplay here. I think that's part of what was so shocking about it.
Aaron: How often does this sort of thing happen?
Annie: We have a database that looks at instances of physical transnational repression. That's things like assassinations, so the Jamal Khashoggi case, but also assaults, detentions, deportations. We have tracked, since 2014, 854 incidents of transnational repression committed by 38 governments in 91 different countries around the world. That is just a drop in the bucket. Our database does not include the indirect tactics, and that's things like spyware, and the use of spyware is so widespread right now, digital harassment, coercion by proxy.
We do think that the database paints a clear picture of the threat posed by transnational oppression and what is happening. We do see additional governments engaging in transnational oppression as we track information in our database. In 2022, I think we saw two additional governments added.
Aaron: You said 38 countries in the current date. How spread out is that? Is this something where there's a lot of it's happening across a lot of countries, or is it heavily concentrated among a small handful of regimes?
Annie: Great question. I would say the majority of countries engaging in transnational repression are countries that are rated as not free in our Freedom in the World Report. Our top 10 offenders are responsible for 80% of all of the incidents we have in our database. That is China, Turkey, Egypt, Russia, Tajikistan—I'm probably not remembering them all in order—but it's also Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Belarus, Rwanda, Iran, that's the top 10. And 80% that's significant, but it's global. It's in Asia, it's in Latin America, it's in the Middle East, it's everywhere.
This is partly because we are such a globalized world. We have tracked at Freedom House 17 consecutive years of decline in democracy around the world. That has been driven, in part, by worsening repression at home. Because we're so globalized, we see people flee, and it's easier sometimes for people to flee now than previously. It's also a lot easier for governments to engage in transnational repression. You can get spyware very cheaply. The digital age, where everyone needs to be online, and everyone is connected has made it very easy for governments to target dissidents and critics, even after they've fled abroad.
“We have tracked at Freedom House 17 consecutive years of decline in democracy around the world. That has been driven, in part, by worsening repression at home. Because we're so globalized, we see people flee, and it's easier sometimes for people to flee now than previously. It's also a lot easier for governments to engage in transnational repression.”
Aaron: Just staying for a moment on definitional questions, how narrowly tied to, I guess, the state does it need to be to count? What I'm thinking of is you can have an instance where the state leadership basically hires people or sends its own people off into another country to assassinate someone. It's like a very direct tie. Then you might have something like the Salman Rushdie situation, where it's more just we're going to foment a lot of anger at a given person and then hope violence against them falls out of it. Does that count as well?
Annie: Great question. We do look at non-state actors who are tied to governments. For our definition, there would need to be some sort of clear linkage between the government and the actor. For example, when a government hires private investigators to surveil, technically, whether those investigators know it or not, they would be engaging in transnational repression. You also have instances where governments have been linked pretty clearly to organized crime or other individuals who are, thugs for hire who will go intimidate and beat people up. That would count.
I think it gets a lot more tenuous if it's just anger fomented at someone like Salman Rushdie. That's less clear for the purposes of our database. There are indeed non-state actors who have been involved.
Aaron: Can you talk a bit about the link between this and accusations of terrorism? I found that an interesting part of the argument of basically claiming critics are terrorists.
Annie: Yes, absolutely. We see governments around the world copy laws or arguments made by democracy for their own purposes all the time. We definitely see this in the case of terrorism. The pervasive use of the term terrorist following the 9/11 attacks by the U.S. and other democracies made it easier. I'm not saying here we should not have called those individuals terrorists. I'm not speaking to that at all.
There are a lot of governments now who the first thing they will do when you try to say, "Excuse me, you are targeting someone because they are a critic." They'll say, "No, I'm not. This person is a terrorist." They will toss all sorts of spurious charges at them. This in the case of Russia, of China, of Iran. The government of China is responsible for 30 percent of all the cases in our database. They'll say, "Oh, they're inciting violence or a national security threat. They're a terrorist."
“The government of China is responsible for 30 percent of all the cases in our database. They'll say, "Oh, they're inciting violence or a national security threat. They're a terrorist."“
It's one of the top things we see, one of the top excuses that governments use in going after critics. One of the things we talk about with policymakers is just being really aware and not taking some of these charges at face value, particularly when the government's making the allegations are ones we have documented as engaging in transnational repression.
Aaron: Is the audience for this terrorist label? If I'm a repressive regime that wants to target a critic overseas and I am now publicly labeling that critic a terrorist. The people that I'm doing that labeling for, you've mentioned, to some extent, it's an excuse you can give to other countries. I was not just targeting a critic. This person was dangerous and I was therefore within my rights or justified. Is there also an element of talking to their own people in doing that? Even in authoritarian regimes, if you can convince the people that you're doing these things for their own good, that's an easier sell?
Annie: Absolutely. Transnational repression is one of a wide array of tactics that governments use when they're trying to repress, and control, and manipulate their population. Particularly for individuals who only have access to state propaganda. Or only consume state propaganda for a variety of reasons, it's a very effective argument to make for their domestic audience. It's part of the reason why they do it. Definitely, in terms of the countries that do engage in propaganda, I think, the propaganda arm goes hand in hand with any charges of transnational or any allegations of terrorism.
“Transnational repression is one of a wide array of tactics that governments use when they're trying to repress, and control, and manipulate their population.”
Or any of the other charges they lob at individuals. We see this, in Hong Kong and mainland China all the time in the way that Chinese state-owned publications talk about human rights lawyers and activists and others.
Aaron: Why do they care so much? If I'm in a repressive regime, everybody in my country is, reading and listening to and watching state-run media. I have a pretty strong hold on power. I know that murdering this random journalist or college professor or whatever they happen to be on foreign soil, it might not get me thrown out of power. The United States is not going to go in and like have regime change in Saudi Arabia because of this murder, but it's going to cause me trouble on the world stage. Why not just ignore these critics? If they fled the country, maybe they're not that much of a threat anyway.
Annie: It's a great question. It's something that, so I've been in D.C. policy circles for 20 years, which, I don't know, does that mean I'm doing something right or doing something wrong? That's a whole other conversation for another day. If you were thinking logically as an authoritarian, and then this is where you start wildly speculating about just the dynamics of human psychology. If you're thinking logically, you just do only a little bit of repression, right? Not enough to catch international attention, not enough to outrage your population. Some of these really more dramatic acts, I think there are a variety of reasons.
Certain regimes are very sensitive to their public image. Definitely, this is true in the case of the People's Republic of China. Sometimes I do really wonder if it is a function of some of these leaders just not having anyone brave enough to be a critical voice and tell, are you sure? You sure you want to do this? In some cases, it really has pushed public opinion too far. I think Saudi Arabia, they're obviously very engaged on the political stage, but it took a long time and this still comes up as an issue, as it should. There's still a lot more accountability that is needed there.
Aaron: How do we get that accountability, especially given that often these repressive regimes, Saudi Arabia has a lot of oil and a lot of connections throughout, say, the US. China is an enormous market. It's a manufacturing powerhouse. There seem to be a lot of incentives to find excuses to look the other way on this behavior, especially among the people who are actually in a position to potentially do something about it. The Washington Post journalists can gripe all they want to, but they're not going to be able to depose the head of Saudi Arabia or impose sanctions.
Annie: I think that is why education on this topic is so important, because it is a violation of sovereignty and it does directly impact the security of individuals in democracies. In the United States, we saw the Iranian regime try to kidnap a women's rights activist, and their plot was that they were going to kidnap her from her home in Brooklyn and stick her on a boat, take her to Venezuela, and then from Venezuela back to Iran. Then when that didn't work, they tried to assassinate her, I think twice now.
A friend of mine is an activist from Hong Kong. He's at home in his apartment in LA, and heard a strange noise and looked outside, and there was a drone hovering outside his apartment trying to take pictures. Okay. He didn't run out and tackle the drone. How can we prove who's operating it? This is a real violation of U.S. law. It's a violation of the 91 countries where it has occurred. For us, how to get the accountability, you're right. It's not an easy answer. There will always be political realities at play, but education around this issue and then codification of a definition in law.
Unfortunately, there's a mix of governments [that engage in transnational repression], so I don't want to paint the picture that only authoritarians are doing this, but it is certainly mostly countries that we rate as not free.
What transnational oppression is, is the key first step because that definition, everything stems from that. Do you need additional criminal law? Do you need training for government officials? Do you need to adjust immigration law to allow quick, easy entry for people who may be targeted? We would certainly say yes. Do you need additional resources and support for people who have been targeted once they reach your shores? We would say yes, but all of that starts with a definition and then coordination among governments that want to address the issue, which we're starting to see.
The G7 has talked about this issue and is continuing to work on it. There were some statements released alongside the Summit for Democracy and it's not only authoritarian regimes engaging in this. Unfortunately, there's a mix of governments, so I don't want to paint the picture that only authoritarians are doing this, but it is certainly mostly countries that we rate as not free. Democracies are really going to have to work together because we see the non-democracies working together, and so we don't want to be caught flat-footed on this one.
Aaron: What would defining it clearly, narrowly within the scope of law accomplish if these are either lawless regimes or—I guess let me ask it this way. It seems like if I am one country and I assassinate someone within the territory of another country, I've committed murder. That's already illegal. I have potentially violated the sovereignty. That's defined in different ways. What do we gain from carving out a specific legal standard about this thing?
Annie: There are actually two areas of law where I think you would want the definition. One would be Title 22, which is all the foreign affairs stuff, right, where you can have that broader, more expansive definition that really describes all the ways that transnational oppression manifests. Things we haven't talked about yet like coercion by proxy, where here I am in the US, I have family back home somewhere, they are getting threats and pressure and harassment from the government. Codifying it there will let you, as I mentioned, train government officials who might come in contact with it so that they're less susceptible to, for example, seeing an arrest warrant and picking someone up just based on the fact that it's an arrest warrant, whereas if they've gotten training and they know, aha, this is coming from a government that engages in transnational oppression, let's turn a more critical eye. Which in the US, I do think that there is already wide awareness and growing awareness at the federal level, a lot more to be done at state and local, so that's one whole basket. Then there's Title 18, which is criminal law, and I think there's plenty of robust discussion and good debate that could happen around should we, if we do criminalize, what should it look like?
If you look at the cases that have been prosecuted already, Department of Justice is having to get really creative in what they are using. Murder is pretty straightforward, obviously, that is illegal, but in the case of some individuals who were surveilling and harassing folks here in the US, they had to use stalking charges or conspiracy to commit stalking. In the case of the Ryan Air flight that Belarus forced down so that they could apprehend a blogger, there were some Americans on that plane, and so the United States used a law that I, until that moment, did not know existed, which was conspiracy to commit air piracy.
I think we have heard repeatedly, there's a real gap in law, and I think this is where you want to make sure you're protecting civil liberties, and where robust debate and discussion from lawyers is well warranted of, okay, if we are adding, what does it look like? There's also the advocacy value, telling the People's Republic of China, "These people are being convicted in the United States on conspiracy to commit stalking" does not have the same ring to it as saying they're being charged on engaging in transnational repression. There's real value in a democracy being able to say, "No, can't do that here. It's a crime here."
“There's also the advocacy value, telling the People's Republic of China, ‘These people are being convicted in the United States on conspiracy to commit stalking,’ does not have the same ring to it as saying they're being charged on engaging in transnational repression. There's real value in a democracy being able to say, ‘No, can't do that here. It's a crime here.’“
We are, of course, not so naive as to think that fixing laws in different democracies will stop this from happening completely, but it's an important step. I think coordination of democracies over time will send a very clear message that this is not tolerable. You got to follow that up with other actions, which we could talk about all day long.
Aaron: I was actually going to ask about those other actions.
Because it seems like if I'm China and I hire some people to harass you because you've been criticizing China or I hire someone to take you out because I really want to escalate things, those people, it's not like I'm sending senior government officials or people of I guess consequence in the regime's eyes to go and do this stuff. It almost looks like the mob takes out a hit and so you throw the person who carried out the hit in jail but the mob boss doesn't really suffer any consequences. What meaningful kinds of consequences other than democracy saying, "No, we really mean it. You shouldn't do that."
Annie: Yes, fair question. Listen, I actually think most folks would be really surprised about the level of officials who are directly engaging in this. I will say I was speaking to a journalist from a country in the Middle East, she's wanting to be under the radar for now so I won't name the country, not Saudi Arabia, different country, and is living in Germany. She was beaten up in Germany by a diplomat from the embassy in Germany. There is a level of hubris that goes into this and we have seen in some countries it really does seem like certain diplomats are traveling around with their portfolio almost being transnational oppression.
I think this is a foreign policy issue. It is also a domestic policy issue and you really to be effective have to address it as both. On the foreign policy side of things, there are sanctions that should be imposed on individuals engaging in this but also on individuals directing transnational oppression. This should be an issue that is routinely raised publicly and privately with the government. It should be an issue at multilateral bodies as it is starting to be because you can't just get at this obviously with one simple law.
We have talked a lot about the conditioning of foreign assistance which if we did it could be effective if we didn't allow loopholes. The GAO for your readers who want to dig in more actually released a very good report about a month ago that looks at some of the options within the US context. Say that they were talking about do you bring in arms control policy? Do you bring in other existing measures that have not been fully deployed? There is a lot more room on the targeted sanctions front quite frankly.
Aaron: On the technology front because the technology is making this—It's either easier to find the people you want to find or easier to track them, or easier to harass them. Should we as liberal regimes be cracking down on the use of spyware and the sale of these tools? I ask about that again in this question of incentives because while the United States government might not be participating in targeted assassinations overseas, we do buy and use spyware. Other liberal regimes do as well. What do we do about that considering that the countries that might want to crack down are the same ones who are also good consumers of these products?
Annie: It's a huge problem. I would say the short answer is yes, and. You already have companies like NSO Group which is the purveyor of the famous Pegasus [spyware software that allowed governments who bought it to hack the phones of dissidents, journalists and other critics] which actually Jamal Khashoggi had on his computer. Also, it's popped up with dozens of human rights defenders who we know. That's already on the entity list for exports. You can't buy that. There are plenty of purveyors of cheap spyware, and many of those companies are not in the United States. It used to be that just a handful of companies existed and now there is to your point a proliferation.
If companies in democracies stop exporting, that can help in the sense that at least economically it can make it more expensive. Maybe somehow there you limit it. You also need to make sure and this goes to my earlier point about you want a definition so you can provide training. You need to make sure that people who may be targeted are receiving training in digital hygiene. How do you stay safe and secure online? When you see violations, you need to be able to prosecute it. In the US, we need a comprehensive privacy law. It's a very complex web and quite frankly, some of this is going to be very difficult to walk back.
In that sense, a lot of the human rights defenders we work with, it is the informed risk on their end and people needing to do things these days like go out and have conversations in fields. Particularly with the government of China and the way that they're exporting some of these technologies to countries around the world. We just need to be very aware and have eyes open and raise these as issues if you're a policymaker. Back to my earlier point, when you see misuse, impose targeted sanctions and make sure that you are prohibiting export when you can.
Aaron: You also mentioned immigration as a way to help this, to make it easier for people to get out of these repressive regimes and seek some degree of protection in other countries. How do we define regime critics for that purpose? If we're going to carve out special exceptions to immigration laws because I'm going to assume that we can't just radically liberalize immigration laws because that seems to be an uphill battle constantly. Probably made more complicated by the fact that the countries that Americans seem to be most skeptical about letting people in from are often the most repressive regimes. But if I come to you as an agent of the state and say, "I'm a regime critic, let me in." How do you know? What's the standard for regime criticism?
Annie: Yes, great question. I am not an immigration lawyer, so we're going to rapidly be in territory that I have no business speaking in detail about. I would say, actually, there's legislation that was introduced by Senator Menendez that was a visa for human rights defenders. I think the way they got at that it was for human rights defenders at urgent risk. They were describing the risks faced and perhaps not the definition. There would certainly need to be vetting. You don't want someone to claim something inaccurately.
We do think that we work with folks under threat all the time, and there are actually some European countries that have some interesting emergency visa options for folks. Obviously, in the EU context, it's easier. Some of the European countries have been welcoming folks not from the EU. We have talked with policymakers in the US about whether that can be educational and informative for what it can look like here in the US. Can we expand some of the existing categories?
Aaron: This is very clearly a big problem, and one that will be challenging to address because of complexities, because of incentives, lots of reasons that we can't just wave a wand and fix it tomorrow. If there was one concrete step that we could take, we say, like the policy level, could take right now to make things better for people who are in real danger because they've been criticizing repressive regimes. What would be that one like, "Let's do this?"
Annie: This is a great question. As a policy person, I'm going to be like, "No, don't make me pick one." In terms of like, what will save a life tomorrow, it would be, let's get an emergency visa. If you're talking about pick one thing that would be most effective, I would say, let's do the definition so that we can start mandating training and outreach. That is, to the great credit of the U.S. government, that is happening pretty extensively, at least as compared to other democratic countries. The FBI, for example, has a whole webpage dedicated to transnational oppression. You can call the FBI hotline and report it. They are trying to do outreach to potentially targeted communities.
“In terms of like, what will save a life tomorrow, it would be, let's get an emergency visa. If you're talking about pick one thing that would be most effective, I would say, let's do the definition so that we can start mandating training and outreach. That is, to the great credit of the US government, that is happening pretty extensively, at least as compared to other democratic countries.”
There are some good-faith efforts already happening there. I think it's going to take years of work. This, it's going to sound strange that I say, this is an issue that makes me feel hopeful in a way that 20 years of other work doesn't. That is for two reasons. Number one, as I mentioned earlier, this is an issue where it so clearly shows the link between human rights abuses abroad and security and rights in your own country. The interest in this and the work on this is so bipartisan. That is not a small thing in this environment, as you at The UnPopulist know well.
The other thing about this that makes me so hopeful is the human rights defenders themselves. They have been through things we cannot fathom and they are still going. They have family members who have disappeared because of their work back in their home countries, or who are actively getting threats. They are actively getting threats and they are still going. To me, who am I to throw in the towel if they haven't? In that sense, it's going to take years, but here we are. We're ready to keep going.
“The other thing about this that makes me so hopeful is the human rights defenders themselves. They have been through things we cannot fathom and they are still going. They have family members who have disappeared because of their work back in their home countries, or who are actively getting threats. They are actively getting threats and they are still going. To me, who am I to throw in the towel if they haven't? In that sense, it's going to take years, but here we are. We're ready to keep going.”
Aaron: Thank you for listening to Zooming In at The UnPopulist. If you enjoy this show, please take a moment to review us and Apple Podcasts and also check out ReImagining Liberty, our sister podcast at The UnPopulist, where I explore the emancipatory and cosmopolitan case for radical social, political, and economic freedom. Zooming In is a project of The UnPopulist.
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Aaron Ross Powell: Welcome to Zooming In from The UnPopulist. I'm Aaron Ross Powell. Joining me today is Berny Belvedere, the new senior editor at The UnPopulist. We're going to chat today about the state of politics and the defense of liberalism.
A transcript of today’s podcast appears below. It has been edited for flow and clarity.
Aaron Ross Powell: Berny, let's maybe start with a bit about you.
Berny Belvedere: Thanks, Aaron, for having me on. I'm really stoked to be here. So, I was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, which, just a funny thing about that: the literal translation of Buenos Aires is something like good air. But really, I think, the key idea that that name tries to get across is something like friendly skies. It's the capital of Argentina. I didn't get a chance to know it too well—we left when I was four and a half, five-ish. We had an opportunity to become citizens really quickly here in the United States, so my parents took that opportunity and we went from Buenos Aires to Kansas City, Kansas, on the Kansas side of things. We're one of the few on the Kansas side of the divide. Then, for my high school years, we moved to Miami, Florida.
So those are the places where I've lived. It's an interesting mix of different types of arrangements and social configurations, but it's also colored my approach to the kinds of places that I feel like society can build well. I've taken my love for suburban America from Kansas City. Miami is an international metropolis, very big on sprawl in a way that I don't quite prefer as much. I like a more densely concentrated type of city. Buenos Aires is just sort of European in its flavor, but also combining South American aspects as well.
Those are the places I've lived. Intellectually, I've pursued both theology and philosophy at a pretty high level. I didn't get a PhD, but I went for graduate degrees in philosophy and in theology. In the past, I guess if we were in medieval times, it would have just been one field of study, but with the specialization of knowledge, it forced me to get a degree in each. Even the theology that I did was very philosophical in nature. I guess that [philosophy] would be my overriding interest. That's a little bit about my background.
Lots of other stuff we could also talk about, though not the focus of this show. I'm married, got three kids, love sports and music, but let's stick to the stuff that the people want to tune in and listen to us talk about.
Aaron: Your academic background is theology and philosophy, but you're now working as senior editor for a political journal, and before that, you were working on another political outlet. What's the connection?
Berny: I've always been drawn to political philosophy. Even when I studied theology, I looked into the different traditions and what they had to say about the different polities and how society should be arranged—that was always a really interesting avenue of thought for me. In terms of now working for a journalistic outfit as opposed to some think tank or something else, I decided toward the end of my graduate degree in philosophy that a career in academia wasn't for me. The reason is partly vain, I'll admit. It's also partly, I think, morally okay. The vain part is I wanted to be a part of a broader conversation. Unless you become a kind of academic rock star, your work isn't going to be read by many people, maybe your fellow faculty in the department where you work, but that’s it.
“We've got these structural features in place that complicate our ability to genuinely have good discussions and intellectually rich discussions. Same as it always was, but one hope, a techno-optimist hope early on, was that technology in the social media age would try to counteract that, but we're not seeing that at all.”
I wanted to be part of a bigger conversation, so I pivoted to journalism where I've been privileged to be able to publish at some big venues and people interact with your work. They send you messages. Your thought becomes something that then someone else takes into consideration. Then that advances the conversation in a way where you're fortunate enough to be a part of an ongoing discourse about a topic.
That always moved me, so I pivoted to that. I've been working in political journalism for a while. I founded my own venue, Arc Digital, in 2016, right before the election. Ever since then, I've been involved in online writing and editing.
Aaron: Both of us then come from this background of academic ideas and enjoying those kinds of ideas, discussing them, communicating them and so on and both of us ended up leaning more into the popular audience's side of things than the strictly academic. When you look out at either the job as a political journalist or the state of political conversation, what role do you see for these kinds of ideas? Because we're in this weird time when it seems like on the one hand, ideological ideas are more dominant than it feels like they were 20 years ago.
Particularly on the right, you're seeing the populist movement which has a much more ideological streak than the more bland Paul Ryan conservatism at least professed to have. On the left, you're seeing the rise of their own kinds of ideologies about the nature of power and privilege in society. These are the sorts of heavy ideas that we grapple with but on the other side of things, it feels like the interest in high-level conversation has declined. That politics has been taken over by id, that we have elevated politicians who don't just speak in soundbites but often speak in incoherent soundbites. How do we navigate that?
Berny: I think that's a great question. From the beginning at Arc Digital, one of my goals was to take higher-level thinking, to take academic work—and I had reached out to members of faculties and different scholars—and distill some of this higher-level thinking into something that's more publicly digestible. Because that oftentimes represents really good argumentation that if you can just package in a way that is more palatable to the masses, it could influence thinking for the better.
That's been, for a long time, a kind of holy grail for people with these sensitivities to stronger forms of arguments and intellectual discourse. This is the holy grail: Are you able to take some of the awesome stuff that's being published at the research level and show it to the masses in a way where they can be receptive to it and it can influence their thinking? I think that's a great approach that responsible publications ought to take. Some of their output should be scholarly stuff, again, made into digestible forms for the masses.
I tried to do some of that at Arc. The UnPopulist does that really well where we work together with scholars and with editorial assistance and guidance we help the work come out in a publishable form where people can read it and get a lot from it. I think that's a burden of publications today that want to make a meaningful contribution to the discourse.
We're up against it. You're right. We're up against a discourse culture now where the basest forms of political point-scoring have penetrated how you go about participating in it, and it has turned everything into an “own the libs” aesthetic or on the other side, on the flip side of that, whatever that might look like.
Interspersed throughout all the attempts at high-level discussions and thinking, you get a whole lot of nonsense—so much of it, in fact, that it can feel like you're under a torrential downpour of it. You can't ever get to the good stuff because your feed [is dominated by this] and the people you follow [are drowned out by brasher voices]. You and I see this on the social media platforms that we're on. People are always complaining about the kind of deluge of crap that our feeds are now dominated by—and rightly so. It's partly a function of the way these spaces [are designed]—where tossing red meat to your followers is a way to increase engagement and increase your followership. Where not ceding a single inch to your opponents, even when you privately think that they've got something right, you know that if you do that, you're now subject to the blowback where people promptly unfollow you or they no longer see you as a reliable source for the position that they want championed.
We've got these structural features in place that complicate our ability to genuinely have good discussions and intellectually rich discussions. Same as it always was, but one hope, a techno-optimist hope early on, was that technology in the social media age would try to counteract that, but we're not seeing that at all.
Aaron: This sounds like a Marshall McLuhan, "the medium is the message" sort of argument. I'll just as an aside, I believe it was Ezra Klein who made this point on social media recently that the Marc Andreessen tech optimist manifesto, which didn't seem very optimistic but mostly just seemed very angry, was this interesting example of essentially the structure of Twitter colonizing the intellect and rhetoric of essay writing. That this essay was written in essentially a very long series of tweets, so not just short declarative statements, but also I think exactly the kind of thing that you're mentioning, which is rhetoric tuned to create engagement, anger, and that's spreading out.
Some of it seems like this started with cable news though. I don't know that we can pin all the blame on social media, but this seems like a problem for us. The UnPopulist publishes long and thoughtful essays on a wide range of topics that demand careful engagement and focused attention. We're not writing super academic stuff, but this is not a series of tweets and it's not a series of rage-bait declarations. This is all happening in a digital space that seems to structurally further incentivize that. How do we get out of that from the political standpoint?
Because we have to participate in it. The UnPopulist can't just be a print magazine that doesn't do anything digitally. We have to participate in this space. We have to communicate in ways that are to some extent native to the space if we want people to talk about it. This seems like a big problem for politics is that we have imposed structural limitations on the very discourse itself and then that's making things worse.
Berny: Absolutely. It's a problem, again, that is not new. When cable news arose and operated under a different coverage model, it was incredibly attentive to viewership numbers in a way where past network news channels—when there were so few of them—didn't have to be. Because, after all, where else were people going to go for their news? But cable news had to very closely pay attention to what people would want to hear.
I know there's a cartoonish quality to Aaron Sorkin's work at times. It can be extremely optimistic—but it’s a kind of naive optimism. So his show, The Newsroom, illustrates that same struggle where you have a news anchor who is constitutionally bothered by the fact that the masses appear to want to tune into a bunch of garbage and a bunch of dumb argumentation and just theatrics and he wants to tell the news. The underlying thesis of that show, which is profoundly mistaken, is that if you just give people the right information, they will see the value of it and then they'll lead better lives, they'll form better thoughts. We can call it the naive information theory.
That's been proven false because people time and again revert to wanting that sort of memefied, simplistic narrative that says, "My opponents are idiots and our side is so obviously correct," instead of an informative package that at times tells you, uncomfortably, "You're a bit wrong on this, the other side might be right, we're not totally victorious on this point." People just don't want that. There are neurological, psychological reasons for all of this, and reality is just structured that way. When you say we're up against it, we definitely are—and in a far deeper way than people realize.
Algorithms are calibrated to exploit all of this—[because these algorithms secure] the results that the social media platform engineers and big shots want. They keep people engaged. In a sense, [our approach to journalism, by contrast] has this counter-cultural vibe to it. Sure, there are people who do want argumentation and a platforming of opposing views at times. They want things that are infused with the intellectual virtues as you and I know them to be—but that's not the majority. That's not what people consistently want, even the good ones.
I don't want to make it seem like we're in a heroic quest of “us against the world,” but we do have the difficulty of belonging to an environment where the structural conditions frustrate our goals all the time. We are forced to model a better way within an ecosystem that doesn't really have time or patience for it. What else can we do? Like you said, we can't opt out. We'd be leaving the people who could be influenced by it without good quality stuff. We'd be leaving them to the wolves, as it were.
We have to be there even if our message at times is unpopular, or too nuanced [for the recommendation engine]. Of course, we don't get things perfectly right. But there's a difference between an outfit that is pandering to the worst impulses of a particular voting bloc and an outlet that will get things wrong in a way where they strove so hard to not get them wrong and to be fair. I think there's a lot of value in being that way and in doing that work even if you're going to ultimately suffer a lot of frustration.
Aarion: Do you see a relationship between the existing media and discourse landscape and the structural incentives that exist within it and so on and populism and the contemporary rise of populist movements?
Berny: I do. One of the big engines of populism is an uncritical acceptance to what “the folk” want in a naive sense without trying to tame them or corral them or even steer them toward a different way. That's reflected in the way that partisan news works today—say I’m The Blaze and I have a small impulse in my head to say, "Let's just tell the truth on this one." You know that you've got five or six other outlets on your level of scale—outlets such as The Daily Wire and others—who won't tell the truth on this topic and you're thinking, "The viewers will gravitate toward them if we don't pander in the way that they are doing there."
It crowds out any inkling of journalistic and objective integrity. Those are the partisan incentives that are there. Populism effectively takes a look at the vast swaths of the people that you're trying to win over and it says, "Let me reflect in my messaging to you the same values and urgings and promptings that you have in your heart without in any way challenging them to be better or corralling them into a more humane version of that.” It doesn’t care about doing that enhancing work. In fact, it often degrades people—taking them from where they were and helping them get worse rather than elevating them or ennobling them at all.
I think it's two sides of the same coin, absolutely.
Aaron: It seems we're stuck in this effectively rage feedback loop where as you say, it's become the role of what used to be the commanding heights of culture and the media and so on. Their role is now just reflecting back the anger, which then exacerbates the anger. We've all had an experience like that. That relative who becomes a diehard Fox News or Newsmax person and they just seem like the right anger keeps seeming to ratchet up because they get angry and then they watch everything through that lens of more anger. At the same time, are being told, "Your anger is justified, and here are more things you ought to be angry about," and it just snowballs.
This seems to be, not just psychologically bad for everyone. It's not good for you to live in a constant state of anger and hatred towards each other, but a real problem for liberalism as well, because we can talk about liberalism as a set of institutions or the rule of law, or a way of living in relationship to each other. One thing that liberalism is, I think because you can think of it as patience and equanimity towards each other.
“We are forced to model a better way within an ecosystem that doesn't really have time or patience for it. What else can we do? Like you said, we can't opt out. We'd be leaving the people who could be influenced by it without good quality stuff. We'd be leaving them to the wolves, as it were.”
That if liberalism is diverse, people going about their own conceptions of the good life in close proximity to each other and in cooperation with each other, in order for that to work, you can't be just enraged at every difference that you see and every person who's doing something that you wouldn't do. Especially if you have people on your television telling you, "Those people are trying to destroy America, they're evil, they're corrupting, they're sapping Western civilization of its precious bodily fluids," and so on, we need this patience and equanimity to simply get along with each other.
Simply getting along with each other is what liberalism is, but everything is tuned to pushing against that. Now we both are with The UnPopulist, which is critiquing the populist right but is doing so as part of a broader defense of liberalism. How do we talk about and defend liberal values in an environment where people are being encouraged to not embody them? Also in a lot of cases, in particular, on the right where these very liberal virtues of patience, toleration, equanimity, getting along, acceptance are portrayed as weak, as themselves corrupt.
That what you need is this stridency and anger and strength and toxicity and so on as a defense against the effete and civilization sapping and weakness of liberalism.
Berny: That's a tall order. First and foremost, we can produce the kind of work that models a better way. As we noted, that work is going to have a kind of ceiling to it, in the sense that because we're not out there posting in the manner that generates a lot of engagement or scores a cheap political point … our way has a natural ceiling to it that we can't overcome. We're not going to be able to overcome the limitations of this kind of work—just won't reach the masses in a way that a meme just dunking on your opponent will. Still, the primary font of our output is the work that we come out with.
In addition to that, I think we need to have ongoing discussions about what shape the liberalism that we expect to be resilient in our day and age should look like. Think, for example, of the discussions we've had in the past five years or so about Karl Popper's paradox of tolerance and the various ways that people landed on that—where if you are fully tolerant of all perspectives, some of those will be intolerant ones. It forces you to be intolerant, as someone who is advocating for tolerance, in order to get rid of the views that would complicate the social project. Perhaps you didn't want to be that aggressive, but you have to be because if you aren’t, it could lead to the unraveling of the very framework that you're trying to set up. During the medieval era, heading into the modern era, you had various forms of governments that were trying to break free from the shackles of religion, and its dominance on the social arrangement … they saw some people being a little bit too committed to their religious ideals. They understood that that could potentially be a challenge when you have two allegiances, one to the social contract and everything that that requires, and one to God and what you perceive God to be telling you to do. When push comes to shove, which one are you going to prioritize? That led to a lot of people who wanted a thriving, vibrant social framework to be in place, looking on at these really committed and devoted religious types and saying, "We have to deal with you a little harsher than we would want, just simply because your presence within this sphere represents an existential challenge to our increasingly liberal project.”
What does that look like today? We have dominant voices on the extremes, on both sides, but increasingly suffused throughout the entirety of the right, that are pushing for straightforwardly illiberal forms of society and forms of life. Should we move from a classical liberal, harm principle as our only guideline, where the negative liberty of—if you don't harm someone else, you can do whatever you want—mild procedural liberalism to a more muscular form of liberalism where you have to take more aggressive steps to counteract the tide of illiberal sentiment and proposals from people?
I do think there is a conversation that we should have about that, where our liberalism takes on a more aggressive posture. Not because we would ideally want to veer into a authoritarian approach to establishing liberalism, but because the very possibility of liberalism in this more heightened atmosphere requires it. What does that look like? Maybe putting pressure on our [private] social platforms to not be as free speech absolutist, but to take a stronger stance toward obvious and flagrant misinformation. In an era where the challenges to liberalism might not have been so severe, we could take the free speech value and say, "This is the value to defend, and so let's have zero restrictions."
In a time where all of that stuff is used toward the erosion of liberalism so that we could get something completely new and authoritarian and tyrannical, there are steps we can take, I think, to counteract that.
Aaron: All of that raises a lot of, I think, really interesting and extraordinarily thorny issues, complicated issues. One of the things that came to mind as you were saying that is I am just constitutionally, in many senses of that term, very worried about state intervention into basically everything. One of the really interesting things that we've seen is, say, for misinformation, the platforms have frequently, voluntarily, of their own accord, without outside regulatory pressure, taken steps to limit the spread of misinformation or to community label things that are misinformation as such, and other ways to just slow down its proliferation on their platforms.
They're doing it, partly because the leadership are people who don't want to see misinformation and can recognize the harms they can cause, and then partly because it turns out that platforms' customers like places that aren't just filled with conspiracy theories. Some customers do like that stuff, but it seems to be a minority. Your platform gets better traction if it's not full of trolls and misinformation.
What's been interesting is how those sorts of voluntary and speech behaviors, it simply is an exercise of free speech to label a tweet as, this is not true about vaccines or whatever, gets framed often by people not just on the right but centrist as well as abridgments of speech.
I'm thinking of there's recently something on the West—I think it was the Westminster Declaration that a bunch of people signed about free speech and the need for free speech. A lot of it was, it is censorship, it's a violation of speech norms for platforms to be labeling, for platforms to be undertaking this kind of stuff. There's this pushback not just on the prospects of state intervention but the prospects of just voluntary calling out, criticizing, and so on. It does raise these particularly complex issues within liberalism of what counts as the kind of stuff that crosses the line.
“We need to craft this norm and hammer it home: everyone should be able to say what they want. But it’s also important to hold that not everything they say is equally plausible. Those are two important things to hold in our heads at the same time. So when it comes to free speech, let's defend it to the hilt. But when it comes to building our institutions and platforms and wanting those to be a positive force in society, there is nothing wrong with the algorithm prioritizing views that meet certain criteria—views that are factual, that have a sensitivity to details and historical accuracy.”
If what you're saying is there's a line where a certain set kind of views or a certain quantity of a certain kind of views becomes sufficiently dangerous to liberal foundations, that we need to do something about that. We can't just let it go because the risks are too high. We have to decide where to draw the line. In a large sense, that seems to be the crux of a lot of the most vitriolic arguments right now is which views, expressions, beliefs are so dangerous to our ordered society that we have to crack down on them.
The right right now is basically thinks that LGBT identities cross that line, that the expression of or the promotion of these things, the mention of them in schools, whatever, will destroy our society and so ought to be prohibited. Critical race theory crosses the line for them, whatever it is they mean by critical race theory because that's a little ambiguous. On the left, you get certain traditional religious beliefs cross that line, non-acceptance of gay identities. Not the we need to stamp them out and exclude them from the public sphere but just like I don't personally want to be involved with it or I have expressed I don't think it's correct and so on.
Certain views about race or gender or class cross that line and it's not clear how we solve that without, in a sense, reverting to a illiberalism, without saying like, "Okay, you, Berny, it's going to be what you decide. You determine where the line is and that's it." That wouldn't be liberalism as we understand it or we put me in charge or we put some small star chamber in charge. It feels like that's where the conversation is going forward is figuring that out, is recognizing that liberalism needs defending and can fall into illiberalism or authoritarianism or fascism but at the same time, we all pursue motivated reasoning in deciding what are those things that we can no longer tolerate as well.
We're not all unbiased Adam Smithian, outside observers. We're embedded in this discourse and dialogue and political environment and social environment and religious environment and so on ourselves. Is the answer to that just then to go back to those liberal virtues? To say, "We can't get the answer right. We can't have perfect knowledge. We all have these incentives and biases," but lean into the very intellectual virtues that we were talking about earlier of humility, inquisitiveness, charity and understanding and so on.
Berny: So I'm a philosophy instructor and one of the thing is teach my students when we're going over logic and critical thinking is informal fallacies where we go over them—their categories, their names, and I give a couple of examples of each.
And when we get to equivocation, there's this interesting one that shows the kind of subtlety of how this might work.
It’s a short argument. See if you can spot the equivocation and let's talk about why it's an equivocation.
And the argument is:
(1) Everyone has a right to say what they want.
(2) So everything that people say is right.
And then I ask them what word is being equivocated over and of course they can detect that the word is “right.”
In the premise, the word means something like a social allowance to be able to say what you want, the ability to say what you want without the state bearing down on you for saying something wrong. Everyone's got a right to say what they want.
But then in the conclusion, without announcing itself, the word shifts to a different usage of “right,” it becomes something like: every view is equally plausible.
When the premise goes, everyone’s got a right to say what they want, and the conclusion says, so everything that people say is right, to the untrained ear, to the uncritical thinker, you’ll end up swallowing an argument that tells you that in the end every argument should be equally acceptable and every view is equally plausible. When that’s just manifestly false.
So I think what we need to do as a society and to craft this norm and hammer it home: everyone should be able to say what they want. But it’s also important to hold that not everything they say is equally plausible.
Those are two important things to hold in our heads at the same time.
So when it comes to free speech, let's defend it to the hilt.
But when it comes to building our institutions and platforms and wanting those to be a positive force in society, there is nothing wrong with the algorithm prioritizing views that meet certain criteria—views that are factual, that have a sensitivity to details and historical accuracy. There’s nothing censorious about taking a post that has these elements in it and then the algorithm pushing that one forward, getting it across more people's eyes, and overlooking a different kind of post and not promoting that one algorithmically that instead is just a whole bunch of nonsense. There's nothing censorious about that—if it's announced ahead of time, if it's part of the TOS of a platform.
So that's, I think, one way to carry out a more muscular form of liberalism, where you're not at all compromising on free speech because you're allowing the bad speech to exist, but neither are you naively promoting it as if it should share a kind of equal, ‘hey, everyone, take a look at this, this is really helpful’ kind of announcement or label to it.
Aaron: Thank you for listening to Zooming In at The UnPopulist. If you enjoy this show please take a moment to review us in Apple podcasts and also check out Reimagining Liberty, our sister podcast of The Unpopulist. Where I explore the emancipatory and cosmopolitan case for radical social, political, and economic freedom. Zooming In is a project of The UnPopulist.
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Aaron Ross Powell: Welcome to Zooming In, a project of The UnPopulist. I’m Aaron Ross Powell. My guest today is George Mason University law professor and B. Kenneth Simon Chair in Constitutional Studies at the Cato Institute, Ilya Somin. Ilya recently wrote an article for The UnPopulist about the state of the Supreme Court—whether it’s become more politicized than it used to be, and why many of the proposals to fix it could be counterproductive, even dangerously so.
A transcript of today’s podcast appears below. It has been edited for flow and clarity.
Aaron Ross Powell: Is the Supreme Court more politicized than it used to be?
Ilya Somin: I think it depends on your definition of politicization. I think it is more politicized in the sense that there's more polarization between Republican-appointed justices and Democratic-appointed ones than there was say 30, 40, 50 years ago. On the other hand, I don't think it's more politicized in the sense that justices’ political views play a bigger role in their decisions than they did in the past. I think there's little evidence to support that. While the justices are not now, nor have they ever been completely free of political bias, I think they are much less biased than other governmental institutions are. That enables them to play a more neutral role than we would have otherwise if we weaken judicial power.
“I think it is more politicized in the sense that there's more polarization between Republican-appointed justices and Democratic-appointed ones than there was say 30, 40, 50 years ago. On the other hand, I don't think it's more politicized in the sense that justices’ political views play a bigger role in their decisions than they did in the past.”
Aaron Ross Powell: One of the things that frustrates me about the way that a lot of people talk about the Supreme Court and its decisions is there's this sense, I think from both sides, but you see it a lot from the left that justices make a decision on what they think the right answer or the best answer or the answer they'd prefer for a given case is based on their partisan political priors. Like, I'm a conservative, therefore I want to restrict immigration. Then when there's a case in front of them about immigration, they just reason backwards from that.
It's like a disingenuous legal argument effectively when in fact, as we both know, these justices usually come in with a coherent and developed jurisprudential perspective and philosophy. They're originalists or textualists or living Constitution people, and they're often fairly upfront about what has political—it is more likely if you are a progressive that you're going to find living constitutional perspectives more persuasive than strict constructionist perspectives, but they're reasoning from that articulated theory.
When you talk about them becoming more politicized in the first way—the politics of the justices are diverging, are we seeing a growing divergence in the underlying judicial philosophies? The living constitutionalists are becoming more extreme in their living constitutionalism—more hardcore—and the textualists are becoming more textualist in theirs?
Ilya Somin: I don't think that's necessarily what's happening. I think it's simply that what we have is a greater divergence within the Supreme Court on both political ideology and also some issues of legal methodology as well. That translates into a bigger gap between the predicted votes of a Republican appointee versus a Democratic appointee than would have existed 40 or 50 years ago. Such a divergence is not completely unprecedented in American history, but it is different from what you saw in the immediate post-World War II era where, say, from the late 1940s until perhaps the 1970s or the '80s, differences between Democratic and Republican appointees were much more modest.
It's not because the justices of that era were somehow less biased or more removed from politics. It's that within the legal elite of that era, with the possible exception of southern segregationists, there was much less disagreement over big major issues, either of interpretation or of political ideology than there is now, and also I think over time, as there's been more polarization between the political parties, there's also been more in the way of divergent litmus tests on—while both Democratic and Republican presidents, they want to appoint people who have strong professional credentials, they also have a series of litmus tests on how they want the people to vote on different issues.
When they vet potential nominees, particularly for the Supreme Court, they will do what they can to make sure that they get somebody who's likely to vote the way they want on these issues. Not because that person is deliberately being political but in most cases because due to their jurisprudential and other views, they will tend to come out in that direction even if their motive is not to please the president that appointed them or the political party.
Aaron Ross Powell: Can you talk about this in the context of the nomination and confirmation process? Your essay at The UnPopulist begins by looking at the changes there. Can you tell us how things used to look, how they look now?
Ilya Somin: Sure. Nominations and confirmations have looked different ways, different periods of American history. If you look at that period, say from the 1940s to at least the late 1960s, and even later, most nominations with rare exceptions weren't particularly controversial. Many senators from the opposing party, usually a clear majority, would still vote for the most nominees. Often the questioning of nominees was pretty perfunctory. I mentioned the example of Byron White who was only questioned for about 40 or 50 minutes, and a lot of that time was spent on questions about his football career because he had been a professional football player before he was a judge.
Obviously, if you look at recent years first, almost every recent nominee in the last 15 years or so, a majority of opposing party senators have voted against the nominee. The last nominee who got a majority of opposing party senators, I think, was Chief Justice Sean Roberts when he was nominated in 2005. Even with him, there was something, I think 22 Democratic senators devoted against him. Secondly, recent confirmation hearings have featured a lot of questioning and debate about controversial legal and political issues.
Obviously, this next factor is less new, but some of them have featured issues of personal scandal like accusations against Kavanaugh, though there have been cases like that in previous history as well. Those kinds of things are more charged even than they would have been 50 or 60 years ago because the fear of Republicans with Kavanaugh was not just a Kavanaugh might be defeated, but the Democrats would somehow create a situation where they could string things out until the election and then maybe the Democrats would control the Senate in its aftermath, then therefore block Republican nominees.
Just as in fairness, the Republicans in 2016 were able to block the Democratic nominee, Merrick Garland, for several months until the election happened. Then they were able to get their own nominee through instead. There has been an escalation of political conflict over nominations and also of senators voting against opposing party nominations, at least in most cases.
Aaron Ross Powell: I want to get to the Merrick Garland move because that's obviously quite significant in the narratives about politicization. Before that, I want to ask if it's the case that politicians are now picking judges who are more removed from what used to be a consensus center than they used to be. They look more distinct from the guys that the other party might be picking if they were in charge.
That's basically a demand-side change. Does that mean that we are getting less qualified nominees than we did before? Before, the selection criteria was, "I wanted to find the best possible justice" and now it is, "I want to find the best possible justice who aligns with my more extreme politics", that's going to narrow the pool of possible nominees.
Ilya Somin: It's an interesting question. A lot depends obviously on what you consider a good qualification for a Supreme Court Justice and there's not a consensus on that. If you believe that what should be a good qualification is technical expertise on legal issues with an extensive background in those kinds of things, I think the nominees in the last 20 or 30 years are actually on average somewhat better than those from earlier eras because in addition to the greater polarization and vetting, there is also emerged the norm, which some people criticize of appointing people with extensive experience in legal theory and also in appellate court judging usually at the circuit court of appeals levels.
“If you believe that what should be a good qualification is technical expertise on legal issues with an extensive background in those kinds of things, I think the nominees in the last 20 or 30 years are actually on average somewhat better than those from earlier eras.”
We have almost completely eliminated the previous tradition of at least sometimes appointing professional politicians to the Supreme Court. Some the most important Supreme Court justice of the past, there is Earl Warren, Hugo Black, we can name other examples, had been professional politicians, not people whose main background was as judges or legal theorists. That's almost completely gone. It's hard to even remember the last time a career politician got nominated to the Supreme Court. Maybe the last Supreme Court justice who had experience in elected office, if I remember correctly, was Sandra Day O'Connor, who had briefly been a state legislator, but even that wasn't her main thing that she had done.
If you look at the purely technical professional qualifications of Supreme Court justices, they actually look more impressive for the most part in recent decades than before. Though as I mentioned earlier, there is disagreement about whether appellate court judging experience is the thing we should most look for. Some people argue that there are other kinds of experience that are undervalued. I, myself, think it might be good to appoint people with experience as state Supreme Court judges and not rely as exclusively as we seem to on people with experience as federal judges.
Aaron Ross Powell: Or a hobby horse that's of a lot of people in our circles is appointing more people with defense experience to the court versus former prosecutors.
Ilya Somin: Yes. My Cato Institute colleague, Clark Neely, makes a big point. I think there's some merit to it. On the other hand, it's important to remember that people who have experience as government lawyers and prosecutors nonetheless sometimes have widely divergent views even on criminal justice issues, probably the most pro-prosecution justice right now, Sam Alito and one of the two most pro-defense justices, Sonia Sotomayor had experience as prosecutors, but obviously they clearly derive very different lessons from that experience or they just took in different viewpoints even before they took those jobs.
I think it is true that it would be good to have some diversification beyond people who have experience as executive branch lawyers or federal appellate judges, which is the main pipeline that we see over the last several decades, but at least in terms of conventional metrics of qualifications, these people look very impressive. You might object to him on jurisprudential grounds or in Kavanaugh's case, the accusation of sexual assault or whatnot, but it's hard to say that these people lack technical legal qualifications. They have them actually on average more than justices from past eras of American history.
I would note also, of course, that women and non-whites are in the pipeline for these nominations much more in the last several decades than any time before. We now have multiple justices who are not white at the same time, three of the nine, and we also of course have more women on the Supreme Court, than ever before.
Aaron Ross Powell: Was the Supreme Court historically accused of being politicized? I guess what I mean by that is one of the pieces of evidence that people give, or one of the things, the main drivers of the narrative that the Supreme Court right now is more politicized than it used to be, is that it is making controversial decisions on issues that the electorate views is like very important in their own personal lives; Abortion decisions, religious practice decisions, and so on. We had the court in the '50s and '60s, the civil rights courts were making all kinds of decisions that were wildly controversial. Were they accused of being politicized in the same way that we see the current court today?
Ilya Somin: Yes, absolutely. If you look in the 1950s and '60s, critics of the Supreme Court at that time, southern segregationists, but also tough on crime advocates, they certainly accused the Supreme Court of pursuing left wing ideology of various kinds at the expense of jurisprudential values. When Roe vs Wade was issued in 1973, that accusation was also made. You can also find past eras in American history where such accusations were made. Basically, any time when there's significant conflict or controversy over Supreme Court decisions, it is likely that at least some critics will accuse the court of being political in the sense of pushing their political values rather than jurisprudential values.
“Any time when there's significant conflict or controversy over Supreme Court decisions, it is likely that at least some critics will accuse the court of being political in the sense of pushing their political values rather than jurisprudential values.”
If there's a difference now compared to '50s and '60s is that those disagreements fall along more clearly partisan lines because in the '50s and '60s, the southern segregationist critics, many of them were also Democrats, even as more liberal northern Democrats had a different view, and at least for a time, the tough on crime issue also cut across party lines. Though eventually beginning in the late '60s and '70s, the Republicans became more the tough on crime party.
Ironically, Richard Nixon ran for president in 1968 on the slogan that he was going to restore law and order and appoint judges to the courts who would be less sympathetic to criminal defendants. Ironic because of course, later he himself got into serious legal trouble as did members of his administration and some of those same judges ruled against him when he tried to hide the Watergate tapes.
Aaron Ross Powell: Let's get back to Merrick Garland then.
Ilya Somin: Sure.
Aaron Ross Powell: That seems to be the catalyst or precipitating event of the current wave of accusations about the Supreme Court being politicized in an unfair, corrupt way. That's an instance where the accusations of politicization, which is a word I'm sure I'm going to stumble over a few times as I try to say it in this conversation, is not so much that the person who eventually got that spot was a partisan hack, but rather that the GOP effectively cheated in order to get a guy who represented more their views than a guy who didn't into office— not into office, onto the bench. That then delegitimizes. The politicization delegitimizes a lot of these decisions because it was a cheat.
Is there any validity to that argument that maybe the justices themselves aren't hacks, but it's become increasingly common and particularly common with the GOP, starting with Garland to abuse the process in order to influence the court in their direction and therefore de-legitimize the resulting decisions?
Ilya Somin: You can say they cheated in the sense that it was an escalation in the conflict over judicial nominations. On the other hand, it was not cheating in the sense that they violated the law or the constitution. The Senate has the power to refuse to hold confirmation hearings on nominees just it has the power to vote them down. I would also add that, what the Republicans did in 2016 did have important precursors and things that the Democrats did. I would point to two things in that regard.
One is, in the early 2000s, the Democrats in the Senate pulled off a very similar move with respect to several George W. Bush nominees to the DC Circuit, which is usually seen as the second most powerful federal court in the land. They essentially sat on the nominations for years on end until the nominees withdrew, and each of those nominees, some of them were people who are seen as highly-qualified potential future Supreme Court appointees.
Granted, the DC Circuit is still not as important and powerful a court as the Supreme Court. Doing this at the Supreme Court level, you can say is a further escalation, but it's a difference in degree more than kind. In addition, when we had the 1992 and 2008 elections, when there was a Republican president in office whom it looked like, and indeed it did happen, that he was about to replace with it by a Democrat. A number of Senate Democrats including Chuck Schumer and then-Senator Joe Biden had made noises along the lines of that they would try to block a nomination to an open Supreme Court seat until after the election happened. Now, I certainly agree there's a difference between saying you might do this, and then they never actually did do it because no seats came open and actually doing it, but what you see with a gradual process of escalation is when one side escalates in one way, the other side tends to top it in other ways.
I do think the underlying dynamic here is not that GOP senators were uniquely abusive of the rules, or for that matter, the Democratic senators were, but that both sides have temptation to use the procedural weapons more in an era when the stakes of nominations are seen as higher, given that there's a bigger gap between the rulings of a likely Republican nominee versus those of a Democratic nominee.
“The underlying dynamic here is not that GOP senators were uniquely abusive of the rules, or for that matter, the Democratic senators were, but that both sides have temptation to use the procedural weapons more in an era when the stakes of nominations are seen as higher, given that there's a bigger gap between the rulings of a likely Republican nominee versus those of a Democratic nominee.”
In the days of Byron White, as I mentioned earlier, Republicans, most of them, didn't feel like Byron White's rulings were going to be massively different from a person that might have been nominated by a Republican president, and therefore they felt little need to complain about White or to try to block him unless it was revealed there was some kind of scandal or something like that.
Aaron Ross Powell: From your perspective as someone who obviously has a lot of legal expertise, but also pays a lot of attention to the conversations happening in the broader public and the media and the chattering classes and so on, about the Supreme Court and politicization of it and so on, what are some of the things that people—one thing we can say is there's less politicization than we might think there is, but are there examples of things that people tend to view as politicization or as evidence of a politicized court that in fact just aren't, like they're mistaken about how the court works or operates, and so reading it the wrong way.
Ilya Somin: I think in recent years, and you could point to conservatives making similar mistakes in past there, but in recent years, I think one big mistake that left-wing critics of the court tend to make is that they either ignore or downplay the court's fairly significant rulings in favor of various liberal causes. We may not have time to go through them all, but I'll just mention a few. Just within the last term, the court issued a six-three decision ruling against the so-called independent state legislature doctrine, which would prevent Republican, but of course, also Democratic state legislatures from monkeying around electoral votes after the fact.
“One big mistake that left-wing critics of the court tend to make is that they either ignore or downplay the court's fairly significant rulings in favor of various liberal causes.”
The Supreme Court has several times, including this term, turned back major Republican challenges to Biden administration immigration policies this last term in an eight to one decision, US v. Texas, and some of those were very important immigration policies. In the recent Voting Rights Act decision, Allen v. Milligan, a five to four court with the support of two conservative justices gave the Democrats a big win in a voting rights case. The result of which is likely to be the Democrats getting several additional Congressional seats in the House of Representatives over the next couple of election cycles.
Of course, they turned back Donald Trump's challenges to the 2020 election. There's a number of other examples like this that I could mention. I won't go through all of them. Sometimes, the reaction is, "Well, all of these cases were easy jurisprudential issues and obviously the liberal side was right.” In one or two cases, I think that was indeed true like in the Trump election challenges, but it's still significant that Wendy Wright has a really bad legal argument. The court rules against them because when you look at how politicians behave, they're happy supporting their own side no matter how bad the argument is most of the time.
Second, I think in many of these cases, the right did have at least a reasonably plausible argument. They certainly did in the Voting Rights Act case even on independent state legislature. The court got it right, but the argument that the word legislature just means the legislature narrowly defined and that therefore all the power over electoral votes and other things rest in the hands just of the people in the legislative branch of state government, that's a plausible legal argument. It's wrong in various ways we could talk about, but it's not ridiculous and stupid. Ruling against it was not just something that any minimally competent jurist would always do.
You can make similar points like this about other things including for instance that the Supreme Court has already signaled that it's likely to rule against the Texas and Florida social media laws, which require social media firms to host speech of various kinds they disapprove of, and which the left is not like because it prevents the social media firms from blocking what they see as disinformation and there are other examples like this. I think ignoring all of that or downplaying it as just this are just obvious cases, I think that's a mistake. I think also when you view cases like the affirmative action case and the abortion case and the like, in every era, there are some cases where there's just deep disagreement over them.
It's reasonable to expect that when you have high profile issues where there's disagreement that different justices are going to rule different ways. I think when you look at both of these areas, it is simply not the case that Roe vs. Wade was so rock solid that you couldn't reasonably reject it. On the affirmative action side, I think when you look at the types of racial preferences that were being engaged in, it is simply implausible to say those were obviously constitutional.
“It's reasonable to expect that when you have high profile issues where there's disagreement that different justices are going to rule different ways. I think when you look at both of these areas, it is simply not the case that Roe V. Wade was so rock solid that you couldn't reasonably reject it. On the affirmative action side, I think when you look at the types of racial preferences that were being engaged in, it is simply implausible to say those were obviously constitutional.”
Even if you believe, which I do to some extent grant, that the constitution doesn't call for 100% colorblindness in all instances, still the rationales that were being used and the policies being adopted were sufficiently problematic and flabby that if you were going to uphold them, you would have to have either a very severe double standard between different kinds of racial preferences or you would have to have a lot of deference to government agents when they discriminate on the basis of race of a kind that many on the left would not like in almost any other context like they certainly wouldn't say that should be acceptable in areas like racial profiling and law enforcement.
Aaron Ross Powell: Is there also an aspect of misreading things when it comes to the court's decisions in what cases to take in the first place? Because one thing you'll hear is when a potentially controversial, like a case that could deal with existing rights or seems to be very, very relevant to people's individual lives, gets taken up by the court, there's a sense in which they took it up in order to overrule that or change things like they're basically shopping for cases in order to advance their conservative now, in the past, maybe liberal agenda.
In a lot of cases, it seems like the court faces its own set of rules for when it needs to take up a case and that sometimes feels like it gets lost in the conversation. They couldn't reasonably have turned down this case.
Ilya Somin: In most cases, the critics do have a reasonable point in that unlike virtually any other federal court, the Supreme Court has enormous discretion over what cases it takes. It is true if the Supreme Court rules, there are certain guidelines they have for what cases they take, but they're not actually required to follow those guidelines with rare exceptions that we can talk about having to do with the so-called original jurisdiction of the Supreme Court, where the Supreme Court is the court that hears the case in the first instance, and even that the Supreme Court has made discretionary.
With the exception of that, the court has near total discretion over which cases they take. It's essentially any cases that four out of nine justices want to hear if there's a petition for certioari that's being filed, a petition to get the court to hear it. It is true that there are some cases that they take, not because they partake interest in the issue, but just because they feel this is an important disagreement in the lower courts and it has to be resolved. I think some cases in commercial or business law that they take are like that.
I also think that there is a significant component of cases that they take because the Supreme Court justices themselves think the issue is important or because they see an opportunity to move the doctrine in a direction that they like. If you want to change that, the solution would be to give the Supreme Court less discretion over its jurisdiction, and there are ways Congress could potentially do that. For the last 100 years, ever since they passed a so-called “judges act” in the 1920s, which gave the court even greater control over its docket than it had before that, Congress has been unwilling to intervene in that area.
That said, with these issues that people complain about, it's not easy to claim that these issues are so insignificant that the Supreme Court shouldn't have heard them. Abortion surely is an important issue and it's reasonable for the court to hear cases on that even if people don't like the results. I think the court may have over time overestimated the significance of the issue of affirmative action in higher education, which only affects selective universities, which are a minority of all universities in the country, and certainly a minority of where college students go.
This may arise from the fact that the Supreme Court justices, most of them also graduated from various elite selective institutions. They travel in circles as you and I also do, where these things are considered to be very important. You could have a reasonable beef saying maybe they should have looked at more other kinds of cases. That said, the more general issue of race discrimination is certainly an important one in American society.
It's not easy to argue that the Supreme Court should have just left racial discrimination issues alone, though I personally think it may be the court over the last several decades should have spent less time on affirmative action, higher education, and more on maybe some other racial or ethnic discrimination issues. I think here there's not so much an ideological bias, it's perhaps a class bias that relatively affluent, highly educated people are much more focused on what goes on in elite higher education institutions than the rest of the public may be.
Aaron Ross Powell: The trendiest proposed solution to politicization is effectively court packing. There's no reason we have to only have nine justices, we can put more on there. If the court through reasonable means or through "cheating means" has become unbalanced in one direction, then the answer is the next time our guys are in control, we will simply confirm more justices to shift the balance back in the other direction. We'll add two or three or four more people to the bench. How reasonable is that?
Ilya Somin: In fairness, most of the people who advocate court packing, the real problem in their mind is not so much that this will solve politicization but that this will solve, in their view, the fact that the court is making decisions in what they think is the wrong direction. If they change the balance of power and the court will make them in the right direction, it certainly will not end politicization in the sense of justices being appointed by ideology or justices voting in a polarized way because as Joe Biden, among others, has pointed out at various times, if one side packs the court, in this case in the near future more likely to Democrats, then of course the other side will do the same thing next time. They simultaneously control the presidency in both houses of Congress, and the end result will not only be further politicization but in the medium to long run, it would be the destruction of judicial review because a practical matter, the Supreme Court would then be unable to effectively make rulings that go against anything that the president and the majority party in Congress wants because, if they do do it, there'll be another round of court packing. The court either would be deterred from making such rulings or those rulings would swift we be overturned the next time there's an opportunity for court packing. If you look around the world, court packing is a standard tool of authoritarian regimes undermining democracy.
You'll have cases like Turkey, Hungary, Venezuela and others where it has happened. Those who advocate it—I can understand if you just generally don't like judicial review and there are some legal scholars who have that view, then absolutely court packing then makes sense if you just want to destroy the institution of judicial review. If you're unhappy this is simply that you just don't like particular decisions that the court has made in recent years, then you should ask yourself is getting rid of those decisions really worth it if the price is destroying judicial review across the board, especially if you're talking about decisions that limit the political branches?
“If you look around the world, court packing is a standard tool of authoritarian regimes undermining democracy. You'll have cases like Turkey, Hungary, Venezuela and others where it has happened.”
If your goal is that you want to restore Roe v. Wade, for example, court packing is not going to do that. It might do it briefly but in the long run, it would simply destroy the ability of the judiciary to function as an effective check on the other branches of government whether it comes to abortion or anything else.
I would finally add that there is a range of issues where because of polarization on things like abortion, guns, affirmative action, and some other stuff, there's a range of issues where judges do systematically check the other branches of government that is lost sight of. I mentioned before them ruling against Trump's dubious election challenges, than turning back attacks on freedom of speech including some from the right. There are other examples.
If you lose that, the end result would be political branches, particularly the executive branch that is more out of control than before. Even if you, for instance, trust Joe Biden with that power, you should ask do you trust Donald Trump? Should he come back to office or whoever the next Republican president might be? Having an independent judiciary with a real power of judicial review does serve as a check on that even if the check isn't perfect. Even if obviously we wouldn't want to put all our eggs in that basket, we want to have other constraints as well
Aaron Ross Powell: Then what are more reasonable, workable, advisable, solutions because we're not saying that the court hasn't become more politicized, you're saying it's not as bad as people make it out to be, but it still seems if we can have a less politicized court, that's better than having one that's more politicized both in terms of maybe the rulings that are coming out of it but also it matters a lot that the public accepts the court as legitimate and its decisions as legitimate and narratives of politicization corruption, et cetera, undermine that. Are there things that we could be doing to help right the course that don't open us up to these profound worries that you just articulated say in the instance of court packing?
Ilya Somin: I don't think there's any short-term solution to the problem of, if it is a problem, of justices appointed by one party being very different from justices of the other and therefore there are being more conflict over judicial appointments. That can only be resolved if we reduce polarization in American society more generally which may be there are ways to do that. That could be a whole separate podcast but is not something that can be done quickly.
“I don't think there's any short-term solution to the problem of, if it is a problem, of justices appointed by one party being very different from justices of the other and therefore there are being more conflict over judicial appointments. That can only be resolved if we reduce polarization in American society more generally.”
There might be incremental reforms that can help some problems at the margin, though even those will not be easy to enact. One that is actually quite popular across the political spectrum with both experts and the general public, is term limits for Supreme Court justices. Instead of serving for life, they could serve for 18 years. That's the most common proposal but you can imagine other lengths of the term.
This would reduce the extent to which the random events create opportunities for one president or another to have a lot of nominations in a short time, or on the other extreme, you end up with a president like Jimmy Carter who didn't get to make any nominations. It was kind of a bummer for him. Also, it would reduce the issue of justices staying on until senility or mental problems arise in their old age and the like.
It would also regularize the process of Supreme Court appointment. Each president would get to make two appointments during their term and reduce the extent also to which a justice could enjoy vast power simply through longevity by staying on the court for 30 or 40 years. I think this reform would probably require a constitutional amendment. There are some people who think it would not but I think it likely would. We can talk about why if you're interested.
In the short run, it would not change the balance of power on the court most likely. Therefore, if your main concern is simply that the current 6-3 majority is making conservative decisions or too many conservative decisions, this would not immediately fix it. It would take some time to address it. I think you could also potentially either through Congress or the justices themselves, enact some ethics code for the court to the extent that people are unhappy about things like Clarence Thomas taking a lot of expensive vacations at the expense of Harlan Crow, who's a big right of center billionaire, and you can enact limits on the gifts that they're allowed to take and other restrictions like that.
I think that may be desirable to do, although Justice Alito recently said he thought Congress had no power to enact these rules, I think they do have the power. They could do it. I think it would be desirable to have some limitations there. I also, again, even if this was done and the rules were strictly enforced, it would not change the fact that the Supreme Court voted to overturn Roe v. Wade or made other decisions that many people don't like.
I think also it's worth noting that while the Supreme Court's approval rating has declined somewhat, that is in parallel with declining approval ratings for other governmental institutions. Even at its worst, the Supreme Court's approval rating is still a little bit better than that of Joe Biden or Donald Trump, the likely presidential candidates.
If you look at Congress's approval rating, Congress could only dream of the kind of lows that the Supreme Court has when the court bottoms out at maybe a 40% approval rating with Congress, which is down most of the time in the 20s or even lower than that for the last 15, 20 years or more. The increasing level of polarization in American society and political conflict leads to bad approval ratings. If you want to call it, problematic legitimacy for a lot of institutions. Again, if there's a way to fix that, it would have to do with reducing the overall level of polarization and political conflict in society, rather with a fixed specific to the structure of the Supreme Court.
Aaron: Thank you for listening to Zooming In at The UnPopulist. If you enjoy this show, please take a moment to review us in Apple Podcasts. Also check out ReImagining Liberty, where I explore the emancipatory and cosmopolitan case for radical, social, political, and economic freedom. Zooming In is produced by Landry Ayres and is a project of The UnPopulist.
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Aaron Ross Powell: Welcome to The UnPopulist Editor's Roundtable at Zooming In. I'm Aaron Ross Powell. It's our birthday. The UnPopulist is now in its terrible twos, and so today I'm joined by my colleagues Shikha Dalmia and Akiva Malamet to give a progress report on what we've accomplished in these last two years and where we see the current state of liberalism.
A transcript of today’s podcast appears below. It has been edited for flow and clarity.
Also our five favorite posts of the last 12 months.
Aaron Ross Powell: Shikha, why don't you take us away?
Shikha Dalmia: Thank you, Aaron. And thanks to Akiva and both of you for being here. It's an important milestone in The UnPopulist's life. As you mentioned, we are beginning our terrible twos, but I'm hoping that instead of throwing tantrums, we are going to make the “right kind of trouble” in the immortal words of John Lewis.
But to give our audience a bit of a progress report: Two years ago, The UnPopulist was founded with a singular mission, and that was to defend liberal democracy from the rise of the illiberal populist right. And it was going to do so by using classical liberal thought. Classical liberalism, in my view, and I think I can speak for the two of you, offers the richest intellectual resources to fight tyranny and authoritarianism in all its forms. And I felt like it was being completely underutilized, if not misused in many, many ways. And so the idea was to both defend liberal democracy and also kind of re-articulate classical liberalism itself to make it relevant for this new threat that we were confronting.
It was also my very firm belief that just like socialism in some ways was the defining threat of our times after World War II, this liberal populism of the right was going to be the threat of our generation or well, I'm very old, but future generations.
And why is that? In my view, populism in some ways, or illiberal populism, poses even a more fundamental threat to liberal democracy than socialism. And the reason is it kind of changes the relationship between the government and the governed. A liberal democratic framework is centered around the power of keeping political authority in check. And one crucial part of the check are the people. I mean, “throw the bums out” when they get too tyrannical. The premise over there is that people are going to guard their freedom. They are going to be a bulwark against authoritarianism and an authoritarian. But that changes in a populist framework where the people actually join forces with the strongman populist figure. And instead of guarding freedom, their motive becomes to use the levers of power to attack their political enemies. And so in a fundamental sense, the whole relationship in a populist polity between all the various checks and balances and institutions of liberal democracy kind of changes. And to me, there is therefore no greater threat to liberal democracy than populism.
“The premise over there is that people are going to guard their freedom. They are going to be a bulwark against authoritarianism and an authoritarian. But that changes in a populist framework where the people actually join forces with the strongman populist figure. And instead of guarding freedom, their motive becomes to use the levers of power to attack their enemies, their political enemies.” — Shikha Dalmia
And so with that understanding The UnPopulist, as the name suggests, was incubated at the Mercatus Center two years ago, and it was on a two-year grant. And after that, it needed a new home. And so I'm happy to report that even as our audience has grown, we started with 650 subscribers. We are nine times bigger now and growing rapidly every day. You guys have been an invaluable part of it. Aaron, you almost from the inception and Akiva, you a little bit later. And as we grew, we felt like we needed a new home and we've created one and it's called the Institute for the Study of Modern Authoritarianism — ISMA. It is no physical building, there's nothing bricks and mortar, but it's a platform which will give us an operational base to expand ourselves and our activities as we go forward. The UnPopulist, let me mention, is just going to be one element of this new center. We are going to do other things. We have a new editorial partnership with Persuasion which is an awesome sister Substack publication founded by Yascha Mounk, a Johns Hopkins professor. He comes from the progressive side of the spectrum and he's worried about some of the progressive excesses and threats to liberal democracy. So just as we, or at least I, see myself as an internal reformer on the right, he sees himself as an internal reformer on the progressive end of things. So we have a editorial partnership with Persuasion and we'll be promoting content and each other's work.
Another element of ISMA, the Institute for the Study of Modern Authoritarianism is going to be a polling project that Tom Shull, our editor at large, is launching to study the appeal of strongman politics in the United States. That's something that isn't very well understood or tracked. And we feel we should be able to pick up trends when people are getting more attracted to strongmen figure. And another element is going to be a liberalism conference. So our readers will be familiar with the national conservative movement and other illiberal movements on the right. And they host their own conference every year. And we think we need a conference to make a strong and strenuous and vigorous case for liberalism.
In the last two years since The UnPopulist was founded, I don't think our work [load] has diminished. I think it's actually increased because the state of the world has become, in my view, decidedly worse.
Here in America, the Republican Party seems to reach new lows every few weeks. Jan. 6th was not a shocking enough event for the party and it didn't awaken it. After the event, Trump is still the favorite to win the nomination of the party. There are 91 indictments against him and instead of being embarrassed, the Republican Party seems to think that the problem is actually with the system that's trying to hold a rogue president accountable. You know, it's been the law and order party all this long except for when it applies to its own favorite politicians. Even if Trump were in jail, that would not necessarily be a barrier to his election.
But if he were to somehow not be the nominee, the two people who are waiting in the wings are Florida Governor DeSantis and neophyte Vivek Ramaswamy. And both of them represent two different styles of populism within the GOP. De Santis has this nasty statist side where he wants to use the government to reign terror on his woke political opponents. And Vivek Ramaswamy has a different, what I call, paleo-libertarian style of populism where he wants to selectively withdraw agencies and curtail the federal governmentt so that that hurts his political opponents. Now, many of us are not opposed to reducing the size of the federal government, but the selective way in which he [Vivek] wants to do it to promote right-wing causes and diminish left-wing causes is very concerning. Add to that his kookiness and his conspiracy theory mindset, and his border hawkishness. And he is in my view and reincarnation of Ron Paul in many ways, who, the difference is that Ron Paul was an outlier when he ran in the Republican party, whereas Vivek Ramaswamy in fact speaks for the party.
Meanwhile, if you look at, look around the world in India, my home, my native country. Modi, Narendra Modi, a Hindu nationalist and a strongman, populist figure, is a hands down favorite to win elections again for the third time next year. And then if you go around the rest of the world, things are not looking a whole lot better. In Turkey, Erdogan won again, even though the opposition put up a pretty valiant fight. He still prevailed and everybody now thinks Turkey is on sort of an irreversible path to certain kind of religious illiberalism. Gone are its secular commitments.
And then if you go down the list, whether it is Italy, it is Hungary, Poland, the same thing is happening. In Germany, the Alternative to Germany which is a far right outfit, is the second largest party. It may well be in the governing coalition in the next elections. In France, even though Emmanuel Macron [who is considered a moderate] won, he's now in trouble and the National Rally and Eric Zemmour, two very far right figures, are gaining ground. In Italy, you have Giorgia Meloni.
And to me, the most ominous sign that things are on a very bad track is that the European Union itself seems to be succumbing to far-right priorities and policies. Take its position on immigration. I mean, we care about immigration, but it's also sort of a bellwether issue. And the European Commission, which used to be very opposed to stiff border controls around Europe, has now succumbed. Its [annual] border control budget, just to throw out one figure at you, has increased from $85 million to $754 million in less than a decade. Whereas earlier it used to talk about how we don't need to control Europe's border, now they are talking about “collective border security” and are doubling down on it. So given all these trends, I think The UnPopulist and ISMA have their work cut out for them. And so we are going to be doing this over the next few years and hopefully getting more support from our audience and our viewers and everyone else.
Akiva Malamet: So I really appreciate what you said there, Shikha, and I think particularly the international focus that The UnPopulist takes is a unique emphasis in combining focus not just on America and on the West, but on the world in general. One country that wasn't discussed as much in your catalog of horrors is Israel. And I think of Israel as quite an important country because it serves as a kind of cultural social bridge between the West and the East. It has elements of both Eastern and Western culture within it. And geographically as being on the Mediterranean, it serves that function as well.
The shift in Israel towards where very worrying judicial reforms in which the far right in Israel is essentially attempting to hobble the power of the Supreme Court and the Supreme Court's ability to protect its citizens from majoritarian rule and from authoritarian attempts to remove women's rights, remove LGBT rights, to install — a wish, I think, of a less likely but still consistent wish for part of Netanyahu's coalition — is to install a theocracy in Israel, although I see that as a little bit less likely. And all of those pieces are coming together to make Israel, which was historically considered a great American ally and a great sign of democracy in the Middle East, Israeli democracy is no longer looking quite as good and in fact may be crumbling in some very critical places.
The installation of the first line of these judicial reforms, which was getting rid of the reasonableness clause, is now undergoing hearings by the Supreme Court. We will see whether the Supreme Court allows for and passes something to amend its own power, and whether they will consider that legally valid or not. I think the reasonableness clause is a fairly minor clause because it's an administrative declaration that says that you can't pass certain laws that don't take account of certain reasonable variables. So for example, the reasonableness clause was used to get rid of people from being ministers who had been indicted for corruption. So Aryeh Deri, the minister from the Shas party, which is the Sephardic ultra-Orthodox party in Israel was removed from his post and being minister because he had served time in jail. Those kinds of considerations that the reasonableness clause is meant to curtail to prevent corruption in government.
And so while it's a relatively minor clause, there are other ways to prevent corruption in government. There are other powers that the Supreme Court has of judicial review. It represents a significant move towards curtailing the power of the Supreme Court, both to uphold good standards and best practices in government and prevent corruption. But also to be able to balance the power of the Knesset, the parliament, against the framework, against the protection of individual rights. It's important to remind people that Israel, which has no formal written constitution, is dependent on the Supreme Court to protect the liberties of citizens, which it does through its interpretation of the Basic Laws, which declare certain fundamental rights but are not themselves equivalent to a constitution. Absent these judicial review powers, there really is no block or check and balance to the power of the Knesset to enact all kinds of majoritarian tyrannies that severely violate the rights of Israeli citizens as well as Palestinians. And so the judicial reforms, as I see them, are a significant blow to one of the more important democracies in the world today.
Shikha: Thank you for correcting my omission over here. Israel is obviously a super important country for both geopolitical reasons and as well as, as you mentioned, an important liberal democracy at least. Some of us think it's liberal enough that we should be worried about its more draconian turn. But one of the things I want to emphasize is that this is — sometimes when we talk about liberal democracy, it sounds arid. It sounds very abstract, but it has actually like real consequences on real people. And it's not simply about, in Israel, for instance, it's not simply about things like judicial review and curbing the power of the executive, all clinical terms. It has impact on the, you know, on human rights, right? I mean, the Palestinian fate to some extent depends upon what happens in Israel. The Muslim faith in India depends upon whether the Hindu nationalist government is able to run roughshod over them. And so when we talk about liberal democracy, it's not simply about maintaining a system, it is about maintaining a system that protects life and liberty of actual, breathing, living human beings. And that's kind of why to me it's such an important cause. You know, if liberal democracy fails, it's not just going to fail and be replaced by something else that's less good. There will be many lives destroyed, decimated, and major upheaval if we don't get things back in order.
“When we talk about liberal democracy, it's not simply about maintaining a system, it is about maintaining a system that protects life and liberty of breathing, living human beings. And that's kind of why to me it's such an important cause. If liberal democracy fails, it's not just going to fail and be replaced by something else that's less good. There will be many lives destroyed, decimated, and major upheaval if we don't get things back in order.”
— Shikha Dalmia
Aaron: Yes, that's absolutely critical. So I'll just quickly say it has been, it's been a real privilege and honor to get to be a part of this project for, for the last couple of years. And I think I agree with everything that's been said that the mission of The UnPopulist mattered a lot when it launched. It matters at least as much now in part, because I think that a lot of the threats to liberalism have become in many ways more subtle and easier to ignore, easier to dismiss. I think probably in my mind, and maybe I'm being naive about this, but I think that the immediate threat of Donald Trump himself has lessened a lot compared to where it was two years ago. I think the path to reelection for him is exceedingly narrow if not effectively gone, barring extraordinary circumstances. I just don't see a way that he wins back the suburban white voters who flipped to Biden after everything that's been happening in the indictments and all of that.
And I think that a lot of what we've seen is electorally a lot of the really hardcore of Trumpism doesn't seem to do very well at the national level. DeSantis, even if he won the nomination, I don't think would would win the presidency because he's just not terribly popular. He can't even beat out the kind of rando Pharma bro who's running against him in the primaries. So at the national level, that kind of real Trumpism was, I mean, was never popular, it never got majorities. It seems to be less so now, especially as it becomes more shrill. But the threats, as I said, have become more subtle.
And so one of the things that really worries me is threats to liberalism from within the liberal coalition. And a lot of that is the way that the pivot to the culture war being the dominant force in American politics, that we don't really argue so much over policy anymore, or policy is not centered in our political debates. to the extent that it used to be, it is now culture war issues dominate the conversation. And the real extreme versions of the right's views on the culture war are not, again, terribly popular. They don't have widespread purchase and that shifting as demographics and particularly age demographics change and so on, like which generations are ascendant and which are shrinking.
One of the things that really worries me is the way that edge concerns in the culture war are getting used as justification for kind of broader reactionary attitudes that were present in the larger liberal coalition, but were kind of kept on the down low. And so we're seeing this in reactions to LGBT rights or trans rights where people will point to smaller issues, women's sports, or some kids getting certain kind of medical interventions, and use that as a way to broaden out a critique of essentially the dynamism of culture and privileged groups, underprivileged groups becoming more privileged, formerly heavily privileged groups maybe dropping in their privilege. Cancel culture concerns are also this way. We see a lot of, there are genuine instances of like cancel culture run amok. But often what you see is concerns about that providing cover for general concerns of like people with higher status not really liking it that kind of the lower status people are now challenging them, pushing back on their ideas, that they're not as they're not as centered in the conversation as they used to be. And what I think a lot of this has exposed is that even in the broader liberal coalition, there was there's always been a tension between conservative values and the social dynamism that is a necessary part of a liberal society or a necessary consequence of a liberal society.
“Edge concerns in the culture war are getting used as justification for kind of broader reactionary attitudes that were present in the larger liberal coalition, but were kind of kept on the down low. And so we're seeing this in reactions to LGBT rights or trans rights where people will point to smaller issues, women's sports, or some kids getting certain kind of medical interventions, and use that as a way to broaden out a critique of essentially the dynamism of culture and privileged groups, underprivileged groups becoming more privileged, formerly heavily privileged groups maybe dropping in their privilege.”
—- Aaron Ross Powell
And so I think that's where we really need to maintain a check on taking concerns seriously, but not allowing them to provide cover for basically, I'm in favor of liberalism as long as it doesn't like destabilize my own position, my own status, my own prestige, my own preferences, because as you said, like these things, we can talk about them in this clinical sense of the function of various institutions and the laws that govern them or the laws by which they govern themselves, but ultimately this is about people. It's about their lives and the reason that liberalism matters.
The reason that I think all three of us have dedicated our careers to defending and advancing it is because it is the best system that we have found yet for enabling diverse dynamic people to not just live together in peace but live together in mutually beneficial ways. ut that cuts against these natural tendencies for hierarchy and class. and categorizing people and then seeing their dignity as of differing values depending on where they fall into these categorizations. And, and that's, that's been the challenge liberalism has faced since it started, is liking it in the abstract, but then disliking it when the kind of the effects of freedom become real to us. And so that's where I think the tremendous value of The UnPopulist is in making those values clear and defending them and calling out where they're in retreat, especially as it moves into the less cartoony flamboyant threats of a Donald Trump and into what I see as these more subtle avenues for backsliding into particularly kind of social illiberalisms and then the inevitable political illiberalisms that follow.
Shikha: Aaron, I couldn't agree with you more, and yet, I mean, in a very fundamental sense about the value of liberalism and what we are fighting for here, I couldn't agree with you more. But I would say that precisely because of some of what you said, I'm less sanguine about the threat that Donald Trump and the Republican Party pose even now. Part of what we are seeing right now with the rise of the illiberal populist right in the United States especially, is that the gains of the civil rights and the women's movement are only beginning to be felt now in the sense that these groups have now moved into positions of power. And they don't believe that the previous norms of patriarchy and a certain kind of white articulation of the world work for them anymore and they are demanding change.
Now as they demand change, these things never happen neatly. There are going to be excesses, which is why I appreciate what Yascha Mounk is doing and Persuasion are doing. There will be excesses. But the backlash from the right is far bigger in my view than the excesses on the left. And that backlash is not going to be contained anytime soon. What's spooky to me is that the Republican party has not, like I said, woken up from its Trumpist stupor yet. That fever is still continuing to, if not grow, but retain its hold on the Republican brain. But look at the new populist figures that have emerged in the GOP. Vivek Ramaswamy, he's a double Ivy Leaguer and yet he issues purple condemnations of the elite and what have you. But he himself is the son of immigrants. He's a practicing Hindu and he's a son of immigrants. And yet, there is a certain political entrepreneurship that this Trumpist style of populist politics has opened, which is going to continue to play out in the Republican Party.
And when you have a duopoly, when you have a country with only two parties, when one party is in such a bad place, it can continue to pull down liberalism in many ways. And I would have to say that, you know, Democrats, the rap against them is that they are too much in the pockets of progressives, right? And they're allowing the extreme progressives to set the agenda for the party. My opposite fear is, as is yours, is that in response to this backlash from Republicans, Democrats will actually succumb on their commitments to defending minority groups and what have you. I don't think that has happened yet and I think they are not doing it smartly. I think they do need to listen to concerns about the other side—and at least remove some of the obvious causes. on those grounds where the backlash is justified, they ought to keep that in mind, but they have to do it in a way that doesn't weaken their commitments to the little guy, to the underdog. And I think that's kind of, if Republicans continue to make political gains the way they are doing, I think Democrats may well follow suit just to keep themselves politically relevant.
“My opposite fear, as is yours, is that in response to this backlash from Republicans, Democrats will actually succumb on their commitments to defending minority groups . I don't think that has happened yet and I think they are not doing it smartly. I think they do need to listen to concerns about the other side and at least remove some of the obvious causes. On those grounds where the backlash is justified, they ought to keep that in mind, but they have to do it in a way that doesn't weaken their commitments to the little guy, to the underdog.”
— Shikha Dalmia
Akiva: So I really appreciated, Shikha, what you said about this being, to some extent, the coming to fruition of certain liberation movements. And so we're seeing a backlash as a result of this dismantling of patriarchy, the dismantling of prejudice against LGBTQ people and so on. And I think this speaks to a fundamental impetus in liberalism, which is that nobody's free until everybody's free. And the move within liberalism to be continually looking for who are the edge groups, who are the groups that are not yet in our circle of equality, who are not yet in our circle of liberty, continues to create backlash. I always think it's interesting that you have periods of liberalization followed by a backlash. So you have, I think it's interesting that you have the Me Too movement and then you have Trump in a chronologically related section. Similarly, you have a lot of the accomplishments in the original classical age of fascism. You had all these feminist accomplishments of the 1920s that were then followed by the age of fascism. And you had a thriving gay scene in Berlin that was then followed by fascism, in the 1920s. And so, in a way, this illiberal populism is predictable because there's always a response to the status of some groups being disrupted in society because other groups are demanding their place at the table. But the fact that backlash is almost inevitable shouldn't give us cause for despair, rather it should give us reason to be aware of what will happen culturally and to find the resources to push back against it.
“I think this speaks to a fundamental impetus in liberalism, which is that nobody's free until everybody's free. And the move within liberalism to be continually looking for who are the edge groups, who are the groups that are not yet in our circle of equality, who are not yet in our circle of liberty, continues to create backlash…illiberal populism is predictable because there's always a response to the status of some groups being disrupted in society because other groups are demanding their place at the table. But the fact that backlash is almost inevitable shouldn't give us cause for despair, rather it should give us reason to be aware of what will happen culturally and to find the resources to push back against it.”
— Akiva Malamet
Aaron: And that's where we can get back to, I think, the clinical, institutional side of things. I think liberalism at its core is a set of social values about how we view each other and our interactions with them and what it means to live together in beneficial peace. But if there's this baked in cycle of, some people are more committed to that vision than others, and some people are committed to it so long as it doesn't mean things get too weird for them, and then they have the backlash, or their status lowers, and then they have the backlash. That's where protecting these institutions, which has also been a big part of The UnPopulist's mission, because those liberal institutions exist to essentially defang those inevitable backlashes that people can get — they can get frustrated about changes in the world around them.
They can not like it that their town looks different today than it did when they were kids or that popular music sounds funny or there's these people who speak foreign languages or the children are up to weird playing with their identities that makes me a little uncomfortable. We can't we can't undo that, but what we can do is ensure there are political institutions can't be co-opted by the people caught up in the backlash in order to advance actual political oppression in order to stop it. That instead they can kind of rage against it, or they can use their associational rights to find parts of the country that were better reflect their values or whatever. But what we saw with Trump and the ongoing threat is that backlash can if liberal institutions aren't strong, can grab the mechanisms of power, can grab the very heights of power. And then, fortunately, Trump turned out to be wildly inept in doing it, but can attempt to re-oppress the people who liberalism is freeing, re-marginalize the people that it has unmarginalized. And that's where I see, if we can't, that the link between social values and the institutions and the need to keep an eye on both.
“What we saw with Trump and the ongoing threat is that the backlash can, if liberal institutions aren't strong, grab the mechanisms of power, can grab the very heights of power. And then, fortunately, Trump turned out to be wildly inept in doing it, but can attempt to re-oppress the people who liberalism is freeing, re-marginalize the people that it has unmarginalized. And that's where I see, if we can't, that the link between social values and the institutions and the need to keep an eye on both.”
— Aaron Ross Powell
Shikha: Yeah, just to add to that, Aaron, you know, what spooks me about this backlash is precisely its attack on liberalism, right? The populist right understands that the impediment to its designs to roll back the clock is precisely liberalism, because groups that have now been empowered can fight back. You know, they can use those same institutions and those same rights to fight back and maintain their gains. So the reversal of those gains requires precisely attacking liberalism. It is not a coincidence that Trump called the press the enemy of the people and attacked the background of a Mexican judge who felt he wouldn't rule in his favor for his fake university or whatever it is that he was doing with that. And so that's why the backlash is so dangerous.
A lot of my conservative friends who are not even sort of part of the Trumpist right, they've catastrophized, they have catastrophized the left so much. This argument that the left controls all the commanding heights of the culture and American society. And so, to take back those heights, we can't play by the normal liberal rules. you know, we've got to play by some other illiberal rules is very much part of the right. The only thing I would exhort the left to do is that as it pushes back against the right is… that part of the problem with the left is that in order to make more gains for people, you know, for marginalized groups, as you mentioned Aaron, was that they were claiming too many innocent victims, right? Or too many people who could be better reached by some kind of persuasive rather than coercive or punitive strategies. And they overplayed their hand in that respect.
I've alluded to this piece in Vox before Trump came on the scene where this liberal professor wrote a piece anonymously about how his liberal students terrify him because you know, anything he says in class, no matter how innocuous, can and will be used against him, if it doesn't somehow advance their agenda or it ruffles some feathers. But there was already a corrective current in our politics against that. And we could have come to a pretty good place where we advanced more rights for more people while preventing innocent victims of that you know, of that particular cause.
But the right came along the scene and it doesn't want to have anything to do with these corrective mechanisms. It doesn't want to, you know, have anything to do with using liberalism. It's in it for the power. And my fear is when one side becomes so wholly devoted to using the levers of power to advance its agenda, it's not inconceivable that the other side will also do the same at some point. I think for the center left side of the spectrum there are two dangers it has to worry about. One, it has to worry about imbibing too many of these sort of regressive right-wing policies and agenda and giving up on some of its progressive causes. On the other hand, it may also succumb to the twin temptation of just simply seeking power to advance its agenda and forgetting about liberalism. So all of that is kind of part of the mix in our very fluid tumultuous political world. And now The Unpopulist firmly believes that at this moment in time, the right is the far bigger threat than the left. The left is a mixed bag, it has some good causes, but its means are occasionally questionable. But liberalism could have handled that. But we will also occasionally keep an eye on that kind of stuff.
“I think for the center-left side of the spectrum there are two dangers it has to worry about. One, it has to worry about imbibing too many regressive right-wing policies and agenda and giving up on some of its progressive causes. On the other hand, it may also succumb to the twin temptation of just simply seeking power to advance its agenda and forgetting about liberalism. So all of that is kind of part of the mix in our very fluid tumultuous political world.”
— Shikha Dalmia
Akiva: I really appreciated what you said there, Shikha, especially about the value of protecting liberalism as an institutional framework. Speaking to the mistakes made by the left as it tries to oppose the right, one of the things that gets underappreciated is the mistake of conflating democracy and liberalism with each other. And often there's this idea on the left that if we failed to protect our values, it's because the people weren't really speaking. Were misled and needed to be guided by us instead of by some other force. And what we really need to do is have is not have democratic fundamentalism and we also don't want to have a kind of protection of rights with or without any response or check and balance with respect to democratic accountability. But it's important to recognize that rights need to be protected independently of whether or not they're democratically sanctioned. And this is also a really important time for the left to double down on some of the things that maybe it's become a little softer on in comparison to how it's been historically, such as free speech when you decide that an institution can be manipulated for your own end…So for example, the expansion of let's say, different things to the category of hate speech or incitement, those same instruments can be used by the right to manipulate and then go after let's say, Disney's woke behavior becoming a problem for the discourse just as much as whatever the left may perceive to be a problem in terms of hate speech. And so there's an important need to not let whatever “the people” want become the equivalent of a liberal society. And there's also a need to defend liberal institutions because more often than not, someone that you don't like is going to then be in charge of them if you start to abandon those principles.
“There's an important need to not let whatever “the people” want become the equivalent of a liberal society. And there's also a need to defend liberal institutions because more often than not, someone that you don't like is going to then be in charge of them if you start to abandon those principles.”
— Akiva Malamet
Shikha: I'm actually curious as to what, Aaron, you think about what Akiva just said. You feel passionately about trans rights, right? And so the question is, what are the legitimate means to advance those rights? What are the limits? Is using the power of the state to advance them acceptable? Are there means that trans activists have used to advance their rights that would give us pause from a liberal framework? What are the limits for advancing any crusade for anybody's rights?
Aaron: There are always limits. We could certainly draw them at, “don't advance your rights in a way that violates the rights of others who aren't themselves violating yours.” So what I mean by that is say, in the abolitionist movement, anti-slavery, was clearly about advancing a set of rights that were being heavily violated, like absolutely violated. And that entailed often doing violence to slaveholders, taking away what they wrongfully imagined to be their property and so on. I don't see that as “don't violate others' rights when advancing your own” limits, clearly. But you can certainly, in trying to move yourself from the margins more towards the center of society in trying to undo oppression, it is possible to do that in ways that are rights violating to others. You know, appropriating their rightly held property, which is a fairly common thing of we're going to just, we've gotten our power back, now we're going to seize everything from everyone who's we see as wronging us. But I don't see that really playing that playing out much in the current situation.
I mean, one of the interesting things about the trans rights concerns right now is this isn't actually an example of a group of people suddenly using the power of the state to rapidly advance their interests. Rather, most of the rights that we talk about now, that trans people are worried about losing are things that they've had for quite a long time, that the state has protected for quite a long time. And what's happening now is a rolling back, an attempt to roll back existing rights. They're not claiming a whole bunch of new ones. Rather, these were things that they had been doing forever. And suddenly it became, especially with the shift to the culture war, the victory of gay marriage. And so the need for it accelerated after changes in abortion and that becoming not the kind of driving thing that was motivating the right. The culture warriors on the right looked for a new thing to rile up, and we have Chris Rufo explicitly saying he's doing this. And then targeting this group that no one had really been concerned about. There hadn't been worries about any of this stuff until people decided it was a big problem. And now you see scaling back of it.
“One of the interesting things about the trans rights concerns right now is this isn't actually an example of a group of people suddenly using the power of the state to rapidly advance their interests. Rather, most of the rights that we talk about now, that trans people are worried about losing are things that they've had for quite a long time, that the state has protected for quite a long time. And what's happening now is a rolling back, an attempt to roll back existing rights. They're not claiming a whole bunch of new ones. Rather, these were things that they had been doing forever.”
— Aaron Ross Powell
So I don't see a lot of this as over-exertion in terms of claiming new rights and privileges, but rather, please stop taking away the ones that we have had and then being very vocal in demanding that they not be taken away. But I think, to Akiva’s broader point. Yes, there is a need to distinguish democracy and liberalism. They are obviously very interrelated. Democracy is the best system that we have found for achieving and maintaining liberalism compared to institutional alternatives that we've seen in practice. Democracy also is a system that really puts at its core the equal dignity and participation of all citizens, except in those times when democracy tries to deny some citizens' democratic participation. But it is absolutely the case that majorities can be illiberal, and majorities can disrespect rights, and majorities can want to see underprivileged people remain at the margins of society. And so we need to be careful to not see majority rule, democracy as majority rule as synonymous with liberalism, but rather liberalism is a set of values that will inform what the majority sees as its goals in the political sphere.
And so I think If we're gonna look forward to, how do we defend this thing we call liberalism, this thing that The UnPopulist has spent the first two years of its life defending and, and we'll spend the next many, many years continuing that fight. For me, a lot of it is, is keeping an eye on the ball when it comes to those values and keeping an eye on who is actually advancing them and who isn't and not allowing these subtle forms of illiberalism to gain purchase and respect and prominence within circles that ought to know better. But instead to call them out, even if it means, and this is, we've all been through this, even if it means calling out our friends and our allies, people that we have associated with.
Because illiberalism is not concentrated among people who just wear hats that say, I am illiberal, but it's been a constant presence throughout the history of liberal democracies. It's always pushing back. It's always coming from every direction. Liberalism has been fighting against illiberalism as long as it's been around. And, so paying attention to that and asking ourselves, if I'm caught up in, oh, here's an instance where liberalism has gone too far, here's an instance where the behaviors become dangerous to it or corrosive of its values to really put effort into thinking about what's driving those motivations. And is it just cover for of reactionary preferences or is there something genuine there and then stand our ground when it comes to talking about those values and fighting for them.
Aaron: Thank you for listening to Zooming In at The UnPopulist. If you enjoy this show, please take a moment to review us in Apple Podcasts. Also check out ReImagining Liberty, where I explore the emancipatory and cosmopolitan case for radical, social, political, and economic freedom. Zooming In is produced by Landry Ayres and is a project of The UnPopulist.
Here are our favorite pieces from the past year. Tell us yours in the comments:
“Jordan Peterson: Putin's Useless Idiot” by Tom Palmer
“A Typology of the New Right” by Shikha Dalmia
“Israel's Internal Divisions Are Its Mortal Enemy Now” by Akiva Malamet
“Joe Biden and Walter Russell Mead Deserve an "F" on India” by Salil Tripathi
“How to Defuse Nativism in America: An Interview with Justin Gest” by Aaron Ross Powell
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Today on our editor's roundtable, host Aaron Ross Powell and colleague Akiva Malamet are joined by special guest Walter Olson, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute's Robert A. Levy Center for Constitutional Studies. He is not a lawyer, but we've invited him on anyway, to discuss the recent Trump indictment in Washington, DC.
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This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.theunpopulist.net -
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