The Bulwark Podcast - S2 Ep1027: Jonathan Rauch: Focus on the Corruption

Episode Date: April 23, 2025

Trump may be brilliant at assaulting us with his daily distractions, but Democrats need to relentlessly target his corruption because that may be his weak spot. He is running the government in a pre-modern way—like it's his own personal piggy bank. And he has replaced rules-oriented bureaucrats with mostly incompetent loyalists who are only there to do his bidding. Meanwhile, Christianity could help heal the country's partisan polarization if it returns to the teachings of Jesus instead of the gospel of Donald Trump. Plus, the constant burden of having to fight the cognitive warfare and sensory overload coming out of the White House.  Brookings’ Jonathan Rauch joins Tim Miller.joins Tim Miller.  show notes Jon's piece on Trump's patrimonialism Jon's predictions in 2022 about a Trump second term A Chris Murphy Senate floor speech on Trump's corruption Mark Hertling piece on the Russian and Ukrainian armies that Tim referenced Jon's new book, "Cross Purposes: Christianity's Broken Bargain with Democracy" Jon's book, "The Happiness Curve: Why Life Gets Better After 50" The opening scene of The Godfather

Hello and welcome to the Bullwork Podcast. I'm your host, Tim Miller. It's Wednesday. So if you're looking for political hot takes on Mayor Pete's voyage into the Manosphere, Scotty Besant's damage control, Trump's approval numbers, head on over to the Next Level Podcast with Sarah JVL and I. That's going to come out later this evening, comes out on Wednesday evenings. But on this show, we're getting a little sociological

and ecclesiastical and welcoming senior fellow in governance studies at the Brookings Institution, a contributing writer at the Atlantic. His latest book is Cross Purpose, Christianity's Broken Bargain with Democracy. It's Jonathan Rausch. Hey, Jonathan. Hi, happy to be here. Welcome, welcome. I guess you were on the spot with Charlie a while back. I was trying to check. I went and re-listened to that this morning. So it's a welcome back, not a welcome. Appreciate you. Now I want to get to the new book in a bit, I promise. But I feel like I have to pick your brain about what's happening in DC first. You wrote a column for years called, what's called social studies, is that right? Yeah.

On kind of how government and society interact and function. So looking at the first three months of this administration, did you ever imagine the social studies will look anything like this? No, no. I'm in the same boat a lot of people are. I'm astonished, bewildered, disoriented, dismayed, distressed, distracted, sometimes depressed. Everything that begins with a D is what I am. We're seeing every day things that were unimaginable in the America that I grew up in, or at least thought I grew up in.

So there's that. And this is on purpose. This is a campaign of cognitive warfare to essentially create sensory overload and a sense of futility. Demoralization is the goal because demoralization is demobilization and then we stay home and don't resist. So that's, that's what we're fighting. It makes sense to be demoralized in some cases. And I think about on the other hand You know, there is some political gravity that still exists, you know, we see yesterday

Elon is maybe getting pushed out of or maybe leaving Doge. Maybe not and we'll kind of see how it goes but obviously at least feel some pressure to indicate that that he may both from Tesla shareholders and indicate that he may, both from Tesla shareholders and maybe from people inside the government, Trump's backing down on some of the terror threats with China yesterday. I just, as somebody who's analyzed this, particularly as it goes to Elon, I kind of wonder how you assess what they've been up to, what they have been effective at doing, what is counterable. Well, I have always been someone who thought it might be useful to shake things up in a rational way.

And I guess we're all in that camp. I have also been someone who has always thought, I wrote a book about this actually 30 plus years ago, it was called Demosclerosis, the Silent Killer of American Government. It's about how interest groups and subsidies and regulations and programs build up over time to serve vested interests and make government calcified and maladaptive and unable to solve problems and that's where we are and that's created a lot of grief.

The public's very unhappy about it. The problem is that if you send in, I don't know, what one political scientist I know called Mussolini meets Geek Squad, and you just start unplugging stuff and firing people and taking over databases, what you're doing is reducing government's capacity without reducing government's commitments. Because the commitments are still there in law. These are all things that government's commitments. Cause you know, the commitments are still there in law. These are all things that government's supposed to do and that Trump will be unpopular if he doesn't get done. And reducing capacity without commitments is a recipe for, boy, I'm alliterative this morning, I'm on a streak, chaos.

And that's what we got. Mussolini meets Geek Squad is maybe a little kind. I mean, Mussolini was keeping the trains running on time, like Gaddafi meets Geek Squad, maybe, if we're going to be alliterative. I don't know. I want to think about that. But you have a little bit more kind of distance from this than me in the TBS trenches every day.

We have a, you know, our friend, Andrew Sullivan, was, I think, in the lead up to the election, certainly quite a few ticks more conflicted about it than I was, maybe, so to speak. We had some disagreements and I've been wanting to have him, have a talk with him about it. We'll see if he wants to do this. But you know, and he's been just sounding the alarm and he's on Bill Maher a couple weeks ago, just hair on fire, rightly, about the threats to individual liberties that we're seeing, about just the total lack of respect for the rule of law and for norms.

I'm wondering where you see yourself on that spectrum as far as how big of a crisis is this as compared to what you had anticipated? What do you think worries you the most? Is there any areas in which you think maybe I'm overboard and my panic? No, Tim, I don't think you're overboard. Sometimes I like to talk to people that are, you know, a little bit more even tempered. I thought maybe that'd be you. Way back, August of 2022 for the Atlantic, I wrote an article on the six things that Trump would do

if he got a second term to turn the United States into Hungary. And I'm terrible at remembering lists, so I won't remember them all. But they were things like purge the military, turn the civil service into a patronage machine, weaponize the Justice Department, use the pardon to immunize his friends. There was one other and there was a sixth and that's openly defy court orders. What I said in that article is we know he'll do these six things or at least we know he'll do five because he's already either done those five or attempted to do those five. And that when he does number six, which I also predicted that he would do, and which he did do at Mar-a-Lago, that's why he was indicted defying a judge's order, that that's

the end of liberal democracy in America as we know it. Within about a month, I think, five or six weeks, he had moved right through number one through five and he did it faster and more brazenly than I or anyone had expected. The direction did not surprise me. The speed surprised me. I did not see Elon Musk and the Geek Squad coming, so that surprised me. And now we are working on number six, which is Defying Court Orders.

He's playing games and defying lower courts while pretending not to, but I fully believe that's coming and I fully believe, still believe what I said then, which is that once he does that, I think he'll get away with it. I think his party and his base will back him in defying the courts. And I think then we're in a different country. So you tell me, am I? Yeah, we might already be there. No, you know, we're aligned. You're maybe teetering me over

the brink actually. Here's your list just for folks who are trying to wrap their head around it. It was install toadies in key positions, intimidate the career bureaucracy, co-opt the armed forces, bring law enforcement to heel, weaponize the pardon and defy court orders. Hard to argue with any of that. You did, I guess maybe the thing that gave me some thoughts that you might have a less apocalyptic view than I did was a really important article you wrote in the Atlantic about a month ago, which kind of spurred wanting to get you on about the one word that describes Trump. And I want you to get into kind of how you defined the Trump government as maybe a different

strain than the type of autocracy people talk about. But I want to give people the teaser if they're already down in the dumps that you said that this type of government does suffer from two inherent, in many cases, fatal shortcomings. So we're gonna get to the shortcomings. But first explain how you think it's useful for people to process the type of government

Trump's trying to put in place. So this is an idea for which I'm indebted to a couple of political scientists named Jeffrey Kopstein and Stephen Hansen who wrote an important, very short, very readable book. I recommend it. It's called The Assault on the State. And what they point out is that the best way to think about what's happening right now, not just in America, but in Russia, India, Turkey, Hungary. There's an attempt to do it in Israel by the Netanyahu government, but lots of places is the resurgence of a very old form of government.

In fact, the predominant form of government until liberal democracy came along. It's called patrimonialism, terrible name, but it comes from a German, the German social scientist, Max Weber. So, you know how Germans are about words. Pete can we do it in German? Maybe you'd have a better ring to it if we said it in the German. Peter Let's not but say we did. Pete Okay. Peter So, patrimonialism is when the government is run as the personal property and family business of the head of state. And monarchies were typically like that, but a lot of governments work that way.

And not just governments, but a lot of social organizations like the mafia works that way, right? That's the godfather. It's all a business. It's your godfather's business. Gangs often work that way. Cults, and it's a very, very standard familiar form of social organization.

What's interesting about it, what's sometimes a little bit hard to understand, is it's not like the kind of classic authoritarianism that we associate with the great authoritarians of the 20th century, the Mussolinis and Hitlers and Maus and those people, because the opposite of patrimonialism is not democracy, it's bureaucracy. In other words, what you do with patrimonialism, you can have it to an extent in a democracy, but what you do is replace rules with loyalists.

So you just fill the government with people who are personally loyal to the person in charge. The government becomes about doing the bidding of the person in charge. But what you don't do necessarily in patrimonialism is set up the great authoritarian engines of state, the institutions and bureaucracies of oppression, which we all know if we read 1984, the Ministry of Peace and the Ministry of Love, you know, and that would be stuff like the Politburo and the secret police force and the propaganda agencies and the special military arms. They don't necessarily do that. They just go through the government.

It's like the scientists, we were talking about this with Michael Steele yesterday, right? Like a good Nazi, like a good authoritarian would, like was using the scientists to ends of the state rather than firing all the scientists and like jailing some of them in immigration detention centers and stopping all the research, right? Like it's the, it's, it's breaking everything down rather than like using it for the purpose of the state. Nazism was notoriously bureaucratic. You can go to the camps and look at the offices where they kept the bureaucrats, kept the meticulous records of everything they're doing. Patrimonialism is just, it's way more ad hoc. It's, okay, I'm going to fire the people who are there and I'm going to replace them with personal loyalists. And you can go through the whole government, do that.

What you do is you snip the tendons of the institutional state, what they call the deep state, but that's the rule-based authorities where you do regulation by formal rulemaking. And you replace that with regulation is whatever I say it is today. That's why we have chaos in trade. The new rule under patrimonialism, the government belongs to the head of state. It's his personal business and he's decided this morning that he wants to raise tariffs. Tomorrow he'll decide the lower tariffs. Nothing bureaucratic, nothing systematic, nothing institutional. So that's what they're doing. We see this around the world. It does have

two fatal flaws and that's how you get at it. You focus on those flaws. The Trump-Mussolini comparison like did always kind of fall flat for me, right? But for this very reason that you're getting at is it just like, Trump doesn't like want the trains to run on time really. Like Trump is not, does not have like all the same qualities. You know, like many people have been like going back and reading, you know, like many people have been going back

and reading 1930s diaries and books to try to like gain some insight and like there's some parallels, right? But then there's some other elements are like, this is not like Trump does not share like some of these fascistic tendencies. And so when I was reading your article about the patrimonialism, and you quote John Bolton, and actually in an interview he's doing on Shield of the Republic, which is our foreign policy podcast, where he says that Trump can't tell the difference between his own personal interest and the national interest, if he even understands what the national interest

is. And that really feels right to me. This description of Trump as somebody who wants to run the government as his own personal piggy bank, kind of like a mob boss, like feels more on the nose. And like once you've identified it, I think, then you know, kind of these flaws come into focus. So I don't know if you have anything more to say about Trump in particular on that front. Well, I think that's about right. You know, a pretty good guide to what we're seeing is the opening scene of The Godfather.

Not sure if you remember it. Are you going to do this to me? I have to admit I've never seen The Godfather on my podcast. Well, most of your audience has. And they'll remember that a businessman who's on the level comes to The Godfather for help to get justice for his daughter. And what Marlon Brando, what Don Corleone says is, so now you come to me, you went to the police first, the state didn't help you.

Now you come to me and you want my help, but you have not been my friend. Why didn't you come to me from the start? Because being my friend, that's what matters. And in order to get what the man needs as the scene ends, he kisses the Godfather's ring. He pledges personal loyalty to the Godfather. And that's a lot of what this is all about. It's enforcing personal loyalty and turning the state into the embodiment of the will

of the single person. And in a, you person and in a pretty random ad hoc way. That's kind of the point, right? Getting to the two inherent flaws. One of them is the incompetence. We are seeing this on full display now and I guess we all saw it during COVID too. It's just for a variety of reasons that didn't land with certain segments of the population. But we're seeing it again, just kind of the vast incompetence.

I had a friend, it was like a business guy, finance guy who was sort of Trump light, like, just a typical, I just like the tax cuts, don't pay that much attention kind of person text me last night, just like, this is way more of a shit show than I thought. And I was like, You don't say,

doctor. But yeah, exactly. Anyway, unfortunately, we have to all live through it for people to learn from this. But incompetence was one element of it and corruption was the other. And talking about how those shortcomings might help us get out of the morass here. Well, let's talk about them serially because they're both important and they're different. Patrimonialism was the standard form of government until the modern state, basically, more or less, until the United States,

and was actually very common then until the late 19th century when we professionalized the government, and until Otto von Bismarck and the modern state. The interesting question is why did it ever go away? Why was it replaced? The major reason for that is that running a big modern state with a modern economy and a modern military, a vast mighty war machine, this takes a lot of expertise and it takes a whole lot of social organization.

And that means it's got to be bureaucratic and rules-based. There is just no way that some guy with his whims and his family and his pals and his personal loyalty can do those things effectively. And what patrimonialists do when they snip the tendons of the administrative state and replace them with loyalties diminish the capacity of the state to do what the state needs to do. And it turned out that patrimonialist systems were just not able to meet the demands of

modern statehood. And, you know, you see that in a place like Russia when you look at the, to use your scientific term, shit show, when they tried to topple a weak neighbor and what they wound up with wasn't a victory, it was a traffic jam. Hurtling was so good on this. I'll put it in the show notes because because years ago I did an interview with him where he talked about just why the Russian military was much less competent than people thought.

And he kind of goes through all of this. He didn't use the word patrimonialism, but it was this, right? That like he, there were the types of people that were in mid and high level positions. And the military did not have the competence to do it, did not have the willingness to tell the mob boss that there was something wrong, right? And so it created this culture of incompetence.

Michael O'Brien So Trump is doing the same thing here. It's basically a form of Putinism, at least pre-war Putin. And he's replacing competent people with incompetent people. And I think you've made that point very well on this show. The name Pete Hegseth springs to mind, but you know, they're- The Ratnik is a great example of this, right? It's like, oh, we'll find a business guy that's loyal and that'll go along with my tariff gambit, right? Rather, you know? Yeah. And then when you do bring in people who are competent, like I think arguably Scott Bessent is probably a competent person,

you make them incompetent because you require them to do silly, crazy things. So incompetence is just baked in to this type of regime. There's some stuff they can do about it by cleaning up their act, but really not very much, especially if Trump continues as he began, which unlike in the first term where he kind of, you know, he subsided a bit

and allowed some grownups to run the place, he doesn't seem willing to do that. So this is a major weakness. My view on this is that it usually doesn't take very long for the public to figure out that the state is incompetent because shit starts to happen, right? And after a while, it gets a little bit harder to blame the previous administration for it, say it's Joe Biden's fault or to fire someone and replace them with someone else and say, now we've fixed it.

We're already seeing ample evidence of this. We're seeing the AP had a story yesterday about the administration members are already at each other's throats and they can't decide what Elon Musk is doing and who's in charge. Of course, you've got agencies where you've had the experts fired and then rehired and you've lost massive amounts of state capacity and you're about to lose a bunch more in the state department and on and on and on, right? But my view of this is it is mostly self-explanatory

to the public, because this stuff's just gonna happen. Okay, so now you get to be my priest for a second though, since you wrote a book on religion, because Sarah and I just did a secret podcast on this a couple of weeks ago. So we want to let them be incompetent, right? Like we need people to see it. If like that's the weak point of patrimonialism, we don't want them to protect themselves from themselves. Yeah, you don't have a choice. You know, they've got, they've got the, of course, the executive branch and for at least two years, they've got Congress. They're going to be incompetent.

We don't have to do anything to make that happen. If you could save them, you'd have a moral dilemma, but you can't. Get out the popcorn. We should all feel terrible about it, of course. Because what they're doing is not just a short-term decline in competence, they're demolishing state capacity every day. They are diminishing the government every day. They are diminishing

the government's ability, not just now, but potentially for years to come to do the things that the American people have assigned it to do. So yeah, we should feel terrible about this. Absolutely terrible, but it won't read down to their political advantage. So Achilles heel number two, and this is the one that I really try to get people to focus on and that's corruption. By definition, patrimonialism is everywhere and always corrupt because it substitutes the good of the leader for the good of the public. That's the whole point, right? The government becomes the personal business of that state.

So you get petty corruption, you get financial corruption, that stuff like, you know, the famous meme coin exploit and, you know, on the first term having people put up at Trump properties and you get all that stuff. But you get the bigger form of corruption, which is political corruption, which is when you obliterate the distinction between serving the leader and serving the state, and you turn entire engines of government to the advancement of the personal interests of the guy in charge. And of course, we're seeing that in a big way.

So corruption is not necessarily self-explanatory, but people don't like it. They do understand it. And it turns out that when you look through history and different places and times, what seems to work consistently in taking down a patrimonial regime is targeting its corruption in your messaging. So in the late 19th and early 20th century, that works for the progressives in America. That's how they take down the political machines. They're relentless about the corruption of Tammany Hall

and the famous Thomas Nass cartoons and all of those people. This is how in the modern world, it's how the Ukrainians take down their regime in the Orange Revolution and afterwards, Yushchenko, the guy they overthrew. Yeah, Paul Manafort's man. Yeah. They highlight his corruption. This is how the Polish Democratic forces kicked out the

Law and Justice Party in 2023 after I think eight or nine years of installing some pretty deep patrimonialist roots, they got kicked out because the opposition nailed them on corruption. So it was Navalny's strategy before he was killed. It was Navalny's strategy. That's why Putin had to kill him. Navalny went big on Putin's corruption. So you can go on and on in this way. I think a seminal campaign and demonstration in America in the United States, which you may remember,

was Newt Gingrich's campaign against House Speaker Jim Wright. This is in the late 80s and early 90s. Your younger audience members won't remember it. I'm concerned now about how old you think I am right now, because it's just this administration is aging me. It's what's happened. Why I have the bags, Jonathan, but I was, I was, I think eight when this happens.

Eight? Oh gosh. So please refresh my memory. Time is slipping away from me. So Republicans are in a permanent minority in the house and a backbencher, a kind of eccentric guy named Newt Gingrich decides that he's going to take down the democratic majority by taking down the Speaker of the House. And to do that, he starts launching ethics investigations against House Speaker Jim Wright, who's a Democrat from Texas.

And he begins going on a massive publicity tour, which initially is just basically him, right? He's just some guy. But then the theme of the tour and of everything he says, and he talks to media everywhere he can, and he gets on the house floor. And as I said, he launches house ethics probes, is most corrupt speaker ever. And after not getting traction, he does get traction and Jim Wright falls. And a couple of years later, the Democratic majority falls as well. The thing to notice about this campaign is not that the corruption was all that important.

There was some stuff involving, you know, people were buying Jim Wright's book in large quantities as a way to curry favor with the speaker. Crazy. What a different era. Yeah. That's what they were going after. It wasn't the details of the actual corruption. It's the relentlessness of the messaging. It's the same thing that Trump and his forces did to Hillary Clinton, right? Corrupt Hillary, corrupt Hillary, corrupt Hillary.

What about Hillary's emails? Now Hillary's emails were a procedural violation that never caused any actual leak of anything important, but with the help of the gullible New York Times and sheer repetition, sheer volume, they were able to frame Hillary Clinton as corrupt. Of course, Donald Trump was much more corrupt, but that doesn't matter. The point is to do this corruption campaign, you need to really focus on it as the center of your messaging.

You need to organize your messaging around it. And that's something Democrats have never been able to do with Trump. He's brilliant at the daily distraction. And he does this on purpose. We know this. We've seen this and he's told us that if he gets in trouble in one area, brilliant at the daily distraction. And he does this on purpose. We know this. We've seen this, and he's told us

that if he gets in trouble in one area, he will launch the tweet or do something outrageous in another, and we'll all rush over there and look at it. Well, that needs to stop. The Democrats and the people opposed to Trump need to foreground corruption. It needs to be the daily story and the daily theme and everything else and lots going on, but everything can be organized under the

general rubric of corruption. And that's how you get these guys. I don't disagree with anything you said. I think that incompetence just lands a little better with Trump as far as like getting people to buy it. Like the corruption thing is so tough. And this goes back to God, I did a briefing with the democratic super PAC in 2016, when I went over the opposition research we had on Trump in the primary and like made this case you made like really like focus on this, how he screwed over, how he's corrupt in his business dealings, he screwed over working class people, he just wants to enrich himself.

And it's just never really stuck to him. I agree that part of it is his flooding the zone strategy. Part of it is the lack of democratic consistency of the message. Part of it is like people just don't buy it. Like they think that he's rich already, you know, and he's kind of successfully like conned people into thinking like that he lost money by going

into politics. So I don't know, I mean, the crypto thing is just is just so crooked and so blatant that maybe it provides an opening, but that's also confusing a lot of people to understand crypto. So I agree with your assessment. I just think it's a little bit more complicated than the incompetence side of things. But TBD. Well, as I say, it may be a bit more complicated. There may be a couple more logical steps to go through, but I think incompetence will basically just show itself. I don't think you need to do a lot about that. On the corruption being hard, I think back to what happened to Nixon. He'd had a reputation for corruption for a while. People would call him Tricky Dick, but it takes time for this to sink in. But the American public did come to understand that Nixon's corruption was political corruption, not financial corruption.

It wasn't money in the bank for Nixon. What he was doing was repurposing the system, the government for his own political gain. Trump is doing that. He's doing it in a very big way. He's shaking down law firms for a slush fund that he can play around with. You can frame that story that way. One of the interesting data points that I stumbled across is that the amount that they want to cut taxes, largely for rich people, is the amount that would be necessary to keep Social Security solvent indefinitely instead of going, I think the date's what, 2035 now. Trump's corruption is going to take your social security money and put it in the pocket of his rich pals. So there are lots of these stories that you can weave,

but you got to build that larger narrative. The guy who knows how to do this, someone who's figured this out is Senator Murphy. Yeah, he's doing well. Chris Murphy, who went on the floor. And you know, he had the whole chart and maybe it was too complicated and there are too many steps, but he just started rolling through it. Corruption, corruption, corruption, example, example, example. The problem is there's only one of that. And you need a whole rotation of democratic senators who are on and off the floor every day, corruption, corruption, corruption. I think that breaks through after a while. Yeah, there are a lot of

people who think they're all corrupt. All politicians are corrupt. There are people who give Trump a pass because they think he's somehow authentic and maybe less corrupt than the others, or he's already super rich. Wolf in wolf's clothing. Yeah, a wolf in wolf's clothing. Exactly, but you remember here, the goal of this campaign is not to win MAGO voters because that's hopeless. Now this country is basically, you know,

you got 40 to 45% of the country that's just gonna vote for the Democrat or for the Republican, no matter who that person is. What you're going after are those votes in the middle that you can get. And those are people who think that Trump is somehow authentic. And corruption can drive a wedge there by saying, no, this guy isn't for you. This guy's for himself. He's turning the whole government into something for himself. And what you want to do, I mean, Sarah said this many times, which she's right, what you want to do is drive his approvals into the thirties and keep them there. And I think corruption is your best bet for doing that. It has an overarching message. Am I wrong?

Corruption is your best bet for doing that, as an overarching message. Am I wrong? Well, I think the best bet for doing that is a recession. But that's not a democratic strategy item. But I think that's the safest bet for doing it. But yeah, no, look, and it's why I am obsessed with the crypto thing because I think it was the most direct element of it. But I see your point about tying it into some of these other more mundane policy issues like the tax bill that's coming up. You know, there are ways to tell these stories like recession is because of his corrupt trade

deals. No, no, he's, he's raising tariffs in order to make deals that put money in his pocket. And it's caused a recession and then we're in trouble, you know, stuff like that. Recession for everybody except Jared and the Trump kids, they're doing great. Let's talk about religion, why not? You know? At least it's different. Some light fare. Cross Purposes is the book, as I mentioned at the top. It's an argument

for why Christianity is needed. It's coming from a gay atheist Jew. So, let's hear it. Give us the pitch. I might be a little cynical on this one, but I want to hear it from you. Well, cynicism is welcome. I understand. I come from exactly the same place. This book is an apology for the dumbest thing I ever wrote, which was in the Atlantic in 2003, I celebrated secularization and the fading of religion as a force in American life. And I said, you know, religion- That's the dumbest thing you've ever wrote? I mean, congrats.

Well, I also wrote in the Atlantic in 2015 that Donald Trump would never be president. Okay. So, I think my take on religion was even dumber than that, but you choose. Let me hear more about your take on secularization and then we'll grade you at the end. Yeah, okay. So, I said, isn't it great that Americans are just losing interest in religion and religion is the most divisive and dogmatic force out there and will be like Scandinavia and will be happier and more harmonious.

I was hugely wrong about that. In this century, the first 20 years of this century, we have seen a wave of de-churching, secularization unlike anything in American history. 40 million people have basically abandoned the church. Now, we're talking Christianity since this is, you know, it's obviously our predominant religion. You saw just in a period of 14 years, you saw a 15 percentage point drop in the number of people saying they were Christian, and where did they go? They became so-called nuns, N-O-N-E-S, people with no religion. Far from making society less turbulent, as you know, all the indicators

went south on things like loneliness, anxiety, depression, lack of social connectedness, enemy. Worse than that, we saw the rise of extreme political polarization, hyper-partisanship, which looks like a kind of substitute religion. People start defining themselves. When they used to devote their lives to Christ, now they're devoting themselves to being the Republican who hates Democrats or the Democrat who hates Republicans. So you get kind of the infection of politics with religious zeal. And then you get the infection of Christianity with politics, especially the white evangelical church.

Basically, this is overstating a bit, but not hugely. The white evangelical church effectively merges with the Republican Party and then effectively merges with the MAGA movement in the Republican Party. And that means that, you know, what used to be a church that stood for Christian witness and behave in a Christ-like way becomes much more like behave in a MAGA-like way, which is not very Christ-like. So through all of those things, Christianity loses what the founders counted on it to be able to do, which is to provide this sense of social connectiveness, collective worship,

a sense of where our values and meaning come from in life. You can't get that from politics. Not the first person to say it. You've heard it many times, but you can't get meaning in life out of politics. It's not what politics is for. So boiling it all down, the claim in my book is that America is becoming ungovernable in large part, significant part because Christianity has failed. And I have to care about that even though I'm not Christian. Pete I think that there is, there's some truth in this, but I'm going to take the

rabid defender of secularism side of this and let's kind of hash it out together. Pete Tell me apart. Pete The rudeless cosmopolitan side. The parts of the country where the social cohesion seems the highest are the places that you're talking about though that have become the least religious. I mean, I'm thinking about, if you try to think about where in America things are going okay right now, think about where I grew up, like suburban Denver. I would assume that you have much higher rates of college attainment right now in suburban Denver than you did 30 years ago, lower church attendance, a higher diversity.

The places that are creating the problems in the country, like really the places that have become more secular? I'm not sure about that. The answer is, as I understand it, yes. The higher you are on average on the socioeconomic scale, the more likely you are to be participating in organized religion. And that's not surprising,

because of course the higher you are on the socioeconomic scale, the more likely you are to be participating in everything. What we seem to be seeing is the breakdown of Christianity among those who you would think would need it most, which are people who are lower on the socioeconomic scale and who are facing the crises that we all know about, you know, the industrialization and deaths of despair, and who don't seem to have the kinds of faith-based resources that they used to

count on. We've seen a collapse in church going in many of those communities, and churches closing at an absolutely alarming rate. I knew when I was asking the question that the hole in my question was the kind of de-churchification also of the industrial mid midwet, right? Like rural working or not even rural, but like small town working class, you know, kind of white folks in particular, but really across the racial divide. Even still, like listening to you and I was listening to you and Barry talk about this and reading some of the books

this morning. And it is, it resembles the conversation I was having with a fellow atheist, so, you know, to you. I guess I would put myself more in the agnostic camp, but he is an avowed atheist. We were driving across Texas, like seeing all the Punisher stickers and Oath Keeper stickers, and kind of just talking about the state of affairs.

And he was basically expressing your view, right? That like, this is, that you've seen this, you know, in, in working class communities, like the de-churchification, the move towards other or nothing, or the move, move towards other less nutritious sources of community. And like, maybe that like is underscoring some of the social discohesion that we have right now. The, there's a part of me during that conversation where I was saying to him, I was like,

I don't know, man, isn't this just a couple of globalists, upper middle class, upper class people trying to come up with an answer for something that we don't really get? Aren't we just grasping for a solution for some cultural problems that have other explanations, be that economic or phones, technology? What would you say to that? I'd say that this is something I think that I misunderstood.

I come from exactly where you were. I'm very secular. I was on board with the project of thinking society would be better off without superstitious nonsense. And I think one answer to that is that I was empirically wrong. And the second answer, that's more fundamental, which is that I have come to think that faith,

and in America, that means Christianity, let's not beat around the bush, that's what we're talking about in this conversation, and it means predominantly white Protestant Christianity, that's our founding faith and still the predominant form of faith, that it has answers to questions that secularism can't really provide.

And one of those questions is why am I here? What's the purpose of my life on this planet? Am I more than just a random, you know, accumulation of cells that will blink in and out of existence? That's just not a satisfying way of thinking for most people. I'm okay with it. I seem to manage with it. But a lot of people need more and faith provides it. And the second question is the question of what's the basis of good and evil that's bigger than just the personal preferences, you know, the Nietzschean world that Mago lives in or that the postmodern left lives in. That also comes from faith and in our society, Christianity. And then finally, I would avert to the founders who told us in as many words that the Constitution

and the system they were giving us is not self-sustaining, that it relies on a bedrock of what they call Republican virtues, and that those have to come from civil society by which they meant family, community, schools, but they also very largely meant Christianity. That doesn't mean it's a Christian country, you have to be Christian to be a citizen, or, you know, they deliberately kept any reference to any faith out of the founding documents, which was controversial at the time. But it does mean that they understood that if you don't have a healthy faith sector, that's socializing

people into these civic values and giving them some sense of purpose, everything else is just going to be a lot harder. And that's, I think, where we are. Again, I want to agree with this. Every time I try to agree with it, I start to think, okay, there are other answers that are more satisfying to me for why we're in this period of tumult. Another example of a weakness of this argument is that if you look at the types of churches that are appealing right now, that are drawing people in, you have highly

politicized churches. Obviously, in the Catholic Church right now in America, you have a huge rise, kind of the traditionalist Catholics. I go every year to the Turning Point USA event, which has turned into kind of like a revival. Like, and the most, the most young church-going people I've ever been around are people at an overtly political conference who are like drawn to the more, I forget what you call it in the book, the sharp version of Christianity. The church of fear, yeah, sharp Christianity. Yeah. And the more, you know, whatever you want to call it, Jesus-like, the more modest, the more humble types of Christianity, like those, a lot of those types of churches, not

all of them, we're paying with a broad brush, like you go into a Methodist church these days and it's like all gray hairs, right? Like it's not young folks that are being drawn to that. So, like in practice, you know, are not the churches that are appealing to people, the types of churches that are not really going to resolve the problem that you're setting out to resolve. Well, the Sharp Church, the White Evangelical Church, Well, the sharp church, the white evangelical church, while it has been politicizing in the past, it's been more than 20 years, but it really turbocharged in the last 10 or 15 when they, you know, started going 80 plus percent for whoever the Republican candidate is, including Trump, has been shrinking rapidly. And that's because as it substituted the figure of, you know, what they substituted partisan politics for the witness of Jesus Christ, people kind of figure out,

well, I don't need to give up a Sunday morning for that. As Russell Moore, the editor of Christianity today has said, the reason, if you want to know why young people are fleeing the church, it might be because if all you offer them is a choice between secularization and paganization, they'll choose one or the other. So, the point here is, yeah, there's a church of fear, but it's shrinking. It's not growing. It is proving unattractive. So, Tim, the core of this book is not Christianity, So, Tim, the core of this book is not Christianity, yay, we need more of it. It's the teachings of Jesus Christ, the core doctrines of Christianity. We need more of that.

And that what we find again and again in America, but also throughout history, when the church gets corrupt, when it substitutes the gospel of power and life in this world from the gospel of truth and life in the next world, it gets into trouble because the appeal of Christianity, it's a countercultural religion, it's a radical religion, but it asks people to do three things. The first is not be afraid. The second is imitate Jesus. And the third is forgive each other. And those are three things that James Madison and the founders also needed people to do

for the sake of liberalism. Don't be afraid means it's not the end of the world if you lose an election. Have some faith in the system. You'll learn something from being out of power. You'll come back stronger. You won't try to steal the election or lie about the election. Imitate Jesus translates into treat every person as an end unto themselves, not a means

into an end. Every person has dignity, treat them with dignity, especially the least of these, especially the minorities. There are some things that governments should just never do to minorities and to the weak. Like, I don't know, grab them off the street and send them to a dungeon in El Salvador for no reason. And the third, forgive each other. That means politics is not about, to use a phrase, retribution. It's not about demolishing and crushing the other side. They're still citizens, they're still your countrymen. You share the country after you win an election.

Those are the cores of Republican virtue. So my claim in this book is Christianity would be a lot more attractive and appealing as a religion and also could do a lot more to heal the country if it returned to its own Christian roots. A strange thing for a, you know, atheist gay Jew to tell the church. Interestingly, this is kind of resonating more with Christians than it is with secular. Secular people are, a lot of people say what you say, which is, you know, they just still kind of think, wouldn't we be better off if we could be a secular country and make that work? But a lot of people say what you say, which is, you know, they just still kind of think, wouldn't we be better off if we could be a secular country and make that work?

But a lot of Christians are saying, yeah, being more Christ-like is something that the church should do. That's not surprising to me because I think that, you know, in a lot of ways, I kind of went through my abandonment issues with the institutions I cared about already before with the Catholics, before I got to the Republicans, you know? And so I don't have like this need inside of me to feel like that institution or that thing that is important to me is redeemed. That is not something that I concern myself with. But I understand it. I understand that impulse and I understand that there are a lot of people that are Christians out there

that are drawn to the church that want to believe, that want to have a community, but that feel alone, right? That feel like that the church has left them, that like the big churches that have the energy right now are ones that they don't like connect to. There's some exceptions to this obviously, but like I understand that sort of yearning for trying to bring back something that they can connect with. I just wonder if those folks are the types of folks that need to be reached or you know, whether they're going to be able to find fulfillment elsewhere, like whether the people that need to be reached are the people that are

being sucked into other more damaging associations, if you will. Yeah, and that I don't know the answer to. As much as I disagree with the so-called post-liberals who you alluded to earlier, these are the people like Adrian Vermeule and Patrick Deneen who think liberalism is over and we need to go back to a kind of traditionalism. I don't think that's right, but there's a core truth in the idea that it is really hard to be a person of faith in a modern secular society where you're dealing with cell phones and consumerism. If you're conservative, you're

hearing on Fox News that your kids are going to come back transgender from school, and you won't even be told about it. So all of that creates a challenging environment and I don't know if Christians can recover the teachings of Jesus at a large enough scale to win people back. And I can't promise that moving back to Christ-like witness will revive the church. I can only say that what they've been doing, basically turning the white evangelical church into a Republican party auxiliary, has not worked. It has failed. It is shrinking the church, and it is tarring the church with the brush of hypocrisy. There is nothing Christ-like at all about the person and

movement that white evangelicals have elevated and embraced. And I think their odds, at least, of winning back a following to Christianity and to democracy would be better if they followed the gospel of Jesus Christ instead of the gospel of, say, Donald Trump. But- Pete That's a low bar. That's a low bar that we've crossed. I'm with you on that, Jonathan. Okay, we're getting into a bleak place contemplating our sociocultural future. So can we end with something happier? Can we end with a happier item? Is that allowed?

Well, you know, to me, this work on Christianity, so I'm very much an outsider to Christianity. But I got to know a whole bunch of pastors and some theologians and, you know, people that you know who are deeply Christian, the late Michael Gerson, but Pete Wehner who you know, and of course, I love all these folks. Yeah, Russell Warren, Wehner. Yeah, David French and Russell and a local pastor who's become a close friend and many, many others. And here's what you learn is that the Church of Fear, this sharp, politicized, partisan, divisive church that's all hunkered down and wants to bring the culture wars to the pulpit, that does not remotely speak for all Christians. There is a hunger in

Christian world for those principles of Jesus. The people who are most unhappy with what's happened in the church are the pastors. In a poll a couple of years ago, 42% of them said that they had seriously considered quitting the church in the last year. And the third biggest reason they gave after obvious stuff like, I don't know, stress and low pay, I can't remember. But number three was politics. They want to move back in the direction of Jesus. There seem to be some green shoots and it's very early days, but we seem to have seen finally a bottoming out of the fight from Christianity. It looks like Gen Z is interested in Christianity and in finding its way back to something more organized. It won't look like our parents or grandparents, you know, the cathedrals

and the mega churches. It'll be more customized. And Russell Moore says the way this happens, Christianity has been in trouble because it got in bed with power and the state many times in the past. And it's found its way back from the bottom up. It's not like the epic struggle between the Maggachurch and the anti-Maggachurch. It's the grassroots, it's the influx of younger people who are actually interested in the gospel of church plannings, new generations of pastors, the small groups which are the core of evangelical life, you know, the Bible studies.

It's you begin to create new stuff and the old stuff begins to wither and shrink as it becomes more and more self-defeating. I don't know that that will happen. I do think though that the message of Jesus, even to a secular Jew like me, the message of Jesus has inspired people for 2000 years and is at its strongest when it's the most counter-cultural, when it's the most in contrast with what's going on in the surrounding society.

And that means right now, it's at its most appealing when it's least like politics and the MAGA movement. And so that to me at least means there's material there to work with and it's material that Christians have found their way back to in the past. Pete I wanted to be so. I connect mostly with the torment of the Russell Moore and the Pete Weiner of the world. Because I just, you know, you want there to be good people like that in the world. You just want, you know, they're like an oasis in the desert and you want to drink from their cup. But

I think it's tough world out there for it. I was going to end on a different happier note, but we're going to let people read it. You also wrote a book called The Happiness Curve Why Life Gets Better After 50. I'm not ready to read that book yet. I've looked at it a couple of times and I've been like, you know, I'm not ready to think about that quite yet. But when I'm 48 and a half, we're going to have you back and we'll talk about that. Assuming I'm still allowed to podcast, you know, assuming I'm not in an El Salvador prison camp of some kind, or maybe I'll do a, maybe I'll have a rogue podcast from an El Salvador prison camp. some kind, or maybe I'll have a rogue podcast from an

El Salvador prison camp. We'll see. But if we make it to 48 and a half, we'll have you back to talk about why life gets better after 50. That sound good? It sounds good and I hope we don't have to wait quite that long. Thank you so much, Jonathan Rausch. Thank you, too.

Everybody, we'll be back tomorrow with somebody who has a very high motor and a very strong and resilient bladder. I'm excited to talk to him. We'll see you all then. Peace. My lover's got humor. She's the giggle at a funeral. It was everybody's disapproval. Should have worshiped her sooner.

If the heavens ever did speak, she's the last true mouthpiece. Every Sunday's got a little bit of a party. She's the last true mouthpiece. Every Sunday's got a little bit of a party. She's the last true mouthpiece. Every Sunday's got a little bit of a party. She's the last true mouthpiece. She's the last true mouthpiece.

She's the last true mouthpiece. She's the last true mouthpiece. She's the last true mouthpiece. She's the last true mouthpiece. She's the last true mouthpiece. She's the last true mouthpiece. I should've worshipped her sooner If the heavens ever did speak She's the last true mouthpiece Every Sunday's getting more bleak Fresh poison each week We were born sick You heard them say it My church offers no absolutes She tells me worship in the bedroom The only heaven I'll be sent to Is when I'm alone with you I was born sick, but I love it You command me to be well Amen, amen, amen

Take me to church, I'll worship like a dog at the shrine of your life I'll tell you my sins and you can sharpen your knife Offer me that deathless death, oh good God, let me give you my life Take me to church, church I worship like a dog At the shrine of your lies I'll tell you my sins So you can sharpen your knife Offer me that deathless death

Oh good God, let me give you my life If I'm a pagan of the good times My lover says, sunlight Keep the goddess on my side, she demands a sacrifice drink the whole seat, get some shiny something meaty for the main course that's a fine looking house, what you got in the stable? we've a lot of starving faith for

that looks tasty, that looks plenty We've a lot of starved and faithful That looks tasty, that looks plenty This is hungry world Take me to church I worship like a dog at the shrine of your light I'll tell you my sins so you can sharpen your knife Offer me my deathless death The good God never give you my life.

Take me to church, I worship like a dog at the shrine of your lies. I'll tell you my sins so you can sharpen your knife. Offer me that deathless death, the good God, let me give you my life. The Bulldog Podcast is produced by Katie Cooper with audio engineering and editing by Jason Brown.