The Dispatch Podcast - The Art of Persuasion

Episode Date: July 3, 2020

Yascha Mounk, the founder of Persuasion, joins Sarah and David to discuss his new publication and the project of defending liberal democracy. Show Notes: -Persuasion -Stranger in My Own Country -Stop Firing the Innocent Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to our special Friday Dispatch podcast brought to you by the dispatch.com. Check out our website for the full slate of newsletters and podcasts. I'm your host, Sarah Isgert, joined today by David French and his friend, Professor and writer Yasha Monk, and their new project, Persuasion. A little about Yasha. He's an associate professor of practice at Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies and a lecturer on government at Harvard University, a fellow in the political reform program at New America, as well as a fellow at the Transatlantic Academy of the German

Marshall Fund. And that's only the stuff that made it to the very top. Plenty more about him that you can find. But I want to read for a second something he wrote this week as he launched their persuasion project. At the very moment when it would be most important for those who oppose an emboldened far right to speak with confidence and conviction, these same values are losing their luster among significant parts of the left. Companies and cultural institutions, institutions fire innocent people for imaginary offenses, prominent voices alternate voices alternate alternate between defending cancel culture and denying its existence, and an astonishing number of academics and journalists proudly proclaim that it is time to abandon values like due process

and free speech. This is what we're going to talk about today. let's dive in yasha i'd like to start at the very beginning with folks how did you get here where did you come from what what brings you here today no tell us a little bit about how you started persuasion

and what your vision for it is yeah absolutely look you know i've been writing for a very long time about something that's you know near to the heart of dispatch which is the threat of right-wing populism for tyrannism the way it endangers liberal democracy in the United States with Donald Trump, obviously, but also around the world when you look at India and Narendra Modi,

when you look at Hungary and Viktor Orban. Now, over the last few years, I've also become increasingly concerned about the fact but at the very moment when we need to ready as many troops as we can, unite as many people as we can in the fight against these dangerous figures, The basic values of a free society are losing their luster on parts of the left and parts of the center as well. And, you know, I've been horrified by the ease with which some institutions, many academics, many journalists say, you know, free speech is something we should give up on. That's a right-wing concept. Or we don't really need due process.

I'm horrified by the way in which some of the books when are now topping the bestseller list in this country like Robin DiAngelo's white fragility actually seem to exhort people, including white people, to make the racial identity the very center of who they are in a way that I think is really quite pernicious, even for it claims to serve sort of noble ends.

And so, you know, I wanted to found a space for people who are committed to these principles and these values and who are going to defend them, whether they're on the attack from people on the right at Donald Trump or from some of these developments, you know, in other parts of political spectrum. And you wrote a popular book called Stranger in My Own Country several years ago now. That seems to be a through line for me. This was a book about that you felt like a foreigner as a Jewish, non-German, born a person then moved into Germany.

Do you feel that way still in the United States as well? And does that sort of help your view of this? Like you feel a little bit outside watching this happen. And so your commentary on it is built on that to some extent. Yeah, I've been thinking a little bit about the relationship between sort of that part of my life and that book and how I see this current moment. I think the link perhaps is a little bit different when you suggest. So, no, I grew up Jewish in Germany, and in many ways, I was, you know, in a really lucky situation.

So economically, we were sometimes better off and sometimes less well off when I was a kid. My mom is a musician, so I come from obviously an educated household. You know, I'm not visibly a minority in Germany, right? I don't have an accent and I don't have dark skin, so I can walk into a bakery or I can go about my daily life when I'm in Germany without people sort of realizing there was something different about me. And so in many ways, I was, you know, more likely than perhaps other immigrants or other minorities to come to feel German. And yet, whenever I mentioned that I was Jewish, I felt like this incredible distance between me and other people very quickly build up. And part of the reason for that was sometimes anti-Semitism or sometimes people sort of treating me badly. But a lot of the time, it was the opposite of that.

It was a kind of creepy phylo-Semitism where people said, oh, my God, you're Jewish, that's so amazing. You know, Hebrew is a beautiful language. I love Woody Allen. Right of the way, I'm so, so sorry for the Holocaust. Please forgive me, right? And I have to say that for all that's admirable about the serious way in which Germany has dealt to the Holocaust and dealt with the history of the third right,

and I do think there's a lot that we can learn from that in the United States, I'm worried that people like Robin DiAngelo are the American equivalent of these kind of phylocemites, that they are not capable. When you read her book, they don't seem to be capable of actually having normal friendships and relationships of people who come from a different religious or ethnic group. They think that ethnicity and identity finds us so deeply that we can't actually communicate across those boundaries. And so I sort of feel sometimes in the United States, all the important differences, I don't want to equate the experience of Jews and Germany, we experience of African Americans in the United States, especially socioeconomically. It's very different.

But I feel sometimes like I'm now being asked by people like DiAngelo to treat, you know, my, my black or Latin American friends and acquaintances in exactly the way that I hated being treated when I was growing up Jewish and Germany. And that doesn't sit right with me. And David, you're joining us today because you have joined Yasha in this project. Yes. And one of the things that I find really cool as I was diving into what all. all you all plan to do are the book club stuff. Like, this is real book club. This isn't like a book suggestion list. Like, there's going to be a book club. People are a reading. Yeah. Like, you join the author. You tell you out. Yeah. Not like the book clubs I've been a part of, which is mostly about

drinking. So, David, what, how did you get involved in this to begin with? And what have you and Yasha bonded over in particular. Yeah, that's a great question. So I've gotten to know Yasha over the last couple of years. So I'm on the Board of Advisors. Just to be clear, unpaid Board of Advisors for Persuasion. So very honored to be on it. I'm also going to be doing a book club around my upcoming book and helping out in any

other way that Yasha would like me to help out because I really, really believe in what he's doing. I got to know Yasha and a really unique gathering of people relatively soon after. the Trump election. And I say it was unique because there's a lot of people who expressed exactly the concern that Yasha just expressed. Maybe they'd come from the right and had always believed that left-wing illiberalism was a real threat and then were surprised and appalled by the rise of right-wing illiberalism. Or maybe they'd come from the left and had always thought right-wing liberalism was the real threat and had now seen some of what Yasha just outlined. And what was

really unique about this gathering is it was a group of people where no one was said, hey, we're all coming together. These are all centrists coming together to try to save America from extremes. It was, these are people who are genuinely men and women of the right, men and women of the left, who share a common dedication to decency to, you know, the fundamental sort of principles of American democracy and are really, really worried about how much we hate each other in this country. And so I got to know, Yasha, and it's part of this, what I think is kind of a realignment that's occurring in our political culture that is a little bit different from some of the realignments that people have talked about, you know, nationalism versus, on the right,

nationalism versus classical liberalism, et cetera. But where you have people who are small L liberals who are on the right and on the left are really, there's a movement for. the small ill-liberals on the right and on the left to ban together against illiberalism, whether it's from the right or the left. And there's a difference, and what do I mean, there's a difference between, so if Yasha and I, and we had a great podcast a couple of years ago, where we talked about some of our differences, say, over free speech doctrine. But, well, here was the commonality. We believe there should be a free speech doctrine. So it's like the difference between debating over like the size of the ball or whether there should be a ball at all.

And so one of the things I think that was, you know, and what I'd like to hear, you know, wonder what Yasha thinks about this. One of the things that I have found is there are a lot more of the people who fit that category of sort of small ill liberal and are really worried about what's going on on. liberalism right and left, then we might think. And I think part of the evidence for that is the thousands of people, as Yasha tweeted yesterday, that signed up, like, immediately. And what I have found is that people who disagree with us often tend to shout it. And the people who agree with us tend to whisper. And I don't know if you have that sense of there's more of us than you think. No, I think that's exactly right. I mean, look, I grew up hating the phrase for silent majority because it was used by Nixon to say that the silent majority is in many ways,

you know, against progress on racial issues, against a bunch of things that I strongly believe in. I generally think that there's a silent majority today, and it's not a reactionary sound majority. It's a silent majority that is horrified by Donald Trump and horrified by many of the people who are running the Republican Party. But that, frankly, is also horrified by, you know, a lot of the op-eds that now dominate the opinion page of the New York Times. But it's also horrified by the idea that we should, you know, A, at all and, and

be without any kind of political or legal process, be removing and destroying statutes of Ulysses S. Grant. And as you're saying, I think, you know, there's a few reasons why these people haven't been shouting their convictions. One of them is that, you know, on the right. you have your own kind of political correctness where anybody who criticizes Donald Trump gets shouted down and has to found, you know,

amazing institutions like the dispatch. And more on the left, you know, there is this big fear of, you know, if you don't get rid of the program, if you criticize some of that stuff, and we're going to call you a bigot and worse. And so a lot of people sort of just, they don't want to speak for those ideals

when it's about particular cases because they're afraid of being canceled. They're afraid of what will happen to them. And, you know, I've been doing a little bit of reporting on people getting, you know, fired from their jobs under this truly crazy circumstances. So that's not an entirely irrational fear. So here's my theory of the case. I mean, if I can bore you with my sort of very small parted history of life and netters in the United States, I think there used to be a bunch of sort of mainstream institutions that were probably always a little bit more hospitable to the left and the right in all kinds of ways.

They also had real blind spots. I mean, they were, in many ways, sexist and racist and so on. But they did aim to, to some considerable extent, they did embody small, liberal principles. They believed in free speech. They believed in due process. They believed in evidence and all of those important things. And then you had the foundation of a set of ideological counter-establishments over time.

So, you know, conservatives founded the National Review, which you were part of for a long time, David, and had a foundation and so on, because it felt like, You know, for they shared a lot of those more liberal principles, you know, the New York Times and Brookings and Harvard wasn't quite the right home for them. I mean, libertarians founded Reason Magazine and AI and the far left found it, you know, had the nation and founded Jacobin and took over a certain sort of university departments. What's happened in the last five or ten years is that a lot of the mainstream institutions are only questionably liberal. At least the liberalism of these institutions are so challenged with the people who are proud, small. are liberals, who want to fight with those values, don't feel at home in those institutions,

feel like they always have to argue with people who disagree with them, feel that they're being hostile edited by 24-year-old editors who completely disagree with the worldview. And so I think this is what we need to do. We need to follow the path of other ideologically-minoritarian political traditions in the last 50 years of the United States and found our own fighting institutions, where we can seriously, with real internal debate, with the awareness that we've gotten somethings wrong, but we need good answers to real and deep problems, but we don't already have.

Ague for those principles, gather our troops, develop in its pre-de-core, coalesce this group of people who are passionate about these ideas and passionate about not whispering these ideas, not childhood, really, but stating them loudly and confidently

because we have nothing to be ashamed of. I think we have the values in different, you know, versions, some people who are further to the left, some people who are further to the right and exactly how they interpret those values. So we have the values that can make the society more just and more peaceable and more calm and less crazy and less unfair and less unpleasant than it is today. And so that's why we need to gather. So everything that you're saying, I think a lot of people agree with because it's at 30,000 feet, because it's stated as principles.

So I want to get down into the nitty-gritty. on some of the things that we're actually arguing about. So one thing that you tweeted that I, has been popping up in my Twitter feed a lot is the Emancipation Statue in Emancipation Park where Abraham Lincoln is standing with his hand outstretched on the head of a kneeling, newly freed African-American.

This was paid for by freed slaves, but there's a lot of conversation now that the statue needs to come down because of how it depicts a newly freed man as still crouching. And something that you tweeted that was great was Frederick Douglass's response at the time where he didn't love that depiction either, but his solution was to have more statues

and one of perhaps Grant standing next to a newly freed man or things like that. So let's set aside Emancipation Park for a second. What would you do about the various army bases named after Confederate generals? So let's talk about that statue for a moment because I do think it is actually an important case. So, you know, you can have different opinions of how successful a statue is. I don't think it's the best design artistically.

I don't think it represents the moment of emancipation as I would choose to represent today, not but I'm a talented artist. In fact, that's for one thing in life. I'm utterly devoid of talented. I couldn't go to him if I was forced to. well that's a relief to all of us because honestly if you were just going to sit there and make your own statue we were just going to throw up our hands what are we doing here is an incredibly talented woodworker which is something that that was blows me away but no

I have no no talent for that point but but this is a statue that was paid for by the wages of freed slaves and you know even within the logic of a certain form of wokeness where sort of all questions should be adjudicated by, you know, who is more oppressed? And then the question was, well, who gets to speak for the people who are more oppressed and how do we make the determination? But even by by that logic, how can anybody who is alive in 2020 be as oppressed as the freed slaves who decided, once they were emancipated United States citizens, to contribute their money to the statute? I mean, who are we to sit in judgment of that?

Now, as you're saying, Frederick Douglass, I think, had a beautiful solution, which was to say, you know what, we should have next to this statue, one that honors Ulysses S. Grant, which we haven't done, but also one that shows African Americans further on the path towards full citizenship as proud people standing up in the act of citizenship. And that is, in fact, what happened in Washington, D.C. So in Lincoln Park, opposite this what's called emancipation group, you now have a statue of a very important 20th century

African-American activist, Mary McLeod. You know, and so that's already been done. So that's that. Look, I mean, I do think the resident... But when you, just to push on that a little, because, you know, I live here and been to emancipation park quite a few times, and that statue has always made me a little uncomfortable. agree that it has historical significance. But lots of things have historical significance that we don't

sort of leave up and expect people that they need to go read the signage and know the full history in order to grapple with that. And I think similar arguments have been made for some of the Confederate statues that people want to put in museums instead. So I guess part of it is I hear you on the history, but when do we decide that that history is better put into context somewhere else rather than having, you know, children playing in that park looking at that statue a little bit confused as I was when I first got to D.C. Right. Well, let me say a few things about that. So first, I think there's a very crucial distinction, which I think David has made and other people have made between what you're honoring somebody for, right? I mean, certainly some of our founding fathers

were deeply flawed men. Many of them did have slaves. And that's a, you know, lasting blemish on moral record. That's not why we honor them. That's not why we have studies for them. We don't have studies for them because they held slaves. We have statues to them because they gave us some of the ideas and the constitutional system that allowed us finally to overcome that deep black mark on America. When it comes to Confederate statues, with very few exceptions perhaps, which I'm having trouble thinking of, so probably without exceptions, that's not the case. We're honoring them supposedly honoring and very heavy quotation marks for having tried to preserve slavery and destroy this country. And so, you know, obviously, we should not be doing that. There's simply

no reason to do that. Now, I agree even then that it shouldn't be, you know, done in a lawless manner that we shouldn't just be pulling these statues down. We want to be doing this through a political process. Ideally, we do preserve those statues somewhere, I think under any circumstances smashing statues is not the right idea. But no, I don't see why we should be naming army bases after Confederate leaders. I don't see why we should have statues that memorialize these leaders at all. Now, what we're talking about with the Emancipation Group is actually a third category, right? Here we're not talking about somebody who had amazing achievements, but also was a flawed person being honored. We're certainly not talking about somebody who is supposedly

being honored for very bad things. We are talking about somebody who, or a statue, that expresses a beautiful moment that tries to encapsulate artistically something that we all agree with, which is the incredible importance of the emancipation in American history and something to be celebrated, and it does so in ways that, you know, perhaps is open to misunderstanding. I think that's, you know, if we start to censor art or remove art, because some people might misunderstand that, not much art is going to be left. And frankly, the fact of the statue, I'm not a fan of a statue. I don't think it's artistically well done. But the fact that somebody might ask questions

about it and say, mommy, you know, why is this man kneeling? Well, so that forces the parent to explain the history and legacy of slavery in this country. That might not be a bad thing. I mean, that's certainly uncomfortable. Can I jump in for just a quick sec on this? I think, you know, what we're talking about here, when we're to back up just a little bit, and to give a shout out to something that I'm constantly being attacked for advancing procedural liberalism, that I would say that everyone, you know, we all agree, vast majority of people agree if you're dealing with the emancipation statue yanking it down without a process you know

a mob yanking it down no that's a no go but then there's another aspect of sort of illiberalism that gets insiduous as well one that says okay all right we'll have a discussion about it we'll have a discussion about it but if you disagree with me in this discussion i'm going to make life difficult for you on your um you know with your employer or um i'm going to cast a cloud over you as a horrible human being that in some small way, whether it's on Twitter or in social media, I'm going to try to stamp some enduring pain upon you or some enduring consequence upon you for your position on this matter. And I think that that's where we increasingly are right now. And I'm glad, Sarah, you brought up that hot button issue because

it's a great example of how that illiberalism has seeped into our culture. to such an extent that we, I would say the procedural liberal like myself would walk into, let's say I'm going into the Parks and Rec style city hall meeting. And I'm saying, no, let's keep this up. And here's why I think we should keep this up. And I would echo the points that Yasha made. And I might lose the argument. And I might lose the argument. But I've lost the argument. I'm upset that I've lost the argument. But I have respect for the opponents who made the counter argument. I have respect for the process that rendered the decision. And I then also defend the process and know that the next argument, I may well win. That's how we kind of hang

together. That's how we sort of function as a culture. But I think what we're increasingly seeing is I'm going to go in there. I'm going to make the argument. And if I lose, I'm going to say, this whole thing was illegitimate. This needs to be smashed. This is ludicrous. How is it possible that I'm right and I lost. And, and I think that that's, that's a lot of how the distinction goes in our, in our arguments now. Yeah, let's have the argument so I can win. And if I can't win, well, something is wrong with the system. And, and you see this constantly on the right with, well, you know, that's just, you know, that's just their path of defeat. no often it's the path of victory it's not always the path of victory and and i think that that's

you know and especially with negative polarization something where you're saying no it's not always the path of victory is unacceptable so we have to figure out how can it always be the path of victory you teach at sice johns hopkins uh school of advanced international studies And I was wondering as I was, you know, I loved so many of your articles this year in particular. The most recent one, of course, went particularly viral where you're talking about these people who have been fired or have lost their livelihood for things that I think most people would find deeply unfair. When you're dealing with your students, either this past semester or in the past, I'm curious what gives you the most optimism and the most pessimism as you're teaching them. Listen, they give me optimism, and the pessimism is what gives me the most poor. So what I find striking is, you know, Johns Hopkins is, and I teach undergraduates as well in Baltimore,

as well as graduate students at size in Washington, B.C. And both of those groups in slightly different ways are incredibly diverse. The group at size is very, very international, as well as being diverse among its American contingent. The group in undergrad at campus tends to be a little less international. but extremely diverse. I mean, I think in the entering class of Hopkins last year, something like 25% of the students were white. I mean, so this is, you know, a deep, the majority, minority institution now.

And these students are perfectly capable of coming together and sitting around a seminar room, bringing in the identities in the sense that their perspectives are informed by who they are, as my perspective is, when we're talking earlier about my upbringing in Germany as somebody's Jewish and as your perspectives are in various ways, but not just using what Gary Steingard beautifully calls me as a phrase, not just saying, you know, as a so-and-so, I believe this,

and you have to agree with me, arguing about difficult and challenging topics, about the rise of populism and why that's happened, around questions of democracy and diversity, which I'm teaching about right now. And they have a respectful, serious conversation with each other. Sometimes I disagree with their views, sometimes we disagree with each other's views, but that works.

And I think that's a beautiful encapsulation, despite, I'm sure, power dynamics going on with classroom and all kinds of limitations. It's a beautiful encapsulation of what America might one day become. Now, I think what gives me pessimism is that if I asked them in the abstract, do you think it's possible for people of different ethnic and religious groups to come together and have a serious respectful conversation, they would say no. So in a long day, they would deny the own experience.

And that, I think, says something to the pervading pessimism of the moment. So my next book is going to be an optimistic case for fair, vibrant, multi-ethnic democracy. And, you know, one of my enemy targets in the book is the pessimism on the right, the frankly paranoia of people like Michael Anton, if you have a famous flight 93 election and, you know, all that stuff. but also the deep pessimism at the moment on big parts of the left to basically say we've made no progress on these issues for the last 50 years and therefore we're probably not going to make any progress on them for the next 50 years unless we have sort of revolutionary change

or the right people come to power and just oppress all the people who are sort of terrible bigots and racist and are going to be that forever and even for I'm deeply aware of the many real problems we have in this country the problem of police, misconduct and violence and racial disparities. I just think that is a delusional view of where we are. We have clearly made progress in the United States over the last 50 years. And I think there's a good reason to be optimistic that we'll make more progress. And despite some of their opinions, I think my students are a beautiful living example of that.

David, sitting above all of this is what we have been experiencing since March, a worldwide pandemic that has changed our way of life in the United States. Tomorrow is the 4th of July. There was a great little piece in the Morning Dispatch this morning that highlighted those in the United States who feel extremely or very proud to be an American is at an all-time low. At the same time, anger and fear are the emotions most felt by Americans right now, 71%, 66%, respectively. I wanted you to be able to ask Yasha about his sort of Cassandra at the Gates moment when it came to coronavirus and what that means for us now. Yeah.

So I, just as a little preface before we, I take it to Yasha, I was, I'm not an epidemiologist. I'm not, I'm. Again, like Yasha does not build statues, I'm also relieved to find that you are not in addition an epidemiologist. I'm not an expert in infectious diseases. For a long time in January, I was in, and into February, you're saying, you know, you're looking at what's happening in China and looking what's happening in Italy. And quite frankly, you know, I had this growing sense of alarm, but it was sort of unformed. It was unease.

And it just had more unease and more unease and more unease. And I didn't know what to do with it. I didn't know what should you be saying about this. and then on uh and i'm at that unease is growing and then i believe it's march 10th uh the atlantic publishes uh an article by uh yasha that says i think the title was cancel everything people misunderstood me now they cancel people yeah i was talking about the virus people and and so you know you are out ahead of that and it turns out that as you wrote that the virus was more spread in our country than really anybody new. I mean, as we sort of have been able to rewind the

clock, we now have figured out that we're facing community spread or something like it even before those days. And I firmly believe that you got a ball rolling that saved a lot of lives, that saved a lot of lives. And so I want to know, how did you get, what caused the alarm bell to go off in your mind and why? And are there alarm bells ringing now? And if so, yes, if yes, why or why not? Well, first of all, it's very kind of you to say that. I think the article did have a huge impact. And honestly, in the days after I wrote it, it felt like one of this impactful article I have ever written or probably will have a right, because I thought that our government would take over steps to then contain the virus. If we do, in fact, cancel events

and slow community spread, make sure that we flatten the curve as the slogan was at the time, that would give the government time to put in place an effective test and trace regime that then allows us as soon as possible to open back up and go back to some semblance of normal life.

Now, that's what's happened in every single damn country of the European Union. I mean, there's a lot of responsible countries but the members of the EU, some kind of, I love, like Italy, that these governments is not exactly renowned for efficiency, every single country has managed to do that relatively well. And people

a few days ago in Prague had a big reopening party in the streets in a way that's relatively safe. And in the United States, we have wasted this time. We have not done that. So in retrospect, I don't feel like that article did much good. But that's a separate conversation. Now, two points. The first is, you know, how did I call that? I don't know. I mean, I think there's sort of two things that I called really earlier than others. The first was the rise of right on populism and the way would transform our politics and then the second was the virus. And I think what both had in common is situations when we sort of all see what's going on, but because it's different from the past, we don't want to think through the logical

consequences of the evidence that's in front of us. I think the best metaphor for it is I always picture, you know, these old cartoons, you'd have, you know, a character running over the cliff and then it would be like suspended in midair for a little while, and then it would look down and the moment it looked down, I think it often, you know, it takes a while for someone that's unsustainable, but that's been going on for a long time to actually collapse, right? It takes a long time. We see the rise of populism slowly, slowly, slowly in Europe and other countries over time.

But I always says, well, they're always in opposition, we're always going to stay in opposition. And you look at that and say, well, they only really need three or five percent more, and suddenly they'll be in government, and that'll be a pretty different thing. And I was willing to say that and other people were not. And so I think when I look at the virus, I'm not an epidemiologist either, but you saw the exponential growth of the virus in every country around the world. It was growing exponentially in China until they got it under control. It was growing exponentially in Asia.

It was growing exponentially in Europe. And so when the first cases came to the United States, I don't know if it was anything that makes the United States so different from Europe. I mean, more different from Europe than Europe is from Asia. That doesn't seem right. So clearly, if we don't do anything about it, the same thing is going to happen here. And that's really all that those needed. So the virus, though, has so changed our day-to-day world. People have, I think, become increasingly

frustrated and angry and fearful. And I think that has fed into a lot of the reasons you've now needed to start something like persuasion. And perhaps has even fed that anger and fear has fed into the cancel culture and not being around other people and having to interact with people on a daily basis has maybe fed into something else that I'm very curious about, which is the fear of getting canceled

for defending people who are getting canceled. And I think you have signed an open letter about an issue around Scott Alexander, that's his first and middle name in the New York Times, something that is, I think, just starting to percolate up, sort of in social media. The New York Post had an editorial about it yesterday. I was wondering if you could explain a little bit about what's going on with that and perhaps discuss how you think coronavirus is affecting these conversations that we're trying to have around persuasion as we all

sit at home with our own thoughts and just our own family and the people most like us. And yet we're being asked to think about people who not only are different than us, but maybe have diametrically opposed views than us. Yeah, look, I think the metaphor that people always reach for today is that of a witch hunt. And, you know, in important ways, I think that's a wrong metaphor because witches where burns of a stake or drowned in rivers and lakes

and people today are not being killed for the wrong opinion. They're not even being put in jail. And that's, I think, an important distinction. But there are interesting similarities. The fact that we have to say that that's an important to say. No, I agree. similarities. And one of the similarities, two very interesting similarities. The first is that you cannot defend yourself. If you say, I've been accused of this, but that accusation is actually

wrong, that's often taken in certain circles as evidence of how manipulative and evil and bad you are. So there's this odd sort of self-confirmation of the accusation that you deny it, then it must be true. And the second element, which you call attention to, which is just as important as, if you defend somebody who's accused, you become guilty by association. So, you know, if you say,

I don't think that woman over there is a witch, well, if you say that, that must be because you're unique with a witch. Why would be a weak of a witch? You must be a witch. I hear the Monty Python skit right now. So when I was asked to sign a witch, this petition, you know, for the pseudonymous author of this blog called Slate Star Kodax,

for a day or two, I sort of didn't respond to my friend who'd asked me to sign sort of slightly shamefacedly because I couldn't quite figure out what to do because I didn't know the blog very well. I'd come across a couple of postings over time, but I had not at all followed it closely or carefully. And the author has now taken down the blog from the internet because of his fear, he's a medical doctor of his name being revealed in a way that makes it harder to serve his patients. I believe he's a psychiatrist. And so I thought, look, like, I don't want to stand guarantor for all of the things that he may or may not have said on this blog, right? And then I thought, you know what? You don't want to be a wish. Well, I don't want to say, hey, I agree

with the content of this blog, right? You don't know the blog. And so then I, when I, when I, exactly, when I decided, you know, that's actually the wrong standard. I mean, it may be that he wrote all kinds of things which I would passionately disagree, in which I would happily argue with him over on a podcast or write articles saying why his views are deeply wrong. That may very well be the case. That does not mean that the New York Times has a legitimate interest in revealing the true identity of a private citizen with, you know, a considerable but relatively modest following on his blog, who's not in a position of political power, who's not a public figure,

and whose livelihood might be ruined by this, and by the way, the care of this, patients might be ruined by this. So I decided, you know, irrespective of what exactly that blog may say, I think I should defend him here, and that's what I did. I've been rereading lately an essay that I love by George Orwell. And by way, when I say rereading, I'm using that in the French meeting. The French meaning of rereading is, I just read for the first time.

I've been reading an essay by George Orwell on PG Woodhouse. It was written in the middle of World War II, published at the beginning of 1945, when the war was still going on. And in this essay, George Orwell, who was as proud an anti-fascist as any major writer in our history has ever been, he went to the Spanish Civil War to fight against Frank. He has no sympathy politically for Woodhouse. Some people like Woodhouse because he seems to be critiquing the aristocracy, but nobody who satirizes aristocratic title. with such relish isn't deeply attracted to them at heart. And he doesn't doubt the fact that Woodhouse made terrible political misjudgments during the war, basically letting Goebbels use him as a propaganda tool in Nazi radio,

because he ended up under host arrest in Nazi territory, Nazi-occupied territory in Belgium. So Orwell does not have any particular sympathy for Woodhouse. But he doesn't believe that Woodhouse is an ideological fascist. He doesn't believe that he is what was then called acquiesling. And at the time, everybody is denouncing Woodhouse's that. And Orwell, in the midst of World War II, thinks that the principle of defending a deeply flawed, partially guilty man, who stands for an ideology O'Will abhors from a charge that is wrong was worth spending time and effort rectifying. And I thought, if O'Wel can do that in World War II, how can we stand by and say, well, this person is being, you know, this person's livelihood

may be destroyed, but I haven't read his blog. So let me sit this one out. David, I'm going to leave the last substantive question to you. So in pursuing that, you know, I have a theory and maybe it's too optimistic, Yasha, and I want you to tell me if I am ridiculously optimistic. my theory is if we can get where you are where you can defend the rights of those with whom you disagree defend the rights of others that you would like to exercise yourself that you'll actually do more than preserve sort of the structures of American liberty you'll actually begin to rebuild American fellowship and and the reason why I say that is I think that in the act of defending

somebody with whom you disagree, and the act of standing beside them, even if it's via Twitter, that two things happen. One, you create a level of understanding of what their position is because you often research what they are saying before you're going to dive into the fight. So you understand them. And then B, there is an intangible bond that occurs when you stand with somebody in a difficult circumstance. And I have seen that replicate, as a civil liberties lawyer, I've seen that replicate again

and again and again and again. And I just wonder, on an individual level, I just wonder if that can scale up. And that seems to be what persuasion is aiming to. And that's a source of optimism for me. And I just, do you think I am Pollyanna-ish? No, I think that's right. Look, I really think that most people, in this country, like

most people in many or every country can make deep misjudgments politically, can get some things wrong, but I had a hard, decent people who want to live in a fair society that doesn't feel as nasty and

violent and mutually mistrustful and hateful as ours does today. Now, the problem we face is though we don't have institutional voice that this country is deeply split in two. On one side, the people with deeply liberal values have won. On the other side, we're making, you know, a decent bit for power. And we need to make sure that we recapture those institutions. But

that's only going to work if we start building institutions of our own, where we create what you're talking about, what we create fellowship, where we create a real community of people who are united in a proud defense of the values of the free society. So if you allow me one shameless plug, that's what we're trying to do at community. We'll have articles discussing all these issues and defending all these issues, but we're really also trying to build connections between people, build that's pretty core, build that community. And so we'll have these amazing book clubs that David is going to do one of.

We'll have amazing life events. We're going to experiment with different ways of connecting people, which in some ways is harder and some ways is actually easier now during the pandemic. So please, please, please, you know, go to www. persuasion.com community and to our group. I'm particularly excited about the George Orwell Book Club, actually, which does not have a date yet attached to it, I noted, but I look forward to that having a date.

So in the green room, when I was trying to make sure I was pronouncing your last name correctly, it's slightly different than monk as the religious scholar. It's monk. It has a little more you to it. You told me a fun story. Your last name is wholly unique. It is. It's made up by my mom. And so who all has this last name? My mom and me. So if I need any other M-O-U-N-Ks, it's your mom, basically. I assume so, yes. I have some weird alter ego. So this got us talking about names. Uh, so my last question to each of you is, uh, what would you, have your parents told you what you would be named if you had been born a girl? And did they know ahead of time what you were going to be or was, was this a surprise for them? As being born was a surprise for you, I assume.

It would be. You're very comfortable in the womb and suddenly all kinds of traumatizing things are happening. I know. I feel terrible for my son. He's three weeks old today. And, uh, last night was a rough night, and I just was like, I know, I know this is very hard. We did not know how hungry you were. And before, like, that was just taken care of immediately. And now you poor thing, you have to communicate this to us. Very tough. Okay, so, so Yasha, what say you? So I didn't know whether or not my, my mom knew that I was going to be a boy before I was born, actually. I think not, but I'm not 100% sure. And the name would have been Fanny. I love the name Fanny

You said another relative named Fannie that I think that's how we got into this topic but that the first Yeah that is my

I only have two relatives who came through Ellis Island because my the Isger side is Jewish my like direct great grandparents they had already met the Jew quota in

New York and so they were the boat had to keep going and they ended up in Sedalia, Missouri a shout out to the Isgars in Sedalia Missouri

hey guys so I would have been Isaac my parents did find out and my mother said she cried with relief when she found out I was a girl wow so that was pretty funny David so I'm the old person here as I always seem to be on every dispatch product I'm always maybe that's because you're old and maybe because I'm the oldest person in the dispatch so so this was pre you know learning the sex before. So you had to walk into the delivery room with two names. Oh, wow. Yeah. Okay. So I have to confess, I was singularly not curious about this question. How could you not be? I was so curious, so early. Growing up, and I think the answer is just in the

vague recesses of my memory conversation with my sister who was curious about this, that I found out that I would have been, my sister who's two years younger than me, they had, they just slid the girl name to two years down. And her name is Janet. I wonder what her name would have been, like, because then they had to come up with another boy name. I believe it was going to be Brian. Oh, David and Brian. I believe. Janet and maybe John. I don't know. Probably would have kept the biblical. I don't know, Sarah. And Yasha, you must be an only child then. I have a half-brother, but yeah, on my mom's side, I'm an only child. Okay.

Well, thank you, Dispatch listeners for joining us for our special Friday episode. And do check out Persuasion and check out Yasha's Twitter feed as well where you can see his latest writings. His last one for The Atlantic was just, just so fabulous, can't recommend enough. His writing on what persuasion is and why I thought was short to the point and really important. And we hope to hear a lot more from both of you on this and plug for the book clubs and all of that. So thank you for joining us. Thank you listeners for joining us. And we'll see you again next week. Thank you so much. You know,