The Eric Metaxas Show - Ross Douthat (continued)

Episode Date: March 5, 2020

Ross Douthat continues illustrating key elements of "drift, repetition, and dead ends" from his hard-hitting, "The Decadent Society: How We Became Victims of Our Own Success."

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I tell all my relatives to take it. relief factor.com. Welcome to the Eric Mattaxas show. My name is Todd Wilkerson, and I'm happy to be the announcer for the Eric Mataxis show. But it's gotten to where I can't go out in public without people recognizing me, and just loving on me big time right there in public because I'm so awesome. Look, I get it. You love me.

I am fascinating. I know. But how about once in a while you respect my space? I mean, I'm not some sticking piece of meat. Okay, Eric, you're up. I don't know what kind of show I'm trying to do, but that's not it. Todd, I don't even know who you are anymore. Folks, I'm talking to Ross Douthit, New York Times columnist, author of many books.

The new one is The Decadent Society, How We Became the Victims of Our Own Success. Ross, ultimately, this is a pessimistic thesis. So I know that you and I share Christian faith. Do you see any hope here or? Is this just something that we're going to have to live with for a few centuries the way the Romans did? No, I mean, well, one, I think the Roman example tells you that there's always hope, right? Because the idea that Rome endured for 400 years, right, as a decadent society, those were the 400 years that saw the birth and spread of Christianity. And that Christianity didn't suffice to save Rome from its own fall, but it's suffice to renew the Roman Empire from within, create another civilization that could carry on afterward, and that could carry the best of Rome in many ways forward into the Middle Ages and the modern world.

So even in a case as in certain ways depressing as the story of the Roman Empire, you know, from Caligula down to when Romulus Augustulus gives up the ghost in 476, even that story shows that under decadence, you can have the most important religious transformation in the world. So in that sense, yes, there's always hope. I think the point I try and make in the book, though, is that if you just extend current trends forward, there isn't something that's just obviously going to fix things. And you need some kind of disjunction, some kind of unexpected thing, an unexpected invention, an unexpected religious revival, an unexpected political realignment, that can sort of help the system shake free of this torpor and decay that I'm talking about.

It's interesting. I mean, anytime you have a moment like that, 9-11 is one, you realize how much we take for granted. And I think that the relative peace and stability and prosperity that we have, we do tend to take for granted. The more we have it, the longer we have it, the more we forget that it's possible maybe not to have it. And so you think about things like the coronavirus, there are always horrible possibilities out there. And I guess sometimes I have wondered whether anything will break through to wake us up. It's sort of, you know, you talk about being safe. And there's something just so sad about that, right? It's like, I mean, it kind of reminds me of, you know, like there's a Star Trek episode, right,

where Captain Kirk, you know, he's given the choice between being safe and protected by, I don't know, who it was. Actually, was some kind of a Roman god or something like that. And you remember that episode, of course, with the dwarf. We can't talk about that. But the point is that he chooses, as anyone would have in late 1960s America, he chooses freedom and the risks of failure. He would rather have that, you know, to really be a man, to really be a huge. human being means to have that kind of freedom. So to what extent is what we have now our having traded away freedom? Is that, I mean, I guess when I look at the European Union, which always

makes me think of where we could be in 10 or 20 years, it seems to me that they've traded some measure of wildness and freedom for stability, whatever it is. But it seems like a malaise. it seems like a sad kind of safety. Yeah, I mean, there's a Californian, he's a writer who's sort of a pundit and a philosopher, a guy I'm friends with named James Poulos, and he has this phrase that I borrow from in the book called the Pink Police State. And basically the Pink Police State is not a ruthless, repressive tyranny that's going to, you know, put you in a camp and execute people en masse and so on. It's a soft, gentle, friendly form of sort of bureaucratic supervision. The goal of which is to make the world safe for pleasure.

So it is a kind – it's not giving up all freedom. It's choosing a particular kind of freedom, which, of course, the founding fathers of America wouldn't have called freedom, right? The freedom to indulge your appetites isn't true freedom. But that's, I think, how people conceptualize freedom today. And so under this system, it's really important to – protect people's pursuit of pleasure and sort of their own self-actualization and protect their feelings from being hurt. And then the older set of freedoms, religious freedom, freedom of speech,

and so on, they aren't abolished, but they're considered a little dangerous because, you know, they aren't about pleasure and self-actualization. And maybe you might say something to defend people, or maybe people might have a religious belief that says your, you know, pornography addiction isn't the greatest thing in the world. And so that, that I think, is sort of the, that's the decline of freedom part of this narrative, that the decadent society tends to sort of generate a kind of bureaucratic apparatus of supervision where, you know, and surveillance adds to this, right, thanks to not just video cameras everywhere, but the surveillance device we all carry in our pocket. We're always being scrutinized and monitored, and there isn't

one authority doing this. It's 17 different corporations plus the national security state. but it adds up to a kind of safe, you know, safety for pleasure, but not necessarily for high ideals of the old school. Yeah. I mean, at the end of the day, all of this is a battle of ideas. And I guess one of the reasons I'm proud to be an American is it seems to me that we still have enough people in America who get the idea that the nanny state is bad because it's the enemy of freedom. even if they can articulate exactly what they mean by that, they have some sense that I'm less of a person if I give over too much of my safety or care to some bureaucracy. Yeah, and there's a lot of discontent with decadence, right?

I mean, the reality is that all of the political disturbances in the West over the last five years, on the right and the left, both, I think, reflect some kind of inchoate desire not to just, you know, sort of have stewardship of decadence forever. And I think you can see figures as diverse as Barack Obama and Mitt Romney and Jeb Bush and Hillary Clinton as sort of stewards of decadence. And figures like Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders are both in their different ways, guys who are saying, you know, no, we can go back to where we were in the 60s. And for Sanders, it means getting back to some sort of socialist utopia. And for Trump, maybe it means going to Mars, right? But that impulse is alive in American politics and in Western politics. It just has a hard time figuring out what it wants to do once it takes power, I think.

Well, I mean, you know, in terms of looking back to a socialist utopia, if anybody can name one, I'm happy to go back there. But I think it's a fiction. Trump, on the other hand, does – it is interesting to me because he kind of embodies the – the – the – the anger or the frustration with political correctness and the regulation and so on and so forth. It's like he's America's id or something like that. And I see that as a sign of health. In other words, I think that the way Europe has gone, it really does amaze me to see them just sort of slide off into where they are now.

I mean, there's some. But Europe has its own versions, right? I mean, Europe has its own versions. I mean, Brexit happened before, I mean, took a long time. Yeah, yeah. but it happened before Trump. Right, right. And there are populist eruptions, you know, Italy is, Italy and different parts, I mean, France and Germany in different ways, that I think it's not just an American thing to feel this sense of simmering discontent.

Sure. Well, no, I agree. I guess I just see it writ larger in the United States, but you're right. I mean, Brexit to me. I think we're less decadent than Western Europe. I think that's right. Why do you spell eruptions IR instead of ER? I don't know.

I just prefer it. I prefer it too. And I saw it on the book and I thought, I can write it that way. Anyone can. Is it really an alternative spelling? Yes. So there's no nuance of meaning. No, I think there is a slight nuance of meaning, but we'd have to look it up between segments.

Okay. This is the 10-minute segment, so that means we're out of time. We'll be right back talking to Ross. Doubt that the book is The Deccant Society. day. Up on a ridge, he rested as he went along his way. When all at once a mighty herd of red-eyed cows he saw, plowing through the ragged skies,

and up the cloudy draw. Hey there, folks, that is Johnny Cash. I'm Eric McTaxus, and I'm sitting here with Ross Douthat. You're not going to believe this, ladies and gentlemen. You heard us talking moments ago. I brought up that Ross, sitting here with me, use the word eruption, I-R-R-R-U-P-T-I-O-N in his book. When I read the book, I noticed that I like that spelling better than E-R-U-P-T-I-O-N.

And even when you spoke earlier, Ross, you seem to say the word eruption instead of, I don't know. Maybe it's pronounced the same way, but it kind of, it triggered me. So on the break, we looked it up and we just got the shock of our lives. Please, my friend, share with my audience what just happened. So if you go to Merriamwebster.com and they give a definition of eruption, I-R-R, which is a sudden, violent, forcible entry. And I think that is the difference between an eruption, like a volcano, is something bursting out, and an eruption is something bursting into a pre-existing world. So that's all terrific. But then they have a sentence, right, use it in a sentence.

And the sentence is the assassination still feels like a primal catastrophe. an eruption of inexplicable evil as horrifying as any boogeyman. And it's a quote from a guy named Ross Douthit, which is me. Folks, we're not making this up. Ross, come on. That is so hilarious. But it could be that this is all that maybe I invented the word. And this is all some sort of weird, recursive thing.

I was going to say, this is the kind of thing that I would want to do. I'd want to invent a word and then get it in a mirror. But we've just kind of reprised this for the audience. So we were looking up the word eruption, wondering if there's any real difference. between E-R-U or I-R-R versions of the word. And the example given is a sentence by none other than Ross, doubt that's sitting right here. Which may tell you that I'm the only person who ever uses it, but now you can't be too, Eric. My goal is also to get in Miriam Webster for eruption, maybe for eruption and for other words that I'm going to use that I can't share on the air.

But that is so funny. I just love stuff like that. I love words, you do too, and how wild that we would look it up now and find this. Okay, so we were talking about wildness and safety, and ultimately, Ross, we're talking about ideas. So when we talk, for example, about religious revival and what could spur religious revival, because I sometimes feel like that is our only hope in the West. I guess I wonder if there are enough Christians who have what we can, again, call cultural confidence in these ideas. Because it seems like even many evangelical Christians that I know, they seem to have sanded down the edges.

They don't want to be too in your face in terms of sharing their faith. They almost act as though it's not, nothing's worth looking awkward for, nothing's worth. In other words, it seems like that malaise has affected the whole society, including, you know, I say evangelical Christians, any kind of Christians. Yeah, I mean, I think that a lot of religious people and Christians have in the same way that the wider society has kind of gotten stuck. So so many of the arguments that are sort of inside Christianity between liberal evangelicals and conservative evangelicals or in my, I'm a Catholic, so it would be liberal Catholics and conservative Catholic. They're the same arguments people have been having since the 1960s, and in certain ways, since the 1920s and 1930s since the fundamentalist modernist wars back then. But so, you know, it's arguments about sex. You know, how can the church change to adapt to the sexual revolution or should it not?

But even, you know, somebody, a figure like Rob Bell, right, who was, you know, this mega church pastor who started questioning the reality of hell and then sort of gradually drifted into being a kind of spiritual but not particularly Christian. figure on Oprah Winfrey's circuit. Rob Bell, that journey, that's a journey that's, you know, was new and fresh and interesting to people 30, 40, 50, 60, 70 years ago. The idea of, oh, the evangelical pastor doesn't believe in hell, you know, it's not novel, that's not new. That's the same story that the secular media has been fastening on. And I think that stuckness is, it's a problem.

It's hard for churches to figure out how do you get beyond. the culture wars of the 60s and how do you propose the faith in a way that doesn't just feel like another battle between liberals and conservatives that they've heard before. But at the same time, I think it can be done. I mean, I think one of the striking things is that, all right, so, you know, Christianity is stuck in these civil wars and stuck in these internal arguments. But I spend most of my time in secular spaces. I write for the New York Times, which it's fair to say, as a somewhat secular readership. Oh, for sure.

Perhaps, occasionally. Yeah. And, you know, what's striking about sort of the secular world picture right now is that it just sort of lives with these internal contradictions. Sort of secular progressivism wants to simultaneously believe really intensely in certain moral absolutes in, you know, human rights and human dignity. And, you know, it used to be conservatives would criticize liberals for being relativists. But if you look at sort of, you know, the point of the spear for progressives right now, they're not relativists. They have a moral vision. They're certain about it.

But they don't know where they get it from. Exactly. But then their metaphysical world picture is either something, sort of a very vague spirituality or a kind of, you know, or a sort of hard Darwinian materialism. It's not just a belief in evolution. It's a belief that you can reduce everything to matter. And those two things can't be put together. You can't get to an absolute view of human rights from the sort of that sort of, you know, strictly materialist view of matter. I think people know that.

I mean, I have arguments with people who sort of accept that and say, well, we're just trying to muddle through because, you know, we can't imagine going back to traditional religion. Right. Okay. And but out of that comes, you know, you're in New York City all the time. Like we're in the midst of an astrology craze, right? The most secular city in the world. But doesn't that make perfect sense? It's filled with people who, you know, are saying, oh, well, of course I did that.

I'm a Virgo and these kind of things that is, again, a sort of cycling back to the 70s. But who said that, it sounds like Chesterton, that, you know, when people will believe, who don't believe in anything, they will believe in everything or something like that. And I just thought, speaking of Cheston, I just thought of an aphorism as we're sitting here. You said, you know, if we can reduce everything to matter. and I thought if you can reduce everything to matter, nothing matters. That's got to be the case, right? But I think it's the idea that people are willing, this is, maybe this is a facet of the decadent society,

that people are willing to shrug things like that off. In other words, rather than say, hey, wait a minute, I have a problem. They go, who cares? They don't seem to care that, for example, to argue that, you know, I just want to kind of groove on the rubble. Like, I don't really care about ultimate meaning or anything. I'm just trying to get by. That's not an argument.

And if you point that out, they say, well, I don't care. Why do I have to have an argument? They're not being forced to have an argument. Right. And I think there's a fear, too, of where arguments take you, right? I mean, I think you could say in certain ways, we already went through the decristianization of the Western world. It was called the rise of national socialism and Soviet communism. Right.

We went through a period where people pushed. post-Christian arguments all the way to the end. Right. And what they found at the end was Auschwitz and the Guleg. And to their credit, people recoiled from that, right? You don't have a lot of Nazis walking around, and even Bernie Sanders isn't going to defend the Gullag. But having recoiled, they don't, you know, there was sort of, you know, this window, and you've written about it with Dietrich Bonhoffer, this window of sort of Christian revival in the 40s, 50s, and 60s that was sort of saying, okay, we went all the way to a post-Christian society. you don't like what you found, let's try Christianity again.

But then that sort of came apart with the sexual revolution and the social revolution to the 60s and 70s. And once left now is, yeah, this world that says, we can't go back because, you know, Christianity, it's repressive or it's too dogmatic or it's too doctrinaire. We can't really, or we can't really believe in some of the supernatural stuff. But we don't want to push way beyond Christianity because, you know, we don't want to become Hitler or Stalin.

And so we're just, like you said, we know it doesn't quite make sense, but we want to stay in this halfway house and be comfortable there. And the question is, at the start of this conversation, I said, you know, I'm stealing my definition of decadence from Jacques Barzun. And part of, he's this cultural critic and part of what, part of his definition is the idea that when a society accepts that kind of futility and self-contradiction as normal, that's what decadence is. Okay. Now, so my question, or one of my questions, has to do with this idea that there are, let's take the sexual revolution. Now, we've had, you know, it's roughly 50 years. So it's interesting that the high water mark, if we call July 20th, 1969, the high water mark of something, then we've had 50 years of whatever. But it seems to me that

we've now had enough time to see the fruit of the sexual revolution. If in the 1970s, everyone could say, hey, divorce is fine. It's better to have quality time with your kids than quantity time and don't stay together. All these cliches that were in the culture that you could say without any pushback. Now we have decades of data that say, hey, wait a second. Maybe there's some issues there. We're going to go to another break and I will try to finish that thought. It's the Eric Mattaxas show.

We're listening to my conversation with Ross Douthit. Don't go away. Hey there, folks. I'm talking to Ross Douthit. It's the Eric Mataxas show. the book is the Deccant Society. Ross, I was just talking about the sexual evolution and how we've had enough time past now where we can see the fruit. In other words, the brokenness, the single families, the divided families, kids who aren't sure, you know, who their family is.

There's lots and lots of negative fruit and evidence that we now have that we didn't have in the 70s and in the 80s. And it seems to me that there has to be some sort of reckoning, even if you're not seeing it among the cultural elites, your average person has watched this and seized their own families. And so, right, so two things have happened, I think. And one is good and the other one is not, right? And the good thing is there has been some of that relearning, I think, that people are more aware of the costs of divorce.

People are more troubled by abortion, even if they aren't all the way to being pro-life than they were in the 1970s. And so if you track a lot of indicators from the 70s, you get a huge spike in the abortion rate, and then it's gone down pretty steadily since. You get a huge spike in the divorce rate with the divorce revolution. It's gone down. And even in the last few years, the out-of-wedlock birth rate has finally leveled off and started to decline. So that's good news.

Maybe that's the beginning, at least, of a sort of restoration or reclamation of healthy family life. At the same time, the other thing that's happened is that people have just sort of stopped getting married, stopped having kids, and stopped even having sex. The most amazing statistics about our sexually liberated society is that the frequency of sex, not just in the U.S., in Germany and Finland, all the – you know, the most liberated societies on Earth are having less sex today than they did 15 or 20 years ago. But isn't that because we've forgotten about the meaning of sex? We don't really understand what it is because it's become, it's effectively onanism, right? If it's onanism with another person, with yourself, but this idea, this transcendent idea that once animated, you know, civilizations, that two people come together and create life. And there's something beautiful and transcendent about that. And it points to a picture in heaven of the union of the bridegroom and the bride.

And all of that, when that goes away and it's replaced by this mechanistic, materialistic, view, you sort of think, so what is this then? It's just, it's just pleasure. Why can get pleasure this way or this way or this way? It ceases to be linked to anything beyond itself. Yeah, absolutely. And that's, I mean, I think the rise of pornography and especially internet pornography enters into that in the most literal oninistic way, right? That, you know, a big part of the story of the last 15 years is, you know, the transition from the first wave of pornography, that was, you know, the playboy under your dad's bed and, you know, things that seem tame and innocent, really, I mean, not innocent, but you know what I mean, to the age of internet pornography where it's, you know,

it's sort of comprehensive made to order, and there's all kinds of evidence that it literally rewires men's brains. But don't you think that that at some point, and we're sort of at that point now, where we begin to see what is happening? In other words, okay, we've had iPhones for, you know, 10 years or whatever, but you can begin to see certain effects, which you couldn't see. And there has to be at least some desire for self-correction to say this isn't good. Maybe we can't abolish it, but we see something. I think there's absolutely, especially among younger people and, you know, younger conservatives right now, I think, are more likely to think porn is a big problem than young conservatives did 15 or 20 years ago. So there really is some sense that, you know, we've taken a wrong turn. At the same time, and this gets back to, you know, the question of sort of sustainable decadence in the context of the book, there are ways in which this stabilizes society, right?

If men are, you know, essentially gratifying themselves using the Internet, then they're not out doing reckless and dangerous things. Like getting married? Like getting married, but also, you know, but also rates, rates of sexual violence have gone down in the last 20 years. It really is the case that this sort of, I mean, it's the problem that you get distilled in Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, right? One of the most famous dystopias ever written where Huxley, unlike George Orwell, George Orwell says the future is the totalitarian boot stamping on the human face forever. And Huxley says, no, we actually are going to build dystopia by giving everybody pornography. and giving everybody soma, which is, you know, a sort of mood maintaining and stabilizing drug. And we aren't in that territory.

We haven't reached that endpoint, but there are ways in which we're in that territory. With the drugs that we take that we prescribe, legal and illegal, with the way we use the internet, pornography above all, there's a real brave new world flavor to our decadence, I think. Oh, there's no question about it. We mentioned abortion earlier. It strikes me, one of the things that is possibly interesting is that because of science, because of the progress of science, something like abortion, we can look at it differently than we once did. Now that we know that the cultural narrative, especially among secular cultural elites, is abortion good, anti-abortion bad. But it seems that as time passes and you begin to realize, hey, we have the technology to see what this is, we can no longer blithely say it's a clump of cells, that that that's a time passes.

does cause a reckoning, and it may take time. But I think that one of the ways we gain cultural confidence, you know, if you were fighting slavery in the 1850s, it would be hard to exist in much malays when you know that people are suffering that way. And when it's a human rights issue, whether it's sex trafficking or the murdering of the unborn, that people can get very animated by that. We have just a few seconds left. caught me talking again. I will be right back, folks, and Ross Douthat will have the last word. This is the Erkman-Taxas show. In my earring fellow creatures, I endeavor to correct to all their little weaknesses I open people's eyes and little plans to snub the self-sufficient I devise.

Hey there, folks. I'm talking to Ross Douth. Just a few minutes left. Ross, I was just talking about how science is helping us understand that at least late-term abortion is very far from what it's report it to be, which is, you know, it's like excising a tumor or something like that. And that I think more and more people, especially younger people, are seeing this. And because it's a human rights issue, I can see this kicking against this trend, you know, because as people see something, the same thing with sex trafficking, that it makes you angry. You say this cannot stand. I still think there are places like that where we have an exorkeying. We have an exorkeying. exhausted all of our energy along those lines. And there are points of tension and contradiction in the sort of governing structure of our time.

Yes. So I was saying earlier that, you know, the idea of this sort of pink police state, right? Right. Sort of bureaucratic apparatus that's supposed to prevent harm and enable the pursuit of pleasure. But what happens, as in the case of abortion, when the protection of pleasure requires harm, when you realize that's an unborn life that's being harmed. Or in the case of pornography, right? There have been a lot of stories lately about how Pornhub, the main sort of clearinghouse for online pornography,

surprise, surprise, doesn't really do a good job of figuring out when the women involved are actually giving consent and when they're being sex trafficked and when they're being raped and when there's violence involved. And, again, there too, this idea that, you know, you can have a society that's just dedicated to the pursuit of pleasure and everyone's just consenting adults runs up against these unavoidable human realities. And, yeah, I think those are places where if you want to resist decadence, those are some of the best places to start. Well, one of the things that I've noticed, too, is that when you have a cultural narrative, such as we've had since the 60, since the sexual revolution, that the secular left, which is effectively the mainstream media in places like Manhattan, where we are, now that they, they, will push a certain narrative and they will tend to censor or ignore other narratives or evidence against it.

I mean, when abortion is a classic example of that, you almost never, ever hear the stories, these innumerable women whose lives have been torn apart by having an abortion. In other words, it wasn't an empowering thing. That's a reality in America, but you don't hear those stories. The same thing with people who've had transgender surgery and it's gone wrong. wrong or whatever. In other words, there's a kind of a narrative that's out there. And I see the hope in alternative forms of media getting those stories out. In other words, because they're true, it seems to me that they would have some purchase and would get people to change behavior or

think differently if they were aware of it. But when you have, what do you call it, a pink police state, I sometimes think that the mainstream media in America has functioned that way. Yeah, I mean, I think in when I read, you know, I'm part of the mainstream media, right? Sort of. Sort of. No, I, you know, I work for the New York Times, man. Yeah. I'm part of the mainstream media.

Yeah. And some of the time, I think I want to defend the media against claims of bias. I think there are ways in which the mainstream media does a better job than sometimes conservatives give it credit for. But I think the place where I agree with you is that what the problem with mainstream coverage is often not what's covered but what's left out, right? It's that, you know, reporters are great at seeing stories. That's, you know, the talent that a great reporter has is finding the story that you didn't know need to be needed to be told. But because, you know, the media comes from a similar educational background and similar political background and so on,

it's easier for them to see one kind of story than another. It's easier for them to see, you know, abortion bans as oppression than it is for them to see, you know, women who are effectively victimized by it and so on down the list. So there, yeah, there are definitely ways in which there are stories that could be told and don't get told because of, you know, the kind of ideological makeup of most mainstream media institutions. Oh, for sure, for sure. And I think that, you know, there is some hope in the free market in the sense that folks at places like CNN or MSNBC. They, you know, you, at some point, people do have the ability to vote with, you know,

the clicker as they're watching TV or, or where they're getting their news from. But it is interesting because when you have that kind of monolithic power over decades, I mean, you know, the New York Times is the paper of record, we say, at what point do people say, well, not so much, you know, or the same thing with you went to Harvard, I went to Yale. I mean, the point is that these places, they have this brand. that carries on well beyond, you know, it'll carry on even as everything goes south. But at some point, ideally, the free market, you know, gives us something good if the people within the free market are virtuous.

So to me, it is fascinating because I do see, you know, in Trump and Brexit and a lot of other things, I see movement eruptions, if I can use that word, of the other side of it. the question then is what will become of them, will any of them amount to anything? Can you build, can you either sort of transform existing institutions or build new ones? And I think the struggle is that, you know, I went to Harvard. I think Harvard is decadent in the way I talk about in my book. But Harvard and Yale and Stanford and all of the elite schools have maintained their dominance over the last 50 years. There's nothing more decadent than the top of the U.S. news rankings.

It doesn't change. It's just the same institution circulating. And social and cultural conservatives have, you know, they've built rival schools or they've established footprints at elite schools. But they haven't yet succeeded in either creating full-fledged alternatives that can rival elite institutions or in having that transformation from within. So that's the challenge. It's, you know, you can recognize the decadence of institutions and you can have people looking for other options. And it's the same thing with Trump, right? Trump recognized a real weakness in the establishment, in the elite consensus, in the center right and center left.

The question is, once he gets into power, does he have the personnel to operationalize it? Does he have a blueprint or a vision? Is he just going on instinct? And that's the challenge for all of the populists, that they sort of channel this anxiety and discontent. But we haven't yet figured out in every case, you know, how to govern once they've actually gotten into power. That is the question. We're pretty much at a time here. You know, this is the conversation, the kind of a conversation that I aspire to have on this program. So, Albin, one day out of a thousand, we hit it. Ross, really just always fun to talk to you in any context. Congratulations on the new book, The Decadent Society. I wish you well with it. Thank you, Eric. This has been great. Sure, for sure. By golly, it's clean, clear to Flagtown. Come on?

Yeah, it's a big ten for there, Big Ben. Yeah, we definitely got the front door, good buddy. Mercy's sakes alive. It looks like we've got us a convoy. It was the dark of the moon on the 6th of June and a Kenworth pulling logs. Cab over Pete with a reefer on and a Jimmy hauling hogs. We is heading for bear on I-10 about a mile out of shaky town. I says, Pigpen, this here's a rubber duck, and I'm about to put the house. hammer down. Oh, man, I think I'm doing a public service.

The Eric Metaxa show is doing a public service to America by putting C.W. McCall's convoy on the airwaves where it belongs, folks, okay? It doesn't belong in the bottom of a dusty box in the back of a storage unit on an eight-track tape. No, it belongs on the airwaves where we can appreciate it for the genius that it is. CW McCall's convoy. Hey, Albin, we're doing a show that has nothing to do with that. So let me just mention a couple of things.

We've been talking to Ross Douthit. First of all, folks, if you would, please share these shows with your neighbors, with your friends, with your relatives. I always bump into people who say, like, I didn't know you had a show on. You have a show on? You do Breakpoint, right? No. It's the Eric Mataxis show, and it is on two hours a day. And a lot of people who've enjoyed my books or this or that, they have not.

no idea. So would you please let people know about it? And you can go on your phone and get the Eric Mataxis show app. I actually listen to it when I'm running to listen to how horribly I interrupt my guests and I'm trying to learn from my mistakes. I'm failing, but I'm trying. I just want you to know. But I put on the app and I go for a run in Central Park or whatever and I listen to the program and I thought it's so easy. You just go click and there's the program 24-7. You don't have to tune in when it's on in your area. So you go to go to the app store on your phone and just put them in the taxes. It'll come right up.

But anyway, we're doing a fundraiser. I want to remind you, we need your help. We want to raise $2,000 today. Now, I know there are folks out there who could easily give $2,000 right now. So if you can do something like that, there are very few organizations that we partner with. We vet them, we work with them, we get to know them so that we know that your money is being used wisely. Food for the poor is feeding the poorest of the poor in Guatemala. Guatemala has the highest rate of malnutrition in the Western Hemisphere.

So when you think about that and what you think $80 of hours can do, $80 of our money, tax deductible given to food for the poor, can feed someone for an entire year. that's how they leverage American money. They get donations from around the world of rice and beans. And, you know, this is what these folks do. But they need your help. They're a tremendous Christian organization. I want to say to you that it's serious, right? We do a lot of joking around, but this is one of those things.

It's serious. And we get to give back. So anybody who gives, as Albin and I have said over and over and over, tomorrow we're going to announce a grand prize winner. Anybody who gives, doesn't matter. Whatever you give, you're entered in the grand prize because we want to reward you with signed books and visits to the studio and all this other stuff. But we know you don't give to get. So we're just going to say, please go to metaxistalk.com. We do need your help. This is a need

thing, right? We need your help. Metaxistalk.com. The number, you can dial it right now and get this over with 844-863 hope, 844-863 hope. 844-8-6-3 hope. We've only got seconds left, So I'm going to say it again. I was in a restaurant with Woody Allen last night. It killed me that I couldn't go up and say something to him. But I didn't. I resisted because my wife was there. I don't want to embarrass her.

And also I want to say tomorrow on the show, we've got Sean Spicer. Spicey is on the program. Wow. We will have John Smirak on the program. And we will do another segment of Ask Metaxus tomorrow. In the meantime, would you go to MetaxusTalk.com and give to Food for the Poor 844-8663. Hope. 844-866 Hope.

Thank you.