Within Reason - #109 David Pakman - The New Threat Donald Trump Poses to America

Episode Date: June 22, 2025

David Pakman is an American progressive political commentator and host of  @thedavidpakmanshow . Buy David's book, The Echo Machine here Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

David Packman, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me. Why do the right keep winning? Oof, that's a, there are many answers to that. In the United States, there's a few overlapping layers that explain that. Number one, I think their ideas are better summed up in tidy and pithy fashion, which we can get into. Number two, at the congressional level, gerrymandering, the way that this, districts are drawn has been helpful to the Republican Party to the extent that the right goes

through the Republican Party in the U.S. That's another aspect. And then number three, there have been a number of different sort of structural realities, including around how media is and has been funded and sort of organized in the United States that has also benefited the political right. is just like a 30,000 foot view, a 10,000 meter view, which we can, you know, dig into more in more detail. But that's kind of the big picture, as I would put it, of the last 30 or 40 years. One of the things that strikes me when reading a book like yours, the echo machine, which I'll, of course, have a link to in the description, is that there is, you spend an entire chapter on this question, you know, why is the right winning? And if somebody is a conservative vote, or

a Republican or a MAGA lover, and they read your book and you talk about, like you say, gerrymandering and funding and economics and, you know, the state of social media, they might read this and say, that's all really interesting, but is it not possible that we're winning because we're just better, because we're correct, because we are capturing people's imagination. I mean, from what I see in America, it doesn't seem to me just a result of like some, you know, funky business when dividing up the voting lines. it seems like a lot of Americans have been genuinely swept up in a movement. In other words, like how much of the right success do you attribute to these slightly more dubious factors

and how much do you attribute it to a genuine ideological interest? Well, I think it's interesting because you mentioned two things together there that I think are actually two different things. You mentioned maybe they actually have the right ideas or maybe people have been swept up by some of those ideas. I don't think that that's the same thing. So I'll give you a concrete example of that. Right now, serious economists of all political stripes are looking at this tariff scheme that depending on which day you look, it's either on or it's off. I don't even know as of this moment, because today there was a big announcement about a deal. I couldn't tell you as of this moment whether the tariffs are on or off or what percentage

and on which countries. But there's this idea that that scheme is going to be very good for the average American long-term. There may be some short-term pain, but there is long-term gain. One question is whether that's salient with voters and whether they accept it. The other is whether it's economically and empirically verifiable. The economists say no. Blanket tariffs are an import tax. They will raise prices. They will reduce job creation. They will slow the economy. That may be the truth, and yet people can still be swept up by the idea. And so I do think your point is a good one in this sense. In 2016, 2015, when his campaign started, Donald Trump correctly identified grievances and concerns among a large swath of Americans. And I think actually

we've seen it in Europe as well in terms of motivating reasons to say the sort of center-left order has left us behind. We want to look at something that's on the political right. That is true. Framing himself as the man with the solutions who could fix trade and fix health care, all of the claims that he made in the first term, that was demonstrated to be untrue. So I think what's really interesting about what you're kind of posing is people have been swept up, yes, and I think Democrats and the left are significantly to blame for that to a degree. And I talk about that a lot on my program, but that doesn't mean that they are right. People are often swept up by things that are not demonstrable. As I've seen you point out, you know, to a lot of

these religious apologists, for example, in conversations, people can believe something that's not true. So you're right that I sort of threw in a couple of things there, but I suppose take just the strength of the movement, true or false. A lot of people, as you say, have been swept up by this. And so there's an extent to which I think it's interesting to look at the fact that, you know, be more funding for one political operation than another, and there might be some dubious gerrymandering of voting borders, for example. But at the same time, I do see a genuine movement here. I see MAGA as an actual movement, distinct from, you know, general right-wing conservatism, distinct from republicanism. It's its own thing, as everybody notices.

And so that's why when I read this chapter about why the right are winning, I wonder to what extent, like, left-wing analysis can neglect the fact that it is just a popular movement. You know what I mean? I totally am with you there, but I would actually place less credit on the movement being genuinely popular than the degree to which it fills a vacuum that, to a great degree the left is to blame for. And some examples of that, I mean, yesterday I did a commentary about there are two issues immigration and crime on which Democrats and the left.

failed in our November of 2024 elections. And so, for example, to pick crime, when Trump and right-wing politicians candidates elected officials bemoaned urban crime and used all of the traditional and predictable kind of dog whistles around that, weak we, meaning I as someone on the left, could show up and say, here's the chart of violent crime nationally, and it points down. Here's the chart of property crime nationally, and it points down the idea that left-run cities are more dangerous than right-run cities is wrong, and we can compare New York and Oklahoma.

I could do all of that. But Kamala Harris and other Democrats did it to such a degree that it came off as dismissive. And voters don't want to feel as though their concerns aren't being heard, and they're being told what you believe matters doesn't matter. So this is sort of the problem, I think, with democratic politics to a degree, which is it kind of doesn't matter if we have the facts on our side. It matters if we want to stick to truth. But it doesn't matter in terms of figuring out a way to connect with voters and win elections. And that vacuum, I think, has as much to say for Trumpian success as the sort of rightness or popularity of the specific ideas that it proposes.

What do you think the MAGA movement is as distinct from being a right-wing American a couple of decades ago? What is it that's distinct about the Donald Trump movement? Well, the biggest difference in terms of the electorate is that it has gone beyond the sort of three factions of the traditional Republican voter, and it's kind of activated or created or activated a fourth one. So the way I usually break it down is there are three primary constituencies for pre-Trump Republican voters. You have the kind of Mitt Romney-style low-tax business conservative. You have the libertarian right. And then you have the religious right. What Donald Trump did, to his credit, by seizing upon legitimate concerns, economic concerns,

is to use a sort of libertarian-ish population. rhetoric to bring out a fourth constituency that is people who knew they weren't happy with the status quo, but they didn't identify with any of those three factions I just mentioned. This was a lot of new voters, people who previously either were too young to have voted and their first foray into politics was with Trump in 2015, 2016, or they were part of the 50 to 60, I'm sorry, 40 to 50 percent of Americans that didn't traditionally vote in presidential elections. So that is a distinct feature of Trumpism. Now, of course, the religious right initially resisted.

They liked Ted Cruz in 2016. When Ted Cruz didn't get beyond 3%, they really didn't want Hillary. And so, yes, they sort of initially begrudgingly came along. The libertarians said Trump's closer to me than where Hillary is. So there was acquiescence there, but I think of the spark of it that allowed Trump to win that primary by attrition when they started with 18 candidates. and a lot and didn't get beyond two or three was this fourth constituency that he mobilized. And another thing I'm really interested in, and I suppose these are sort of primer questions to getting into the nitty gritty, is the extent to which you think the MAGA movement this time around is significantly different. I think a lot of voters in America and international observers thought to themselves, Donald Trump is a fool.

It's sort of, it's comical to watch this from afar. But, you know, we got through his administration. He lost the next election. Biden came in. It goes back. It goes forth. It's not the end of the world. So the prospect of another Trump presidency, people look at this and go, look, we've

been through this before. It might not be great. Living standards might go down. The economy might suffer. But, you know, the world isn't going to end. And they see a kind of sensationalism that is so often criticized in particularly American media. as applying to the critics of Trump too.

But do you think that this time round something really is different? Well, I think in these first hundred and something days of this presidency, we've already seen things that are objectively different. Now, the degree to which that's a five alarm fire and we need to be screaming from the rooftops, well, I mean, we can sort of talk it through

and depending on our values, we might come to say it isn't that big of a deal or it is, but a few things that are objectively different. in his first term, there was at least a sort of pantomime of hiring qualified people. A lot of them very quickly ended up at odds with Donald Trump. You know, you had Rex Tillerson as Secretary of State. I'm not the type of person who says, let's put an oil man as Secretary of State. Wouldn't be my preference.

But he had a certain level of competence and gravitas that when you look at someone like the current Secretary of Defense Pete Hexeth or the current director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, or now there's a sort of wellness guru who has been ushered in in the last 24 hours to be the surgeon general who is in favor of glucose monitors for everybody, regardless of any medical reason to do it. There's another layer here where we're skipping right to the loyalty is the number one currency for hiring. That's different. Number two, the degree to which the pantomime around we support law and order has gone down the toilet is notable. where we see judicial orders being ignored.

We see claims about what courts say being disputed as those are bad judges, and therefore we've determined it's a bad judge and we can ignore them. I won't give you every example, but this sort of authoritarian slide is different. Now, I try to be honest with my audience, you know, sometimes I'm on the side of not being alarmist and people write to me and say, this is a much bigger deal than you claim. sometimes I'm on the other side and I get emails you're being too hyperbolic. I'm trying to just be accurate and honest with my audience. I don't know where this is going to land three and a half years from now, but the starting

100 and something days is objectively of a different caliber than anything we've seen before. Do you think that by the end, I mean, we've seen some extraordinary things under Trump. I mean, like the whole storming for the capital, blah, blah, blah, all of that kind of stuff really increases my confidence in the idea that there are far more unpredictable, extraordinary things coming down the line. We've seen serious talk from people like Steve Bannon and joking talk by people like Donald Trump himself about the prospect of running for a third term. Some would be legal theorists saying that, yes, the Constitution says that you can only run for two terms, but it means consecutive terms. Do you think at the end of this administration we are going

to see a serious national conversation about a third Donald Trump term? I don't think we are. And we get to those, you know, to your question of, is there an exaggeration with regard to the degree of danger and novelty here? This is one where some in my audience say, David, you're not taking this seriously enough. But I think Steve Bannon is a professional troll and he knows how to push buttons with this third term stuff. When Trump has been asked about it, even Trump is struggling to play coy in the way that he normally would. And in a recent interview with NBC News, he said, I'm in a survey years and that's it. I do not expect there to be any serious play at a third term for Donald Trump. I could be wrong. I might end up

beating my microphone, but I don't think so. The ideological movement behind Maga wants to last for a long time, though. It wants to revolutionize the right wing of American politics and stay in power for as long as possible. So if not this kind of discussion at the end of Trump's presidency, what do you suspect? Like, is there going to be a clear successor? Do you think J.D. Vance takes over the MAGA movement as a Trump too? Or do you think MAGA kind of dies with Trump and evolves into something else? It's all going to depend on what happens between the November 26th midterm election and the 2008 presidential election. I've been talking to a lot of senators and members of Congress lately who kind of share their off-the-record conversations with their Republican colleagues.

And there's going to be some moment. Maybe it's going to be early 2027, something like that, where Republicans are going to look at a couple of things. They're going to look at what is Donald Trump's approval rating and his salience. And listen, Trump is an obese old guy. We just don't know what the state of his health is going to be in 27, but there's going to be sort of an assessment done and a calculation. If you are an elected Republican that wants to continue in elected office

beyond 2028, you put your finger to the wind and you say, am I better off on the MAGA train, or is it time to get off? It will be dictated by events that have not yet happened. If Donald Trump can do something which is unusual in American politics, which is to have a recovered approval rating,

approval ratings for American presidents tend to only go down as voters find something the president did that they don't like when you lose them you tend not to get them back except in situations like a 9-11 for George W. Bush if Donald Trump's approval rating continues down if the damage of the tariffs becomes palpable in a way that's undeniable you will see an anti-maga Republican movement and an attempt to go in a different direction if Trump ends up being able to play kingmaker he will get his choice and whether it's, you know, recently he said both J.D. Vance and Marco Rubio are doing a good job. He'll be able to choose. So I think we just have to wait on that. Hmm. I want to know what extent or to what extent you believe that this MAGA movement or just the sort of movement that underlies Donald Trump to any degree is one of political principle. Because one of the things that you write about in your book and have spoken about too is the extent to which political principles are just for show. They're ostensible. It's like, yeah, we believe in free speech and we believe in free markets until it doesn't benefit us

anymore. Do you think that there is such a thing as like a political principle or set of political principles that genuinely underlies this movement? And if not, then like what is it? Is it just like an ultimate goal? Is it like a vibe? Like what is it that's that's behind all of this, if not political principles? You know, we can talk about fiscal conservatism, free speech, law and order, free trade, all of this stuff. They all wither away. It's like when you have cotton candy and you pour water on it and it's suddenly gone. The real principles and goals that have sustained since 2015 have been loyalty to Trump, no matter what position he takes on an issue, and a desire to undo or cancel what prior Democratic presidents have done or what

Democrats today want to do. Those are really the sustaining principles. And you can have your choice, right? If it's law and order, well, they don't like certain court orders so they're ignoring them. When it's free speech, well, they spent COVID wanting to tell private corporations what they should be forced to publish or forced not to publish. And now people are being snatched off the street with no due process for things they said or wrote. When it's free trade, we now have this blanket tariff protectionism racket. So I try to go by what they've done, compare it to what they've said. And what I'm seeing is that none of those principles seem to withstand even the most

minor inconvenience in the sort of marketplace of ideas and politics. But something must be motivating this aside from just loyalty to Trump, because of course, loyalty to Trump is loyalty to a man who wants to do something. I guess he wants to stay in power and rule America. But like, if it's not genuinely, I mean, it's one thing to say that people sort of think they have these principles, but when they run up against challenge, like, oh, they're a bit confused and they're not entirely sure. But if people are willing to just sacrifice their principles willy-nilly, what are they sacrificing it too? Like, what is the ultimate goal of the

MAGA movement, if not things like restoring free speech and getting the economy back on track and all the things that they'll say? What actually is it, do you think? Well, it's versions of that. So, for example, it's restoring free speech for those they believe have had it taken from them, right? So it's, they just interpret these principles differently. And so this is why when we point and say, but look, you say you want to restore free speech, but here's five ways in which you're actually limiting it, you then sometimes uncover the real goal, which is, well, we believe the speech of political conservatives and

white Christians have been suppressed. And so what we mean by restore free speech is equalize for what we've identified as an injustice. I might disagree with their assessment, right? And so that's why we would see it differently. But it's often that there's a goal below the superficial talking point that relates to how they really see the world. What did you mean when you said earlier about how the right is better at condensing their ideas into like pithy statements and why is that the case okay a couple of examples um abortion is murder and therefore it should be illegal took me a second and a half now what is the position of the left it's not abortions are awesome let's increase the number that also took a second and a half but of course it's not the

position of the left. The position is we're dealing with a complicated issue that overlaps culture and medicine and science and the law and bodily autonomy. And what we want is to make, it's a losing argument right now. We could workshop it and we could say abortion is about freedom. We're for freedom and therefore abortion must be legal. It's not quite as emotionally salient. And so that's an example of where I'm not even necessarily placing credit or pushing blame. I think the position of the right benefits from some of this simplistic thinking. I'll give you another example. It's your money.

You should get to keep it without the government taking it. That's pretty good. The opposite, it's not your money. Give it all to the government is not the policy of, you know, the American left. It's okay, listen, it's your job, which you've obtained based on a combination of infrastructure that's been built by the government and the ability to enforce contracts, education that may involve public, and we want an amount of taxation appropriate to the level of services, you kind of get the direction I'm going.

It's already necessarily kind of convoluted. And I think this applies to a lot of these positions. And is there a way for the left to overcome this? Probably. I'm not like the messaging guy. So I think there would be others better suited to kind of talk us through it. But there's these really natural pithy principles or aphorisms that work very well for the right. Yeah, well, a lot of the time the slogans that people use are certainly not exhaustive of the philosophical positions that they represent. And I do think that's true of everyone who uses them. I mean, slogans are necessary because, because, like you say, you need to be able to get your point across in a few seconds, sometimes even just to indicate, like, what side you're on. But I do think that the left has engaged in this too, to what seems to me, maybe an equally successful degree. When I think about slogans like my body, my choice and the abortion debate, again, crucially, that's not going to exhaust the

philosophical position. And if you speak to a pro-lifer and say, my body, my choice, they're going to come in and they're going to say, but, you know, it's not really your body, it's somebody else. But already they're kind of having to make these distinctions that you're going to be able to philosophically dispute and you're into a conversation, kind of, in the same way that if a pro-lifer says abortion is murder, murder is wrong, you know, the pro-choice is going to say,

well, you know, murder is defined in this way, and a fetus is this, and that. And I do sort of see that happening, you know, my body, my choice in the abortion case. I'm not sure about the, like taxation. You know, you've got the sort of taxationist theft, which is a very powerful imagery. But then you do have the imagery of like, you know, if Bill Gates gave his money away, then you could lift X many people out of poverty and no one would starve or whatever.

And of course, another that comes to mind is the Black Lives Matter movement, where that very phrase itself became emblematic of one of the most significant movements in American politics within living memory. And of course, Black Lives Matter movement. And of course, Black Lives matter is not a philosophical position exactly. It's representative of a movement and a quite sort of subtle in many ways and deep political philosophy that you could spend hours and hours digging into and discussing and defining. It's just a product of needing something that will fit onto a placard when you want to protest your grievances. And so it would be easy to say, I think, well, the reason why the right are better at sloganing is because their positions

are less philosophically subtle, so they're easier to sort of condense into slogans. I think you could make that case. But I'm not convinced that they are actually doing it more or more successfully than the left, but maybe I'm just wrong there, I'm not sure. Well, I don't think you're wrong in a general sense that, of course, there are both rebuttals and counter-rebuttals

to all of these kind of pithy phrases. I think my perspective as someone kind of living in it in the United States is that even when you say, okay, well, my body, my choice, and then all of a sudden someone says, well, but there's another body involved here, I think that that's much more effective than the counter you had to the abortion is murder and, well, let's get into the definition of murder. Even that, like, I just don't think that that's a salient. So I think this is a matter of degree. And then when you build a layer of fundraising on top of it, where the right is still very good at raising money on some of these ideas, the effect over decades is cumulative. You're not wrong in your critique. I think my experience in living in the space is that it's still tuned better and it's working significantly better for them. It's not that there aren't rebuttals, but I think it's functioning better for them. What do you think is the rights obsession with abortion in America? In the UK, we have a pretty significant right-wing presence, especially as of late, parties like Reform

UK, really focusing in on the issue of immigration, which is like huge here. I think that's what Brexit was about. It was about immigration and basically nothing else. And so have been, interestingly enough, I think the success of labour has been due to the Conservative Party's failure on immigration, a bit like how you attribute the success of the right in many ways to the failures of the left. If I saw Nigel Farage get up in Parliament and give a speech about abortion and protecting the lives of the unborn, I would be genuinely surprised. I would think it sort of came out of nowhere. I'd be blindsided by it. There will be some Catholic society somewhere in Parliament that probably is like lobbying for abortion to, probably not even be criminalized because it feels like a kind of settled issue here. So it's not just the weirdness. that that debate hasn't been kind of settled in America, but the fact that in particular, it seems to be for many people, like, one, like single issue voters, this is like their

issue. And if it's not to do with the genuine philosophical principle that they just actually care for the lives of unborn children, what do you think it is? Maybe it is that, but I don't know. What do you think? I think for some people it is that. So I would say a couple of different things. There's a degree to which, so first of all, I've spent time in some of these more rural, conservative communities. And if you live in a city, it can be hard to understand. But when I go to some of these communities and, you know, consider the size of the United States and how isolated some of these communities are. There's basically two activities in a lot of these communities. There's evangelical churches and there's gun shooting ranges. The politics of the area

follows directly from that, or maybe it's that the presence of churches and gun ranges follows from the politics, but there's a feedback loop where what you're seeing is people who spend time a lot of time in two places. Evangelical churches where the teachings are that abortion is murder and gun ranges, which are going to be hampered by gun safety legislation. And so this leads to a feedback loop where a lot of money is raised by candidates and organizations that say we will oppose abortion and we will oppose gun safety regulations. Now, how much of it is the, the sort of a tail wagging the dog how much of it is the people genuinely saying this is what matters and therefore it's reflected i don't know i think there's there's a sort of circular nature

to it but in a sense it's logical that if that's your environment those are going to be your your big issues there's another difference with the uk certainly france and spain which is in the u.s both because of the size of the country and the population of the country and the wealth of the country, you can raise more than enough money to do almost anything around those issues. Being against abortion as a primary issue in many congressional districts is enough to raise all the money you need to run a successful campaign. I don't want to speak for other countries necessarily, but my impression having spent time in a lot of these countries is you wouldn't even get the buy-in from the population if that's what you were offering. I will

go and I will oppose every attempt to legalize the murder of babies. I just don't think it would be, it would interest enough people in a lot of these countries based, as you say, on how shocked you would be if Nigel Farage gave such a speech. So I don't know if I'm directly answering which is the cause and which is the result, but this is sort of like the circular nature of why this persists. I will mention one other thing. We recently had Roe v. Wade overturned by the Supreme Court, this 70s era law that guaranteed access to abortion services, at least in some situations. This has been a major emboldening of the movement where now all of a sudden many of them are saying, wow, we could go even further.

And this has reinvigorated fundraising around the issue as well, the idea that we could actually do a lot more here. Do you think that given how important this is for many voters, And like I say, single-issue voters, a lot of them, for a lot of them, it is abortion. Do you think that success for the left will require either being more ambiguous or a little less liberal about abortion in particular? So if you had asked me about the gun safety issue, my answer would be a little different. So let me take abortion first and then I'll analogize to the gun safety issue. the abortion situation is tough in terms of strategy because in the immediate aftermath of the overturning of Roe v. Wade, there were these off-year elections in the United States. The timing wasn't such that the presidential election was right after the overturning of Roe v. Wade, so I think there was more distance. It had less of an impact. But there were both state referenda on enshrining rights to abortion services and some off-year and special elections.

shortly after the overturning of Roe v. Wade, they were swept by the pro-choice left and by let's enshrine abortion rights. And polling defends and supports the idea that Americans overwhelmingly believe that at least in some, if not most cases, abortion should be legal. So there's an asymmetry here between the people who really care about this are willing to donate a lot of money, much more than would be financially. advisable if we were looking at sort of their budgets. But at the same time, by sheer numbers, Americans actually do support that.

So on that one, I don't think that the left has to moderate. The gun issue is a little different, and I've had some disagreements with elected officials recently. Every shred of evidence I've seen is that at the national level, it doesn't make sense for Democrats to run on passing gun safety laws. Laws I defend, laws most sane countries have, because what seems to happen is it doesn't bring out anyone new to support you and it can really work to generate donations for the opposition and to bring out voters that are coming

out specifically to vote to prevent some of those laws from passing. So I think even though you asked about it as applied to abortion, I think when it comes to gun safety, I've not seen evidence that it makes sense to include that in a serious manner in national political platforms, which I find regrettable on a personal level, but strategically accurate. Do you think that it produces any kind of conflict of principles? Because there's sort of a level to this way you want to say, okay, let's be strategic. You know, we want gun reform, but it's not going to get us elected, so let's not run on that and sort of problem solved. There's another sense in which you say that, like, you know, people are dying and

our gun laws are in need of desperate reform, but to get elected, we kind of need to not focus on that. Do you think that a decision like that, a kind of strategic thinking on issues that are as morally charged as abortion and gun control, are something that we should do? Because some people will say that the very criticism we make of the MAGA movement is that, you know, they say they've got moral principles, but as soon as it's electorally disadvantageous to hold those principles, they just throw them to the wind. Is there a risk of doing the same thing when we start thinking, okay, abortion is really important, guns are really important, but what we need to think about here is how to get elected. Because to me, that seems like a legitimate move, but you can see why that

would make some people a little sort of suspicious of the principles underlying the left-wing movement. Yeah, I would love to talk to those folks, and what I would say to them as, number one, there's a difference between not campaigning on something and abandoning it as a principle. First and foremost, in order to pass legislation, you have to be in power. In order to be in power, you have to win elections. So why would you run a campaign likely to prevent winning an election, getting in power, and being able to pass legislation? Now, this is not theoretical.

Joe Biden did not really run on gun safety regulations. Democrats in 2020 did not really run on that either. But when Joe Biden became president, there were some strengthens of gun safety regulations that were passed at the federal level. And they included the ability to take guns from people in certain legal or medical situations, red flag laws, et cetera. It's a perfect example of how we know the principles that these folks believe. They didn't campaign on them. But as soon as they got power, they did do something about it. I wish more could have been done. The counterpoint is you look after the Sandy Hook shooting that happened in Connecticut in the United States. I believe it was in 2012.

After that happened, something like 88 or 90 percent of the country said we want universal background checks, not to make this all about background checks, but there are sort of loopholes at the state level and federally that interact in a way where if I sell you a firearm personally, we can circumvent the need for a background check. Anyway, overwhelming support for this. And nothing was done legislatively at a time where there was arguably kind of more political will than ever because Republicans were able to stand in the way because Democrats simply didn't have the number. So I think if we look pragmatically and empirically at this, not campaigning on something is not abandoning it as a principle. And you won't be able to achieve anything unless you actually

get yourself elected, so I have no moral issue with saying, don't campaign on it. Do you think there is a sort of element of deception involved in intentionally suppressing something that you care about, not abandoning it as a principle, but intentionally kind of, oh, we're not going to mention that until we get in power and then we're going to see what we can do about it, knowing full well that if you had campaigned on that, you might not have gotten elected, it sounds, if you describe it in those terms, it sounds a little bit sort of morally suspicious, if you know what I mean? No, I mean, listen, of course on some superficial level, you're correct, which is if I believe

15 things and I only talk about 12 of them on the campaign, there's a degree to which I'm hiding certain aspects of myself. I would argue everyone who goes for a job interview does the exact same thing. everyone who goes on a first date does the exact same thing everyone who's parenting is choosing to downplay certain traits in front of their kids i i think for me i i'm not sure that this is about some general principle i mean the counter to what you're saying is what everything you believe should give be given proportional public display in every campaign and everything short of that is is dishonest i think the question i think the more interesting question

would be to ask voters and say, hey, here are the 15 views of this candidate. We've identified that these three are disadvantageous to play up. Do you have a problem with just focusing on the other 12? I think most voters would say, no, it actually, I think it makes a lot of sense. I think the point you're bringing up is a great one, but I think in practice, this is not the sort of moral quandary that maybe it would seem to be. Yeah, no. I certainly don't think it is either, although what I do think it does is potentially it raises like an implicit criticism of democracy. I'm interested to what extent you trust the intelligence and, you know, functional ability of the US electorate to make intelligent decisions. Because a lot of the time the criticisms people make are things like, you know, like he didn't win the popular vote and so shouldn't have been elected or, you know, the real problem here is the misinformation campaign. And if we had a sort of perfect democracy where information was correctly administered and voting was fairly operated, you know, everything would be okay. But there does seem to me to remain this extent to which, like, you would still.

need to be strategic about essentially like psychologizing people and going like, are we going to turn them off with the abortion thing, even though we really care about. And so I think what might be lurking under there is like an implicit mistrust in democracy as as like a principle for getting the best form of government. Because for a lot of people, they will happily admit that democracy is very ineffective. It prevents things from getting done. But the purpose of democracy is not because it's the best form of government that works the best, but because it's the fairest, because you have a right to representation in Parliament. Others will say, however, that actually the reason we choose democracy over authoritarianism or oligarchy is because

it is actually better. What's your grasp on the success of democracy in America? Well, you bring up a lot of interesting points there. I mean, I think, let me get to the bigger point in a second, to briefly say, I mean, listen, more than half of the people who vote voted in November, voted for someone other than Donald Trump. Donald Trump won with a plurality of the vote. Is that unfair? It's the system we have, and he won fair and square based on that system. It is also the case that I'm against the Electoral College. I would prefer a national popular vote, but that's not the system we have. So there's no reason to deny that he became president the way the rules are. I would like to see it organized differently. To your first and bigger question of,

do I trust the, I don't know if you use the word intelligence, but maybe you did of the electorate. No, not really. And, you know, as Plato said, there is some degree to which in democracy you eventually get the lack of intelligence of the electorate leading to exactly what we've seen in the United States. Now, I think the critique of this has to involve a lot of different sort of theaters, for lack of a better term. Education is a part of this. And there are state boards of education all over the country that have eliminated critical thinking and media literacy from curricula. I think it's something kids should start learning probably at age seven. In Finland, they do. They're very good at this. I've seen documentaries about

Finnish critical thinking and media literacy classes. And kids can understand this stuff if it's taught to them and if they're treated like individuals who can handle this material. my belief is if you tell someone hey if you cut taxes for the rich it'll benefit everybody there's a degree to which you're going to fall for that if you are less able to think for yourself and evaluate claims and sort of understand the basic building blocks of epistemology so i think that is one kind of layer of the problem um there's also you know many many have predicted that even relatively intelligent populations sooner or later fall for a charismatic strongman, right? We've seen that in the 20th century and I think it certainly applies to

Donald Trump. So is there something above my pay grade from sociology or psychology that explains why there's a tendency to like or fall for that? Maybe there is. But to your broader point, I can't tell you that I'm honestly super impressed with the voting public's ability. to evaluate the promises and positions of political candidates and rationally decide, you know, I'm kind of shouting into the void when I say it. And a lot of people would say, no, people decided based on how they perceived these messages should be interpreted. And you can't fault them for that. Okay. But my personal opinion is, no, I'm skeptical of the ability of the electorate to rationally and intelligently decide. You talked about media literacy amongst young people

and critical thinking as a means to approaching what we're seeing on social media and in television and stuff, you write in your book about your own relationship with the news media, only engaging with the news, only looking at it on days when you're producing the show and otherwise trying to completely avoid it. Some people say, I don't read the news at all because it depresses me and gets on my nerves. Other people say, that's irresponsible. You need to be aware of what's going on in the world. what do you think is a healthy and advisable but also, you know, morally upright relationship that a person should have to the news media and information generally about the world?

Well, you know, this is a big discussion. And right now there are so many authors that tackle this. You know, if you look at any books right now, if you look at self-help books, if you look at productivity books, if you look at time management books, this idea of, What is it, is it, um, fundamentally virtuous to pay attention to the news? It's become a very big topic generally. I think the question I immediately have when people say, is it the right thing? Is it the correct thing to be informed about what's going on around the world and in my country? My question is always, well, what is your goal? What is the, what is the point of being

informed. Certainly, if your goal is, well, I want to be aware of every problem so that I can try to fix it or improve it, we're not going to be able to do that. But there's just sort of some reality where, you know, as I read now about the border skirmishes and conflicts and growing tension between Pakistan and India and the region of Kashmir, I don't think there's a damn thing I'm ever going to do that is going to directly impact whether that becomes a nuclear showdown or not. Like, I just, I just don't think it's going to be the case. You look at Russia and Ukraine. Well, you know, my government in the United States is certainly more involved there, and there is plausibly some degree to which, depending on whether there is consent manufactured

for supporting Ukraine or not, it might more directly touch American policy, you then go to the potholes on my street. And I think we can see how I can much more directly have an impact on that by kind of focusing on my immediate community. So I do, where I've come down on this after doing this for so long is it's overwhelming, exhausting, and demoralizing to be paying attention to everything all the time when in practice, we're not going to have a direct effect on most of it. Is there virtue or value in being generally aware about what's going on in the world in a sort of healthy way, I think there is, once you get beyond, I want to affect or fix every one of these situations, I do think even to understand the communities around us,

there's value in things to be gained from understanding conflicts around the world or scholarship from around the world or conversation. So I think it's about finding balance is the point. I do know people personally who are obsessed in an unhealthy way with the 24-hour news networks and following everything. And they do strike me as depressed. They do sort of live in the news rather than in their communities. And I just don't think anybody really benefits from that. The people you're hearing about don't benefit. I don't think you benefit. I don't think your community benefits. So I think that that goes too far. I do believe that this is an issue of balance. For me, it's, you know, domestic politics mostly, economics, right? I've sort of picked

out some areas that are of most relevance to me, media analysis and critique, mostly focus on the United States, where I live, but also with some of our allies. That's how I've kind of decided, and no news on the weekends, and that works for me.

Right. Speaking of interaction with news media, we have a new Pope, apparently, which is why my eyes were just darting down at my phone as people were texting me to let me know. We're currently waiting to see him walk out onto the balcony.

It might be something to keep your arm once we finish up recording. But that's demonstrative of the very problem we're talking about, which is that I cannot keep my eye off the news, although for my line of work, I suppose, this is quite an important moment. I am interested in, as we wait for this, this pope to walk out onto the balcony who will, a lot of people are talking about the kind of,

of politics of the new Pope. We've had a, broadly speaking, progressive pope. Are we going to see a return to a traditionalism? Are we going to see someone carry on his legacy because he appointed like 80% of the Cardinals or whatever? What do you think is the relevance of religious belief in American politics, right? Because a lot of people talk about like Christian nationalism and a lot of Americans are Christian and they talk about Christian principles. and Donald Trump thinks that he was saved by God when that guy tried to shoot him and stuff. But there's also an extent to which people are very cynical about this and say, well, you know, when Donald Trump was asked the name his favorite Bible verse and he said, you know, oh, it's just too personal a question. And I always like to, it's one of my favorite moments.

They then ask, well, are you more of an Old Testament guy or a New Testament guy? And he goes, I would say probably equal, you know. And so there's an extent to which that's actually kind of just like nonsense. and just the dressing up of whatever your political principle happens to be in the language of religiosity. Obviously, Christianity is a big thing in American politics and Christian nationalism is a big thing. But to what extent do you think like genuine sincere religious belief is influencing American politics? You know, it's so hard for me to say because as someone who's lived in liberal, relatively non-religious northeastern cities, essentially since I moved to the United States

when I was five years old. My view is, of course, that even most, you know, most of the people I know who are religious are religious the way a lot of Italians are, which is sort of like nominally and we kind of go through the motions. You know, my Italian friends often say, like, we're religious, but like, come on. And it's so my view is very skewed by that. And I say that as a sort of like agnostic Jewish person. But I don't want to assume that if you go to Nebraska and you go into the churches of Nebraska, that there is not genuine religious belief there because I want to believe that there must be, even if I don't share in those beliefs. I don't want to believe that it's all window dressing and sort of contrived for socio-cultural status or political power.

But in a sense, I'm like the wrong guy to ask for a number of reasons. You talk in your book, you mentioned specifically a moment in the very first chapter where people advocating for certain policies, be it like to do with the civil rights movement or indeed to do with abortion or whatever, even guns to some degree, would cite biblical justifications. And you said that this violates the church and state distinction because of the sort of creeping influence of religious belief into political matters. I think this is a very subtle issue, right? Like, what do you think the separation of church and state in this context in America means? A lot of people think that's a bad thing. I think you and I are on the same page that it's probably a good thing, awesome, but what actually is it? What does it mean to say that church and state are separate or should be separate?

it means different things in different contexts and you know i think the most so there's some simple ones right i think it's very clear that the 10 commandments shouldn't be at a courthouse or at a post office that's by the way something that does happen in the united states there's lawsuits over it but i think that that's very clear when we talk about separation of church and state choosing a document that applies to a couple of religions and putting it in an officially government sanctioned um uh place and capacity and position of privilege, I think that very clearly violates the principle of church and state. Lawyers can weigh in on whether it violates the legality, but I think it certainly violates the principle. I think with something like abortion, I appreciate the subtlety

of you can privately have only religious justifications for your opposition to abortion. That's not a problem at all. I'd rather we not even know about them, to be perfectly frank. The civil conversation about whether it should be legal, you should be able to justify its illegality based on something that is not based on a religious doctrine or text. Now, there are of course ways to game this, right? And so it could be that my real opposition to abortion is religious and I sort of contrive or fabricate something and state that when I go and debate it. in the state house. But to me, separation of church and state means you're allowed any private belief that

you want, but the debates around what the law should be should not be couched in any scripture or religious text. That's my initial framework, at least. I see. Yeah, because the quote, I found the quote that I was talking about here, right on page 11, so right near the beginning, you're talking about racial integration and civil rights. and you say, as has been the case in the battles for LGBTQ plus rights, abortion rights and other rights, this group would often cite biblical justifications for racial separation.

Whether these citations are, were accurate, is irrelevant as using a religious text, or using religious texts to justify civil law clearly violates the principle of separation of church and state on which the United States was founded. And when I read that, it jumped out to me, jumped out at me, because I thought, well, you know, it's not, I don't think it violates church and state to cite biblical justifications for your vote, but presumably here you're talking about the public advocacy of political groups. But again, there is this further subtlety where even if you have, even if you have like a political campaign group that just says, yeah, we are Christians and we think Christianity forbids abortion, and that's why we think you should vote against abortion. That doesn't violate any principles.

If a legislator gets up in Congress and says, I want to oppose abortion because of my religious beliefs, to me that is still something which, although it's starting to get a little bit murky, I still think it's kind of legitimate to say, like, I have my private belief and that's what informs my vote. But at the same, because you can't not do that, right? like as a legislator, you can't just put your convictions to the side. Maybe you should, but like, I'm really confused about exactly where this line between like private religious belief motivating how you vote in an election versus private religious belief sort of creeping into, is it public

advocacy? Is it the construction of law itself? Like, like, where is this, this line between the private and the public with religious belief? Yeah, no, I think it's a really good point. There is, I think there is some murkiness, you know? I mean, to take another example with the religious, with the racial stuff, right? During the civil rights, the early phases of the civil rights movement, and even recently in the Mormon church, right? I mean, there are alleged scriptural justifications for why black people are less than. And therefore, discrimination against them is actually justified. If we put a pause on that first, a second. Imagine that you actually could have a non-religious scientific racism verified way of saying,

no, here is a difference between races and therefore there should be discrimination under the law. People of certain races shouldn't be allowed to hold certain jobs or whatever. I would still be against it, right? And so I think that there is, you bring up a really interesting point. And I think that there are some cases where you know it when you see it in terms of this establishment of one religion over another. But I do think there's a lot more murkiness than maybe some on the political left are willing to acknowledge. It doesn't change my view. But I think that we have to acknowledge that. And I think that the framework in which we talk about this has to be elaborated a little bit more. Like suppose a legislator were voting. And they got up and they said to

their constituents. I think that abortion is wrong because I'm a Christian. That is why I think it's wrong and this is how I'm going to vote. Whether or not they would successfully win the next election or whatever, would you see that straightforward like, this is my private religious belief, but my job as a legislator is to say this is what I privately believe and this is what I'm going to vote? Do you think something as explicit as that would be a violation of this sacred church state distinction or would it need to be more like institutionally embedded for it to constitute a violation? I think it would be more institutionally embedded. I think simply an elected official informing us the basis for their vote probably does not cross the line legally. I mean,

again, it's really a question for a lawyer, but it doesn't strike me as something that would cross the line. Unlike if the legislation they were proposing said in the law, like abortion is wrong because God says so, or something like that. That would be the kind of entryment that would, that would violate this distinction. I just think that a lot of the time people are a little bit confused about exactly what it means to say there's a separation of church and state, as if when someone says, oh, I voted for this because I'm a Christian, they sort of say, well, that's very anti-gephersonian of you. It's like, I'm not sure that that's actually what he meant. And I think it's worth sort of clearing that up. And it sounds like we're on the same page about that. And this actually

came up in the aftermath of the law that banned bans on same-sex marriage. So they were no, you could no longer ban same-sex marriage at the state level. The next kind of wave of challenges on this became so-called religious freedom. The infamous cake-baking case was also sort of played a role in this and then hobby-lobby cases. You know, there's a bunch of these different examples. And it's the idea that, okay, listen, we're not saying ban same-sex marriage, but you must respect my religious belief that this is wrong and therefore I as a county clerk will not do any gay marriages. By the way, that woman lost. I forget her name, Kim, something. And so I think that though that's kind of like the next wave of how you can interject

religion in these ways, which seem completely on the wrong side of that separation. Yeah, the cake baking thing, if I remember rightly, it was a gay wedding case. right? That's right. And the cake bakers didn't want to make the cake. And as far as I'm aware, it wasn't like they wouldn't sell this cake. It was like they were going to make a cake especially. They were going to like design it or put some writing on it or whatever. That became like really emblematic of this murkiness and defining church state separation. And it's interesting because when you talk to people and you say, well, you know, maybe they're like an asshole because they don't want to make this cake. But look, that's their belief. And you can't force. somebody to say anything or produce what is essentially art on a bit of cake. And a lot of people at the moment's reflection were like, okay, actually, yeah, maybe I'm confusing my discomfort with their moral choice with like a legal principle, which is that they should be able to do that. And it's like, okay, now I suppose it's an interracial marriage and the same thing happens. And suddenly people find it really difficult to swallow that pill in the same way. Do you think

that that was a, uh, an indication of, of murky church state, uh, violation? Like, I, I don't know what your view at the time was it's been a while since that that case has come up but what was your what was your feeling on that i mean listen my my there's two different sides of this my feeling was that it was completely wrong and it was using a religious justification it was lobbying a civil government with regard to public accommodations on the basis of a religious belief so i i believe that it would be uh it should have been against the law i believe that ultimately it was deemed legal because there were so many alternative places that could bake cakes that you couldn't reasonably argue that these people on the basis of their sexual orientation were

being denied. And so I believe that it was allowed. I think there are other circumstances where imagine in a hospital setting where a nurse says, I don't want to administer a medication that you need because something about your identity lifestyle beliefs or attractions violates my religious views. I think that in the medical world, again, I'm not a lawyer. I think it might even depend on the state, but it may be federal law says you actually can't do that. You just, you have to administer the medication. That's not a scenario where you can use your religious beliefs as justification. And I think we can all understand how a needed medical treatment and a cake are substantively different.

They don't really change my personal view about it, but it may be a different legal situation, certainly. Yeah, I mean, to me, those feel significantly different in a way that is relevant, which, like, if you are going to die or have serious medical problems without some kind of treatment, and a doctor says, I'm not treating you because you're gay, like, that is quite trivially, just like, illegal,

as far as I'm concerned. Whereas if it were like the doctor, for some reason, if they don't perform this behavior, like, you know, like two gay people are still going to get married, but they're going to have a slightly worse marriage and it's not going to be quite as enjoyable. I don't think it would carry the same sort of moral force because, like you say, there is this complication of like alternate available services, but also the extent to which it is just a non-essential product that is like curated rather than something that's just being sold or given out that's then being actually refused. It feels a bit more like to me going to like a band and saying, oh, I really want you to play some music at our. at our wedding and they say, oh, sorry, we're a, we're a Christian rock band. We can't play gay gay marriages. I think people would still be kind of like maybe upset about that. They might say, why did you choose them in the first place? But I don't think it would have caused the same like national like frenzy as the cake thing. And I, like, I wonder if the cake is more like

the band playing the gig than it is like the doctor administering the medicine, if you know what I mean. I think without a doubt it is. And I'm thinking about this in terms of the legal. framework. I mean, of course, on a practical moral level, if I were a gay couple, I wouldn't want the homophobic band playing at the wedding. It's just sort of like naturally practical conclusion. But from a legal standpoint, I do think the band and the cake are probably one category and the medical treatment or processing your passport application at a post office for a man and his husband or whatever. I think that those are a different category in a sense. Sure. Okay. I want to round up here. We've sort of gone a little bit off track and I got a bit distracted by the new Pope and it's all very exciting. But one thing that I think it is important to sort of put out here as a sort of end to this conversation is the fact that you've already said there's a lot about the success of the right that's really due to the failure of the left. And it's very popular to say, you know, Trump didn't win the election. Harris lost the

election, stuff like that, that kind of language. It was more popular when it was Hillary, right? Like, Hillary lost the election. Trump didn't win it. But people often say this kind of thing. It's like, well, at least to some degree, it's a failure of the left. What changes need to be made, what lessons can be learned from this election cycle so that next time we do this, the left has a stronger, more viable, and like you referred to earlier, less dismissive, all of this kind of stuff. Like what can we learn what changes need to be made to be more successful the next time around? It's a very long list. I mean, in no particular order of importance, the relationship between the political establishment left and independent media needs to be totally rethought.

I think the Trump and Republicans related to the podcast and independent media space in a way that was very helpful to them. The Harris campaign did not. I think the lessons around appearing to dismiss concerns with regard to immigration and crime are a reminder that what people believe matters impacts the way they vote, regardless of what the statistics demonstrate and sort of really rethinking that. Number three, you know, a lot of the economic ideas of Kamala Harris did not resonate. So there was this idea of, hey, I'm going to give a tax cut. I'm sorry, I'm going to give a tax deduction, or was it a credit, I've forgotten, against costs to start a new business? Like, great, okay, cool, but that doesn't have the emotional capture of they're coming

over the border and I'm going to put a stop to it, even if that's untrue. It's just not, it's a categorical difference. It's just completely different. So I think that there needs to be a coherent message that's actually something to vote for. Number four, the idea that voting against whoever else is running as enough should be completely done away with. People really do need something to vote for. And then finally, I would say, candidates need to be selected based on who they are rather than chosen and then like molded into what the Democratic Party thinks that they should be. That just doesn't work. It comes off as inauthentic and disingenuous. So those would be like five bullet points at least. Yeah. Well, phenomenal, David. I think it's been a fun

conversation. It's a little bit outside of my normal area of sort of strict philosophy, but I think it's important not just to talk about this stuff, but to also see the extent to which philosophical assumptions and ideas actually underlie a lot of what seems to just be practical, political thinking and decision-making. So I appreciate you taking the time and coming on the show. The book is the Echo Machine, how right-wing extremism created post-truth America. And the link is, of course, in the description. You go into all of this kind of stuff in a lot more detail. And I think for anybody who's interested here, it's definitely worth checking out. But for now, thanks for coming on. Thanks so much for having me.