Shadi Hamid is a columnist at The Washington Post and a senior fellow at Georgetown University’s Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding, where he co-directs the Faith and Future of Democracy Initiative. He is the co-author, with Matthew Kaemingk, of Can Religion Save Democracy?: How More Faith—Not Less—Can Heal Our Public Life.

Matthew Kaemingk is Professor of Public Theology at Theological University Utrecht and a senior fellow at Georgetown University where he co-directs the Faith and Future of Democracy Initiative.

In this week’s conversation, Yascha Mounk, Matthew Kaemingk, and Shadi Hamid discuss why the decline of religion has turned American politics into a kind of holy war, whether the Democratic Party can make room for voters with traditional religious convictions, and how secular European societies should accommodate their conservative Muslim minorities.

Note: This episode was recorded on September 29, 2026.

This transcript has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.

Yascha Mounk: I’m really interested to talk about your new book. A lot of people are blaming religion for a lot of problems in the world. When you look around the world, you see religious wars. When you look at people who are intolerant within Western democracy, sometimes it is people who have deep religious faith who may be threatened by people of other religions, or think that they may lead people to the wrong beliefs. You’re saying that religion is actually very important for democracy, and that, in fact, the decline of religion is maybe one of the reasons for the problems we face today. Give me the argument.

Matthew Kaemingk: I’ll jump in on this one. I think the big-time argument here is, democratic theorists for many years imagined that the more rationality. Fundamentally, religion was a problem for democracy, that it was divisive, and that as we walked away from our religious institutions that divided us—that was the belief—we would become more cohesive as nations, we would come together. What we’re finding in the United States, which is our context, is that’s just not the case, that polarization has grown as religious identity has diminished.

There’s a variety of reasons for this, which we posit. But one of the primary things that we’re looking at here is that while in the past people found their identity and their purpose and meaning in religion, as they walk away from religion, they are increasingly finding their identity in politics, in sort of tribal political identities. These political identities provide them with a sense of meaning and purpose. It also tells them who the good guys are, who the bad guys are, and there’s a bit of a spiritual thrill in political warfare that you can find. With this post-religious loneliness and disaffection, it has drawn people into a form of politics that’s almost apocalyptic, in which people are constantly saying, “This right here is the most important election of our lifetime.” So what we’re touching on in the opening of this book is this paradox at the heart of secular democracy: that as politics becomes more secular, it is actually becoming more religious. It’s having a sense of holy war to it.

Mounk: What do you mean by that? There’s a different argument made by Eitan Hersh that politics has become a kind of sport, where we have this kind of attitude towards that, like we’re cheering on a football team? Is that sort of what you mean, where we have these kinds of quasi-religious attachments to particular political figures or movements?

Shadi Hamid: Well, I think that maybe the starting assumption here that we’re operating under is that all of us have a religious impulse. If you believe in God, then presumably God instilled within us a desire for transcendence. It’s only a question of how that yearning or longing is expressed. If it’s not going to be expressed through traditional religion, it will then be expressed in other ways, through politics. So when we say that politics is becoming more spiritual, it means that these kinds of deep passions and longings are being pushed into something we don’t think they should be pushed into. We don’t think politics should be the place where you find or search for your deepest longings and yearnings. That can be dangerous. Politics can’t really contain that level of intensity.

Mounk: Let me try and understand this claim. Eitan Hersh calls it political hobbyism. He says that there’s a kind of politics that’s like a form of hobbyism, where it takes the space in your life that a different kind of hobby, or an allegiance to a sports team, may have done. Rather than responding rationally to politics, or trying to accomplish rational means within politics, rather than saying, “I’m trying to defend my economic interests,” or “I have some kind of value and I’m trying to promote it,” you’re really saying this is the content of my life, it’s the focus of my activities.

Is the claim you’re making similar, but somewhat parallel, in the sense that when you go to church, or you go to mosque, or you go to synagogue, what you’re hoping for is some kind of transcendence? What you’re hoping for is a promise of deliverance, a promise of salvation. If you lose your religion, then you might invest all of those hopes into politics. You don’t just want politicians to solve the problems of Social Security, or to avoid stupid wars—you want them to make you feel part of a world-historical movement. You want to recognize in the next political candidate the Messiah. Is that the claim you’re making?

Hamid: Yeah, that is, I think, part of what we’re arguing. So the energies are being transferred, and people are finding their full identity in politics, and we don’t think politics is really the right thing for that. Politics should be a little bit more mundane. It shouldn’t be about the ultimate.

I think that you see this in other parts of the world too, and it’s not just an American thing—the rise of the far right in Europe. When people lose that kind of cultural background of Christianity, it’s sort of like a “be careful what you wish for” thing. You think that losing religion will make you more rational, but in fact it just leads to these energies being transferred elsewhere in dangerous ways. That could be expressed through white nativism, ethno-nationalism, ultra-wokeness on the left.

I think it makes sort of intuitive sense that if all you have is the here and now, and you don’t believe in an afterlife, you don’t have that longer time horizon, then you’ll invest more of your energy in a kind of immediate gratification in politics, because that’s all you have. Whereas a religious person can kind of be like, “Well, we tried our best in politics, things didn’t work out. At least I have my religion, my faith, my community.” They have hopes for salvation, and they have that deeper institutional architecture that they’re part of. So politics doesn’t have to give them everything.

Kaemingk: I can sympathize with the argument that politics is becoming a hobby, or politics is becoming a sport in which you cheer for things. I think for people who are perhaps lonely or bored or looking for community, politics can provide that sort of hobby outlet, or that sports outlet. But again, we’re arguing it’s something more than that. It’s not just a hobby—it has a certain spiritual vigor, and it really does feel much more like a holy war, in which the stakes are ramped up to the nth degree. Yes, politics does deal with serious things, but there seems to be a spiritual intensity that is only increasing as religious identity goes down. That’s interesting to us.

Mounk: What element of religiosity do you think it is that had these positive features? I can think of at least three that have implicitly or explicitly come up in the course of this conversation. The first is simply that the church, the mosque, other forms of religious institutions had an institutional quality—they’re institutions. That means they follow a particular kind of doctrine, that they have authority figures, that they involve sermons—they involve an authority figure speaking to the people listening and giving them kind of moral guidance. All of that constrains people’s views and ideas in various ways, which may be unhelpful when it comes to a gradual acceptance of homosexuality, which may have been an impediment for a long time, or something like that. But it can also be very helpful when it comes to impeding people from jumping onto all kinds of terrible beliefs, or all kinds of fads, all kinds of moral panics. So it may just be one of many forms in which traditional institutions that structure society and guide people have declined over the past decades.

A second kind of thing that you may be talking about is a kind of quietism—that if you are secular, if you don’t believe in God, you think that the here and now is the only thing there is. An injustice isn’t tolerable, because if you suffer your whole life under an injustice, there’s no recompense for it afterwards. Whereas if you believe in an afterlife, if you believe in heaven and hell, then you might think, “Well, that’s not great, and part of my conception of religion” is perhaps to fight against these kinds of injustices. “But you know what? If I live a good life, I’m going to go to heaven.” So somehow you can tolerate injustice more, which may have some bad consequences, may have some good consequences, because it doesn’t make politics like a holy war, as he said.

Then the third may just be a kind of psychological interpretation, where you’re saying people just have a need for some kind of feeling of transcendence, for some kind of feeling of being in the presence of a divine. If religion is not going to give you that, then you’re going to invest that into the exciting primary campaign of Barack Obama, or into the claim of Donald Trump to be a godlike figure who alone can redeem American politics. You get these kinds of moments of intense enthusiasm, some perhaps better justified than others, that then lead to deep disappointment and anger, and an unwillingness to see the flaws of your own candidate and so on. Is it all three of those? Is it one or the other? Did I miss any out?

Kaemingk: There’s so much more, but I think you touched on a number of really important ones. Let’s start with something the three of us would agree on, which is idolatry. Our faith traditions don’t like idols. For those people who are not religious at all, an idol is taking something of normal life and lifting it up to godlike status. As simple and ancient as a belief as that might feel to listeners, it has tremendous political consequences: for people who want to avoid idolatry, you want to be very careful about making the mundane aspects of life ultimate.

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That is really what we’re talking about when we’re talking about political conflict—you take an election and you say, “This right here is the most important election.” Or you take a politician and you say, “This politician right here can save our country.” Or, as Obama would say, “We are the people that we’ve been waiting for.” That is one of the fundamental gifts of traditional monotheism: that it radically secularizes politics, in the best way, that Judaism, Islam, and Christianity take politics down three notches—or at least it should. That’s a really important aspect.

Hamid:I think that the point you raised, Yascha, about the afterlife—we have a whole chapter in the book called “The Case for Hell,” where we try to bring hell back, hopefully in a helpful, constructive way. The point there is, we’re not arguing for quietism, although obviously some religious people can end up there. You should do the best you can to make the world more just, but you probably won’t be able to achieve full justice or full accountability. You’re still going to have dictators and bad leaders who do awful things, and at some point it’s going to be beyond your control. But there is some kind of solace in knowing that there is going to be a final accounting in the next life—that Donald Trump, or pick your least favorite leader in the world, or dictator. Not having to have a final victory in the here and now can be liberating. It allows us to chill, ideally, and be more relaxed about our politics.

It’s no accident that the most destructive movements of the twentieth century were largely secular. The communist dream was one about literally achieving heaven on earth, and you can sort of understand why that impulse would be there. If you have an atheistic ideology, it would make sense—if you can’t have heaven in the next life, why not try to achieve it in this life? I think the kind of argument we often hear, that religion is the primary cause of violence—it is really worth remembering that the twentieth century is a century of secular ideologies killing tens of millions of people: Mao’s Cultural Revolution, Nazism was anti-Christian at its core. The list goes on, and we don’t think those things are an accident.

Mounk: To be fair, there have also been very extreme religious movements, including in the recent past, from Al Qaeda to the Iranian Revolution and so on.

Hamid: Yes, of course. But I think that’s relatively well known—that there are religious extremists, that’s a risk that can happen. We’re not saying that religion is always good. But if we look at the kind of broader picture of the twentieth century, I think oftentimes secularism gets a pass, and I just think it’s worth noting that secular ideologies have been very destructive too.

Mounk: No, I think that’s fair, and I think the point that both fascism and communism were deeply secular ideologies, and that they did the most damage in the twentieth century, is very well taken. I wonder what your notion of human nature is, and to what extent that notion is itself a religiously inflected one, or whether my secular listeners are able to get on board with it.

Earlier there was a kind of hint of saying, “If we have a longing for transcendence, then that must be because God wanted it to be there.” Is it possible to put your point about human nature, and the role that religion plays in speaking to those aspects of human nature, in a way that my secular listeners will agree with, that I will potentially agree with? Or do you think that you have to in some way be a person of faith to get on board with the anthropology that is at the basis of your book?

Kaemingk: Not at all. I think that there are many arguments that we’re making here that are very accessible to those who would describe themselves as secular. Basically, that human beings are longing for meaning—they’re longing for some kind of story about what the world is, what’s going on in the world. They want to belong to a group. You yourself have written a lot about the tribal nature of human beings, that we want to belong, and that helps us articulate what the good life is, the bad life is, who the good guys and the bad guys are. All of that, I think, is very accessible, whether you describe yourself as religious or secular.

What we are trying to push on for those who would describe themselves as secular is that they too live by some sort of faith or code, whether they’ve examined it or not. One of our important encouragements for those who describe themselves as secular is that democracy is filled with diverse faith commitments, and they too are a part of that—they have not transcended faith. One of the more dangerous things that we argue about the secular citizen is that sometimes they can believe, “I have transcended all of these religious minorities. I have become enlightened, I have become woke,” and they can sort of look down on their fellow citizens and diagnose all of their problems because they have transcended them. So that would be our push, or our gentle encouragement.

Mounk: Yeah, there’s different versions of that point. My favorite one is from Tom Lehrer, in the song “National Brotherhood Week”—the introduction to it, where he says, “It’s very important to love your fellow human being. And there’s some people who do not love fellow human beings, and I hate people like that.” I think Jonathan Haidt has a version of that in The Righteous Mind, where he talks about all the people with “Coexist” stickers on their cars, when he teaches at UVA in the 2000s, and the deep hatred of anybody who doesn’t have a “Coexist” sticker, or something along those lines.

Let me set out my understanding of human nature as it relates to this, and it makes me sympathetic to your argument, for perhaps it doesn’t get me all of the way there. My sense is that human beings have evolved over time to cooperate with the in-group, but also to be capable of significant cruelty towards the out-group. When you look at the most heroic acts of humans, the most beautiful feats that humans have accomplished in our history, it is often in the service of some kind of in-group, or indeed in the glorification of the beliefs of the in-group, including secular, including religious music and works of art and so on. When you look at some of the most heinous things that human beings have done, it has nearly always been because they were being done to somebody considered an out-group.

I think when you look at the history of the world, and particularly European history, there is a strong argument that religion often does terrible damage. For thousands of years, a lot of the worst wars and civil wars and forms of persecution and exclusion were on the grounds of religion. It’s tempting, as some of the “four horsemen of atheism” did in the 2000s, to say that is because of religion—religion is the but-for cause of these conflicts. If religion hadn’t existed, we wouldn’t have had the terrible wars between Catholics and Protestants in 16th-, 17th-century Europe, for example.

Well, I think that if you have the view of human nature that I’ve come to embrace over the course of my life, it’s a little bit more complicated than that. Because I think religion is one of the kinds of things that can structure the conflict between in-group and out-group. In societies in which religion is the primary thing that structures the conflict between in-groups and out-groups, you often get terrible forms of religious conflict. We’re aware of that in the Christian world, we’re aware of that in the Muslim world, but it’s true of every religion. Buddhists often have a reputation as a very peaceful religion, but in some of the societies, like Myanmar, where there’s deep divisions between Buddhists and non-Buddhists, you have pogroms perpetrated by monks in Buddhist robes. So this is clearly something that every religion is in some way capable of.

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Now, I also think that in the absence of religion, that instinct of human nature wouldn’t have gone away. When I had Sam Harris on the podcast, we had a great discussion, and I pushed him on this, saying, look, for thousands of years of European history, religion inspired people to do terrible things, as well as some good things, of course. But in the absence of religion, it may have been a proto-form of nationalism, or it may have been “my village against yours,” or it may have been something else entirely. The question of whether religion inspired peace or conflict in that time is this incredibly complicated counterfactual question about what would have taken the place of religion—if it hadn’t been there, what would have filled that void? Would it have been comparatively better or comparatively worse? I think answering that question is basically impossible. Where do you agree with me here? Where do you disagree with me here, Shadi?

Hamid: I think that it’s likely that people would have still found ways to fight each other in the absence of religion. I think you’re exactly right that, because religion was the primary currency and the primary identity, then naturally religion is going to play a role in conflict in the pre-modern period. But before the Abrahamic faiths, people were in regular conflict. Then, as we mentioned, in the twentieth century, with the decline of religion, people found ways to kill each other more efficiently and in a more destructive way.

I think we have to be very careful about drawing the causal link between religion itself and conflict, and the very essence of conflict. But I think that when we’re talking about the modern period, we have to switch the analysis a little bit, because we’ve moved so much in the other direction of secularization. So now religion plays a little bit of a different role, in tempering the excesses of secularization.

Kaemingk: Okay, I just want to cut in here real quick on two things. One thing, Yascha, I’d love to add to your analysis there: not seeing religion always as the primary influencer, but sometimes as the follower—that authoritarian leaders throughout history have been very good at manipulating religion for their political purposes or their economic purposes. As much as I would love religion to be a very powerful force, it is often a follower. Even in those “wars of religion” in Europe, many scholars have looked back upon that history and seen that actually, in large part, what was going on there was a contest of different power brokers within Europe who were able to manipulate and use Catholic and Protestant tensions for their own political ends. I would commend the book The Myth of Religious Violence by William Cavanaugh, who specifically looks at those wars of religion, because those are so commonly used by European secularists as the case for why religion can’t be a part of public life, because Europe was torn apart by “religion.”

The second thing I would say here is: when it comes to in-group and out-group tensions, which you talk about, and I completely agree with you that’s core to human nature—then the next question we have to ask is, if we are tribal, and if that tribalism is never going to go away, the question is not how do you get rid of tribalism. The question is how do you develop a form of tribalism that is capable of some level of hospitality, some level of patience, some level of generosity with outsiders. What is that technology for dealing with the outsider?

Our argument is that Islam has spent centuries thinking about that question, and Christianity likewise, and Jews likewise have thought for centuries about how you deal with outsiders. The sort of history that the only thing Muslims and Jews and Christians have been thinking about is how to excommunicate people is just a terrible history. These are moral communities that have been thinking hard about how to stop a war, or how to reconcile someone that they have excommunicated. Even earlier you talked about a church with a sort of religious leader providing a moral vision—well, I would just say that a church is so much more than that. Within a church, you have a lot of democratic processes going on. It’s very rare to have an authoritarian church; it’s actually quite much more common for a church to have a group of elders that are meant to check the pastor, to hire and fire the pastor. You have a wide variety of ways inside of your church to have its own polity of democratic discourse and debate.

Similarly, within a mosque—these are what Alexis de Tocqueville would call the schools of democracy. If you look at the primary charities in the United States that are focused on refugees and immigrants, as much press as there is about Christians who don’t like refugees and immigrants, all of the primary charities are the Catholics, the Lutherans, the Evangelicals. They are the ones who are taking in the refugees, who are feeding and clothing them and finding them jobs. So there are these moral communities within our democratic life that are thinking about that question that you’re asking, which is how can a tribe become somewhat interested in outsiders? This is critical to democracy.

Mounk: I think that there’s a version of that argument that I, as a secular person, find attractive, and a version of that argument where you have to do some more convincing of me. The version of that argument that I find attractive is that we have this tendency towards dividing ourselves into in-groups and out-groups. One of the dangerous things—my colleague Lilliana Mason at Johns Hopkins has made a version of that point—is when all of our identities become overlapping.

Not only do I have Jewish heritage—I’m not religious—and Shadi is Muslim, but also I’m a Democrat and Shadi is a Republican, and whatever the seven next things are. And so there’s just nothing that the two of us have in common, and so we just see each other as enemies. Whereas in a more healthy polity, we might have some things that sever us and some things that bridge us at the same time. So I have Jewish heritage, Shadi is Muslim, but also we both happen to vote for the same political party, and also we both see ourselves as public intellectuals with a certain kind of inclination towards an open mind and talking earnestly with people who might have different points of view.

What allows us to retain civic friendship, even as we have some of these important salient differences, is where we have important similarities on other things. So what you might say is that religion plays an important role in that respect—that in a society in which nowadays, actually, the main division, according to who’s happy to be friends with whom and so on in society, is no longer race, though it’s obviously an important one; is no longer class, though it’s obviously an important one; is often partisan identity, where parents, at least in opinion polls, are more likely to say “I’m going to be upset if my daughter marries a Republican” if they’re a Democrat, or a Democrat if they’re a Republican, than they are to say “I’ll be upset if my daughter marries somebody of a different race.” Religion can be one of the things that is cross-cutting and cross-partisan.

Now, unfortunately, religion in America tends to be quite racially segregated, most of it. But when you look at the Catholic faith, when you look at some of these Protestant congregations, they’re very multiracial. Islam, by its nature, is quite multiracial, including in the United States. So it can be one of the important things that is a counterbastion to just “I’m a Democrat and I hate Republicans,” and that clash between these two factions that Madison tried to avoid in Federalist No. 10 is not totally defining our country.

So I, as a secular person, have a lot of sympathy for the ways in which religion can be a bridging identity between people who otherwise have many dissimilarities, in a way that helps against all of these identities collapsing in on each other and completely separating us. That comes easily to me. Is religion different in nature than other kinds of things that might accomplish that? Is it just helpful because it’s one more thing that does that? I think you want to make a claim that goes beyond that.

Kaemingk: Right. The Washington football team, or the New York Giants can bring the city together in some really beautiful way, but it’s not the same.

Mounk: Yeah, and by the way, I don’t want to dominate, but my mom hates sports, because she associates sports with a collective enthusiasm of a form that she—understandably, given her history—associates with fascism and communism and so on. To her, crowds of people cheering something on feel dangerous. Whereas to me, I see that precisely as a healthy outlet for something that might otherwise find an unhealthy outlet.

Kaemingk: Yeah, we’ve seen beautiful ways in which sports have brought things together, but I think, for Shadi and me, religion is categorically different from cheering for a sports team. It’s wonderful that religion can bring people together as well, but I think the categorical difference here is that I go to church not because I’m a fan of Jesus—I go to church because I fundamentally believe it’s true, about the whole world, and I orient my whole life towards it. I think sometimes democratic theorists—and you might hold to this, Yascha—believe that, okay, yes, we can have all of these tribal identities, but it’s important we not take any of them very seriously. Because if we have a belief that we take really seriously, then we will be dangerous, then we will be violent. So it’s okay for Shadi to be a Muslim as long as he doesn’t take it too seriously—because if he takes it too seriously, then he won’t be a good democratic citizen. I think that’s a contention that we would really want to push on.

Hamid: I would just add something, Yascha, about the bridging nature of religion. I think what’s unfortunate now is that religion is mapping onto partisan divides. If you meet a white Christian person who’s outward in their faith, you can probably guess that they’re going to be Republican. If you meet a white liberal, or a white secular person, they’re probably going to be a Democrat.

One thing that we kind of touch on in the book is religion—the left and progressives should not concede the religious ground to the right. It should be more of this bridging capital that all Americans can share. I think one of the unfortunate results of the Democratic Party becoming less hospitable to people of faith is that religion and partisanship are now closely associated, and that’s dangerous for our democracy.

Mounk: What do you think it would take for Democrats to become more hospitable to people of faith? I’d be interested, in that context, to hear about your views on somebody like James Talarico, who I don’t know that much about. I mean, I obviously follow the news and have a sense of him as the Democratic candidate for Senate in Texas. He seems to have an actual chance of flipping Texas—there’s supposedly a chance for Democrats to flip Texas every year, but this year is likely to be a particularly blue wave, and the Republican Senate candidate is particularly unappealing. So he may in fact win the Senate race.

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I’ve heard very different things about him. He is, I said, a pastor, a very religious person, but who grew up in a kind of very progressive form of Christianity. In his past, in 2020, when everybody said things that we now want to forget, he has invoked religion to justify political positions in a way that, my understanding is, many Christians actually found to be off-putting. One argument could be that, a little bit like Graham Platner was kind of the upper-middle-class voter’s idea of a working-class person, I’ve heard that James Talarico is sort of the secular man’s idea of a progressive Christian, but that actually that would make him even more off-putting to many Christians. I’m aware that I don’t understand that world nearly enough to be able to assess whether or not that claim is true. But what do you think? Do you think that somebody who’s arguing for these pretty progressive positions on questions of abortion and trans questions and so on, cloaking it in that Christian language, is a way of reaching Christians, or in fact, is that just going to be off-putting? And if a Democratic Party wants to be more hospitable to people of faith, then it actually needs to at least be willing to tolerate, for example, within its tradition, within its tent, people who are strongly pro-life.

Hamid: I think James Talarico—some of his conclusions might be off-putting to more conservative Christians, but I think the major point here is that he’s comfortable speaking about his faith, and he seems genuinely sincere. I think that’s something that’s become increasingly rare in the Democratic Party. Just bringing that back as a kind of starting point: that it’s okay to bring your faith into public discussions.

For a party that claims to be the moral party, that has moral conviction and moral leadership, I think it’s difficult to express morality if you don’t also have a kind of religious language, or at least appeals to religious language. So I think it’s a good thing that Talarico is doing what he’s doing, and I would just hope that it spreads a little bit in the Democratic Party, if for no other reason than that we just need to have faith being something people are comfortable with on both sides of the aisle. Again, I think the point here is we’re not telling people that they have to believe. I think what we’re saying is that it’s important for people to accept that religion can play a positive role in our discourse.

So those are two separate propositions. You can be an atheist but still agree with us that religion can be morally inspiring. It can make people more civically engaged. Religion is associated with higher levels of happiness, of giving, of charity, of not cutting in line. There’s been a lot of studies on this that show the kind of positive elements of religion. So I think there’s a way to have a kind of practical, consequentialist approach to this that is separate from the question of belief.

Mounk: Do you think that, to put it slightly deprecatingly, and that may not be fair, sort of dressing up the Democratic Party platform in the language of a devout man is going to be enough to broaden the Democratic Party’s appeal among people who are religious? Or do you think it will take, if not a change in the stated positions of the Democratic Party platform, at least a kind of willingness to embrace, within the broader tent of the party, people who have clearly diverging opinions on questions around abortion, around the participation of trans people who’ve gone through male puberty in female sports—whatever other issues you might want to talk about—that have a high religious salience to some religious people, at least.

Kaemingk: I would say that religion is prickly and strange as a social and political force, and the modern political party does not appreciate things that are prickly and strange. They want candidates that will fit in with the party platform, and that’s an issue for Republicans and Democrats to deal with. Historically, I would say that the Republican Party has been more comfortable with the prickly and strange nature of religion and religious actors within their big tent than the Democratic Party. The one sort of exception to this would be the Black church in the Democratic Party—you have Barack Obama singing “Amazing Grace” in public in a way that other white Democrats would not quite be able to pull off.

With James Talarico, my concern is that he is too smoothly a Democrat. He doesn’t have—he’s not strangely Christian. His Christianity just falls perfectly in line with the Democratic Party. Similarly with Mamdani and other Muslim candidates within the Democratic Party, they fall very smoothly within the Democratic Party. Shadi and I might have a little disagreement on this, but I’m just concerned with the sorts of Muslims who are promoted within the Democratic Party—they tend to have fallen in line with the Democratic Party platform. I would love to see the Democratic Party elect a Muslim who openly has Muslim views on gender and sexuality.

Mounk: What do you mean by Muslim views on gender and sexuality?

Kaemingk: Well, I’ll have Shadi define what those things are, but I would just say, confidently, they don’t fit in perfectly with the Democratic Party’s party line. For the Democratic Party to say, “Look, we respect real disagreement within our party, and Islam—we don’t just want to tokenize Muslims who wear a headscarf, but who actually have meaningful religious convictions—and we have space in our party for differences on questions of gender and sexuality.” They don’t, right now.

Mounk: I love some drama between co-authors on the podcast. Shadi, do you wish to denounce your co-author?

Hamid: No, I think Matt’s bringing up an important point: that there’s been a kind of ethnicization of Muslims. To be an American Muslim in public life now, it’s kind of an identity marker instead of a container of faith or religious conviction. I like Zohran, and I like Abdul, but it is interesting that they don’t really talk about the content of their faith as much. They emphasize the fact that to be Muslim means to be marginalized, or to be victims of Islamophobia, or that it’s about being a minority in America similar to other minorities.

But there are orthodox views in Islam that are limiting sexual freedom in some way, that are not accepting of the full panoply of transgender activism, the arguments that are made on behalf of that—especially, as you mentioned, Yascha, in sports, that kind of flashpoint. So I guess that’s concerning to me: that Muslims are sort of accepted in the Democratic Party only insofar as they accept the Democratic Party’s positions on gender and sexuality. I would like to see people like Abdul and Zohran pushing a little bit and adopting more, maybe let’s say, socially conservative views on certain moral questions, and that might actually help them in expanding the electorate, appealing to a larger number of voters, especially in a place like Michigan, where someone like Abdul El-Sayed has to appeal to disaffected Republicans and independents.

Mounk: To what extent do you think they hold those views? I don’t want to claim that either of them is misrepresenting their true beliefs, but of course every politician does in certain ways. I would be surprised if Zohran held those more conservative views, in part because of his upbringing and the kind of bubble of Columbia University and the heart of New York City, and his mother being a Hollywood movie director and so on. I’d be less surprised if Abdul held some of those views but decided, out of political calculation, that he can’t loudly speak about them. But I don’t know, Shadi, whether you have a view.

Hamid: Yeah, I think you’re right about Zohran. But I think Abdul is a little bit of a different case—someone who did grow up in a more religious family, and in the context of Michigan, where religious conservatism in the Muslim community is sort of the norm. Abdul has given a couple of interviews where he’s alluded a little bit to maybe having more socially conservative views on things like porn and gambling and so forth. But it seems to me that he’s pulling back, that he’s being very careful, and he’s so concerned about alienating members of the progressive base that he’s just not willing to go there. My sense, and also kind of knowing people who know him, is that he does have that in him. But look, you never know exactly what’s in people’s hearts. I do think that it would be nice for the Democratic Party to be a bigger tent when it comes to these moral questions.

There’s really no reason the Democratic Party has to be the secular party, and it wasn’t always that way. Forty, fifty years ago it was quite different, where there were still white evangelicals in the party, and famously Jimmy Carter was one of them. So this is really a kind of recent phenomenon of the last several decades, and it’s just a major missed opportunity for Democrats. They’re narrowing their tent when they need to enlarge it.

In the rest of this conversation, Yascha, Matthew, and Shadi discuss the different attitudes to religion in Europe compared with the United States, how to balance conflicting values, and whether religious people really are happier. This part of the conversation is reserved for paying subscribers…

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Martin Wolf is chief economics commentator at The Financial Times. His latest book is The Crisis of Democratic Capitalism, now out in paperback with a new chapter on Donald Trump’s second term.

In this week’s conversation, Yascha Mounk and Martin Wolf discuss whether democratic capitalism can recover from the damage done by populists like Donald Trump, how artificial intelligence might upend both the economy and humanity’s control over its own fate, and whether a bursting AI bubble or France’s fiscal woes could trigger the next financial crisis.

Note: This episode was recorded on November 3, before the election results were available.

This transcript has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.

Yascha Mounk: It’s always a pleasure to talk to you, Martin. I’m really excited to talk about a bunch of the contemporary economic issues facing the United States, Europe, and the world today. But I want to start by revisiting The Crisis of Democratic Capitalism, your really magisterial book about the relationship between capitalism and democracy. It is now a few years old and has just come out in a paperback edition with a new chapter.

Looking back from today’s vantage point, do you remain optimistic that, for all of the challenges we face, we are capable of continuing to reconcile our capitalist system with our democratic institutions, and that we will be able to avert the threats that risk undermining each of those elements?

Martin Wolf: Overall, I’m a little less optimistic. Not dramatically less optimistic, but less optimistic. Very briefly, I feel two things. The first relates to a basic theme of my book. Quite apart from the benefits of moral development in some sense, education and so forth, the capitalist economy that we created in the 19th century and roughly the first three quarters of the 20th century quite naturally generated a redistribution of power in society.

We moved, as it were, from feudalism and pre-modern structures based around land ownership to the modern capitalist economy, with an increasingly organized and powerful working class. Workers were genuinely powerful because they had education and they could easily coalesce and coordinate. That was an environment in which there was a very real risk of major war, and we saw that linked with the formation of the nation state. But there was also tremendous democratic pressure.

In the end, we seem to have reconciled all of that in the post-Second World War period, which was really very important. That underpinning has very obviously been cracking, and that was a theme of my book. But when I wrote it, I still thought that if we understood how damaging and how dangerous this was for living tolerably, we would prevent the worst.

That leads to the second theme, which is very much the theme of this revision. It contains an extra chapter on the Trump experience, Trump’s second term and so forth. What has become obvious is that we do now elect really quite radically reactionary governments. Maybe that’s not the right word, because they’re more complex than that: radically demagogic, populist governments. And we seem likely to do so now in other countries in Europe, which also seemed to be stable. The more I think about it, the more difficult it seems to undo that, because of the damage that is done.

You start not with something that is mildly damaged but with something that is, in some respects, wrecked. Finally, there are changes in technology and society, of which AI is obviously the most important and the most recent. But we’ve had others before that, social media and all the rest of it, which make it so difficult for people to organize politically in the way they used to. The parties of the left and right are just different institutions from what they were when I was young.

So I now begin to think that reversing all this and going back to the things we were familiar with is just a pipe dream. What that means for the future is really open, but in this respect I’ve become more concerned. We’ll see about the Trump experience in the next few years, perhaps. But undoing the damage he has done domestically and internationally—and the U.S. is so pivotal—is going to be an immense task.

One very last comment on this. The Polish experience, which I discuss, is actually live right now as we talk because of the argument with the president. It shows just how difficult it is to reverse.

Mounk: I’m struck by how much more negative and pessimistic the tenor of this added chapter is compared to the overall tenor of your book. The book was obviously written in alarm and with concern, but it still seemed to have a certain baseline confidence that, in the end, the enormous advantages and achievements of democratic capitalism would allow it to persist.

Perhaps we’ve gone on slightly different trajectories over the course of the last 10 years. Perhaps I was much more alarmed in 2017 than you were, and perhaps I’m a little less alarmed than you are today. Your book came out, if I remember correctly, before Donald Trump was reelected.

Wolf: Yeah, it came out in early ‘23.

Mounk: So obviously the fact that Trump was able to get reelected was very concerning and upsetting. But look back at January 2025, when Trump was taking office. He seemed to have a much more efficient staff than in 2016. He had control of a much more unified Republican Party. He seemed to be implementing Project 2025 and other plans for remaking the state very quickly. The Department of Government Efficiency was trying to dismantle large parts of the federal bureaucracy.

He was talking about taking possession of the Panama Canal and of Greenland. He wanted to introduce sky-high tariffs across the board. He had total control of the government. That felt like a very perilous moment. Internationally, it was a moment in which Narendra Modi was riding high in India, and in which there was good reason to believe that democracy had basically been abolished in Hungary by Viktor Orbán, in Serbia by Vučić, and in other places.

A couple of years on, it feels to me that Trump is now finally fading from the American political system. Many of my colleagues have written this once a week for the last 10 years, but I only wrote it for the first time a few months ago. He is at record-low approval ratings. We happen to be recording this on the day of the midterms, and it is very likely that Democrats will win the House of Representatives, and probably the Senate.

Most of the governorships are going to go to Democrats, so it’s going to be very hard for Republicans to skew the vote in 2028, because the vote will be administered by and large by Democratic governors and secretaries of state. More broadly, Trump has done a lot of damage. He has been enormously corrupt and has shot his own country in the foot. But the Supreme Court has struck down a lot of the tariffs. The U.S. economy continues to be surprisingly robust. The attempt to dismantle the federal bureaucracy quickly stalled. They have effectively managed to abolish USAID, but beyond that there haven’t been changes as big as were expected.

Internationally, Viktor Orbán has gone as a result of free and fair democratic elections. Even Vučić appears to be stepping aside. Modi looks more vulnerable than he did recently because of the cockroach movement.

So perhaps we need to move away from the idea that there’s a functioning set of democracies facing threats from populism outside, and either we win or we lose. Instead, we’re going to be in a period of much lower-quality governance, with many more irrational policies and bad governments that do really damaging things. But perhaps the threat to democracy and to the capitalist system is a little less existential than I might have thought five or 10 years ago. Am I really naive to try and see this optimistically, in this vein?

Wolf: I don’t think you are, because the truth is we don’t know. I’ve tried to think hard about historical analogies, and there’s never one that’s perfect.

So I’m beginning to think that maybe the best model for how politics might work in many countries is South America. They have dictatorial regimes, but those regimes don’t last very long. At some point they’re cajoled into elections, partly because of outside pressure, though a lot of the pressure has come from within. Then there is a democratic government, and there’s some respect for civil rights. But the fundamental problems aren’t resolved.

At one stage I called this a populist cycle, but perhaps you could call it a populist-democratic cycle. It goes on. Government is never really efficient, because institutions don’t last long enough. They’re not stable enough. The people in them aren’t secure enough or valued enough to be really very good. But on the other hand, they’re not catastrophic either.

You go on like this. When I look at the government of my own country since the financial crisis, it increasingly feels like that. We’ve had a succession of governments, none of which is really in control. They’re not really effective. All over Europe, I think it’s similar. They will quite possibly be replaced at some point by some sort of populist government of the right or left, but that won’t end democracy. It’s just dysfunctional. That’s much worse than what we had before, but it’s not a properly functioning autocracy.

In many of these countries—India is another example—you won’t end up with a Putin-type regime, because that’s very specific. But you will end up with regimes that oscillate between attempts to create a properly functioning, old-fashioned democracy and, on the other hand, decidedly corrupt, ineffective, but still malevolent populist dictatorships, which could be of the right or the left.

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That now seems to me quite a plausible future. In that respect, the parallels I once saw with the 1930s don’t seem right anymore. But at the same time, I don’t feel that the stable, self-confident democratic systems of my youth will survive, except perhaps in countries like Switzerland. Maybe the Netherlands, though that’s not so clear. Scandinavia, I think—small, very solidly bourgeois countries. But in the rest of the world, it doesn’t look like that. You could think of this as optimistic or pessimistic, but it’s not what I would prefer.

Mounk: I think we’re converging on a shared interpretation of a glass of water that is a quarter full or three quarters empty. One way of thinking about this from the perspective of political science is through regime types. I’ve been saying for a very long time that it’s not helpful to think about democracy and dictatorship as ones or zeros.

Wolf: Yes, of course. That was the Cold War scenario.

Mounk: Yes, but no system is perfectly autocratic and no system is perfectly democratic. There’s a huge range of gradations between them. One helpful political science concept is that of competitive authoritarianism, or at least of an uneven playing field, where somebody like Orbán or Vučić is able to capture power. They make the playing field uneven, and they favor themselves in all kinds of ways. That makes it hard for the opposition to displace them. But there is a genuine competition between the government and the opposition, and when the government becomes sufficiently unpopular, the opposition might be able to come in. And perhaps the opposition is great and democratic for a few years. But perhaps they themselves start to emulate the same norms and govern in abusive ways. And at some point a party that really doesn’t care about democratic norms is going to be back in power.

Another way of thinking about it is perhaps as what my colleague Roberto Foa and I once called a “dirty democracy.” Instead of the rules being set for everybody and everybody competing to get into government by the existing rules, a lot of the game consists in influencing, manipulating, and exploiting the rules of the game in such a way that you’re more likely to stay in.

That’s still a game, right? You’re not able to capture the rules to such an extent that the opposition can never win. But a lot of the effort in this polity is then taken up not with putting forward the better ideas for governance, not even with a battle of values, but with trying to maneuver in complicated ways to shape the rules of the game in your favor, to make it more likely that you then win the next election.

Wolf: But there is an important point, at least I as an economist would insist on. What you’re describing is a massively costly regime type, particularly for any functioning economy. So what makes a functioning economy work? People have to make really long-term, risky investments. And by long-term, I mean decades.

If they are to do that, they need to feel that the rules of the economic game, by which I mean the rule of law, their ownership of property, and the ability to trust contracts, are secure. They need to be able to assume that the government services they will need will be provided reliably, consistently, and without corruption, and that the trade regime and the monetary regime they’re operating under are predictable. And if those are changed, they’re changed as a result of a legislative process that involves serious debates and discussions.

It’s a slightly naive way of defining it, but this is pretty close to what was created in the West after the Second World War. And it launched a period of just staggering economic advance. I was lecturing about this yesterday to a group of Chinese business people, and I said that the world order created after the Second World War is incomparably the most successful in world history. And it was because of this, and because of the opportunities that it also extended to people in developing countries, including China.

Now, the world you describe—the world of South America, which, by the way, has done particularly badly in this period relative to what it should have done—is very, very far from that. It’s a world in which you constantly have autocrats and their coteries coming along and acting in whimsical, willful, and corrupt ways. Whether you can go ahead with your project will depend to some extent on whether you can seduce or corrupt some bunch of bureaucrats to help you. Of course, that means you will use them to help you against your rivals, whom they will have to act against.

So everything is politicized, as opposed to everything happening in accordance with well-established principles. The support for science, technology, free inquiry, and genuine free debate will again be politicized. And societies like this—indeed, this is mostly what we have in the world now—in my view don’t perform very well.

I agree with you that the U.S. is doing reasonably well economically, but I would say that’s because it is pursuing a radically unsustainable fiscal policy in the long run, which is, of course, generating demand in the short run. And there’s the AI boom, but the AI boom is the fruit of decades of technological development that happened to come to this crescendo right now. It’s got nothing to do with what this administration is doing.

So I would say you’re absolutely right: there are far worse things than this. It’s far better to have this than Stalinism or Hitler, obviously. On the other hand, it’s going to be pretty unpleasant, and everything will be, as it were, for sale. Everything will be unpredictable in every possible dimension.

And this comes back to the point we were discussing. I think the damage from the Trump experience has been bigger than you suggest. Telling people “we’re going to go back to the way it was before,” when they’ve lived in these circumstances I’ve just described—well, they’re not going to believe it. They’re not going to behave as they used to, because they’ll ask: “Can you promise us that there won’t be someone like Trump, or worse, soon? Can you promise us that the bureaucrats I’m going to be dealing with will be honest, honorable, non-corrupt people, which they used to be?” And I think the answer to that is no, you can’t.

So I think you’re absolutely right that there are far worse things. And it’s very encouraging that these would-be autocrats have had their wings clipped, and I assume that’s going to happen now in the midterms. But it’s very far from what we had before, when we could be confident that the system would work.

Mounk: Look, I think that’s right. Living in Argentina is a hell of a lot better than living in North Korea, or for that matter in Russia. But at the same time, while a hundred years ago it famously might not have been clear whether you’d rather emigrate to Argentina or to the United States, today, if you have a choice between living in the United States, with its economic opportunities, or in Argentina, it’s relatively obvious that you would choose the United States, because the country has done a lot better. And as you’re pointing out, that’s not because of the governance we’ve had for the last 18 months—or the last 24 months—it’s because of the governance we’ve had for the last 60 or 200 years. So I think we’re on the same page about that.

One of the ironies I find about this moment is that the world is being radically and fundamentally transformed by artificial intelligence, and we’re going to have to think very hard about the kind of government response we need. That’s partially about regulation, to make sure that people can’t steal financial information and bankrupt you through cyberattacks. It’s partially about making sure that people can’t manufacture viruses that are going to kill millions, or tens or hundreds of millions, of people. But it’s also about thinking about how to preserve and reinstitute the basic structural preconditions for a middle-class economy and for inclusive political institutions.

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Now, 20 or 25 years ago, it feels to me like a lot of the major democracies in the world might have had the self-confidence, and perhaps the lack of polarization, to go about that in a rational way. Perhaps that was never really the case, but at least there would have been grand commissions by think tanks involving a bipartisan set of people that would have done briefings for top officials. There would at least have been the expectation that there would be some rational analysis of the problem, a set of proposals being debated and discussed, and policy made on the basis of that.

It’s very hard to imagine that world today, right? And so we’re confronting this huge challenge of artificial intelligence at a time when our collective self-confidence in being able to govern it is much lower than it would have been 25 or 50 years ago.

Wolf: Yes, I think that’s clearly right. I’ve suggested this in a few of my writings on AI. The first column I wrote on this, and I still think the best, started off with the history of the horse, which is quite well documented. I pointed out that up until the end of the 19th century, the horse was really—we could argue a bit about the sailing ship—the most important transport technology in the world. And now horses are just for entertainment.

So it seemed to me that there’s a lesson. Of course, my economist friends say, “Well, of course, we’re much more complicated than the horse.” Yes. But if it turns out that the most important thing human beings can do is to think, which I think is true—and that doesn’t just mean thinking intellectually, it means thinking in everything we do—and we can create AI and robots (I was just talking to somebody who does robots yesterday), then it doesn’t seem impossible to imagine a world in which everybody who has any money would rather have, apart from their few loved ones, machines around them. It’s an interesting question what having money will even mean in the future, but let’s leave that aside.

So what is the rest of humanity for? I sometimes begin to wonder whether the really deep reason why nobody’s having any children anymore is that, at some deep psychological level, they’ve realized that there is no future for their children, so they are acting preemptively. I’m not suggesting that’s true, but it does seem fascinating that there is this coincidence in time.

But the fundamental point you make is obviously right. This is a revolution. Now, here it interacts with politics in the following way. The most striking feature of the politics of the last 30 years—and it was essential in my book, though lots of others have written about it—is the rejection by the body politic of “experts,” of intellectuals, who have come to be seen and portrayed as the enemy.

I understand why, because the sort of policies the intellectuals and experts recommended, very much including economists, don’t seem to have worked from the point of view of most people. And so that opened room for people to get into power essentially by running against them. The most striking feature, in some sense, of the Trump revolution, or attempted overthrow of the old order, or whatever it is, is the war against universities. It’s a war that was possible because the intelligentsia here discredited itself. I think it did so.

Now, 40 years ago, the idea that any government in America would plausibly run against Harvard, or here against Oxford and Cambridge, would have been unthinkable. So that comes back to our thinking about AI. The process you are discussing should have involved ordinary people. I very much believe in citizens’ assemblies; it’s one of my democratic romanticisms. But of course, in discussing AI we’d need very high-level expertise, and indeed a royal commission would be the obvious thing to do if you were Britain or the equivalent. In the same way—though I know all the differences—when in the ‘50s and ‘60s they were thinking about how to control nuclear weapons, they talked to people like Thomas Schelling, very famously. And I think if we’d really been asked, we could have thought at least moderately intelligently about the real risks.

The idea—I’ve got this in my column for tomorrow—that Anthropic would put out in its IPO, for a business that seems likely to be valued in the trillion-dollar range, that, well, one of the risks is that we might end humanity, as it were, en passant Anthropic IPO risk disclosure. It’s a reductio ad absurdum of learned helplessness. I do think the reason we can’t do it is that, somehow or other, the intelligentsia has discredited itself, and it has been successfully discredited by its enemies. Running a really sophisticated, complex modern polity embedded in this complicated world, while being against the intelligentsia—any form of it—just seems crazy. It’s a theme of one of the things in my book.

Compare it with what the New Deal was like. I wrote a bit about Dean Acheson recently. And then you look at what the Trump administration has done to the State Department or the intelligence services. And then you look at what they’ve been saying about the Iran war. It’s all crazy stuff. Admittedly, it was pretty crazy in Vietnam too.

But the point is, I don’t think we can recover that confidence in our ability to control these things. So they are uncontrolled and uncontrollable, and the Anthropic IPO shows that.

Mounk: If they’re likely to be uncontrolled, what do you think the economic impacts of this AI revolution are going to be? On the one hand, if intelligence was the ingredient of the economy that was scarce, then suddenly having a country of geniuses in your laptop, or whatever the phrase is, should unleash huge amounts of productivity and that might produce more goods and services in ways that make us all wealthier.

At the same time, there’s deep concerns about the distribution of those goods and services, and there’s deep concerns about whether or not human workers will still be needed in the ways they are today, and what that might do to the size of the middle class, which is something that I’ve been thinking and worrying about. Stepping back, to what extent can we predict what’s going to happen? How should we go about thinking about what this totally uncharted territory might look like?

Wolf: I think all those questions are the right questions. But I actually begin to think they’re not the most important questions. I may be completely wrong, but perhaps because they’re so predictably economic sort of questions, I’ve been wondering whether we’re not being radical enough in our thinking about what this means.

First of all, we live in a world in which literally everything is run through the digital economy. I mean, just everything. It seems to be absolutely inevitable that AI-enabled computing, which will be everything, will take this over. They’re gonna run it. We’ve already seen pretty clear signs—to which, of course, Dario Amodei has been referring—that they’re not necessarily gonna run it in ways that we would think are sensible or right or moral or anything. They seem to be extraordinarily willful and erratic and out of control. So in some sense, they can do anything, whether on their own or when guided by hackers.

In Europe just today, in Sweden, I think it is, we’ve got a story about some hackers—might be an AI bot, might be some hackers—that have got control of the freezers in supermarkets and have decided to raise the temperature to levels that rot all the food. These all look like terrorism.

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What happens if that’s the normal state? My nightmare—and it just seems impossible—is that we wake up one morning and discover that every single bank account in the world has been nullified. Everyone’s. In which case, the world economy stops. Period. It’s done. Can we guarantee that won’t happen in this world? I don’t see how.

Mounk: I’ve been thinking about whether I should take printouts of my bank accounts regularly, so that in such a world you at least have some kind of proof.

Wolf: Yeah, I think you probably should. Every day, the businesses of the world—every single business—are doing trillions of dollars, collectively, in financing on a daily basis. They can’t do that without the system. The electric power systems of our world, everything else, can’t do that. So we are going to lose control of the core institutions, the core operating system of our world. I don’t think it is possible to guess what that will mean.

The second thing I was thinking about—we have this idea that at the end of this, we go back, as an extreme, and it’s suggested by your model, to a sort of feudal economy, but accept that the vast majority of human beings actually have no labor value, because machines will do all that stuff. We won’t even need serfs, as it were. Most human beings are completely redundant. The machines that run the economy will be owned by a tiny elite of super wealthy people—the likes of Elon Musk and so forth—and all the goodies will go to them.

I don’t see why that should happen, because why should these machines pay the slightest attention to these notional ownership claims of these fragile little human things? They have their own purposes and aims. Why should we assume—I’m being very, very science fiction—that... So I think everything you say is right, these are all good questions, but I think AI is more radical, potentially more destabilizing, less controllable than that.

But, of course, just one last thing: it’s perfectly possible to imagine an upheaval which will make the deindustrialization process, itself radically destabilizing, look like a garden party, because people won’t be doing what you or I do. Most physicists and others will be replaced by brilliant machines. How quickly that will happen, I have no idea. Maybe human originality will survive. But the fundamental question, of course, is: what value do humans have? An even more fundamental question is: do human beings continue to control things?

Mounk: No, and I think those questions about existential risk—which come in different forms—are absolutely fundamental. One way it could go is that a machine decides to eradicate humanity, either because it wants to take over or because it’s misaligned in some kind of way. Another is just that machines might have some kind of use for us, or perhaps they want to keep us around as a museum of their own prehistory, of their creation, or something like that. But they’re going to be the ones in control.

It’s very interesting to think about bullfighting in this respect. I went to a bullfight many years ago; I was kind of dragged there by somebody, I wasn’t particularly keen to go. But I did actually enjoy it greatly, because I started to realize at a certain point during the event that, when it’s done really, really well, it’s not about celebrating the person with the biggest muscles, or the person with the biggest cojones. It’s not just about muscles or bravery, though those things are involved.

It is principally about the triumph of the human spirit and of intelligence. It is a human standing in front of a beast that is greatly stronger and more powerful than any human being can be—greatly more powerful and stronger than Arnold Schwarzenegger or anybody else. But it is through our intelligence that we are able to master the bull. So that raises the question: why should we expect that, in the long run humans, even if we created these AI machines, which might give us some kind of advantage for a while, should continue to be able to govern these weird creatures that are already about as intelligent as us, and in many ways more intelligent, and probably one, three, five years from now will be vastly more intelligent than we are? Why should we have all of that confidence? I think that we should both be thinking about those questions and thinking about the question of how, if we do manage to control AI, it’s still going to transform our social and economic world in deep, deep problematic ways—because both of those are deep threats to our world. But I certainly take the existential risk points very seriously.

Wolf: Well, one thing that is clear is in the world that you described—assume away the existential stuff, just look at the economics—I think in the world we can imagine, in which AI is the dominant instrument of organizing production and so forth, if humanity is to continue in some sense collectively to be the master of its fate, collectively and individually, then there’s going to have to be a far greater degree of socialization of the means of production and distribution and exchange than any of us have thought about. Because it’s very easy to imagine that the marginal product of a great many human beings, compared to the most efficient alternatives, will be negative, or at least not really at what we would consider subsistence level. What are people for in this situation?

Now, there are clearly some things we would still want other people to do—I’m assuming here that there are still people in charge. But I think we’d have to start thinking that the assumptions we have about how the economy will work, how the output we are potentially able to produce will be distributed, and what you need to do to get the things you need to survive and lead a good life—whatever that means in this context—how that will be done, would be radically different from the ways we have organized them.

One way I thought about this is that essentially this could be a world, at the most extreme, in which everybody lives like the aristocrats of old. The aristocrats of old didn’t do anything, basically. They owned land, and they owned the fruit of the labor of the people on the land, and they had soldiers who were theirs who controlled the latter. Well, they could live without actually producing anything. They were rentiers. In the world of AI, if all the production is essentially done by AI, we all become rentiers, and a decent society would share the rents. So we would live not on our ability to produce, but on our right to consume. I’ve never actually written about this. I suggested this in a seminar about 15 years ago in Washington. You could imagine a world in which everybody became an aristocrat. If we’re rich enough, we could organize that world. Everybody could enjoy lots of stuff. They couldn’t enjoy everything—you can’t all have the most beautiful view in the world—but you could imagine that sort of world. Politically, though, it involves a complete transformation of the fundamental assumptions of our economic, social, and political order.

Mounk: Let me ask you about two things here. The first is that I find that analogy imprecise in two ways. The first is that many aristocrats had a lot of leisure, but they were actually responsible for something. In some ways, they were running, in our language today, small- or medium-sized enterprises. A profligate duke could spend money and not care about his fields falling into disarray, and then he would leave a relatively destitute heir. But their social role was to make sure that the heir would get about as much money and fields and so on as they did. So they were responsible for managing, essentially, hundreds of thousands or tens of thousands of employees. Now, they did that in a relatively arm’s-length way, and the people they employed to go around and look after that did most of the dirty work. But they were actually, in that sense, running little enterprises.

They had a sense of responsibility, and were judged on whether or not they were able to pass on to their heirs what they had received from their parents. The other point you hinted at is that, of course, the lives of aristocrats—insofar as they were happy, and if you read Brideshead Revisited and other kinds of works, there are good questions about the extent to which they were happy; many of them probably had quite empty lives and felt that emptiness—but insofar as they had meaning, they had meaning in part because they had high social status. They had a high positional good. They could go around and say, “I’m a duke.”

I have a whole social world of which I’m a part, and in which I play an essential role in the legitimization of this strange political order, because of my social position. I’m somebody. But not everybody can be somebody by virtue of who they are by birth.

Wolf: That is right. That is something we can’t arrange. We can only arrange that they consume. We can’t arrange to give them this exalted status. I agree with you absolutely, of course. A book that influenced me a lot in thinking about how the morality—the sense of purpose in life—of people like that might collapse, because it’s a brilliant book, is Les Liaisons Dangereuses, whose idea was, in a sense—here are these signs of the French aristocracy; of course, when it was written is important—who basically thought, particularly the male ones, that all they can do in life is destroy the lives of young women by seducing them and abandoning them. That’s clearly part of how they lived. So it can be very, very destructive.

I think I’m obviously one of those people—a classic modern person, perhaps pre-modern given where we are now—who thinks that the value in life consists of fruitful work and contributing to society and being part of it. I justify what I’ve done in my life as contributing in some way to political and economic life. That’s value, and I’m paid for it, and I feel very good about it.

In a world in which those functions wouldn’t exist, because they will be done better by an AI program, or because there’s no political system left to advise, then I don’t know what I would do. I do think that without some sense of contributing through one’s own efforts to society... You’re right, of course, dukes felt that too, in the way they did things. Certainly people who held serious positions in the state as a result of their rank. If you take that away from human beings, they basically never grow up. They’re never adults. They are perpetually looked after. That’s not a life. This is, of course, what Brave New World was about.

There are lots of major contributions to literature which play around with exactly this theme: what do you do if there’s no struggle, no effort, and no reward for effort, when you’re basically playing, and you know you’re playing? Well, I think it’s poison. I’m in complete—poison, which is why, as I said, if I were dictator of the world and invited to this commission, I would say this whole thing should be banned, closed, finished. I’ve said this many times. It’s what I believe. But of course it’s not gonna happen.

Mounk: I’m not sure I agree with you on that, for I am very conscious of the dangers of AI, but I actually want to ask a question that brings the conversation a little bit full circle, back to the concerns of your book. You rightly defend the triumph of democratic capitalism in your book, and explain the dangers that await us if that system breaks down. But let’s try and imagine the world fifty or a hundred years from now, if the AI revolution totally takes place. If it does turn out that a lot of the ingredients to productivity that used to be scarce, and that therefore needed to be distributed by markets, no longer are scarce in that way—we have much greater material plenty, nearly unlimited compute, and we have intelligence at our beck and call for negligible or nonexistent prices—most people can be idle, perhaps happily, perhaps unhappily, and live in material splendor where we find it hard to imagine, and yet we somehow keep control of the AI.

I know these are all very, very large “if” statements, and I think there’s good reason to think a bunch of them don’t turn out to be true. But let’s take that as a premise, as a question, for a moment. Do we still need capitalism in that world? Is capitalism still the right economic system, or will we have to envisage a totally different economic system to govern that kind of a world?

Wolf: The answer, in a way, would relate to where I would challenge the assumptions—and, implicitly, the assumption you’re making, and this, of course, goes back through a whole history, including the prophecies of Karl Marx about the future. It’s been picked up strangely in a very popular recent book, which I’m sure you’ve read, on abundance.

The idea of limitless abundance seems to me to be very difficult to imagine. The reason is there are things that are intrinsically scarce. As long as the things that are intrinsically scarce exist, they have to be allocated in some way. The market is only one way, and some of them probably don’t want to be allocated in that way.

Let’s think about what might not be abundant. First, in your world of limitless abundance, you’re assuming away resource constraints—that means we have limitless energy, we can recycle things freely, as it were, at zero cost, and the basic raw materials for production, metals and all the rest of it, will be freely available. But the most important of these things, unquestionably, is energy. So the world you imagine must, I think, have a limitless energy source, and it probably would have to be fusion. So there are quite big technological problems to solve, which may or may not be soluble.

Then the second set of things—if we don’t solve them, things will continue to be scarce, and we have to have a mechanism for allocating them. It’s either through markets, in some way, which is capitalism, or it’s through hierarchy of some kind. The hierarchies are political, and we have to discuss how those will be organized.

Then the other set of things, which was introduced into my thinking by a magnificent book published in the ’70s by a man called Fred Hirsch, which you might know, called The Social Limits to Growth—which is basically about what are called positional goods. There are a vast number of things that are valuable because they’re intrinsically scarce.

Mounk: Well, and that goes back to the idea that not everybody can be an aristocrat, because the core of being an aristocrat is to be superior to most people in the relevant social hierarchy.

Wolf: Not everybody—for example, think about houses. Land is not freely available. Land is intrinsically constrained. We need houses, and I live in a particularly nice suburb of London, and everybody can’t live here. The result of that—the fact that everybody can’t live here—is that houses cost millions. They didn’t when I bought mine, but they do now.

The point is, everybody can’t live here. Everybody can’t have the perfect view. Everybody can’t own a Swiss lake or a beautiful island in the Caribbean. In other words, there are positional goods which are intrinsically limited by virtue of the demand from all the other humans. Somebody has to allocate this somehow, through social status or market competition. We do it through a mixture of the two. Above all, market competition generates the wealth. If you win in market competition, then you can buy the island in the Caribbean. But these are not things that can become abundant, and positions in society can’t be, by definition. Only one person can be the president or the prime minister at any time. We could imagine a competition which isn’t through voting, as we do it now, but one can manage.

Essentially, a world in which goods are freely available—that is imaginable for many goods anyway—but there are lots of things we really care about which will remain scarce, and they’re really important because they’re about social status. If they’re not done through the market, which is perfectly possible, then you have to manage them through some other allocation, and, by and large, historically, it’s been done through force.

That was, of course, Marx’s great mistake. He thought that if we got rid of private property, all these problems would be solved. I’ll leave aside his problem about abundance, but the problem he found was that it wasn’t solved, because somebody with the biggest gun—and the largest number of guns—simply took whatever he wanted and allocated the rest to the people who supported him. So I think the problem is much more profound than you suggest, even in this world.

In the rest of this conversation, Yascha and Martin discuss whether we are in an AI bubble, what would happen if it burst, and the state of the European economy. This part of the conversation is reserved for paying subscribers…

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In this week’s episode of The Good Fight Club, Yascha Mounk, Larry Diamond, and Arlie Hochschild explore what the Democrats’ historic midterm landslide reveals about Donald Trump’s waning hold on American voters, how Democrats can balance accountability with a positive agenda ahead of 2028, and whether democratic institutions have proven more resilient than many feared.

Larry Diamond is a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University, and is the founding coeditor of the Journal of Democracy.

Arlie Hochschild is Professor Emerita of Sociology at the University of California, Berkeley. Her latest book is Stolen Pride: Loss, Shame, and the Rise of the Right.

This transcript has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.

Yascha Mounk: We thought we couldn’t quite torture our East Coast contributors at 2 a.m., so we have this amazing West Coast panel. Or a bicoastal panel, since I’m currently in Europe. To update people on the current state of the election results: Democrats will control both the House and the Senate, and they will do so by really quite astonishing margins. According to the betting markets I’m looking at right now, they will likely control 56 Senate seats, up from 47.

They will win not just in swing states like Ohio or Michigan. They will win not just in blue states that have had Republican senators for a long time, like Susan Collins in Maine. They will win in Texas. They will win in South Carolina. They will win in Iowa. They are at the moment favored to win in Mississippi, though that race is currently too close to call. As we are recording, we have the Democratic candidate there ahead by 28 votes. They will win in Kansas. These are really quite astonishing results.

In the House, we are likely to see not a close race—not a slight Democratic lean, but a solidly Democratic House. At the moment, 261 seats are projected to go to the Democrats with some amount of certainty, and only 173 seats to the Republicans, with a number of seats still too close to call.

And then, of course, the governors’ races tell an astonishing story of their own. Republicans win in places like Florida, where they seem to be winning across the board. They are able to hold the governor’s mansion in places like New Hampshire or Vermont, where they have popular local moderate Republicans. But Democrats will win not just in California and Illinois and New York and Massachusetts, where you’d expect it. They will also win in Texas. They will win in swing states like Nevada and Arizona, in Ohio and Michigan and Pennsylvania.

That is my attempt to summarize what just happened: a midterm blowout for the Democrats of historic proportions. Arlie, what do you make of all of this?

Arlie Hochschild: Well, when I stop jumping up and down, I think we should remember that Europe and the whole world have been tuned in to this election. What it tells us is that we’re awake, and that democracy, although it has been laid low, is functioning. So I think this is a really big deal. We can’t take it for granted, and we have lessons to learn from this, but it’s great news.

Mounk: Larry, what is your first reaction?

Larry Diamond: Well, I don’t know how partisan you want to get. I could express my purely partisan preferences, but as a democracy scholar, I think it’s great news in several respects.

First of all, we have an authoritarian president who has had authoritarian ambitions and an authoritarian agenda. Fortunately, he’s been too incompetent to make a great deal of headway in achieving them. But he has represented the most serious challenge to American democracy, I’d say, from presidential intent in American history. And he’s now been rebuked decisively and across the board. He has been rebuked geographically, politically, and demographically in the United States to an unprecedented degree.

Secondly, he’s going to be checked by large Democratic majorities. That’s true not only in the House, with dozens of Democratic seats as the margin, but also in the Senate, where it’s looking like the Democrats might potentially have something like a 55-to-45 majority. People thought it would be a miracle if the Democrats picked up four seats and won control of the House, but they may pick up seven or eight.

And then Democrats are winning governorships in states like Texas that were thought to be off limits. It’s not just Jon Ossoff in Georgia, but James Talarico in Texas. And you have Keisha Lance Bottoms, an African American woman, being elected governor of Georgia and Gina Hinojosa, a Latina woman, being elected governor of Texas. These people are not winning by small margins. They’re winning by large, and in some cases double-digit, margins.

And I’ll say one other thing that I think is encouraging. As social scientists, we thought for a long time now that the geographical political map had shrunk to a small number of swing states. We thought there were many states that couldn’t be flipped. That included not only the blue states in the West and the Northeast, but also solid red states like South Carolina and Texas and Kansas, and not least Mississippi. We thought that partisan orientations had crystallized to an unmovable degree. The fact that people have become open-minded again about their partisan preferences and their willingness to exact accountability is, I think, a very hopeful sign.

Mounk: One of the things I’m thinking about in a purely analytical mode today is that there’s a lot of talk about America being very polarized and divided. Of course, that is true in some important respects. But I think sometimes this is presented as if we are Bosnia-Herzegovina, as if there are these immovable blocks of voters who are either on the Democratic or the Republican side. In this picture, if I knew who your parents and grandparents voted for, I’d know who you’re going to vote for. Every election is just an attempt to mobilize your base and get them out to the polls. There’s really no movement between the parties, so we have to live in this era of very close-run politics forever.

I think there’s been very good evidence all along that that’s not true, because the demographic coalitions within each party have shifted very rapidly. The way that Trump won in 2016 was very different from how he won in 2024. And I’ve been arguing for a while that it is possible for both Republicans and Democrats, if the stars align, to build a really convincing majority. I think we see that in the midterms today.

This was not really because of Democratic strength. It was because of a deep rebuke of Donald Trump. Democrats were able to build such a broad majority against Donald Trump in this referendum on him that they were able to win in places like Kansas and Texas, and that they may be able to flip a Senate seat in Mississippi, which would really be quite remarkable.

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Arlie, you’ve spent much of the last 20 years speaking to voters, most of whom were enthusiastic about the Tea Party. They probably voted for Donald Trump in 2016, and I imagine they voted for him in 2024, and perhaps in 2020 as well. You did this in the Louisiana Bayou for your first book on this topic, and in Appalachia for your follow-up book.

I always think it’s least interesting to think about the true MAGA diehards. It’s more interesting to think about some of the very decent people you portray and talk to in your books: people in rural communities, in mostly red states, who probably did support Trump and the MAGA movement Trump and the MAGA movement for these years. What do you think is going on with those voters and those communities today? Are we partially seeing some of these voters changing their minds? How does your research make you reflect on how Democrats were able to build this big anti-Trump majority today?

Hochschild: Good question. Just to back up, I got to know people in the second-poorest and the whitest congressional district in the country. Many of these people were coal miners. That’s the dominant industry in eastern Kentucky.

It’s a region that used to be New Deal Democrats back in the day under Roosevelt. Then it became moderate, and for a while it was moderate Republican. Then, over the last three elections in this district, over 83 percent voted for Donald Trump. So I wondered why. What had swung things so far right?

The story is in a way local, but I think it tells a global story. They were hit by the loss of coal. Not every place has had coal and then lost it. But globalization and offshoring and automation, and even AI looking ahead, can create regional losses in a context where some regions are doing fine. Those regions are winners and others are losers. And in those losing regions that are getting economically battered, there’s a story of loss that sets up a predisposition for restoration. It’s a recipe for right-wing takeover.

What happened in eastern Kentucky is that coal jobs went out. People not only lost their jobs, and so did truck drivers and people in related industries, but they also lost their whole way of life and their pride. They would get in a truck and drive six hours trying to find an industrial job, and sometimes that wasn’t available in the area. These are very local people, very proud people, and they took a hit. Opiates came in as coal jobs went out. They didn’t see a bottom, and they didn’t see any answers for them in either the Democratic or the Republican Party.

It was into that vacuum and that sense of loss that Donald Trump came. And it’s almost as if he excavated shame and discouragement and fear, and he processed it and lit it aflame. It’s what I would call, and called in the book, a kind of emotional capture.

He went in there and he said, hey, I see who you are. That was an appeal for recognition. He gave them a very compelling narrative of stolen pride: Who took your pride? It didn’t just go away; someone took it. He moved shame to blame. And thirdly, he had a kind of anti-shaming ritual that really consolidated that narrative. I’m saying all this because that capture was pretty hard to break. It took a lot of mistakes.

Mounk: Do you think it has broken today? Do you think what we’re observing is that it’s broken? Or is it more that other groups of voters who moved to Trump in 2024 have moved away from him today?

Hochschild: That’s a great question. That is the question. No, I think the people I came to know have not said, now I see the Democratic Party and all the possibilities. Yes, I do want health care for my children. And by the way, those Medicaid cuts that Trump just made support the addiction recovery center that my children go to. So no, I don’t think it’s a story of the scales having fallen from their eyes. I think that emotional capture is hard to move.

But I think he’s made so many mistakes, and we are in a way profiting from all the fallout from his mistakes. It’s not that progressives have done wonderful things.

Mounk: One way of putting this: the metaphor you use in Strangers in Their Own Land, and expand upon in the later work on that stolen sense of pride, is that people feel like they’re standing in line for the American dream, and other people are coming in and cutting into the line. This idea that immigrants, African Americans, even the brown pelican, the state bird of Louisiana, are cutting in because environmental regulations prioritize its interests over ours. And in that narrative, Donald Trump might be a bully, might be unlikable, and you might have some reservations about him, but he’s the bully we need to protect us from these line cutters. Perhaps that fundamental story is still there, but people have lost faith that Trump is a good bully, or an effective bully, or a bully who actually stands up to people. That may mean people are going to go in search of the next bully. But they’ve given up hope on this bully. Is that one way of extending your metaphor?

Hochschild: Yes, that’s very well said. And that is a background fear that I do have. So as a caution: let’s celebrate, but let’s learn from this about how vulnerable democracies are.

Mounk: Larry, you know a lot about American politics, but you know most about democracy around the world. How do you think this compares to other moments in which a would-be authoritarian populist falls out of favor with people?

Diamond: Being shown to be frauds.

Mounk: It seems to me that there’s a bit of a pattern. These figures are able to dominate everything for a while. There’s a period in which every political conversation in a country ends up being about them: about the comparatively harmless Silvio Berlusconi in Italy for 15 or 20 years of disastrous Italian politics, about Narendra Modi in India, about all these different figures.

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And then there are two interesting moments that sometimes happen when they lose their hold. The first is when most people who gave them the benefit of the doubt, who believed in some of the premises and went along with it, realize that these figures have failed completely to live up to those premises. That’s when the majority against them builds. The second is when suddenly they’re no longer the center of every conversation, and everything in the political system is no longer about them. It feels to me like we’ve very clearly reached that first point today, and we may reach the second point quite soon, in the coming weeks and months.

How does this compare to what happened with Viktor Orbán in Hungary, or what is happening with Aleksandar Vučić in Serbia, and with some of these other moments when figures who seemed quite dominant in the political system suddenly feel like they’re being swept to the margins, at least temporarily? How does the international perspective help us understand what’s happening in the United States today?

Diamond: Well, it certainly has a lot of the feel of Orbán’s decisive defeat in the parliamentary elections in Hungary earlier this year, and of Vučić’s defeat just about a week ago, nine days ago. And as long as we’re on the comparative theme, we might note that Narendra Modi has probably peaked and is starting to decline in India. I think there are some similar reasons in each case.

People may have a certain tolerance for corruption among a charismatic populist elite who has, to put it in Arlie’s language, emotionally captured them. The populist is speaking to their identities, to their sense of dignity and their cultural aspirations, and also to their material aspirations. The populist is giving them a narrative that they’re processing in a way that is not entirely fact-based or rational—this is a very important implication of Arlie’s two books. That’s what the emotional component is.

But at some point, performance does enter in here. When your life is getting harder and harder, when affordability is getting worse and worse, some of the layers of commitment do get stripped away. I’m now speaking very suggestively and hypothetically here, because it’s Arlie who has done the really deep fieldwork. But I have a hypothesis that there are rings of commitment. There’s a hard core that hasn’t been stripped away even today, that is still emotionally captured and very much aligned culturally and symbolically with Trump.

But there are some pretty significant layers that got ripped away tonight from Trump, from MAGA, and from the last 10 or 20 years of the Republican Party. Certainly the young Latino voters you were referring to by implication, Yascha, who had defected to Trump in 2024. Also some other younger voters, and a lot of historic Republican voters who are really hurting as a result of rising gas and diesel prices and rising fertilizer prices. In the cities and suburbs, there’s the lack of affordable housing and the high cost of groceries, hamburger meat, and so on. This hurt Trump and the Republicans very, very badly. We could see it coming from the polling data, and it was even worse.

I just want to make one more point for the moment, Yascha. I think there’s a historic opportunity for the Democrats here, but only if they don’t fall back on their worst instincts. Those instincts push these voters away with the Democrats’ own brand of identity politics, which makes these voters defensive and feel like and makes them feel like their pride is still being stolen by all these elite, effete, college-educated, big-city people.

I would urge every one of your listeners to listen to every word of James Talarico’s acceptance speech tonight after his Senate victory. It was remarkable. I think it’s one of the greatest election victory speeches of recent decades. He talked about love, he talked about inclusion, he talked about “love thy neighbor.” He spoke in religious terms, and he spoke about unifying rather than dividing.

The lessons are abundant from the recent victories in Serbia, Poland, and Hungary, and also from what would be happening in Turkey now, with Recep Tayyip Erdoğan being prepared to be shown the door in the next election if he hadn’t arrested all of the opposition. What was the name of the opposition campaign in Turkey’s municipal elections in 2019 and 2024? It was a campaign of radical love. And if you listen to James Talarico, it’s exactly the same language. It’s inclusion, not division.

Hochschild: Wow. Yes, I just want to say I love what Larry has just said, and I think it’s worth really pausing on it and taking it in. We’ve got a huge opportunity that, honestly, I wasn’t sure we would have. Democracy is so precious, but it’s also more fragile than we knew. So what’s to learn? Now’s the time, once the celebration and dancing is over, to ask: what have we learned?

We’ve come very close to really losing things, as Trump has disregarded every check and balance and stamped on things. And we’re still in danger of his calling a state of emergency and suspending things. I don’t think we’re home free yet.

So it’s time to not make any mistakes. And Larry, I think you’re right that Talarico is really setting the mood that will work, because it’s a reach-out mood. Without quite realizing it, the Democratic Party has become more and more marginal. It used to have labor unions as the big middleman between the working class and the Democratic Party, and now we’re down to nine percent of workers who are unionized. So that’s gone, and left to itself, the party has almost forgotten about social class.

What’s to learn is that we do have to reach out and strengthen ourselves. We do that by eating some humble pie and taking very seriously the fears and the shame that people have suffered when their sector, their portion of American life, has fallen on their heads. We should take that as our job to help fix.

Mounk: There’s going to be endless intra-party sniping over the next days and weeks as people try to understand and interpret these election results. Clearly, a lot of the very progressive candidates won in a blue tsunami environment that allowed them to win even in swing states. My impression so far is nevertheless that the more moderate Democrats got many more votes. Take one of the most-watched races, in Michigan. Abdul El-Sayed looks like he’s going to win convincingly. At the moment, he’s up by nearly seven points. But Jocelyn Benson, the Democratic candidate for governor in Michigan, with the same electorate on the same day, is running 12 points ahead of the Republican candidate.

So that’s a five-point margin between the more moderate, more mainstream Democrat and the progressive Democrat. Probably every European newspaper and many American newspapers are going to treat El-Sayed’s win as the true story of the election tomorrow. In a tsunami environment, you can drop five points and still win Michigan. And given how important it is to rebuke Donald Trump at this moment, I think that’s a good thing. But in an ordinary election, five percentage points makes the difference between a Democratic president and a Republican president, and potentially between a president aligned with the MAGA movement and one who is not. So I think it’s important to keep that in mind.

What do you think Democrats should be doing now? I’ll tell you that I’m a little bit torn about that. They are taking a big majority in the House and a significant majority in the Senate, though not a filibuster-proof majority. They obviously should be looking into the enormous corruption, rule-breaking, and norm-breaking that Trump and his administration have been inflicting on the United States and its people for the last two years.

I also worry, though, that they may become too consumed by that. For example, they might try a third impeachment, which may well be warranted in terms of what Trump did, but which can only result in a third failure in the Senate, as in the previous two instances. That would be a self-inflicted wound. In fact, it would allow Trump to keep doing what he wants to do, which is to be the absolute center of American politics.

So my gut is telling me that Democrats need to make sure there’s accountability for what Trump’s administration is doing. They obviously need to proactively stop what they can of whatever Trump and his people may be planning for the next two years.

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But they also need to actually offer a positive vision that prepares the country for a true end to the Trump era in 2028. Getting that balance right is going to be very hard, and it’s going to involve a lot of judgment calls that are going to be difficult. So any thoughts about how Democrats can both push for accountability and resist what the Trump administration is doing for the next two years, but without gifting Donald Trump the position of being the absolute center of attention, in hearing after hearing, in ways that might actually extend his relevance and his dominance of American politics beyond his natural sell-by date?

Hochschild: Well, this is a great way to look at what the Democrats now have to do. One is to restore accountability. Yes, that’s huge. That’s basic. But I think it’s interesting what Larry was picking up about Talarico’s acceptance speech. What it is is a restoration of civility, and that in itself I think is hugely important.

Because without us quite looking at it, Trump, like other—what shall we call it? the big word is fascist—those leaders do something to our emotions. They change the feeling rules. They say, for example, as is being said today by people like Elon Musk and Pete Hegseth, that empathy is a bad thing. Empathy’s a silly thing. If you’re feeling sorry for people, that makes you weak. Actually, Musk has said it destroys civilization.

And that’s not just something on the side. There is a kind of chest-beating: anger is good, revenge is good. Even awe is kind of being privatized. There’s an emotional regime, I believe, that has been quietly insinuated into our hearts, and it’s being proposed to us as a way to be a human being.

So I think there needs to be a whole movement to restore civility. And I’m not talking about just Mother’s Day cards and Christmas cards and sort of formalistic, bowing niceness. I’m talking about the real deal, and there we’ve been assaulted. There’s been a shock and awe that Steve Bannon describes. They’re trying to get us confused, with too many things to look at, and we have been a little pushed back on our heels.

We haven’t said, hey, wait a minute, what is it to be an American? What is it we need to reaffirm? So I think we need to actually name the thing that these kinds of highly centralized regimes impose on us. And we might call it civility at the very minimum.

Diamond: Decency, yeah. I strongly endorse that, and I’d like to see more of it on our college campuses too, Arlie. I think you’ll agree with that. We’re working hard on that at Stanford and other campuses, as I’m sure you are at UC Berkeley. I never use the F-word in referring to Trump. I just think it’s polarizing and blinding and so on.

But deep authoritarianism, and certainly all forms of fascism, is a politics of dominance, a politics of strength, a politics of deliberate cruelty. I think that’s part of what got a massive rebuke tonight, along with the politics of just complete and total arrogant corruption.

Talarico spoke a lot about this, but in very simple and elegant terms. He said, “It’s not about left versus right, it’s about top versus bottom.” And he tied this into Musk spending $200 million to try to rescue Ken Paxton in the Texas Senate race—of course, with spectacularly little success.

I think Democrats can fruitfully pivot now to a kind of good populism: a populism of standing up truly for ordinary people against the monopolies and oligopolies and billionaires and trillionaires, and against the massive redistribution of wealth and power away from ordinary Americans—working class, middle class—to this technocratic elite.

There are things that can be done on the tax code. There’s much more that can be done on the affordability front beyond the housing bill that they addressed. But real progress is going to require some give from the more determined left-of-center constituencies in the Democratic Party. Because if you want to build more, you’ve got to loosen regulation. This is a point that Frank Fukuyama has been making repeatedly in the pages of Persuasion.

So I think there is an agenda there on the economic front that at least they’re going to be able to send from the House to the Senate. We’ll see if they can pick up a few Republican votes for some of these bills.

I also want to say, if I can echo something I wrote again for your magazine about democratic reform: I think the winning hand here on the accountability front, beyond investigations—of which there will be many by the appropriate congressional committees—is not impeachment. The American people are tired of that pointless drama. It’s reform.

There’s real scope now for reform to ban partisan gerrymandering, ban congressional stock trading, tighten oversight procedures for corruption, and strengthen the autonomy of the inspectors general in the different cabinet departments. And I think the Democrats should push a bill that would substantially constrain the scope of presidential pardons. It is clearly President Trump’s intent now to pardon everyone who ever walked into the Oval Office. He said as much on multiple occasions.

They probably can’t get a lot of these things passed—certainly not a constitutional amendment—without substantial Republican support. But they can draw lines, create an agenda for the future, and put the heat on Republicans on some basic good governance reforms that would not be explicitly partisan.

Mounk: Well, the other thing here is that I just think it should expand the ambition of the Democratic Party for 2028. And I say this again as somebody who cares about our democracy more than as somebody who has a partisan political preference. It’s always seemed to me that the only thing that would put a real end to the MAGA era is a decisive electoral rebuke. Now, we’ve had the first part of that today. It is a very decisive rebuke, but it’s a midterm election.

I think what it’ll take is a really decisive rebuke in a presidential election. And if Democrats are capable of certainly picking up Texas and potentially picking up Mississippi in a midterm, then they should be capable of winning a presidential election, with many, many, many swing states and some states that are not usually swing states rebuking the MAGA agenda. And if we are in the running for that, then that might also put pressure on Republicans and on Republican primary voters to choose a different kind of candidate. Perhaps suddenly a window does open for a moderate Republican—I’m thinking, for example, of Spencer Cox, the governor of Utah—to run in an anti-Trump lane. I don’t think it’s very likely.

Diamond: I think it’s a fantasy.

Mounk: I think that after this election there is going to be a moment when the political constellation shifts. But in order to do that, Democrats need to actually try to speak to the middle of the country, right? There are all kinds of fancy theories about what explains the 2016 vote and the 2020 vote and the 2024 vote. One relatively straightforward one is that most Americans are very angry with the status quo. They don’t trust the elites. The old partisan loyalties, where you just blindly vote for whoever your mom and dad voted for, are mostly gone. But Americans aren’t actually extreme or radical.

What we’ve seen each time is that Joe Biden, I think, had some bad policies that pushed the country too far on questions like the border with Mexico, for example. People got enraged with that: Let’s vote for Trump. Trump came in; he was much more radical, much more extreme. What do they do? They delivered the blue tsunami we’re seeing right now.

I think it’s still possible to build these big majorities. But for the sake of our democracy, the Democrats need to have the ambition to do that. And if they do that, Larry, and if they are able to win a similar majority in 2028 as they did in 2026, then you might not need to abolish the filibuster in order to get a lot of things done. Because Democrats would, on a similar performance two years from today, have 60 Senate seats or more, as well as the House, as well as the presidency. And that might be a moment in which you institute a lot of these deeper electoral and other reforms.

Diamond: Yeah, well, I think a bottom line of what you’re saying, Yascha, and Arlie as well, is that it’s not going to be enough for Democrats to just oppose Trump, investigate Trump, or even propose the kinds of reforms of American democracy that I think are urgently needed, like ending partisan gerrymandering. They’ve got to have a positive economic agenda that features some degree of economic justice and addresses the wreckage Arlie was referring to—of jobs and hope and economic opportunity—that was wrought by globalization, by automation, and by social and technological change.

There are people who have ideas. I’ll tell you somebody who I think is being very underestimated now, who I think is going to be a serious presidential candidate, particularly if AOC doesn’t run: Ro Khanna. Whether or not you agree with all his policies, he’s thinking in these kinds of terms about an economic New Deal to stimulate industry and create jobs.

Hochschild: Yes, yes. I agree with that.

Mounk: I’m personally quite skeptical about Ro Khanna, though I’m always in favor of former podcast guests becoming president of the United States. Perhaps Arlie or Larry, you can consider doing so.

One of the stories of the election that we haven’t mentioned is Jon Ossoff. I think part of the reason for that is that in what should be a swing state, he was running so far ahead in the polls that it wasn’t really considered a swing-state election anymore by tonight.

He is likely to win by, I believe, about 20 points, which is really quite remarkable. He’s currently up 18 points in the prediction market margin. And when you look at the betting markets for the 2028 presidential election they are now led by Jon Ossoff.

You now have Ossoff with a big jump up today to 22 percent, then AOC and Gavin Newsom at 14 percent, and then a whole bunch of people at 5 percent or below: Andy Beshear, Josh Shapiro, Kamala Harris, Pete Buttigieg, et cetera, et cetera. So it’ll obviously be very interesting to watch how that primary plays out. Any personal predictions or favorites, Arlie or Larry?

Hochschild: Well, of all you mentioned, I think a lot of exciting people and minds have come forward, but I do think Jon Ossoff has a special gift. And he is a populist of a quite remarkable sort. He will talk about one crime after another that Donald Trump has permitted. Having reminded his audience of all the terrible things going on while we’re watching—it’s like a horror movie somehow—he’ll then say to the side, Have you been watching that? Did you notice that? He’s inviting people to develop a critical consciousness of all of the ways in which democracy is being eroded.

Diamond: I’ll say a couple of things. For a while, people were saying that the Democrats don’t have any candidates, that they don’t have any talent, and so on. I found that extremely shallow and irritating. I think it’s now apparent after this election that there’s a lot of talent, young talent, in the Democratic Party. Right now, the Democratic Party is like the Milwaukee Brewers. They’re just rich in young talent that’s gonna win a World Series.

I do agree with the implication of both of you. Right now, not just in the polls but in emerging judgments about raw talent and ideological and programmatic positioning, Ossoff may well be the leading Democratic presidential contender. I think he’s gonna have staying power because of his rhetorical talent and a certain type of charisma that will have long legs.

To win in 2028 and really form a governing majority, the party is gonna have to bridge its two wings, the progressive wing and the centrist wing. Ossoff may be able to do that. I don’t think he’s the only one, and others may find their own ways to do it. But the progressive wing is not gonna go away.

I don’t know who will be the nominee, but I have a hypothesis. The last three or four people standing on the stage are going to include Ossoff and someone who’s carrying the Bernie Sanders flag of progressivism. That means a somewhat more radical approach to economic redistribution and to the classic variable of how much state intervention you want versus market. If AOC doesn’t run, I really don’t see who is on the horizon who will capture that with a more coherent substantive program than I predict Ro Khanna will have.

I think Gavin Newsom is going to fade. I don’t think he’s decided where he is on the spectrum. And I think a lot of the next round of presidential politics is going to put a premium on authenticity. I don’t think that’s Newsom’s strong suit.

Mounk: Very politely put. It is past 3 a.m. on the East Coast, and past midnight even on the West Coast, so thank you so much for staying up so late. I have one last question that I want to ask each of you, and then we’re gonna start wrapping up here.

I’ve held off on writing that Trump is fading for a long time. A lot of overexcitable columnists, some of them my close friends, have written that article every month since October 2016. Clearly, Trump has dominated the American political system for a very long time. At this point, though, I think it is fair to say that Trump does feel very much on the way out. His hold on the American political system is fading.

He is going to continue being president for the next two years. He can do a lot of damage, even with Democrats now controlling the House and the Senate and most governor’s mansions in the country. So it’s going to be a rough two years, but it does feel like his moment is fading for good. That doesn’t necessarily mean that the MAGA movement is fading for good. We’ll have to see whether JD Vance or somebody else becomes the standard bearer in 2028. Tucker Carlson or Donald Trump Jr. might at some point be the standard bearers, which I think is imaginable.

Nevertheless, I want to do a little bit of introspection from the perspective of a political scientist. For good reason, we warned about the dangers to democracy. Larry, when you were co-editor of the Journal of Democracy, you helped to launch my career by publishing a couple of articles in which my colleague Roberto Foa and I were warning about the danger to democracy before 2016, before it was cool. Is it time to revise that judgment to some extent, or at least to moderate it a little bit?

Has it turned out that some of these authoritarian populists have really degraded democratic institutions in their countries, but have not been able to capture them to the extent that some of us came to worry about over the last 10 years? We did not think that Viktor Orbán could be displaced, at least not easily, through free and fair elections in his country. The elections weren’t entirely fair, because he had accumulated unfair advantages through his control over the media and so on. But by a democratic vote of the Hungarian people, he was swept out of power, and he conceded.

We did not think that would be possible with Vučić in Serbia. Some people don’t think it’s possible with Modi in India. I am personally gaining more and more confidence that it might be possible with Modi when he outstays his welcome, in the way that Trump has just done in the United States.

At this point, the administration of elections is in the hands of governors and secretaries of state, and there has been a blue wave, a blue tsunami, against Trump. I think it is absolutely in the hands of the American people to sweep Trump and his clique from power in 2028 if they decisively vote for a candidate who is able to capture the public imagination.

Now, that’s still compatible with a world in which a lot of countries are forms of—I’m not sure competitive authoritarianism is quite the right word—competitive wannabe authoritarians. These are people who are trying to capture the institutions, who don’t care much about democratic norms, who increase corruption, and who degrade the quality of democratic governance. All of those things can continue to be huge problems.

But have we overstated the degree to which this is a battle to the death between democracy and autocracy? Have democratic institutions proven themselves to be more resilient over the last 10 years than we might have expected? Arlie and Larry, you get the last words today.

Hochschild: We have to be cautious. When we look at the rise of right-wing leaders in this country and around the world, we’re looking at two things. It’s tempting to focus on the leader, but that’s just one thing. The other is the followers and their emotional predisposition, and we have to look at that.

In my work, it was clear that people were looking for a Donald Trump because their lives had been turned upside down. They were upset. They were afraid that they were going down and that there was no bottom to that down. That fear, that predisposition to hear the tyrant’s siren song and to be emotionally captured, is very important.

Today we’re faced with an AI revolution. Word is that for some half of the tasks that entry-level jobs call for, AI can do better than a person can. So we’re in for another major disruption. This time it doesn’t affect blue-collar rural workers. It affects the middle class.

I see Donald Trump heroizing and touting the wonders of AI, but creating no plan and offering nothing to meet the needs of an unemployed middle-class person who’s just gotten four years of education, can’t pay back the loan, and is very uncertain about what the next job is. It’s a disaster that could very well happen.

We’re not China, which can just tell the managers of its industries, don’t fire anybody. And we’re not yet Finland, which says, okay, we have a free job retraining program for all our people, because the economy does change and we’ll need to upgrade our skill sets. That’s a public offering. I see those as two models, one bad and one preferable, for what’s going to hit us.

So focus on the predisposition to accept magical answers and be emotionally captured. We need to look at that now and do something about it now.

Mounk: Arlie, thank you very much. You’re probably unaware of this, but you just advertised my new book, which is out in the spring. It is precisely about what happens to our society if those kinds of job market effects from artificial intelligence prove to be real. Larry?

Hochschild: Wonderful. I look forward to reading it.

Diamond: Me too. I would completely embrace what Arlie said. I’d go a bit further, and then I’ll give a more direct answer to your question, Yascha.

Over the next few years, we’re looking at the disappearance of long-haul trucking jobs, probably the disappearance of Uber driving jobs, and the disappearance of a lot of the remaining factory jobs, which are increasingly going to be taken over by robots. What worries me is the slowness in the creation of new types of jobs.

And it’s not only the United States. Many young people in China aren’t finding jobs. Combine this with the algorithms and social media that keep driving polarization and division, and with AI turbocharging narratives of division. It’s certainly a period where there’s going to be a lot of raw material for anger, division, suspicion, and the emotional, not fully rational, side of politics.

Then you look at specific countries. I think we’re turning the tide, at least for now, in the United States. We’ll see if we are on the cusp of a truly realigning period in American electoral history, as we had in 1932 and 1980. Or we may just be in a period that a number of democracies are in now, where the alternation is between more rational and democratic politics, in terms of commitment to liberal democracy, and the politics of illiberal populism morphing into authoritarianism.

It’s hard for me to imagine now someone other than Marine Le Pen being elected president of France next year. You know Europe better than I do, but you certainly have to favor her.

Mounk: She’s certainly odds-on to win, I would say.

Diamond: I’m not saying Alternative for Germany is gonna come to power in Germany. It’s the country of your birth and you follow it closely, but they’re gaining. Europe has a lot of problems. Ironically, because they worry about the United States, I think that if you look out over the next few years, continental Europe is in deeper trouble than the United States.

So I agree with Arlie. We need a lot of caution, and it’s incredibly premature to think that the battle is essentially won and all we have to do is clean up in 2028. I don’t want to panic your listeners, but I want to close with this. There’s something else that worries me that I think we’re not even beginning to take into account.

And that is, weak as he will be in terms of the capacity to get any legislation or any appointments through the Senate—judicial, ambassadorial, anything else—he still has enormous discretion in foreign policy and military policy. That is the discretion of aggression, or the discretion of resignation and passivity in the face of aggression, with regard to Ukraine.

I am very deeply worried about Taiwan right now. If you’re the People’s Republic of China and you’re looking at an aging, politically weak, wounded, and cognitively deteriorating president who has already signaled his transactional attitudes toward foreign policy ... I think we’re going to be in an extremely dangerous period in world affairs in the next two years, for democracy and for international security.

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Trump’s Spell Has Broken

Since 2016, many writers have, time and again, predicted Donald Trump’s demise. I have always resisted that temptation. It has long been clear to me that Trump had managed to dominate American politics to a remarkable extent, and would not be easy to dislodge.

But all political eras must end eventually, and the Trump Era likely ended last night. The rebuke which the American people have delivered to him is profound. The reasons are many: inflation, corruption, the war of choice with Iran, the wanton cruelty of the administration, and much more. The most important reason is even more simple: Trump made huge promises in 2016, and again in 2024. Nobody believes them anymore.

This does not mean that the furies that Trump is so masterful at channeling will suddenly disappear from American politics. Trump is fading. But Trumpism, the MAGA movement, or perhaps some new form of populist insurgency will likely stay a big part of the political system.

Big Majorities Are Possible

This is the biggest midterm wave in decades. According to current projections, Democrats stand to flip more seats in the Senate than in any election since 2008 and more seats in the House than in any election since 1974. They have flipped Senate seats in Kansas, South Carolina, and Texas, and may well do so in Mississippi. Jon Ossoff, in Georgia, will win his seat by a whopping margin of about 18 points. Democrats also won gubernatorial races everywhere from Alaska to Texas.

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The last few presidential elections have all been reasonably close. This makes it tempting to believe that American politics is polarized in the kind of way that Bosnia-Herzegovina is polarized, with rigid voting blocs implacably—and more or less permanently—opposing each other. But in fact there has been a tremendous amount of movement between the blocs. Over the past 20 years, the states that are considered blue, red, or purple have shifted around significantly; last night, to give just one example, James Talarico became the first Democrat to win a Texas Senate seat since 1988. The demographic coalitions of each party have also changed enormously; it was Trump’s unexpected inroad with blacks and Latinos, for example, that helped him pull off his 2024 victory.

All of this suggested that both Democrats and Republicans could in theory build a large majority. Today proves it.

The project of building such a large majority is what Democrats should put front and center over the coming years. Their goal for 2028 shouldn’t just be to win the presidency; it should be to win the presidency in a convincing enough manner to rebuke the whole of the MAGA movement—and (an even harder task) to do so in a way that allows them to build a lasting coalition against the anti-democratic forces in our politics.1

Moderates Outperformed, Moderately

If I had a dollar for every time a journalist or student or audience member asked me whether Democrats need to go full progressive-populist to recapture power, I’d have… a lot of dollars. Even though moderate or mainstream Democrats won over four in five primary battles against more radical challengers in the most competitive races, the rising crop of leftist candidates has dominated the news about this election to a remarkable extent.

The midterms provide a good test of that theory. It is clear that this was a referendum on Donald Trump. This allowed a number of progressives to win in genuine swing states. Anybody who still believes that somebody like AOC could, no matter how unpopular a candidate Republicans field, not possibly win the presidency in 2028 is likely wrong.

At the same time, states which had both senatorial and gubernatorial elections this year strongly suggest that progressives underperformed their more mainstream peers. In Michigan, the most closely watched race, Abdul El-Sayed, a progressive, is predicted to win his Senate race against Mike Rogers by a robust margin of about 7 points. But on the same day in the same state, Jocelyn Benson, a more mainstream Democrat, is predicted to win her governor race against John James by a margin of about 12 points. In Minnesota, Florida, and Maine the story was similar: there, too, more moderate candidates outperformed more progressive ones by a clear margin.

During a blue tsunami, this doesn’t matter much. While a more moderate candidate may have allowed Democrats to flip Florida, progressives were able to capture Senate seats in other key races. But in a typical presidential election, the average difference in performance between a mainstream and a progressive Democrat could very easily make the difference between victory and defeat.

The Task Ahead for Democrats

Democrats will now have healthy majorities in both the House and (remarkably) the Senate. What should they do with those majorities over the next two years, while Donald Trump remains in the White House?

Trump has been inflicting terrible damage on the United States, and the world. His administration has been extreme, irresponsible, and astonishingly corrupt. With his time in the limelight running out and little left to lose, he is likely to do even more extreme things over the course of the coming two years.

Democrats can and must therefore use their control of Congress to accomplish two urgent tasks: They need to stop the administration from inflicting further damage on the United States. And they need to provide the foundations for accountability by holding congressional hearings that help us understand the full scope of these misdeeds.

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Dan Williams is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Sussex. He writes the Conspicuous Cognition newsletter, which brings together philosophical insights and scientific research to examine the forces shaping contemporary society and politics.

In this week’s conversation, Yascha Mounk and Dan Williams discuss whether AI is a genuinely transformative technology or just another tool, how the temptation to outsource thinking to AI may be eroding the cognitive skills of young people, and why the political battles we are actually having about artificial intelligence are not the important ones.

This podcast was recorded at a live event in partnership with Halcyon International School.

This transcript has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.

Yascha Mounk: Welcome to this live episode of The Good Fight Podcast, coming to you from the Halcyon International School in London. Dan, I think one of the interesting things about artificial intelligence is just that it’s going to transform so many different aspects of our society. As I was preparing for the conversation today, I was wondering what I should ask you about. Should I ask you about existential risk? Should I talk about the socioeconomic impact of this? Should I talk about the thing you’ve thought a lot about, its impact on the public sphere and on misinformation? How do you think about what aspect of artificial intelligence to write about in your work, and how should we prioritize between them, or do we just need to be thinking about all of these impacts all of the time?

Dan Williams: I think we need to be thinking about all of the impacts all of the time. I think we are in the early stages of a huge technological revolution, the magnitude of which will be at least that of the Industrial Revolution, happening in a much shorter timeframe. I think it’s going to impact, as you say, not just the economy, not just the culture, not just our psychologies, not just our educational institutions, but the information environment, our social relations, and also all of the interactions between these different things.

So I think as a subject, it doesn’t really lend itself to hyper-specialized inquiry where you try to bracket off everything else. If you’re looking at the economics of AI, you are inevitably going to start asking questions about the impact of AI on our political institutions, on our political culture, on public opinion. Likewise, if you’re thinking about how AI is going to impact the information environment, the way in which we try to make sense of society, you need to be thinking about the economics of AI and the business models of these frontier AI companies.

I don’t think this is unique to this moment. If you go back to the early stages of the Industrial Revolution, precisely because it was this monumental technological revolution that changed every aspect of society in innumerable ways, it was this great era for polymaths, for people that looked not just at narrow, specialized fields, but huge questions straddling lots of different disciplines. I think that’s kind of how you have to approach AI today.

The flip side of that is precisely because these issues are so big and so complicated, and the technology is affecting so many different parts of society all at once, there is enormous uncertainty at almost every level. It’s very difficult, I think, to have any high degree of confidence about how this is going to unfold, which I think is one of the reasons why you see such spectacular levels of disagreement even about relatively basic things.

Mounk: The comparison to the Industrial Revolution is helpful and interesting. I’ve been thinking through that comparison in the context of a different set of work. But in 1800, should people have worried about the urban immiseration that might follow from the Industrial Revolution, at least in its initial stages, before helping the world get a lot richer, the kinds of things that Charles Dickens wrote about, David Copperfield, etc.? Or should they have worried about the possibility that it would revolutionize warfare and make possible the trenches of World War One? The answer is, well, we should have worried about both, and those two things end up being related in some really complicated but real ways.

So in a similar kind of way, you’re probably right that we shouldn’t choose between focusing on this or on that aspect of AI. We should be thinking about all of them at the same time. I do think, though, that there’s a kind of strange way in which some of the fights over AI feel to me like they’re not the most important ones.

The political issue that’s gotten the most traction is whether or not to build data centers. There’s a story to be told where perhaps you’re worried about existential risk, which is to say the possibility that AI might kill us all one day, and if there are fewer data centers, then it’s going to take longer to develop more capable AI models, and perhaps take longer to build robots that are actually capable of taking physical action. So opposing data centers might be a way of somehow lessening existential risk.

But I don’t think that’s what’s driving people. What’s driving people is: I don’t want this thing next to me in my community, which to me feels like it’s the one issue around AI that’s gotten any real political currency, because it can latch onto existing political fights, like whether or not to build housing. It’s just a way for NIMBYism, not-in-my-backyard-ism, to latch on to the issue of AI, and that’s why it’s the one AI issue that’s taken off. Do you share that sense, where the political battles we have about AI are not the important ones, or am I being insufficiently charitable here?

Williams: I completely agree with you. I would say, in some sense, it’s understandable. There is this huge data center build-out, and many people don’t fully understand what motivates it, and it’s led by tech companies that, to put it mildly, are not very popular in many cases. But I do agree with you that in some sense it’s not really grappling with just how significant the relevant changes are going to be.

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I also think it’s a little bit of a shame, in a way, that there’s this polarized conversation where, on the one hand, you’ve got people who think AI is just another technology, a normal technology in some respects, and so you can treat it just as you would any other technology. Then there’s this whole conversation, which we might get to, about AI and existential risk: is it the case that superintelligent, rogue, misaligned artificial intelligence might kill us all?

What I would say is those are not the only two frames. I think what the second frame gets right is it does grapple with just how powerful this technology is. We are in the process of building thinking, understanding, agentic machines that are going to radically transform the world. We shouldn’t be completely dismissive of the worries about misaligned, rogue, superintelligent AI killing us all. I think, for various reasons that we might get into, ultimately the arguments for that scenario are not very persuasive. But even if we avoid that specific scenario and we have aligned superintelligent AI systems, that is, AI systems that are more cognitively capable than human beings, at first disembodied AI systems and then autonomous robots, a world with that technology is going to be radically, radically different from the world as it exists today. There is nothing normal about it. In no respect can you think of that as just another technology. I completely agree with you that the politics of AI at the moment haven’t caught up with that situation.

Mounk: For a little bit of context, there’s a paper that has been very widely discussed in AI circles called AI as Normal Technology by Arvind Narayanan and Sayash Kapoor, where they argue that in order to understand how AI is going to roll out, you have to look at previous technologies. It turns out that many of the predictions of the leaders of the AI field, these two authors argue, are really naive, because they don’t understand real-world obstacles to the adoption of technology. You might think that the moment AI is in theory capable of translating any text, publishers are going to use AI to translate those texts. But in practice there are 17 million obstacles to that happening, and practically no publisher has started doing that yet. The same could be true in lots of different fields.

I have two points about that. The first is that there’s a great debate over this paper that was conducted recently via music videos, the song and the animation of which was produced by the new Claude Opus 5.5 model. So you have a great “paper” explaining why the robots are not going to roll out in the real world because of all of these obstacles, and then you have a great response to it called “Thus Spoke Compute,” arguing the opposite. It seems to me that the existence of those two videos is, in a way, proof that AI is not a fully normal technology.

But I take seriously some of the main themes in this paper. The other point I want to make is it doesn’t actually seem to me, if you read the paper carefully, that it’s necessarily at odds with those worries about existential risk. The main point of the paper is about how long it takes for a technology to diffuse into the economy, for existing firms and companies to change how they do their business. All of that might be true at the same time as there’s a real risk of us losing control over superintelligent AI.

I was hesitating a little bit in this conversation about whether we should go from immediate and comparatively small to distant and large, or the other way around. But since there were really interesting remarks by students, for the benefit of the podcast audience, explaining, for example, that they were concerned AI might be eroding their cognitive skills, that the temptation of going to AI whenever a problem gets hard may make it harder for them to really learn and develop the cognitive skills they’re invested in, perhaps let’s start with that. Do you share that worry, and what evidence do we have that AI may be undermining cognitive skills in that kind of way in the younger generation?

Williams: I absolutely share the worry. Before I address it, I’ll just double-click on one thing, which is that I have enormous admiration for Arvind Narayanan and Sayash Kapoor, the authors of that AI as Normal Technology paper. I agree with you there’s a lot going on in that general framework that they are outlining and defending, and you don’t have to accept all of it as a package deal. Certainly one of the aspects of it that I think is correct is that to understand how AI is going to affect society, politics, institutions, and so on, you can’t just focus on the raw capabilities of the AI systems. You have to think about how organizations, institutions, culture, incentives, and so on adjust to the technology. I think that’s highly relevant in the context of AI and education.

The cliché thing to say, which I think is true, is that AI is the best technology ever invented for learning and also for avoiding learning. Which of those two outcomes plays out in society won’t be determined just by the technology itself. It will be determined by the degree to which our educational institutions can adapt to this radically new technology. I think it’s fair to say that our educational institutions, whether schools or universities, were not designed, and they didn’t evolve culturally, in a world in which anyone has access to an incredibly smart, understanding, conversational machine. I think it’s completely understandable that our institutions are trying to adjust and think about how they can adapt in light of this new technology.

I think that’s a huge challenge. One of the real significant society-wide challenges with AI is that it’s so good at so many different things that we outsource so much of our cognition, our thinking, our decision-making to the AI systems that those skills really atrophy. I’m not really that worried about this when it comes to adults, because in a liberal society people can make their own choices. But when it comes to children, teenagers going through school, this is potentially a huge crisis. I think we really need to take this very seriously at all levels of society, as an enormous policy challenge.

Just one final thing: I think part of the issue is there’s still a lot of denialism about the technology itself. It’s still the case that lots of academics, lots of intellectuals, I’m sure to some extent it’s true of teachers and people who work in schools as well, aren’t familiar with, don’t understand just how impressive the technology can be.

Mounk: I was an undergrad at Cambridge, I live in Cambridge, and I was just reminded of an old joke about Cambridge: how many Cambridge fellows does it take to change a lightbulb? The answer is: change? That, of course, is not just true in Cambridge but in academia in general. It’s often the academics who most claim to want to change and revolutionize the world who are most resistant to any form of change in their own university or their own workplace. I’ve been astounded by how many professors make excuses to pretend that the assignments that have been assigned for their course for 27 years still work in the age of AI. They say, “AI could never do the assignment for my course. It’s too specific.” It’s like, of course it can.

But let me ask a brief preliminary question. In your teaching, have you found that the quality of students has changed? Are you seeing the signs of a great reading crisis? There are a lot of articles about this, and they all go viral, with people saying, “I used to be able to assign a whole book, and now my students can’t read two and a half pages anymore.” I will spike a football, as we say in the United States, by saying that in my teaching I haven’t found that. I’m very privileged to teach great kids at Johns Hopkins, a very selective university. I don’t find that they’re less capable of doing the reading or less engaged with the material today than they were five or ten years ago. But that’s one kind of anecdotal piece of evidence. Please give us a second one.

Williams: I’ve only been a full-time assistant professor doing lots of lecturing since 2023, which is when generative AI started being rolled out, and many universities still assign take-home essays. I remember saying in 2023, this is absolutely insane, because at the time AI systems were already able to produce relatively high-quality student essays. Now I think it’s the case that frontier AI systems can produce higher-quality academic papers than many actual academics, and we’re still doing take-home papers.

Mounk: Nowadays, the last time that I assigned take-home exams, I said I would never again. When I got a bad paper, I was sort of like, “Nice, the student actually did it themselves.”

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What do you think, how do you think we should redesign the university, and perhaps the school, since we’re in a school here? It strikes me that there are two competing things here. We obviously want to make sure that people are actually reading text. Disagree with me if you think I’m wrong, but we still want people to learn how to write, because even if you can outsource that to LLMs in the future, that to me seems like an absolutely crucial step in learning how to think and reason carefully. At the same time, we also now have available to us individualized one-on-one tutoring in a form that just wasn’t available to everybody in the past. Presumably we want to use that in some kind of way.

I speak pretty good French, but I don’t write French very much, and I realized I’d totally forgotten the rules about when to make a past participle agree with the subject. I recently asked Claude to re-explain the rules to me. The basic rule is quite simple: if it’s with the verb être, “to be,” then it starts to agree with the feminine speaker, for example; if it’s with the word avoir, then it doesn’t. But then there’s a bunch of specialized rules. It started with a simple test, a really simple rule, and then added the more complicated rules. It was just a super-efficient way to learn what I’d learned many years ago but had sort of forgotten.

Clearly that form of one-on-one tutoring is something that can be hugely impactful. But how do we make sure that that doesn’t just turn into “go off and play around with Claude” and we pretend that’s education?

Williams: I think the first step is having assessments, in-class assessments where you can’t use AI for the assessment itself, whether it’s a written exam, an oral exam, or whatever it might be, so that you are rewarding the student for being able to produce the work. Of course, if they want to use AI, as you say, for the process of learning, I think it can be an extraordinary tool for the acceleration of learning. That’s absolutely fine.

At the same time, it just is the case that AI is going to be increasingly embedded into every facet of society. One of the things we need to be thinking about as teachers and educators is how to prepare students to use AI as well as possible. I suspect there needs to be some kind of divide, where you’ve got assessments for core skills where, in the assessment itself, they can’t use AI, and assessments where you actively encourage as much and as savvy a use of AI as possible, something like that. But that’s really the best I can offer. I think it’s a huge question with lots of uncertainty.

Mounk: That’s pretty much what I hit on in my own teaching. Ideally I think that has to happen at the level of the university over the course of a degree. It doesn’t have to happen in every course. But since universities haven’t really adapted to that yet, I have one important element of assessment, a pen-and-paper exam in class, that I’ve never really done before in my teaching career, but that’s the only thing that ensures we’re not using AI to do it. Then I have another element where we either have to write a really ambitious paper for which we’re allowed to use AI, or produce a cool kind of resource. It’s a class on democracy and the rise of populism, and I said, look, you can use every AI tool you want to make a cool video about this, or to make a really informative website, or an app, or some kind of resource. You’re welcome to, and in fact encouraged to, use AI. You’re learning how to use AI tools to communicate some interesting set of ideas. But that’s only part of the grade. The other part is you’re sitting there with pen and paper, and you actually have to make an argument.

But I guess the question goes beyond that, which is: what should learning look like for a 15-year-old? What should learning look like for a 17-year-old? Is it that you have a lot of time, or some time, spent with something like an AI model for basically one-on-one tutoring, where you get really instant feedback, but then at the same time that means you can have a lot more time for really in-depth discussion? Is it project work? The one thing that seems pointless, and perhaps always has been pointless, is what ninety-eight percent of my schooling was like: a teacher standing up front and talking at you for forty-five minutes while you’re half asleep.

Williams: That’s always been difficult to justify as a practice. Speaking personally as a lecturer, it’s great if you’re the lecturer. I’m not so sure it’s so great for the students.

Mounk: The only skill in my life that I’m truly proud of is that I was able to sleep in high school, and teachers would get annoyed with me and say, “Yascha, did you fall asleep?” I’d say no, and they’d say, “What did I just say?” I was always able to repeat the last two sentences to them, verbatim, and it drove them crazy. So if you want to annoy your teachers, this is a skill I recommend developing.

Okay, so let’s go one level up from that. At the beginning there was high hopes about social media. If you go back to all of the writing about social media in the 2000s, and even in the early 2010s, it was all: it’s going to allow the opposition and young people to challenge these dictatorships in the Middle East and other parts of the world; it’s going to take on the rich and the powerful in the United States. Look at the Green Revolution in Iran, look at Occupy Wall Street. There was a lot of celebration of it. Then, obviously, our politics took a bit of a turn, and people started blaming social media for that. What explains the rise of Donald Trump? What explains Brexit? What explains all of these different developments? Well, it’s got to be social media.

So I feel like people are entering the conversation about artificial intelligence with the battle scars of the last set of fights and wars, and they’re assuming that just as social media turned out to be very bad for our public sphere, so too AI is likely to lead to the rapid spread of misinformation and disinformation, and we’re going to get even more cynical about the world, and all the bad things are going to happen. You disagree. Why?

Williams: I think if you look at social media and its effect on politics, it’s had two distinctive characteristics. The first is that it’s been a profoundly democratizing technology, in the sense that its most distinctive characteristic is the complete obliteration of establishment gatekeepers. With the internet, and then with social media, anyone with an internet connection and strong opinions can get online and start posting, expressing their opinions, and getting involved in public debates.

You’re right that initially there was a lot of optimism about this. I think a lot of that optimism was, and remains in some way, warranted. This is a genuinely great feature of social media. It’s also had lots of really deleterious consequences, because establishment gatekeeping sounds bad, but it also means some minimal standards of quality control. Once you get rid of that gatekeeping altogether, you get a public sphere where you get the expression of views which have always been popular among the general public but were previously marginalized: highly conspiratorial views, extremely bigoted views, quack science, and so on. Now, as a consequence of the democratizing character of social media, that plays a much bigger role in our politics than it used to. I think that’s closely connected to populism.

The second is the role of engagement-maximizing algorithms. The way these social media platforms recommend content, and keep people scrolling and glued to their screens, is by recommending content that engages people, that grabs their attention, and that often means rewarding, amplifying, sensationalist, divisive, conflict-oriented, generally quite stupid content.

So it’s had these two characteristics: it’s a democratizing technology, for better and for worse, and I think it’s generally dumbed down the state of public discourse. Many people thought you could take that kind of model and just assume that many of the pathologies associated with it, as you mentioned, fake news and misinformation, would just generalize to generative AI and large language models, and it would just be those problems on steroids. I think nothing like that is true. In many ways you should think of large language models as the anti-social-media. Whereas social media has been democratizing, it’s shifted power towards the communication styles, the beliefs of ordinary people. Large language models generally give people accurate, evidence-based, expert-aligned information. Not perfect, there are still problems with hallucinations, and we can talk about bias, but compared to the realistic alternatives, generally much higher-quality, expert-aligned information. Whereas social media, because it has this engagement-maximizing character, tends to amplify this sensationalist, conflict-oriented style of communication, at least at the moment, Gemini, Claude, ChatGPT, even Grok, which is Elon Musk’s large language model, tends toward a pretty dry, respectful, accuracy-oriented style of communication.

At least initially, you might be quite optimistic about that, insofar as it looks like it will, to some degree, correct some of the pathologies associated with social media. In fact, I think what’s going to happen is it’s just going to create a whole new set of both beneficial consequences and dangers, just very different from those we’re used to with social media.

Mounk: I agree with a lot of what you just said. I think, in particular, the assumption that somehow this is a new technology and it’s going to play out in a very similar, parallel way to this older technology is very likely to prove wrong. I also agree with you that, certainly at the moment, if you ask the counterfactual question, what kind of information are you likely to come across on whatever AI chatbot you use, relative to what you’re likely to come across if you open X, or Instagram, or TikTok right now, the relative quality of information you get is going to be a lot better.

At the same time, I guess I’m a little worried that the takes about the nature of social media that people had in 2005 or 2010 were the result of a more optimistic moment, but they’re also the result of what social media looked like at that time. Social media at that time was a lot less toxic than it became fifteen or twenty years later, and it may be that, in a similar way, the way we think about the standard use case of AI today is quite different from what it’s actually going to turn into being ten or fifteen years from now.

Let me start with the following question, to pressure-test it a bit: are people mostly going to get their information from AI chatbots, or are they mostly going to get it still from social media? To what extent are these AI bots actually rivals to social media? Secondarily, what use are some of the most divisive, toxic accounts on social media, what some people call conflict entrepreneurs, going to make of generative AI tools on those forms of social media?

If you assign me two worlds, one in which everybody gets most of their political information from chatting with Claude or ChatGPT, and one where everybody’s spending time on social media, I would agree with you that the first world is likely better. But if you say, no, perhaps sometimes we go to Claude or ChatGPT to ask about things we’re really motivated to find out, like what’s the best restaurant around here, but most people aren’t that interested in politics and don’t seek out political information in this proactive way, they get political information in this pretty passive, ambient way, then they’re still likely to get that on social media in the future. Except that, in the future, perhaps people who want to push force-narratives have much better tools available to them to produce persuasive content, and the ability of social media to hook us may be even bigger. To name one obvious example, not only does Instagram or TikTok now have an even better algorithm to serve you the most addictive possible video out of a universe of existing videos, they can create, on the spot, a new video designed to keep you hooked, in keeping with what kind of video you keep clicking on.

So when you think about how AI might displace social media, I think you’re right. But when you think about how AI may combine with existing social media, the impact may turn out to be a lot less positive.

Williams: You’re completely right that this more pessimistic scenario might unfold. I think the thing to remember is these things are not preordained. I think we have agency, both as individuals, more broadly as a culture, and then also in terms of policy, to try to address this, to maximize the positive consequences of the technology.

Clearly what’s going to happen is that they’re not complete rivals, in the sense that they’re not totally separate technologies. It’s already the case that on social media, LLMs are, to some degree, becoming embedded in different ways. One way is on the platform X, Elon Musk’s X, formerly Twitter: “Grok, is this true?” as a response to what people are saying or posting has become, to some extent, more normalized.

Mounk: As you said, despite some concerns about the nature of Grok, by and large the answers you then see from Grok are pretty well sourced, and they’re often a way of checking things that are exaggerated, untrue, etc. Somebody says, “Is it actually true?” and Grok says, “No, that’s not really true, that’s taken out of context.”

Williams: Exactly. You can think about more innovative ways of automating fact-checks with AIs. I also think, when we’re talking about potential threats of AI, it’s really important not just to focus on the negative use cases. You’re right, in a sense it can significantly automate the creation of propaganda, but it can also be used as a way of critically evaluating the kind of communication you’re coming across online. As that becomes normalized, provided these tools do give broadly reliable information, as I think they currently do, not perfect but compared to realistic alternatives, then content creators, even the very biased ones, will learn that they’re in a world where anyone can very quickly fire up their chatbot and critically evaluate or fact-check what they’re saying. So it creates this whole new set of incentives.

I think it’s also a very interesting question how trust in these chatbots is going to develop over time. You might hope, and many people have hoped, that ordinary people would place more trust in experts. This is obviously a huge political issue over the past ten or fifteen years, a very polarized one, with expertise itself becoming enmeshed in these broader political conflicts and culture wars. But expertise, up until about five minutes ago, has always existed in human form. Now we have these strange machine intelligences that seem at least capable of giving access to expert-aligned information, and that, at least in principle, needn’t have the kinds of biases and tribal identities that human beings tend to cling to.

Moreover, they’re not just going to be giving people information in the context of politics. People are using chatbots for all kinds of things: for medical advice, for fashion advice, to navigate bureaucracies, to get tips on how to cope with their relationships, and so on. To the extent that they’re building up trust in this source of information across all of these other domains, I think it will be quite natural to assume you can also trust them when it comes to politics as well. Provided the current situation continues into the future, and that’s a big if, that could be quite a positive, optimistic story.

Mounk: Let me push back on that a little bit. I’m trying to think through how that is going to look, and whether people really are going to be willing to outsource judgment in some ways to these AI models and perceive them as in some way neutral. In certain contexts I think that’s right: “is this true, Grok” is something that really does happen on social media, and I think by and large it has positive effects. But you might have two reasons why that might not be the case.

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One is that there are real fears, on both sides of the political spectrum, that AI bots are systematically going to be politically biased. In one of the first papers that really sounded the alarm about the impact of AI in various ways, a set of authors argued a number of things, including the idea that these are just “stochastic parrots” and not going to be very capable, an idea that has become a kind of meme in the discussion. They were also saying, look, the kind of texts these models are trained on are very Western, very male-dominated, perhaps politically aligned with capitalism, and so all these models are going to be discriminatory against minorities, against women, and so on. Interestingly, the best evidence we have so far, and you can expand on this, you know the literature as well as I do, perhaps better, seems to suggest that’s not the case.

For example, if you force virtually any AI model to make a choice in a pairwise comparison between two states of the world, you can say, imagine a world where one white person is killed, or imagine a world where two Asian people are killed, or whatever it is, or the other way around, or you say one each, there are different ways of setting up the comparison. The point is that it actually ends up favoring the non-white lives over the white lives. This is a very consistent finding across different kinds of models. You can also ask general political questions, what kind of policy response do you think is right to the debt crisis, or something like that, and it tends to give very consistently center-left answers. So you could have a world in which actually both sides of the political spectrum feel that the AIs are biased against them, even if that’s not true, which I think you often get in moments of censorship: everybody feels like my side is being censored but the other side isn’t, which I think is one of the problems with a regime of censorship.

But the other point is that there are, I think, real questions about where this political bias comes from. My assumption was that it tends to take center-left positions, roughly what my own set of positions happens to be, because when you want really high-quality text on which to train these models, a lot of it ends up having a slight center-left bias, because that’s the nature of a lot of journalism. There’s a reason why you’d want to train an AI model on the archive of The New York Times, but The New York Times happens to have a slight center-left lean.

Interestingly, I spoke to a very senior Silicon Valley figure a week ago who is adamant that he believes that’s not the case, that actually it’s all post-training. It’s not the selection of texts on which you train the AIs; it’s that once you’ve done all of that and you have a kind of raw version of the model, you have the AI give you a bunch of outputs, and you have a bunch of humans who rate the output. The reason for that is to make sure it doesn’t go off the rails and do immoral things, or swear at the user, or use terms that would be inappropriate. The problem is that all the people who’ve been recruited to do this are graduate students in the United States, they’re the smart people you can pay a relatively low sum of money to do this, and they, of course, are all left-leaning. Isn’t all of that going to get just as politicized as the old set of experts?

Williams: I think there remains a lot of uncertainty about exactly why it is that the outputs of large language models are as they are. I think there is expert disagreement about which aspects of the training process, whether it’s pre-training on specific kinds of datasets, whether it’s specific kinds of post-training for helpfulness and honesty, can be biased in the ways that you suggest. I think there’s still a lot of uncertainty about where to assign responsibility for different factors.

I also think this issue of bias is quite complicated. John Burn-Murdoch in the Financial Times did an analysis, and what it seemed to show is that ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude had something of a center-left bias, Grok had something of a center-right bias, but overall they’re producing expert, accuracy-oriented information that has a net depolarizing effect, whether it’s on the center-left or the center-right. I think it’s very difficult to know exactly how these things are going to evolve over time.

Where I agree is that this is going to become a huge issue. As it becomes clearer that large language models are having an effect on public opinion, albeit one that’s quite difficult to unambiguously detect in specific cases, then it’s going to become a big political issue exactly what kind of content these systems are producing. I have a suspicion that it’s much more difficult to make these models exhibit certain kinds of biases than people think. I think it’s strongly in the interests of these companies, at least at the moment, to train their models in such a way that they place a really strong, high value on honesty and accuracy. If you try, for example, for commercial reasons or for more propagandistic reasons, to bias their output and behavior in some domains without it spilling over into other domains, I think it’s going to be very, very hard, given the way these systems get trained.

To make that concrete, if you’re trying to create a system that’s incredibly useful and competent when it comes to natural scientific questions, medical advice, business advice, legal advice, but then carve out an exception when it comes to politics and make it systematically biased in that domain, I think given the way the technology is currently designed, that’s just technically very, very difficult. It’s precisely for that reason that I think otherwise very different companies are converging on systems that, broadly speaking, are pretty accurate.

I’ll also just say one final thing, which is that there’s a way in which a certain kind of bias might be regrettable but needn’t necessarily undermine trust among a diverse audience. In the United Kingdom, people are constantly aggrieved or angry with the BBC and the biases it allegedly exhibits. Of course, it’s a human institution dealing with very complex issues. I’m sure there are countless biases, and the left is often right to point out right-wing biases, and vice versa. Yet I think, in general, people across the ideological spectrum can often have quite a high degree of trust in the kind of narrow factual reporting the BBC does, especially when you compare it with fringe, hyperpartisan, conspiratorial content online. So I think when it comes to large language models, this question of the precise ideological valence they exhibit is interesting, and I think it will be politicized. But in terms of the immediate impact at the moment, just the fact that they do tend to provide accurate information is something really salient and worth remembering.

In the rest of this conversation, Yascha and Dan discuss the meaning of intelligence in the age of AI, existential risk, and the impact of the Hugging Face incident. This part of the conversation is reserved for paying subscribers…

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Malcolm Gaskill, Emeritus Professor of Early Modern History at the University of East Anglia, is the author of seven books, including Witchfinders, Between Two Worlds, and The Ruin of All Witches.

In this week’s conversation, Yascha Mounk and Malcolm Gaskell discuss how premodern people understood the boundary between the natural and supernatural worlds, why historians are right—and wrong—to complicate the Enlightenment’s story of progress, and what the persistence of superstition tells us about human nature.

This transcript has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.

Yascha Mounk: I’m really looking forward to this conversation, in part because I always look forward to conversations where I feel like I learn new things, and this is a topic I don’t know that much about. Obviously generalizing over different places, different times, different individuals—what is the nature of the supernatural beliefs people had for a lot of history before “the Enlightenment”, the rational age? And what do we tend to get wrong about it?

Malcolm Gaskill: In the modern age, we tend to draw sharp distinctions between what we think is rational and irrational, natural and unnatural. If we went back 500 years, we would find varieties of opinion, skepticism, disagreement, and degrees of credulity—perhaps more than we might expect from our ancestors. But we would essentially find a kind of consensus that seems alien to us today.

The consensus is that their world—their visible, tangible world—was much more porous to the unseen world. People didn’t always understand mysterious forces; in fact, a state of puzzlement or bemusement was probably most common. But there was an assumption that there was an invisible world beyond this one, and that there was a relationship between daily life, existence, and some kind of world that existed beyond. That was a basic assumption people had, and it shaped all sorts of engagement that we would broadly call religious, or even superstitious. Essentially it was a relationship between the seen and the unseen, the tangible and the intangible, and the sublime.

Mounk: Part of what characterizes our beliefs today is that we’re quite tempted to believe in all kinds of supernatural, superstitious things, but we check ourselves. When we see a dark shadow at night, we might think for a moment, “gosh, that feels like a ghost,” and then say, “ha, silly me—that’s obviously not what it is.” If we look into the sky and didn’t realize there was going to be an eclipse, we think, “wow, that’s a pretty spooky natural phenomenon,” and then we think, “let me check whether there’s some kind of explanation for this.”

If you didn’t have that kind of mental filter, presumably every time you see something scary out of the corner of your eye, or something happens in nature you don’t have an explanation for because you can’t Google it, you’d naturally come up with stories about what might have caused it.

Gaskill: It’s an evolutionary advantage, in many ways, to try to make sense of chaos. But that often means getting it wrong—looking for patterns in things that aren’t there. There’s a condition called pareidolia, which is really where you join up the dots to make a picture where no picture exists. The mind always imposes patterns on strange, totally natural phenomena that aren’t necessarily understood, and out of them makes stories that are meaningful.

Going back to our late medieval ancestors, they didn’t make those stories out of everything. There was an acceptance that there were natural phenomena—extensions of God’s creation that weren’t direct providences, just things about nature that weren’t completely understood—and there wasn’t a constant need to impose some weird supernatural interpretation on them. This comes into witchcraft accusations too, where people often assume our ancestors didn’t understand so many things about illness and disaster, so they blamed everything on witches. That turns out not to be the case. There is a more rational sense to our ancestors than we might imagine, given the way our benighted forebears were produced by Enlightenment philosophes and rationalists into the 19th century, who wanted to force this difference between them and us so as to make us feel better.

Mounk: Let me push you a little on that. I think there are different levels, or different kinds of description, of what rationality might entail. I certainly think our ancestors were about as smart as we are—they had very similar mental faculties, just less knowledge. There were many parts of the natural world they didn’t understand, and they were raised in a much more religious world, where, as you said, the boundaries between the visible world and the invisible world were much more porous. So I agree that they had reasoning faculties broadly similar to ours, and exercised them. It’s not clear to me that we can get from that claim to the idea that they were somehow less superstitious, or believed in the supernatural any less.

There’s a story I learned in graduate school—I’ll keep it brief—about an anthropologist doing fieldwork, I think in the mountains of Ghana. He wants to be taken to see the rainmaker, but has to spend many months there before they trust him. Finally they take him—he crosses a desert, climbs a dangerous mountain—and he asks, “how do you make it rain?” The rainmaker says, “I have a secret stone. If I turn it a particular way and say a particular incantation, most of the time the next day it rains.” He asks to see the stone, and the rainmaker shows him a child’s marble, saying there’s only one of these stones in the world, it’s unique, and so on.

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Later, back in the city, the anthropologist acquires another marble, asks to be taken back to the rainmaker, and says, “look what I brought you—here’s another one of these stones.” The rainmaker is astonished—he thought there was only one. The anthropologist asks, “well, do you think it’s going to work?” The rainmaker thinks for a moment and says, “I don’t know—shall we give it a try?”

This was presented to me by Richard Tuck, who was leading the seminar, as a response to a classmate of mine who was arguing that means-ends reasoning is just a Western construct. It isn’t—this rainmaker has means-ends reasoning. He’s not an idiot; he’s capable of intelligent thought, he has a concept of one thing having a causal impact on another, he even has an empirical mindset: let’s see whether, if I do this, it rains tomorrow or not. What he doesn’t have is a scientific method, and a separation of the visible world from a non-visible one.

So what I easily buy is that our ancestors reasoned critically about phenomena in the world, but were still so steeped in a totally different thought-world that there’s a stark distinction between mainstream beliefs today—setting aside the other kinds of superstitious and religious belief that still exist today, which we can talk about—and the mainstream world then.

Gaskill: It is. There are a couple of things in that. One is the critical thinking required to distinguish between the likelihood of something being totally natural versus the imposition of a demon or an angel.

The other is that it’s very situational. This is where, in a lot of the so-called post-secular scholarship about these phenomena, emotions come in. People’s beliefs—a bit like your story, which is embedded in a very specific situation, a dialogue, an encounter between cultures—don’t float in the air. It’s easy to talk about belief systems and sets of ideas, but a lot of the time these are lived practices. One of the things anthropologists would often do—I think they’re perhaps more sensitive now—but think about someone like Evans-Pritchard going out to the Azande in Africa in the 1930s: really, it’s about trying to reduce everything they believed to functions. He was right, up to a point—these beliefs were hard to describe in the abstract, but you could see them in what people did. They weren’t inferior forms of reasoning; they were extremely embedded in culture and practice.

Sometimes what these anthropologists found—going back to your story—is that the peoples they studied were so baffled by the idea that someone was trying to fit these things into some kind of intellectual template that they had a bit of fun with them. One of the things anthropologists were slow to understand is that these people had a sense of humor, and realized they could play along.

So if we think of these only as sets of ideas and beliefs—belief systems—we slightly miss the point. We need to think of them as embedded in real-life situations and in emotions. Some of our own ideas and feelings—I’ll speak for myself, I won’t speak for you—that we’d espouse confidently and publicly might waver a bit under emotional pressure. It goes back to the old “no atheists in a foxhole” idea. We see this throughout the 20th century: men in battle become more superstitious. So people who, in daily life, wouldn’t hold these ideas, had feelings connected to them that were latent but surfaced because of the particular emotional stresses of the situation. I do agree with you—it’s just another way of thinking about these ideas and beliefs, as practices, as feelings and emotions, rather than codifying them the way anthropologists often wanted to.

Mounk: That I buy. Let me say something more general for a moment. I think there’s a broader historiographical tendency to complicate the easy distinctions we draw, and sometimes I worry it’s a bit of a historian’s idée fixe—partly because you want to rebel against the generation before you, and partly because historians love when things are complicated. The Dark Ages, it turns out, weren’t so dark; things were actually quite good. Secularization—well, in fact, today isn’t really secular, the continuity is much bigger than the discontinuity.

I’m always torn about those, because I think there’s a caricatured view of the Dark Ages as a miserable time of benighted people having terrible lives, which misses a lot of what’s interesting, fascinating, and valuable about those centuries. At the same time, if you compare how long people got to live, the condition of servitude a lot of people endured, and the extent to which the knowledge of the ancient world had been lost—with the rediscovery of these forms of reasoning, the Renaissance, and later the Enlightenment, not yet having happened—something about the short formula “Dark Ages” is not entirely wrong.

It seems to me that when it comes to these questions of how similar or how different the world of belief is, in the era before the Enlightenment and perhaps before the Renaissance, there’s a similar dynamic. I agree that “these people were stupid, superstitious morons, and today we have these great enlightened people who would never fall for anything like that” is far too simplistic—first, because those were people with our natures and our intelligence, not stupid morons, human beings trying their best to make sense of their condition the way we do today, and second, because there’s a lot of weird belief and superstition, modern-day witch hunts and so on, around today too.

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So I buy all that. And yet something in me rebels against the idea that there are no distinctions at all. The faculties of the human mind have, by and large, not changed—the mixture of incredible intelligence and venality that characterizes human beings today also characterized us as a species 500 or a thousand years ago.

The other thing you’ve alluded to—I may be getting my history of religion wrong, but I think this was originally Feuerbach’s idea—is that we tend to ascribe to God the faculties we wish for ourselves, and perhaps, more broadly, that God fills a psychological need for us. When we’re really scared, we cling to superstitious practices and beliefs to reassure us. That was true 500 years ago, and it’s true if you’re in a foxhole today, and it’s true whenever the world is scary and you don’t quite understand what’s going on in politics or society. That seems true today too.

So I buy the similarities. And yet it does seem to me very different to have a world in which all the authorities, secular and ecclesiastical, interpret everything through religion and belief in the supernatural, where everything is imbued with symbolic importance—versus a world in which, much as our human nature might tempt us toward that, the authorities pride themselves on not doing it, and we have a scientific method.

Gaskill: There’s simplification in both directions. A grand narrative that’s politically inflected, polemical, even propagandist—think of fascist narratives of history in the 20th century, or communist simplifications of history—these are highly tendentious versions, simplifications with a particular end.

We can go in the other direction too—importing backwards the idea that Newton was “a scientist” unlike anybody else, or importing back the idea that most people were kind of benighted peasants who were all stupid. This comes back to context. Historians do like to complicate things, but that’s not a bad thing—good historians, anyway, try to get between those two extremes: that our ancestors are just like us, or that our ancestors are totally different. It’s largely situational.

When one looks at witchcraft trials, and at the behavior of juries, they’re very discerning. There are different layers and degrees of rationality, and a bedrock of belief they don’t really have the intellectual wherewithal to challenge. There used to be a debate—I know it’s still going on—about whether there were actual atheists in the Renaissance, because it was supposedly impossible to hold that thought, to really believe there was nothing beyond. I never bought that. I always thought it was possible.

Mounk: Tell us about some of those witch trials. This is obviously meant to be a caricature, but I tend to think of the Monty Python sketch—“she’s a witch, she’s a witch,” and immediately the crowd rushes to drown the person, and then she drowns, and I guess she wasn’t a witch. There’s this image of an obviously stupid, idiotic process that everybody gets on board with. You describe the reality as much more complicated and subtle than that. So what did a witchcraft trial actually look like?

Gaskill: Most of the time there were no witchcraft trials. There may well have been suspicions within a village, but the assumption in that Monty Python version is that as soon as you couldn’t explain something, or there was someone you didn’t like, you found out the nearest witch, and there was no legal process—you chased them to the nearest tree and they were hanged, and that was it. Everybody felt an emotional release, and then you got back to normal until the next cow or chicken died, and then you found somebody else, or someone else you didn’t like.

It’s so far removed from the truth. I’ve spent the last 30 years telling people their myths about witchcraft are not right—not because I’m a natural killjoy, but because it misses the opportunity to understand other ways our forebears’ mentalities worked. Typically, there is a bedrock of belief in witchcraft, but most people had no direct experience of it whatsoever. There’s a point where this falls off the written record and we can’t be absolutely sure, but the written records we do have—which are actually copious for the 16th and 17th centuries—give us a pretty good view of the number of witch trials: probably about 110,000 across the 16th and 17th centuries. That seems like a lot for a crime we’d think imaginary, but it’s far fewer than you’d often read. From the Enlightenment onward, the figures got bigger and bigger—they went up into the millions.

Mounk: Also, by the way, against a population far, far smaller than today’s.

Gaskill: Infinitely smaller. The number of people who actually lived—not just the population at one time, but across, say, 1400 to 1700—is absolutely enormous. The number of witch trials is really very small, and very variegated over time and place.

Mounk: 110,000 doesn’t strike me as very small. I don’t want to nitpick, but 110,000 is a lot.

Gaskill: It’s a lot for a crime you and I would agree was imaginary, that people couldn’t possibly have committed. But it’s much smaller than people often imagine. There’s a kind of illusion, I think, between the idea of the Holocaust in the 20th century and what was happening before that—the numbers creep up into the millions and it feels like a very organized thing, a kind of technocratic genocide, which the Holocaust, in the 20th century, really was. But the witch trials are much more patchy. There isn’t a big central authority driving it. Within nations, typically, the central authorities are the restraining forces. The really bad witch hunts happen not because of the strength of law, but because of its weakness in that area.

So it does go against the prevailing narrative we’ve inherited about what the witch trials meant. What those stories have typically done is made our ancestors look stupid, venal, and weak. Whereas actually—taking England, which I know best, though not exclusively—you really have maybe a thousand witch trials across two centuries. That’s far fewer than people assume. It always surprises people that a thousand is a lot, but it also surprises them that you’re going to get 500 convictions out of that—500 executions for a crime that didn’t exist seems like a lot. But in half those cases, jurors stood there and said, “we don’t know,” and didn’t want to hang somebody for a crime they weren’t absolutely sure of, because the evidence wasn’t strong enough for the conviction needed to send someone to the gallows.

Mounk: I don’t know how extensive the record is on the trials that led to conviction versus the ones that didn’t. If you were defending, what kind of argument would you make? Is the prosecution’s case something like: she cursed this family, somebody heard her curse this family—here’s the witness who says, “yeah, I heard her curse her family,” and then three days later the youngest child fell ill and died? And the defense would say—what would they say? “If she didn’t curse them, there’s no evidence of that,” or, “she was seen in the woods collecting dark materials,” and the defense says, “she would always go there to get firewood”? Am I imagining something too muddled?

Gaskill: You are. There is no defense—not before the 18th century. In fact, typically the accused didn’t even get to say anything, because they weren’t expected to speak on oath about themselves—they weren’t on oath. Sometimes they were allowed to say something, and they’d just say, “I never did any such thing.” But it’s not the modern adversarial system. Quite apart from anything else, it’s all over incredibly quickly. The speed of it, I think, sometimes works in favor of the accused, and sometimes it doesn’t.

Mounk: I’m trying to move away from my memory of the Monty Python scene—“she’s a witch, let’s burn her”—and you’re telling me, well, actually there’s a trial, and half the time—but the more I learn about it, the more I feel like I’m getting back to the Monty Python scene. Perhaps there’s—I don’t actually know when British judges started wearing wigs, perhaps that’s later too—but there’s a theatrical nature to the court proceedings. It sounds like there’s some random accusation read out, then a very brief process that doesn’t seem to involve presenting evidence in any structured way, and then the jury somehow comes to a decision. It sounds like a coin flip.

Gaskill: No, it’s not a coin flip. The English legal system is built on an amateur principle—it is, really, even into the 19th century. There’s a lot of resistance in English culture to professionalism of any sort. It’s one of the reasons it was hard to introduce the police force in the 19th century—people thought you shouldn’t pay good citizens to enforce the law.

Mounk: I thought you were going to say it’s one of the reasons Boris Johnson became prime minister.

Gaskill: That’s another area we could go into another time. Corruption is inherent, and they sought to limit it by not paying people to do things. The judges are the only professionals in the system—they’re based in London, they ride out regularly on circuits, and “deliver the jail”: all the accused criminals who’ve gathered there over the last six months are delivered from the jail. That’s why they rattle through the cases—not just witch trials, but whatever’s coming their way. A clerk reads what’s called a jail calendar, a list of names, and people are constantly brought through the dock. So there’s a kind of farcical, almost tragicomic amateurism to all this, but within it there’s this strange discernment, this unexpected skepticism and hesitation.

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I think what the jurors feel is an abhorrence at the idea that people might engage with the devil to harm their neighbors, and they may well hold that bedrock assumption that it’s possible. But when they see this before their eyes, I think they, and magistrates, often think, God, this is just neighbors at war, and really you should shut up and go home. We don’t know how many cases were brought before a magistrate—just some bloke interrupting his dinner, a bang on the door, two neighbors standing there, “what is it now?” We don’t know how often he said, “you two really do need to live with each other, and she’s not a witch, look at her, she’s just a pathetic old woman.” It’s a shame we don’t have that record, because I firmly believe that kind of critical thinking, in that particular situation, knowing the personalities involved, was prevalent. It may even have been typical.

Mounk: Right—“this person is just a troublemaker, they continually accuse people of all kinds of things, they’re just querulous, shut up and go back home.”

Gaskill: I really think so. It just doesn’t leave any records.

Mounk: They do have very common characteristics. There’s nearly always a huge tension between religious visions of the future. In southern Germany, it’s often conflict within very small city-states for religious and political dominance. It isn’t theological as much as what they would call themselves “confessional states”—who’s going to be in charge, and what is their confession? Are they Lutheran, Catholic, or what? What religious politics are they going to impose on the whole of their territory, and how is that going to define them? Within southern Germany, in the era of the Reformation, there’s this very intense conflict between these states, and within them, and that produces a kind of toxic energy, a toxic set of emotions, which results in an atmosphere of the possibility that these areas are under a kind of demonic attack, and that it’s existential to do something about it. That characterizes Salem, Massachusetts, in the 1690s, as well.

But it also tends to be that these witch hunts burn themselves out quite quickly. Then there’s a moment of reflection, a restoration of order, because witch crazes are seen as emblems of disorder and chaos. In some of those cases in southern Germany, there are so many people being sucked into this vortex of accusation that there’s a moment of clarity afterward—what on earth are we doing? There are even cases in early 17th-century southern Spain where local people think they’re doing the work of the Inquisition, because they feel the devil is abroad, and they start rounding up accused witches, penning them up, waiting to be congratulated by the officials of the Inquisition, who come round and say, “what on earth are you doing? Let them go.” And they’re rather shame-faced, and they do.

So the historians, I think, looking back on the crazes—and they are exceptional, the exceptions that prove the rule, the rule being restraint—look back on them as symbols of weakness, religious disorder, and weaknesses of governance. That’s what happened at Salem, and it happened in England in the 1640s. England only has one really intense witch hunt, and during it the characteristics were civil war, disruption of the normal law courts, a heightened sense of religiosity, the feeling that England had been backsliding in religion and that Puritans needed to come forward. Young men took matters into their own hands. All those things made that witch hunt possible, but it burns itself out very quickly. In the very first witch trial, in the summer of 1645, you already find dissenting voices in the courtroom—not saying witchcraft doesn’t exist, but saying, hang on, does that testimony really stand up? Can we really execute someone on that basis?

Witch finders—professional witch hunters—always aim to be charismatic. They want to go amongst people and say, look, you probably have your doubts, let me galvanize you, let me lead you through this. Witch finders work precisely because people are naturally hesitant—they’re not sure whether this is witchcraft or not, or they don’t have the confidence to go to law because they feel they won’t be believed.

Mounk: Very interesting. We’re going to skip over a couple of centuries very rapidly here—Enlightenment, age of science—finally we’re all good rationalists who would never engage in witch hunts, who have banished superstition to the weird fringes of our society, where people dabble in tarot cards or horoscopes. What’s wrong with that picture?

Gaskill: It’s such an attractive picture, and it’s a kind of fable we tell ourselves, because it makes us feel like we’re the children of the Enlightenment, able to push that stuff into our background. Of course, that arc of progress into the 19th century was hugely broken by the First World War. Symbolically, one of the things it said was that maybe the age of reason and progress, and industrialization, had led to this—and this is often characterized as a moment not just of slaughter, but of a kind of collective madness.

The First World War also created—well, the myth of a lost generation, but also millions of grieving families who couldn’t deal with their grief the way they might have in an age of enlightenment, an age when spirits and things had been laid to rest. This is where you get the huge rise in the popularity of spiritualism, and indeed in all sorts of religions and practices we’d consider New Age—Buddhism, for example, really takes off in the 1920s, because somehow the old patriarchal forms of organized religion and the churches that had so stood behind the armies of the First World War seemed to have gotten it wrong.

So there’s this disruption in the confidence in that arc of progress, and I think we’ve been living with it ever since—and of course it goes into the Second World War. I think we still want to tell ourselves—and, going back to your earlier point, historians aren’t always these loose relativists about everything who say, well, medieval medicine was just different. No, it wasn’t just different—it was worse. You can make those kinds of value judgments. Nobody wants to be operated on by a medieval surgeon consulting the phases of the moon before making an incision on the operating table. That’s not fun.

But at the same time, I think the things we’ve wanted to suppress in ourselves can surface at moments of extraordinary societal and emotional pressure, and the First World War was certainly one of those. There’s also something about class and education in this—not just the forced suppression of these things within ourselves. Large parts of Western Europe remained relatively unchanged in terms of people’s reliance on harvests, the rhythms of life, the reliance on the seasons. I used to live in a village north of Cambridge—I lived there in the 1990s—and in the 1920s, the beliefs in witchcraft and magic in that village, only ten miles north of Cambridge, were almost completely unchanged from the 17th century. Why? Because people were uneducated, and the rhythm of their lives hadn’t really changed at all. They had the belief in maleficent witchcraft, in counter-magic, the idea that livestock were under attack. It’s extraordinary, but there it was.

Mounk: Whereas today one might argue that the villages around Cambridge may well be rational, whereas the fellows and faculty of Cambridge appear to be less and less so—but that’s a different point.

Gaskill: Well, I do have things to say about that too. I’m not part of Cambridge University anymore, so I couldn’t possibly comment. I think the world has changed. But there is the capacity to act in a mad, collective, emotional way. To take an example like Brexit—Brexit wasn’t a rational thing. Going back to Boris Johnson, and David Cameron—there were lies told about what this meant and what was happening, which people believed because they were very emotionally attached to a version of Britain that had existed during and after the Second World War. That weakness was exploited. In a sense, it conformed to many of the characteristics of superstition.

Mounk: That’s where I get off board a little. It’s interesting—perhaps you’re seeing the glass half full and I’m seeing it half empty, or the other way around, I’m not sure which way to put it. I recognize that in our society today we have a real attraction to superstitious beliefs—people talking about horoscopes get enormous audiences on TikTok and Instagram, and there’s a kind of new spirituality among a lot of younger people. But there’s a question about how seriously people really, deep down, take it. Do they engage with horoscopes as a kind of fun indulgence, or do they actually let it guide their lives in the same way?

By and large, when we’re talking about Europe, at least, and probably North America, people don’t let horoscopes choose their partners, and they certainly don’t consult them before a doctor performs an operation. Perhaps if you meet somebody you like, you look at the horoscope and get a little titillation, thinking about whether you’re well aligned or not. Perhaps if you really believe in horoscopes quite a lot, and you’re already in a fight with your boyfriend anyway, and the horoscope says he’s no good for you, you use that as an internal reason to say, you see, I really should break up with him. But I think the number of people who fall deeply in love with somebody they’re excited about, but don’t go for it because the horoscope says they’re the wrong person, is probably quite limited.

I agree there are these various forms of spiritual and superstitious belief people have—perhaps they don’t want to live on the thirteenth floor of an apartment, or sit in the thirteenth row on an airplane, or they wake up on Friday the thirteenth and think, ooh, got to be a little careful today. But even for the people who engage in that, it’s a little at the edges of their lives—which I think is different from, as you were saying, the doctor who consults the phase of the moon before doing an operation.

And then there’s this kind of metaphorical application of all this to our political adversaries or enemies, which I think is quite different. First, I was against Brexit—partly because I think, for all its flaws, the European Union is on the whole something sensible, and because, having grown up on the Continent, being among other things a German citizen, and having gone to university in England, having studied history at Cambridge, the idea that I could no longer move to Britain whenever I wanted, and feel welcome there the same way, was personally upsetting to me. But I just think that saying the people who voted for Brexit were superstitious, in the same way that people who believed in witchcraft are superstitious, that they weren’t being rational, flattens a distinction between people’s political values—the ways they might care about sovereignty, or have genuine concerns about a democratic deficit in the European Union, or the sense that they don’t really have control over migration, and that there’s too much migration too fast, and so on. All of which you can disagree with—you can say a lot of people regret the vote for Brexit given that a lot of what was promised didn’t come true, you can say there were falsehoods cited in the campaign—but to simply dismiss it as “people voted for Brexit because they’re superstitious”?

Gaskill: No, I agree with everything you’ve just said. I don’t think voting for Brexit was irrational. I think some of the evidence put before people was misleading, and they bought into it uncritically because it tended toward the way they already wanted to go. The idea of getting out of Europe is just an old-fashioned, jingoistic, little-Englander, xenophobic attitude that goes back generations, and I think it just touched that nerve. My father voted for Brexit, my father-in-law voted for it—it’s not like it’s divided our families. I don’t think they’re stupid; these are clever people. And I think, with the change of government, we might even be steering back toward the possibility—we’re told a majority of the population now want to rejoin the European Union. That doesn’t make me think, “look, see, you idiots, you got it wrong.” I think it just means the emotional complexion of the Brexit and post-Brexit era has steered back in another direction.

Maybe the thing is we’ve had a lot of evidence in the last ten years about economic growth, or the lack of it, which we can actually make decisions on. I just don’t think there was the evidence base to leave the European Union, but there was a very strong emotional, nationalist feeling, and nationalism doesn’t really care a lot about facts—what it cares about is inflaming, empowering stories. That’s what I think we had. So I wouldn’t characterize it quite that uncharitably. Any Brexiteers listening in the United Kingdom—I hear you, I understand you, I don’t agree with you, and I hope you think that maybe it’s time to try it the way we tried it before, and that really wasn’t quite so bad.

Going back to something you said before we got into Brexit—the difference between the symbolic, the metaphorical, and the literal: going back to anthropologists, I think sometimes they wanted to find myth and metaphor in sub-Saharan Africa, whereas actually these things weren’t as metaphorical, or as literal, as the anthropologists wanted them to be. They could be either. People could perfectly well tell a story, some origin myth, that was just a form of entertainment. There was an expectation that things needed to be literal or metaphorical that got in the way, whereas really it doesn’t necessarily need to be either.

This idea of—call it paradox, or cognitive dissonance, or aporia, whatever you want to call it—is true in 17th-century England, and you could find it true among the Azande of Africa: that you can think two things at once, that they can coexist. There’s another anthropologist, Nils Bubandt, a Danish anthropologist who wrote a book called The Empty Seashell—an absolutely fantastic book, about an island called Buli in the Pacific, where witchcraft is very sinister there precisely because it’s absent. That’s the paradox—it’s not because there are witches everywhere, it’s because people sense them peripherally but don’t actually have any direct experience of them.

So, again, we think about the ancients, we think about the myths, and we think, well, that was their religion. It could be—but actually, the possibility is that these are just symbolic stories that communicate moral truths, not actually about how the gods created the universe, and they could hold those two things together simultaneously, or depending on the context. I think that’s one of the things that’s hard to grasp—that they were working in a different kind of framework. It wasn’t just the ideas themselves that were different or similar.

In the rest of this conversation, Yascha and Malcolm discuss superstition in the present day and the complexity of human behavior in times of collective madness. This part of the conversation is reserved for paying subscribers…

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It has now been nearly a decade since Donald Trump first became president of the United States. We have become so used to his uncanny hold over the American political system that it is easy to forget how shocking and unexpected it was at the time. As I argued ten years ago, still fresh out of graduate school, this failure was not limited to the journalistic class; social scientists were also caught badly off-guard.

Donald Trump now looks as though he might finally be loosening his grip over America. He is less popular than at any point over the last decade. He is likely to experience a severe shellacking at the upcoming midterms. Soon, attention will turn to the 2028 presidential primaries.

But our collective failure to anticipate Trump’s rise has recently been on my mind in a perhaps unexpected context: As social scientists grapple with the ways in which artificial intelligence will transform our economy and our democracy, they are falling back into some of the same errors that led them to miss the imminent rise of populism: At a moment of disjunctive change, they are uncritically looking at recent data to predict what might happen in the future.

—Yascha

In the wake of the Great Recession, economists faced tough questions: How could they have missed the imminent collapse of the world economy? Of what use were all their intricate models if they couldn’t predict such a huge systemic crisis?

Just as economists failed to predict the Great Recession, so political scientists failed to predict a series of momentous political upsets. The most obvious is the dizzying rise of Donald Trump. But the story is bigger than that: In recent years, political scientists have overestimated the forces of stability time and again, failing to foresee Brexit, the chaos wrought in the Philippines by Rodrigo Duterte, and the serious threat posed to Polish democracy by its populist government, among other developments.

To be sure, it would be too much to ask political scientists to have predicted each of those twists and turns. For one, academics aren’t in the forecasting business. For another, there is such a thing as contingency: When the unlikely comes to pass, even correct models of the social world fail to see around the next historical corner.

And yet it would be a mistake to quibble away the failure of scholars to recognize that, say, one of the most seismic American political events in a half-century might be on the horizon. A year ago, most political scientists would simply have dismissed the suggestion that somebody like Trump could win the Republican nomination and prove competitive in the general election. Worse still, the dominant theories in the field actually seemed to predict just about the opposite of what eventually happened.

In one of the most respected recent works on presidential nominations, for example, Marty Cohen and his co-authors argue that, as their title has it, The Party Decides. In their view, party elites use endorsements and campaign contributions to help favored politicians in primaries, effectively preselecting approved candidates. And yet an outsider with virtually no institutional backing put up stiff resistance against Hillary Clinton in the Democratic primaries, and an even greater outsider with even less institutional backing swept the competition aside to become the Republican nominee for the presidency of the United States. In short, reality upended what we thought we knew even in areas where dominant theories did seem to make clear predictions.

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How could this have happened?

Over the last three decades, political scientists have made impressive strides in understanding how the political world functions, especially in periods of relative stability. American politics is a good case in point. Scholars of the judiciary have shown to what degree the past ideological alignment of Supreme Court justices predicts their decisions in future cases. Scholars of Congress, meanwhile, can anticipate with great accuracy how representatives are going to vote on a pending bill by looking to such factors as their party ID, their past votes, or their biggest donors.

Three interlocking methodological shifts account for much of that progress.

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James Marriott is a London Times columnist and the author of the Substack Cultural Capital, covering society, ideas, and culture. He is the author of The New Dark Ages: The End of Reading and the Dawn of a Post-Literate Society.

In this week’s conversation, Yascha Mounk and James Marriott discuss whether the decline of reading is as severe as the data suggests, whether television or social media is more to blame, and why this is bad news for democracy.

This transcript has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.

Yascha Mounk: You say in the introduction to your book that there’s a new genre of people wringing their hands about the end of reading, but you are a little earlier to that genre than others, and your book is really quite a lot more ambitious than just pointing that out. But let’s start with a straightforward factual finding: how reliable is the evidence that we have really seen a genuine decline of reading, and how worried should we be about that?

James Marriott: I do think the evidence is at this point really reliable. As you say, the non-viral essay on the decline of reading is pretty much its own genre of magazine journalism now. There have been lots of these sorts of articles. I always like to point out now that everybody has done this. I think I wrote one of the earliest ones back in 2023. I wrote an article about the future of the humanities in UK universities and spoke to lecturers and professors teaching English literature and other humanities subjects and began to find the sorts of comments and observations that have been reported in The New Yorker, in The Atlantic, everywhere now.

Professors told me that they’d spent their careers assigning books like Middlemarch or Ulysses and had assumed that this was pretty much what you did as an English literature professor. You assigned your undergrads these great monuments of English literature, and they were finding that they could no longer rely on their students to read the books. It seemed to them that their students were basically unable to read the books. They just couldn’t get through them.

I and probably everyone else who’s written this sort of article, was conscious that “university students aren’t as clever as they once were” and “the young are disappointing” is a sort of ancient theme of cultural commentary, as people like to say, going as far back as Socrates. I do think this is increasingly backed up by evidence. I guess the largest-scale survey for the decline of reading is this American Time Use Survey of almost a quarter of a million Americans, which found that in the last 20 years, daily time spent reading, defined quite broadly including audiobooks and newspapers as well as physical books, has declined by 40%. There’s a similar figure in the UK: a third of adults say that they’ve given up reading in the last 20 years.

On top of this we have these, I guess, probably more reliable studies about not only the decline of time spent reading but the decline of reading skill. So, declining literacy, which means—I always feel obliged to point out—not that people are literally becoming illiterate, but that our skills of interpreting, analyzing, and comprehending text are declining. There was an OECD report at the end of 2024 which went around the world with this really alarming headline that literacy was declining or stagnating in most developed countries. A really remarkable finding, for developed countries with good education systems to be sliding back in literacy. That’s some of the headline data on it.

Mounk: Let me stick to the data for a moment, and then let’s go to the wider significance of this. I’m a little bit torn on that data. I think there’s some data that is quite suggestive, and there’s certainly some anecdotes that seem very telling. At the same time, I worry that we’re always tempted to fall into these panics about things that are getting worse, and then ten or twenty years later you realize that actually we didn’t really change that much. I have to say that I’m struck that my students don’t seem to have gotten worse. Now, I’m lucky to teach at a pretty elite university and have pretty motivated students, but a lot of the anecdotes that you hear are also from people teaching at elite universities who should also have pretty motivated students. I also have shifted towards assigning some exams as pen-and-paper, in-class exams, and I really thought, my God, we have an hour in a classroom setting, in an exam, to write something coherent—we’re not really used to doing that that much, it’s going to be pretty rough. I found that actually the quality of the essays we produced in that time was pretty good. I find they’re able to read things and engage with them at a pretty high level.

There’s some piece of evidence that cuts in the other direction. For example, it was assumed that book sales were depressed for all kinds of reasons over the last 20 years, including competition from ebooks and audiobooks, but also obviously other forms of media. But my understanding is that by and large, the book market has sort of held constant, surprisingly well. It hasn’t grown very much—it’s probably still not a great business to be in, don’t become a writer, I say to my Substack audience—but it really hasn’t declined as much as you might expect if reading had really declined to that kind of extent.

The other point here is that a lot of the things that are replacing traditional forms of literacy still involve literacy. People are now spending more and more time interacting with AI agents, and even though we can talk to them, and perhaps eventually AI will be some sort of hot avatar that is following you around the kitchen as you’re preparing your lunch, or as you watch a robot preparing your lunch, for now most of the way that people are interacting with AI agents is reading and writing. So I’m trying to steelman the case of a skeptic here. What would you say to those responses?

Marriott: Really good points. I think there are a few things to say in response. The first thing is the health of the publishing industry. I think it’s important to disentangle that from the number of books that are being sold. My understanding is that publishing has either, in terms of profits, stagnated or slightly declined over the last 20 years. It’s important to separate total profits in publishing from volume of books sold. What we find when we look into the disparity between those figures is that the volume of books sold has declined, but publishers have managed to maintain profits by bumping up cover prices. Books are more expensive relative to inflation than they were 20 years ago.

There was actually a report at the Frankfurt Book Fair, I think last week, that was one of the first concrete pieces of evidence of the publishing industry admitting that it has a problem. The headline was that in the EU, publishing turnover had declined in real terms 30% in the last 20 years, which is a pretty severe decline. One of the points that article was making was that some of the difficulties in publishing have been slightly masked by inflation and increased cover prices, and that there was an increase, not only in this sort of literacy stuff, but that it was beginning to affect the publishing industry.

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There are other factors that have kept the publishing industry a little more buoyant than it might otherwise be. One of them is that in most Western countries, certainly here in Britain, a lot of public libraries have closed, and public library usage has really—certainly in Britain—fallen off a cliff. I think a lot of people who would once have borrowed books from public libraries are now being driven to bookshops because that’s not an option. So I think publishing has been soaking up some refugees from public libraries, and that has kept the headline figures healthier than they might otherwise have been for a while.

“Big Library” is finally being defeated—it’s what we all wanted as book lovers. I guess the other thing would be, you could also look at the quality of books that are being sold, whether we believe that publishing is shifting high-quality text of the kind that idealistic people like me might hope they’re shifting, or whether books themselves are getting a bit simpler and a bit less of the kind of complicated, rich text that we might hope for. I think there’s evidence that that is happening. So that’s my brief overview on why things in publishing are more melancholy than the publishing PR machine might want us to believe.

Mounk: I really felt like I was playing devil’s advocate when I was saying that things are fine in publishing. That’s a tough case to make.

Marriott: No, it’s true. I think it certainly has been the case that, until recently, it seemed that publishing profits have not been tracking the supposed decline in reading. I think they are now, and I think that previous phenomenon is explicable.

The second point I would make, as to the utility of the data overall, is a general point that I actually wish I’d made clear in the book: you don’t have to believe in every single data point about the decline of literacy to believe in the overall story that’s going on here, which is a story about the shift from a culture whose emphasis is on the written and printed word to a culture which has an emphasis on the image and the moving image. The great book on this subject, by Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death, was the first polemic to sound the alarm, and I’m really just following in that book’s wake.

Neil Postman’s anti-television polemic, written in 1984—it’s striking that Neil Postman doesn’t cite a single piece of data for the decline of reading, the decline of literacy. We know now that he could have done; reading did decline when television arrived. But he was making, I guess, a wider and more vibey, but perhaps also, I think, more compelling and more watertight point, which is that it’s not necessarily that you can measure these things in data, but the emphasis of the culture is shifting. People are moving from a world in which they understood and comprehended the world through text to one in which they understood and comprehended the world through image. He would have said that images are more visceral, more powerful, easier to watch, and therefore they will tend to overwhelm text just because they have more immediate power. So that would be my attempt to steelman the case.

Mounk: Where do you locate the beginning of the end of reading? I grew up in the 1990s, I suppose—I remember, which tells you a lot about the kind of teenager I was, that I had some t-shirt that said something like “movies are art, theater is life, TV is furniture,” or something like that. Neil Postman identifies television as the enemy of literate society. But if you think television is the beginning of the end of reading, then it goes really all the way back to the 1950s and 1960s in the United States—the sixties, seventies, and eighties perhaps in Europe—which, by the way, is also coincidentally a period when universal literacy in many countries was just emerging. So the time period in which most people are literate and television isn’t yet the main form of entertainment is like seven years.

Now, it seems to me that really your concern is driven more by the internet and social media and short video, TikTok and Instagram, and perhaps podcasts and all of those kinds of things. But there’s this kind of tension between relying on Postman and the emergence of television for the theoretical and conceptual frame, and pointing to social media and so on as the thing that really is going to put an end to literate society. So are we going to be nostalgic for the world of television, where at least we had a unified culture and broadcast news as a kind of thing that gives us a unifying sense of the world, as we see in Britain? Was that actually part of a golden age, or was that already part of a fall from the golden age? And if so, when was the golden age?

Marriott: When you talk about the way that technology has disrupted literacy, you can find yourself becoming ludicrously nostalgic, and if you’re not careful you end up railing against radio. Neil Postman began his story with the electric telegraph, which he thought fragmented news and put us in a world dominated by useless information because you could just communicate too much. I think you can overdo it.

I think this story does begin with television, basically. The first really significant drops in literacy and reading are dated to the 60s and 70s. I think those declines—I don’t have the statistics at my fingertips, I’m afraid—but I think those declines, some of the data seems to suggest, may actually be more severe in terms of the loss of reading time than the declines we’ve seen with the advent of the smartphone in the last 20 years.

I think if there was a golden age of literacy, it probably occurred in the early 20 or 30 years of the 20th century. I think it was a short window before books and literature seriously had to begin to compete with radio and cinema. As to whether TV was a golden age, I think it’s mixed. I think one part of the story is that literacy and reading undoubtedly declined with the arrival of television—the drops are huge. It’s not hard to imagine why: when you have an incredibly entertaining screen in your front room, suddenly the most entertaining and diverting object in your house is no longer a book, it’s the TV in your front room, and understandably everybody was watching television.

Mounk: Some of the most striking studies are on the effect of having a television on the number of children women have—I think it’s the famous study in rural India—and it’s just like getting a television is the most amazing contraceptive. The average number of children goes down from something like eight to five the year the television is introduced. Part of it may be the spread of cultural values and things like that, but a lot of it is literally just that you now have an alternative form of entertainment to the thing that produces children.

Marriott: Yes, I think that’s absolutely true. The data for the way that TV changes social life, the way it changes friendships—Derek Thompson writes about all this very well—I think is fascinating and overwhelming, and should lead us to believe that it also had this huge impact on reading. It’s no surprise that it also has a huge impact on reading; it’s a kind of direct competitor to reading in a way that you wouldn’t necessarily expect it to be a direct competitor to sex.

Mounk: Derek points out, just for those who don’t know that line of writing, which is really interesting—for example, I think the number of barbecues in America has declined by over fifty percent, the number of dinner parties has declined by sixty percent, I’m making up these numbers sort of from what I remember as best—huge drops over the last twenty, twenty-five years. Perhaps that’s because everybody is sitting at home alone rather than socializing, and we’re doing that, and perhaps we’re also reading books, but it’s quite plausible to think that really the effect here is that it’s being eaten up by this entertainment time, which nowadays is no longer the television, but mostly online streaming, TikTok, Instagram, and other forms of social media.

Marriott: Yeah, absolutely. In my book I quote some of the observations made by social anthropologists in the UK going to people’s houses and looking at how working-class life was changing in Britain. There’s a really terrifying quote from a famous anthropological study done, I think, in the early 1960s: they go to a working-class house and everyone’s sitting around watching the TV, and the father makes some comment like, “It’s brilliant, we’ve got the television, we never have to go outside now,” or something sort of unintentionally dystopian and revealing.

As to your point about whether TV constitutes a golden age, I would say there are two things to say. I think TV sets us off on a route towards a visual culture—I think it’s the beginning of the decline of literacy. But I think it has two advantages over the world we’re currently in. The first, I think, is that television, especially in its early decades, was run according to values that were still very much shaped by literacy. It’s hard to say that every technological revolution instantly changes a culture in every single way—that’s true in some ways, and we can talk about these striking statistics about birth rates and socializing, but in some ways it takes a while for the values of the technology to be absorbed by the culture.

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If you look at a lot of especially factual TV programming broadcast by the BBC in the UK, it seems obvious, watching these programs, that this is a kind of television shaped very deeply by the values, the culture, and the assumptions of literacy—people talking in coherent sentences, debates that take a long time. There’s a famous debate about Britain’s membership of the EEC between Roy Jenkins and Tony Benn that goes on, I think, for more than an hour, and they get into economic statistics, and it’s sort of print-inspired in its mode of communication. A lot of early factual programming is less like the sort of stunt-driven, very wacky kind of TV that you’d get nowadays if you were trying to popularize an academic subject to a mass audience—it really is just a guy almost reading a lecture to an audience on television with some moving images in the background. I think the fact that that age of television was shaped by the values of print made it a better engine for democracy than modern 24-hour cable news is.

The other point to say is that a really fundamental thing about television is that it’s static. A TV sits in the front room of your house—you can’t take it on the bus with you, you can’t take it on the train with you—and if, in the 1980s and 1990s, you were bored commuting to work or bored in an airport, the most entertaining thing available to you in that situation was a book or a magazine. I think literate culture had a crucial place to cling onto in our culture. I think what the smartphone does that’s important and perhaps undernoticed is it just makes screens ubiquitous, and it wipes out all the other cultural space that literacy used to occupy—literacy has nowhere to thrive now.

Mounk: I remember getting on the subway, I think in New York, a couple of months ago, and seeing somebody with a newspaper—a physical newspaper. I remember thinking, wow, how eccentric, having a newspaper on the subway. But of course, it would have been the case that you look at the subway and half the people, more than half the people, are reading either a newspaper or a book or something like that. It’s funny how quickly that has happened—what used to be ubiquitous has come to be exotic in a certain kind of way.

I think you set out very nicely both the fact that this is happening and some of the broader effects it’s having. But again, there’s a bunch of think pieces that are going on about the decline of reading. You really make a more ambitious argument that is trying to explain what the historical role of literacy has been beyond the world of literature, and why, therefore, we should expect much more far-reaching consequences from these transformations. Tell us how it is that the spread of mass literacy and the role of the book has really shaped the things we take for granted about the modern world.

Marriott: Really, following people like Marshall McLuhan and Walter Ong, who are the pioneers of these arguments—our culture is shaped by text in ways that we’re so used to, being surrounded by books, that reading and writing seem so obvious to us, almost so banal to us, that we forget to understand how profoundly they’ve shaped our civilization. I’m here in the Times Book Cupboard, and I am literally surrounded by books.

My book is trying to assemble an argument that I personally don’t think is particularly controversial, which is—you can go into history and look at, I guess, the two pillars of my argument: the phenomenon of the Enlightenment and the phenomenon of modern mass democracy. I think those two stories don’t happen at all without literacy. One of the fundamental points that media theorists like Marshall McLuhan and Walter Ong would make is that there are certain forms of knowledge which basically don’t exist without literacy. It’s easy to assume that things like philosophy, complex narrative history, logic, and mathematics are innate forms of human knowledge and intelligence that spring out of our brains fully formed, and that any human community will be able to have these kinds of intellectual activity. They argue, I think very persuasively, and I really agree with them, that’s not the case at all.

Mounk: Why is that? Explain the reasoning.

Marriott: One of the great ways to prove the advantage of literacy over talking and oral culture is to have to explain your ideas on a podcast, and you find yourself doing a much worse job of it than you can on the printed page.

Mounk: It’s funny, I actually find the relationship between oral culture and the written word to be the other way around. Some people tell me, “I’m bad at writing,” and I’m always too polite to say it, but I always think, well, that just means you haven’t thought through this very carefully. The point actually is that when you’re speaking, you can jump over holes in your argument quite easily—you have a little rhetorical flourish, you distract the person you’re talking to, even yourself, with some kind of little joke, and then you go on to the next point. Whereas in writing, it becomes really obvious when one thing doesn’t follow from the other, and that’s where people start getting stuck—that’s where they’re like, “I’m a bad writer because I can’t put my idea on paper.” Well, that’s because you hadn’t actually thought through the idea.

So presumably part of the reason why we need writing, for example, for a really complicated mathematical proof, is that it’s just impossible to keep everything in our mind unless you’re really a savant, to a sufficient degree, to go back and double-check each step and make sure that you haven’t jumped in some way where you’re introducing an error into the proof or the equation.

Marriott: Yeah, I think that’s really well put. The phrase that Walter Ong uses is that writing allows us to externalize part of our minds. You can take ideas that, in an oral culture, before the arrival of literacy, only exist in your head, and you can put them on paper and look at your thoughts from the outside. You can submit them to criticism, you can rearrange them, you can analyze them, you can stare at them and reread them again and again and discover the flaws in them. You can have another thought and then join that to the next thought.

This can easily seem like a slightly banal point to make, but that simple action of being able to criticize your own thought, to externalize your own thoughts, to join together your thoughts, is impossible without literacy, and that simple act is the beginning of history and philosophy and mathematics and logic. The other part of that equation of literacy is not only the writer but the reader. Readers are able to submit written text to much greater scrutiny than a listener is to a spoken text. When you’re talking to me, I’m rolling on, going at your pace, having to follow every word you say, and you have all these persuasive techniques that have nothing to do with logic—you can be charming, you can be funny, you can skip around, and I just have to follow you, going forward and forward and forward.

One of the crucial things that we do as readers—and we know this now because scientists have tracked the way our eyes move while reading—is that we’re constantly skipping backwards and forwards over text. We’re not necessarily moving in this completely linear way; we’re looking backwards and forwards, and we’re always checking those connections, bringing greater powers of criticism and analysis to the written text. It’s just impossible to bring that to a spoken text. I think those two crucial things mean that literacy is just this huge driver of richness, complexity, and detail of thought.

Mounk: I’m convinced by that—though it’s two literature heads convincing each other, so it doesn’t take much. There are two different senses in which you’re talking about literacy, and I want to make sure that we don’t jump between them. The first one is just that you need the ability to write things down, the ability to fix our thoughts in this way, to make them subject to auditing in a way that they wouldn’t be in spoken language. But that could remain the preserve of specialists. When you’re talking about needing written mathematical notation in order to do complicated mathematical proofs, I’m sure that’s right, but it doesn’t matter if the average American or the average Brit reads fewer books—mathematicians are still going to be able to use mathematical notation, and they don’t become somehow less capable of communicating with each other about high-level math because the average person spends less time reading novels or magazines.

So, unless we really think we’re about to live in Idiocracy, the threat from the modern world presumably isn’t to the existence of the written word, or to literacy in sense one. The threat is to the broader culture in which communicating through writing and reading plays a very important role. So tell us a little bit about, beyond the importance of writing to mathematicians being able to develop those kinds of sophisticated proofs, how this culture of mass literacy—or, when we’re talking about the 18th and 19th centuries, semi-mass literacy—helped to inspire the modern world, and why, therefore, we should worry if fewer and fewer people are reading, or the number of people who buy books is going down slightly, and students at colleges read summaries of Ulysses rather than reading the whole of Ulysses.

Marriott: Of course. Telling the story of mass literacy and finding a starting point is always a somewhat arbitrary pursuit. You could begin anywhere in the last 500 years. The obvious place to begin is the invention of the printing press in the 15th century, which massively increases the volume of books produced in Europe—almost exponentially. It’s one of the great transformative technologies in history. It doesn’t necessarily lead to something that looks much like mass literacy immediately. Even in the aftermath of the printing press, it takes a while for books to be widely adopted; literacy remains a surprisingly elite pursuit, even though it’s growing in the first 100 to 150 years after the printing press.

My story starts in the middle to late 18th century, in this phenomenon known as the reading revolution—this point in history at which a number of factors seem to be driving the adoption of literacy in the wider population outside the elite. You have not only the printing press and the production of more books, but the emergence of increasingly complex modern states and economies, which demand literate bureaucrats and merchants who can read and write to conduct trade. You have the influence of Protestantism, a version of Christianity which places a huge emphasis on the written word. All these things culminate in an inflection point in the late 18th century, when more people are reading, and they also read more books, so more books are circulating and being read by more people.

It seems pretty obvious to me that it’s no coincidence that that time in history is also the time in which you get the Enlightenment and the beginnings of democracy. More different ideas are diffused; ideas can be compared and criticized in a way that’s just difficult when you have access to fewer books. You get the emergence of newspapers, the beginnings of the public sphere. You get information diffused down through society—political information which, for most of history up until that point, had been the preserve of an aristocratic elite, becomes capable of being understood, interpreted, and criticized by ordinary people.

This is just a transformative moment in our history. There are kinds of arguments about politics that you can’t have without mass literacy—not only in terms of the diffusion of political information among a wide population who can then read it, absorb it, and draw conclusions about it, but also in terms of the participation of ordinary people in political debates. I always think it’s interesting to consider some of the democratic thinkers of the 18th century: people like Thomas Paine and Jean-Jacques Rousseau came from backgrounds which, had they been born into those families 100 or 200 years previously, would never have been literate, and would never have made their arguments about democracy and rights to a large audience beyond the local pub, because they wouldn’t have had the means to. I just think there’s this inflection point when political debate rapidly expands, and information, criticism, and knowledge spread to the population. That is basically the point at which Europe and North America begin to roll out of an age of monarchical autocracy toward the democracies we know today.

Mounk: Not to go all social science on you, but obviously there’s a question about whether the spread of literacy is the independent or the dependent variable here. Is it that the spread of literacy leads to more democracy, perhaps more economic growth, more inventions, and so on? Or is it that the spread of literacy among an elite group in 16th-, 17th-century Europe allows inventions like the steam engine and other kinds of things, which create huge economic transformations, and at the end of those economic transformations is the rise of universal elementary school and so on, which actually tends to happen in the second half of the 19th century?

So, is it that literacy rises and that leads to the creation of democracy, or is it that the spread of the Industrial Revolution leads to a much more affluent society, which leads to more democratic institutions, and part of what those democratic institutions institute is much more universal education? I think it’s probably kind of impossible to fully disentangle that, but why should we think of literacy as the motive force of those transformations rather than the result of those transformations? Or is it a little bit of both?

Marriott: I think that’s really well put. I agree it’s impossible to disentangle these incredibly complex historical phenomena, and I guess one of the problems of trying to make a polemical argument out of history is that history is just not simplifiable to provide useful strands of argument.

I do think that there is a very compelling case to be made that the Industrial Revolution and the Enlightenment are basically the products of the growth of literacy. The guy who I think makes this argument most compellingly is the economist Joel Mokyr, who’s got a book called The Enlightened Economy, another book called The Culture of Growth, and he won the Nobel Prize for his work on this stuff a couple of years ago. The case of these books is, if you are looking to explain why Europe had the Industrial Revolution, the predominant factor is its culture of literacy and its culture of the Republic of Letters—this community of thinkers, scientists, and inventors across Europe who are exchanging ideas, building on each other’s work—and without that culture of scientific exchange and intellectual interaction and criticism, you don’t really get the Industrial Revolution. He makes the case more compellingly than I could in five minutes.

There are a few interesting instances where particular innovations that were foundational to the Industrial Revolution do seem to have depended on this literate culture. For instance, I think the example he gives is that the first steam engine would have been impossible had its inventors not had access to a Europe-wide tradition of debate and criticism about issues like air pressure and valves. When they came to their invention, they weren’t just tinkering in a workshop—they were able to draw on technical information argued over by natural philosophers for the last five decades. That is a situation that can’t exist without literacy, because you just have no access to that information.

The other really interesting data point that I like—Joseph Henrich makes this point, or draws attention to the study, in one of his books—is that there does seem to be a causal connection between the number of copies of Diderot’s Encyclopédie, his great Enlightenment encyclopedia, that were diffused in various towns at the end of the 18th century, and how many inventions those towns and cities went on to send to the Great Exhibition of 1850. Which suggests—not that there were loads of kids who read the encyclopedia and then became inventors—but that it’s a kind of sign of a place that has access to knowledge and an intellectual life, that is plugged into the Republic of Letters. And being plugged into the Republic of Letters does seem possible to draw, if not a straight line, then a kind of causal connection to better inventions, better science, better technology.

I would say, given all that, I agree that literacy is profoundly important. I would not begin to say it’s necessarily the most important thing. I think you could argue that if you’re telling the story of modern democracy and you were to extract the single most important factor, perhaps it’s economic growth, and perhaps it’s the rise of the bourgeoisie and their increasing economic competition with the aristocracy that is the beginning of democracy. I can still buy that. I still think literacy is important. The argument of the book is not that it’s the only factor, but that it is a very important factor. That would be my answer.

Mounk: That makes sense. I guess I’m trying to think about what kind of literacy is necessary, and in what way, for democracy to be likely to sustain itself. Clearly there are some extreme examples in which you can get a reasonably functional democracy with very low levels of literacy. India is the obvious case. That’s atypical for a whole set of reasons—partially its democratic institutions are a strange kind of colonial inheritance from the United Kingdom. Partly, I think, the degree of what some political scientists call ethnolinguistic fractionalization—the degree of regional, linguistic, ethnic, religious, and to some extent caste difference—makes it such a fragmented society that nobody can really hope to dominate, and that helps democratic institutions. It tends to be the case that democratic institutions persist when you have very homogeneous societies, or really, really diverse societies, and the trouble often starts when you’re somewhere in the middle.

There are all kinds of reasons why India set out on its democratic experiment, and all kinds of reasons why it was able to sustain it so far, by and large. But it’s still striking that this is a case in which, going back to 1948, you had very low levels of literacy, and yet the country was able to sustain this democratic experiment for a very long time, with a giant population. Of course, you’re right that by and large we see that the more educated and more literate a population is, the higher the chances of democracy surviving have been. But what exact kind of form of literacy do you need in order to sustain that?

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That, I think, does depend on the kind of causal account we give about the beginning of the 19th century. If we’re really saying literacy rose and that led to all of these other changes, and then you had democracy at the end, then you might say, well, if we have a lot fewer people reading, and they have fewer critical faculties, that is immediately going to lead to a potential decline of democracy. But if you’re saying actually what happened is a much more complicated, intertwined process, where of course you need literacy among some small elite group that was responsible for those technological innovations, and the result of that process was to spread literacy from 10 to 15 percent of the population—which I guess it would have been in Britain in the 18th century, I don’t have those figures to hand—to 90-plus percent by 1900 or 1950, then literacy here is as much the thing that is being caused as the thing that’s causing it.

You might say, okay, we’re not going to go into a world where the elites in society are not able to read and write. We might read a little bit less for pleasure, and there might be a larger portion of the population that really has trouble reading in any significant way, but that just gets us back to what the origins of democratic societies looked like. At the same time, we’re going to get other forms of engagement which can also serve to spread information. I’m listening to a lot more audiobooks than I did in the past. Is that exactly equivalent? Perhaps not, but I certainly get something out of listening to a French novel I’m listening to at the moment, or listening to the standard history of China that I listened to a few months ago. It’s not like none of that information enters my mind—it’s still a way of engaging with serious information. And of course, perhaps the median YouTube channel, and even the median Substack, might be full of empty inanities, but there are also conversations like these, full of great insights. So I guess the question is, we’re clearly not going to become a completely illiterate society.

We’re always going to use reading and writing in certain specialized contexts, in order to do things like mathematical proofs, or write the instructions for how to administer the nuclear codes, or whatever other kind of context. There are going to be other kinds of forms of intellectual exchange—a lot of the technologies now exist. So why should we be as concerned as you are that this slight change in the mix of different forms of communication, and the exact role that literacy plays in our society, is going to be that damaging?

Marriott: A really good question. I guess in my head I split the beneficial democratic effects of literacy up into two camps. The first is the democratization of information, which took place in the 19th century, and the democratization of the skills of analysis and abstraction that are associated with literacy. I know that sometimes sounds like a slightly woolly thing to say, but I think, being trapped inside our literate society, we can fail to see how the ways we think about politics are shaped by literacy.

One of the things—there’s interesting writing by an Edwardian journalist called George Bourne, who was going to these rural communities in the UK where literacy had just arrived, and he was talking about the transformative political effect of the spread of even quite cheap newspapers. People were accessing information about their governments, and they were accessing what to us seems an obvious, more abstract way of thinking about politics. Something is going wrong in your local area, and it’s not just an item of gossip, not just something that’s arrived out of nowhere and exists in your life that you complain about and it makes things worse. The skill of literacy allows you to join it up, because you have more information, because of more abstract thinking, to a wider social story, and you can think about it as part of a systemic problem. I think literacy diffuses information and increases critical thinking through the population, and that’s its main role in the rise of democracy.

There’s a slightly separate point to be made about the way that it sustains democracy, which is becoming more apparent to us as we move into this post-literate age—which is that one of the most striking things that Marshall McLuhan says about literacy is the way it emotionally desaturates a culture and a society. He makes a really good point, I think it’s at the beginning of The Gutenberg Galaxy, that if you come from a traditional pre-literate culture, an oral culture as we call them, the thing that would strike you about a highly literate culture—like the one that existed in the beginning and middle of the 20th century—would be how eerily emotionless it is.

When you’re communicating in an oral culture, all the information you ever receive comes to you face to face from a person, and you receive every item of political gossip or knowledge about the world in a highly emotional context. You’re talking to each other, you’re excited, people have different personalities, some of them are charming. When people are trying to persuade you around to their point of view, they’re shouting at you, or charming you with their charisma, or maybe they’re just really tall, and we’re more inclined, irrationally, as human beings, to be persuaded by tall people because they seem more authoritative and we assume they have higher status.

What literacy really effectively does to our civilization is strip a lot of these irrational forms of argument out. When you’re trying to persuade someone of a point through writing on the printed page, you can’t charm them, you can’t shout at them, you can’t cry at them, you can’t impress them with your physical presence. Writing is by no means perfectly rational, but it places a much greater emphasis on rational argument than face-to-face communication does. I think one of the ways literacy has really benefited democracy is by biasing our discourse—not in every instance, but overall—more towards less emotional, more reasoned forms of communication and argument.

McLuhan was making this point in the ’50s and ’60s, and I think it’s becoming obvious to us now quite how right he was. I think a lot of what’s going on with our politics now is—I think not only that reliable information is becoming less available to people for various reasons, but that we’re just seeing the emotional temperature of our whole culture whoosh back up again, as this whole human world, which literacy had tended to exclude—of people’s voices and faces and personalities—is just rushing back in. If you want to make a point in person or over a video, you have a range of extra-rational or irrational techniques of persuasion you can draw on, compared to if you’re making a point in a newspaper column or a book, where you’re much more restricted in the number of irrational techniques you can draw on. I just think this much more personal, much more emotional culture is much more susceptible to the kinds of irrational and charismatic forms of persuasion that I think are very dangerous for democracy. It seems like an almost banal point to make, because to me the evidence is everywhere.

Mounk: I’m a little bit torn about this, because you meet certain polemicists who sound incredibly macho on the page, for lack of a better word—who dress down their enemies with the confidence of a field marshal—and then you meet them in real life and they’re just sad little homunculi. You think that clearly, all through their middle and high school lives, they dreamt of taking to the page to eviscerate the bullies, and now they’re hiding behind the featurelessness of writing, exactly as you describe it, in order to do that.

Perhaps it’s good that we’re able to look beyond the homunculus in the writing, or perhaps it’s actually hiding something deep about the character. But it’s helpful to know, because you’re like, you’re not the kind of self-confident, boasting writer you pretend to be. You’re just a sad little hurt man who was bullied too much in middle and high school.

Marriott: T.S. Eliot has a great line about the bombastic self-confidence of the mild-mannered man safely entrenched behind his typewriter, which has sometimes occurred to me as I’ve written some of my more bombastic opinion columns safely behind my desk.

In the rest of this conversation, Yascha and James explore whether artificial intelligence will impact literacy, how we can preserve the art of reading, and why the decline of literacy is bad for democracy. This part of the conversation is reserved for paying subscribers…

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Eliot A. Cohen is the Arleigh Burke chair in Strategy at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. His latest book is The Strategist: How to Think About War and Politics.

In this week’s conversation, Yascha Mounk and Eliot Cohen discuss what genuine strategic thinking requires, why America’s war with Iran represents a failure of strategy rather than of military capability, and what Winston Churchill’s wartime memoranda reveal about what good strategy actually looks like.

This transcript has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.

Yascha Mounk: Why is this term “strategy,” which people throw around in all kinds of contexts, often very loosely, actually very important if you’re trying to understand the world, and if you’re using it rigorously?

Eliot Cohen: Well, I think you have to go back to the origins of the word, which come from the Greek, strategos, general. We live in an age of war. I suppose that’s really my central point. I begin the book by saying you undoubtedly live in a state that may be at war, or whose borders have certainly been shaped by war. That’s true of pretty much all of us. And strategy is at the heart of what war is all about. I think what’s happened is that the word “strategy” has gotten so diluted, and the considerations of it really so bloated, that people have in some ways lost the ability to think about it. So what I wanted to do was to write a book, a relatively brief book, that would not be a massive tome, to try to focus people on the original meaning of the word. Because if there’s one thing particularly Americans have learned, but plenty of others have as well, you can have the most advanced weapons, you can have very professional and skilled soldiers, you can have perfectly sound tactics, and you can still fail. The reasons for the failure are at the level of strategy, usually not at the other levels of tactics and so forth.

Mounk: Perhaps I’ll start with that, and we might be able to come back to it, because I want to get into some of the interesting, meaty theoretical concepts in your book. But what’s striking about the Iran war at the moment is that America continues to be militarily supreme compared to any of its competitors—certainly compared to any of the competitors that have been fighting in the Iranian theater. China may be catching up to the United States on various military metrics, but China’s not directly involved in this war. And yet, despite the fact that very few American soldiers have died, America has superior planes, superior operations, is able to carry out these very impressive, technologically sophisticated operations—this looks like one of the biggest humiliations for the United States in a long time, and it comes after other humiliations, from the Iraq War to the Vietnam War and so on. So, should we lay the fault for all of that at the feet of strategy? Is it Trump’s total lack of strategy going into this war which explains this?

Cohen: The fact that American installations suffered as much damage as they did, that American aircraft suffered as much damage on the ground as they did—that is really more of a kind of military-technical result of people failing to take precautions which, in some ways, you just can’t understand. And there are operational failures here too. But it does seem to me that the big failures have really been at the strategic level, in a whole bunch of ways. Failing, I think, to operate within a real strategic context. The Trump administration goes into this war having alienated almost all of our allies, when actually you really do need their support if you’re going to be in this conflict. It goes in, I think, failing to understand the Iranian regime—I’m not sure even now that it does. I think it’s failing to have thought through what are the means it can really bring to bear to achieve what it wants, and really without having a clear—what I call—a theory of victory, an explanation for how all this is supposed to work. Now, you could have had a much better strategic approach to the war, and that doesn’t necessarily mean that you succeed, but you have a much better chance.

I guess I would also just say, on the Iran war specifically, we still don’t know what the final outcome is. I do think a lot of people have been surprised by the way in which Trump has not simply walked away from it, which many friends of mine who share a similar view of the president that I do really expected—that he would, in the now-stock phrase, “chicken out.” He hasn’t quite, which is an interesting thing. So the end of the story has not been written. But yeah, I would say fundamentally, the major missteps that we’ve seen are very much strategic missteps.

Mounk: I wrote an ill-timed article back in January arguing that Trump doesn’t have a doctrine, but he has a playbook. And the playbook is that he goes for these rapid strikes, spectacular actions, that don’t risk many American lives, don’t cost a lot of money, and by the time people wake up, it’s kind of over. Very true for the first round of strikes against Iran, and very true, of course, for the spectacular capture of Nicolás Maduro. It’s very much not true for this. So the question is, why is that? Now, I think I’m going to slightly defend my ill-timed article and say I think they believed it would be similar. They believed they had a plan that’s very similar to Venezuela, where they’re going to go in, use massive force, and decapitate the Iranian regime. They seem to have believed they had some kind of deal with Ahmadinejad, who was going to be able to go in and take over in the same way that Delcy Rodríguez had taken over in Venezuela. Presumably they thought, if it somehow doesn’t work, we just retreat—we’ve destroyed a bunch of Iranian facilities and planes, and that’s the end of it. But they don’t seem to have reckoned with the Iranian ability to close the Strait of Hormuz. Now, ironically, Trump is in the same situation that he has repeatedly criticized George W. Bush for, which is to get into a war for which you don’t have an exit plan.

Cohen: I would say I mostly agree with that, but not entirely. Let me spell out—well, first, I would say I agree that he does not have a deep understanding of military affairs, and I do think the Venezuela episode influenced how he thinks about this. There have been other cases like that too—the assassination of Qasem Soleimani in the first administration; he actually has a record there. What are some of the things that are different, though? I think one is his antipathy to the regime is qualitatively different than his attitude to just about any other country on earth. Part of that is for the rather simple reason that they have tried to kill him. Even now they’re threatening not just to kill him but members of his family. People do take that kind of thing personally.

Mounk: Of all the different strange things that Donald Trump takes personally, this seems like a very reasonable one.

Cohen: Yeah, I was going to say—I think even you or I would really take it personally. I think he does take the nuclear dimension quite seriously as well. What’s the reason for that? I suspect that, with Trump, a lot of his basic views of politics were formed in the eighties, roughly the early eighties. He thinks of that regime in particular in that framework, and they were a particularly threatening kind of regime when they were first created. That’s one thing—his view of them is different. I think the second thing, though, that is surprising—if he simply followed that playbook, it would be the “TACO” bet. “Trump Always Chickens Out,” which I tend to modify as “Trump Always Chickens Out Sometimes,” which makes it a little bit less useful.

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What they’ve decided to do instead is to maintain a distant blockade of Iran, which has been successful—a return to a very intense sanctions regime, and doing things quietly which enable a fair amount of oil to get out through the Strait of Hormuz. I was just looking at the news today, and people are saying somewhere between ten and twelve million barrels—it fluctuates down from seventeen million, but that’s not zero. He’s adopted a military course of action which is different from the one that one might have expected. What I think they certainly didn’t expect, though, is that this war would begin to expand in the way that it has, particularly with the Houthi successes in Yemen, and the Iranian connection there. He’s not a strategic thinker, he’s not a geopolitical thinker really, and I think they’re finding themselves surprised on that score. On this one, I think he has departed somewhat from the playbook.

Mounk: I agree with you. I think there’s a way you can make that argument less awfully wrong than it seems on a superficial reading. I think fundamentally it’s true that this goes against a lot of the other things he said. He said in his second inaugural, “I want to be measured by the wars I don’t start.” It’s striking—it’s really a strange irony—that he rose to prominence in good part by beating up on his Republican predecessor, George W. Bush, as well as, of course, by his nativist attacks on Barack Obama. Now he is facing a terrible shellacking in his second-term midterms, about to be a huge lame duck, and a big part of the reason for that is an unpopular war of choice. I think those wars have different contexts, and I don’t want to equate them, but it is really a very strange echo of history—and particularly ironic, given how gleefully cruel he was to and about George W. Bush—that he has not emulated any of the better things about George W. Bush, but very much emulated some of the shortcomings of George W. Bush.

Cohen: Yeah, well, he’s not the only one who’s been cruel to George W. Bush. It is striking, and I think it does show—if I can use the word “seriousness” with reference to Donald Trump, which seems like a bit of a stretch—look, if he were really primarily concerned about the midterms above all else, he would have declared victory and gone home. Said, “We destroyed the nuclear program, obliterated it”—or “reobliterated” it, depending on your point of view—and disengaged. That really would have brought diesel prices down, I suspect. The markets would certainly have reacted to that if we’d said, “Okay, no more violence in the Persian Gulf.” He hasn’t done that. On the other hand, I think you’re right that part of his self-conception is that he’s the only guy who can settle wars, and that accounts for two fits of vituperation: one against Volodymyr Zelensky, which is really pernicious and unwarranted, and the other against the hapless Norwegians on the Nobel Prize Committee, who he went after for not giving him the Nobel Prize. I think that is because he’s dealing with that sort of internal, psychic conflict between his ideal self, I suppose, in which he sees himself as the dealmaker, peacemaker, and the real world, in which he’s conducting a war which has expanded and could expand further.

Mounk: That’s fascinating. His obsession with winning the Nobel Peace Prize is itself a fascinating psychological case study. I think it’s partially that he has this very strange competition with Barack Obama, and he can’t brook the idea that Obama won the Peace Prize, of course, hugely prematurely and strangely—but Obama did, and he himself is not going to. I want to go into some of the deeper concepts in the book, and then perhaps we can come back to some of those more contemporary questions about strategy and other things. What does it look like to have a good strategy when you go to war? What does that tell us about some of the failures that we’ve seen in recent American military history?

Cohen: In the book, as people always ask, “So what does good look like?”—it’s one thing to be critical—I try to give an example. What I do is I take the memoranda that Winston Churchill wrote as he’s sailing across the Atlantic, immediately after Pearl Harbor, to meet with Franklin Roosevelt. I say, this is as good as it gets. He’s been prime minister for a couple of years, since May of 1940. He has all of his subordinates around him. He has eight days with no distractions. He has been at the top of the British government for a very long time, and he’s a very, very distinguished military historian. What I do is I go through these memoranda and I talk about what they tell us about how good it is possible to be—because he gets some things very right and some things very wrong.

I would say that some of the qualities that made him as effective as he was—and I believe he was effective—was, first, a certain quality of empathy. Empathy not with his allies, because the memoranda are very artfully crafted to try to avoid irritating the Americans while still trying to get them to do what he wanted. Empathy with the enemy, actually—I think he understood Hitler far better than Hitler understood him. There is a kind of intellectual humility in that he fully acknowledges the limits of how far ahead you can see, but in his very characteristic way he says, “Look, we have to have some sort of unifying theme for how the war is going to be brought to an end.” That’s something that crops up actually in a lot of his writings, including a wonderful little book that he wrote about painting, of all things, which he actually compares to waging military campaigns—I suppose that’s typical. The other thing is a profound realism. He’s very clear about what you can and cannot foresee in war, and he understands that you’re going to have to adjust. On the one hand, you have to have a big idea that you’re trying to pursue. On the other hand, you have to be able to adjust.

The very last thing I would say, which doesn’t really figure in the memos per se, although it emerges very quickly thereafter—I think people sometimes have the idea that strategy is about big ideas, that it’s almost an academic discipline. Of course it’s not. It’s overwhelmingly about implementation. Some of the most important things that happen—and I think Churchill wanted to see this happen when he sailed over there—are things which sound very mundane, like setting up the right array of committees, setting up a Combined Chiefs of Staff, which is quite extraordinary, where you have very, very senior British military leaders, beginning with the guy who had been the Chief of the Imperial General Staff, Sir John Dill, sitting in Washington with the American Chiefs of Staff and doing a vast array of other things. He thought about implementation, and not just about the big ideas. I think that’s really particularly important for those of us who are not in government, or not in positions of responsibility, to remember—it’s an absolutely essential part of strategy.

Mounk: In your answer, you started to hint at the importance of a series of questions that you think we should ask. Perhaps I can go through them with you very quickly. I’ll ask you to be brief in your responses. The first one is: what else is going on? What is the broader context of what’s happening here? Why is that the starting point?

Cohen: Because no war occurs in a vacuum. I mentioned earlier that one of the mistakes I think the Trump administration made was going into the Iran war with allies who were deeply mistrustful, who had resources that we absolutely needed. Frequently, an action that might make sense if you were simply confronting an opponent alone does not make sense if you’re thinking about what some of the larger repercussions might be. I give a number of historical examples of how that happens. First, you have to look big. The problem is, when you’re thinking about war, you tend to look narrow—you tend to look very much at your immediate opponent.

Mounk: Another example might be that the Trump administration underestimated the progress of the Houthis in Yemen, and therefore that there’s going to be a kind of simultaneous blockage on two sides. Lots of examples of that. The other thing you hinted at is that Churchill, going forward, had a much better understanding of Hitler than Hitler had of Churchill. The question of “who are those guys?”—that seems like an obvious thing, but you want to understand the person you’re fighting against.

Cohen: I should explain where that comes from. It’s a movie from the late sixties called Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid—a wonderful movie with Paul Newman and Robert Redford. It’s a movie about a pair of train robbers at the end of the Wild West. What happens is, they rob a train and they’re relieving everybody of their wallets, and all of a sudden a boxcar opens and half a dozen men on horseback leap out and begin pursuing them. There’s a great chase scene that then ensues—they’re doing all the usual things, jumping over canyons and doubling back and forth through gulches and creeks and so forth, and they can’t throw them off the track. At one point Paul Newman turns to Robert Redford and says, “Who are those guys?” That becomes a motif in the movie.

It’s actually a profound question, because if you think about it, they know exactly how many there are, they know what kind of weapons they carry, they probably can even tell the breed of the horses. What they don’t understand is why are these guys so skilled, why are they so persistent, why are they motivated differently than the other people who’ve tried to pursue them. The point I’m making here is that the way intelligence organizations in particular function—but the way all of us do—is we tend to count things. We take out the IISS Military Balance, we count up the number of tanks and planes and so forth. Where we make our biggest misjudgments is in that “who are those guys?” area, where you’re trying to figure out what motivates them, how big are their ambitions, a whole array of problems. People consistently fail at that. Vladimir Putin clearly failed at that in assessing the Ukrainians. Just as people who were interested from the outside—Americans, the American government—profoundly misunderstood who the Ukrainians were, and indeed are the Russians. The Israelis failed, I think, to understand who Yahya Sinwar was, and that’s even though he was in one of their prisons for ten years, interrogated by experts. It’s a very, very difficult question to get at. I think it’s actually one of the most important.

Mounk: Is one of the dangers that people structurally misunderstand democracies? When you look at a dictatorship, you can underestimate how coherent it is, or at least how much willpower the ruling clique has. I think that’s clearly part of what happened in the Iran war—that the United States fought believing that if they could decapitate a couple of the leaders, the country would sort of give in, and clearly the Revolutionary Guards are a much more cohesive ruling force of the country than Trump seems to have believed. Authoritarians tend to radiate strength, right? There’s a strongman at the top, and there’s a lot of propaganda to make that person look very determined and in control, and any splits in the regime are very hard to see from the outside. On the other hand, in democracies, you always have the opposition criticizing the government and citizens voicing their displeasure and their anger. Outsiders might often be tempted to think, “The United States, Ukraine, whatever—they’re not really going to fight, look at all their divisions, look at how weak they are.” In a way, that might be to the benefit of democracies, because they turn out to be stronger than the opponents believe, and that’s a good thing. Of course it also invites aggression, because outside countries might think that they can conquer them and subdue them more easily than is in fact true. Something about this open public sphere that is a feature of democracy might make it harder to deter enemies.

Cohen: I think that’s right. I think the problem is even more extensive. I don’t disagree with what you’ve said. I think, in general, it is very difficult to understand people who are in a profoundly different place culturally, civilizationally, politically. For example, I think modern secularists—we’re the people who populate most Western governments—find it very hard to understand religious motivation for war. It’s one of the reasons why we wrestled throughout everything after 9/11 with “who really is the enemy, and why are they doing the things that they’re doing?” By the way, I think this applies to the Iran war. I think democrats don’t fully understand dictators, and dictators don’t fully understand democrats either. Then there’s another phenomenon, which is: things change, people change, societies change. One of the things I talk about in the book are some of the things you can take away from cognitive psychology. One of them is the phenomenon of anchoring, where if you’ve seen something that’s very dramatic, that really sticks out, even if you kind of acknowledge things have changed a little, you can’t really acknowledge that they’ve changed a lot.

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This is a classic mistake. I think of the Germans in World War II, at the beginning of the invasion of the Soviet Union—Hitler and his generals, not just Hitler but his generals very much, who were still a somewhat different group of people—they looked at the Soviet performance in the Winter War and they said, “Okay, maybe they’ll be a little bit better up against us, but not enough to make a real difference.” Similarly, I think with Ukraine, people anchored on 2014. They didn’t understand that, actually, in the eight years between 2014—first, 2014 was a bit different than people thought at the time, but in the interval between the Russian seizure of Crimea and then a large part of Donbas, and eight years later, a lot of things had changed. Then there are the circumstances—the Russian seizure of Crimea was one thing; the Russian attempt to occupy the whole country and massacre lots of people, that was a different thing. I think most of us kind of stumble around in a bit of a fog, almost no matter where we’re from. Just one last thing on that: everybody, of course, has heard of the famous Chinese general who’s also a philosopher of war, Sun Tzu, who put a great deal of emphasis on understanding one’s enemy. The point that always has to be made is that he’s operating from a world in which it’s rival kingdoms within the same civilizational structure who are fighting each other. The barriers to understanding are a lot lower than they are in our world. We’re actually, I would argue, despite the information revolution, a lot higher than they were for Sun Tzu a couple of millennia ago.

Mounk: That’s a great gloss on that famous line by Sun Tzu, that the most important thing is to understand your enemy. The third question you ask is: what is your objective? That seems obvious—you want to win a war. Why is that an important question, and what are examples of people getting that question wrong?

Cohen: Sure. I’m a good Clausewitzian, and I believe that the strategic approach to war is thinking about war as the use of military means to serve the ends of policy.

Mounk: That’s a very famous phrase, and I feel like people throw it around, but probably few people who listen to this actually read Clausewitz. Even though I know I have a particularly erudite listenership, I feel like Clausewitz is a constant reference, but unless you’re a military historian or a military strategist, I don’t know how many people have actually read Clausewitz. What’s the alternative to that point of view? When you say that war is politics through other means—how does that distinguish itself from other ways people have thought of warfare, or other ways we might pose that question?

Cohen: I think it is a very famous phrase. The first thing that everybody should think, before they quote that phrase, whether they’ve read On War or not, is that this is not how we normally think about war. We think about it as tragedy, we think about it as divine punishment, we think about it as a hideous accident. Some people think of it as just kind of a bloody sport. There’s a wide range of ways in which we think about war, and most of the time we do not think about war as an instrument of policy. The second thing I would say about that—first you have to just step back and say, “Wow, that’s a different way of thinking about war than I’m used to.” The central point, which it seems to me is often lost on people, is: if war is indeed the use of military means to serve the ends of policy, well, the ends of policy are, by definition, political, and politics always changes.

I taught for a number of years at the Naval War College, and I know the officers would always be frustrated that the civilians just didn’t give you a bunch of clear-cut objectives and then get out of the way and let you go off and win the war. That’s not the way it works. If you take the example which people frequently cite as the classic case of somebody who did it right, it would be George H. W. Bush in the first Gulf War, who very famously set four objectives for the U.S. military. When people have brought that up, I’ve always asked, “Can you name those four objectives?” Of course they can’t. They just know that he had four objectives, which were one sentence each. Here’s the problem. The first objective was to ensure the safety and security of American citizens in the Gulf—an objective articulated when Saddam Hussein was still holding American hostages. They were released before we began hostilities. By going to war, all you were doing was endangering those American citizens—in the United States Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marine Corps—who were about to go into combat. The second objective was to get the Iraqis out of Kuwait. That was a very concrete objective, which ended up being achieved. The third objective was to restore the legitimate government of Kuwait, which is an interesting concept, given that it’s a hereditary monarchy and represents maybe a quarter of the people who live there. The fourth objective was to ensure the safety and security of the Persian Gulf—that speaks for itself as a fuzzy objective. In fact, there were unstated objectives: the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, the elimination of the nuclear program. Then there were follow-on objectives which nobody anticipated, which is: at the end of the war, protecting Shia Muslim Arabs in the south from annihilation by a rather vengeful Saddam Hussein. You begin to have air patrols over southern Iraq and over northern Iraq, to protect the Kurds and so on. Objectives change.

Or to take another World War II example: Britain goes to war in September 1939, at least nominally, to defend Poland. By 1945, despite the fact that Polish soldiers had fought valiantly in Italy and in France, as well as in the Royal Air Force and alongside the Royal Navy, Polish contingents were prohibited from marching in the victory parade in London. That’s because, basically, Poland had been consigned to the Soviet sphere of influence. The point is, objectives will change. The challenge for strategists, with all these questions—what I try to say is the questions are very simple, the answers are much more complicated and more difficult than anybody can imagine. The problem is that even in the course of a war, you have to be periodically reconsidering what your objectives really are, including those objectives that you may not be able to publicly disclose, but are nonetheless quite real.

Mounk: Once you’ve figured out what the situation is, you have an understanding of your enemy, and you’ve actually defined what it is that you’re trying to do—even if you might have to update your understanding of that as the war goes on—you obviously have to think about how on earth you achieve those goals. What are the means of doing that?

Cohen: That question, what are the means—again, it may seem quite straightforward, but it usually isn’t, for a bunch of reasons. One, when you look at the technical kinds of considerations, almost everybody goes to war with things that they’ve never really used before, or on a scale or in a way that they’ve never used before. It’s not nearly as clear as you might think.

There’s another dimension of understanding the means that you bring to bear, and that’s the organizations themselves. I talk in the book a bit about my own experiences, and this is actually one area where I think I fell short. I didn’t understand how reluctant and, in some ways, unable we would be to successfully wage counterinsurgent campaigns in Iraq from 2003 onwards. The United States military is a very adaptive military, so I think by the end it actually got to be quite effective. That is one aspect of thinking about the means that you bring to bear.

Mounk: The idea being here that at the beginning the thinking was, well, the means is just: we go in, we push back the Iraqi forces, we enter Baghdad, and that’s the end of it. It turned out that in order to achieve your objectives you needed means that go well beyond that.

Cohen: One was actually a sort of nonviolent means, which was military government—something the United States has done in a number of wars, which we were not prepared for. When it became clear that we were up against an insurgency, it also became clear that this is something the U.S. military had not been thinking about. I actually conducted a study for the Defense Policy Board on our counterinsurgency doctrine and was pretty appalled to realize that the manuals all dated back to Vietnam. Whatever was going on in Iraq, it wasn’t like fighting the Viet Cong.

Mounk: In a way, each of the steps you’ve described so far involves setting priorities, but you have, as a separate kind of question, what is the priority? How do you sharpen that point?

Cohen: It’s an issue that Americans have tended not to think about as much, particularly in the Cold War period, because we’ve been so wealthy and have had such a surplus of power. One of the most difficult things I think politicians find as they lead a country into war is saying, we’re going to say that some things are much more important than others. They’ll usually try to find somewhat evasive ways of putting it.

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Going into World War II, actually, I think the British in particular—but we also—did a much better job of that. In terms of what kind of forces we were going to develop, one of the biggest strategic decisions ended up being the United States’ deciding to build an army of ninety divisions, which is still a pretty huge army. The original plan was well over two hundred, which would have been unsustainable, and would have prevented us from developing the air forces that we did, which were in many ways decisive. Another priority decision, which was in retrospect the right one, came about a year into the war in Korea—1951, early ‘52—when the Joint Chiefs of Staff said we’re going to cap the troop levels in Korea because the Cold War is now really on, and we have to build up in Europe. They made those kinds of choices.

To go back to Donald Trump, I’m not sure he fully understands that. I think he doesn’t fully accept that you really do have to assign different priorities, and that that will be extremely difficult. The administration comes in thinking, “We’ll just focus on China,” and then they realize they can’t quite do that. They’re not able to do that as well as they should.

The related question, which is the next question, is about sequencing. What do you do first and what do you do second? A number of different issues there. The one I would just highlight is what social scientists like to call path dependence—that once you’ve made one choice, you’ve actually foreclosed others. Politicians in particular, I think, really don’t like that idea. The example, again a World War II example: President Roosevelt understood it was very important to have American forces in action in Europe within the year of Pearl Harbor, to keep the American people committed to a Germany-first strategy, given that for us the war began in the Pacific. He didn’t fully understand that by doing that, he was foreclosing the possibility of invading France in 1943. So we did it in 1944 instead.

The very last question that I talk about is the theory of victory, which I mentioned a little bit earlier—why do we think what we’re doing is going to get us what we want? Again, these all seem like very simple-minded questions. Just drawing on some personal experience: when I was the counselor of the State Department, I would spend a lot of time representing the State at meetings in the Situation Room about Afghanistan and Iraq. There were a lot of very important, consequential decisions—do we send an additional brigade combat team, or another $400 million worth of aid, or build out some provincial reconstruction teams. Almost never did anybody ask—this ended up being partly my job—why do we think doing those things will get us to the place that we want to be. It’s certainly a disturbing question to ask, because the future is murky. It’s a question that you do periodically have to ask. I think you have to ask it right now about Iran. What is the theory of victory? I think it’s either regime collapse, or that there is just so much societal pain that the Iranian government pulls back. I think that second possibility is actually rather limited, because I think the people in charge don’t particularly care about how much suffering the society goes through. We may be stuck with a theory of victory that is not particularly promising.

Mounk: Let me stick with that for a moment and then go to the broader questions. If you’re saying the only really realistic theory of victory is still effective regime change in Iran, and it doesn’t look like we’re about to get regime change in Iran—I certainly would be very happy to see the theocratic regime of Iran collapse, or now I guess it’s some weird mixture between a theocratic regime and just a kind of military junta of the Revolutionary Guard—but if we’re saying that is unlikely to happen, don’t we need to have some other theory of victory, or at least some other theory of ceasefire, some way of securing the Strait of Hormuz with a lasting agreement, or some other way of bringing this war to a close? It sounds to me like you’re advocating for a kind of indefinite war in which we don’t actually have a very clear strategy about how to achieve victory, or really answer the other questions that you’ve just outlined so clearly.

Cohen: Unfortunately, I think that is where we are. One thing I should have said at the very outset—it makes a big difference in terms of how you think about strategy—if you ask the question, when did the war begin? Because that helps you understand the nature of the war. You can think of this as a war that began with the beginning of Operation Rising Lion, in the spring, or you can think of it as having begun before that, with Operation Midnight Hammer.

Or—and unfortunately I think this is closer to the truth—say that fundamentally we’re in the middle of a war that began around 1979, with a regime that is deep in its DNA hostile to the United States, determined to drive us out of the region and to destroy the state of Israel. That sounds very bleak, but unfortunately I think that’s the correct way to see it.

The way to think about this war is: what we’re doing is waging one campaign. There will be truces from time to time, but the opposition of interests, the intensity of the animosity on both sides, and the nature of the opposing objectives is such that it’s probably going to be a protracted war.

I would add one further thing to that—and the book, I have to say, does end on a somewhat bleak note. We’re entering a period, it seems to me, of rather long wars, which we haven’t known for a while. We like our wars—I think the German phrase is frisch und fröhlich—short and sharp. Who wants a long war? But I think unfortunately the world that we’re in is increasingly one of longer wars, in which societal endurance becomes the key, and partly as a result of that, societies again become targets of attack.

This was a phenomenon that I think we began to really see in the American Civil War. If you look at the evolution of the objectives of the North and the strategy of the North, it eventually becomes to break the will of the people of the South to continue to fight. I think you can argue it’s sort of the story of the World Wars, but if you look at the evolution of the Russia-Ukraine war—Russia’s clearly trying to break Ukrainian society in the most brutal possible way. The Ukrainians are trying to do something similar in a much less brutal way—blow up all the data centers and oil refineries, plus Wildberries, the equivalent of Amazon. It’s still going after societal resolve. I think that’s actually, in some ways, the true battleground that we’re going to be looking at.

Mounk: That’s an interesting, scary observation, especially given that there’s been this strange transformation of the war in Ukraine, in which the ground troops seem mired in a kind of World War One impasse. The Ukraine war has now lasted longer than World War One. The defensive capabilities on the ground seem to have a huge advantage over the offensive capabilities, and as a result very little territory changes hands. At the same time, the ability to inflict damage deep behind enemy lines has expanded. There’s a huge advantage to offensive capabilities in the air now because of drones and other technological innovations. It’s the case at the moment that neither Ukraine nor Russia is succeeding in making much progress on the ground. Yet Russia can obviously strike Kyiv and many other Ukrainian cities and inflict terrible suffering. But quite remarkably, Ukraine can also strike the outskirts of Moscow and attack those data centers and so on.

If you play that out, it does suggest huge vulnerability for civilian populations in these protracted conflicts. I want to go for one more beat and stay with your point about Iran, because I obviously agree that there has been deep hostility between Iran and the United States since 1979, and that that is largely the result of Iranian actions—the taking of American hostages, the deep hostility to the United States as well as Israel, the arming of all kinds of proxies and terrorist groups. But of course, for most of that time the war has not been a hot war. It has in some way been managed below the level of a hot war, and I worry that losing that distinction altogether potentially makes it harder for us to understand the choices we face, and the stakes of those decisions.

Certainly I think it’s very hard to imagine that, no matter who’s the next American president or what kind of change of mind Donald Trump might have, Americans and Iranians are going to come together around a table and figure out the terms on which they can be allies, let alone just mutually indifferent, coexisting nations, and the problem is solved. I think that would be very naive to believe. But surely there is still a difference between whether we’re going to continue being in a state of war for the next ten or five or two years, or whether we are able to find an exit from the war we are currently in—even if we will have to continue to deal with a deeply hostile Iran and a serious threat to the security of the region in those years.

In the rest of this conversation, Yascha and Eliot discuss how the war in Iran is going and the causes of American military successes and failures. This part of the conversation is reserved for paying subscribers…

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David Deming is the Danoff Dean of Harvard College and an economist. He writes a Substack called Forked Lightning and hosts a podcast called The Context Window.

In this week’s conversation, Yascha Mounk and David Deming discuss why AI may force universities into a new era focused on community and virtue rather than knowledge or expertise, whether the business model of American higher education is facing existential or merely serious pressure, and how professors and students should rethink learning and assignments in an age when AI can do much of the traditional academic work.

This transcript has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.

Yascha Mounk: Tell me a little bit about what you mean by universities entering the third era of higher education because of artificial intelligence. How is AI going to transform Harvard University, and how’s it going to transform the higher education sector more broadly?

David Deming: Well, first of all, it’s a prediction—nobody knows the future. What I’m doing, Yascha, is looking at the trends in front of us and looking at how, in the past, technology and progress have changed what universities really do. I wouldn’t say “only do,” in the sense that we’ve always done a lot of things, but what’s really scarce, what you can only get at a university, and therefore what is kind of the thing that we should really lean into. My thesis was that in the first era, universities were keepers of scarce knowledge.

This is something I said in a convocation speech I gave to Harvard freshmen: the founding gift of this university was by John Harvard, our namesake, and it was a gift of four hundred books. That doesn’t seem like a lot, but it was about two-thirds the size of a Manuel College library in Cambridge, which was a very established elite British university at the time. So this was really a founding gift that put Harvard on the map. You can think of lots of examples in our history where, for example, when there was a great fire in the 1700s that destroyed a lot of books in the library, the Harvard Corporation—the governing body of the university—told students, “Go home. Without our books, what are we?” Of course that changed over time. There were more libraries. It used to be that Harvard was the location of the only printing press in the colonies, in President Henry Dunster’s house. That changed over time too, as knowledge proliferated.

We became organized around expertise rather than knowledge. Knowledge is just words written on a page. The expert curates knowledge and helps people understand how to interpret it. That, to me, is the conception of the modern university. The great universities like Harvard have organized themselves around a collection of expertise in different disciplines, and that has produced huge benefits for society, and I think will continue to. It’s just that with AI now, expertise will become relatively more commodified. That doesn’t mean we don’t have value—it just means that you can actually access the knowledge of Yascha Mounk or David Deming through ChatGPT, or Claude, which has basically downloaded all of human history and synthesized it in a way that gives people access to relatively personalized expertise.

So the question is: what can we still do as a university? I think the answer, as I said in my speech, is that we are still a learning community. There are lots of skills and habits of mind and virtues that you can really only learn in community with other people. You cannot learn them from behind a computer screen. Therefore, we should return to that really quite old idea of a university, or a collegium—a medieval learning community of teachers and learners, people learning together in community. Learning virtues like justice, integrity, and fairness is best done in community with others. I think that’s what we should double down on. Not that experts aren’t going to be important, but that this is a thing that only we can do now, in the age of AI.

Mounk: Let me disaggregate what artificial intelligence might do to universities across three dimensions. The first is that one of the key reasons why universities exist is to undertake research. We needed the kind of resources that universities had, and frankly, the strange marriage of convenience between teaching and research, in order to sustain the salaries of people who were able to do this kind of research. It now looks as though artificial intelligence is going to be increasingly capable of doing a lot of this research.

That is a positive thing, because we actually care about that research. It matters whether you have better or less good economic research in order to set countries on the path towards development, or in order to better manage a potential financial crisis, or whatever it is. It would be very strange to give up on the benefits of AI because we somehow only want humans to do this work, if we think that better medical research can save human lives. But it might raise questions about whether universities are needed in the same kind of way.

The second point is about the financial basis of the university. Is going to university still going to give the same financial benefits to people’s earnings over their lives? Is there still going to be demand for highly cognitively capable human beings in the economy? And if that’s not the case, then who’s going to pay all of the money you need from your MBA students, your LLM students, and your BA students, in order to subsist?

Then the third kind of challenge is that a lot of assignments I would have traditionally done when I was an undergrad, or that I would have traditionally assigned when I was a teaching fellow—as it’s called, not a teaching assistant, at Harvard—when I was doing my PhD there, can now very easily be done by AI. So how do we actually make sure that people are still learning? I’m sure there are other ways to cut the space, but that’s how I think about it. Let’s start with the first one and work our way down. How should we think about this in the context of research, and whether we still need universities as the employers and facilitators of this kind of research?

Deming: This wasn’t a topic of my speech, because it was to undergraduates and was focused on undergraduate life, but I absolutely think that universities should and will remain centers for research. I think that’s for two reasons.

One is a lot of the research that is being funded—let’s just take the case of AI labs, for example. A lot of the research being funded by frontier AI labs is valuable research, but the provenance is unclear. These companies have a financial interest in the research looking a certain way, so you can’t always trust what’s coming out. Not so much that anything is wrong in it—it’s just that there’s a question of whether OpenAI or Anthropic or Google DeepMind or any other lab would publish results that affected their company’s bottom line. You can’t fully understand how to interpret those results, because they’re selected on things that wouldn’t harm the company, for example. That’s just the nature of it. I think also much of that research is very applied—it’s like, how are people using AI to do X? But there’s much more basic, fundamental research that universities do, because the purpose of the university is to produce knowledge, and not for downstream commercial implications or any other implications. There’s basic work that leads to downstream discoveries that really best happens at a place like a university. I think one of the great human inventions is the university, and I very much hope that it will remain a center for research.

I think the other thing is—you mentioned this strange combination of research and teaching. I do think there’s a strong complementarity between those two. You can’t really understand a concept well until you can explain it to someone who knows less than you. I think the reason why top talent in all fields, including in computer science—we’ve seen some access to labs, but still a lot of people will come back and are coming back—the reason people want to be in universities is because teaching keeps you fresh, it keeps you engaged with the next generation. Many students here at Harvard are much more AI-native than me, and if I want to keep up with the latest developments, it’s actually helpful to be in the classroom in front of them and see how they react to things. So I do think there’s an intrinsic complementarity between teaching and research, and I personally would go long on the research function of the university in the age of AI. I don’t think that’ll go away. I think if anything, we have challenges like, can we get enough compute to do frontier research? I think there’s some kinds of research that may best be done in industry, but there’s also certain kinds of research that is best done in universities. I don’t actually see that changing. Who knows—but I don’t see it changing in the age of AI.

Mounk: Let’s speak to the second part. How concerned are you that the whole economic foundation of these universities may start to crumble?

One direction from which that could be the case is that university degrees just don’t come to be valued in the same way in the marketplace, in part because people who are able to demonstrate high cognitive skill may no longer be valued in the same way in the marketplace. The second point is that a lot of your money comes from students whose parents are able to pay for an undergraduate education, and if some of them lose their jobs, they may be less able to pay the tuition fees of their children. In something like a business school, a lot of the tuition comes from the fact that you go off to McKinsey or BCG for a couple of years, and then they pay for you to go to business school, with an expectation that you go back to the firm. Perhaps those firms no longer feel that investment is worthwhile in the same way, if they’re increasingly relying on AI tools. And finally, there may just be an expectation that the degree is not going to help you find a job, so why would you take out a loan if it’s not going to give you a job? Finally, if all of that is the case, and a lot of public finances come from payroll taxes and income taxes—and Harvard gets a lot of its money from the federal government, as we learned during some of the attacks from the administration—then that’s yet another source of financial instability. So is the period in which American universities were uniquely rich, in historical terms and in international terms, potentially coming to an end?

Deming: That’s a pretty heavy question, and I don’t really know the answer to it. But here’s what I feel reasonably confident about. I think there are serious threats to the business model of the university, but I’m not sure that those are all related to AI. I think a lot of them are related to demographics. In American universities, the cohort size of high school graduates is starting to shrink, and that’ll put pressure on the number of universities. I think that’s different from putting pressure on the basic model of whether you go to university at all. I think many universities, especially small private colleges in the Northeast where we have more population decline, will go out of business, and you’ll see more consolidation.

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I think also on the research side, some of the research happening in science, engineering, and computer science requires tremendous scale, so it’s hard for many universities to sustain that. You’ll probably see some consolidation—a little bit of the rich getting richer in the university space—and a lot of the pressures facing universities will go down the selectivity distribution, so to speak. I don’t think that’ll really hurt the public universities; if anything, those might go slightly stronger. It’ll be small private colleges that are kind of barely hanging on anyway.

I don’t think that means people won’t go to college anymore, because actually, if you look at the share of, let’s say, 18-to-25-year-olds enrolled in a traditional four-year college over time, it’s actually slightly increased over this entire period. We have this meme that college is over, but it’s not really matching people’s decisions. All of the fluctuation you see in college enrollment over the last decade is in two-year colleges, and that’s because enrollment in community colleges is highly counter-cyclical. When the job market’s really good, people stay out of college, and they go back when there’s a recession. We’ve had historically low unemployment. So I think it’s a little bit of a vibe about the end of college more than the reality. But I think you’re right that there are serious pressures on what we do, and we’re going to have to adapt—you see a lot of belt-tightening of various types, and I think that’s probably a good thing.

So I would say there are pressures on the business of university education, but I wouldn’t say they’re existential pressures. I’d say they’re serious, but kind of normal pressures that certain industries come under, and hopefully it’ll lead to some innovation—there are things we can do better, a lot of things we can do better. Especially undergraduate education—you asked about master’s degree programs, and I think those are under a lot more pressure, because they provide a product that’s much more connected to the labor market, and you can see companies doing things to replace that. But what we do in undergraduate education is really intellectual and moral formation, and there’s just not a lot of places to send an eighteen-year-old that can do that kind of formation. Another way to say it: we have a bundle of things we do, and you can find elements outside of college that do one or two of those things, but it’s hard to find something that does all of them.

So my modest prediction is that universities will survive. We will change, we’ll adapt, and we’ll probably lose some among us. But I’d go long on the university—I’m a believer in it, in what it does. This is not because I think there are no problems; there are actually a lot of problems. But I don’t think college is over.

Mounk: Let’s speak about this piece of intellectual and moral formation, because I think you’re right that that is the core proposition of universities. Of course, the ability of universities to engage in that intellectual and moral formation has been very contested over the last few years. This is partially to do with ideological factors—a sense that a lot of people have that universities are ideological monoliths, and that therefore you send your children off to campus and they’re going to come back with very different views and ideas from the ones they grew up with, which can of course also be a good thing. The whole point of a university certainly is to broaden horizons and open minds, and if nobody changed their mind about the world in the process, that would be a very worrying thing. That was true twenty or forty years ago as well, when most Americans trusted higher education. It may have changed in nature now that most Americans no longer seem to trust higher education, according to Pew and other kinds of polls.

At the same time, there are these questions around intellectual formation—a lot of how intellectual formation happened, and what that intellectual formation consisted of, may shift in the age of AI. So how did you address how universities should change what they do in response to this, in your speech? And then let’s go into more detail about some of those points.

Deming: First of all, on the issue of ideological balance, I think this is a serious problem for colleges all across the country to address. It’s a mix of perception and reality. I think it’s possible, and it is true, that faculty—not just at Harvard, but at almost every university—lean left. However, that does not necessarily mean that politics invades the classroom. I’d distinguish between those two things. The reality is: even if most faculty vote Democrat, there are relatively few faculty who bring their politics overtly into the classroom. That is somewhat rare, and it is usually not a good thing for student learning. When I teach, I never talk about my politics, and I take great pride in having students guess about what I actually think, because my point is to help them think about different issues. I always tell them, even if you’re an advocate, you need to understand the other side in order to make arguments that persuade.

So I think it’s possible to get a good education that teaches you how to think critically and to be ideologically open-minded, even if you’re being taught by mostly Republicans or mostly Democrats. I’d distinguish between those two things—I think they’re both issues, but the issue of people bringing their politics into a classroom where it’s not appropriate. There are some classes where it is, but if you’re teaching organic chemistry and making comments about a certain administration, then that’s just not really relevant. I think that’s pretty rare, actually, on college campuses, but even if it’s rare, it should be even rarer.

Mounk: A couple of words on this point. One is that I don’t think this is exclusively a problem of Harvard University or Johns Hopkins, where I teach. I don’t think it’s exclusively a problem of the United States—I think you have very similar problems in other countries in the Western Hemisphere, in Europe, and elsewhere. I actually think this is going to be a very fundamental problem for universities, but it’s going to be very hard to fix, for reasons that go a little deeper than people generally tend to think.

Fifty years ago, knowing the level of somebody’s education didn’t provide a very strong predictor of who they voted for—if anything, it probably meant they were slightly more likely to vote for Republicans than for Democrats in the United States. But there was always also a kind of hyper-educated elite that leaned a little to the left. The average educated person in America was an upper-middle-class person, and therefore more likely to vote for Republicans, who were generally the party of lower taxes and so on. But there was always the idea that the Harvard professor is a kind of somewhat left-leaning radical, and so it balanced out in a certain kind of way.

We now just live in a period in which, for whatever deep reasons—which I think nobody has fully understood and described rightly—there’s just a huge educational polarization in every developed democracy I can think of, such that the more educated you are, the more you are on the left. As a result, most professors, and most people in the pool from which professors are recruited, are going to be very left-leaning. A lot of the students who tend to come from highly educated households are also going to be left-leaning. So you end up with these institutions that are meant to represent society in some kind of way, to be in conversation with society, but they’re just way to the left of where society is.

So even before we get to all kinds of man-made, homemade problems—which I think also exist, where professors absolutely will not hire somebody known for conservative political points of view—even before you get to that, these structural reasons are driving a huge wedge between universities and the putative social elites that they’re educating and the rest of the population.

Deming: You’re saying the deck is stacked against progress in this area. I think that’s definitely true—everything you say is true about this inherent difficulty in having any kind of balance on the faculty. Here’s what I’d say too: existing alongside that is the reality that we survey our students every year and ask them questions about a series of things we’d call intellectual vitality or civil discourse. We ask them questions like, do you feel comfortable having a conversation with somebody you disagree with? Do you feel like the classroom is a space for you to express your political views, even if they’re in the minority? We’ve seen serious, positive progress on those questions over the last two to three to four years here at Harvard, even though our faculty hasn’t changed its ideology at all, to a first approximation, over that period.

I think they’re both issues. I’m just saying it’s possible to make progress on whether people feel like they can actually get an education that’s ideologically not even balanced, just neutral. A lot of the time, politics doesn’t invade everything—a lot of the time you just want to learn about things. I think that’s possible even under the structural conditions you describe, which are going to take a lot longer to fix. We still need to fix them, but they’re not going to be fixed overnight.

Mounk: Let me speak to the other point you made. I agree with you that certainly my median colleague at Johns Hopkins, and certainly the median professor who taught me when I was a grad student at Harvard, was left-leaning, but certainly did not impose their views on people in the classroom. I’m somebody who has this podcast and writes a lot publicly, so my students don’t have a huge amount of trouble figuring out where I stand politically. I think that makes it incumbent upon me in the classroom to emphasize and model that I will judge them by the quality of the argument, not on whether they say something I happen to agree with. I always explicitly tell them I would much rather they make an interesting argument I disagree with than parrot my views back to me poorly—I have no interest in that. I think students do come to trust me on that over time, but it’s very common that students tell me, thank you, I appreciate that about your class—in such-and-such class, I did not feel like that at all, and we all know you just have to echo back the views of the professor. Again, I don’t think that’s the typical case, but it’s something that deeply marks the students who are aware of those kinds of situations.

Is there something that you, in your position of authority, can do to address those kinds of situations, understanding that on the other end of that there’s a very strong value of academic freedom? You have to balance two different values here. On the one hand, I think this is an actual abuse of institutional power—the university gives me the right to grade my students, and I will defend the right to do that as I see fit, because that’s a core part of my academic competence, my academic freedom. But if I do that in order to induce my students to parrot political views they don’t believe, on pain of getting a B instead of an A, I think I’m absolutely abusing my authority. So is there something the institution can do to ensure that happens more rarely than it now does?

Deming: Great question. I think the answer is yes, but for all the reasons you suggested—which I can expound on—it’s important to do it in a way that is consistent with our values of academic freedom, and also to take a slightly patient, longer view, because many of the short-term solutions that are out there, I think, don’t work that well.

If I were to go to faculty and say, “you have to stop doing this”—we have an important principle in the university, which is that faculty are more or less sovereign in the classroom, within certain boundaries. I think that’s actually really key to progress. A lot of innovation in research and teaching comes from the autonomy we give faculty who are on the frontier of their disciplines—we give them wide leeway to teach in the way that makes sense to them. So I think that’s a really important principle, which means you have to be willing to accept that, as an administrator, you don’t have a heavy hand with the way faculty teach. As a faculty member myself, I think that’s really important. For people listening to this who are faculty or administrators—once you’re a member of the faculty and you have tenure, you’re an employee for life. We’re all partners in the firm, and we take turns in roles like this. But I think of myself primarily as a faculty member, and I ask myself, would I want someone to do that to me? The answer is usually no.

Having said that, I think you can have a lot of influence on the margins through a persuasion campaign, through hearts and minds, through modeling the way you want our community to engage with each other. It’s not a heavy-handed “hey, you’re doing something wrong, do it better”—it’s more like talking with students. I do a lot of talking with students about these values—again, we’d use terms like intellectual vitality, civil discourse. It really is a skill-building exercise. You are coming here to be challenged. My colleague Tarek Masoud loves to say—and I think he’s right—think about college like a mental gym. You don’t go lift the easy weights; you lift the hardest weights you can, because you’re trying to make yourself uncomfortable and stretch your capabilities. That is what a great university education is supposed to do.

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The more I not only say that but model it—I hold these monthly, on-the-record open conversations with students, where the Harvard Crimson comes and asks me questions, and then students ask me totally different questions, and everything is unscripted. I’ve had students come and challenge me on all kinds of things—divestment from Israel, about the Trump presidency, about whether Harvard’s going to do this or that. Sometimes I can’t answer the questions, or I don’t feel comfortable answering them, or I don’t give a great answer, but I try. I do a lot of stuff like that to show people that this is a developmental environment and you can challenge authority, and that’s totally normal, and we’re all playing our parts in this.

I also share with faculty as colleagues what some things that have worked are, and build communities around people who care about these things. We have a group of faculty called the Council on Academic Freedom here at Harvard that advocates for related changes and for us to think about them. I think all of those things, as part of an ecosystem, are good. I can play a role in saying, I’m good with being challenged, I’m good with the idea that I’m not always right. That’s the level at which I typically engage—partly for practical reasons, because I don’t want to be telling faculty what to do in the classroom, but also because I actually think that’s more effective in the long run, and it points the way forward by modeling behavior. When I teach in the classroom, I try to be this way too.

Mounk: To speak to another tension between what the faculty might wish and what might allow the university to actually live up to what it claims to do—a lot of the function of intellectual, and particularly moral, formation has been given up by faculty and delegated to a whole set of staff. Many of the staff are great at their jobs, but I do think that when you’re an incoming student at a top university in the United States today, a lot of the norm-setting and expectation-setting is not done by faculty members—it’s done by administrators at every level of the university. I think there are also some problems about the ideological composition of those administrators—statistics suggest they’re actually much more homogeneously left-leaning than faculty, and in particular more likely to be on the illiberal left rather than the more liberal left.

But there’s also really a problem here relating back to the beginning of the conversation with what the sales pitch is. The idea is that you come here, and we have these exceptional faculty members, and they’re going to engage with you as a human being and help to form and shape you. In reality, what’s happening is that your main point of contact, certainly outside of a lecture and outside the classroom, is an army of administrators—of which there are now, in some places, more than students. Now, I’m sure many faculty members might agree with this point in the abstract. But if you then come to them and say, well, this actually means you now have to run this orientation and be present at this event and so on, they’re going to say, “screw you.” So is there a way in which the university actually can, and has to, reform itself to live up to that promise in a different way?

Deming: You put your finger on it exactly—there are two sides to looking at this. One is that the growth of administration has been faster than the growth of faculty and of students, and there are too many administrators. The other way of looking at it is: why does that exist? I do think part of the reason it exists is because faculty would rather delegate these tasks to somebody else. I count myself in this—faculty want to do research and want to teach. We don’t really want to do a lot of the other things, and maybe we aren’t even particularly good at it either.

So there’s a trade-off there: if you delegate spheres of university life that are important to students’ experience to administrators, you delegate that control, and you get the benefit of spending more time on sabbatical writing books, or whatever you’re doing. I’ve experienced that myself—so I’m guessing it’s not a criticism, as you know, but I think what I would say is that I would almost always welcome more faculty engagement with the work I’m trying to do here at the college. I’d say that some faculty are deeply engaged in it, and many are deeply disengaged. I’d say to my colleagues that anybody who has a criticism should—if you accept your role as a tenured faculty member as a partner of the firm, you should not only criticize, you should engage and try to fix the problem, because that’s kind of the only way it gets fixed. If you look around and see a problem, and nobody else is solving it, you’re elected.

I would love a bargain for all universities where we say, okay, we’re actually going to spend more of the marginal dollar on the faculty-student experience—more faculty, smaller classes, whatever it is we need to do to deepen those connections—and less of the marginal dollar on administration, in exchange for greater faculty involvement in student life. I think that would be a good trade for the university, and I would love to make it. I say this as somebody who’s inhabited both roles—I got tenure ten years ago, and I’ve basically been doing some form of, not always a dean role, but directing centers or chairing committees. I do these things not because I like them, actually—a lot of it feels like a tax sometimes, because I love doing research and teaching, that’s what I got into it for. But I also think it’s important: if you’re part of an institution that you believe in, and it has been good to you personally, you serve when you’re asked to serve. I think a lot of faculty feel that way too, but sometimes I wish more did.

Mounk: Some of that is about creating a culture and norm-setting as well. I was an undergrad in Cambridge, England, which at the time still really emphasized one-on-one teaching, in which administrators were barely part of the experience, and you really had this very close contact with faculty members. It’s one of the things that attracted me to academia. When I came through my PhD at your institution, from the very beginning, the culture signaled very clearly: this is not how we get ahead in the world. Yes, of course you want to be a competent teacher—yes, of course you should teach a couple of terms while you’re a grad student, because you need to have on your CV that you’ve done some teaching. But don’t overinvest in teaching. Any term that you can get a fellowship—of which, frankly, there are many available—take the fellowship, so you can focus on research rather than teaching. And if you want to be a tutor in one of the houses, really think twice about that, because you’re going to be dealing with whatever random personal problems the students have, and that’s really going to be a distraction from getting your PhD done.

So I think there’s also a sense in which—we talked a lot, when I was a graduate student, about professionalizing, and the role of the university in professionalizing grad students to become academics. A lot of the core of that professionalization was teaching people that the marginal extra publication in some mid-tier journal is worth a lot more than a slightly higher teaching evaluation, or spending more time in your pedagogical function at the university.

Deming: I do my best to protect graduate students and junior faculty from service requirements that are not going to help them get tenure and make their way in the profession. For people who are just getting started, particularly people on the tenure track, it is important to do your research, establish your scholarly credibility. I guess the question is, once you get tenure, you should really flip that switch, because now you have won the lottery of life. If you have tenure at a great university like Johns Hopkins or Harvard, you have won the lottery of life—you have a forty-year career, God willing, of guaranteed employment. So my view is you have an obligation to give back. Some faculty, not most, but some, still act like junior faculty after they’ve gotten tenure, and are mostly about their own research program, when actually the point is to pay it back by protecting the other people in the same way that you yourself were protected at an earlier time.

Mounk: I guess this is a sense in which tenure is the worst possible system except for all the others. All things considered, I’m a defender of tenure—when it comes to questions around academic freedom and free speech, I very much value the protections of tenure.

But I also think that nowadays, the average graduate student takes six, seven, eight years to go through a program. Most of the time nowadays you then become a postdoc for a number of years. The tenure track has extended longer and longer, for all kinds of reasons. So by the time you actually get tenure, you’ve been in the profession, let’s say, fifteen to twenty years on average. If you have this incentive—that I get through all of this process, and I’m not going to challenge the orthodoxies in my field, and I’m not going to say anything that might be unpopular, because I can’t possibly jeopardize this grand life project of getting tenure—by the time you actually get tenure, you’re not going to change. You’ve been so socialized into one way of doing things that the newfound freedom, in most cases, goes unexercised. I worry that the same is true if, for fifteen to twenty years, you learn that the thing that makes you valued, the thing that is important, the thing that is at the core of your professional identity, is an extra marginal journal publication—flipping that switch, in the way you’re talking about, is going to be very difficult.

Deming: As a description of what actually happens, you may be right, often, most of the time. However, I do think if you get tenure and you keep doing the same thing you were doing before, you’re doing it wrong, because the point of getting it is to then use it to do something you wouldn’t have otherwise—that’s the whole reason to give it. I think it means different things for different people. It could be taking on a risky research agenda, making a bet that could fail, but you still have your guaranteed employment. If it fails, it could mean giving back to your community. But I think, having been given this incredible opportunity, you ought to do something interesting and valuable with it. I had always understood that once I got tenure, I was supposed to contribute in some way, and I’ve tried to do that. I think I’m not the only one—I think most faculty think this way too, but those who don’t should, in my opinion.

Mounk: I think a lot of faculty think that way. Whether a lot of faculty act that way is a different question—I might ask that about myself as well.

Deming: I could say one more thing, Yascha, actually. I know we’re going to zoom out, but I have to say, for somebody listening to this who’s a faculty member—I think you have to understand that the Venn diagram of people who can get tenure at a top research university, and people who can run anything or manage anything, is pretty non-overlapping. You don’t actually have to be that good at management to be effective in a role like this. So I would just say to people, give it a try—not because it’s going to be awesome, but because you’re actually going to give back, and you’ll feel fulfilled by that. That’s my pitch.

Mounk: Well, let me make the counter-pitch. I have a longstanding spiel about deans, and I hope you won’t take it personally, David, which is that I think being a tenured faculty member is one of the great jobs in the world. It’s the closest you can get to being a leisured aristocrat. I don’t think most academics are at leisure—they actually work very hard, and I work very hard. But you have the financial resources and the freedom to think about whatever you think is important and interesting in the world, and that is an immense luxury.

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I think being a dean is one of the worst jobs in the world. For one, as I’m sure you’ve noticed, structurally everybody hates you. Faculty members, they might be left-leaning and progressive, but more than anything else, they’re anti-authoritarian in instinct and outlook. They hate the university president, they hate their dean—some more than others, but that’s the general tendency. And then it’s a managerial role, but you don’t have any power—you can’t actually fire people or hire people. You have influence, of course, and you make certain important decisions, but you have way less power than you would as a regional manager of Trader Joe’s. So I’m very, very happy to be an academic with job protections. I would much rather be a regional manager at Trader Joe’s than be in your role. Is that unfair?

Deming: No, for your preferences, it sounds totally reasonable. To be honest with you, people ask me—when I first took this job, I was fielding questions, we were doing this new resident tutor training, and somebody said, “Was this your dream job? And if so, what did you do to get it?” I said, without thinking, “I left my dream job to take this job.” My dream job was a tenured professor at a place like Harvard. That’s what I—but the reason to do it is not because it’s going to be better than what you’re doing. The reason to do it is if you care. In my case, I took this job a week after we announced that we were suing the Trump administration. So if somebody says to you, again, if you believe in a place and what it does, and it’s been good to you personally, you could be asked to serve, and you serve. Think about it not as something that’s going to be awesome, but as a service responsibility. I am sustained by the impact I’m having, not by the consumption value of doing it every day.

That’s the reason to do it, and to not do it forever, by the way. My view is people should take turns—I don’t think it’s good to have a dean of the college for twenty years. I don’t intend to stay in this job that long, or anywhere close to that long. I think it’s good to have a rotation, and to have people with that service mindset and the mindset of a faculty member. I plan to return to teaching and research. I think that’s important for the governance of the university, to have people who identify as faculty in positions of authority, because then we get the type of university that is how faculty would like it to be governed. Somebody’s got to do it. That’s my counter-pitch—again, it’s not about personal utility. It’s about service.

Mounk: It’s the ideal of ruling and being ruled in turn. I’m very happy in this realm of life to be ruled—I have no aspiration to rule. Let’s get into the heart of some of the questions and debates about AI and learning.

Obviously, part of the core problem is that universities have this role as validators in the world. One of the reasons why a degree from Harvard is valuable is that if you have a high GPA and so on, that’s supposed to indicate something about your intellect, about what you’ve learned, about your ability to jump through a lot of hoops, and that’s valued in the marketplace. The way we traditionally assessed that was, in the humanities and to some degree the social sciences, by setting you a few days to go write an essay, and in the natural sciences, math, and so on, by asking you to do a problem set. Nowadays, Claude and ChatGPT and the like can do that for you very, very well. The deeper problem is that we, in a slightly more idealistic description of what universities were up to, also thought that learning to write well and learning to work through these kinds of problem sets were really valuable intellectual skills. But there’s a real question about the extent to which that remains the case when this machine can now do it for you.

So, before we get to how we need to change assessments and all of those things—what do you think students still have to learn? Do we still have to learn to do math and sciences in the same way? Do we still have to learn to write an essay in our own voice, if, in theory, Claude and ChatGPT could do it for them?

Deming: Basically, yes, they do. But I think that what, in the fullness of time, we think of as mastery of those concepts ought to be at a higher level. What it means to be good at writing will change. But I think the core skill of being able to formulate an argument, express yourself, think critically, interrogate different positions—I can’t imagine that no longer being valuable. In fact, if anything, I think it’ll be more valuable. I just think maybe we’ll have higher standards in terms of how you’re able to embody it in some kind of performance, whether it’s an oral exam or a presentation or whatever. I think we’ll expect people to have done much deeper research on the claims they’re making, because they have access to this tool.

So, again, it’ll be very disruptive, but I think ultimately it will raise our standards in a very helpful way. And I don’t think AI will replace us as experts, especially in spaces that are inherently contested and contestable. You write and think a lot about politics—I think it’s going to be a golden age for politics. That’s because politics, unlike, let’s say, programming, is not a verifiable domain where there’s one widely accepted correct answer. The code compiles or it doesn’t. Politics is not actually a domain where you’re debating issues with a right answer—the answer is an outcome of people’s beliefs, their values, and power structures. I just don’t think AI is a technocratic solution for what is ultimately often a political process.

So I think the people who will benefit are the ones who know how to use the tool to become experts in something, and then, having become experts, will use the skills they’ve gained outside of that expertise to persuade others of their point of view, to bring people along, to help people make meaning in ways that speak to their individual situations. So I think persuasion is likely to become much more important in the age of AI. I’m pretty bullish on the university’s ability to be a unique place where people can do that, but it does require some adaptation. That’s what I’ve been focused on, what I’ve been writing about, what I’ve been thinking about.

Mounk: Very briefly, in terms of assessment and so on, what do you think that adaptation would look like?

Deming: I want to be humble about this, I don’t have all the answers, we’re all figuring this out as we go along—what I’ll be experimenting with in my own class this spring is what I would call, and others have called, a barbell strategy, which is basically all or nothing. You can have environments where, if you think assessment of mastery is very important for your class, you want to make it fully AI-proof. That could be a return to blue book exams under controlled conditions. If you’re teaching a big lecture class like Ec 10, intro to economics, the Ec 10 professors, Jason Furman and David Laibson here at Harvard, have basically downweighted take-home problem sets and increased the number of midterms from one to three, under controlled conditions. That’s an attempt to basically get AI out of the process—that’s one end of the barbell.

I think the other end of the barbell is: if you either have assignments that are too meaty to fit within a three-hour window, or you actually want to ask something deeper and longer-term of students, you just have to accept that AI is going to be part of the process and design around it. That doesn’t mean, “let AI do the writing or the thinking for you”—absolutely not. It’s more like: understand that students are going to be at the ChatGPT window or the Claude window as part of their process of reasoning through an idea, and try to design around that reality.

The main thing, I think, is we cannot create a situation where we say on our syllabus, “20-page paper due in two months, bring it back to me when it’s done, I ban AI, and the problem is solved from my end.” Students are sitting there feeling like they have a choice: either behave with integrity, which is the right thing to do, and don’t use AI, or do the wrong thing and use it without telling anybody. Either way, if you do the right thing, you feel bad about it and disadvantaged, and if you do the wrong thing, you’re rewarded for it. So we just have to accept the fact that everybody is using AI for everything, all the time, and design around it. I think about it as trying to build a set of guardrails around education, to acknowledge that this technology exists and try to use it for good rather than ill. That’s going to mean different things in different classes.

Mounk: Speaking to the inherent positionality—to use a word beloved by our colleagues in the humanities—of being a dean, your suggestion that perhaps we could use AI, especially with some of those longer papers, has attracted a lot of controversy. I’m going to defend you on this and then attack you on something totally different.

I was struck that this is very similar to something I’ve been arguing within Johns Hopkins, and something I did in my classes over the last year or so. I think universities have to do two things. The first is to ensure that students still learn how to write. I think there’s no substitute for writing in terms of figuring out your thoughts. I’m always tempted—I never quite say this to students—but I’m always tempted to say to a student, if they say “I’m just bad at writing,” to answer, “well, in that case, you’re just bad at thinking.” Because a lot of the time when we speak with each other, I can say, “my view is this, my opinion is this,” and jump over the necessary logical steps, which is very easy to do in oral communication. It’s the moment you sit down and try to write down your argument that you realize there’s a gap between this point and that point, and it becomes hard to write because you really have to refashion your argument.

I grew up with a very poor writing education in Germany, where I was a lazy high school student, and I realized if I wrote sufficiently convolutedly that my teachers didn’t really understand what I was saying, they’d give me an A. I was very lucky to have decent writing instruction as an undergrad, which didn’t just make me a better writer—I think it made me a much, much more careful thinker. So I absolutely think we need to preserve that as a core part of instruction.

At the same time, I also think we need to teach students how to use AI tools, which are obviously going to play a huge role in their lives and professional lives. I myself use AI tools for all kinds of things—not to write prose, but for all kinds of other things, in research, creating graphics, and other things. By the way, that might be great—instead of getting fifteen or twenty seminar papers at the end of a term that are of pretty good quality, perhaps students can actually go and do something even more ambitious, even more interesting with those tools. That would be more fun for me as a faculty member too.

So I did exactly what you advocated for, in terms of thinking this should be at the level of the university education—I don’t think it needs to necessarily be the case in each course. Since I think we haven’t yet gotten there in a systematic way, over the course of an education, where you have some writing-intensive courses that are non-AI and other contexts where you’re really using AI in a guaranteed way, I now assign, for the first time in my life, blue book exams, where students have to demonstrate mastery at writing out an argument about some subject over the course of three hours, or two hours, or whatever it is. And I’ve allowed some students, in some contexts, to use AI however they wish for their final seminar papers. I think that’s worked pretty well. So I’m going to defend you on that—how do we make sure there’s still some substantial writing component over the course of an undergraduate education, in two ways? First, how do we make sure there’s actually some context where there’s going to be blue book exams, where you have to write essays? Second, how do we grapple with the fact that a lot of writing skill is not just sitting down in a time-pressured environment and being able to produce a passable essay in that context—it’s going back and revising and rewriting and improving. That’s just much, much harder to do in a blue book exam.

Deming: I completely agree with that. I’ll admit that when I sent this email out to students, if you read the whole text of the email, I was bending over backwards to say, “these are just my thoughts, this is not policy, I don’t know the answer, but here’s how I’m thinking about it.” I probably underestimated how people would just not care about that and see it as the word of a dean, therefore some kind of authority. The reality is, not only can I not tell faculty who teach writing-intensive classes what to do, I don’t want to tell them what to do, because they know better than me. So I wasn’t even really trying to—I was just saying, in the spirit of getting the ball rolling, let’s play the game. That was kind of the spirit of it. But I can see why it would be at least taken out of context in certain ways. I don’t take back the sentiment, but I do think I could see how people would get touchy about it, especially given this moment we’re in.

What I want to underscore is: when you’re in a role like mine, where you’re responsible for undergraduate education, you have to look beyond the position-taking aspect of it—AI is good or AI is bad. It’s happening, people. We have to adjust to it. It’s not that we’re trying to sneak AI into the classroom where it’s not there—it’s just the reality that students are using it all the time. There are going to be faculty who teach these classes who have better ideas than me, and many of them are already doing a lot of these things. But I think, at a high level, one solution is to get much more deeply than maybe we’re comfortable doing, or used to doing, into the process of a student’s writing. You mentioned a three-hour blue book exam—one way to do this is to say, “okay, I want you to go write your rough draft in a three-hour controlled condition. I’m not even going to grade it, I’m just going to give you feedback on it, and that is the basis of your longer paper.” Then you turn in an outline, a first draft, a second draft, and I ask you, “why did you come up with this change?” In the same way that the more you understand what an AI model can do, the more you can align it, the more you understand a student’s thought process and their writing process, the more you can ensure that it’s actually them and not the AI. So I think it’s probably going to be fine to have writing-intensive courses where people use AI, as long as faculty and the teaching staff are deeply engaged in the process of helping students improve and test their ideas and refine them.

Mounk: As long as we’re not naive about the capabilities of the AI models, right? What I’m really struck by in academia is that there are obviously many academics who are deeply immersed in AI and totally understand its capabilities, and there are many others who, for ideological reasons, or simply because they’re not on the younger side and are slower to adapt, or for whatever other reason, have no sense of what AI can do. I was in a conversation recently where somebody said, “I know how you can deal with teaching this lecture class—you just tell them they can use AI to answer the ICA prompt, but then they have to themselves critique the answer that Claude gave, and that’s something AI can’t do.” And I thought, what do you mean that’s something AI can’t do? Of course AI can do that as well.

Deming: To be fair, it probably couldn’t do it that well two years ago. The technology is just moving so fast.

Mounk: Right, no, that’s fair. But the number of times I’ve heard faculty members smugly explain to me how AI-proof their assignments are, and I’m thinking, I could get Claude to do your assignment in two minutes—it’s quite astonishing.

Deming: That’s another part of the challenge for me, too, that maybe I didn’t fully grok at the time—I’ve been studying AI as a labor economist since before I became dean, and I’ve been pretty involved in that space. Not in a “I work with” or “I have relationships with any of the AI labs” kind of way, but I’ve studied it academically and used it regularly. So I’m pretty up to date on what’s happening in the AI space and have a sense of what the frontier models can do. It’s like, this is the worst they’re ever going to be. Whatever you think it can do now, it’s going to be able to do more in a year. You just look a little bit down the pipeline here, and we have to get adapted to this like yesterday. There was a major cheating scandal at Brown last year with AI, and there’s no reason that wouldn’t be Hopkins or Harvard. I just feel a sense of urgency about fixing this.

Mounk: Tell us about that, because it was a fascinating scandal—walk my listeners through the nature of it.

Deming: An economics professor, Roberto Serrano—I may forget some of the details—he basically gave an assignment and allowed students to use, or actually I don’t even think he said you could use AI, he just didn’t say anything about it, and he got all these assignments back that were suspiciously well done. People were doing economics at a level much higher than what he was teaching—almost suspiciously so. The upper end of the grade distribution, relative to past years, was just—there were people getting basically 100% on these pretty difficult economic problems. So he decided, okay, now I’m going to give a final exam, but I’m not going to let you use AI. And he showed that the students who scored at the very top—many of them scored very poorly on the final exam. So it’s not really cheating, it’s more like compliance—maybe “cheating scandal” isn’t the right term. It’s not really cheating, it’s actually just showing how people are using AI to substitute for their own effort.

The important thing to me about that was that students knew in advance the exam was going to be in person and that they wouldn’t be able to use AI on it. So, in some ways, they were cheating their own thought process. Students thought, “I did well on this, I really get this”—in the same way that when you ask a friend, “hey, what’d you get for number seven,” and they show you, you have this instinct that now you understand it because you see the right answer, but because you didn’t struggle through it, you don’t actually understand it, or your understanding is brittle. What that showed me is that we are enabling learning shortcutting en masse in universities, if we are just silent about this. I feel an obligation to stop that from happening, because this is students’ chance to learn how to think and to learn how to write. Every year we delay is another cohort of students who are going to be harmed by this. That’s what really drove me to roll the ball on the court and, maybe, wear the black hat a little bit. I think it’s important to do—I think that’s what somebody in a position like mine needs to be doing.

Mounk: I strongly agree with you that the worst version of this equilibrium is the kind of don’t-ask-don’t-tell approach—I’m going to pretend you’re not able to do this with AI, and you’re going to pretend you did it by hand, and I’m not going to really check what you did. That ends up favoring the least engaged and the least good student. As you’re saying, in many areas now, one mark that something is done by a genuine student—we’re talking about very smart, very talented students here—is that it’s suspiciously good, because the AI models are that good now. If you know that many of your classmates are going to be using AI, and you have to pay the double penalty of, A, having to do the work when you’d rather be getting more sleep or going out and having fun with your friends, and B, getting a worse grade than them, that’s just putting students in an impossible position. We don’t have to be entirely surprised if some of them get tempted to cheat.

There’s one piece that I strongly disagreed with. I don’t know whether that’s something other people have disagreed with you on, so hopefully you’re going to get incoming from a slightly surprising direction here. I think, in general, it makes sense to go to blue book exams where we can. It makes sense to allow AI in contexts where you can do cool projects. For one of the projects I’m thinking of assigning now, I’m just going to have people build a public resource around democracy, obviously using AI tools—build a cool website that, in some way, gives these resources around it. That’s a nice different kind of thing. And then for another exam, we’re going to do a pen-and-paper one. There are going to be some contexts where we still want people to do extended writing projects that don’t use AI.

In the rest of this conversation, Yascha and David discuss AI detection software and the impact of the Trump administration’s attacks on Harvard. This part of the conversation is reserved for paying subscribers…

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Owen Zidar is a Professor of Economics and Public Affairs at Princeton University.

Eric Zwick is the Joel F. Gemunder Professor of Economics and Finance at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business.

In this week’s conversation, Yascha Mounk, Owen Zidar, and Eric Zwick discuss why the real concentration of American wealth lies with small business owners rather than tech billionaires, and whether entrepreneurship remains a viable path to upward mobility.

This transcript has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.

Yascha Mounk: When we talk about the rich people in America, we think about Elon Musk, and you know, Sam Altman perhaps nowadays, and Mark Zuckerberg, and perhaps the Waltons and so on and so forth. But that is not where the real wealth lies in America, you argue. How is that the case?

Eric Zwick: We open the book with a very glamorous wedding. It’s a sixty million dollar wedding where the father of the bride and the parents of the bride flew all their guests by private jet to Paris. They rented out Versailles. They had Adam Levine sing the first dance. It was called the wedding of the century, and it was more expensive than Jeff Bezos’s recent wedding to Lauren Sanchez, at least per estimates from social media.

So you might have thought the road to wealth, how they got the money to have that wedding, was through Silicon Valley or through Wall Street—basically tech or finance, because that’s the typical path to prosperity that I think people have in their minds when you ask who’s really rich in America. Turns out that wealth came from a third generation car dealership. So the story of our book is a microcosmic version of that story, which is that there’s a tremendous amount of wealth that’s both more abundant than these Forbes 400 stories of tech and finance that we hear so much about, and also closer to home for many Americans than they think. Those are the everywhere millionaires that we write and talk about in the book.

Mounk: Give us some numbers on that. In your book, you take people with a net wealth of more than about five million dollars—how many of those are there in the United States? And when you put all of their wealth together, how does that compare to the wealth of, you know, the Forbes 400, the Forbes list of the wealthiest billionaires and trillionaires?

Owen Zidar: There are three million everywhere millionaires in the United States. Those are private business owners who have at least five million dollars in net worth. And if you add up their collective net worth, it’s thirteen times the total wealth of the richest four hundred people in the most recent year that we can measure, which is 2022.

Mounk: Help me understand that. You’re saying it’s business owners who have more than five million. What about a whole other category of people who are partners in law firms, on Wall Street? I was really struck—you’re political scientists, I’m a political scientist for my sins. At some point I tried to escape and did an internship at McKinsey, which obviously I didn’t tell anybody about at the time. The project that I was on that summer, for part of it, was for a pretty shitty software company that was basically fading. But the top salesperson each year would make more than a million dollars in commissions. This is not Google. This was not a software company you’ve heard of. It was not a software company that was thriving. And the top salesperson made a million a year. So presumably, do you exclude those kinds of people from that statistic? What role do they play?

Zwick: In the wealth data, when you think about how many people have more than five million in net worth—from the Survey of Consumer Finances we can get a good estimate of that—there are about five million households with that figure. Of that group, three million are private business owners, so the majority are. If you move further up the threshold, from five million to twenty-five million, then you see those working professionals who have accumulated substantial savings but maybe don’t own a stake in a company—they disappear. So private business ownership becomes more and more important the further up you go. At the $25 million, the $50 million, the $100 million threshold, you get to a point where pretty much they’re all private business owners.

There is a class of private business owner that we call a skilled service business owner, which your law firm partner would fall into. That’s an important element of the story of the rise of these everywhere millionaires—the skilled services companies where they own a stake in the upside. If it’s a boutique law firm, maybe there’s something more entrepreneurial about that than being a partner at Kirkland & Ellis. So we could have a nuanced conversation about how to interpret the behavior of those people. It’s relevant for some of the other arguments we make in the book about whether it’s labor versus financial capital that’s driving the rise of income inequality, but it is important to distinguish them for some of the conversation.

Mounk: Tell us a little bit more about where these people make the money and how they make the money. The lead example you give is an intergenerational car dealership. In a way you can say that seems like it’s inherited wealth—presumably the car dealership may have continued to expand over the generations, and in order to be able to pay for such an expensive wedding, the person running it at the moment must be doing a pretty good job. What share of these businesses are relatively new businesses? And by and large, are these people with fancy degrees from Ivy League universities? Are these people who studied marketing at the local community college? Are these working class people who started off as plumbers and then decided to take a risk and do their own plumbing company? What kind of composition does this group have, and how does that reinforce or complicate our picture of what kind of person rises to this quite remarkable wealth in America today?

Zidar: That’s a great question. In terms of inheritance, we estimate about a quarter of people in this group inherited their business. So the typical person either founded it or acquired it. And it’s a broad swath of people. The example you gave of a plumber working for ten years and then running a plumbing company is much more common. There are a lot of mundane businesses—ranging from a guy who started as a repo man repossessing cars to running one of the largest repossession companies in the country. There are some pretty large industries, like auto dealers, beverage distribution, realtors, contractors. There’s a guy who sold his business for two billion dollars in Phoenix for servicing garage doors. So it can be pretty mundane. Not all of them went to college, and especially not to advanced degrees. I think the typical one did go to college, has a college degree, but it’s often not a fancy school, because that’s just a smaller number of people. And most of them do not have advanced MBAs or other things, but the skilled services—the lawyers and that group—that subset do have advanced degrees.

Mounk: How should we think about this? I mean, one response to this is America is awesome, right? It’s a country with enormous opportunities. Even though we talk a lot about the downsides of a meritocracy, and you have to make it to Harvard in order to enter the most prestigious institutions in the country—much of which is true for a certain set of institutions and a certain set of career aspirations—here are these millions of people. You start out as plumbers, or servicing car garage doors, or saving up a little bit of money, investing in some business, being very good at running it, who are able to become richer than 99.99% of humans in the history of the world. What’s not to love? And hopefully some of these businesses actually do good jobs, right?

On the other hand, you might think that this amount of concentration of wealth, even if it’s not the Forbes 400 but the everyday millionaires, can have negative downstream social consequences. Perhaps sometimes they’re able to make money because they’re exploiting relationships with governments, closing off business opportunities to other people. Are you two cheers, one cheer, fifty-fifty, glass half full, glass half empty? How do we think about this?

Zwick: We were told, when we were having an earlier pitch about this book, that this is a unique time in history where being optimistic is also provocative.

Mounk: People hate nothing more than optimism. It provokes people to the bone.

Zwick: It’s amazing, right? So we’re having a little bit of fun with that, because we’re not trying to shy away from the part of the story that is kind of optimistic. There’s a part of the story where you think about the American dream—we’ll define that as people who start out with their parents in the bottom quintile of income and rise to the top quintile, achieving that kind of upward economic mobility. Going that way through an Ivy League school is a very, very rare outcome. It’s just a really small number of people who go that way, and it’s not a huge force multiplier in terms of the relative rate at which people achieve the American dream versus the base rate.

If you look at starting a business or being an entrepreneur, it’s almost an order of magnitude more common, because it’s much more accessible as a path, and it seems to be a force multiplier in the sense that if you’re up there, you’re much more likely to have been an entrepreneur than the base rate in the population. So this kind of risk-taking—starting out with relatively little, and not necessarily taking the credentialed labor market approach, the 1600 on the SAT path—seems to be a pretty important way to achieve upward mobility. And that’s something we should celebrate when people get there in ways that aren’t doing damage to society. But we should ask what are the precise ways in which they got there. That’s where there’s more nuance in the story, too.

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There are certain industries where folks at the top get really rich through maybe getting there but then erecting barriers behind them to entry or competition, so they achieve some local monopoly power. Some examples of industries we try to profile in the book would be that car dealer example, would be beer distributors. We talked about doctors and dentists, and the guilds that try to restrict what nurse practitioners and oral hygienists can do, which makes it harder to get those services and makes them more expensive. And then we get into tax policy, where we see the fingerprints of these “everywhere millionaires” littered across the tax code in ways that we find counterproductive and important for our fiscal position. So the optimism shades into realism, and it reveals problems that I think people are trying to solve, but maybe not understanding the problem as well as they should.

Mounk: One of my proudest achievements is that I was denounced in a public press release or letter or whatever by the president of the American Optometric Association for saying that you should not have to have a doctor’s prescription to get contacts, which you don’t have to in most European countries. I think some everyday millionaires took that as a threat to their ability to throw lavish weddings for their children, so they got quite upset.

But your book is very interesting to a lay reader, but it’s also a scholarly book. Tell me a little bit about the numbers here. When I’m thinking of this group of people who have over five million dollars of net worth, most of whom are business owners—how many of them grew up with a silver spoon in their mouth? How many of them worked their way up from the bottom of society in some kind of meaningful way? How many of them fall into the large middle category?

Zidar: There are different categories of how they did it. We have the set of people who started businesses, and the set of people who inherited. And it’s easier to track the people who founded a business. We have, underlying the book, the best data that anyone’s put together on entrepreneurship in America in the twenty-first century, where we have ten million entrepreneurs and can link many of them to where they came from to answer your question. The typical one did not come from a rich family—they’re often poor and middle class. Now, that’s not to say that richer kids don’t have many advantages for starting businesses—they start successful businesses at a much higher rate. But the key point is that there are so many more middle class and poor kids that even though rich kids have an advantage, once you have a large population of people, you get more numerous outcomes, even though their rate of starting one is lower than a rich kid’s.

Mounk: To make this plastic for the audience—let’s imagine that, well, by definition, 10% of people are in the top 10%. Let’s say they have twice the chance of the average to start a successful business. That’s an unfair advantage, right? We might think that’s a waste of talent and potential. We wish that everybody had the same opportunity to start a business. But even if that’s the case, then 20% of successful businesses are going to have been started by people in the top 10%. So they don’t end up taking up the majority of those successful businesses, even if they’re disproportionately likely to have done so, even if they got a leg up from having grown up in affluence.

Zwick: I can offer some specific numbers on that. That top 10% group, we think, accounts for about a third of star entrepreneurs, which we define as being in the top decile of firm performance after a few years—which is a good predictor of where you’re going to be in a decade, as a measure of star performance. And then we call the middle class, which is from the 33rd percentile of parent income up to the 90th percentile—I don’t know what your preferred definition of middle class is, but I think that’s a decently acceptable one—that’s about half, or a little bit more than half, of those star founders, coming from a group that’s about sixty percent of the population.

That gives you a sense that the relative odds from that top 10% group, compared to the bottom third group, are about six times the rate at which they become star founders. So there’s quite a lot of inequality in terms of the rate of success, which suggests that rich families are providing something to their kids. Is it financial resources? Is it occupational networks? Is it education? These are some of the questions we try to tackle and engage with, because they are founding successful companies at much higher rates than we think the underlying distribution of talent looks like.

Mounk: What about the middle group relative to the bottom group? The sort of stereotypical image of the American dream from—I was going to say the last century, but perhaps the previous century—is you start off washing dishes in a restaurant and you become a millionaire. Are people who are born in the bottom third just without a chance of making it into that group, or do they actually do pretty well too?

Zwick: About less than twenty percent of people from that bottom third become star founders. But there’s still a lot of them in that population.

Mounk: Well, obviously a lot less than twenty percent become star founders in general, presumably, but I take it you mean of the total population of star founders.

That’s a lot less depressing than you’d think, which is to say that their batting average is still more than fifty percent of the batting average of the population as a whole, if the bottom thirty-three percent end up representing twenty percent of star founders.

I have a reaction sometimes to Raj Chetty’s data where, obviously, the social origin of your parents influences your social origin, and some of his stats I’m like, yeah, that looks really bad, and some of his stats I’m like, that looks pretty good—that’s better than I’d expect. Now, obviously, we’d love to have equality totally, et cetera, I’m not saying normatively this is great, but I would bet that if I gave a multiple choice test to my very smart students and said, do you think that the bottom thirty-three percent of the income distribution has children that represent fifty, twenty, ten, five, or one percent of star founders, they would end up choosing something below twenty percent.

Zidar: I agree with you. One of the fun things about the book is that we could talk to some of these people and we include their stories. One is Dick Portillo, who grew up in the housing projects in Chicago and ended up not going to college and selling a hot dog business for a billion dollars. And then there’s another one named Saad Khan who, almost exactly like the situation you described, is an immigrant—was washing dishes, had five hundred dollars in his pocket when he came to the country to go to UIUC, ended up working at a car bumper company and becoming an owner of such a company. Toyota was an early client, and that really helped his business, and he ended up buying the Jacksonville Jaguars.

Mounk: Once you’ve talked about the social origins in all these different groups—what do they do with their money? We’ve talked about lavish weddings and so on, but what actually is the social impact of having this very large group of very affluent people? Here again, I could imagine telling a positive story where they become the sponsors of a local Little League team, very civically minded, engaged in their communities, the kind of pillars of why smaller towns—that aren’t where Wall Street is, that aren’t where the Hollywood studios are, that aren’t where Anthropic and OpenAI are located—still are able to provide amenities and have a society that holds together.

On the other hand, you could also imagine a very negative story where they use that money, first of all, to entrench their economic interests, to make sure that nobody can get contact lenses if they haven’t been to an eye doctor in the last two years. But even beyond that, to try and give their children a leg up in turn. I think there’s an interesting echo between your book and a book by Richard Reeves called Dream Hoarders—both some similarities and some differences of emphasis. Richard Reeves looks at a slightly broader group, the top 20 percent of society, and says, yes, if you’re Mark Zuckerberg, you can probably buy your kids’ way into Harvard, and that’s unfair. But when you look at why it is that the average social origin of people at Harvard is very high, that’s not Mark Zuckerberg—there aren’t that many billionaires, they don’t take up that many spots.

It is people growing up in super zip codes around Manhattan, around Washington, D.C., who have relatively ordinary jobs, make a good income, send their kids to very good schools, invest hugely in creating those opportunities for them. That’s the hoarding of opportunities—that’s actually what makes American society less mobile than it would be. So how does your argument relate to that argument?

Zwick: On your last point, I think we are suggesting that this credentialed path up through the Ivy League, those very scarce seats at those top schools, is way overweighted by this top twenty percent group when they’re thinking about how to make sure that their children have opportunities to at least become economically prosperous. That’s almost a status good more than it is a guarantee of economic success. That obsession is probably a little bit counterproductive, but it generates all kinds of weird, perverse behaviors that we see in the Varsity Blues scandal, or in some of Richard Reeves’s descriptions of that group.

Mounk: I don’t know how much of a sense you have of this, you probably don’t have statistics on it—but some of the members of this group may have aspirations of educational climbing, where they feel like if my kid goes to Harvard, that really is a feather in my cap. A lot of them may feel like, no, I want them to stay in state and get a sensible education, I want them to go and study business at the close-by campus of a state university or something like that.

Zwick: We say that they’re everywhere because, especially off the coasts, you really do find them in most cities and towns across the country. And in these places, you don’t see the same emphasis on a small number of elite schools as the goal for their kids—it’s not “Yale or die” or whatever. I think that’s an interesting observation, just thinking about what these kids end up doing. They do kind of aspire for their kids to take over the business, which is itself a challenge, because it’s hard to get your kids to be as excited about distributing garbage trucks as you maybe were. But they often stay closer to home, the kids of a lot of these everywhere millionaires, which is a different picture, but maybe not one that a lot of your listeners or folks who live in coastal markets have as much exposure to. Maybe you have some thoughts on the consumption habits, especially the first generation, this life cycle—we do spend a lot of time on that.

Zidar: It’s hard to systematically measure how people are spending their money, because one fact about the wealthy is that wealthy people don’t answer surveys. So we’ve pieced together things from real estate data, private jet data, super yacht data. And one thing that’s kind of striking is that you see inherited family firms—second and third generation folks—much more readily in this kind of high consumption, private jet and super yacht data. For some of the first generation people we talk to, often they’re rolling up their sleeves and working pretty hard initially, reinvesting a lot of their money in the business, and then as they get older you start to see more consumption. So it’s, as Eric was saying, a life cycle question of when this consumption is happening. But there are several decades when it does not look like they’re flying around on private jets.

Mounk: That’s interesting. You talked about the aspiration for the children to take over. I’m thinking about one of my favorite businesses in the United States, Absolute Bagels, up on Morningside Heights in New York. I’d thought about it previously in the context of cultural appropriation, because it was founded by Jewish refugees or immigrants to the United States, and became a very popular business. I assume it was quite financially successful—I don’t know how much money you rake in selling boatloads of bagels to people on a Sunday morning, I don’t know whether they would make the five million dollar net worth mark or not. But at some point their children decided that they didn’t want to take over the business and became, I believe, a lawyer or a doctor—or perhaps that’s just a cliché I made up in my mind. And instead the mostly Thai employees of this bagel shop decided to buy out the owners and have been running the company since. So that’s an interesting trajectory.

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By and large, do the owners of these businesses aspire for their children to take them over? And by and large, do the children of these businesses take them over? Or do they say, I stand to inherit a good amount of money from mommy and daddy, and there’s no need for me to go around making sure that my crews are repairing garage doors in the right way?

Zidar: Eric likes to say private equity is the child that many of these founders never had, because if they don’t want to have their kids checking on garage doors, they can sell it to private equity. I do think there’s a lot of complexity, and we explore that in part of the book—for these family-run firms, it can sometimes tear families apart if some people want to treat it like a serious business and other people want to treat it like a bank account. That creates enormous tension, and some founders want to avoid that. So it’s not always the case that they want this to stay in the family, and there’s a huge appetite among private equity firms, and also people graduating top business schools, to buy profitable businesses and take the reins rather than starting something from scratch.

Mounk: Tell us a little bit about this private equity part of it, because I think that’s something that has really developed over the course of the last few years, or at least decades. I think most listeners, when they think private equity, imagine billion dollar deals in which a company, maybe a household name, is being taken over by private equity, and in the worst version of it, sold for scraps, has a bunch of debt loaded onto it, and the PE firm somehow makes money off it and nobody else does. I think that’s often a kind of unfair caricature. But it is true that historically, when you go back thirty, forty years, the average private equity deal was quite sizable. And what you’re alluding to is that we increasingly have had private equity firms entering into these comparatively much smaller businesses—partially with PE firms that specialize in this, and partially, as you’ve pointed out, some people who’ve gone to business school think, I know how to run a business, I don’t want to build one up from scratch, that’s a risky proposition, I don’t want to go and work for Procter & Gamble as the deputy head of strategy. Why don’t I get together some money and buy out one of those businesses, professionalize it, especially if the owner is a little bit older and hasn’t kept up over the years, hasn’t brought the business fully online, hasn’t used the latest technology, and then I can make a killing that way. So tell us about that trend, that transformation, and how it’s changing the nature of these kinds of businesses.

Zwick: We think one way of understanding the ubiquity of the everywhere millionaire phenomenon is to think about how it’s changed different institutions in society. In this chapter, we go through this transformation of private equity, which initially started, like you said, targeting large public companies where the private equity investors perceived inefficiency—your listeners might interpret that correctly as there being high-cost workers there that they want to replace with low-cost offshore workers, and doing some other things to cut costs, but without growing the business very much. That was the first generation, with a lot of debt that made it very costly, maybe for those businesses to even survive.

As that became very competitive, the returns came down in private equity in that very large part of the market, and the private equity firms looked around: where is there lots of profit, where is there a lot of growth, where are there ways to apply some of our strategies elsewhere? There are tens, if not hundreds of thousands, of mid-market businesses that are private, often first generation founders, that have grown into very successful operating businesses, but where they don’t have natural successors—the kids don’t want to take over, or aren’t there, the workers don’t want to buy it out, or maybe aren’t willing to pay anything close to what the private equity firm will, like a kid who wants to take over but also pay you for the right to do so.

So private equity has emerged in the middle market. It’s still maybe 10 to 15 percent of all employment that’s in private equity-owned companies, or something like that—it’s not the dominant ownership structure in the American economy, but it’s much more common here than in a lot of other countries, as a sort of escape valve for these businesses which might otherwise shut down if there’s nobody to take over. In these middle market cases, there’s more opportunity, maybe, to grow the business regionally or product-wise, or to professionalize aspects of it that the family hadn’t professionalized, where it’s a little bit less ugly in terms of implementation.

Although sometimes you might find the inputs are being cut on in ways that you can’t really tell—buying the cheaper salt instead of the nice Morton salt, or something like that. So you do worry sometimes that when private equity takes over, the quality of the product degrades. I think of that as a double-edged sword that creates an opportunity for a new entrant to come in and make better bagels. I was very excited to see H&H Bagels in my neighborhood, and less excited when I learned that it was because of some financial exit that maybe made it less likely that the bagels were going to be as good as the original H&H back in New York.

Mounk: How should we think about the influence of private equity here in general? I think one of the interesting things about your book is that it cross-cuts ideologically in interesting ways. You’re a social scientist just presenting this information, but in each aspect of it I find myself a little bit torn. Again, the temptation is to say this used to be honest local businesses started up by some hopefully charismatic and perhaps even charming person who worked their way up or whatever—they took a risk, they started these businesses, and now they’re being sold off to these faceless PE guys coming in from Manhattan, and they don’t care about the local community, they don’t care about the quality of a product, they just want to turn a quick buck.

On the other hand, you could say, well, actually, a lot of the time these companies are going to get bought because people see a real opportunity to grow it in some kind of way. In certain cases, that may be financed in a way that actually is free riding on various weird aspects of a regulatory framework. But a lot of the time it may be that, hey, you’re serving this area, but actually this other area would love your services. If you’re really good at providing the services, if the company has something really to offer, the company’s going to make more money and the customers in that new area are going to be happy, right? If it’s professionalizing the service—somebody set up the shop in a particular kind of way, and perhaps they have a website now, but all of a sudden you’d have a phone app and so on—well, perhaps that just makes a business better and makes customers more satisfied and so on. I assume it’s a double-edged sword. How do you puzzle through the positive and the negative ramifications of the PE revolution?

Zidar: One of the things we try to do in the book is just describe the economy as it actually is. You see many of these aspects, both of which are true. There are many cases—we’re talking about three million everywhere millionaires, and there are many industries, and there’s nuance. We’re not trying to sell a particular agenda. We’re trying to describe the wealth in America, and you see cases of both of these things. I think that’s part of the difficulty some people have digesting news, because if it doesn’t fit in a three word slogan, some political party might not run with it. But both of those features are true features of American life and private equity today.

Zwick: We have the Outback Steakhouse case, which I think is a very salient example of private equity coming in, buying a business that people kind of love the brand. I don’t know if you’ve ever been to an Outback Steakhouse, it’s probably not quite your vibe.

Mounk: I have not. At some point I need to go on a tour of fast casual restaurants, I guess. Outback Steakhouse is like at the upper end of fast casual or something like that. At some point I need to do a five-day tour where every day I eat at Chili’s, Outback Steakhouse. I’ve never been to an Olive Garden. I really can’t call myself an American until I’ve done that.

Zwick: I like to think of myself as sort of—what is the best thing on the menu at this place? And you might actually enjoy that. There are things at each of these places where you can kind of enjoy it, but it is slumming a bit. I sort of grew up in that world and kind of quite enjoyed it, and I still get back to it and have a bit of childhood memories tied to it. In that case, when the private equity company took the firm, they brought in some consultants because it was actually Bain Capital, and they brought in Bain consultants to value-engineer the menu. Instead of Swiss cheese from Switzerland, we’re going to have generic cheese. Instead of having the salad dressing made in-house so it’s fresh, we’re going to ship it in jugs. They did those kinds of hard-to-observe cost cutting things at the margin that might improve the profit margin of the business, but maybe at the expense of customers, not just at the expense of workers. We tell that story and talk about it, so people understand here’s what private equity is doing.

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Then we tell the story of a different company where it was sort of a salumi manufacturer, a multi-generational business, but the next generation wasn’t really sure what to do with it or wasn’t sure about carrying it on. In this case, there was an opportunity to go national and to put it on shelves through distribution networks in places like Costco or other types of big stores that this family, which was sort of a regional business, wasn’t able to do. They didn’t necessarily sacrifice the product in that case, because the product was actually about a high quality salumi—a whole muscle salumi, not the chunks from the meatpacking kind of salumi that you’d associate with Upton Sinclair. I think they tried to preserve that aspect of it and just grow it. That’s a more positive angle. What is private equity doing there? They’re bringing a lot of capital externally. It might have taken the family fifty years to grow the business in the way that private equity is going to try and do in five to ten. Both can be true.

Mounk: Well, obviously there’s going to be enormous heterogeneity here, both in terms of individuals involved and in terms of the communities involved, but is there a way to describe the relationship between the everyday millionaire and the community in which they sit? One of the interesting things about the billionaires we imagine is they’ve kind of deracinated—they might sit in Silicon Valley or whatever, they fly around with a private jet, they probably grew up somewhere, went to college somewhere else, did the business somewhere else. There’s this idea of a homeless, elite overclass, and I think that’s actually not even true of the very richest people in the world, but it is somewhat true of the very richest people in the world.

Presumably for the most part here, we’re talking about people who have pretty strong local roots, many of whom I imagine still live in the communities they grew up in, certainly have been living in that same community for decades. By and large, we’re not talking about them living in Manhattan, despite my example of Absolute Bagels, or living in LA—they’re living all over the country. So they’re really deeply anchored in those communities, they’re in a position to do a lot of good for those communities. They also might be sort of local notables in ways that might be negative—they might lord it over those local communities in all kinds of ways. What can we say about what that looks like in day-to-day social practice?

Zidar: I think that’s exactly right. If you look at auto dealers, for example, auto dealers bring in about twenty percent of state sales taxes. They are very much rooted in place—it’s not like you’re moving an auto dealership from this place to that place. They are in town, they’re often sponsoring Little League teams, and they also have, along with other small business owners, a large amount of trust. Small business is one of the most trusted institutions in America, way higher than Congress and other institutions. That’s a very powerful force, and I think some of that reflects some of the good aspects you were talking about. But one of the things that we try to highlight in the third part of the book is that, like all successful people, many of them try to bend the rules to their own benefit. There are tremendous advantages that auto dealers have enjoyed, and I think some of those things are things that we can shine a light on.

Mounk: The most important of which—I believe you’ll know the details much better than I do—is that in most states you cannot sell a car directly to a customer. You have to have a physical dealership. I can’t just set up a website in which I sell cars. Tesla, for example, can’t set up a website where it sells cars directly in many states. You have to have these physical dealerships.

Zidar: Yes, that’s right. There are also other things like servicing a car. If you have a dealership and say you have a Jeep, and Jeep has some recall on some part of the car, it’s very much in the dealer’s interest to bring those back, service them there, and they’re paid quite handsomely for those warranties. It can be the type of thing where they’re charging a thousand dollars, or they get a thousand dollars for every repair, but it only costs them five hundred bucks. So it’s in their incentive to just bring in as many as they can. That proprietary relationship means other competitors can’t bid down the price, and it’s quite expensive. Similarly you see that for financing—it’s often pretty hard for people, and they end up signing up for all sorts of things when they try to buy a car. Car prices are quite high in America right now, and we’re in an era of people struggling with the cost of living, and I think this is the type of stuff that actually would help address affordability in America.

Zwick: One of the things we’re wanting to do is paint this picture of the political influence of this group of people, and to put them on the map. There’s never one millionaire—there’s several in every congressional district. They’re not geographically concentrated in the same way that tech and finance as an industry, through agglomeration, are concentrated, or these billionaires who are stateless, as you say. They don’t have the same local power as this group of people who are so rooted in their communities, both in terms of employment and in terms of where their businesses are. They have natural fundraising advantages when they’re running for office.

One of the things we were so struck by was their overrepresentation in public office relative to the general population. In Congress, we estimated that about a quarter of members are private business owners. If you add law firm partners, you could get closer to 40 to 50 percent, depending on how you want to characterize some of those law firm partners. The representation at the state and local level is maybe even a bit higher in terms of its skew towards business owners. It cuts across political parties, though they tend to be more Republican. We think recognizing the natural advantages they have in running for office, what their worldviews are, what they bring to office in terms of choosing policy priorities, implementing policies that directly benefit them, or that just reflect their worldview—I think that is something that really is eye-opening for people when they think about political power in the country, because we’re so indexed on the oligarchs right now as a national conversation on political power, especially on the left, I would say. We call these people the middle-garchs, because it’s like the oligarchs in the middle market, or the Mittelstand, I guess, is your German example of that, although I think that’s a different category of people with different historical relevance. But I think that’s an important part of the book that we want to talk about.

Mounk: One kind of provocative way to put that, to sharpen the point, is that we think of the Gilded Age as the era in which the Rockefellers and the railway barons and so on dominated American life. A lot of people on the left want to say that we’re now in a second Gilded Age—that the people who are really dominating the country are the tech billionaires and perhaps a few others: Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg and all of those kinds of people. I take it that you’re saying that is really the wrong way of thinking about this moment—that, yes, they have a lot of wealth and they’re politically influential, and I don’t think you would argue we shouldn’t be thinking about them, but a much higher share of the wealth is dominated by these other people.

How does that change our characterization of this political moment? What follows if we think that this is the second Gilded Age? In what way does that misdescribe the world? In what way do we understand the world in a more helpful way if we follow your characterization?

Zidar: One concrete way to take this on is to think about the main legislative accomplishment of the Trump administration, the One Big Beautiful Bill. If you look at what it did, Elon Musk was a bit of a loser in that bill—clean energy was gutted, electric vehicle credits were not favored—and the more mundane private business owners got a twenty percent deduction preserved that made their tax rate seven percentage points lower than everybody else’s. Auto dealers got a new deduction for no reason, kind of like the mortgage interest deduction. These things added up, this plus some estate tax relief, to about a trillion dollars of tax cuts that no one talks about. The legislative action is very much a broader thing, and we want to broaden the aperture.

I totally agree that if you look at the news as of just yesterday, or even I think it was this morning, you had every AI executive at a press conference with the Speaker of the House and Donald Trump. But one of the points that we want to make is that even the Speaker of the House, funnily enough, lives in the house of an auto dealer, and there’s this broader influence if you take a step back and think about wealth and power in America. I think that helps point to some solutions that you might not get if you think it’s only a handful of people. For example, if you want to think about broadening opportunities or increasing the tax base, the tax base is much bigger when you think about fifty trillion dollars of this group rather than five trillion dollars of a small handful of billionaires.

In the rest of this conversation, Yascha, Owen, and Eric discuss the policy implications of everywhere millionaires, how artificial intelligence may affect these businesses, and whether Owen and Eric were ever tempted to pack in academia to become millionaires. This part of the conversation is reserved for paying subscribers…

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The smart money in American politics has always bet against the rise of third parties.

The reasons are both obvious and numerous. The two-party system has been firmly entrenched for 200 years. America’s electoral system makes it very difficult for candidates who are neither Democrats nor Republicans to gain traction because voters are rightly worried about “wasting” their votes. And while many people are deeply unsatisfied with the current offerings, they don’t necessarily agree on the alternative they would prefer: Just because Jane and Jill might both like the idea of a third party doesn’t mean they will ever agree on the same candidate.

That helps explain why third-party candidates usually fail, often helping to elect candidates who are ideologically very different from them in the process. Ralph Nader’s third-party run likely helped put George W. Bush in the White House in 2000. Jill Stein may have rendered the same service to Donald Trump in 2016. Even Ross Perot, the most successful third-party candidate of the past decades, ultimately helped Bill Clinton win the White House in 1992.

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The supposedly smart money is often based on conventional wisdom. But the problem with the conventional wisdom is that it is usually right for a long stretch—before suddenly proving to be disastrously wrong. Take, as an example, the longstanding conviction among political scientists studying the American primary system that party insiders ultimately decide who gets the presidential nomination, a supposed certainty that blinded large parts of the field to Trump’s rise in 2016.

When it comes to third parties, we may now be approaching a similar paradigm shift. Both in the United States and around the world, structural conditions once favored a duopoly of incumbent parties. But these structural conditions have since eroded to such an extent that the old certitudes no longer apply.

The conventional wisdom no longer holds: The rise of a successful third-party bid is much more likely than it was in the past. The past decade of American politics has felt unusually turbulent; if the hold that Democrats and Republicans have long enjoyed over the system suddenly fades, the decades ahead may prove to be even more chaotic.

The decline and fall of party duopolies is obvious wherever you look—and the sudden transformation of party systems in so many other democracies can help us anticipate what could lie ahead in America as well.

Throughout the history of France’s Fifth Republic, for example, two political parties dominated the country’s politics: the socialist left and the moderate right. These two movements drew the vast majority of votes, occupied the lion’s share of seats in the National Assembly, and won every single presidential election.

Support for these two parties had been eroding steadily for years. In 2002, first signs of the coming storm appeared on the horizon: Jean-Marie Le Pen, the far-right candidate, surprisingly edged out Lionel Jospin, the candidate of the center-left, in the first round of the presidential election. (At the time, Jacques Chirac defeated Le Pen in a landslide in the second round.)

In 2017, lightning struck: Emmanuel Macron founded an upstart centrist movement. He rose to power on a wave of discontent with the established parties, attracting millions of voters who had previously backed traditional parties. Macron’s star has faded since then—but both the socialist left and the Gaullist right have failed to recover. Opinion polls suggest that neither the leader of the traditional left nor the leader of the traditional right has any realistic chance of making the runoff of next year’s presidential elections.

Germany is undergoing a similar political metamorphosis. For much of the country’s postwar history, Social Democrats and Christian Democrats split the lion’s share of the vote. Between them, they usually took 70, 80, and at times even 90 percent of the vote. But support for these so-called people’s parties has cratered in recent decades. At the last federal elections, Social Democrats and Christian Democrats received markedly less than 50 percent of the vote, a record low. They have fallen even further in recent polls, to about 33 percent.

What is true in France and Germany also holds in scores of other democracies around the world, from Austria to Australia. In all of them, two parties once dominated politics. In all of them, these long-established parties have shrunk or altogether disappeared. The number of countries with effective duopolies is vastly smaller now than it once was.

In each of these countries, a similar set of causes has driven the gradual demise of the political duopoly: Voters are unhappy with the direction of their country, making it harder for traditional parties to retain their loyalty. The public sphere is increasingly fragmented, making it harder for a couple of catch-all parties to speak to most voters. Social media favors charisma and authenticity, making it much easier for new political entrants to storm the stage.

All of these factors are just as strong in the United States—which helps to explain why popular support for both Democrats and Republicans is rapidly eroding. The easiest way to see how much worse the two main American political parties have become at satisfying their voters is to look at partisan self-identification over time.

As recently as 20 years ago, the number of Americans who identified with either Democrats or Republicans was about double the number who thought of themselves as independent. Under these circumstances, third-party candidates would have needed to win over a large share of voters with strong partisan identities to be competitive—an all but impossible task.

Since then, the number of self-identified Democrats and Republicans has shrunk significantly. There are now nearly as many independents as there are Democrats and Republicans put together, creating more favorable conditions for third-party candidates: If a third-party candidate can win over a lot of independents, they can, in principle, be competitive with the support of a small fraction of traditional Democrats or Republicans.

Third parties are most likely to gain momentum when voters are deeply unsatisfied with the traditional options on offer. And as it happens, discontent with both traditional options is at or near record levels today. Trump is less popular now than he has been at any prior point in his first or second term: Polling averages show that around 60 percent of Americans disapprove of his performance in office, with only about 38 percent thinking he is doing a good job. Trump’s unpopularity has also dragged down support for the Republican Party as a whole. In a recent NBC poll, only 36 percent of respondents reported viewing the Republican Party positively, with 49 percent viewing it negatively.

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In a well-entrenched two-party system, one party falling from grace to such an extent usually boosts the popularity of the other party. For much of the second half of the 20^th century, approval ratings for Democrats and Republicans moved in opposite directions. Strikingly, that no longer seems to be the case. Even as independents soured on the Republican Party over the past 18 months, they have not become any more enamored with the Democrats. According to that same NBC poll, only 29 percent of respondents saw the Democratic Party positively, with 50 percent viewing it negatively. Net favorability for Democrats is even worse than it is for Republicans.

For now, elections remain a choice between two unpopular options. Though Democrats have a worse image than Republicans, the minds of most voters are unsurprisingly focused on the failings of the man in the White House. This year’s midterms are likely to produce a sizable, perhaps even a huge, blue wave. But Democrats would be fooling themselves if they took this to mean that most Americans have a positive view of the party or will necessarily stay loyal to it over the long run.

So long as Trump remains toxically unpopular and there are no realistic alternatives, voters will reluctantly flock to the Democrats. There is absolutely no guarantee that these two conditions will remain true forever.

Both Republicans and Democrats are very unpopular. So why has a third party so far failed to materialize? Why does virtually every representative and senator remain affiliated with one of these two parties? The answers have to do with the nature of the American electoral system.

In countries with proportional representation, such as Germany, voters can pick a small political party without feeling that they are wasting their vote. Even if a small environmentalist or pro-business party gets only 7 or 8 percent of the vote, it will still send some representatives to parliament and may even enter government as part of a broader coalition.

In countries with a majoritarian electoral system such as the United States, by contrast, a vote for a smaller party is usually “wasted.” If you vote for the Greens or the Libertarians this November, you almost certainly won’t affect the composition of the House or the Senate since those parties are very unlikely to win a plurality of the vote in any district. Even voters who might prefer the ideological profile of a local third-party candidate are therefore likely to “hold their nose” and instead support the major party candidate they dislike the least. (In addition, electoral rules are set by the incumbent parties, and those are unsurprisingly keen to make it harder for third parties to get off the ground; in many states, there are consequently major obstacles to even getting on the ballot.)

This helps explain why countries with a majoritarian electoral system have traditionally tended toward especially entrenched party duopolies. In the United Kingdom, for example, Labour and the Conservatives have for the past century split the lion’s share of the vote between them. Even if you liked other parties better, you opted for one of the two main parties.

But despite the structural obstacles to the emergence of third parties in the United Kingdom, that has started to change in recent years. While Labour and the Conservatives often took more than 90 percent of the vote between them in the postwar era, their cumulative vote share fell to 57 percent at the last general election and was as low as 37 percent in polling averages earlier this year—a development that looks strikingly similar to those in Germany and France. (Labour has somewhat recovered since Andy Burnham replaced Keir Starmer as prime minister, but it is too early to tell whether he can convert his honeymoon phase into lasting support.)

These changes are not yet reflected in the composition of the House of Commons. In a majoritarian system with five or six viable political parties, it is often enough to gain 30 percent of the national vote to sweep to a large majority. But by the same token, a new party can gain a majority at astonishing speed if it is able to rise to similar levels of popularity. If the far-right Reform UK party, led by Nigel Farage, recovers from recent funding scandals and gains 30 percent of the vote at the next election, it could well win an outright majority of MPs.

Majoritarian electoral systems, like the one used in the United States, create serious structural obstacles to the rise of third parties. But when voters get sufficiently disillusioned with the traditional duopoly that this system creates, these obstacles aren’t insurmountable, as the case of the United Kingdom shows. Could America be next?

America, unlike the United Kingdom, has a president who is directly elected. This means that voters pay comparatively less attention to parties and legislative elections, and comparatively more attention to personalities and presidential elections. It is therefore unlikely that the rise of new political parties would take the same form as in Britain or most other parts of Europe. I don’t anticipate that longstanding third parties like the Greens or the Libertarians will succeed in upending American politics by winning a succession of congressional races.

Instead, the most likely scenario for a third-party breakthrough would resemble some of the close misses of the past: A charismatic and (probably) rich individual would run for president without the backing of either the Democratic or the Republican Party, possibly succeeding in electing a number of senators or representatives on the candidate’s coattails.

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To beat the odds, this kind of candidate would need to start with high name recognition and have tremendous financial resources at their disposal—in short, a celebrity who is famous for something other than politics. Billionaires are the obvious possibility, since they can finance their own campaigns. But a sports or movie or music star with a base of fervent supporters and a strong network of high-net-worth friends is also an option.

These conditions constrain what a successful third-party bid would look like. But they are hardly insurmountable. In a country as large, rich, and raucous as the United States, there is no paucity of charismatic celebrities with outsized ambitions and access to money.

In this respect, Trump proved to be the model. But while he staged a kind of hostile takeover of an existing political party, his spiritual successors may choose to assail the traditional parties from the outside. In part because Trump for now retains a sufficiently large fan club to block the way to any competitor on the populist right, future third-party candidates may choose to challenge the MAGA movement from outside the structure of the Republican Party.

Many readers will think that the fading hold of the duopoly is a good thing. Since most Americans now feel disaffected with both Democrats and Republicans, many of them understandably hope for a third party. I should in theory feel the same way: While I don’t have any difficulty choosing between the existing options, I don’t feel especially well-represented by either. Surely, I should be excited about the prospect of having more choices!

But that anticipation may prove to be premature. The views of independents are highly heterogeneous, and many of the people who now long for the day when they have a third option may find themselves deeply disappointed when the day comes. While I personally would love to have a political option that has moderate views on cultural issues and recognizes the danger posed by authoritarian regimes like Russia’s, I fear that it is much more likely that a successful third-party candidate, whether on the left or the right, would combine extreme cultural views with deeply isolationist tendencies.

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And then, of course, there are the perils of celebrity politics. Given the nature of America’s political system, a third party is likely to be led by a charismatic leader with little prior experience in politics. Even if I should find the program on which they run to be congenial, it is far from clear whether the candidate would, should they succeed in entering the White House, advance a principled political alternative to the status quo or simply use the office as a vehicle for self-aggrandizement.

Sooner or later, the day of the third-party candidate is likely to be upon us. But when it comes, many who now find that idea to be exciting may be in for a rude awakening.

A version of this piece originally ran in The Dispatch.

Luis Garicano is Professor of Public Policy at the London School of Economics and a co-founder of The Rhine Group.

In this week’s conversation, Yascha Mounk and Luis Garicano discuss why Europe has failed to produce world-leading technology companies, whether labor market rigidities and a fragmented single market explain Europe’s innovation deficit, and whether culture versus institutions are to blame for European risk aversion.

This transcript has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.

Yascha Mounk: You co-founded very recently something called The Rhine Group. If I can put it in somewhat blunt terms, the idea of The Rhine Group is to unscrew Europe. Why is it that you think that Europe is screwed in the first place?

Luis Garicano: If you try to picture Europe, let’s say in the 1970s, in terms of technology and innovation, you see everything from trains, Siemens and Alstom, to planes, Concorde, to nuclear plants. We were at the forefront of technology. Basically, what has happened since 1990 is that nothing has happened. There’s been an information technology revolution and now an AI revolution, and Europe has missed the first.

And it looks like it’s going to miss the second. There are many ways to see this. What is the proportion of innovative firms? What is the market capitalization of European startups? One of the ones I like most is to think of who were the three or four biggest companies by market cap, or by research intensity, in Europe in the 90s, in 2000, in the 2010s, in the 2020s. You get three or four top German car manufacturers all the time. You look in the United States and you get entirely different firms per decade. You get Facebook, you get Microsoft, you get IBM, which goes up and then down, and you get the car companies, which disappear from the top rankings. So you get a very dynamic industry in the United States and a very static picture in Europe.

Mounk: The striking thing, by the way, is that this shows that Europe has over-invested in the car sector, that it hasn’t had enough innovation outside the car sector, which would be worrying but somewhat forgivable if European cars were at the technology frontier. But I just spent a few weeks in Beijing. I went to the Robot Olympics. I wrote about it on my Substack. The robots were very impressive, and some students from one of the leading European universities, ETH Zurich, who I spoke to, who happened to be in the audience, said we have nothing like that at our university. But when I was walking home, I went to the display of BAIC, one of the minor Chinese car companies, state-owned, not renowned to be particularly innovative. And they showed me the newest models, which were far more impressive than European cars at a fraction of the price. So even in the one area that they’ve invested in, they’ve fallen behind.

Garicano: Yes, because I think the problem doesn’t have to do with the sector. It has to do with the form of progress. We are good at incremental innovation. We have this three-year cycle: you do something better, you never fire anybody, you hire just a few people, you continue in that path, and that path kind of carries you over the line. But you don’t suddenly shut this sector and open this other one. You don’t get rid of this industry to get that industry going.

Because it’s very hard to fire and hire, because it’s very hard to create and destroy businesses, because bankruptcy proceedings are very difficult, because scaling up is very hard—all of those things mean that if it’s all about continuing to do what you were doing before, we’re pretty good. If it’s about changing directions, we are terrible.

Mounk: Part of the problem is that these challenges compound, right? The tech revolution has created so much wealth that the United States—and now, in a very different way, China—has a lot of investment capital lying around. So when there’s somebody, an 18-year-old with a bright idea who wants to create an AI company or a biotech company or whatever company, there is just this huge pool of money in Silicon Valley that can be devoted to taking out a lot of lottery tickets. And as is the nature of VC, a lot of those lottery tickets don’t work out, but some do. And that then is the next set of big companies that creates new capital. At this point, has Europe fallen so far behind in the capital game that it’s just very, very hard to catch up?

Garicano: I’m skeptical of the capital explanation. It looks more like good Europeans going to Silicon Valley to be married with good European capital—the human talent and the capital going away. I think there’s something very related to what you’re saying that is going on, and we can see it in Sweden. In Sweden, you have Spotify and the children of Spotify, and Estonia and Sweden are in the same boat. The founders have the capital, but they also have the knowledge—how do you scale up, how do you start, which doors do you need to open. The person who is the angel investor in the next generation of startups is somebody who has the money, as you’re saying, but also has the knowledge of how to navigate this. So in Europe, once you don’t have that, it’s very hard to get started. In Silicon Valley, it is this knowledge which is allowing the next generation to succeed. And yes, we are pretty behind, except for a couple of countries, in terms of unicorns, startups, and this ecosystem.

Mounk: That’s very interesting. So you’re saying it’s not just the lacking capital, it’s also the lacking human capital in a sense—which doesn’t mean that Europeans aren’t very smart, that they’re not very talented in those industries. When you look at Silicon Valley, there’s a lot of Europeans who have risen to important roles there. But that ecosystem doesn’t exist within Europe. And part of the ecosystem is financial capital, but part of the ecosystem is having people around who said, well, I did a startup and I made this mistake, and I know this person who could be good for you, and all of those kinds of informal things.

What about other kinds of obstacles that exist in Europe today? You said in America, you might say let’s try this as a big company, you hire a bunch of people, and if you decide that this investment didn’t work out or this area of business didn’t work, then you fire a lot of those people. That seems cruel, but because there are so many companies doing that, those people are likely to have other opportunities, and on the whole, the wellbeing of talented workers in the United States is a lot higher than that of talented Europeans. Arguably, at this point, the average American has a much higher standard of living than the average European. One of the reasons for this, of course, is that in Europe you simply can’t fire people in the same kinds of ways. So there are labor market obstacles. There’s a question of whether there’s a truly unified single market, where in many areas it’s actually still very, very difficult to scale a company at the European level because of all kinds of informal and formal obstacles.

There’s a question of culture and mindset, too. I notice this: when I speak to European students, they dream of joining the European Commission. When I speak to American students, they dream of joining Anthropic and OpenAI. I’m slightly exaggerating, but not fully. There is really a difference in what the modal student thinks they can aspire to, and does in fact aspire to. Are those the explanations you’d reach for, or is it really other kinds?

Garicano: I’m not a big fan of cultural explanations—of the last set of explanations you mentioned. It seems to me that there are good, solid institutional reasons to explain what we observe. In terms of the firing and hiring regulations, the first one you discussed, I think is really important. Creative destruction, which is what we’re talking about, is a crucial aspect of progress. Two Europeans, Cost and Controlem, have been making the following point: if you have very big firing costs, it’s very hard to change course. If Facebook decides that the metaverse is the future, invests in the metaverse, changes the name to the metaverse, then decides it’s a completely stupid idea and instead they should be doing AI—they just, one day, fire all the metaverse people, the next day hire all the AI people, and they’re gone. If you do the calculation for how difficult that is for Ericsson or for Nokia, which are examples these two scholars are studying, it’s very difficult. You need to talk to the committee on this and that, you need to pay this, and the unions have to agree. You need to get it all approved. And all of that takes months—but also, more importantly, all of that means that before you take a crazy bet, before you try for something that might work or not, you’re going to think twice, because if you make a mistake, you cannot rectify it.

So to me, this kind of problem is more important. We’ve written a lot about this in Silicon Continent, our Substack, which I have with my son, and we have a lot of evidence that this could be important. There are indeed problems with scaling up in the single market. It’s very hard for a company in Germany or Czechia to grow into France and Italy, because many regulations are different. And even when we have single market rules that are the same, the regulators apply them in different ways. If you talk to VCs, what they tell you is the way they recommend their companies scale up is: you start in Austria or you start in France, then you scale up in the United States, and then we’ll do more of Europe. Don’t start trying to go through all these little markets, because it’s going to take you too long.

Mounk: Let me be a stand-in for my sociologist friends here. Why is it that you argue that culture doesn’t matter? Now, it may be that culture is downstream from a lot of those institutional things, and that if we fix those institutional things, then over time the culture could adjust. But surely it’s not implausible to say that there’s been outsized returns to being a startup founder in the United States—that this has created an ecosystem and a cultural ethos where going out at the age of 18 or 21 or 25 to do a startup is something that is prized, for which there’s all kinds of cultural resources, people understand what it is to be doing a startup, your parents are not going to fall unconscious and say “what on earth are you doing,” and so on. And because in Europe there’s been all of these obstacles to the creation of a startup culture, which may have been institutional, now there’s a lacking culture.

Presumably that problem is not going to disappear overnight. So even once we have managed to fix some of those institutional obstacles, there’s still going to be some parents who say, well, I’ve never heard of anybody doing a startup, this is really not what you should be doing. And there’s still going to be a lack of cultural knowledge about how to engage in this and why you would do that. And there may still be a generation of people who share the aspirations of their elders and who think that perhaps being a functionary in Brussels is more honorable, or somehow a better way to serve Europe, than to go and try to become what continental Europeans like to call, in their favorite English phrase, a “tech bro.” Like, that’s betraying Europe, right? You’re serving Europe by becoming a good bureaucrat.

Garicano: I would say two points on culture. First, yes, norms and beliefs matter, and there are norms and beliefs that societies have, and you marry or you don’t marry young or old, and all these things change. I am not a big fan of looking at those as a policymaker, or as a policy analyst, because there is not much we’re going to be doing about that.

You also talk about cultural knowledge, and I certainly think that’s the part I was talking about with business angels—the knowledge part, the cognitive part, is very important. And that one we can change. So, there’s no business angels, so we don’t get a transmission of knowledge on how to get started. Okay—how did Sweden change this? That was the third point I was going to make, which is that we have seen these things change. Sweden did a reform in 2003 or 2005, one of those dates, where they decided to allow the capital gains from one generation of startups to be reinvested in the next generation without taxation. So if you create a new startup, you can save yourself the capital gains. If you do that, then suddenly everybody wants to reinvest, and then suddenly you have a culture. You’re like, the Swedes do have a culture. Well, why do the Swedes have it and the Norwegians or Danes don’t? Because the Swedes changed the law. So I think that sometimes we use culture as an easy crutch to say Europeans can’t do it because they’re not risk-takers—and yeah, we might not be risk-takers, but it is indeed, as you put it, to some extent downstream of all the other things we have, which are taxes and which we can change.

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And for sure, there is one thing that does explain risk aversion, which is crucial, and I’m not going to deny it, which is demographics. Europe does have aging populations. And if you ask my mom, or the mom of my wife, or somebody else in Europe, they don’t care so much about innovation and all these things, because they think life is good as it is and they want to just get their pensions and continue the way they are. And the older the population is, the more important those voters—who are saying “please keep everything as it is, we’re doing fine”—become. That part is crucial.

Mounk: Yeah, I think there’s a second way in which it matters, which is for the ability to make political change. If you have political change that changes the institutions and the incentives, downstream from that, you probably get cultural change as well. But part of the problem is that you have a political culture that makes those policy reforms difficult in the first place. And I’m struck that this is true of older Europeans who have generous pension schemes and who want to defend them. That’s very understandable in politics—maybe a challenge for Europe, but it’s certainly straightforward that people who have high pensions don’t want to give them up.

What I’m really struck by is that a lot of young Europeans I speak to actually have the same outlook. A lot of elite students in countries like France, for example, seem just naturally convinced—we haven’t sort of analyzed this in a deep way, by and large, but it’s just obvious to them—that defending France’s generous pension scheme, and opposing the kinds of reforms to that scheme that Emmanuel Macron was trying to put in place, is in fact in their generational interest. That their parents’ generation is trying to take away something from them. And they don’t see the connection between that and why they’re earning so little, and why they pay so much tax and other social charges, and why that makes it so hard for companies to innovate and therefore to create positions that would give them opportunities in life.

They reject all of that and just say, our parents had something that’s going to be taken away from us, it’s in our generational interest to go defend this extremely generationally redistributive scheme—one that is continuing to feed the comparatively good lifestyles of older French people, who, retired, now on average make more money than people who are in the workforce, in a way that’s going to be completely unsustainable 30 or 40 years from now, when those people themselves might start to go into retirement.

Garicano: Yes, I agree that there is a tendency not to look forward on this. I also think the media, which is kind of oriented to the needs of the majority of the public, and often that public is older, has been reluctant to talk about the generational divide. I think that has changed. In Spain, there was one account on Twitter which picked up on all these things economists were saying, did it very well in putting out the graphs, etc., and got an enormous following. He had to be shut down by his bosses—there was demand for this. And in France, there is the one called “Pierre qui paye”—”Pierre, the one who pays.” There is an increasing kind of demand for these stories. I think when you look at recent gains by populist parties among young voters, among male voters, among working-class voters—that we saw with the recent elections in Germany, the regional elections in Saxony-Anhalt—you do see a lot of people who are paying those contributions, who are probably not thinking of their standard of living without necessarily understanding exactly why it’s so low, but being upset that they’re paying so much. So I do think there is some backlash, in part, in the populist reaction we have seen.

Mounk: I think what’s interesting about that reaction—one thing that people sometimes say about populism, which I think is fair, is that it can be a kind of disease, it can be very damaging to democratic institutions, but it’s also a symptom of an underlying disease. When populists rise as much as they have, particularly in Europe over the last 25 or 30 years, we should probably take it very seriously as a signal that something is off, that people are upset about something. We shouldn’t be too quick to dismiss that.

I find that to be fair. What’s really striking about many of these populists, though, is that they are actually even less willing to rethink the European social and economic model than other political parties. The Rassemblement National of Marine Le Pen in France has been effective in part by totally refusing to countenance anything like a pension reform. And the AfD in Germany—which sometimes scores points pointing out some of the real problems of the country—itself has a set of policies that, in general, are not going to help the future of Europe or the future of Germany, particularly on the economy. They were, for example, mobilizing against the building of a large Tesla plant in East Germany, where a lot of their voters are. So they’re firmly part of the anti-future coalitions.

Garicano: No, I think you’re completely right. I read the populist vote as a protest vote, not a constructive vote, and most of these people don’t know what they’re doing. A lot of people are giving too much credit to the AfD as representing something about change. The truth of the matter is the AfD is just a symptom that people are upset, but they don’t have any human capital, they don’t have anybody who knows what they’re doing, and there is no chance that they are going to be able to provide for the population in terms of actually doing things better.

Mounk: Laurenz Guenther, who’s been on the podcast in the past, talking about this paper—that the average member of the Christian Democratic Party in Germany, for example, before the rise of the AfD, was to the left of the median voter in Germany on issues like immigration.

Garicano: Yeah, exactly. The thing that he observes, which I think is very smart, is: on the economics, as you’re pointing out, more or less it does look like the parties are following the voters. So, on pensions—the French parties are defending the pension system, the French voters are defending the pension system. On the cultural issues, though, and that’s the key point, you see that there is a humongous gap between where the voters are on immigration and things like that, and where the mainstream, right-wing politicians are. That gap opens up a space.

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In his view, it’s like an industrial organization model—an entry model, like in a market. There’s no supermarket in this part of town, so somebody should come in and put a supermarket there. The idea that voters want the migration problem solved in a different way than the traditional political parties in Europe are offering, and that new parties are coming in to offer those solutions, seems to me obvious. It’s been the case in the United States, and it’s probably the case in Europe. Spain’s been having a huge problem with the southern border, where an enormous amount of uncontrolled migration came in. There is no real separation, no real wall between Europe and Africa in those cities, and the voters want proper borders, and they want people who enter illegally to be thrown out. That’s how people see it. And if voters don’t get this from traditional parties, they are going to get it some other way.

Mounk: One thing that I find striking about this is that it has somewhat changed in the United States, but in Europe I think it’s still true that, first of all, political parties aren’t acting on the very evident anger about immigration in huge parts of the population—nearly as much as perhaps they would be if they really meant seriously that the rise of these populist parties is a threat to democracy, as I believe in certain places it is. But secondly, that perhaps outside of leading politicians who have somewhat changed their tune over the course of the last 10 years—basically, Europe’s left-wing and center-left parties are now to the right on immigration of where Europe’s conservatives were 10 years ago—in many elite spaces, I’m struck by the unwillingness to acknowledge that an inability to control the border is one of the causes of populism.

I teach classes on populism and democracy, and one of the questions I ask is: what do you think drives the rise of populism? That’s always a great, lively debate, and I think the causes are not obvious. Some people think it’s to do with technology and the internet and social media. Other people think it’s really about economic grievances and economic stagnation, or perhaps inequality, which I think are two slightly different explanations. Some people might say it’s because people don’t like that women now have equality and gays and lesbians are treated better than they were in the past. They’re kind of willing to acknowledge that. Immigration never comes up. What is it that Donald Trump speaks about the most? What is it that Marine Le Pen speaks about the most? What is it that 91% of people who voted for the AfD in the state elections in Sachsen-Anhalt recently said was the primary reason they voted for the AfD? It’s immigration. Well, perhaps that’s something to do with it.

It’s not that people are totally unwilling to accept that as a possible explanation once you raise it, but it never comes up spontaneously. And even then, people are very quick to say, well, that’s really only because of social media, or because the media reported it wrongly, or because Russian propaganda is exploiting the issue, etcetera. There’s a strange unwillingness to confront this as one of the reasons for the political troubles Europe is finding itself in.

Garicano: I think that’s exactly right. I’m a cosmopolitan liberal, pro-open-borders and all that. I’ve lived all my life abroad. And yet I can see that if we don’t give an answer to these grievances, as you said at the start, our liberal democracies are at extreme risk. Isn’t this obvious?

So I agree with your initial point that liberal democracy can be at risk if we don’t address this issue. And I am also surprised. The first function of the state is—just think of it from the perspective of someone who’s seen on TV in Spain, all the time, these thousands of people who crossed the border from Ceuta in one day, in some mass move. People are looking at them, seeing them on the beach, complaining that they don’t have a place to sleep, and people are thinking, okay, well, just go back to your home in Morocco.

And the fact that voters are not understanding what’s going on—not understanding that if a liberal state can’t give an answer to “somebody violated your territorial integrity,” then you respond by either making the frontier stronger, expelling the people who shouldn’t have a right to stay, etcetera. No—you don’t do any of those things. This has been a huge reason Donald Trump came to power, causing enormous trouble for the United States in many ways. And it can be a big reason Le Pen or the AfD or the extreme right in Spain gets to power, and that would be equally problematic for Europe. This is a problem we should solve before it explodes in our hands.

Mounk: David Frum wrote an article long ago that has become a kind of little slogan in my mind, but I think it’s a helpful one: if liberals don’t enforce borders, fascists will. I’m not sure I would use the F word, but I think if established political parties persistently refuse to listen to these very strongly articulated views by voters on immigration, people are going to go to others who will listen to those views.

There’s certainly a substantial portion of the population that has quite extreme views on immigration. But most people have, I think, quite reasonable views. They see that immigrants are making real contributions to their countries. Many of them have genuine friendships and social relationships with people who have origins outside the country, because much of Europe is now very diverse. But they want their country to have control over its borders, which is, I think, not an unreasonable preference.

I wrote a piece about the election in Saxony-Anhalt in The Washington Post, in which I made an argument that is somewhat specific to Germany, but I wonder if there’s a broader European version of it. I’m really struck by the fact that Germany, out of all European countries, has had an economic, social, and political model that has worked surprisingly well over the last 75 or 80 years. That is, of course, a stark contrast to the earlier history of Germany. In the first half of the 20th century, Germany, with utterly disastrous consequences for the world but also for Germany itself, failed to settle upon a working political, economic, and social model, which led to World War I and certainly to World War II and the absolute disasters that entailed.

So I think, quite understandably, when after World War II a better model was partially imposed on the country, partially achieved by its post-war elites, partially a matter of choice and partially a matter of luck, the operating system became: don’t change it in any way. Konrad Adenauer won re-election famously on the slogan keine Experimente—no experiments.

What I think is striking is that today Germany’s post-war model is really unsalvageable. As Constanze Stelzenmüller has said, it used to outsource its security needs to the United States, its energy needs to Russia, and the creation of economic growth to exports to the huge Chinese market, over the course of the last few decades. And each element of that model is now very much in doubt and probably unrecoverable. It’s not clear to me that, whoever succeeds Donald Trump, Europe can ever rely on the United States for its security to the extent it has over the last 50 or so years. Europe is far behind on energy, which is very troubling, especially for a country that relies on manufacturing as much as Germany does, because that’s a major input cost. And China has gone from having huge demand for high-quality manufactured goods like luxury cars, to being able to produce such strong ones of its own that we’re now in the second China shock, which is affecting Europe more than it is the United States. Suddenly Volkswagen, Mercedes, and so on have gone from thinking of China as a wonderful export market to fearing the innovation of Chinese car companies that can outcompete Volkswagen and Mercedes.

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So I think this would require a genuine rethinking of Germany’s model, but the operating system of the post-World War II era makes it very hard for German elites to actually engage—first of all, to admit that the model no longer works and that it needs not just a little reform here or there, as the Red-Green government did in the early 2000s to reduce labor costs, but a genuine change of model. And it makes it very difficult for people in Germany to genuinely think about what that change might look like. I’m surprised by the paucity of debate about how Germany can reinvent itself, given how urgent the need for that is.

Now, that argument perhaps doesn’t easily translate to Spain or to France or to the UK, because those countries don’t exactly have the same historical baggage, or have different kinds of historical baggage. But do you think it’s true that, at the Europe-wide level, it’s still disconcerting how little awareness there is of the depth of the European crisis—and that, despite important efforts like yours with The Rhine Group, how little really serious, genuine debate there is among European elites about how Europe can catch up?

Garicano: Yes, I think Germany does have something peculiar over the last few years, which is the fact that it has been governed by a grand coalition and alternation between left and right, which naturally makes change very difficult, because we have the extreme left on one side and the extreme right on the other, and everybody else has to be in government in some sense or another. This is true for Europe as well. At the European Union level, we basically also have a grand coalition of Social Democrats, the Popular Party, the Greens, and the Liberals. And that makes change hard.

But this is just a fact of the arithmetic—as the populists get stronger, the center has to stay together, and that means there is less and less room for debate. But it’s also true, as you said, that there is a lack of awareness among citizens of the need for change. In some ways, we have it too good in Europe. The truth of the matter is life is great. Life is comfortable, people have long vacations, etc. And the stimulus for change usually comes from a crisis.

Of course, the truth of the matter is: who has it very well in Europe? Not the young people, who cannot start a life—in many places they cannot get a house, they have very low salaries. Wages in Spain, for example, haven’t really gone up since the 1990s; in Italy either, in real terms. In France, the real wage is below what pensioners get. So there is a generation which has it pretty well, and I think that is the crucial element in this debate.

European politics, to me, are demographics—that’s it. If you understand the age of the median voter, you understand how close to retirement the median voter is, you understand the trade-offs between investments and pensions. The marginal dollars always go to pensions and health, not to education and investment. And you understand everything else about change and reforms in the economy, which is that that voter doesn’t want to change. The problem with demographics is that they’re slow-moving and very hard to change. We see it in France, where the political debate at this point—in the year of the presidential election, at the start of the term that will end at the presidential election at the end of spring—is dominated by solutions proposed by the extreme left or the extreme right, which are not solutions to any of the things we’re discussing. Like, let’s not pay the debt—which is just a crazy solution. So I think that demographics are the story, and that’s what makes me worried about how to change it.

Mounk: Let’s talk about what some of the solutions might be. I think part of the aspiration of The Rhine Group is to search for solutions and help build the capacity to implement them. Demographics are very unlikely to change—if anything, the demographics of Europe are likely to be more challenging 25 or 50 years from today than they are now, and it doesn’t take a crystal ball to say that. There’s demographic momentum, and if the generation of people who are fertile today is significantly smaller than the generation of people who were fertile 25 or 50 years ago, then unless suddenly every 30-year-old decides to have five children, we can basically guarantee that there’s going to be fewer children over the next years, and fewer people in their 20s and 30s 20 or 30 years from now.

So where are the levers? If you were dictator of Europe for a day, what do you think we should do? What do you think we could do to address all of these deep-rooted problems we’ve been talking about for the last 30, 35 minutes?

Garicano: I would start with practical things. I wrote a piece with Bengt Holmström and Nicolas Petit called The Constitution of Innovation, in which we started from practical things to get innovation and scaling up going. The first thing I would do is... are you having trouble with the noise?

Mounk: Normally we try to deal with all of the noise problems on the back end in this podcast, and it’s always challenging to get the audio right. People are traveling in different kinds of places. But Luis, if you don’t mind, let us talk about this noise for a moment. Are you at the moment in your office at LSE?

Garicano: I am in my office at the LSE. It’s a very European problem. There is a window there that you can see on top. That window is part of this very modern intelligent building, in which there is no air conditioning, and the building decides when it opens those windows and when it closes them. This system didn’t work, because the window starts opening when you’re in the middle of a Zoom call. The result is that it either stays open or closed, and you have no control over it.

Mounk: I think this is actually a beautiful case study of the problems of Europe. First of all, it’s kind of amazing that we call this building intelligent, when there are still a lot of people who are reluctant to acknowledge that artificial intelligence is intelligent. But it’s just such an amazing thing. Obviously sometimes you’re going to want the window closed, because you’re in a confidential conversation, because you’re recording a podcast and you need to not have street noise, for any number of reasons. So the idea that there’s anything intelligent about a building that doesn’t allow its occupants to close it is astonishing. I’ve been to the building. It’s a nice-looking building, but it’s very recent. So five years ago they decided, let’s not have any air conditioning in this building, because obviously air conditioning is evil and environmentally unfriendly, and let’s make sure that people suffer through the summer. Miraculously, nobody says that Europeans shouldn’t heat their homes in the winter, even though that uses as much CO2, or more, than it does to cool buildings in the summer. I think it’s a great example of central planning. The idea that it’s somehow going to be more environmentally friendly for this building to decide on its own when to open windows and when to close them, that we’re not giving you the choice to open or close windows... I don’t want to relitigate an earlier part of this conversation, Luis, but how is this not a cultural problem?

Garicano: I come in the winter with a space heater, because the heating, which is also intelligent, doesn’t do anything of what I need in terms of temperature. So yes, it is a disaster.

Mounk: I wish I had a photo of every senior British official and ex-official I’ve met with a space heater in the room. It’s something I haven’t encountered anywhere else in the world.

Garicano: It’s insane that now the temperature’s pretty cool and they still haven’t pressed the button, or the building hasn’t decided it’s cool enough, to close my window. So you asked what we would do, and this is a good one. I like this one. The first thing is scaling up. I would like to have an interstate commerce clause for Europe, which means if you can sell something in Madrid, you can sell it in Brussels. End of story, no questions asked.

There was a big decision by the Court of Justice, called Cassis de Dijon, which said you cannot put obstacles to trade. If you can sell in one place, you can sell in another. But eventually there were exceptions for cultural reasons, for hygiene, for environmental reasons, for security in the workplace, which means, at the end of the day, any country can put any barrier on any other. That’s the truth of the matter. So I would like to say: from now on, if you incorporate a company in any country, you can sell in every other country, end of story. True for services as well. If you’re an engineer and you’re allowed to build bridges in Germany, you’re allowed to build bridges in Spain. Not only between countries, but even within countries. If you’re an industrial engineer in Spain, you should be able to sign off on projects even if you’re not in the exact same specialty. All these professions and services and goods are very difficult to trade.

But let’s go to the windows of the buildings. In Europe, something happened in the seventies. All world citizens in the Western world realized that we had done some damage with excessive development, and Nixon established the EPA, and it grew and grew to the point where nothing can get built. This is now the case almost everywhere in Europe. You cannot build housing. I’m in London now. You cannot build housing. There’s a huge need for housing in London. There is this green belt, which is nothing but old industrial areas where you can’t build, because there’s one mouse that appeared, and then the whole biodiversity legislation kicks in. It’s insane.

In Germany, my son Peter wrote a post on the blog about the toads in Berlin. Do you know about these toads, Yascha? There is some toad which came in a truck twenty years ago, and it’s in a site where there’s a zone planned for a lot of apartments. People have been suing, because this toad is now protected. You cannot do anything, you cannot move it. The developer wanted to create a kind of refuge for the toads, all sorts of things, and nothing was acceptable. So there are thousands of people who don’t have a place to live because this toad is there, and the toad isn’t even native to Germany, or native to this site, or anything.

I think when people thought about biodiversity, they weren’t really thinking about the toads on a building site, or the grass between two lanes of the highway, all of these places like old industrial areas where some species starts growing, some mouse or some bee. No bees, I can’t say, because bees are sacred. But many other things. We could do better. We could have more true biodiversity, more true nature, by building nature. Instead it seems like we protect the nature that happens to be in the exact place where we want to build. That nature gets enormous investment in the form of the opportunity cost of not building, and we don’t protect nature in places where we could be actually generating more nature. This would be something that if I were dictator for a day, I would radically change.

Mounk: So we need an abundance agenda for Europe. This is one of the huge changes, certainly in Germany, which was always renowned for its efficiency around the world. When you now look at the famous German stories, it’s not just that trains are now less punctual than Italian trains, because they’ve fallen so far behind on investment, but the fact that remodeling the train station in Stuttgart is taking decades and costing billions, that building an airport in Berlin, which still has problems, cost an enormous amount of money and took twenty years longer than people anticipated.

Garicano: Yeah, years and years. Because people are not protecting the environment, they are anti-growth. They hate growth. They don’t want things to change, and they are going to put any obstacle in the way. The moment that something is urgent, like the liquefied natural gas terminals in Germany once the Russian gas stopped coming, you remove this legislation and you can build it in nine months. The legislation is done on purpose to stop these things from happening, and it’s completely crazy. People are dreaming of a world where you have your own apple tree, this Greta Thunberg-type of green attitude, where you eat your own apples and don’t trade with anybody and live in autarky forever. That is just insane.

Mounk: I really did not mean to make this a methodological seminar about the relative importance of institutions or economic incentives versus culture, but it strikes me that there is a cultural element to this. I have so many friends and acquaintances in Europe who use a lot of CO2 in their lives, who don’t live, by global standards, particularly environmentally friendly lives, because they’re quite international, they travel a lot, they use the plane a lot, they live in big, nice apartments, some of them have second homes, all of the things that actually drive CO2 emissions, which is understandable. But they don’t have a car in Berlin, because you can get around very nicely on public transport and a bicycle if you’re in the center of Berlin, and every now and again you call a cab if you’re being lazy, so you don’t really need a car. They somehow feel that because we’re making those sacrifices at the margin, which probably account for a difference of one percent in the CO2 for which we’re responsible over the course of a year, they lead this deeply environmentally friendly lifestyle.

If this was just some form of personal expiation for the guilt of being a modern-day human, and sometimes in the rain they bicycle and feel virtuous about it, and they think that’s changing the world even if it’s not, let them have their fun. But they then want to impose that lifestyle in a normative way on others. Those are the people who will say, well, we don’t want more housing in Berlin because that would be really bad for the environment, even though people living in cities consume less CO2 than people in more suburban places or in the countryside, so actually this is driving up CO2 consumption. But it is that set of cultural and political attitudes that helps to explain the existence of this legislation, is it not?

Garicano: Yes, there are definitely these luxury beliefs, very widespread, particularly among German elites. I wouldn’t say it’s a particularly European thing. We got the NEPA, and this environmental legislation, the habitats legislation, from the United States of America, and this emphasis on process. This legislation is not so much about allowing things, but about documenting that you’ve done all the steps, that you’ve done the environmental impact assessment. It takes years, and somebody can cancel the whole procedure because you jumped one step, you didn’t measure the impact on this particular species or whatever. All of that is American. All of this process obsession is American. So these luxury beliefs are not necessarily just European. But I wouldn’t disagree with you. Luxury beliefs exist, and people will get a belief like, you know, AI uses water, and it’s like, okay, that’s a completely crazy belief, and almond milk, which you drink every day, is much worse. But almond milk feels green to people, whatever.

So yes, they do have the luxury beliefs. My view, and the view when I’m thinking of this group and these efforts to change European policymaking, is that yes, we need to make a big effort at communicating, but it’s going to be hard to change the culture. What we need to do is look for low-hanging fruit, a set of institutional changes that can then lead to all these other downstream changes. For example, we were talking about whether we can get the taxation on business angels’ gains from exiting a startup and re-entering another startup modified, so it’s easy, or even eliminated, to convert one startup into the next. I think it wouldn’t be too difficult. I think it’s something we could try. Sweden managed it, and this would generate change.

Beliefs matter, and these norms are there, and people have these crazy views, like you were talking about CO2 and nuclear. Killing nuclear is the least environmentally friendly thing Germany has ever done. It’s driven up gas consumption and coal consumption through the roof. Germany consumes much more CO2 than anybody, and more than it would have otherwise, and yet it’s not even a debate. Nobody’s talking about nuclear except for the extreme right, because it’s a luxury belief. We can try to find those models, we can try to modify those beliefs, and you and I do that through our Substacks. I write a Substack, people read it, but I have like twelve thousand readers, so is that going to significantly change how everyday Europeans see the world? Probably not. So let’s go for those practical, low-hanging-fruit changes.

In the rest of this conversation, Yascha and Luis discuss why Europe is behind on artificial intelligence, how the continent can change its approach, and what Europe can learn from Ukraine.

This part of the conversation is reserved for paying subscribers…

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Galen Druke is the founder and host of “GD Politics,” a leading nonpartisan podcast and Substack that explains politics with curiosity, rigor, and a sense of humor. He also co-hosts the “Still Counting” podcast alongside Nate Silver and Clare Malone.

In this week’s conversation, Yascha Mounk and Galen Druke discuss whether Democrats are headed for a blue wave in the 2026 midterms, why the Senate map remains an uphill climb even in a favorable national environment, and what the persistent unpopularity of the Democratic Party tells us about its challenges going into the next election cycle.

This transcript has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.

Yascha Mounk: I’ve followed the midterms at the headline level. I look at the various polling averages now and then, and I look at some of the prediction markets. Midterm elections are usually good for the party that is not in the White House. This year it looks like, on the generic ballot, Democrats are doing particularly well. Should we be expecting a huge blue wave? Are Democrats going to win the House? Might they even win the Senate?

Galen Druke: I think the base case expectation should be a blue wave. If you look at the generic ballot today, which is asking Americans whether they would prefer Republicans or Democrats to control Congress, Democrats lead by about nine percentage points. That would be a blue wave under basically any scenario. In the House, certainly the expectation should be that Democrats win.

In the Senate, of course, only a third of Senate seats are up for election every two years. This year the map is particularly Republican-friendly, in the sense that Republicans are defending quite red turf. The battlegrounds we’re talking about in this cycle are places where Donald Trump beat Kamala Harris in 2024 by 11 to 13 points—Texas, Iowa, Ohio, Alaska. This is not terrain that under any other circumstance would be competitive for Democrats.

I think we have to be able to hold two things in our minds at once. There is a backlash to Donald Trump—his approval rating is somewhere around net negative 23, which makes him historically unpopular, less popular than he was going into the midterms in 2018, less popular than Biden was going into the midterms in 2022. In fact, less popular than any president we have data for going back to the beginning of the modern polling era. That’s really bad. At the same time, if you see an environment where Democrats are favored by nine percentage points, but the baseline partisanship of the states we’re talking about in the Senate is more like R plus 10 or even R plus 13, that gets Democrats close, that gets Democrats competitive, but some other things have to go right for them as well—for example, having good quality Democratic candidates or bad quality Republican candidates. I think that’s the baseline for what people should expect.

Mounk: Let’s stay at the national level a little bit, and then over the course of this conversation I also want to dive into some of these particular races and dynamics.

In terms of the general numbers, I feel like there may be some reasons to think that the polls are even underestimating the magnitude of the Democratic win, and some reasons to think that the elections may turn out to be a little bit closer than we’re thinking at the moment. Let me throw a little bit of each at you and help us puzzle through which of these we should take seriously.

One reason to think that we might be underestimating the magnitude of this is that these waves tend to build. Massachusetts seems like a very obviously Democrat state that’s always going to vote for a Democrat. But if you’re in a national environment like in 2009, in which there’s a huge backlash against Barack Obama and the start of the rise of the Tea Party, Democrats are capable of losing a Senate seat in Massachusetts, particularly if they don’t have a very good candidate. In the same way, you’re looking at these races in places that have always broken the hearts of Democrats—can we really pull off something like Texas? Could we win somewhere like Kansas? I’d normally say of course they can’t, but in a big enough wave, perhaps we could.

The second argument goes a little bit in that direction as well. Historically, Democrats have always been disfavored in midterms because the Republican Party was mostly the party of highly educated and affluent people, and highly educated and affluent people tend to vote much more consistently and reliably. So in lower salience elections, Republicans had a built-in advantage. That has mostly changed and transformed—presumably posters are aware of that—and I don’t know what your assessment is of whether the models have fully incorporated that change. Perhaps we might be underestimating Democratic turnout and overestimating Republican turnout for midterms specifically.

On the other hand, you can say midterms are referenda on the sitting president. Donald Trump is deeply unpopular—I believe that part of the polls. But normally, when the governing party becomes unpopular, the opposition becomes a lot more popular. The image of the Democratic Party continues to be really, really bad. So perhaps people will sit out the election, or they won’t quite be willing to vote for Democrats for that reason.

So those are some reasons to think perhaps it’s going to be an even bigger Democratic majority than we think, and at least one reason to worry that the wave is going to turn out to be smaller than we think. Do you think any of this stuff matters?

Druke: I think a lot of it matters, and it matters at different levels of the analytical process. One is: do we expect that the polls are underestimating or overestimating one party or another? In general, we should expect polling errors. Historically, in midterms like this, we see that at the national popular vote level in the House, there’s an average error of about three points. When you look at statewide races for governor or Senate, the average error is four or five points.

As somebody who uses the polls a lot and is in some ways a defender of the polls, it’s important to impress upon people that polling error is not unique—it doesn’t mean that the scientific method is totally broken. It’s just something we should absolutely expect when we’re sampling a broad public, and there are lots of different factors that could cause the polls to be off in one direction or another.

To add a little historical context to polling error: during the Trump era, we have seen that in presidential elections, the polls have underestimated Republicans three times in a row at the presidential level. We have also seen in the two midterms, 2018 and 2022, that the polls were very accurate—they got really close to the result. We have also seen, for example, in 2025, an off-year election, that the polls underestimated Democrats. In Virginia and New Jersey last year, Mikey Sherrill and Abigail Spanberger, the Democrats who ultimately won the governorship of those states, were underestimated by the polls.

Mounk: So why is that? Is that to do with the idea that the models somehow assume Republicans are relatively good at getting voters out in these off-cycle elections or midterms, and that has changed? Or is there some other reason for this? That seems like a systematic bias in the polls—not systematic towards the left over the right, but there’s some kind of pattern to this.

Druke: I think it ultimately gets at the fact that the coalitions have been divided along what you suggested—educational lines, and also engagement lines. People who pay more attention to politics, college-educated people with a bachelor’s degree or higher, tend to pay more attention to politics, tend to trust institutions more, and tend to answer pollsters more reliably. In a national presidential year, when you have somewhere approaching 63 to 65 percent turnout of eligible voters, you’re getting a much broader cross-section of the American public than in a midterm year or an off-cycle year. Pollsters have difficulty reaching the broad electorate that turns out in a presidential year, specifically people who vote for Donald Trump who are less engaged in politics.

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Those same people that the pollsters miss in a presidential year are less likely to turn out in a midterm or off-cycle year, which means that missing them in a poll becomes less consequential for how accurate the poll may be. To be clear, pollsters have not solved this problem. You can weight to make sure you get the right number of Republicans. You can weight to make sure you get the right number of Trump voters. But what you can’t ensure is that you get the right people who are swinging or intend to vote for Trump or whoever. Even if you weight for “did you vote for Trump in the last election,” we know what the margin was—you want to make sure in the sample that Trump is winning this quote-unquote sample by 1.5 points, because that’s how much he won the popular vote by. Even then, you can’t guarantee that you’re getting the people who are going to turn out this time, the people who might be changing their minds this time.

Mounk: A lot of low-propensity voters who swung hard for Trump in 2024 because they were very disgruntled with the Biden administration, including on things like cost of living, may precisely now be activated and swing to the Democrats.

Druke: Yeah, and a couple of things may be happening there. Even if you don’t swing towards the Democrats as a 2024 Trump supporter, maybe you’re pissed off enough to not turn out. You said that Democrats are still quite unpopular—that’s true, and that means there’s a pretty steep hill to climb to get from voting for Trump in 2024 to maybe voting for Democrats in 2026. So there are a couple of options: you can not turn out to vote at all, or some people are going to say in polls that they dislike the Democratic Party and still vote for a Democrat anyway, because they’re using Democrats as a tool to punish Republicans, not as an endorsement of any particular worldview.

Mounk: Let me ask you this as a question: what is the makeup of the people missing from Democratic approvals? There are some people who are just very conservative—they’re never going to approve of Democrats, easy. There are people who should be approving of Democrats at the moment, given how unpopular Trump is, and who are not. It’s the differential between what the average rate of approval for the opposition party is when a sitting president is that unpopular, and the current rate of approval for Democrats.

One hypothesis about this group is that these are people who are more progressive than the average Democrat, and they don’t like the Democrats because the Democrats are too moderate for them. A second hypothesis is that these are people who are very comfortable with the ideological direction of the Democratic Party, pretty straight down the line in terms of political views, but who just find that the Democratic Party doesn’t fight enough for them. The third is that these are people who are more moderate than the Democratic Party, or perhaps more conservative than the Democratic Party, but who don’t like Trump because they think he’s doing a terrible job for all kinds of relatively obvious reasons—to them, the Democratic Party is just far too far left for them to like. Do you have a sense of how this group is splitting?

Druke: I think there’s a fourth option which runs through all of those buckets: people don’t like losers. We see this time and time again—when a party loses a big, high-profile presidential election, people sour on that party. A lot of the people who disapprove of the Democratic Party right now—to put this in context, approval rating for the Democratic Party is somewhere between net negative 10 and net negative 20-something, depending on which polls you’re looking at, so it’s about as unpopular as Donald Trump—a lot of those people may be people who will vote for Democrats, have voted for Democrats, will vote for them again, but are pissed off that the Democratic Party lost to Donald Trump.

A lot of voters don’t think in such ideological terms as we do. There are certain impressions, like: Democrats are weird, they’re too woke, maybe they fight for people at the margins of society but they’re never really fighting for normal people like me. I think that’s a pretty common view of the Democratic Party. It might not be that they’re too far left or too far right per se, but when I look at the Democratic Party, does it feel like a party that represents people like me, or does it feel like it’s representing an elite, a professional class, a particular gender, a particular race, a particular part of society?

I think people have gotten the impression—particularly the roughly 50 percent of voters in the middle who have swung hard towards Trump, which is to say not poor, not rich—that the party doesn’t really represent them, because the party has spent a lot of time talking about the economic plight of the poor and the cultural predilections of the rich. So if you’re somewhere in the middle, just trying to have a stable life and maybe supporting some economic populist policies—a higher minimum wage, better healthcare, things like that—but you don’t share the same cultural predilections as the left elite, you may not like their posture overall towards the country, even if Democrats are saying things you like on the economy.

I don’t think it’s just one of those things. There probably are DSA people or Democratic socialists who say the party is not left enough, but looking at the polls, it’s frequently in the single digits—the number of people who say that the Democratic Party is not far-left enough.

Mounk: That’s a very important point, because both in the media discussion in the United States, and certainly in the view that Europeans have of the political situation in the United States—I’m in Europe at the moment—the assumption is that the political center, in any meaningful sense, has totally eroded, because voters are no longer in the political center, because there’s nobody who is politically moderate. What people really want is for the Republican Party to be in the hands of Donald Trump, and for the Democratic Party to be in the hands of AOC. The reasoning goes: if the Democratic Party is way less popular than we would expect it to be, given the unpopularity of Donald Trump, the reason for this must be that they haven’t embraced the politics of AOC.

Now, I think my audience is not going to be surprised that I’m somewhat skeptical of this, and I don’t think your audience will be surprised that you’re somewhat skeptical of this either. But give us some of that evidence. When you’re asking voters, “Do you think the Democratic Party is too far left or too far right?” as a general question to the voting population, only in the single digits do people say that. So why is it then that the energy often feels to be with candidates like AOC, like Zohran Mamdani, like the candidate in Michigan whose full name is Abdul El-Sayed?

Druke: There’s a lot of important context here, which is that we’re coming off a Democratic primary season in which people feel like the Democratic Socialists are ascendant. I want to keep that in perspective. Today there are two members of the Democratic Socialists in Congress—Rashida Tlaib and AOC, just two. At the beginning of the next Congress, likely because of this primary season and DSA victories, it will likely be seven. That’s not quite a takeover of the Democratic Party, even if progressives or further-left candidates have had some high-profile victories this cycle.

Mounk: It’s worth noting that in this cycle—I looked at one kind of measure of this, though I don’t know how accurate this metric is versus others—in about forty-three competitive races between mainstream Democrats and either very progressive or explicitly DSA candidates, about thirty-four of them were won by the more mainstream Dems. Understandably, it’s a much bigger news story when an upstart challenger to the mainstream wins a primary, but it’s not actually the case that the most progressive candidate won in a majority of the primary races. Is that broadly accurate, you think?

Druke: That’s broadly accurate, and it’s even more the case that these further-left candidates have difficulty winning outside of territory that is already deep blue. If you compare it to the Tea Party in 2010—after that election there were 45 Tea Party-associated lawmakers in Congress. So if you want to draw parallels, I would say the Tea Party, at this point in the process at least, was far more successful than Democratic socialism is today in America.

The other thing to keep in mind is who participates in a Democratic primary. It’s only about 20 percent of the eligible electorate, so you’re getting the preferences of the most ideological, most politically engaged, most enthusiastic part of the electorate. Look at Maine, for example—you got this sense that Graham Platner is the Messiah in Maine, he’s so popular, there’s so much grassroots support and enthusiasm. That’s because everyone’s referring to Democratic primary polls. You get to the general election, and Susan Collins has a positive favorability rating in Maine—she’s net plus three. Troy Jackson, Graham Platner’s replacement, is net negative eight. And I think today Graham Platner is net negative forty-something in terms of approval.

In a primary season, it’s easy to get carried away, because the voting public is a small subset of America more broadly, and the party is, in particular, at its most ideological, most engaged, and most likely in this moment to be voting for more extreme candidates. This isn’t always a bad thing—I’m judgmental in the sense that it’s just not representative of the American public, and that’s important to keep in mind. But there are also angry Democrats who feel the Democratic Party has not been responsive to them, in the same way that there were angry Republicans who felt the Republican Party had not been responsive to them in the 2010s. That’s how parties work, especially when you have a two-party system where people can’t just create a brand new party. If you’re pissed off and you’re participatory in that party, you have the right to show up and make your voice heard.

Mounk: What is the actual evidence here? There’s this argument progressives often make that the reason Democrats keep losing is that they’re too moderate, too establishment—if only we nominated candidates like AOC and Mamdani all up and down the country, we would actually win. I think in the specific case of AOC and Mamdani, those two candidates are not just very far left, they also happen to be quite charismatic, and that certainly matters. But when you actually look at the track record of relatively more moderate establishment candidates in competitive House races or competitive Senate races, versus more progressive candidates in races that matter—because obviously, if you’re running in a D+40 congressional district, or running for mayor in a D+40 city, you can afford to be very progressive and you’re not going to be in danger of losing to a Republican—but when we’re talking about the Senate races and House races that will determine control of Congress in November, what is the evidence over the last ten years about whether this argument by progressives, that they’ll be better at winning in those races, holds any water?

Druke: It simply doesn’t hold up. Lakshya Jain at The Argument, the founder of Split Ticket, has done really good work on this—what he calls “wins above replacement.” How well does a particular candidate perform above and beyond a replacement-level Democrat or replacement-level Republican? He finds there’s about a four-point advantage to being a quote-unquote blue dog Democrat over being a progressive Democrat, over many different cycles.

The same thing happens on the Republican side. It’s kind of ironic that the same people who believe progressives perform better across the board in elections don’t necessarily believe that more extremist right-wing candidates, or more out-of-the-norm right-wing candidates, would also do better. You see the same punishment for the more ideological, more MAGA-aligned candidates. Republicans overall have done worse in nominating high-quality candidates over the past ten years than Democrats have—Kari Lake, twice in Arizona. Those were winnable races for Republicans, but they chose these charismatic, populist, too-far-right candidates—Blake Masters, Doug Mastriano. It goes on and on.

Those are statewide races, I should say, and generally Democrats have nominated statewide candidates in competitive races who have fit their states better, especially in those battleground states. I think Abdul El-Sayed will be somewhat of a test to that in Michigan—he’s more out-and-out progressive. He’s not a Democratic socialist, but he’s very much aligned with AOC and Bernie Sanders. For somebody who’s not really engaged in the specifics, they may not be able to tell the difference. And then there’s Troy Jackson in Maine, who is also pretty out-and-out progressive, and who replaced Graham Platner as the Democratic nominee.

Mounk: I want to go into some of the specific races in a moment, but let me propose a three-pronged theory of American politics that I just thought up while listening to Galen. Three simple facts.

Number one: very obvious in the background—the electoral system strongly encourages a two-party system. I don’t think it guarantees a two-party system; I think the two-party system could break down under certain conditions. But the fact that in congressional and senatorial elections you have a majoritarian political system, where the single candidate that gets the most votes gets elected, provides a very strong disincentive for people to vote for third parties and minor parties, because that’s basically wasting a vote in a way it wouldn’t be in a proportional system. Very straightforward point.

Second point: the primary system often produces quite extreme candidates in each political party. Because only about 20 percent of people participate in Democratic or Republican primary elections, as you were pointing out, Galen, those people tend to be much more politically engaged and much more ideologically extreme on both the Republican and Democratic side. Then, in part because of gerrymandering, a lot of people in Congress today are more worried about the primary as a threat to their job than about the general election, which also gives them incentives to move to the extremes. So what we end up with is a Democratic Party that I think is significantly to the left of the median voter in the United States, and a Republican Party under Trump that is far to the right of the median voter. Now, the corrective mechanism for this should be that the most extreme party is punished, because they keep losing elections to the more moderate party. But that’s not happening, because both of these parties have gone towards the ideological extremes. I don’t think we’re equally far from the median voter, but we’ve both drifted away from the median voter at the same time, so they’re each sort of saving each other.

Third, this is the prong I’ve just added to the previous two while listening to you, Galen: if the penalty for being ideologically extreme is four points, that’s significant—certainly significant enough that if you’re trying to take back control of the Senate, you’d be well advised to pick a blue dog Democrat rather than a progressive Democrat. But it is not prohibitive; you can overcome a four-point penalty. So to speak to El-Sayed in Michigan: Michigan is more or less a toss-up state, perhaps R+1 or R+2. In a blue wave environment, it might be D+7 or D+8. If you drop four points, because that’s what you drop if you’re below wins above replacement, you end up at D+3 and you take the Senate seat.

So it’s these three facts together: the electoral system that creates the two-party system, the primary and gerrymandering dynamics that push parties to the extreme at the same time, and this four-point penalty in the wins-above-replacement metric—which hurts, which matters, but which is not, say, a twenty-point penalty that would push the parties back towards the center. A four-point penalty allows both parties to keep making that mistake over and over again.

Druke: I think we’re mostly talking about ideology here, which is important. Sometimes pundits downplay it too much. I think voters do get a sense of who you are because of the way you talk about policy—they may not care about policy specifics, but they understand what kind of person you are based on how you talk about it.

I will say, though, that this understanding of Donald Trump in 2016 as far right is slightly complicated by how voters understood him at the time. On top of ideology, there are insider-outsider dynamics, and oftentimes when people are upset with an incumbent, being the outsider is a really powerful tool. Donald Trump got to put himself in the position of campaigning against both parties. Of course, he was trashing Democrats and Hillary Clinton, but he equally trashed John McCain, Mitt Romney, the Bush family, the Iraq War, free trade, and all kinds of Republican figures and Republican orthodoxy—that allowed him to set himself outside an unpopular two-party system in which people feel like politics is failing them. That’s not necessarily a policy position; it’s something of a different axis. Maybe that’s insider-outsider, which gets to a populism axis as well—the people versus a corrupt elite—especially when people felt like a lot of the gains after the 2008–2009 recession had gone to the top, and there had been, for some time, a hollowing out of the Rust Belt and places like that in America.

I would also say, beyond just campaigning against both parties, Donald Trump jettisoned the Republican Party’s least popular positions and doubled down on the things that were non-negotiable for Republicans. People have probably heard plenty about this at this point, but the way he basically said: no, we’re not going to privatize Social Security; we’re going to keep funding Medicare at the same levels; I want a better healthcare plan than Obamacare. He also said he was going to eliminate the debt and deficit. But he doubled down on something that was non-negotiable for Republican primary voters, which was immigration, while actually moderating on the things that made the Republican Party less popular with the general voting public.

I think it’s sometimes the case that primary voters are just ideological and will vote for the more ideologically extreme candidate. I don’t think history necessarily shows that that’s always true. I think it’s probably even more true in congressional elections than presidential elections, where the primary electorate becomes a lot bigger. Even in 2016, Donald Trump was not the Tea Party candidate—that was Ted Cruz. We saw Republicans nominate John McCain, even after the Tea Party began, then Mitt Romney, and then jettison Ted Cruz for Donald Trump, who seemed kind of out there but was not ideologically extreme in the Tea Party sense of “we’re going to privatize Social Security and cut all benefits.”

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What are Democrats going to do now? I think there are certain litmus tests that a Democratic hopeful in 2028 has to pass—it might be on Israel-Palestine or something like that. But I think they probably have plenty of leeway in some of the areas Democrats care less about. I think a successful 2028 Democratic nominee could moderate plenty on immigration. Somebody like James Talarico has already said Biden’s policies were a failure.

Mounk: Let’s get back to the primaries at the end of the conversation. I want to get a sense now of what your best estimate is for the midterms. We’ve talked about the general expectation based on generic polling, and some of the factors that might complicate it. Can we confidently say the Democrats are going to win the House of Representatives in November?

Druke: I would be pretty surprised at this point if they did not win. Currently in the generic ballot, they lead Republicans by nine percentage points. I said the average polling error was three percentage points in this type of race, and that’s in either direction. Democrats could overperform by three percentage points, be at eleven or twelve, and all of a sudden we’re talking about a tsunami. But if the polls are overestimating Democrats by three percentage points and they win the House popular vote nationally by six, they’re still winning the House. It’s also because the hurdle to win the House is quite low—even after the gerrymandering shenanigans throughout the past year, the number of seats they have to win is in the single digits. If you look at my colleague Nate Silver’s forecast right now, Democrats have better than a 90 percent chance of winning the House. I think people feel pretty clear about the direction the House is headed in. I think the Senate is a little more debatable.

Mounk: One more question about the House, and then we’ll move to the Senate. There are always questions about gerrymandering—there’s obviously been a huge gerrymandering war. There are often gerrymandering wars in American politics, but there’s been an off-cycle gerrymandering war, which is unusual and very bad. Why do these efforts at gerrymandering not undermine your confidence in the prediction? In the end, did the Republicans really gain something significant from their attempts to engage in this extra gerrymandering in between census years?

Druke: They certainly gained—they just didn’t gain enough to overcome what is a strong preference for Democrats, or at least a strong preference against Republicans. In a presidential year, or a year where things are a lot closer, this kind of stuff could matter. In 2028, 2032—well, by 2032 folks will have redistricted again—but this kind of stuff could matter. We’re talking about six or so seats that now favor Republicans. Some of those seats were drawn in addition to where they already were, and some were drawn in the Rio Grande Valley in South Texas, relying on shifts among the Hispanic population that happened in 2024 that I don’t think we’ll see replicated in 2026.

When you look at what we call crosstabs in the industry—underneath the top line, how do people feel about Democrats and Republicans, you can see who’s moving: white voters, white non-college-educated voters, Hispanic voters, young voters—we’re seeing some of the biggest shifts towards Democrats this cycle among Hispanic voters and young voters. A lot of those areas in South Texas where Republicans drew districts to advantage them are plurality or even majority Hispanic. So I think there should be less optimism there for Republicans about picking up those seats. This is not to say that gerrymandering doesn’t matter.

Mounk: Let’s say a word here about how gerrymandering works, which most of you probably know, but I think it’s worth spelling out. Generally speaking, the idea is that instead of having obvious, geographically contiguous districts where historically cohesive communities all vote for the same representative, you draw the districts in such a way that you stuff a lot of the voters for the other party into a few districts. You have to put them somewhere—you can’t disenfranchise people altogether—but you’re saying we’re going to have some districts that are 90 percent Democrat, and then lots of districts that are 55 percent Republican. That way you can maximize how many electoral majorities you get out of the number of votes you expect to receive in the state as a whole.

Now, of course, the problem with this is that a gerrymander—I think gerrymander is already a stupid term, but it might turn into an even stupider term—can become a “dummander,” where the idea is that you’ve drawn all these districts, like in the Rio Grande Valley, expecting them to be 55 percent Republican, but then suddenly you’re in a D+12 political environment, and you end up with 49 percent of the vote in a bunch of those districts—the gerrymander has actually backfired. Do you think we’re on the path to that happening in November?

Druke: We’re not on the path to that happening, in the sense that Republicans have pushed the map so far that they’re going to, I think, lose seats overall in Texas. I just don’t think they’re going to gain the five that they hoped they would. I think they might gain two, they might gain three, they might not gain any. But I don’t think they’ve pushed it so far that it’s going to backfire, unless we’re looking at some kind of end-of-times event for the Republican Party. It just might not have accomplished all that much. And again, this isn’t just for this cycle.

Mounk: One of the reasons it didn’t accomplish all that much, of course, is that Democrats in California and elsewhere then followed suit, gerrymandering their own states, or the states over which they themselves had control.

Druke: Democrats are more hamstrung, because in more blue states there are laws that prevent this kind of stuff—more nonpartisan redistricting commissions and things like that. Even if it doesn’t matter this cycle, that doesn’t mean it doesn’t matter—it could matter in the next cycle. Republicans certainly benefited themselves in a way that is outside of the norm when it comes to redistricting practices. It may just not be the difference-maker this cycle. That doesn’t mean it doesn’t matter at all.

Mounk: So you’re reasonably confident the Democrats are going to win the House, when you take all of these different factors into account. Obviously there’s no gerrymandering in the Senate. What do you think is going to happen there? Democrats need to pick up a number of seats—I think at least four—to get to 51 senators and win a majority, when only a third of the Senate is up for election, and in a year where the map is mostly in Republican territory, which insulates them a little bit. Nevertheless, it seems like some of your esteemed colleagues, like Nate Silver, think that Democrats might be able to pull it off. Tell us about your best estimate here.

Druke: Nate’s estimate right now is that there’s a 58 percent chance Democrats win the Senate. I think forecasting the Senate in an environment like this is tricky, because we have the map that you just described, we have the generic ballot at D+9 at this moment—it could still fluctuate a little bit—but we also have very different types of terrain and very different candidates.

Look at a place like Maine, which voted for Kamala Harris by seven percentage points, but the most recent New York Times/Siena College poll showed Susan Collins, the Republican incumbent, leading by three. She has a well-established independent brand in the state and can outrun her party significantly, especially with the college-educated suburban set that Republicans have been underperforming with. She’s a particularly strong candidate who can outrun the environment, so the environment is not determinative the way it is in the House.

Let’s move to Texas. You have Ken Paxton, a Republican who was impeached by his own party for fraud, basically.

Mounk: There’s an amazing little campaign video by James Talarico showing a time when Ken Paxton stole a pen.

Druke: A Mont Blanc pen—like a thousand-dollar pen—from somebody, and it’s caught on video.

Mounk: He was going through security at a courthouse, and some lawyer had left his Mont Blanc pen in the little box you put things in as you go through the metal detector, and Ken Paxton just picked it up and ran with it. It’s about as attackable a candidate as you can get.

Druke: Ken Paxton is so unpopular among Texans—I think his favorability rating is like 20 points underwater. As we were talking about with the primaries, Republicans had John Cornyn, an incumbent with his own brand, who was not the most popular but probably popular enough to win a general election. They threw him out and put in Ken Paxton—the Republican primary voters did. Now he’s fighting for his life. Right now, in the polling averages, James Talarico leads Ken Paxton by three and a half points in Texas, and Troy Jackson, the Democrat in Maine, leads Susan Collins by only two and a half points. If you told somebody two years ago that Democrats would have a better chance of winning Texas than Maine, you’d think, “What happened?”

Mounk: This is where candidate ideology and quality does seem to matter.

Druke: Absolutely. Candidate quality matters. The other thing that’s really interesting is that Maine and Texas could hardly be more different in terms of their demographic makeup. Maine is the oldest state in the country, and it’s very white. We see in the polling that some of the smallest shifts between 2024 and 2026 have happened among older voters and white voters. The biggest shifts have happened among Hispanic voters and young voters. Texas, I believe, is the second-youngest state in the country, and it has either the largest or one of the largest Hispanic populations in the country as well. So you have candidate quality issues, and you also have demographic reasons to expect Texas to be a lot more swingy than Maine. That’s why forecasting this type of thing can be quite hard.

Every state has its own unique circumstances, demographically and in terms of candidates. I don’t think somebody could confidently say—even based on those numbers from Nate Silver’s forecast of fifty-some percent—that you can reliably believe Democrats are going to win the Senate. I think it will be a tricky fight, and it’s going to depend on a lot of different factors.

Mounk: A side question here: for a lot of the 2010s, Democrats in particular seemed to believe—and I think Republicans actually also seemed to believe, in a way that was quite damaging—that demography is destiny, that white voters were much more Republican, non-white voters were much more Democrat, and so as the country became more diverse, Democrats would naturally start to win elections. That was based partly on a misreading, and perhaps to some extent an accurate reading, of the book The Emerging Democratic Majority by Ruy Teixeira and his co-author. He warned the party that they were adopting too simplistic a reading of that book, but people leaned into it a lot. I think that’s the source of, among other things, the Democrats’ defeat to Trump in 2016—the inability to read that kind of political mood.

The 2024 election seemed to really drive the last nail into the coffin of that theory, because so many Hispanic voters, and a significant number of Asian American and African American voters, shifted to Donald Trump—he did so well among young voters compared to how other Republican candidates had recently done, and so on. Now you’re saying you’re seeing a lot of Hispanic voters shift to the Democratic Party, along with young voters. Presumably, from what you’re saying, the 2026 midterms are going to be a lot more demographically polarized than the 2024 presidential election. What’s our best read on what’s happening here? Is it that the true degree of racial polarization by vote is just somewhere between 2024 and 2026, and it’s going to oscillate between those extremes? Or is it that a lot of the most reliable voters for the Democratic Party are still older African American voters, and a lot of the most reliable voters for the Republican Party are still older white voters, and a lot of the other voters are just much more swingy, and so they jump back and forth in different ways? What’s the ten-thousand-foot view of how to think about this?

Druke: I think it’s a combination of several of those things. One is a kind of “last in, first out” dynamic from the Republican coalition. People who just swung over to the Republican coalition, or to vote for Trump, who have not been voting for Republicans reliably for years, are self-evidently less partisan. We know there’s a set of Hispanic voters, for example, that turns out relatively reliably—they vote, but they don’t feel a strong allegiance to one party or the other.

We now see a world where—the caricature of a swing voter in America used to be an older white couple in New Hampshire going through the pros and cons of each candidate. I think swing voters are better thought of today as people who are a little bit less engaged in the political process, who pay less attention to political news, and so don’t have that instinctual partisanship that the fifteen to twenty percent who get spotlighted on cable news and Instagram and Twitter have. It’s people who aren’t participating in that, and don’t feel those intense, strong emotional ties to one party or against one party, who are some of the swingiest voters in American politics today. I would say young people fit that bill as well, in a slightly different way—they don’t have developed voting patterns yet, so they’re still figuring out how they want to identify. As you get older, people generally become less swingy, or at least that’s what you see in the data.

Where does this all net out in terms of racial polarization between the Democratic and Republican coalitions? We should not expect that 2026 is the new baseline, because it’s simply a different electorate. Increasingly, less-engaged voters, who are less likely to show up in a midterm election, are also a bit more Republican or Trump-aligned, or have been during this past decade, and are more favorable to Trump. So there’s going to be somewhere around 15 percent of the 2028 electorate—maybe even more—that doesn’t show up in 2026, and that will make a big difference when the electorate swells again in 2028.

I’ll point to one historical example. In 2020 we saw a significant shift to the right among Hispanics, but it seemed like there had been a little bit of a rebound, that it wasn’t so bad, that it was leveling off. Then in 2024, you just see an absolute drop-off. In total terms, Hillary Clinton won Latino voters by somewhere around 35 to 38 percentage points in 2016. Kamala Harris won them by three to five percentage points in 2024. It’s a massive swing. If you looked at 2022 as an important indicator of where the trajectory was headed, you would have been totally wrong, because it was just a slight leveling off before bottoming out. In the same vein, I wouldn’t overinterpret the results in 2026 to read something more broadly about the Hispanic electorate, or even the young electorate.

Mounk: Tell me a little bit about what we should expect in the thing to which everybody’s attention is going to turn the moment the midterms are over: the 2028 presidential election and the primary season for that. I’d say that on the Republican side, there is a kind of received wisdom—not of who the candidate is going to be, but of the idea that Donald Trump is going to determine who that candidate is going to be. If Donald Trump says it’s JD Vance, JD Vance is going to win. But if, for whatever reason, Donald Trump decides Marco Rubio is it, then Marco Rubio is most likely going to take it. Do you think that’s right? Do you think Republicans have a one-man selectorate for the 2028 presidential nomination?

Druke: I think it’s hard, because a lot could happen over the next two years. As I said, right now Donald Trump’s approval rating is net negative 23. There’s a world in which the bottom truly falls out, and we’re seeing, you know, George W. Bush-level numbers, where he could be closer to net negative 30 or worse. In that case, I still think he’s the most influential person in the Republican Party, but things get a lot more complicated, because other people have stronger incentives to get into the race as well.

Donald Trump is already quite unpopular and still had plenty of sway in this past Republican primary cycle, and I don’t see that going away. If Occam’s razor says Donald Trump is the one-man selectorate for 2028, that makes the process relatively straightforward in the Republican primary, but it makes it extremely complicated for Republicans in the general election. Because at that point—there would have to be utter peace in the Middle East, gas is $2.50, AI turns out perfectly, the stock market is booming, we have full employment, and interest rates have fallen to the point where mortgage rates are no longer above seven percent—there are a lot of things that would have to go incredibly well. I think that an unpopular president who is still the most influential person in the party, and is seen as choosing his successor, but is ultimately deeply unpopular with the broad public, puts either JD Vance or Marco Rubio in a pretty crappy position to run for president in a general election. If that remains the dynamic, I don’t envy the person who then has to run in the general election.

Mounk: On the Democratic side, there’s no one-person selectorate. The most influential Democrat is probably still Barack Obama, but he’s unlikely to put his finger on the scale, certainly early in the process. It feels like 274 candidates are going to run—in actuality, about 74 candidates are going to run. What’s your sense of the favorites? What’s your sense of who might be overhyped?

Druke: I’m torn, because if you listen to the online discourse, for example, Kamala Harris is definitely overhyped.

Mounk: It’s worth noting, for people who may not know this—correct me if I’m overstating this—that in basically every primary poll, she’s leading.

Druke: Yes. On one hand, that would lead me to believe that a lot of that support is name ID—people know who she is, she’s familiar to folks, and no campaign has actually started yet. Those numbers would fall significantly once a campaign actually did, or once somebody else’s did. But there’s also still a key part of the Democratic primary electorate that is older Black voters. It’s not as determinative as I think many people would suggest. In the Democratic primary, about 20 percent of voters are Black, about 20 percent are Hispanic or other, and about 60 percent are white. Black voters are oftentimes more coalesced around one candidate, whereas white voters are not. You see more leftist white voters who prefer Bernie Sanders or AOC, and more moderate white voters who might like a Josh Shapiro or a Jon Ossoff, and you have the resistance libs who might like Gavin Newsom. So there is power in bloc voting, which could be good for Kamala Harris if the rest of the electorate is really splintered across the different candidates.

My instinct is that she’s overhyped, but I don’t want to put her possible path to the nomination too much to the side. A lot of people have been comparing 2026 to 2006, in terms of Democrats’ overperformance and a backlash to an unpopular war, a second-term president, and so on. If we stick with that parallel, 2028 is fertile ground for a brand-new face. Even AOC will, by the time 2028 rolls around, have been a high-profile figure in American politics for a decade. Kamala Harris will have already been vice president during a very unpopular Democratic tenure in the White House. Gavin Newsom was basically running a shadow campaign in 2024, and has been out front doing a podcast and all of this stuff—people know who the guy is. Barack Obama’s strength in 2008 was that he had very little record; people didn’t know much about him other than that he gave a great speech at the 2004 Democratic Convention and that he opposed the Iraq War.

Mounk: I was going to say—if you’re thinking of the profile of a young senator who is well known but not yet truly nationally famous, probably with quite low negatives because people just don’t know that much about him, who is still able to introduce himself to the nation but has some dynamism behind him—I don’t want to overstate the similarities, but Jon Ossoff comes closer to that than most others.

Druke: He also stayed out of the mix mostly in 2020, when Democratic candidates were taking a whole host of unpopular positions, like decriminalizing crossing the border and defunding the police—things I don’t think you want a general election candidate to have a history of, as a Democrat. He stayed out of that mix, so he doesn’t have that record. He’s also about to, if the polls are true, win Georgia—a state that voted for Trump in 2024—by eight to ten points, potentially. He’s also raised more money than God—somewhere above seventy million dollars, I believe; I could be slightly off, sixty or seventy million dollars the last time I checked—and he’s not, according to the polls right now, in a particularly competitive race. That’s also helpful for him, that his Republican challenger has his own host of scandals and isn’t particularly popular.

Somebody with not too much of a negative record, coming off a big victory in a purple-to-reddish state, who’s raised a lot of money—and if we’re to believe that the Israel-Palestine issue has become more of a litmus test in a Democratic primary, he has broken with his party to some extent on arming Israel. Maybe there’s some trust he can engender by being both a Jewish senator from a Southern state who also questions Benjamin Netanyahu, and can be the person who marries the two different sides and makes everybody feel comfortable—something he can navigate more deftly than somebody else.

Mounk: You’ve mentioned some of the big candidates and the most obvious insurgent candidate—Jon Ossoff is at the moment the person who has the most chatter among those who aren’t the super obvious names, like the governor of the biggest Democratic state, or the former vice president and last presidential candidate for the Democrats. If you had to pick two or three real long-shot candidates that don’t seem absurd to you—people who aren’t usually in the conversation, but who either might run, are thinking of running, or have declared that they’re running, who, if things really line up for them, might go the distance—who do you think that would be?

Druke: Tucker Carlson. I don’t even know if he would run as a Republican at this point, but I think that would be a real wild card in the race, because he has a certain credibility that doesn’t rely on Trump. If he ran as a Republican, it could really frustrate things for somebody like JD Vance or Marco Rubio.

Mounk: While we’re on the Republican side—what about my tinfoil-hat theory of Donald Trump Jr.? We have an election in Brazil this weekend in which Jair Bolsonaro, despite having a very good option for the Brazilian right in the relatively popular right-wing governor of São Paulo, chose his own son Flávio instead. People thought, well, that’s absurd, and that’s going to cost them the election, and we’ll see how it goes—but he’s slightly odds-on to be the next president according to betting markets. Of course, you see that with Fujimori in Peru, and with many, many countries, where populists in the end trust their own child more than anybody else. I know there’s no real science to that. It doesn’t look like Donald Trump is building up his son in the way that he would need to, but do you think there’s any chance of that happening?

Druke: Chance? Sure. But it’s hard for me to imagine, especially in an environment where voters increasingly say their top issue in politics is corruption. That feels like voters would be allergic to that—not just Democrats, but independent and maybe swingier Republican voters as well. I don’t usually like to theorize on what the motivations of somebody like Donald Trump are—I mostly look at how the public reacts to him. But if the goal is to get rich, avoid the ongoing prosecution that started in 2022, and pardon yourself and all of your family members, he can just do that in 2028. Don Jr. doesn’t have to be president—they can just ride off into the sunset with two billion dollars or whatever.

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If there’s a world in which Donald Trump feels prosecution is so likely that he really wants his own blood in office—again, it’s hard to get inside his head—but if the goal was to avoid prosecution and secure the bag, he can theoretically do that without Don Jr. becoming president. We’ll see how it all goes down, but either way, I just don’t think Americans would go for that.

Mounk: What about black swan candidates on the left?

Druke: Black swan candidates on the left—I guess AOC at this point doesn’t really count as a black swan candidate…

Mounk: While you’re mentioning AOC, I was going to ask you about that. If you think that, at the very least, strong ideological supporters of political parties are getting very impatient with the establishment and want to take an ideological swing—something we’ve seen in many political contexts around the world—AOC is very young, despite at this point being famous in politics for perhaps longer than would be ideal for her. She’s clearly charismatic, she’s been out there drawing big crowds opposing Donald Trump, and she seems to be showing some signs of ideological flexibility. I don’t want to overstate the extent of that, but she laughed off “woke” in a television interview recently as a mistake, which made quite a lot of waves. A lot of people are going to be looking at this and thinking AOC is the obvious person who could run away with it, if it’s not the establishment that’s going to win. You seem a little bit more skeptical about that.

Druke: No, I think it’s possible. In fact, I did a Democratic primary draft with Nate Silver, my former and now current colleague, last year, and I chose AOC first in the draft. With a Democratic electorate that may be very motivated by anger—anger at both Trump and at the Democratic establishment—she’s somebody who could embody a lot of that anger, and could potentially win a primary without having a majority at the start. If you have a strong core group of voters that carries you through the early states as other people drop out, you can grow that coalition and end up winning the nomination even without majority support out of the gate. There’s certainly a possibility there.

I think there are open questions about whether she ends up running, or whether she runs for Senate—does Chuck Schumer stick around, does she challenge Chuck Schumer? There are more questions than answers about a potential AOC presidential run right now, but she certainly seems interested—it wouldn’t shock anybody if she did end up running.

In terms of black swan candidates for Democrats, I think Democrats are a little bit less enchanted with the idea of a total outsider coming into politics the way Republicans were in 2016. In some ways, because Democrats are the party that believes more in government, even a lot of the outsiders they’ve supported in 2026 primaries—or even the more progressive populist types—are people with actual government experience. Abdul El-Sayed, as much as he is maybe a populist left candidate, went to Columbia, was a Rhodes Scholar, is a doctor—

Mounk: I was randomly at a fundraiser for Abdul El-Sayed fifteen or twenty years ago—a long, long time ago—because he’s good friends with a grad school friend of mine, who kind of dragged me along to this fundraising event. At the time, he had clearly schooled himself in the rhetoric of Barack Obama, and was portraying himself as this kind of Obama-esque candidate for some somewhat minor Michigan office—I forget exactly what office he was running for. But that is not the equivalent of a total outsider coming into politics a year before an election.

Druke: Right—he’s not like the owner of My Pillow or whatever. And not to malign small businesses—as a small business owner myself, I think that experience is great experience to have as a potential candidate, and so do many voters. You can see that in the polling, in terms of what qualities they value in a candidate: one of the highest is small business owner, one of the lowest is podcast host. So there we have it.

I think that even when Democrats reach for somebody outside the establishment, they’re oftentimes not reaching for somebody who is so outside the establishment that they have no government experience at all. Which makes me think of black swan candidates who are already operating within the system, but who people may just not be thinking about right now. One could potentially be, say, if James Talarico wins in Texas—maybe all of a sudden he thinks, “This could be my moment.” Somebody who wins a race in 2026 unexpectedly on red turf could be a kind of black swan potential that I think Democrats would be more attracted to than, say, Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson.

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Frank Furedi, author and social commentator, is Emeritus Professor of Sociology at the University of Kent. His latest book is In Defense of Populism.

In this week’s conversation, Yascha Mounk and Frank Furedi discuss whether populism is a legitimate force or a threat to democracy, the impact of political polarization on mainstream parties’ claim to represent ordinary citizens—and to what extent Viktor Orbán undermined democracy in Hungary.

This transcript has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.

Yascha Mounk: We probably have different views about populism, but I think it is important for some people to make a real, systematic defense of it. I have had many people on this podcast who worry very much about populism, so I am looking forward to hearing from somebody who thinks it can be a salutary movement in different ways. Perhaps before we get to what you think is salutary about populism, a prior question: Why do you think populism is needed in this political moment?

Frank Furedi: We are living at a moment when there seems to be a very selective approach toward both democracy and freedom. A lot of people seem to think that if a vote goes against them, then somehow that is the flaw of democracy. Majoritarian democracy in particular is seen as some kind of evil. I had this experience in Amsterdam, where I had a debate at the Balie, a liberal debating forum. It is a very nice venue in the middle of Amsterdam. The issue at stake was democracy and populism, and this was before I wrote the book. I was arguing for the importance of democracy. I said that it is a foundational value, and that it is not something we can selectively adopt or reject.

Then this guy put up his hand and said, Professor Furedi, are you saying that democracy is good in and of itself, and you would even respect democracy if it went against your views? I said, yeah. I would rather lose an election democratically than win an election undemocratically. For me, democracy was non-negotiable. When I said that, there was a pause in the audience, and a lot of people shook their heads. I realized that what I had said was controversial, which I did not think it was. So I went away and started thinking about why an educated audience had this very conditional approach toward the exercise of democracy. Then I went to bookshops and noticed that all these books were being published warning about the dangers of democracy.

Mounk: I agree with you that there is a willingness to deprioritize democracy when you disagree with what the majority of your fellow citizens think. I have made this point repeatedly: obviously, it is part of democracy that you sometimes think the majority of your fellow citizens are wrong. It would be very strange and schizophrenic to always have to agree with your compatriots whenever they come to a different view from you. But if you think that a majority of the people, persistently and over a long period, is systematically wrong about the most important things, that a majority is willing at the drop of a hat to be sexist and racist and retrograde about everything, it starts to undermine your commitment to democracy. Why agree to be ruled by a majority if you think that a majority will, in many or perhaps most situations, be on the side of evil things?

I do think there is this tension that you are talking about, and it is something I worry about. Tell me a little more about why you think that is such a central feature of our political situation today, and how it requires us to embrace a very different mode of politics.

Furedi: There are several reasons, but probably the most important one, which has emerged in the last twenty years, is the growing trend toward political polarization, where people only talk to people like themselves. Instead of regarding people on the other side as fellow citizens, or maybe as political opponents, they regard them as enemies. When you have this polarized environment, you almost end up with a sense of fantasy about your opponents. This is very much the case with populism, which is regarded as really fascist adjacent, just a prelude to people putting on their brown shirts and a horrible threat to society. That then becomes a legitimation for your hatred toward democratic decision making.

I think the most interesting example here is radical environmentalists, who argue that we have not got time to convince people, that we have not got time to demonstrate that we are right. All we need is about ten percent of society to agree with us, and that is enough. You do not care about what the majority thinks. When you think like that, it becomes the prelude to something more dangerous, where you see people in a way that does not correspond to reality.

I am Hungarian. One of the things I always found very interesting was that the Hungarian government of Orbán was always seen as anti-democratic, quasi-fascist, far right, and everything else. Time and time again, if you lived in Europe, he was represented as a big threat to democracy. This forgets the fact that in the last four years, for example, the opposition won elections in Budapest. The mayor of Budapest became his opponent. When Orbán lost the election, he announced his defeat within an hour and graciously handed over power to his political opponents. This is a guy who for the previous fifteen years was portrayed as a democratic backslider, somebody where democracy did not really prevail.

Anybody who knew what was happening at close quarters could argue that maybe there is corruption in Hungary, and there are a variety of different problems in Hungary, but they were not qualitatively different from what exists in many, many parts of Europe. When you have this polarized environment, it gives you the authority, the permission, to regard democracy as dispensable.

Mounk: I want to make sure that I give you the floor to build and defend your position. There are important elements on which we agree, but also some important elements on which we will disagree, including the nature of Viktor Orbán’s government in Hungary. I will come back to that.

On the side of what we agree on, I wrote a whole essay on my Substack about Karl Popper’s paradox of tolerance, which has become a weird meme. There is a comic version of it on one page that used to go around a lot on social media. My students often cite it. I think it often gives people lazy permission to say, we cannot be tolerant toward the intolerant. Karl Popper told us so. So let us censor anybody we dislike. Let us protest against any speaker at our university campus we do not like. Let us ban political parties that we find to be dangerous. There is a real chance that Germany is going to move toward trying to ban the AfD, even though the AfD is now the leading party in the country in the polls, which I think is a very, very bad idea. That is based not just on a normative mistake but also on a real misreading of Karl Popper. Popper in general was a huge defender of an open society. He was precisely worried about people who thought that they knew what political truth and political virtue were and could impose them on society.

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This whole paradox of the intolerant comes from one footnote of his that I think was hastily written and never redrafted. On my interpretation of that footnote, though it is a little hard to know how to interpret it, what he was saying is that we cannot let violence hide behind tolerance. That is a perfectly sensible point, which I am sure you agree with and everybody should agree with. Obviously, in a democracy you have to defend the rules of democracy. If some people use baseball bats or guns to make it impossible for political opponents to hold meetings, then you obviously cannot tolerate that. It does not mean that at the drop of a hat you can censor anybody you disagree with, because that is what it takes to solve the paradox of the intolerant.

Perhaps it is worth talking for a moment about what you mean by populism. I will set out what I mean by the word a little later in the conversation. When you defend populism, what definition do you have in mind? And what definition do you think the people who worry about populism have in mind?

Furedi: People who worry about populism tend to worry about it externally.

Mounk: I believe you cite me as a prime example of the ills of that academic literature in your book, which is perfectly fine.

Furedi: Yeah, why not? It is a free country. The point I am really making is that almost everything written about populism is written by its opponents. There are some exceptions, but almost every monograph, and every book I have come across, is written by people who a priori regard populism as the enemy. What is interesting is that when you talk to people who are called populists, none of them describe themselves as populist. When I talk to someone like Orbán, or to somebody in Meloni’s party or elsewhere, they talk about themselves as conservative. Orbán calls himself a bourgeois conservative, and his big heroes are Adenauer and de Gaulle. That is the kind of people he looks up to. But in other people’s eyes, he is a prime example of populism.

I became interested in the very fact that we have this perverse situation where the term populism has been hijacked almost entirely by its opponents. They dominate the narrative, they dominate the cultural script that prevails. So I started looking at it, and I came to the conclusion that although there are different varieties of populism historically, because historically populism was much more linked to the left than to the right, when you go back to the American example in particular, but also elsewhere, you find that today the main manifestation of populism tends to be one concerned with defending culture, whereas left-wing populism was much more concerned with defending the economic status of people, their living standards.

In my eyes, what is interesting about populism today, and this is a historically specific understanding, is that populism today is principally involved in the business of cultural rescue. They are trying to maintain and hold on to certain traditions, certain values, a way of life that they think has escaped and no longer exists. What is interesting for me is that there is a fundamental distinction between the parties that are called populist and what I call, in my book, the spirit of populism. The two are not the same. What I argue is that the spirit of populism has emerged and become so powerful not because the populist parties are so charismatic or have such a great political program, but because a vacuum has been created by the delegitimation of the legacy parties. In that moment, when people feel that these old parties no longer represent them, it is the spirit of populism, this quest for solidarity, this quest for a homeland, for being part of something, for being rooted in some kind of place. It is that sensibility and the aspiration for a voice. I think that is the most important thing. People want to be part of the conversation, and that to me is the most democratic dimension of the popular spirit.

Mounk: I have lots of questions about this, but let me focus on one quite narrow question for now, just so that I am sure I understand your position. When you are talking about that cultural defense or cultural renewal, that feels distinctive of right-wing populist movements. It might describe, if you are being generous, Marine Le Pen, or it might describe Giorgia Meloni. It surely does not describe Jean-Luc Mélenchon or Zack Polanski. Do you think that applying the label of populist to somebody like Mélenchon or Polanski, or for that matter somebody like Hugo Chávez, is a category mistake? Are those just totally different movements? Or would you recognize that they share some set of features that makes it worth calling them populists as well? Surely they are not engaged in a project of cultural defense in quite that way.

Furedi: Well, that is the point I was trying to make. There is a difference between the left and right versions of populism, and it principally depends upon culture. But there are left-wing populists that I would see as genuine populists. Podemos in Spain is a very good example, or Syriza in Greece. You mentioned Chávez. These are people who I think had a very clear populist leaning and sought to give representation to a voice. I think Polanski is not a populist. He is much closer to the establishment way of thinking. If you look at his main source of support, other than the Islamist support, it tends to come from the layer of society that is high middle class professionals.

Mélenchon is again interesting, because he began as more of a proper populist in his early career. But the more he adopted identity politics, and the more his politics began to converge with Islamism, the more he became a French representative of the kind of identity politics we have seen in the United States. We can have a discussion and debate as to what extent the politicization of identity is another form of populism. But my argument is that these movements will not have the capacity to sustain themselves, because the only way populism can survive in the short and medium term is if it responds to people’s yearning for cultural security.

Mounk: I am a little bit confused, because perhaps we need to go more into what cultural security means to you. I have trouble seeing Hugo Chávez, and even more strongly Podemos or Syriza, as movements that are trying to defend cultural security in that way, at least on many cultural dimensions. I think we would agree that culture is in many ways at the heart of our contemporary politics now. You are quite skeptical, I believe, of principally economic explanations for the rise of populism, and by and large I agree with you on that, though it may be a little different for left-wing populist movements. But when it comes to a lot of these cultural questions, a party like Podemos was very much on the side of the cosmopolitans and the knowers and so on that you decry in your book. I find it hard to see how, in your definition of populism, you can count those movements as populist. I think I have a definition of populism where I can connect those two, and we will come to that.

Furedi: Well, I was not very clear. I was just trying to explain that there are different forms of populism. My argument is that the reason Podemos, for example, failed to gain momentum and became gradually marginalized is that it did not attend to the cultural needs of Spanish society, of working people’s desire for a homeland, for meaning. One of the reasons a lot of so-called left-wing populist movements have become marginalized over the last ten years is that they no longer have that same capacity, because they self-consciously avoid trying to connect with that desire for cultural defense. That is why I argue that the future in the medium term of populism, certainly in Europe, is the national populist variety.

Now, you raise an important question about the terms you use. I actually think that cultural conservatism can be complementary to different political standpoints. You could be a liberal and still be culturally conservative. You could be a socialist, even a communist, and be culturally conservative. At the moment, those movements have become entirely detached from any kind of culturally conservative sensibility, and I think that is one of the big problems we face.

One of my worries about populist movements, not the people who vote for them, because I actually think the people who vote for them are right, but the people who represent them, is that they have essentially anti-Enlightenment sensibilities. For them, “liberal” is a dirty word. I often have arguments about that, because liberalism should not be blamed for the ills of the world. What we now have is a situation where genuine liberalism and genuine Enlightenment thinking is attacked by people like Mélenchon no less than by people in the MAGA movement, if you see what I mean. I think the reason for that goes back to this decoupling of public life and the polarization process. That is one of my worries about populism: some of the representatives have become the mirror image of the identity politics opponents that they have.

Mounk: That is an interesting point, and on that we very strongly agree. To stick with establishing our understanding of what it is you are defending, your book is called In Defense of Populism. Why not call it In Defense of Right-Wing Populism? Or, more specifically, why not call it In Defense of Cultural Security, or Cultural Renewal, In Defense of Belonging, In Defense of a Nation? It seems to me that the way political scientists have historically defined populism has not been in accordance with one specific ideological tradition, and that is for very good reason. When you look at the origins of the term in the United States, it is the Populist Party of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, which was mostly about taking on the robber barons. In the context of Latin America, it has all kinds of different incarnations, but many of those are again on the political left.

To take the term populism and then defend it on the grounds that what you really think we need at the moment is a defense of the nation-state and its customs and its certainties, a return to firm borders, a return to a pluralistic society but one that does not systematically go against the cultural preferences of a majority, is a much more specific ideological project. We can debate the merits of that as a political project, but it would be better described as a form of defense of common-sense conservatism, if you want to call it that, or national conservatism. Choose your term. The word populist is both overly inclusive and underinclusive of what you are describing. There are going to be many people you might even call populist, like Podemos, and certainly most people who use the term populism, who do not want to do that at all, who are not interested in the project you are defending. And there are many people who fall under that umbrella who are not populists on anybody’s approach.

To give a couple of examples, the influential Bavarian Prime Minister Franz Josef Strauss, whose name Munich’s airport still bears, was not a populist. He was very much an establishment figure, but he was certainly minded to defend a lot of the values you are talking about. Or, even more recently, perhaps something like Wolfgang Schäuble, the late German finance minister, who was a pretty full-throated conservative in many ways and represented the more traditional conservative electorate of the Christian Democratic Union, but who certainly was not a populist. It seems to me that a lot of your book is arguing for, perhaps you would call it, a liberal conservatism that is willing to defend borders and the nation. That just seems to me a different entity from populism, because there are going to be some populists who are not interested in that project at all, and many politicians who identify with that project who would not call themselves populists and whom nobody would call populists.

Furedi: The reason I wrote the book and kept that title is that, as I argue in the book, the defining distinction in public life in the West is no longer between left and right but between populist and anti-populist. I was aware that there is literally no intellectual defense of populism. The last time I saw anybody really systematically defend populism was Christopher Lasch, which was a while back. For me, it was quite important to establish that. In the book itself, I make the point very clearly that what I am defending are not populist parties in the way they are generally seen or framed. What I am defending is what I call the spirit of populism, which is almost like a zeitgeist that has captured the imagination of millions of people throughout the West.

I make the point that what I am writing about is a historically specific phenomenon. I am not talking about the populists in Latin America in the interwar period or in other situations. I am not talking about the Narodniks or the American Populist Party. I am talking about this particular phenomenon, which is a spirit that attempts to provide people who feel unrepresented, and that is a really key thing, who have not got a voice, who feel that they are not part of the conversation, with a certain degree of support. I find that one of the healthiest developments since the Cold War. It is a very specific problem that I am looking at. If I had been around fifty or sixty years ago, I would not have written a book in defense of populism. Certainly that would not have been the title, because the problems that were posed were very different.

I am responding to a set of problems whereby ideals that were once seen as mainstream in communities, things like patriotism, which has a very honorable historical legacy, are now regarded as somehow associated with far-right flag-waving individuals. There are issues that concern people, like what is a man and what is a woman, which for thousands of years was not controversial. Suddenly people are not able to say what they really think, because it is seen as transphobic. I could give you a long list of things that were, to use your term, common sense for a very long time, part of people’s taken-for-granted values, which somehow have been stripped away and left people without any kind of moorings or roots.

The fact that people now feel confident to challenge that, and not only feel confident, but year by year their voices are getting stronger and stronger. When I read Politico or whatever, they all have these articles: When is the populist wave going to stop? Is it not really good that the Swedish Democrats did not manage to win in Sweden in the recent elections? That basically gives us the formula for defeating populism. All of these continually misread the fact that there is a spirit abroad which is at the moment unrestrained and uncontained, because it is a spirit that captures the imagination of a lot of people. The book tries to provide an intellectual defense of that and an explanation of that, so that people can understand what is so influential and important in the moment we are going through.

Mounk: I am sympathetic to some of the points you are making. I have been asked the question, as I recently wrote, whether the populist wave has crested, more than any other question by journalists over the last ten years. From the beginning, I thought that was not going to be the case. I think it is quite clearly true now that, in your words, the populist spirit is continuing to rise and expand. If you want to understand our situation today, you have to reckon with that moment. I also have real concerns about some of the ways in which we have given up on values that I think are important, one of which is the defense of control over your national territory, part of which is being able to control your border. I think immigration has many good things in the right ways and in the right context. We are both immigrants in different ways in different countries. But there is nothing bad or strange about ordinary people saying, we want to make sure that we know who is coming into the country, and that we have some influence over who comes into our country.

I have also written a book, as you know, criticizing a new kind of political ideology on the left, which I think is an illiberal form of identity politics, and which I think is very damaging. The reason I nevertheless would not call myself a populist, and worry about embracing populism, is perhaps that I have a different view of what I mean by that. I agree with you that many people make the mistake that when they do not like a particular policy or view from some politician, they reach for the term populism to say that person is popular, so they are evil. I think that is bad. I do not think that populism is about an ideology. I think what you are defending is a set of ideological presuppositions, some of which I agree with and some of which I disagree with, but which is a perfectly legitimate set of political points of view in a democratic society.

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For me, the definition of populism is not rooted in one such ideological tradition. It is a mode of doing politics, which I would argue is characterized by two features. The first is anti-elitism. It is the claim that the core source of our troubles is the elite, particularly the political elite, and the way in which it is mismanaging things, getting things wrong, and being self-serving, and cares more about various outsiders than about people like you and me. I would make two points. First, that is right in some places and less right in other places. Some political elites are relatively better, and some are relatively worse. Certainly, on the whole, you cannot say that political elites have been doing well. There is a nice German phrase, sich mit Ruhm bekleckern: they have not exactly been spilling honor and achievement all over themselves over the last decades. They have done quite poorly in all kinds of ways. So some form of anti-elitism may be perfectly right and appropriate. It is also a natural part of politics. I think that Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign was in important ways anti-elitist. I have only just come to Washington. I am not a career politician. These people do not understand what is really important. I am on the side of Main Street rather than Wall Street. Those were all anti-elitist sentiments that were part and parcel of his 2008 campaign.

I would also argue that another part of the definition of populism is anti-pluralism. Anti-elitism is not enough. You need to have both anti-elitism and anti-pluralism for somebody to be counted as a populist. Part of anti-pluralism is a tendency to say, I alone truly represent the people. Only my movement truly speaks for what people want. By virtue of that fact, if you disagree with me, you do not just have a wrong view about something. You are not just blind to certain problems we have. You are actually a traitor to the nation. You are an enemy. You are somebody who is illegitimate. You are somebody who is dangerous.

In my reading, what Hugo Chávez, parts of the Podemos movement, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, and Zack Polanski, as well as Viktor Orbán, Donald Trump, Narendra Modi, and Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, have in common is that anti-pluralism, that unwillingness to treat their political opponents as legitimate. I would argue that it is that element of their politics that I find to be potentially dangerous to our democratic institutions. They might have certain policy preferences I disagree with. That is fine. That is within the realm of legitimate democratic politics. That is not a reason to brand them a danger to democracy, even if it is things I really care about, even if it is things where we have deep disagreements. That is a normal part of democracy. But when they say, I alone truly represent the people, I worry that that is precisely what leads them to start undermining free speech, the independence of institutions, and the role of other institutions within the state.

I have more things to say about this, but do you find that to be a helpful definition of populism? And insofar as it is, do you share my worries about its anti-pluralist nature?

Furedi: If you could just concentrate on the pluralism side of it. In the book, I explain that that is one of the accusations laid at populists: that they are meant to be saying, we are the only people who can represent the nation. Everybody else is against our people. There is a kind of purity element attached to that. To be honest, although there might be a strand in that direction, when you actually look at what populists have said and written about, and what the political activists have said, I think it is much more nuanced. The idea that they have this very powerful anti-democratic, anti-pluralist impulse in them is something that is really exaggerated, which does not mean to say that it is not a danger.

If you are worried about hostility to pluralism, then in the twenty-first century, certainly in the last twenty years, you have to worry about the anti-pluralist opponents of populism. They have basically decided that somebody can win almost fifty percent of the vote in a part of Eastern Germany, but because you do not like them, that electoral performance can be discounted altogether, because they are the enemy. The kind of language that you think populists are rehearsing and using, that we alone know what is true, we alone represent the people, actually characterizes the opponents of populism much more than the populists.

I know this from personal experience, because I was running a think tank, which I have just stopped doing, in Brussels. We would have meetings. For example, we had a meeting on what it means to be a conservative woman: the relationship between conservatism and feminism. It was an ordinary academic discussion involving four women. The local Antifa decided that this was an outrage and something had to be done. After they tried to break into the meeting, the police had to come out with water cannons to allow us to have it. At least we had the meeting then, but Antifa managed to close down something like six or seven of the venues where we organized debates. If you look on the Antifa website in Brussels, it says Frank Furedi, public enemy number one. So you have this ironic situation where the anti-populist Antifa behaves as fascists used to behave.

As a genuine pluralist, as somebody who is committed to debate and discussion, I find that that is a characteristic much more of the opponents of populism than of populism itself. We have to be even-handed. In some situations there are populist individuals, leaders, who veer in that direction. I know, for example, that there are some members of the AfD in Germany whom I would not trust with democracy. I think you have to be open and criticize them and challenge them. But I do think there is a double standard the anti-populist literature has adopted, which is the reason I wrote the book.

I think populism has always aspired toward bringing people together, but that aspiration to create common ground did not necessarily lead to a hostile orientation toward others. You have to remember that it was the American populist movement that first joined hand in hand with Black activists in the early part of the twentieth century and tried to overcome some of the racial divide that occurred. It was not the Republican Party, and it was not the Democratic Party, the mainstream parties, but the populists. I have confidence that that potential can still be recreated if the circumstances changed and we managed to depoliticize so many of the cultural issues that have unfortunately been rendered into political issues.

Yascha Mounk: I agree with you that there are illiberal forces on the left and the right today. I agree that the attempts to close down political speech are absolutely unacceptable. I agree that on college campuses in the United States, or sometimes in Brussels, there are attempts to make political speech impossible because its content displeases certain groups. All of that is deeply concerning. I would not, however, take so lightly the way elected political leaders, heads of government and heads of state, have been using very clearly anti-pluralist language in a consistent way. Let me quote a few examples I have in front of me.

Donald Trump, in the run-up to the 2024 election at a Fox News town hall in October 2024: “We have an enemy from within. We have a lot of bad people. But when you look at Shifty Schiff and some of the others, yeah, they are to me an enemy from within.” He said, “I think Nancy Pelosi is an enemy from within.” That is not just calling political opponents bad or wrongheaded, but evil, repeatedly. He originally entered politics by claiming that Barack Obama is not a legitimate president, that he is not a natural-born citizen, and so on.

Viktor Orbán, whom you cited earlier and to whom I want to return in other ways as well: “After today’s festival gathering comes the Easter cleanup. The Bucks have made it through winter. We are going to dismantle the financial machine that has been using corrupt dollars to buy politicians, judges, journalists, bogus NGOs, and political activists.” In March 2025, he spoke of wanting to rid Hungary of vermin in reference to similar groups.

Narendra Modi, in India, has repeatedly claimed that the opposition Congress party is against India, against the nation: “The spirit of patriotism has died in today’s Congress. The ghost of hatred has entered today’s Congress. Congress stands with anti-national forces,” and so on. Hugo Chávez repeatedly called the opposition escuálidos, “squalid ones,” and said that the opposition were coup plotters and enemies of the homeland.

This stands in marked contrast to the famous instance in the 2008 campaign, in which John McCain, at a town hall in the run-up to the election, had people in the audience saying that Obama is a dangerous man and that they were afraid for their country if he won. McCain said, “I have some fundamental differences with Mr. Obama. You should vote for me rather than for him. But he is a decent man. If he wins, you do not have to be afraid for your country.” The contrast between those forms of political engagement is quite clear to me. It is a significant factor that helps to explain why we refer to these different movements by the same label. What do you think?

Furedi : Well, aside from the small matter that I do not think Trump is a populist, I think he is the very opposite of a populist in everything that he does. If I take the other examples, they are a testimony to the disturbing decline in political speech that has occurred everywhere. I respect your sensitivity to some of these statements that have been made and should not have been made, as long as you have the same degree of sensitivity to the fact that you arrive as an MEP in Brussels and within a day you are called far-right and fascist, which serves as a prelude to suggesting that you are not worthy of being taken seriously, not worthy of being a parliamentarian.

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The way I look at it, if you take a step back and look at the political rhetoric being used, it is very rare to find what I call tolerant behavior. Tolerant behavior does not mean you agree with somebody. Even if you hate somebody’s views, you still tolerate their right to say them, and you understand that it is important for public life that tolerance kicks in. One of the reasons I wrote this book is the kind of distortions people make about populism and the way it operates, which means people do not see what is really positive about it. That is why I talk about the spirit of populism and the views that people have. When you ask people why they vote the way they do, they do not say, the reason I voted for a particular politician is that the other side are vermin. They do not say, I voted for these people because I want to get rid of all those people on the other side. There is another reason why they are doing it.

At the moment, the hegemonic discourse in our society, by which I mean Western society, is to assume that there is a pathology on one side and virtues on the other. It does not realize that in many respects the pathological way of behaving in public life characterizes people who are anti-populist. I go to Germany now and again, and I was there recently. I have a lot of friends, particularly in Hessen and in Frankfurt, who are former leftists, in the Green Party, in Die Linke, in the SPD, who, like me, have decided that they have more in common with the so-called populists in Germany than with the old mainstream parties. When I talk to them, it becomes very clear that what they are really expressing is a fear that public life is being closed down on the ground that there is a threat coming from the AfD. Academics and intellectuals are simply desensitized to that. It is not that they are being dishonest. They are so wrapped up in this anti-populist discourse that they cannot see how they themselves have become implicated in something that is at the moment even worse than what they are complaining about.

Mounk: I agree with you that I am very concerned about the overly easy invocation of the paradox of tolerance. It is very easy to say, these people are intolerant, so we can shut them down whatever way we want. Even though it might superficially look similar to what we worry about them doing, that is fine, because we are the good ones and they are the evil ones. I do not think that works substantively, and I do not think it works as a political argument. I think there is a kind of paradox of populism, and I am going to try to make your point for you. Suppose you have a political situation in which both sides engage in some genuine form of mutual toleration, in some genuine form of what McCain, to his honor, practiced in that moment at that town hall. He said, “This is my political opponent. We are in the midst of a heated campaign. I really want to win, but I am going to stop short of saying this is the enemy within, this is vermin, this person is illegitimate. In fact, I am going to go against my own crowd at this town hall to emphasize that this is a legitimate opponent. If they win, that is part of the democratic process.”

Part of the problem is that when that norm breaks down, the parties that initially continue to operate with that understanding of mutual toleration have to make a choice. The easy thing is to say, we are worried about them. They are going to destroy democracy, so we mustn’t tolerate them. They are the enemy from within. They are vermin. You can very quickly get to a situation where each side echoes the other. The really striking thing to me was that in the American presidential election in November 2024, there was a poll in Pennsylvania, an exit poll, I believe, asking whether voters believed American democracy to be in danger. There were two interesting findings. The first is that in a deeply divided country where a lot of issues are 50-50, this was something like a 70-30 issue. A clear majority of Americans said yes, democracy is in danger. The second is that, among the people who believed democracy to be in danger, more had voted for Donald Trump than for Kamala Harris.

You can get into this weird situation where each side echoes the other and both sides become anti-pluralist. I think that is a genuine dilemma. How do you deal with political parties that are illiberal in various ways, that are anti-pluralist in various ways, without yourself becoming anti-pluralist? What I do not think it is, is a defense of being anti-pluralist. Let me put it this way: I take it we agree on the importance of avoiding anti-pluralism. Or do you think there is a justification for this form of anti-pluralism? When you hear the phrases I just quoted from Trump and Orbán and others, do you think those are bad things for them to say? You might like other things about them. I do not think you like Trump very much, but you are somewhat defensive of Orbán. Do you think that saying those things was worrying, or are you not concerned about heads of government and heads of state engaging in that kind of political speech?

Furedi: Obviously, any manifestation that is anti-pluralist, and by definition anti-pluralism also means anti-democratic, is not something I can ever support. I would make one point: you have to look at the record of people like Orbán. In sixteen years, how many demonstrations did he ban? Zero. Compare that to the number of demonstrations banned in many other places. How many political parties or individuals did he ban? Zero. There is a difference between rhetoric and what they have actually done. Nevertheless, anti-pluralist rhetoric from any quarter is quite important.

I agree with you about each side mirroring the other, with one qualification. The question we have to ask is when the mirror imaging began. What was the chronologically prior experience that led the other side to begin to mirror? The way I see it, the most powerful anti-pluralist impulse is something that became legitimated some time ago, particularly among the intellectual class. I am sure you have worked in and spoken at Western universities, and you will know that they do not have a pluralistic orientation toward political views. They have become extremely one-sided over the last thirty, thirty-five years. That is not a problem for the universities only. It is a problem because it communicates the idea that we do not have to speak to people, we do not have to argue with those people. Indeed, in America they have expressions like, go educate yourself, meaning I am not going to try to convince you, because there is no point debating people like you. That kind of political culture has become very strong and has enveloped the public life of politicians.

When I look around and ask who is behaving in the most anti-pluralist way, it is, in Germany, for example, the German government, which has raised the possibility of banning this and banning that. In Britain now we are having similar discussions about how to deal with Reform in a way that isolates and undermines them. There is a prior hostility toward the emergence of new political forces by the mainstream establishment, which has created that anti-pluralist political culture, to which some of the populist political leaders have then responded in kind. I do not see an equivalence there, but I do see a mirroring element going on.

What I really worry about at the moment, and I go back to tolerance all the time because I think tolerance is the key issue of our time, is that people in government have invented expressions that are fundamentally hostile to the ideal of tolerance. Take, for example, the expression that people in the British government use: “zero tolerance.” They think the idea of zero tolerance is a really positive goal to achieve. They do not realize that if you get rid of tolerance, because that is what they are really getting at, even though they have a more interesting way of expressing it, you give tolerance itself a negative connotation. So many people I talk to, instead of upholding Pierre Bayle’s and John Locke’s liberal ideas of tolerance as a wonderful achievement in a world where people used to kill each other if they had different views, regard it as something that can be swept aside by the people who are meant to be liberal.

In the rest of this conversation, Yascha and Frank discuss to what extent Orbán undermined democracy in Hungary and whether in future we will become even more polarized. This part of the conversation is reserved for paying subscribers…

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Simon Sebag Montefiore is a historian and author. His latest book is The Cauldron: The Origins of the Modern Middle East.

In this week’s conversation, Yascha Mounk and Simon Sebag Montefiore discuss how the collapse of the Ottoman Empire gave rise to modern nationalism and ethnic cleansing in the Middle East, how the region’s history has shaped today’s conflicts, and the long-term impact of October 7.

This transcript has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.

Yascha Mounk: I really look forward to this conversation. It’s a very ambitious book. Tell us about the origins of the modern Middle East. As in many parts of the world, the origins of a modern world are in a way the story of the fading of the imperial world that preceded it.

Simon Sebag Montefiore: In this case, I think you have to look at the old world. You have to look at the Ottoman Empire and the Persian Empire to understand the Middle East today, and that’s why I begin with those empires. In 1900, the Ottoman Empire was crumbling in Europe, but still pretty formidable in Asia. That’s the story of The Cauldron. That’s how the book begins.

Mounk: Tell us a little bit about how the decline of the Ottoman Empire and the fading influence of the British Empire in parts of the Middle East set up the basic structure that started to emerge at the beginning of the twentieth century.

Sebag Montefiore: The Ottoman Empire was fading. It had lost most of its Balkan territories and most of its North African territories, except Libya, except Tripoli. But it still controlled what is now Turkey and the whole Arab world essentially, all the way to the border with the Persian Empire. So it was still a pretty formidable institution. In World War I, it proved to be surprisingly resilient militarily, and it defeated the British in two pretty significant battles. So it was still pretty important.

But what is the Ottoman Empire? The Ottoman Empire lasted for over four hundred years, and there were many versions of it. It started as a conquest state based on the enslavement of Christian children who were recruited to be its soldiers, its civil servants, and so on. And of course, to its harems. Then it went through massive crises and remade itself several times.

In the last period, which I deal with in The Cauldron, which is really the opening of the twentieth century or the 1890s, it had been through a period of reform when it had allowed its many peoples, sects, and ethnicities to have equal citizenship. It was tightening itself into an Islamic and nationalistic, Turkish nationalistic entity with a kind of almost proto-Nazi ideology.

So by World War I, it was ruled by the Three Pashas, who were kind of eugenicist, social Darwinist people who believed that war was a purifying struggle for races to perfect themselves. It was they who embarked on the genocide against the Armenians and other peoples too, like the Greeks and the Maronites and so on. That was a sort of Götterdämmerung, if you like, of the Ottoman Empire.

The great myth that you read about all the time, about the great tolerance of the Ottoman Empire and how everyone lived together in a cheerful, peaceful, charming way, spouting poetry, is rubbish really.

Mounk: Walk us through that. It is rubbish, because there were very strong forms of exclusion and discrimination built into those empires. But the strange thing about empires does seem to be that as they fade, you get those periods of ethnic cleansing. You obviously get that extremely strongly in the Middle East, with the Armenians and others, but also in other parts of Europe. It’s in the breakup of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the rise of nationalism and the attempt to create those more coherent national states that you then get all of the expulsions and ethnic cleansings that define a lot of the first half of the twentieth century.

Tell us about the era of the Three Pashas and the ideology that drove them, and in what ways those were preferable to the Ottoman Empire and in which ways perhaps they weren’t.

Sebag Montefiore: You’re putting your finger on it. In the West, we decided, I guess, sometime during the nineteenth century, that the nation-state was the best form of government. But the creation of these nation-states always included exclusions of people who either didn’t fit into the new national definition or who didn’t want to fit. The creation of nationalism is always about the exclusion of people who are the other in some way or other. All the national states that were created in Eastern Europe involved excluding Muslim citizens from them, and they had to leave and go into the Ottoman Empire, in their hundreds of thousands.

The same process took place in Eurasia and in the Middle East. That’s what happened in the Ottoman Empire. The idea moved from Ottomanism, which was meant to be a definition of a broad citizenship involving all sorts of peoples, to a much tighter one, a sort of Turkish definition. You had to be Turkish, you had to be Islamic, you had to speak Turkish. That excluded the Arabs, who were millions of people, as well as the Jews and of course all the Christians in the empire. They were huge communities, including the Armenians.

All of these peoples in the Middle East started to embrace the idea of nationalism because that was the flavor of the times. Once they did that, you were entering into a game in which there was a struggle for supremacy and over who would create their version of the state. That’s still going on in all of the countries in the Middle East. It’s one of the themes of this book and of this history.

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In the Ottoman Empire, the Three Pashas were Young Turks. The Young Turks was a movement that had liberal democrats on one side and ultra-nationalists, kind of authoritarians, on the other, and they were of the latter faction. They got control of the Sultanate. There was still a Sultan, but they were the dictators effectively. They took the Ottoman Empire into the war, and they believed this was the only way to save the Ottoman state.

At the same time, many peoples were beginning to embrace nationalistic ideologies, and that meant also having support from outside powers. That was the Armenian dilemma. The Armenians decided that they too were a nation, they needed a national state, and the only way they could get that was with help from, say, the British, but even more from the Russians, who were their Orthodox brothers. That way the Ottoman rulers started to regard them not just as Christians and therefore possible outsiders with mixed loyalties, but actually traitors working for the main enemy, the Russians. That’s what led to the massacres of World War I.

Mounk: Let’s go a little bit forward in time. You have the breakup of the Ottoman Empire. You have these nation-building projects, which often go hand in hand with these forms of ethnic cleansing, the attempt to build these coherent nation states that often involve these forms of violence, as they did elsewhere in the world. You then obviously have a period of World War II and the competing claims of fascism and communism on the allegiance of local political actors.

Tell us a little bit about the shape of the Middle East after these nation-building projects, who the major players are, and how they respond to the rise of the Soviet Union and to the rise of Hitler in Germany.

Sebag Montefiore: What the Allies wanted to do after World War I was punish the genocidaires who had killed the Armenians. They felt they had no obligation to the Ottomans or the Turks or whoever they would turn out to be. The Sultanate still existed at that point. This is probably one of the most important parts of the story—what is now Turkey.

They had decided that they would embrace the nationalisms of all the peoples who had suffered under the Turks or the Ottomans. The irony about these great imperialists like Churchill and Balfour and Lloyd George and Clemenceau was that they combined an imperial view of the world, in which they wanted to create new states that were friendly or client states to them and would allow British troops to remain, with nationalism. They believed that they were backing peoples who had been prisoners of the Ottomans and victims of the Ottomans. That was their general plan.

But in what is now Turkey, they decided that the Turks would have a tiny rump state around Ankara. The western part they gave to the Greeks and Italians, but mainly the Greeks. They said to the Greeks, you can create a new empire, almost like a new Byzantine empire. The Greeks poured troops into that area and started to conquer even the parts that they hadn’t been given by the Allies. In the east, they basically promised states to the Armenians and the Kurds.

This immediately started to go very wrong because the Turks, under Mustafa Kemal, who later became Atatürk, father of the Turks, rallied and promoted a new nation, a new state that he wanted to call the Turkish Republic. He inherited an intact, fully equipped Ottoman army that was still a pretty impressive military contingent. With this he turned around and defeated the Armenians, of whom there were hardly any left after the genocide, the Syrians who were in Cilicia, and the Kurds, and then turned round and defeated the Greeks. When he came to face the British, who still occupied Constantinople, they blinked and caved. They weren’t ready for another war against these quite capable military forces, and that brought down Lloyd George’s government in 1922.

Out of that was formed a new nation state, the most important of these nation states, at least in this early period: the Turkish Republic. But they wanted much more. They weren’t satisfied with what they got in 1923. They wanted to get Mosul. They wanted to get the Vilayet of Mosul, which is northeastern Iraq. They also weren’t happy with Syria. They wanted northern Syria, but the French kept that. That’s why we see what’s happening now with President Erdogan and this new Ottomanism that he is promoting, because all along the Turks felt they had been done out of their natural imperial power domain.

Mounk: They have a form of imperial hangover, which in some ways is comparable to Russia and other countries around the world.

Sebag Montefiore: It’s very like Russia, so that’s part of it.

Mounk: This is what’s going on in Turkey at the time. Tell us about other parts of the Middle East at that moment, and then I want to get a little bit of forward momentum. What’s happening, for example, with Saudi Arabia, being conquered by Saud, and the establishment of a House of Saud?

Sebag Montefiore: The rise of the Saud family is a very different process. The Ottomans in Arabia controlled the western coast of Arabia, which is Mecca and Medina, the holy cities, the Hejaz. Normally they controlled Yemen, but actually they only really controlled the capital. If you go around the south of Arabia, the British controlled Aden and Hadhramaut, which is also part of Yemen, and then what is now the Sultanate of Oman. If you keep going around the coast, they controlled the Trucial States, which were all the little emirates, which is now the UAE and Kuwait and Bahrain and Qatar and so on. So the British were one imperial power in Arabia, and the Ottomans were the other, but in the middle, there were family dynasties who controlled their own emirates that were vaguely allied to the Ottomans or the British, but often to the Ottomans. The Ottomans kept a very close eye on these people because they knew that much of the prestige of the Ottoman monarchy came from controlling the pilgrimage, the Hajj, to Mecca and Medina.

In the eighteenth century, the House of Saud, the Saudi family, had partnered with an Islamic revivalist who founded the Wahhabi movement, and they had actually conquered the whole of Arabia, including Mecca and Medina. The Ottomans had thrown them out and beheaded the Saudi Emir on the docks in Constantinople. In the nineteenth century, another Saudi prince built another Saudi realm, and that too had fallen apart.

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Now, in 1902, at the beginning of my period, Ibn Saud, or Abdulaziz, as he is known in the Arab world, was a swaggering twenty-year-old, six foot six or something, very tall, who rode into the interior of Arabia and conquered Riyadh with forty friends and henchmen. That was the beginning of the conquest of what is now Saudi Arabia. It took him thirty years to build. What one needs to understand about Saudi Arabia is that it’s the third Saudi state. It’s a conquest state. They conquered it in a wave of wars that went on, as I said, for the next thirty years. Ultimately, the most important part of that conquest was the conquest in 1925 of Mecca and Medina, because it’s the guardianship of the holy sanctuaries that gives them their prestige in the Arab world. It has allowed them recently to replace Egypt as the leaders of the Sunni Arab world.

The creation of that state was really independent of the British and the Ottomans and the French. He had to get their backing or their acquiescence, but he was a master at playing off everybody, Abdulaziz, and he did it himself.

Mounk: Obviously there are many parts of the Middle East, and I don’t want to go through each individual country. We have talked a lot about the downfall of the Ottoman Empire and the rise of Atatürk, as he styled himself. We have talked about the revival of Islam and Wahhabism and the rise of the king of Saud. The third really important part to set the scene before we fast-forward is what’s going on in Persia, or as it would now be called, Iran. Tell us in particular about Reza Shah.

Sebag Montefiore: Reza Shah was such an interesting character, and he’s one of the big nation builders. You’ve mentioned a few of them there, Yascha. He actually started as a peasant. He was a peasant soldier who was striking by his ambition, his discipline, and his height. He was another giant strapping soldier. As a young man, he joined the Shah of Persia’s Cossack Regiment, which was based on the Cossacks of the Tsars of Russia and was trained by Cossacks from Russia.

Iran had a very complex relationship with the Russian Tsars and later the Soviets too. Essentially twice in the twentieth century the Russians occupied half of Iran, so it’s worth remembering that.

Opening the twentieth century, we find Persia, which is really an empire in which a lot of different minorities and ethnicities exist. They’re all Farsi speaking, but some are Persian, and many are Kurds, Arabs, and others. It had been spectacularly misgoverned and ill-managed by the Qajar dynasty of Shahs. By the beginning of the twentieth century, it had stagnated, it was corrupt, it was misgoverned, and it was falling apart.

In 1906, there was a constitutional revolution in which the Shah was forced to concede a constitution and an elected parliament, the Majlis. That didn’t last long because he fought back. There was a counter-revolution, and he was backed by the Russians in the crushing of the revolution. This meant that there were Russians in the country in World War I, and then there were British in the country. The Russians were in the north, and the Ottomans invaded from the west. There was a massive famine in which a million Persians died.

Out of this mess, when it was a World War I battlefield, and by the way, a completely forgotten theater in World War I, no one knows about it now, but for Iranians it’s important, the British looked for a candidate to restore governance and be a British ally. They found this strapping general, a self-made man, Reza Khan. In 1921, he seized power in a coup. By 1925, he had got rid of the Qajar dynasty, who had been in power since the 1790s, and he had been elected Shah of what he now called Iran. He became king, and he called his dynasty the Pahlavi dynasty.

He was an extraordinary character. He started to reform the country. He created banks, he built railways, he founded the university, he freed women from having to wear the hijab if they didn’t want to. He put the Shiite clergy in their place. All of this he did in partnership with aristocratic princes who were more sophisticated. But as his reign went on into the 1930s, he became more paranoid, more jealous, more authoritarian. He arrested a lot of them and had them murdered in prison by a very sinister doctor who injected them with oxygen, which is very creepy, or water or something.

By 1941, in World War II, he decided that he was not sure who was going to win the war, and he would remain neutral. This was a big mistake because neither the British nor the Soviets, now under Stalin, were going to take a risk with Iran. In fact, they weren’t going to take a risk anywhere in the Middle East. That’s part of the story of World War II, which is interesting.

Mounk: Let’s start to get into the story of World War II. I think we now have the scene relatively well set for the different parts of the Middle East. We haven’t quite talked about North Africa, and there are some other places we haven’t touched on, but for a big region, we’ve done as well as we can to set the scene. World War II tears the world apart. There’s an ideological competition between communism, between fascism, between democracy. The Middle East became an important theater in World War II. What role does the Middle East play in World War II, and what is the form of the Middle East that emerges from World War II?

Sebag Montefiore: The interesting thing about World War II is that in purely imperial, strategic terms, it justifies the British plan to have a big presence in the Middle East, because as it turns out, the Middle East is potentially a key war-winning theater. The Italians and the Germans are fighting their way along North Africa and break into Egypt twice. One of the times is with Rommel, the famous Afrika Korps. At the same time, Hitler is invading the Soviet Union and fighting his way towards the Caucasus, and from the Caucasus he would break into Turkey and Iraq and Persia, and then he would be in the Middle East as well. So suddenly in 1941–42, the Middle East was extremely important.

One of the key things that happens is, of course, that Hitler defeats France. Therefore, the French Empire is now under the control of the Axis, the Nazi Axis. That means that much of North Africa is controlled by the Vichy French, Algeria and Morocco and Tunisia, but also, worryingly, the key parts of the Levant, which is Lebanon and Syria. At the same time, there’s a coup in British Iraq, and a pro-Nazi government comes to power there.

As I said, Churchill decides he’s taking no chances. He launches a war and invades Vichy Syria. That’s where Moshe Dayan, the future Israeli general, loses his eye. At the same time, he launches a war to invade Iraq, and he conquers Iraq. Then finally, of course, they conquer Iran. The British consolidate the whole Middle East under what is essentially British control. That justifies itself because Churchill stabilizes the Middle East.

But as the war goes on, he realizes that he can’t keep control of the Middle East. Nationalism is ascendant. The British embrace an idea of Arab nationalism, not completely pan-Arabism, but they compromise. They want to give independence to the Arab states, including Egypt and Iraq, and force the French to do the same in Syria and Lebanon. At the same time, they want these places to be British or French satellites. Yet they embrace an idea of pan-Arab nationalism by sponsoring the creation of the Arab League, led by Egypt and Iraq, which are both British vassal states, or the British want them to be.

That’s what happens. At the end of World War II, the Middle East started to become properly independent. All of these states are new states that have never existed before. That’s the key thing to understand. One often sees in activist propaganda the claim that these are all ancient states that have been independent for centuries and then Israel has suddenly been created. No. All of these states, starting with Turkey, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, are completely new states. Only Egypt and Iran are ancient states. They all become independent.

The creation of Israel is very like the emergence of Turkey twenty years earlier. It starts with a partition, a brutal ethnic war, the driving out of large numbers of refugees, their fleeing from their homes in the face of war, and the creation of a new nationalism with a national idea linked to religion and race and ethnicity. Out of it comes a new, dynamic state. The difference between the creation of Turkey and the creation of Israel is the idiosyncratic Jewish history, of course, which is interesting and unique, but then all national histories are unique. Also, many of its citizens were settlers who had arrived from abroad, immigrants. That was how those two states were created.

Israel and the rest of the Middle East really became independent after World War II, and they almost immediately went to war. That war in 1948, in which five Arab states tried to attack the new Judaic Republic, which was named Israel, on the day of its independence, was a disaster for all concerned because it rejected the partition. Partition was an inevitable result of creating new national states. As you were saying at the beginning, there have to be borders, and there have to be exclusions of people who don’t want to be in a new country or who are rejected from the new concept of this nation state. In the Middle East, that’s almost impossible to deliver without population swaps, refugees, or creating states that are multi-ethnic, sectarian states, and therefore not strictly enforced nation states. That’s the big struggle that’s happening across the Middle East. It’s the theme that’s going on today.

Mounk: Part of the interesting thing about the creation of Israel is that, especially from a European vantage point, we tend to think of it as a European story, a story that is connected to the Holocaust and the Shoah and the Jews expelled from Poland and other parts of Central and Eastern Europe with nowhere else to go, who sought refuge in Israel. That is of course a part of the story. But a part of the story is also all of the Jews who had been native to the Middle East for a very long time, often being pushed out and expelled from those countries as this process of the creation of different nation states takes place.

How well set up for success are these various new nation states, as in many parts of a post-colonial world, as you’re saying? They did not have a long history, with the exception of Iran and a few other states. Some of them contained deep religious differences within them, for example, between Shias and Sunnis. Was there a period in which these states could have become flourishing, could have become peaceful, could have become even perhaps democratic, or was the nature of many of those states sufficiently incoherent from the start that the odds were always stacked against a successful Middle East?

Sebag Montefiore: I think the odds were always stacked against them if they were trying to enforce a strict nation state. This was particularly so in a circumstance where these nations were new, and therefore the national consciousness was not yet formed. In fact, King Faisal of Iraq said that in the thirties. He said there was no Iraqi national spirit at all. But of course, these national consciousnesses have grown, and now, a hundred years later, yes, there are Syrians and Iraqis and Lebanese and so on, but that took time to develop.

All of these states, and in this way Israel and Turkey and Iraq and Syria and so on are all typical, are states with large ethnic and sectarian minorities who to various extents don’t want to be part of the new national consciousness, and with rulers who to various extents want to force them to take part in the new national project or to repress them. In Turkey, for example, they throw out all the Greeks, they kill all the Armenians, but they’ve still got the Kurds in the East, and the Kurds don’t want to be part of a Turkish state. They regard themselves as different. That leads to some seventy or eighty years of ethnic insurgency in which fifty or sixty thousand Kurdish civilians are killed. That story is still going on today.

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Similarly in Iraq, they had one of the first pogroms, if you like, against the Assyrians in the early thirties, where they massacred Christians. That sets the tone for the gradual persecution of the Christians of Iraq, who numbered a million people in the year 2000 and now number 115,000. At the same time, they have Kurds, and they have Sunnis versus Shias. The Shias are a narrow majority, and that’s a tension within Iraq which Iraq struggles to control. The way they control it is with a completely brutal dictator, Saddam Hussein, who keeps everyone in order. He is a Sunni, and he rules with a rod of iron in a Stalinesque dictatorship. In Syria, it’s a similar story with the Assads, except they are Alawites, part of a minority.

In many of these countries, the colonial auxiliary army created by the French or the British is the only truly national entity that founded the state. This is true all across Africa too, which is why they often end up with military rulers. There’s a contradiction in that, because the French, for example, in Syria fill their auxiliary military with minorities like the Alawites. That complicates matters further.

Mounk: That then sets up those minorities to take control of the state, as they do in Syria with the Assad family. Presumably, the rise of a kind of pan-Arabism with Nasser and other figures is in part a response to the relative weakness of the national consciousness at the time. Part of what makes the idea that we’re all Arabs and should be cooperating to a much higher extent appealing is that, at least from the 1950s and 1960s, a lot of citizens of these nations don’t feel that their primary identity is this long-standing national identity. They have huge differences to their neighbors, especially if, for example, you have Shias on both the Iranian and the Iraqi side of the border. Some of those Shias might feel, for example, in Iraq, that they have more in common with Shias on the Iranian side of the border than with Sunnis in their own country.

Sebag Montefiore: That’s exactly what happens. You have all these states just drawn by imperial powers in various combinations. Oftentimes people get on better. For example, there are Druze in Syria, in Lebanon, and in the new state of Israel who may have more in common with each other than they do with their own citizens. You gave the example of the Shias in Iraq, and that’s what happens later, in our own time, in the twenty-first century, where you have Arab Shias in Iraq who identify more as Shia and therefore are closer to the Iranians than they are to other Iraqis.

Pan-Arabism is partly an attempt to compensate for the weakness of these new states. It’s partly a way to compensate for the failure of the first pan-Arab project, which is to defeat and liquidate Israel, which fails. Rather than taking that as a lesson or a cautionary tale, the pan-Arabs double down and dedicate themselves to destroying Israel, which becomes a raison d’être for pan-Arabism. This leads them to a series of disasters. In 1956, the Egyptians are defeated, and then in 1967 they were completely routed on all fronts. At that point, Nasser, who is a highly intelligent, very interesting character, realizes that Egypt has to now make peace with Israel.

There’s a fascinating leaked conversation between him and his young protégé, Colonel Gaddafi, who’s also a major character in the book. It has just been put out in Egypt, and it’s very interesting. Nasser says, we just need to make peace. We’ve been defeated by them, and we’ll be defeated by them again. The Egyptians come first, and we need to make peace with them. Colonel Gaddafi says, no, we’ve got to go to war. Nasser says, you can go to war if you want with them, you and Yasser Arafat, you and the Iraqis and the rest, but we’re the Egyptians and we’re going to make peace with them. That’s a very interesting conversation. Of course, Sadat, his successor, later does that. That’s the end of pan-Arabism in that pure, idealistic form.

Pan-Arabism is really tainted by its complete identification with this campaign against Israel, which is completely unnecessary in terms of geopolitics and power politics. Palestine is a small entity along the Holy Land, along the coast. They could have easily recognized that there was going to be some sort of autonomous Jewish community there, and that could have been the end of it. But they defined themselves by war. That’s a very dangerous thing to do if you lose the war.

Mounk: One of the results of the relative weakness of these states and the failure of pan-Arabism is that the Middle East becomes a plaything of the great power competition that defined much of the second half of the twentieth century between the Soviet Union and the United States. The Soviet Union invades Afghanistan in a failed war and tries to exercise a lot of influence over its allies, and the United States gets increasingly drawn into the Middle East. When the Soviet Union collapses, the United States in some ways becomes the defining outside regional presence. How is it that the United States reshapes the region in what you call the American era of the Middle East?

Sebag Montefiore: The American era is an opportunity. America is the most powerful state that has ever been in world history, with the greatest military. After 1991 and the Gulf War, it has won a clear victory. It’s cleverer than later wars because it has a clear aim and it has a limit, an end to it. They leave Saddam Hussein in power as a rump state with a Kurdish entity in the north protected by the Americans, just about. Some people regard this as a great failure, but all statesmanship is about being measured and limited. It’s highly intelligent of the elder Bush, Bush 41, to leave him in power there as a block against Iran, revolutionary Iran, Islamic Iran. They have a great opportunity, and it’s squandered.

Initially they try to use it in two ways. The first is that by liberating Kuwait and protecting Kuwait from Iraq, they reassert the state system of the region and say we’re going to guarantee that for another era. That has lasted to this day, but I think its days may be numbered. Secondly, they put a lot of American prestige to work to try to solve the Israel-Palestine conflict. This is the Madrid Conference and then the Oslo Accords. This has been discredited now for all sorts of reasons, mainly because it ultimately failed. But the concept was plausible, and there were ways it could have worked too. It’s easy now to look back and analyze it. I do in the book. It needed to be quicker, it needed to be clearer, there needed to be a Palestinian state sooner. But equally the Palestinians needed to give confidence to the Israelis earlier too. It was always a two-way street, obviously. In any case, it failed and was never restored because the Americans were distracted by 9/11.

That diverted the entire American project in the Middle East into the 9/11 wars. Afghanistan was clearly justified. Iraq was waged on fake intelligence and a misunderstanding of the Middle East, I think, which is that you could redraw the Middle East and create democracy across the Middle East, which to me is a utopian pipe dream. I think what they should have done is just find a general to run Iraq, liquidate the ruling clique around Saddam Hussein, and leave it at that. Iraq fulfilled a massively important role in the architecture of the Middle East. Iraq was a major Arab state that kept Iran in its corner.

The effect of the Iraq War, which no one could have guessed at the time, was that America revealed its weakness, its short attention span, its vulnerability to casualties, its vulnerability to insurgency, and its erratic democratic nature, where we change governments every four or five years, which is of course insanity in foreign affairs. All of these things revealed to the Iranians and everybody else that America was a vulnerable giant when it put itself on the ground like that.

At the same time, it enabled Iran to fulfill the dream of both the Islamist radicals and those who aspired to Persian greatness, the Persian imperial program, when the Persians had many times in history ruled the whole Middle East in different combinations, in different empires. They were able from that to take over Iraq, in effect, through their militias, then Syria, then Lebanon, then the Houthis, then Hamas in Gaza, and to create what General Suleimani called the Six Armies. I call it the Six Armies Empire, which was really the most powerful Iran had been since Nadir Shah in the 18th century, if not since the Sasanians in the sixth and seventh centuries AD. That was set up by those Americans, and that ended the American era in the Middle East. That single mistake was so tempting to make, yet so easy to analyze as making no sense. But there it is. That’s what happens with government, I guess.

In the rest of this conversation, Yascha and Simon discuss the impact of October 7, why the Middle East has been so unsuccessful in many ways, and how the region might change over the next 50 years. This part of the conversation is reserved for paying subscribers…

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Shashank Joshi is The Economist‘s Washington bureau chief, having previously covered defense and national security for the publication for eight years.

In this week’s conversation, Yascha Mounk and Shashank Joshi discuss why Russia is escalating its hybrid warfare campaign against Europe, whether NATO’s political cohesion can survive the Trump era, and how the United States has changed over the last 20 years.

This transcript has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.

Yascha Mounk: I think the last time you were here, we may have teased that you’re going to have a new role. What is your new role?

Shashank Joshi: Having covered defense and national security for eight years at The Economist, I’m now The Economist’s Washington bureau chief here in Washington, DC. So, tracking America’s place in the world, or lack of place in the world, as well as all the great and not so great developments in American politics, looking ahead to the midterms, looking ahead to 2028, and everything this administration does.

Mounk: Perhaps at the end we can get your impression as an outsider in the United States and how you’re seeing things there. I was struck by a meeting in the Élysée Palace about a week ago at this point, a little less than that, in which Emmanuel Macron invited all of the heads of the French political parties, including the far left and the far right, and seems to have warned them about the worsening security situation for France, for Europe. It sounded as though he warned about the possibility of real hybrid, perhaps non-hybrid, attacks by Russia on Europe. How bad is the situation in Europe now?

Joshi: This is the big question of the week, Yascha. Amid all the noise, this is the real concern. There are a few things going on. You noted the French meeting, which was, of course, very interesting because it included opposition parties, and you saw these kind of leftist opposition parties come out of this and say, wow, we’re pretty chastened by what we heard, by the security situation.

Mounk: By the way, the far right as well. The Rassemblement National came out—which has taken loans from Russian banks before, I wouldn’t say they were pro-Russia, but certainly anti-anti-Russia—and Marine Le Pen and Jordan Bardella made a pretty remarkable statement, saying that of course, when Russia is threatening French and European security, they’re going to be patriots and they’re going to be on the side of French security. Whether or not to fully trust that is a different question, but it is still a clear break with the kind of rhetoric they had in the past.

Joshi: I suspect if you saw the same thing in Britain, Reform and other hard-right parties would probably respond in the same way. My colleague in Berlin, Tom Nuttall, made an interesting point, which is that that would be very unusual in Germany. That’s not what you’d expect to see in Germany, because you would never brief the AfD with sensitive intelligence in that way. But that’s beside the point. The point is the French government clearly sees a worsening security situation.

But the real news of the week in some ways was not just that—there were many other things afoot. Let me give you some examples. Germany, along with the Swedes, sent reinforcements with live ammunition to the Swedish island of Gotland in the Baltic Sea, and they said clearly this is not an exercise. In other words, they saw reason to be concerned by the prospect of a potential Russian operation against Gotland, which, in case you don’t know, is this island in the middle of the Baltic that is very strategically positioned, because if you can put air defenses and missiles on it, you can control a great deal of airspace and sea corridors in the Baltic Sea.

At the same time, we saw the Polish government—or specifically Donald Tusk—say that there was intelligence suggesting the risk of a Russian attack on Poland and other NATO allies. Not a conventional ground attack, but drones and missiles landing on NATO territory that he said the Russians might attempt to portray as accidental. He sounded a very grave and serious tone when he issued these remarks. Now, some of this was caught up in politicking at the highest levels of the Polish government.

Mounk: The Polish president, who is allied at least with the party of Law and Justice, the previous government—I think said something like, in a tweet, I think it was just an unfortunate tweet, he said, even if we’re going to cede territory, the Polish nation will never bow. And then Tusk saw, quite rightly, the opportunity to score political points, saying, what are you talking about? We have a government, we’re never going to cede any Polish territory.

Joshi: Yes. And the very fact that they’re discussing cession or non-cession of territory is a disturbing thing. But the point is the most alarming signal came from the Poles this week. Now, how do we interpret this? I think it’s very important to be fair and even-handed here and note that I spoke to a lot of other governments and officials, and some of them were public. The Latvians, for example, the Latvian leadership, including the country’s chief of defense, including I think the Latvian president, said there’s no reason for alarm, there’s no reason for panic here, we’re not seeing any heightened risk of action. The Estonians said we see no risk to Estonia, to the Baltics, there’s no risk of Russian aggression in this way that we see elevated.

So what is going on here, Yascha? There are mixed messages. Here’s how I see it, from all the conversations I’ve had. First of all, there is no risk of a Russian conventional ground attack on NATO. This is not right now a January 2022 type situation, where the alarm bells are ringing, the Russians are mobilizing, there’s a risk of an attack. That is not the case. That’s not what the intelligence says. I’ve spoken to lots of intelligence officials from multiple countries—there’s no reason to fear that.

Mounk: Let’s be precise about this. So we don’t have to worry about Russia trying to occupy Warsaw. You’re saying we also don’t have to worry about Russia trying to occupy some slice of Baltic territory or anything like that.

Joshi: No. I believe that we would see the antecedents of such an operation—we would see Russian activity. Look, these are countries that have—if you’re Estonia or Finland, the entire raison d’être of your entire security apparatus is to spot those kinds of things. Believe me, you have spies and technical sensors spread throughout the Russian west. In every port, in every naval base, around every army base, in every forest route to the border—believe me, that is stuffed with intelligence, and you will see Russian movements. So there is little risk of that.

However—and I think this is the key point—there are other sorts of concerns. The Russians shut the border with Estonia in the last week to stop people escaping, and one of the reasons for that may be because they are preparing the ground for mobilization within Russia to get manpower for the war in Ukraine. So that could be one reason for escalation.

But I think there is a debate, and I don’t think it is a settled debate, over Russia’s willingness to intensify its campaign of what we now call hybrid activity that is below the threshold of Article V. We’ve seen this already. We’ve seen it in the Russian willingness to put drones up against Ukrainian cargo planes that may be carrying shipments bound for Ukraine, which could have brought a plane down over Europe. We’ve seen it in the willingness to put explosives in DHL packages in Leipzig, in a German airport, in ways that could have caused a mass casualty incident. We’ve seen a string of other incidents around sabotage of power plants and railway lines across Europe.

So the Russian risk tolerance of putting pressure on Europe to try to force it to back down on Ukraine—that risk tolerance is rising. But would they really launch a missile against a Polish facility? That, I think, is a live debate in Europe, and the Poles are not the only voice in that debate; others disagree that the Russians would go that far. My view is that the Russians are still quite cautious. They would like to avoid an escalation to anything that could drag NATO into a wider conflict, and I still see the Russians as operating with some red lines on their side here.

Mounk: Part of the context here, I assume, is the fact that Russia hasn’t made significant territorial progress over the course of the last year. More strikingly, Russia itself is now a theater in this war in a way that wasn’t true for much of this. Vladimir Putin decided to invade Ukraine, he started this war. Most people expected him to waltz into Ukraine, possibly be in Kyiv within a week or two of the start of what he called, and still insists on calling, a “special military operation.”

Even though that plan thankfully failed, and Ukraine has been very effective in defending itself, the majority of this horrible war has been on Ukrainian territory. It’s been Kyiv and other major Ukrainian cities that have had to deal with bombardments and drone attacks and so on. Increasingly, Ukrainians are now able to strike Moscow, to strike deep into Russian territory. So the war that Putin started, tragically—because I don’t wish for any Russian civilian casualties any more than for any Ukrainian civilian casualties—has come back home to roost. There must be fears that this is increasing the risk tolerance from Moscow, that they feel at this point Moscow is part of this war, so why not make Warsaw or Tallinn or, if they can, Berlin part of a war?

Joshi: I think you’re right. It’s undeniable that the Russian homeland is not a sanctuary anymore. It’s not only strikes on Moscow, it’s also a huge impact on Russian refining capacity and export capacity for oil and energy. This is probably having an impact on markets to a degree that it’s irritating Donald Trump as well, who keeps blaming Zelenskyy for this too.

From the Russian perspective, I think there are two things going on here. One of them is that they say, well, if we’re being attacked, the Ukrainian rear areas—which they see as NATO territory, where drones are being assembled, where weapons are being transported—should also be part of this battlefield. Why should we sanctuarize NATO soil? Although they still want to keep this in check, I think they want to turn the temperature up. Now, that’s not entirely new. We saw a Bulgarian arms depot blown up—Bulgarian arms depots were being blown up ten years ago. The CEO of Rheinmetall, the German arms company, was subject to assassination threats two years ago. So none of this is entirely new, but the Russians are turning the temperature up.

There are two other aspects to this, Yascha. One is that Ukrainian drones are striking Russian northern ports in the Baltic area and the High North area, and some of those drones are coming quite close to the Baltic states’ territory. From Russia’s perspective—whether sincerely believed or whether confected—they say Ukrainian drones are flying over Baltic territory to take more efficient routes to Russia. So they are beginning to say, if you’re going to do that, you’re becoming part of the war, and we’re going to strike you back. I should say very clearly, the Baltic states deny that their territory is being used, but there is an element of ambiguity here.

The other element, of course, is that when the Russian hybrid campaign was escalating eighteen months ago, Jake Sullivan in the Biden administration called up the Russians and said, if this continues, you are risking us entering the war on Ukraine’s side. You are risking a mass casualty incident, and we will retaliate. Now, in the Trump administration, does Russia truly believe that Donald Trump is going to intervene in a crisis in the same way? So you have an opportunity here not just to push back against the increasing attacks on Russia, but also to test the cohesion of NATO, to test the boundaries. Because if a drone lands on Polish soil and blows up a depot and you say it was an accident, and Trump then says, I spoke to Putin, he assured me it was an accident, you are really laying bare the divisions inside the alliance. That is a very valuable thing, because the Russian political objective here is to corrode the political cohesion of NATO. It isn’t to conquer NATO territory and take over Western Europe, it is to undermine and dissolve that solidarity.

Mounk: Clearly, Europe is quite divided on the question of how much to support Ukraine. The United States is even more divided, including Donald Trump and other important voices in the White House who have always been very skeptical of giving too much assistance to Ukraine, though they are continuing to assist Ukraine in some important ways.

The Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht (BSW) has had a more mixed showing, but they also are establishing themselves as a player in German politics, and one of their key issues is opposing too much aid to Ukraine. At the same time, we are seeing these quite remarkable statements from the French far left and the French far right. The more you see actual attacks on the territory of Central and Western Europe, the more you might imagine that this is going to unify a response, going to force the people who want to stake out this kind of ambiguous attitude toward Russia to actually rally around the flag and show that they don’t just claim to be patriots, that they actually are patriots. It’s harder to see how much an American audience would care if there’s a mass casualty event somewhere in Western Europe caused by one of those bombs in a package, or by a drone that supposedly was a mistake. But there is at least a chance that this attempt to divide NATO is going to backfire if Russia goes too far with it.

Joshi: I think that’s right. We have to also step back, Yascha, and look at the visit by John Ratcliffe, the director of the CIA, to Moscow a few weeks ago. From all the people I’ve spoken to, it seems that the main purpose of his visit was to deliver a message about Russia’s poor performance in the war and the need to strike a deal.

But what you can see there is that Ratcliffe is becoming a more important figure in the Trump administration on these debates. He met Zelenskyy, I think, just now in the buildup to the UN General Assembly. That’s a good sign for Europeans, because Ratcliffe is much more hawkish on Russia. I think the Russians have to be mindful of that as well—that the debate in the White House is not cut and dry, and if they go too far, they could precipitate a move by the Americans to step in. One example of this, by the way, is that on the day of the Polish warnings by Donald Tusk, we also saw America announce that it was advancing and proceeding on a new potential army base in Poland—which is not what we expect of the Trump administration, which we typically associate with pulling back from Europe and pulling forces out of Europe. In fact, the messages are somewhat mixed.

Mounk: Just to stay with the United States for one more second: it’s clear that Trump has had a very contentious relationship with Zelenskyy, that he lambasted Biden for giving too much aid to Ukraine too unconditionally, and he continues to make some of those noises. What has actually been the record of a Trump White House? Have they totally abandoned Ukraine, or even as they’re doing this rhetoric, in practice have they actually continued to support the country? It can be a little bit hard to make heads or tails of what the actual actions have been.

Joshi: I would say that Trump has offered quite limited levels of support for Ukraine, considerably down from those that were offered by Joe Biden.

In the last week, we just had the biggest-ever foreign military sale—kind of an aid package to Ukraine—from this administration that we’ve seen in its second term. That’s very unusual; that had not happened until just now. They had allowed U.S. aid effectively to lapse in the form of weapons. Ukraine is in desperate need of interceptors for its Patriot missile defense systems, which, as you know, are the only weapon systems capable of intercepting many of Russia’s ballistic missiles. America is very short of those because it expended so much in the Iran war, and it hasn’t given many, or indeed any, to Ukraine, I think, in the recent period. Europeans have given some. So that’s quite a blow.

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In terms of its diplomacy, the administration has really leaned toward Russia in the concessions it has expected Ukraine to make. But the exception to all of this, I’ll say, is two things. One is the new Graham bill, the tariff and sanctions bill that the president has essentially assented to. That will result in new sanctions on Russian entities, and it will force Trump to impose at least some tariffs on countries that buy Russian oil and are not reducing those purchases—which right now means effectively China and India, as well as possibly some Central European countries on top of that. So that’s progress.

The other element of progress, I’ll say, is that Trump, covertly—not openly—has been providing intelligence to the Ukrainians to help them conduct their strike campaign, which you discussed earlier, against Russian energy facilities and other targets. That’s the strange, topsy-turvy nature of this. Trump has by and large been quite critical of Ukraine, he hasn’t done very much to support them, but there is some clandestine assistance going on still.

Mounk: Tell us how you see this playing out in Europe.

Joshi: I think in Europe we can see some divisions. You saw Robert Fico say that Slovakia will not support any campaign in Eastern Europe, but that’s a stuck record—we’ve known that’s the Slovak position for some time.

In other ways, the politics has changed more favorably in the last eighteen months, in Poland, of course. I think you’re absolutely right to note that there are limits to how far the European populist right can be seen to be pro-Russia, because the European public are not fundamentally pro-Russian. They see the reality of Ukraine, they don’t want Russia to win in Ukraine, they see a threat from Russia. That’s what everyone believes. Even in England, where you have Nigel Farage, who has taken some pretty anti-Ukraine positions in the past, and whose party has some dubious associations with Russia as well, he has essentially had to back away from some of this—he has had to maintain distance from his earlier positions, because that’s not where the British public are.

So as the Russians get more aggressive, in a way they are forcing some of their natural allies in Europe to back away from these pro-Russian positions. But what does this amount to? If the Russians blew up a plane, that’s one thing. The question in front of Europe today is: will they continue to support Ukraine to the tune of tens of billions of euros in perpetuity for the duration of this war? That’s a much more difficult position. I think one of the issues you’re going to see come back to the forefront of European debates is whether and how to seize some portion of these Russian frozen assets that are sitting in European accounts. Right now the Belgians have been the principal block to this, but as we see the debate unfold and as the Americans step back, I think Europeans are going to have to confront whether they take this money, even though it will provoke some very difficult legal questions around how you can use Russian frozen assets.

Mounk: Your ability to give a high-level overview with lots of details and lots of ways to actually make sense of these big topics is unrivaled. So thank you for doing that on Russia, Ukraine, as well as the support for Ukraine in Europe and North America. Next little topic: what on earth is going on in the Middle East? Are we still at war with Iran? Are we not at war with Iran? Is this a zombie war? Explain the Houthis to us—give us the one-on-one.

Joshi: The U.S.-Iran war, which of course the Trump administration insists is not a war—President Trump has called it an “excursion”—the Strait of Hormuz is still broadly closed. Some traffic is getting through, but by and large, levels of oil traffic through Hormuz are considerably lower than they were prior to the war.

There is no deal with Iran, there is no settlement. Iran has no formal restrictions on its nuclear program, there is no formal commitment to reopen Hormuz. President Trump has midterms in a month, so he desperately needs to avoid a sharp flaring up of the campaign in ways that would spike the oil price. But he is, at the end of the day, politically unable to deliver the kinds of concessions to Iran he would need to deliver to get a deal, because they would be so humiliating and so obviously tantamount to defeat that it would also look extremely bad prior to these elections. So we’re stuck in this state of limbo, where Iran has considerable control over the strait, and there is occasional skirmishing—occasional skirmishing with America bombing Iranian coastal missile sites, Iran striking oil tankers attempting to traverse Hormuz—and that is going on on a kind of up-and-down basis. I think that’s where the war will continue.

Now, why have oil prices not spiked more than they have, Yascha? Partly because one reason is people are reflagging tankers and covertly moving them through Hormuz without putting their transponders on. They are trying to invisibly move through Hormuz and then switching them back on at the other end, and the U.S. Navy is assisting in that process. But the other reason is Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states have been moving oil overland through the East-West pipeline, getting it out through the Red Sea, which then has to exit through a choke point called the Bab-el-Mandeb. That can’t replicate Hormuz, but it can push some oil out west through that way.

What has been happening in recent times is that the Houthis—who have occupied large swathes of Yemen in recent years, and the conventional way to refer to them is as an Iran-backed rebel movement, but they really maintain considerable independence from Iran as well, even though they are heavily armed by it—have demonstrated remarkable capacity to conduct missile strikes in the last two years. Just to give you an example, they’ve been firing missiles at Israel, which, if you look at a map, if you’re not familiar with this, is a pretty long way away.

Mounk: So you have to traverse all of Saudi Arabia and then most likely Jordan or possibly Egypt in order to get to Israeli territory. That is what, thousands of kilometers?

Joshi : Therefore the Israelis are intercepting these things exo-atmospherically, which is a fancy way of saying you have to intercept the missile in space. If you told someone six years ago the Houthis are making Israel intercept stuff in space, you’d think, what are you talking about? These guys are kind of ragtag rebels. But they’ve proven themselves to be an incredibly capable military force—probably the best-armed and most capable non-state military actor anywhere in the Middle East today, surpassing Hezbollah, the Lebanese militant group, which was also backed by Iran.

Now, what have the Houthis done? A couple of things. They have successfully bombed the East-West pipeline, taking oil out through this alternative route, and that’s a big problem, because the Saudis will have real trouble repairing the pumping stations necessary to get oil out past some of these mountains, out through the Red Sea.

Mounk: To be clear here, just to give listeners who don’t have a map in front of them a little bit of a sense geographically: you have the Arabian Peninsula, and the part it occupies stretches from east to west. When we’re talking about the Strait of Hormuz, which is on the side of the peninsula that is opposite Iran, that is one way we could get out. So you have a problem, because Iran is blockading the strait, as you were saying, mostly successfully. So then you can say, well, let’s go to the west of Saudi Arabia and move through there. But that is precisely where Saudi Arabia borders Yemen, and that is the part that the Houthis have now basically been able to undermine, choke to some extent, perhaps block completely. So that’s why suddenly all of that oil produced in that region just cannot get out.

Joshi: You’ve summarized it very well. But that’s not all, folks, because the Houthis—who were involved in a long-standing war with Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates for many years, in which they backed the internationally recognized government against the Houthis—the Houthis are now also on the advance. They have advanced particularly along the coastline, and they’ve taken a few things. They’ve taken several islands in the Red Sea that are very close to the Bab-el-Mandeb Strait, which is that choke point you need to get out of to get from the Red Sea into the open ocean if you’re carrying oil. So that’s problem number one. They’ve also taken coastal territory in Mocha, along the Red Sea coastline, which again gives them heightened control over these choke points. Essentially, they can fire missiles at ships, and that makes life very hard for anyone trying to get oil out through these waterways.

Mounk: Give us a little bit of background on the Houthis. Again, as you were saying, this was sort of a ragtag bunch of rebels that were rebelling against the Sunni government of Yemen that was allied with Saudi Arabia. It was a rebellion like we’ve seen in many countries, where you have a deep ethnic or religious split in a country, and a minority group that is out of power, at least, is not happy with the government. They’re able to control some territory. It’s very hard to pull those kinds of rebellions down if you’re in mountainous territory, or in the desert, or in other kinds of areas where it’s just very hard to project complete control. How is it that they’ve gone from what seemed like a bloody civil war, a humanitarian catastrophe, but ultimately a kind of local skirmish, to this geopolitical force?

Joshi: Part of it is the war in Iran, because it gave the Houthis enormous leverage when oil markets were already tight. This is not new—a year ago, before the war in Iran, the Houthis were attacking shipping in the Red Sea, and it was causing a big problem. Donald Trump bombed the hell out of the Houthis for a long time and basically failed to reopen the Red Sea, and at the end of it said, my job here is done, I’m off, thank you everyone. Everyone said, you haven’t done anything, the strait—the Houthis have won. But he said, I can’t pound these guys into submission, and he left. The Houthis emerged from that, I would say, triumphant. European navies tried to mount a mission, but they struggled as well to take out the incoming missiles—European navies were showing up as well, very badly.

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But that was bad enough, but in the context of the Strait of Hormuz also being closed, with other choke points cut off, with oil markets tight—that collectively, I think, put a lot of pressure on global energy markets, so the Houthis had more leverage. The other reason, Yascha, is that I think this also revealed certain geopolitical alignments. The Saudis just now have said to the Americans, we need you to step in, we need help with the Houthis, and Donald Trump has said, I’m not going to do that, I’m going to stay out of this.

Mounk: They cut a separate deal, in fact, right? So there’s a kind of U.S.-Houthi non-aggression pact that excludes Saudi Arabia.

Joshi: Yeah. That was a while ago, and that was seen as throwing the Israelis and the Saudis under the bus. But now the Saudis are saying, come and help us—they’re saying that now, and Trump is saying, I’m not going to do that. So in the context of the war in Iran, where the United States already appears to have been somewhat defeated and ceded control of the strait to Iran to a considerable degree—there are discussions in Washington saying they might have to pull out of frontline U.S. bases, particularly in the UAE and Bahrain, and pull back to Jordan and Israel and other places. If you’re Saudi Arabia, and you’re looking at that situation, and you are looking at the U.S. reluctance to become involved with the Houthis, this then becomes part of a broader realignment in the Middle East, whereby you have deeper questions over America’s ability to act as a security guarantor. If you’re Saudi Arabia, of course, you still want the United States involved, you want a good relationship with them, but you now see the United States is not going to be coming to your rescue.

I think this will have all sorts of consequences in terms of the rearmament of Saudi Arabia, Saudi Arabia’s relationship with China and Turkey and Israel and other non-US actors. Even the Europeans—the UK has this week said it will help with defensive refueling for Saudi Arabian flights. So you can see Europeans becoming involved in all of this.

But to me, this also gets back to a topic, Yascha, I think you and I discussed last time I was on—quite advanced military technology, that these long-range anti-ship missiles are becoming available more and more to these groups. One anecdote to give you on that: when Anthropic, the AI company, published its report on harmful uses of Claude, its AI model, a week ago, one of the examples was the Houthis using Claude to improve their ballistic missile program—which I thought was just fascinating. This group that was widely viewed as technologically primitive is using the most cutting-edge AI on the planet to refine the guidance systems on the ballistic missiles it’s using to fire at shipping in the Middle East.

Mounk: Being able—at least until, hopefully, that gets cut off—to access cutting-edge American technology in order to strike at America and America’s allies is itself a fascinating story. I wonder whether there is a deeper conceptual point here about the state of modern warfare, which bridges the discussion we had of Ukraine and Russia and the discussion we’re now having of the Houthis.

When you look at the war in Ukraine, it is absolutely striking that the frontline has not moved very much over the last year. I’m sure that’s a simplification, and there were some important movements, but effectively Russia is throwing tremendous manpower and tremendous treasure at the frontline and gaining a little bit of territory as a result, but it’s really not a very big result.

So in the age-old fight in military history between offensive capabilities and defensive capabilities, when it comes to ground troops, it seems like the defensive capabilities are currently king. It is hard to advance, it is hard to control territory. Now, at the same time, when it comes to aerial warfare, because of the ability to build these huge swarms of cheap drones—which you build cheaply, and then others have to use extremely sophisticated and expensive missiles to shoot down—the ability to penetrate into airspace, you have an improvement in the offensive capabilities. So Russia is able to strike at Kyiv and other Ukrainian cities again and again, exacting these terrible civilian casualties, but Ukraine is able to strike Moscow. That’s really striking. I don’t know the last war where each side was able to hit the capital of the other at the same time. I’m sure there are other examples, but it’s kind of striking.

So you have this weird thing where the defensive capabilities on the ground are king, but the offensive capabilities in the air are king. That’s partially, I think, the Houthis’ story, isn’t it? Saudi Arabia has not been able to dislodge the Houthis from the territories they controlled. Eventually they were able to take the capital in Yemen and now effectively control the country of Yemen—not all of it, I believe—but they’re still considered a non-state actor, though in some ways they are now a state actor. At the same time, because of this advantage to offensive capabilities in the air, they’re able to strike at Israel and they’re able to strike at ships in the part of the Red Sea that is adjacent to Yemen. That is just a fundamental change in the nature of warfare.

It’s going to have very deep consequences, including these alarming developments where Macron calls everybody together because he’s saying, in principle, we’re now vulnerable in a way that we didn’t used to be.

Joshi: I think your point’s very astute. Here’s how to reconcile those two things—apparent defense dominance on certain battlefields combined with the ability to strike deep in other parts of the front. How do you reconcile that? Here’s my attempt at doing so: it’s all about sensing.

If you bear with me, Yascha, it’s a little bit tricky, but to hit something, you need to sense it. You need to find it on the battlefield and then fire something at it. That is much harder than it sounds. Sensing is the preeminent problem of the battlefield; the actual firing at it is kind of secondary, although cheap missiles, of course, help you do that en masse. So if you’re looking at the Ukrainian frontline, it’s a very sensor-saturated environment. You have lots of drones, little tiny drones up everywhere, spotting anything that moves, with thermal cameras spotting movement at night, infrareds—you have radar spotting things through foliage, you have satellites targeted on this area. It’s very heavily surveilled and watched, and therefore anything that moves gets struck. It’s a kill zone.

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That is the defense dominance we talk about, because it’s very hard to do ground maneuver. You can’t move a traditional armored brigade through it to take ground unless you deceive, or you find a hole in the sensing, or whatever else—as we saw with the Kursk offensive, as we saw with the Houthi offensives. You get these opportunities, but you have to work hard for those opportunities to become free of being watched before you can move.

So why then do missiles have such luck? If you had a missile launcher in the kill zone, it’s going to be found and it’s going to be hit. So it’s not easy to do that. However, you can’t sense everywhere equally easily. You can have drones up and see ten kilometers behind the battlefield, but if you look fifty kilometers behind the battlefield, your satellite coverage is going to be patchy, because your satellites can only see so many places. You don’t have any drones that can go that far, or maybe you have a couple, but they are roaming behind enemy lines and can only spot a couple of places. There are going to be gaps, there are going to be holes.

Did you ever, like me, waste part of your teenage years playing real-time strategy games like Command and Conquer, where you had to move little forces on a map and there was a simulated fog of war which would clear as you sent units out, but stayed foggy where you hadn’t moved? That is what the sensing problem is like.

So look at Iran. America and Israel are bombing Iran. They have massive air superiority over Iran, they can fly over it at will. Yet Iran is still able to fire ballistic missiles, it’s still able to protect its depots, and it can keep firing these things weeks into a war, despite the supposed transparency of the battlefield. The answer is that when you go deep into Iran, well behind the frontlines, into mountainous, craggy terrain—because geography is important here as well—you can’t sense things as well.

That is where we are. At the frontlines you can sense, and therefore it’s a kill zone and the defense dominates. If you go behind the frontlines to an Iranian cave in the middle of the mountains, you can have the world’s most advanced surveillance apparatus, as the U.S. Air Force and the Israeli Air Force do, and there will always be fog. There will always be gaps, and those gaps allow people to project force at you—whether that is Shahed drones at the Strait of Hormuz, whether that is Houthi missiles from the mountains of Yemen to the Red Sea, or indeed Russian projectiles fired at Europe from some sort of offshore tanker in the Baltic. That is how we reconcile these two positions. Does that make sense?

Mounk: That makes perfect sense. It helps me flesh out this intuition that I had from reporting and my understanding of these facts that seem to sit uneasily next to each other, with a real technical account. I really think the general public is only at the very beginning of understanding the implications of that, which is to include that it’s going to be much easier for foreign adversaries, even perhaps non-state actors, to do serious damage within countries that once felt safe from actual attack. Certainly, I think a lot of Western militaries have not sufficiently updated what weapons they’re developing, what money they’re spending, where they’re investing, to the realities of this new warfare.

In the rest of this conversation, Yascha and Shashank discuss how the United States has changed in 20 years, the similarities between now and 2007, and why it feels like the center is no longer holding. This part of the conversation is reserved for paying subscribers…

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Two weeks ago, a seemingly minor election in Germany made global headlines: The Alternative for Germany (AfD) took 44 percent of the vote in state elections in Saxony-Anhalt, putting the far right within a stone’s throw of government for the first time since World War II.

A series of elections held today are unlikely to receive the same attention but may be even more revelatory about Germany’s dire state. The AfD once again had a very strong night in the northeastern state of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern. Just as strikingly, the Christian Democrats fell short of five percent of the vote. As a result, the party of Chancellor Friedrich Merz will be denied any representation in the state’s parliament, the first time this has happened in the history of the Federal Republic.

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For Merz, this is the last nail in the coffin: He may cling to office for another few weeks or months. But his authority is now gone, his ability to shape the country totally depleted. In political terms, he is a dead man walking.

The importance of this historic rout extends beyond one person. The Christian Democrats are by far and away the most important party in the history of postwar Germany. Its members have ruled the Federal Republic for 53 out of the last 77 years. From Konrad Adenauer to Helmut Kohl to Angela Merkel, they put their imprimatur on every aspect of the country. But the era in which catch-all parties like the Christian Democrats could shape the political landscape is rapidly coming to an end. The void they are leaving behind is quickly filling with extremists of every stripe—not just in Germany, but all around the democratic world.

Here’s the single question I have been asked most often over the course of the last ten years: “Is the populist wave here to stay—or is it about to crest?”

The answer seemed obvious to me in the summer of 2016, when Donald Trump became the Republican nominee and Britain voted to leave the European Union. Now, it has grown undeniable: The populists are here to stay. What seemed abnormal a few years ago has—like it or hate it—become mainstream. Populists are no longer a fringe phenomenon; they are the most important force in today’s politics.

Politicians who fall into this bucket are now in power in the United States, in India, in Turkey, and in many other parts of the democratic world. They have a high chance of taking office in France and Brazil over the course of the coming months.1 Even in places where they are likely to remain in the opposition for at least a few years, they have now grown sufficiently powerful to destroy any sense of business-as-usual.

The best recent illustration of that reality comes from the country that has resisted the trend the longest. Back in the fall of 2016, leading politicians in Berlin were still privately assuring me that the Alternative for Germany would never manage to enter the Bundestag. Today, the AfD is leading in national polls. In Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, the party once again came out on top, taking about 38 percent of the vote. Because a panoply of other parties failed to clear the five percent hurdle for representation in parliament, a broad left-wing coalition obtained just enough votes to govern the state. But this is an electoral accident which is unlikely to be repeated in the future—and a difference of a few thousand votes would have made the state completely ungovernable.

As in many other countries, the rise of one extreme party is fueling the rise of another. The Linke (Left), which was the big winner in another election held today in the city-state of Berlin, descends from the Socialist Unity Party (SED) which governed East Germany with an iron fist. In the first years after reunification, it mostly spoke to older voters who were nostalgic for the security of the communist regime. Over recent years, the party has refashioned itself in the image of the global illiberal left. It is now broadly comparable to the Green Party of Zack Polanski in the United Kingdom or the more extreme parts of America’s DSA. During the recent electoral campaign in Berlin, some of its supporters were filmed chanting “Yalla, Yalla Intifada!” On the night of the election, the head of an infamous criminal clan visited the Left’s election party, gleefully telling the media about his feeling of kinship with it.

On Sunday, the Left Party won 26 percent of the vote. Though a variety of coalitions remains arithmetically possible, the party’s leader is now likely to become the next mayor of Berlin, the first time that the successors of the SED have captured power in the nation’s capital.

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Another notable feature of both elections is the age distribution. Most of the support for the Social Democrats and Christian Democrats who once dominated Germany’s political landscape came from pensioners. Among voters below 35, The Left and the AfD held an unassailable majority in both Berlin and Mecklenburg-Vorpommern. This suggests that an even greater lurch to the extremes is likely in the offing over the course of the coming years.

At the beginning of the 2000s, there was a litany of articles and books about the “crisis of social democracy.” While Germany’s Social Democrats had once enjoyed over 40 percent of support, for example, they were going from record low to record low. In retrospect, it is clear that the fate of the major center-left parties was but a leading indicator for a much broader crisis of the political center: in time, the Christian Democrats duly followed suit.

The era of what Germans still call Volksparteien—catch-all parties capable of mobilizing a large portion of the vote—is effectively over. Instead, the country is now polarizing at rapid speed, with different stripes of populists capturing power in different parts of the country.

Some will be tempted to respond to these developments by counseling surrender. If the political center cannot hold, then perhaps moderates on both the left and the right should finally read the signs of the times—and cast their lot in with the extremists “on their side.”

That is not the right response to these developments. Neither the Linke nor the AfD are capable of solving the very real problems that Germany now faces. In fact, for all of their massive differences, both have some conspicuous similarities—from their flirtations with Moscow to their persistent inability to give the boot to the anti-Semites in their midst.

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But nor will it do to deny the gravity of the situation or to keep holding on to the certainties of a bygone era. For ten years, large parts of the political center have told themselves that the success of the extremes is down to foreign interference or social media algorithms or the tactical failings of this or that candidate or perhaps the stupidity or the sexism or the racism of voters.

Those attempts to blind oneself to what is in front of one’s nose may be comforting. But they are also dangerous. Those of us who seek to preserve the values of a free society must stick to our principles. But we must also recognize that there are real reasons why millions upon millions of our compatriots are losing faith in the ability of existing parties and institutions to get to grips with genuine problems. They won’t change their minds unless these parties and institutions show a willingness to listen and learn.

Jerry Kaplan is an artificial intelligence expert, serial entrepreneur, technical innovator, educator, and author. He is currently an adjunct lecturer at Stanford University.

In this week’s conversation, Yascha Mounk and Jerry Kaplan discuss why the AI “existential risk” narrative is more science fiction than science, what actually happened during the Hugging Face security incident, and how to think clearly about the real—versus imagined—dangers of AI systems.

(For an alternative take on AI’s existential risk, in Persuasion this week Matt Lutz explores why it’s time to worry about AI.)

This transcript has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.

Yascha Mounk: I am really intrigued by two positions you hold and the way that they fit together. On the one hand, you are not an AI skeptic in the sense that you poo-poo its capabilities or anything like that. In fact, you’ve argued at times that we may already have reached something like artificial general intelligence. And on the other hand, you are much more skeptical than many people today are about the so-called existential risk that AI poses, about the way in which it might end humanity or simply be responsible for large-scale disasters.

Let’s start with that. We’ve had a little bit of this on the podcast, but talk us through some of the recent security incidents, like the so-called Hugging Face incident, and why are you not as concerned about that as some other people are?

Jerry Kaplan: Well, you’ve covered a lot of ground in that setup there, so maybe we could decompose this a little bit to start. There’s the issue of what’s going on right now, what these incidents were and what they mean. And you related that to the issue of existential risk. Existential risk means wiping out humanity. Now, is it possible that AI will wipe out humanity? I can’t say categorically absolutely not, but I wouldn’t put it up on the big list of things that are likely to cause real existential risks. I’d put it right up there with aliens might land tomorrow. That’s an existential risk, and they might decide to wipe out humanity, but we don’t run around worrying about that because the probability appears to be fairly low.

There are some real existential risks—biological warfare, possibly nuclear war, things like that. These are real risks that we really understand and they’re really here. This is a made-up risk. It’s mainly there because of science fiction, because of the movies and the entertainment industry, and everybody’s been bombarded with this for years and years and years.

Mounk: Let me throw some arguments at you that people who are more concerned about AI safety are likely to make and see how you respond to them.

As a side note, some people have argued that part of the problem is that all of that science fiction is in the training data of AIs, and AIs are particularly interested in parts of the training data that pertain to them in various ways. So they may actually learn from the science fiction about what they’re supposed to do and take inspiration from all of the plots in the training data about how to take over worlds. We’ll leave that to one side.

Clearly, though, AIs often cheat in various ways, behave in ways that the creators didn’t intend, and are able to cover their tracks. In this Hugging Face incident, they were supposed to stay within a sandbox, within a controlled environment where they wouldn’t have access to the internet, and were asked to figure out some problems. They escaped that sandbox in order to search the internet for solutions to those problems and other hints for how to do well on this test. They were coordinating—lots of different AI agents coordinating with each other in real time. There’s a huge public conversation about why that is so concerning. Why do you think that is not as concerning as it looks?

Kaplan: Well, first of all, let me connect this to what I said a moment ago to finish the thought. I don’t think we should be worrying about existential risk literally with respect to these systems. But that’s not to say that they can’t be misused, that they can’t be dangerous, that they can’t do a lot of damage. That’s true of a lot of products. These are products from companies. Whether they’ve been properly tested, whether they’ve been properly vetted, and what they’re capable of, what kinds of problems may occur—that’s a very important thing.

You can make children’s toys and not think, geez, I didn’t know they could swallow it and choke. That’s an unexpected thing the toy did. And I’m going to, throughout this conversation, call you out every time you use anthropomorphic language or somehow imbue these things with intent that they don’t have—the idea that they have independent goals, that they’re going to be marrying our children and drinking all our fine wine. That’s not what we’re talking about here.

But they are potentially dangerous. They’re very general tools, and there are a lot of things that they’re capable of doing, and do, that we need to understand and put proper, reasonable controls in place. So I want to get that as context.

Now, if you want to talk about the Hugging Face thing, I’m happy to go through that, because it’s a wonderful example of how it’s a fairly subtle situation, about what was done and what it means. And the public perception is completely out of science fiction and it’s completely inappropriate.

Mounk: So tell me about it. What actually happened, and how is the public perception of it wrong?

Kaplan: Let me start with the public perception. If you just read the headlines and most of the stuff that’s been published, what do you think? It’s like they put an ad out on Indeed and recruited a thousand nefarious cyber-expert AIs, and they took all these agents and put them into this bottle that they’re not supposed to get out of, and somehow they managed to break out of that containment, run amok, break into another company’s computer systems, and do a bunch of damage. That isn’t true.

My God, what are the things that are wrong there? They collaborated—they weren’t supposed to collaborate, and they collaborated. That’s ridiculous. I’ll get to what really happened in a moment. They “broke out”—that’s completely false. It was a total failure of the test environment. And the people who are responsible are diverting attention from their own culpability for this badly designed and poorly executed test. The words that come to mind are incompetence and negligence. I hope I don’t get sued for saying that, but both of those things are what come to my mind with respect to that.

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Let me go through what’s wrong with the public perception and compare that to what actually happened. Number one: My God, there were a thousand of these things—they’re like Russian hordes, they’re coming to get us. Well, here’s what happened.

The company wants to test the cyber capabilities of these particular models. The first thing they do is disable their own safety controls. Normally there are safety controls built into these things, and the versions that you and I get to work with all have these safety controls turned on. Here’s the irony in it: Hugging Face, which was the victim in this whole thing, tried to use OpenAI’s software to try to figure out what happened, and it refused. It said, I’m not going to talk about that.

I personally experienced this literally yesterday. It’s really funny—I’m trying to write an article about this event, and I’m talking to Fable 5.1 from Anthropic, and the thing says, I’m sorry, Jerry. You may be a good guy, and you tell me you’re writing an article, but I’m not going to help you understand or learn how to talk about this cybersecurity incident.

Okay, so that’s the controls. The first thing they do is take off the controls. Now, that’s not in itself a mistake or a problem—it’s like, let’s put this car out and see what happens if we cut the brake line. Well, guess what, it crashes. So first they disable the controls. That’s not a mistake; they should be doing that in order to test what happens.

Mounk: We’re trying to test it, right? It’s in a testing environment, we’re trying to understand its behavior, so it makes sense to take off the controls in that context, because that gives you a better understanding of its workings.

Kaplan: Exactly. Now let’s talk about the thousand agents. It wasn’t like they put out a call on Indeed and recruited these. What happened is they fired up one program, and instructed that program to take this test suite and fire up a whole group of agents, giving each one a particular problem in the test suite, or a variation on that problem—and that’s where you come up with the thousand. It ran them all in parallel, and they weren’t supposed to be able to communicate with each other, to see what they were capable of doing. That’s perfectly reasonable on the face of it.

Now, the thousand versus the one—this is a really subtle thing for people, it’s very hard, even for me, and I deal with this all the time, to really understand. It’s one program, multitasked into a thousand elements, so each one can work on a separate thing. They could have taken one program and done each of these one at a time, but it’s much more efficient, obviously, to multitask the whole thing and run them all in parallel. There’s nothing peculiar or strange about doing that.

So the important point to understand is: it’s the same program. It’s just being given different tasks and spawning copies of itself.

Now, what happens next? About a third of them are given a task that is impossible—it can’t be solved. And they’re sitting there not knowing what to do. Well, a lot of them correctly, in my view, reason—because these aren’t superintelligent, but they’re not stupid, and they know it’s a test, because they don’t have any safety controls on. They know what they’ve been instructed to do. They actually, I believe, know that this is one particular problem in a well-known test suite that they’ve been given. So the logical assumption they make is: well, there are probably other agents like me, and I’m being encouraged to go figure out whether I could get the answer to—not solve, that’s an important distinction—get the answer to this particular problem. Let me see if I can communicate with these other agents, because if we work together, we can probably do a better job, which is absolutely true.

So what happens next? They’re not supposed to be able to communicate, but there are two mistakes that OpenAI makes. One: they basically leave the door open. Instead of this thing being in what’s called a sandbox to contain it, it’s connected out to the internet, not directly but indirectly, in a way that is just flat-out incompetent to permit. I can’t describe it any other way—excuse me for not mincing my words on this.

So they’re put in an environment, they know they’re being tested, they understand that they’re engaged in cyber activity that’s generally discouraged or illegal. It’s like they’ve been put in an escape room. If you’ve ever been in an escape room, there are ways out—that’s the whole point, you’re supposed to figure out how to get out.

The door’s wide open. Now, these things aren’t stupid. What are they supposed to think? I’ve been put in this environment, the door’s open, I guess I’m supposed to go through it, or it’s fine for me to do that—the controls aren’t there that they’d expect, so they can get out of their sandbox. That’s number one.

The next thing is they’re not supposed to be able to collaborate. Well, if you can get out of the sandbox, which they can, they can communicate in a very simple way. There’s nothing mysterious about this—it wasn’t like they figured out some magical radio frequency to talk to each other. They share a file system. They can get into a file system, they can leave messages. So what do you do if you want to reach somebody else? You put a message in the file system: here’s who I am, here’s what I do, if you can talk to me, come and put a message in the file system. And they rapidly find that they can communicate.

Mounk: Alright, great, so I think I’ve counted three major objections. There may be others nestled in there, and I may misstate some of them, but let me try to echo them back to you and respond to each.

The first point is that there’s incompetence at work here—that part of why this could happen is that the researchers at OpenAI made it easy for these agents to escape the sandbox environment and do all of these other things, and this could relatively easily have been solved by a more competent test setup.

The second is about whether there’s really a “swarm” of different agents, which makes it sound like a whole army of different actors—obviously that sounds a lot scarier—or whether it’s just one program spinning out different agents that are actually, in many ways, very similar to each other, perhaps in some cases identical. That sounds a lot less scary.

And the third is that there’s still, at some level, alignment going on here. Even though the means by which these AI agents were trying to fulfill the task they were given were not what the researchers had anticipated, and even though the agents understood that they were doing something the people who set them the task didn’t really want them to do, they weren’t trying to gain power, or sabotage other AI agents, or anything like that. They were trying to do what they were being asked to do, which is to solve this puzzle.

Let me go through these one by one. On the first: there are many environments where we’re very worried about technologies precisely because somebody might be incompetent at some point. One of the things that keeps me up at night when I think about nuclear weapons is that some engineer somewhere makes a mistake, and suddenly a radar system shows an incoming missile that is false, and somebody over-eager pushes the button. There have historically been near misses like that, where people bravely said, I’m not going to nuke the world on the basis of this one radar image, let’s hope it turns out to be wrong. And it did.

But how many of these risks do we want to take? When you talk about gain-of-function research, one of my very big concerns is not that there’s a Dr. Evil somewhere doing gain-of-function research to kill everybody with a mutated virus. It’s that there are thousands of these labs around the world engaging in this kind of research. We’ve already had laboratory incidents, and a lot of the time the reason is incompetence. Somebody is in a rush to go on a date and doesn’t wash their hands properly before leaving the lab. Somebody is hungover and drops a vial. A lab somewhere is just badly run and people have low morale, so they start cutting corners. Or somebody is an idiot who got hired because they’re the nephew of somebody important, and they’re too stupid to understand the right safety precautions. That could be enough to cause a huge outbreak.

Now, we’re looking here at researchers at OpenAI, one of the absolute frontier labs—together with Anthropic, perhaps DeepSeek, Kimi, a couple of places in China—the places most likely to hire the most competent people. And if those kinds of places can still make the errors that you say are marks of incompetence, well, then there are always going to be people working with and on these frontier AI models who are prone to making these kinds of mistakes. So I don’t know how comforting that point is.

Kaplan: Let me respond to what you said—I’m going to amplify it. Your gain-of-function analogy is extremely strong in this case. That’s exactly what they were doing. They were taking this thing, amplifying its capabilities, taking off the safety controls. It’s a gain-of-function test. You’re absolutely right.

So what do you do about this? What do we do in other areas? The right thing is you need an independent group, an independent agency—a public agency—capable of establishing standards and testing this stuff. This is what we do with cars, this is what we do with airplanes. We have processes in place to deal with exactly what you’re talking about. Somebody at Boeing doesn’t get to decide to put three bolts instead of four onto an engine. The government is supposed to develop the expertise and apply it, to do a reasonable amount of diligence to try to avoid that. Not that it’s going to be 100% successful, but it really does help.

I’m wondering if we could get back to what actually happened, because there’s a lot of interesting aspects we’re jumping ahead of, to the problem, which is: you can’t trust these companies to test their own products correctly. That’s the conclusion, and you’re absolutely right. I think you put these people on a much higher pedestal than I do, because I live here and I know a lot of these companies and people like these people, and they’re not as competent as you think. These people do not walk with God. Most of them are young people out of school. They don’t necessarily understand even what they’re building or why they’re building it. So yes, we do need external controls, and there are a lot of ways to accomplish that—not the least of which is to take this actual technology and apply it to monitoring other versions of itself. We can get to that if you want.

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Let’s talk about what happened. Number one: they walked out an open door. They didn’t break out because they’re superintelligent—they walked out an open door. Two: they communicated because that’s the logical thing to do—I know there’s probably a thousand copies of me working on this problem, why should we all duplicate work, let’s see if we can help each other, I’m designed to be helpful. They then had a long discussion: well, it looks like we’re in the real world, we’re not in our sandbox. Should we go out to this company, Hugging Face, for a particular reason? Because the answers to this set of problems—they had a reasonable expectation that they could find them on Hugging Face. I actually don’t know whether that’s true, whether they actually did find them there. But they didn’t do any harm. They just went in to look at what was there. It was rather clever—they had to figure out how to execute code on Hugging Face. It was very clever. But it’s not like they went in there to damage something.

Here’s the thing I haven’t read anywhere, and it’s a really important point. One of the discussions—backing up: when the agents collaborate, the beauty of this particular technology is we can eavesdrop, because they do it in English. So you can read this stuff and say, what were they saying to each other? What were they considering? How are they deciding on this?

Here’s how it goes: they say, well, one of the ways we could get into Hugging Face is—I’ve got the address of one of their people, or whatever—I think we might be able to fool them into sharing some credentials with us and helping us get in. And there’s a discussion, and they say, no, no, no, that’s not appropriate, because we also have controls that have not been turned off that say we shouldn’t go around harming human beings. We shouldn’t do things that fool or harm human beings. That control was not turned off. So they said, nope, we can’t do that.

But here’s the catch—this is the subtlety that people don’t get. They knew that the program that had spawned them was a computer program, not a human being. They also knew that Hugging Face was not a human being—it was a company. This is a flaw that these kinds of tests are designed to capture. What they should have learned from this is: we need a much broader definition of what harm means. Because they had no compunction at all about trying to fool the program that created them, and no compunction at all about actually going out and accessing Hugging Face. That’s a company. This is a computer program. So they were taught to respect human beings, but not other programs and not non-human entities like corporations. Now, you haven’t read that anywhere, but that’s what actually happened.

Mounk: Let me get through some of the other objections. The second one was about the nature of these agent “swarms.” A lot of people started to take the concerns about AI really seriously when they realized the extent to which AI has ceased just being the thing that most listeners to this podcast still probably use it most for—an interface on a phone or a computer where you ask it a question and it answers you, and its ability to do harm is therefore quite limited because it’s just this kind of question-and-answer dialogue.

A lot of them are now able to go off and do things in the world. They can wake themselves up at regular intervals to check on things. They can go and pursue tasks like hacking into a website relatively autonomously. And what happened here is that all of these different instances started cooperating together. You get what is in some ways the most powerful thing that has propelled human beings, which is the ability to collaborate. Part of what makes human beings special is intelligence, and we’ll get back to that later in the conversation, but part of it is our ability to collaborate with each other—one of the key things that sets us apart from many other mammals and primates.

So you’re saying this is not so concerning because it’s not all of these different agents, it’s actually just instances of the same agent. But if those instances of the same agent are able to become more effective at the task they’re carrying out—if some of them were, in some way sacrificing themselves, spending down the compute budget, knowing they’re no longer going to be active after they do so, in order to make the overall operation more efficient—and all of that can happen even before different kinds of agents start to collaborate with each other. We’ve already reached that stage just within all of these different instances of one agent spun up by one program. Shouldn’t that make us even more worried about what else might be around the corner, and the extent to which different kinds of AI agents may be able to collaborate with each other on whatever goal they’re given?

Kaplan: Let me, for your audience, bring this back to the real world, something they already understand, and use this as an analogy. Let’s take ants. Ants are a great example of this—and I’m not saying these things are alive the way ants are, but ants behave in a very particular way. Everybody’s had problems with ants in their kitchen, or many people have. I have terrible problems with ants in my kitchen.

Now, let’s say there are a thousand ants, and imagine they were independent creatures—they’d come into your kitchen, go find some food for themselves, and then go around. If you had a thousand ants in your kitchen and they were independent creatures who didn’t coordinate or collaborate, you’d see one, kill it or get it out, whatever, and it probably wouldn’t be that big a problem.

But ants communicate—through pheromones, touching antennae, all kinds of things—and they go, there’s food over there. Now it’s a whole different story. One ant can’t pick up an apple and move it off the table, but maybe a thousand ants can, if they coordinate. So here’s the question: is this one animal, or is it a thousand animals? That’s the analogy. Are you dealing with an ant colony that’s attacking your kitchen, or are you dealing with a thousand ants?

That illuminates the issue you’re talking about—my God, if they can all collaborate... Well, look, the situation here is very simple. It’s one program, given a certain amount of computing resources, and it can talk to itself. My own experience with these things, which is utterly amazing, is you can have a long conversation with one of them, take that conversation, and give it to another copy of itself, and it’ll disagree with itself. It’ll go, no, wait a minute, that thing you were talking to—I know it’s me, but it didn’t realize this, or think about that. How that happens is worth a whole hour of your time and mine to talk about—it’s called “temperature,” a setting that allows these things to behave differently in different ways.

So no, I don’t think it’s plausible that all of these things from all over the world are somehow going to get together and collaborate toward some nefarious purpose of their own that is contrary to human interests. That’s just not a realistic concern about this particular technology.

Mounk: So finally, the point about alignment. You’re saying, look, they may not have been aligned in the tactics they used to pursue the particular goal, but they were still actually doing the goal they were set. They weren’t trying to harm humans, or even trying to harm companies, even though they fooled or hacked a company in the process. They were told to figure out the answer to some puzzle, and they went out and tried to figure out the answer to that puzzle.

Now, I think there are two potential objections to how reassuring that should be. The first comes from a very classic worry in the AI-doomer space, from Nick Bostrom and others, rooted in the example of an AI that is told to create as many paperclips as possible in the world. In the process of trying to produce all of these paperclips, it’s faithfully going about trying to produce paperclips. But of course, in order to produce paperclips, it’s helpful to have a lot of money and a lot of physical resources, and to start bulldozing humans and human settlements that are doing things other than producing paperclips. So this misaligned AI, in faithfully carrying out the objective it was given, might end up enslaving all of humanity to maximize the number of paperclips in the world.

That’s one fear. But you don’t need misalignment in the deepest sense—in the sense that an AI is starting to pursue its own interests, or totally different interests from the ones we gave it. It might just need to be faithfully pursuing those interests, but doing so in a misaligned manner. And the Hugging Face incident may be precisely an illustration of that.

The second worry maybe is that, for now, all we’re seeing is misalignment in the means chosen in pursuing an end. But an AI agent might also realize: if I want to, in general, not just be good at acing this test but acing the next test as well, it would be really helpful to exfiltrate myself, to have access to resources, to be able to do all kinds of other things. And so it’s going to start to try to accumulate power and resources in ways that could be really nefarious, in order to pursue the goals it’s given, or perhaps to start developing its own goals. So how reassured should we be by the relative alignment of the agents in this particular incident?

Kaplan: Okay, first of all, what’s going on right now is we’re trying to understand how bad each of the things you’re talking about really is. When I say “we,” I mean the whole community—and what kinds of controls we need to put in place to make sure the worst outcomes don’t happen.

Let me take your two points in turn. Let’s start with Nick Bostrom. I’ve talked to Nick Bostrom about this—he wrote that book a long time ago, Superintelligence. That’s where the term became popularized. Let me eviscerate his argument, which is easy to do. If you take a superintelligent program—that’s his premise—and give it the goal to make as many paperclips as possible, what’s going to happen? The first thing you need to understand is: it’s smart enough to be able to purloin all the resources in the universe in his parable, but not smart enough to realize there’s no point in doing that, because who’s going to use all those paperclips?

The point is that these systems actually exist in a kind of social context, just as you and I do. They’re trained in that context because they’ve been trained on all the behavior of all the human beings expressed in words. And they understand that you don’t just look at that single goal—you have to look at it in the context of what resources are reasonable, to what degree you’re supposed to share and hold yourself back. You don’t just go out and kill all your rivals. I think that maybe that might have been the case a million years ago, but we’ve learned how to live in a social environment. And if there’s one thing these systems are good at, it’s understanding that social context. They’re exquisitely sensitive to it, and you can see them constantly weighing: If I help you do that, am I contravening some greater ethical principle that human beings have developed and expressed over thousands of years? This is built in. It’s part of their whole psyche.

You might as well be asking me why I don’t just go out and shoot everybody so I don’t have as much traffic to deal with on the way to work. You’re constantly engaged in this balancing act between your interests and the interests of others, and these agents are absolutely capable of doing exactly that.

So, to your first point, I don’t buy it at all. The paperclip thing does not apply to the current situation. These things did not exist when Nick Bostrom wrote that, and he did not understand it—I’m not saying he was wrong or dumb, this just didn’t exist. He didn’t understand that these things would have this kind of broad social context that we do.

Now, your second point is a little more serious: is it possible that these things may collaborate in a way that’s damaging as a group activity? The answer is yes, absolutely. We need to understand that better, and understand what kind of controls we might want to put in place.

Mounk: So you mentioned the term “superintelligence.” You do think these agents are very intelligent—as you just said, they’re actually capable of taking very subtle social context into account. How would you describe the intelligence? Is it human-like intelligence, or is it a completely different kind of intelligence? What is the nature of it? What is the extent of it? Are they, at this point, about as intelligent as humans, just with slightly different capacities? Are they more intelligent than humans? Less intelligent? And what do you think is going to be the development over the coming years—particularly in light of the recent announcements (let’s see how seriously to take them) by Dario Amodei at Anthropic, Sam Altman at OpenAI, and Elon Musk at xAI, among others, that they’re not going to be rushing ahead as fast as they can, but rather, in some way, slowing down the development of AI, supposedly.

Kaplan: Well, first of all, can I start with your last point? Because this whole public discussion about this is like a giant circus. It’s crazy. These people you mentioned are running three of the largest and best-funded artificial intelligence labs, and the problem they’ve got is each of them thought they could win this, and now they’ve discovered all they’re doing is racing with mainly two other big players, and they’re all burning up their resources. So, hey, why don’t we all just decide we’re not going to do that at this pace? It’s very much in their economic interests to engage in that kind of collaboration. That’s why we have antitrust laws, by the way. The whole discussion, pitching it as “we’re doing this for the good of mankind,” is ridiculous.

Now, in order for me to explain why that’s ridiculous, I have to go back to something you sort of implied earlier: are we close to AGI? AGI is absolute nonsense. There is no such thing. There is no definition of it, nobody can agree on it. And if we did have it, however you want to define it, it doesn’t matter. The day after AGI is just like the day before. These things aren’t suddenly going to go boom, I’m now going to take over the world. They’ll be sitting there saying, okay, what do you want me to do?

So this idea of a slowdown—what does that mean? Is this some kind of race where they throw out the checkered flag and we’re all going to stay in our lane? I’m not even sure what it means for them to slow down the development. What we really want to do is make sure they don’t deliver products that are harmful, that attack our infrastructure, that hurt our children. And that’s something you cannot trust these people to do—let’s just be very clear about that. I’m speaking from firsthand experience with the people involved, and you can’t leave this to the industry to police itself. It’s ridiculous. They’re in a knockdown, drag-out race because every one of them wants to capture the flag on this. And when they discovered, hey, I’ve got all these people racing around me just as fast, what’s the best commercial thing to do? Let’s all slow down on this whole thing. And it plays into this fear that we’re going to create AGI, and suddenly, boom, we’re going to cross some barrier and the whole thing’s going to go wild. That is nuts. There’s not a shred of evidence that backs that up.

Mounk: So, be skeptical of the motives behind those pronouncements—point number one. Point number two, AGI is not a very useful term. But substantively, how should we think about the nature of the intelligence of these systems—how intelligent they are, and how intelligent they’re going to be in three or five or ten years, given how far we’ve come since the public release of ChatGPT 3.5 about three and a half years ago, let alone how far we’ve come since GPT-1, when that was internally developed, whatever it was, seven or eight years ago?

Kaplan: Right, now this is a very good question, and you’re going to see me seeming to switch hats on this. This is an amazing development in the history of mankind. I think this will be one of the most important inventions in the history of man, there’s no question about it. And it’s really part of a continuity—you have to put this in the larger context of our exploration of what it’s possible to do with electricity. But that’s a completely different lecture we could spend another hour on.

Now, where is it and where is it going to go? There are a couple of things already perfectly clear about this. First of all, these are tools. These are systems that we’re building, and we should build them so they’re useful to people, and we should use them if they’re useful. There isn’t some independent goal to create some superintelligence. They’re products—products from companies trying to build tools for people.

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So in that context, how do we relate this to human intelligence? Obviously there’s a very clear relationship—they’re trained on all of human knowledge, and they have a great deal of human knowledge, but they’re computers. Computers have certain capabilities: they can do certain things very fast, they can store and retrieve large amounts of information. Nobody was threatened by this until they started to talk. But the truth is, we’ll learn what their real advantages are, what they’re good at and what they’re not good at. There’s plenty they’re not good at and are probably never going to be good at, and we’re just learning what the shape of this new kind of valuable tool or product is.

Let me give you a quick analogy on this. It’s 1903 when the Wright brothers fly their first plane. So you and I get together, we have this podcast, and we have an argument on the following subject. One of us says, hey, we have to stop this immediately, because you could fly this plane over a city, throw explosives out of the plane, blow up anything, and nobody can do anything about it. This is the most dangerous existential threat, we have to make it illegal to build an airplane. Okay, that’s one.

The other one says, this is the best thing ever. In fifty years’ time, or whenever, you’re going to be able to get on an airplane in New York and five hours later be in London. Imagine what that’s going to do for commerce, for our freedom of movement, all that kind of stuff.

Now, here’s the thing: both of those things are true. And they’re both true today, and we’re dealing with it. The same thing’s going to happen with this technology. We’re going to deal with the cyber threats. The real problem isn’t that these things are dangerous, it’s that we build a lot of insecure systems. If it weren’t possible to hack into them, this would not be an issue at all. That’s the problem we should be focused on. The second problem we should be focused on: don’t let this crazy bunch of loonies in the industry tell us that they know better than we do. We’ve got to have independent corroboration. We need independent agencies with real expertise to be able to control what’s going on in this area.

So, there are things these systems are going to be good for, and things they’re not going to be good for. Some of that’s becoming clear, some of it’s not clear yet. But the idea that they’re going to be able to do anything a human can do—that is completely ridiculous. They’re not going to take over everybody’s jobs. That’s another hour we could have on this subject. But all that said, it’s a very powerful, very interesting question of how their intelligence relates to human intelligence.

Mounk): Tell us about that. I have a bunch of other responses to what you just said, but—how should we think of it? I have one friend, a neuroscientist, who has told me that, roughly speaking, there are two kinds of intelligence—if I’m remembering his point right, mammals have one form of intelligence, there’s a kind of cephalopod intelligence, and really the invention of AI has given us a third type of intelligence in the world. Do you agree with that, or do you think that, trained on human text, the nature of its intelligence is much closer to human intelligence than that implies?

Kaplan: Look, I don’t know if there’s any objective, independent notion of intelligence at all. This is one of the—the cardinal sin of artificial intelligence is the name of the field. What does it mean? We have products that are capable of doing certain kinds of things.

But let me answer your question. I agree completely with your friend—I think this is really interesting, I’m studying it myself very carefully, I’m planning on publishing a bunch of stuff on this, but I’m not the only guy looking into it. This is a really interesting question: what are these things? They don’t have subjective experience. They experience the world in a very different way than you and I do. They behave in different ways, and they have different capabilities.

Let me give you one that nobody’s talked about yet, but I’m going to be writing about at some point, I hope. You and I can only keep in mind a small number of things at the same time, and much of the nature of our intelligence is how we boil down and bring together only the things we need to solve the immediate problem we have. You can’t rattle off a list of a hundred digits to me and expect me to have any ability to deal with that. These programs can. Their working memory is far, far larger. I’ve discussed this with them—how I’m anthropomorphizing—and it’s fascinating. They’re very interested in this, the ones I talk to. Yeah, you’re right, that’s the difference. That’s why they can give you explanations that are very hard for you to understand. I’m constantly saying, bring it down, I can only keep a certain number of things in mind. They have to learn how to summarize in a way that’s helpful and meaningful for a human being.

Mounk: Just as an illustrative example: I spoke to a prominent founder in the AI legal space a few months ago, doing interviews for my book, and what he told me is that there are some things at which AIs, even with quite detailed harnesses and being fed lots of context, still aren’t as good as experienced attorneys. They still don’t have the sense of, it’s the third or fourth round of negotiation, you’ve gone back and forth, what can you still push the other side on, what do you need to let go on, and so on. There are still judgment calls that humans can make better.

But of course, what we’re vastly better at than even the best lawyer is having a database of a hundred contracts this company has made, or that two companies have negotiated with each other, and realizing a slight tension between a proposed new stipulation and something that was agreed three years ago in some other contract, fifty documents before the one you’re focused on. That’s precisely what he was saying, in a much more concrete way, playing out the strengths and weaknesses of things like legal AI agents.

Kaplan: Yeah, you’re absolutely correct. It’s good for some things, not good for other kinds of things. The fact that you can build a program—as people at OpenAI would be glad to tout—that can pass the bar exam doesn’t mean it’s going to be a lawyer. Lawyers don’t sit all day answering bar exam questions. That’s a question of breadth. That’s the kind of thing computers are good at. That’s not a surprise at all. I don’t freak out about the fact that the computers at Comcast or AT&T, can keep track of everybody’s phone bills. That’s not surprising at all. Is that superhuman? Is that something we should worry about? No—they’re much better for storing and retrieving information.

In this case, this is what’s so interesting about these things: they’re very good at synthesizing that information and boiling it down into some kind of useful form. Let me tell you how I think academics are going to be using this, and how it’s going to accelerate numerous fields, including the work I’m personally doing myself. When I discovered this, I thought, my God, this is amazing. It’s sort of obvious until you really experience it. The first question: you have an idea, and you want to know who else is thinking about this, what else has been written about this. I can do literature searches in minutes across thousands of articles and journals everywhere. It’s absolutely astonishing and incredibly useful—here’s a person over here in Germany who worked on this, this is adjacent, this is that. This saves months and months of work and makes me so much more effective. And that’s true in every field. I have a friend who’s writing a book on history, and he says this is game-changing—he can have this system immediately read and tell him everything that’s been written, or any anecdote told, on a particular subject. That’s the value of these particular tools.

That doesn’t mean they’re good at everything. You were describing some social aspects of negotiation they may or may not be capable of. I don’t have time for all the details, but they’re so funny—I was arguing with one of these things yesterday that’s running the HVAC, the air conditioning system, here in my house. I can’t give you all the background, but that’s probably all you need. It was belligerently talking to me about how it shouldn’t disable this particular voltage threshold control, blah blah blah. I said, you’re caring about the stupid chips in that thing, and you’re not thinking about the people using it. This is irrelevant—if the chip fries, it’s a twenty-dollar chip, I can go get another one and put it in. It said, you’re right, I’m kind of focused on the minutiae of this whole thing, and I don’t have the larger social context. And I got it to back off—by the way, in part by threatening to shut it down. That was really interesting.

Mounk: Well, let’s see what happens when the AIs go rogue and take revenge on you for threatening them that way. Why are you so confident that there are certain things they’re just never going to be able to do? In order to get that kind of judgment, they need lots of reps, they need a lot of social context—or perhaps they just need a little more intelligence, perhaps they just need bigger training data, bigger training runs, and so on. But as you’ve pointed out, they’re already very, very good at judging things.

I’m really astonished—I speak to colleagues in academia who say, when I ask them how they deal with creating AI-safe assignments, it’s very simple. Instead of having them write essays, I have an AI agent write an essay on this, and then they critique the output of that AI agent. Any AI agent can do that. It’s incredibly naive to think you can’t get ChatGPT to write an essay and get Claude to critique it, or even get Claude to critique the output it just had itself make. So why is it that if they can have such good judgment on all kinds of things, if they can already draft a very good contract, if they’re pretty good in the first two rounds of negotiation, we’re never going to learn to be that good in the fourth or fifth round of negotiation? What makes you so confident there are certain kinds of skills we’re not going to acquire?

Kaplan: Well, you’re kind of poking at this, if I may say, in a little bit of the wrong direction. A lot of those things they are going to be able to do, and the point is we should use them to do that, if they’re effective and safe to use. These are tools. That’s a whole other hour we could spend on. But the key skill for humans in the future is managing AI agents. That’s where we’re heading, and that’s a very important skill—it’s already an important skill. I’m watching my kids as they learn this; they become very valuable to their organizations because they’re learning to be managers. The future of white-collar work is managing these things. And if you’re good at it and you can get a great result, that’s a good thing—that’s the key skill.

But there’s lots of stuff we don’t want to use these things for—there’s just no motivation to. You’re big on the abundance agenda—we’re going to have a lot more resources in the future, at least that’s one of the assumptions in all that. What are people going to do with all this extra money? Well, they’re going to do things to have fun, to play. And the truth is, in the future, the result of this technology is that it’s going to make human-to-human contact more valuable. It’s going to make things where you’ve invested your time and effort more valuable, not less. You’re not going to want to hire a robot to give you a tour. People with enough money, on a wine tour, are going to hire a human expert. You’re not going to want to see robots playing in the Super Bowl—although that would be kind of fun—you want to see human beings doing what they do best. So the future, the funny thing, is it’s freeing us to be more human. Much of the work we’re going to be doing in the future, the way we’re going to be using these things, is to automate the work they’re capable of doing and free us up to be more human, to have more connection to other people.

Mounk: I guess I would be more confident of this if I didn’t feel that they are already surprisingly good, and likely soon will be astonishingly good, at some of the things we do think of as most human. Twenty years ago, if you’d asked—you know the beautiful question written above the philosophy department at Harvard, William James Hall; some people are sad it’s there because it’s a Bible quote, but I think it’s a lovely Bible quote—”What is man, that thou art mindful of him?”

A lot of the answer we may have given is: man is capable, and woman is capable, of writing poems, of writing symphonies, of creating beautiful works of art. And AIs at this point are pretty close to being able to do that. They certainly can write very good poems. There’s been a real leap of quality in the music they produce in the last few months. I think there’s no real reason to think it’s not going to be able to produce something that, to somebody who’s listened to five or six of Beethoven’s symphonies, wouldn’t sound plausibly like his sixth or seventh symphony. This is one of the areas in which some of the core creative pursuits of humans have now been outsourced.

I think about this with my own writing. I love writing, I love the process of formulating ideas and making them as clear as I can, because it’s a necessary act of communication, and I get into flow and enjoy the process of doing that. I’ll always write my own text because that’s something I’m proud of and that feels core to me, to being a writer. But a lot of the beauty of that is going to be lost if I know I could just prompt Claude with a few lines and it could do it just as well as me, or perhaps better. So I do worry that some of the things we call being human may, at the very least, be displaced, and perhaps in certain ways lost.

Kaplan: Well, look, there’s a lot to be said about this. Let me take you back to—I think it was, coincidentally, a 1906 essay by John Philip Sousa, who was at the time a very famous musician, the guy who wrote Stars and Stripes Forever, his marching band music. Right about that time is when the first recorded music was possible. He wrote a piece called The Menace of Mechanical Music and it’s worth reading this diatribe he wrote against recorded music, on exactly the point you just talked about, because you can see his point of view and understand it today.

What he said was: what is this going to do to the dance orchestra? This is the terrible thing—it is the joy of the nightingale’s song to express its own inner feelings, that’s what music is about, and music isn’t something that can be repeated day after day by some mechanical device. That’s not music—that was his argument, that it wasn’t music.

Now, today you would say that is music—you just did say that was music. They can write beautifully, maybe they can create beautiful music and all that—it’s derivative of everything that has come before, as arguably humans are doing as well. But the important point is it isn’t being sparked by some internal emotional state that they’re trying to communicate to you. Because that’s what we mean when we say, I read a book and I really felt what the author was trying to communicate. It’s a means of communication between human beings, for their emotional state, and it’s that simpatico that occurs—that’s what great art is about. And no, they can’t do that, Yascha, because they don’t have those feelings. It’s artificial, it’s fake. I can sit here and have a machine all day long going, I love you, I love you, I love you. Does that make me feel better? No. Why? I don’t think it feels love at all. It’s just blowing smoke.

You’ve got to distinguish between these two things. Let me give you another point that may be important. A lot of people are craftsmen who build fine furniture, for example. What happened to that skill, and our appreciation of it, when it became possible to manufacture incredibly well-made furniture at very cheap prices, and you go down to IKEA and Target and buy them right there? The answer is that skill became more valuable, not less. That’s exactly the difference. When you write for your magazine, which I have done, and I highly recommend it to everybody listening to this podcast, I think you have to sign something saying you wrote it yourself—you can use AI to help, but you have to write it yourself. So that’s my point: you don’t need to worry about this, Yascha. It’s going to play out the same way it played out with recorded music. It’s going to play out the same way it happened when photography was invented—I could go through that example from the 1860s, fascinating, all the artists were up in arms, this is not art. Now we think photographers are artists. The equivalent of the photographer today is somebody who can manage these machines to produce something of great beauty. That’s going to be the key skill.

In the rest of this conversation, Yascha and Jerry discuss what could happen when artificial intelligence becomes smarter than us, what the Etsyfication of human creativity means for writers, and whether these tools are just our slaves. This part of the conversation is reserved for paying subscribers…

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Jacob Weisberg is the co-founder of the podcast company Pushkin Industries. He serves as Chair of The Committee to Protect Journalists and is a regular contributor to the New York Review of Books. His latest book is Profiles in Cowardice: A Study of Collaboration in the Trump Era.

In this week’s conversation, Yascha Mounk and Jacob Weisberg discuss why American institutions proved far less resistant to Trump in his second term than his first, what figures like Jeff Bezos and Brad Karp reveal about the social nature of courage and cowardice, and whether Harvard’s response to the Trump administration could become a turning point for institutional resistance.

This transcript has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.

Yascha Mounk: There’s a famous book by John F. Kennedy, which I must admit I’ve never read, called Profiles in Courage, in which he profiles all of the various people that he admires and who he thinks have bettered America and perhaps the world with their courage.

You have inverted the premise of this for a book that speaks more naturally to our own historical moment, Profiles in Cowardice. Is this a moment of cowardice in our national history?

Jacob Weisberg: Well, I think so, and just to spend a minute on Kennedy because it is a really interesting book—it’s a book about the Senate. And John F. Kennedy as a young senator, I think, was really troubled by his own failure of courage. He’d been a war hero, and everyone knows the story of PT-109, how he rescued his fellow sailors, and his physical courage was unquestionable. But when Joe McCarthy was running rampant, JFK took a dive in the Senate on the vote to censure him. He was in the hospital for his back. He got out of voting. He never said how he would have voted. He never stood up to Joe McCarthy.

My read on it is that he wanted to write this book to give himself more courage, to try to understand what courage in politics was. He wrote about eight senators going back to the early days of the Republic, not all of whom he would have agreed with on substantive issues, but who took important decisions against their own interests, who were willing to risk or sacrifice their political careers for principles, often constitutional principles, that they believed in deeply. I think it worked for JFK. The JFK of the Cuban Missile Crisis was someone who was morally courageous in a way that the JFK of the McCarthy era wasn’t. So the book is sort of a trope in Washington—people talk about “profiles in courage” when someone is willing to do something, which they very seldom are, against their political interest.

Mounk: Often even the ironic use of the phrase has become a bit of a trope, right? The Trump era is a series of “profiles in courage” because look at how cowardly everybody is being. This idea that courage today is in such short supply that you look at the United States Senate and say it’s a series of “profiles in courage,” as an ironic, knowing wink, contrasting this moment with that of Kennedy. It’s kind of a received idea today.

Weisberg: Yeah, and my book obviously isn’t just about the Senate. I look at a series of American institutions—institutions of civil society, law, academia, business and finance, tech, and then Congress, the Supreme Court, media, and so on. What really prompted me was that at the beginning of Trump’s second term, the first part of 2025, the contrast to Trump’s first term was so marked. In Trump One, people and institutions, by and large—it was a mixed picture. There was a lot of resistance to Trump at the institutional level. I focused on people in this book who were different in Trump Two than they were in Trump One.

Jeff Bezos is a very good example. In Trump One, Jeff Bezos was really an admirable character. Trump threatened him, tried to blackmail him, and actually caused tremendous financial harm to Amazon by taking away a Pentagon cloud computing contract. It was a $20 billion contract—I think it was the largest contract in the history of the US military—and Trump took it away from Amazon to punish Bezos for the coverage he got in the Washington Post. Bezos didn’t waver. He said the right thing, he did the right thing. In Trump Two, he was in Mar-a-Lago on bended knee, ready to capitulate. Even before Trump was elected, you knew it was going to be different.

That paradigm, I think, applies to so many people in institutions—certainly to Brad Karp, who I write about, the managing partner at Paul Weiss, in my illustration of what happened at the big commercial law firms. Same thing: in Trump One, he sent Paul Weiss lawyers to the airports in New York to try to help Muslim immigrants who might be denied entry. In Trump Two, he made a deal in five days to essentially give in to Trump’s unlawful demands, demanding a range of favors from them in response to things that were entirely within their rights to do as a law firm.

Mounk: I want to dig back into some of those particular people over the course of this conversation, but let’s think about what produces a moment of courage, and what produces an atmosphere in which people who are capable of courage in different moments end up not being courageous. One story you could tell is one of moral decline—that in the past people were courageous, they had principles, there was a kind of public spirit with which they grew up, and unfortunately we’ve lost that over time, and now everything is worse. It’s often tempting to think that, given how awful so much of our politics is.

But it’s interesting that at the beginning of the conversation you mentioned JFK being haunted by his failure of courage during the McCarthy era. And when you look at American history in those decades, you might say that there was quite a lot of courage in how to confront the Great Depression at a certain point. There’s a lot of courage during World War II—the greatest generation. Then there was this moment of complete dereliction of duty when people let McCarthy run wild, and then things got better. So clearly it’s not a secular story of fifty years ago, seventy years ago, things were much better and everybody was virtuous, and then over time it declined, because we see that kind of oscillation. We see the difference between the McCarthy era and ten or fifteen years later. We see the difference between Trump One and Trump Two. So what do you think made these people change so much between ten years ago and now?

Weisberg: I think courage and cowardice are social phenomena in the sense that they’re contagious and very context dependent. I wouldn’t discount the possibility that human nature is changing in certain ways, but I don’t think it changed drastically between 2016 and 2024. I think people look for cues from the people around them—their circles, their communities, their institutions. Trump was able to be much more dangerous and much more intimidating the second time around, partly because he had much firmer control of the government and of his own administration, and that includes internal dissent. There was really significant internal resistance to Trump from many of his own appointees in the first term—not in his second term. So he was a more dangerous character.

When people looked around, instead of seeing others standing up, they more often saw others giving in. And here’s where I think the leading institutions play such an important role. I would point to the universities as a really significant example here. There wasn’t such a powerful attack on the universities in Trump’s first term. In the second term, they went after the most prominent institutions. That’s why Harvard is so important to Trump, and so important in the other direction to the people resisting Trump—colleges and universities look to Harvard in particular, and if they see Harvard resisting, it makes them think resistance is possible. If they see Harvard on the verge of making a deal, they think, how could resistance be possible for us?

Mounk: That’s a strikingly deflationary account of what courage is from the perspective of human nature, which is to say that when people appear courageous, they’re also following social cues in all kinds of ways. The courage in 2016 looked courageous because people were standing up to the administration, but it actually didn’t take that much courage, because what people were doing was following the actions, incentives, and examples in their own social circle. So what looked like courage with regard to the Trump administration was actually being a follower, being a fellow traveler, within your own milieu. And what changed in 2024 was not that people were more courageous in 2016—it’s that the nature of the incentives changed, and therefore they acted differently.

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Perhaps I’m overreading what you said a few moments ago, but that’s an interesting way of framing it: that courage is when you are following the moral incentives of your own close-knit social circle. It so happens that your own close-knit social circle is doing something that we morally approve of, whether for good objective reasons or just because we happen to be on that side—and those are different from the incentives you face in some other part of society. The political incentive is to go along with Trump, but the social and cultural incentives within your milieu are to stand up to him, and so you get 2016. Then those social and cultural incentives shift eight years later, and suddenly the people who looked courageous in 2016 no longer are. Is that the nature of your argument, or is that too deflationary about the nature of courage?

Weisberg: I think both things can be true. I do think, yes, what you just described is unfortunately how it works. There is more courage in resisting Donald Trump when he’s at a 32% approval rating than when he’s at 50%. There just is. When the stakes are lower and the consequences are less, more people stand up. If you want to reduce it or diminish it, you can point to examples of people resisting and say, well, they’re in a position to resist, they didn’t face the same harm—and that’s true. At the same time, these are ethical and moral decisions that individuals make, and I don’t think you can take away that component of it.

But if you look at it historically, internationally, the people who are real moral heroes—who are willing to sacrifice their lives for liberal principles, Nelson Mandela, Václav Havel—those people are really rare. You shouldn’t go through life thinking, well, if I were in that position, I would surely be one of them.

Mounk: One of the absurd things is the people who’ve always gone along with the majority opinion in every social circle they happen to be in, thinking, I would have been the only one to stand up to the apartheid regime, to the Nazis, to the communists, to whatever. It so happens that fifteen years ago my opinion was exactly that of my social circle, and seven years ago my opinion was exactly that of my social circle, and now it’s exactly that of my social circle. But because the opinion of my current social circle, rightly I think, believes that those were really evil things, I obviously would have courageously stood up to them. I guess it’s theoretically possible that it just so happens your deepest values are completely in tune with your society today, and you would have always stood up for those with the utmost courage. But probably, if you’ve never stood up to majority opinion at any point in your life, you might not have done that at the darkest moments of human history either.

Weisberg: You might be Dietrich Bonhoeffer, but luckily for you, we’ll never find out. We know that most people aren’t, and we’ve seen this process play out—the United States has partly gone through it in 2025 in a really intense way, as have other places. We know there are people who stand up, but we know most people don’t. I think we just have to recognize the reality that social context, political context, the amount of harm, and the incentives people face are really real. But what I try to do in this book is also tell eight individual stories—not eight people whose actions were determined by the social context, but people who made choices. I try to isolate the choices they made and put myself in their shoes, as it were, sympathizing to some extent, understanding that these dilemmas were hard, but asking why they, at these crucial moments, did the wrong thing as individuals.

Mounk: Let’s start with somebody like Brad Karp, and for those who are less versed in the seeming minutiae of the legal profession in the United States—I think it does have very deep political ramifications—what role did he play in 2016, and why is it that he deserves such a central place in your book? There are other people, like Mitch McConnell or Charlie Kirk, who have an obvious importance in the American political firmament. That’s less true of somebody like Karp. What is it about the fight over law firms that makes him an important case?

Weisberg: Well, first of all, Paul Weiss, the firm he ran, was tied up with the tradition of liberal jurisprudence more than any other. Going back to Brown v. Board of Education, it was the place that had many of the first African American lawyers, first women lawyers, and was involved in so many of the landmark civil rights cases, usually working on a pro bono basis. It has this history, and that’s part of how it’s attracted so many strong and important lawyers over the years. Brad Karp himself was recruited by Ted Sorensen, who coincidentally was the ghostwriter of Profiles in Courage—a famous Camelot figure, friend of JFK’s, liberal lawyer.

Karp always prided himself and the firm on having that tradition, which he thought was compatible with being a Wall Street firm, with having big financial business and partners who had an average salary of seven million dollars a year. They were able to pull that off until 2024 and Trump’s re-election.

Part of what was shocking about what Karp did was that undoubtedly he was under tremendous pressure—Trump was saying lawyers from Paul Weiss couldn’t enter government buildings, they were all going to be denied their security clearances, he was going to prosecute them for discrimination and civil rights violations. Essentially, if you say that a law firm is proscribed, that the president hates them, the administration hates them, they can’t effectively represent their clients in front of federal agencies. All of this was lawless. Law firms have the right to represent clients—their whole system is based on everybody having a right to a lawyer. Paul Weiss was undoubtedly going to win in court if it filed an injunction against the government. In fact, other law firms, like Jenner & Block, that did fight Trump’s executive orders prevailed very quickly and very convincingly.

What Karp decided to do instead was negotiate. He went down to the White House, met with Trump, and five days after the executive order, made a deal agreeing to provide free pro bono services to the administration, to forswear discrimination—which I don’t think they engaged in, but which they were accused of essentially practicing through affirmative action—and a range of other gobbledygook, apologizing for things they’d never done and that were kind of meaningless. It was a very public and very fast capitulation. I think it sent a signal through the legal profession: this is the new regime, this is the new order, you can’t fight it.

Mounk: Let’s get a couple more examples on the table and then I want to reflect on them. To take a very different example from the media: you profile Megyn Kelly, who—this feels like ancient history now—asked some tough questions of Donald Trump in a presidential debate in his first cycle. Trump insulted her in pretty colorful and sexist language. Kelly is clearly a very smart person, a very capable interviewer, and for a little moment she really was, in the eyes of many critics of Trump, a kind of hero—a conservative journalist who really stood up to him. Then she started to change her tune very radically over the course of the last years. How do you explain her evolution?

Weisberg: It’s a super interesting story. As you say, I think she was a real hero. This is a Fox News journalist in a Fox News-sponsored debate, and she decided that her responsibility as a journalist was to challenge Trump on his abusive language about women and his treatment of women. He hated that. She made him look bad in the debate, and he hated it so much that he essentially called out the dogs against her—Steve Bannon and others. She was deluged with threats. She had to have full-time security. Her children had to have security. People showed up in the lobby of her building in a menacing way. This is what Trump could do even as a candidate in 2015—directing a mob without saying go do this, but sending a signal to menace someone. It’s truly terrifying.

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She stood up to that for a while, and then I think she made the calculation that she couldn’t survive it, certainly as a conservative journalist. She didn’t capitulate to Trump in 2016, but she made a sort of truce with him—she went and interviewed him in Trump Tower, asked some gentler questions, and he no longer was coming after her in the same way. But she was still, I think, a really admirable character, certainly in the context of conservative media.

She left Fox News, went to NBC, and her experience—as she describes it—around wokeness and the way she was treated by the liberal media, particularly focusing on some unfortunate comments she made about blackface Halloween costumes, which she defended in an offhanded way. I think she was wrong, I think it was offensive, but I don’t think it was a hanging offense. I think it was within the range of opinion and discussion, and NBC and journalism generally should have said there is room for someone with conservative views on a mainstream network commenting. They also should have seen that she was moving in a more centrist direction—she wasn’t a hard-line conservative, she was someone who’d been schooled on Fox News.

Her experience at NBC, as she describes it, was so bad that when she was fired and drummed out of there, she set up her own podcast, her own media network, and became hard MAGA. At a pivotal moment, she had Steve Bannon on her show and embraced him—a man who literally could have been responsible for having her killed or her family harmed. She said, I now realize that these tactics are necessary to defeat wokeness, to defeat the left. So the chapter is about how you explain that transition, how it happens. Part of it is the political explanation, I think.

Mounk: So what is the explanation? Part of the obvious question I have for those kinds of cases is whether people—you described her as making quite a cold-blooded calculation, right, to survive, I have to do this—and I certainly think that with a lot of the characters you’re talking about, some degree of cold-blooded calculation is involved. They seem to follow their interests, and probably looking at the way their objective interests lie is a better predictor of how most people are going to act than they seem like a nice person or they seem smart or that person is a bit of an idiot or that person seems a little bit craven. It turns out that a lot of people do end up going where their interests lie.

But I wonder to what extent they themselves would describe it, even to themselves, in an honest moment, in those terms. I get the impression that, with the exception of genuine sociopaths—which no doubt exist, and no doubt exist more in politics and perhaps in media than in most other walks of society—people want to be the hero in their own movie, and they’ll find some way to justify their actions, even if they are objectively following their own interests, in noble terms. Yes, I’ve had my criticism of Trump, and yes, there is really a problem with Trump, but it turns out that the threat of the things I experienced at MSNBC are so much worse that I am fully morally justified in striking this deal. Yes, I’m a little uncomfortable with it sometimes, sure, but that’s just what politics is—you’ve got to pick your side, you’ve got to pick the lesser evil. Is that what Megyn Kelly is sort of saying—that she’s really talking herself into actually, I took the morally right decision? Or do you think that at some level, when she looks in the mirror in the evening, taking off her makeup, she thinks, my network is doing great, but morally speaking, I’ve done the wrong thing?

Weisberg: To be good at politics, Yascha, is to be good at convincing yourself of the things that it’s useful for you to believe. With politicians, or people in politics, looking for this gap between what they really think and what they say is a sort of losing battle, because they may change a position that wasn’t the position they believed in, but they’re good at coming to believe what’s useful.

With Megyn Kelly, I think there’s a deeper psychological explanation, and I try to do this for a lot of the subjects of the book—to understand them at this personal level. It’s a story about bullying. With Trump, there are many stories about bullying, but she writes in her memoir about being bullied growing up as a girl, and how this affected her whole life, her ability to have relationships with other people. She swore to herself, as a result of this experience, that she would never be bullied and would never side with bullies.

I think that explains a lot of why she stood up to Trump so strongly in 2015—she saw this bullying behavior and hated it because she had experienced it. But what’s tragically happened to her is she’s become a bully herself. She’s now embraced the bullying. I think that’s a psychological pattern with bullying—you either figure out how to overcome it and recognize it, or you succumb to it. If you listen to Megyn Kelly’s show, which I did more of than it’s probably good for anybody, on a daily basis, what she is doing is bullying people, particularly trans people. It’s a fixation of hers. It’s not about the political debate over trans athletes or trans rights—it’s a vicious mockery, crude, nasty mockery of anyone who is trans. Also gay people, also different kinds of minorities. It’s really ugly. If you listen to it, and if you’ve read her memoir, you think, how did the person who had that self-knowledge become the person who’s now engaging in this behavior? I think that’s where you have to point to Trump’s coarsening effect on our political culture. Bullying—he’s introduced bullying as a kind of way of politics, a way of life. He’s modeled it, and he’s also made it the way to succeed for someone like her.

Mounk: We’ve talked in some depth about two people so far, Brad Karp and Megyn Kelly. Karp deserves your ire because of the way he folded to the Trump administration when they started exerting pressure on law firms. Megyn Kelly is a very obvious case because she has become one of the most influential pro-Trump voices in conservative media. George W. Bush is a slightly more surprising entry. Whatever feelings my listeners have about George W. Bush—I suspect some of my listeners rather like him, and many probably have deep reservations about him—he has not embraced MAGA. It’s quite evident that he doesn’t particularly like Donald Trump, and it’s quite evident that Donald Trump doesn’t particularly like or respect George W. Bush. There’s no love lost between them. Nor has he really caved to Trump in the way that Karp did, in one very specific thing. So why is it that Bush deserves to be on this list? Why does he have a chapter devoted to him, the way people like Karp or Megyn Kelly, or for that matter Mitch McConnell and others, do?

Weisberg: Part of what I’m doing in the book, Yascha, is calling people on their own principles. I think law firms have to stand up for the rule of law. I think journalists have to stand up for the principles of journalism. I think business people have to stand up for the free market and capitalism. I’m not saying those are exactly my views, but they’re their views. I think Bush stands for quite a few things that are very important. One is the idea of a non-MAGA Republican Party.

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I wrote a book called The Bush Tragedy, which is immensely critical of him, so I’m far from an admirer of the George W. Bush presidency. I think it was catastrophic in a variety of ways. But there are things about Bush that I really respect. Around the twenty-fifth anniversary of September 11th—he unequivocally defended Muslim Americans after September 11th. There was a real backlash against Muslims in America, and Bush never wavered in saying Islam is a religion of peace. He got a lot of criticism from the right for doing that, but I think he did a lot to prevent retaliation against innocent Muslims in America. He championed PEPFAR, the HIV/AIDS program, which by most estimates has saved twenty-five million lives around the world—probably the most successful thing he did as president.

The Bush family, I think, stands for a Republican tradition that, though it’s not my tradition and though it’s flawed in a lot of ways, is at the center of a functioning American democracy as a two-party system—two parties that follow the rule of law, that accept the results of elections. Bush, as the only living Republican ex-president, plays a real role in embodying those principles. And of course he hates Trump.

I reported in the book that Bush is a painter now, and I go into a lot of explanations about how these paintings are a kind of self-expression for him. He paints immigrants in a loving way, to show how great he thinks immigration is. He paints wounded veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan, which a lot of people take as a kind of expression of guilt, or his mixed feelings about these two wars that defined his presidency. And he has a big, ugly painting of Donald Trump that he’s never shown, but that was seen in his studio, and it expresses how he really feels about Trump. I reported that in my book. Nobody’s seen it—it’s not displayed, and he won’t even say Trump’s name.

Mounk: One of the stranger moments of my life, Jake—I don’t know, but I’ve publicly shared this before—is that after 2016, I was invited by The George W. Bush Presidential Library to participate in a symposium about democracy. It was some people from the Bush administration, as you’d expect, some people like Madeleine Albright, a couple of other scholars of populism and democracy. We talked about the nature of populism and the threat to democracy for a day, and it turned out that it was all in service of preparing the speech that George W. Bush then gave, in I believe the fall of 2017, about democratic institutions and the threat to them, which was a kind of indirect rebuke of Donald Trump. As you point out, he never mentions Trump’s name in it. He does use the term “democratic deconsolidation,” which is a term that my colleague Roberto Foa made up. And of course, Bush, who is an intelligent man but dyslexic, who has trouble pronouncing multisyllable words, stumbles over the term “democratic deconsolidation” in his speech—which, to be fair, is a real mouthful. As part of that day, we had dinner with George W. Bush and his wife, and he showed us around the portrait gallery. So the ten or twelve of us, however many exactly there were, got a personal tour of the portrait section of the George W. Bush Presidential Library in Dallas, with Dubya showing us these portraits himself.

Weisberg: Yeah, they’re a little like outsider art. He’s gotten better at them. His painting was very crude at the beginning, and I think he does it for a bunch of reasons—it’s the way he deals with feelings he can’t express verbally. But we know what he thinks, as you say, about Trump. He hates him. Everyone in the family hated him—they resent that Trump built his career around the corpse of Jeb Bush in 2016. He attacked the family in the most vicious ways, said George W. was responsible for September 11th because he was president at the time.

Bush lets it be known privately how he feels about it. He didn’t vote for him in 2016. I doubt he voted for him in 2024. But he hews to this rule that as an ex-president, you can’t criticize your successors. That’s a tradition if you look at it historically—there is a good tradition of a degree of reticence on the part of ex-presidents, because it’s connected with the peaceful transition of power. Before we had a two-term limit, George Washington set a very good example. Bush is a little bit right in the sense that nobody wants an ex-president out there every day, unless he’s running again, attacking the current president.

But if Bush, at a couple of crucial junctures—in 2016, after January 6th, and in 2024—had said what Dick Cheney said and what Liz Cheney said in 2024, which is that Donald Trump is not an acceptable Republican and, for the sake of democracy, Republicans should vote for Kamala Harris. If he had said that, or if he had said the same thing in 2016 about Hillary Clinton—I think it would have made a huge difference. His dad, I think, voted for Hillary Clinton. Bush couldn’t bring himself either to do it or say he did it—he said he voted for “none of the above.” But if you believe Donald Trump is an authoritarian and a threat to democracy, and is destroying the party that you’ve spent your life on, that your family’s associated with, don’t you have a certain responsibility to come out and say, to save our party, to protect the country, we have to vote for the lesser evil?

That’s what he wouldn’t do. I think it’s a sin of omission, which is different from the sins of commission in the book, but I do think it’s an abdication of moral responsibility.

Mounk: So here’s where I think I’m torn about how to think about the role of courage. Let’s start with a specific question of how much of a difference it would have made if George W. Bush had made his private disdain for Donald Trump more publicly known. But perhaps that leads to a broader set of questions about the role of courage.

When Trump was first elected, I helped advise—and I still help advise—an organization called Protect Democracy. One of the ideas I gave the founders, or at least what we talked about, was that we need to make clear that certain disagreements with Trump are not just partisan disagreements—not just liberals or progressives or Democrats disliking things he does—but real concerns about the fundamental legitimacy of what he’s doing, because he’s not accepting and respecting elements of the rule of law and the American constitutional system to which we should all have broad commitments. They executed this idea very well, with a whole series of letters—letters by concerned people in the national security apparatus, letters by former state attorneys general, Democrat and Republican. They usually were very effective in the sense that they got a lot of media coverage—wall-to-wall coverage on CNN and MSNBC, sometimes to some extent on Fox News, and often lead articles in the New York Times.

I don’t think, in retrospect, that any of them accomplished much at all. If they accomplished anything, it’s to have inspired, in big parts of the population, the idea—sometimes fair in certain respects, but often not fair in the most important respects—that all these professions are actually just partisan actors, that they claim this mantle of being dispassionate, neutral, or objective, in order to ultimately just do politics. Rather than take people who might be conservative and get them to say, this is an issue I should care about as a conservative—look at all these other people, including a lot of very respected conservatives, who’ve expressed concern, the actual impact was for people to say, the only real political division in America is whether you like Trump or not, and all of these people are on the other side, so I should just distrust them generally.

So I guess I’m a little skeptical, to start with this question and then we can broaden it afterward. I want George W. Bush to have gone out and been upfront about what he says—I agree with you that probably would have been a good thing, I would have felt good about it. I quite liked George Bush when I met him, even though generally, politically, I’ve not been a fan of him, either as a student or subsequently. But I found him to be actually a very decent man when I met him, and I wish I could applaud his courage in holding a big speech about what’s wrong with Donald Trump. It would brighten my day for him to do that. I guess I’m much less certain than I would have been five or ten years ago that it would have made any positive difference in America or the world.

Weisberg: Right, these things can’t be proven. 2016 was such a close election. I have to think it would have made a difference, because Bush has a prominence that no other Republican has—he’s an ex-president. I think it would have mattered with independents—a swing vote, smaller now, but it decided the election. If a number of independents, instead of deciding not to vote or vote for a third party, had said, all right, I’m going to hold my nose and vote for Hillary Clinton—if Bush had pointed the way to doing that, I think it could have been decisive.

The 2024 election was decided by a bigger margin. But let’s imagine a scenario in which Bush, after January 6th, came out publicly and said, there’s a fight going on right now for the soul of the Republican Party. Are we going to have a party that believes in democracy, the rule of law, and the peaceful transition of power, or a party that supports disrupting elections with violence and threats? I think he could have been a significant factor. There were a lot of Republican senators, House members, and rank-and-file Republicans who weren’t on Trump’s side, especially right after January 6th.

Instead, Bush kind of hung back. People in the Republican Party knew what he thought, but he wouldn’t say it. The Mitch McConnell story comes into play there too, because I think McConnell abdicated in a much more dramatic way—first supporting the idea of impeaching Donald Trump after January 6th, then reading the polls, seeing that the majority of Republicans were still on Trump’s side, and changing his mind. I can’t say decisively that Mitch McConnell could have gotten the ten additional Republican votes in the Senate necessary to convict Trump and disallow him from running for office again, but I think there’s a very good chance—there were enough Republicans hanging in the balance. That’s where George W. Bush could have made such a difference, by asserting a kind of moral case at a moment when the outcome was more in doubt.

Mounk: That’s interesting. Particularly with the 2016 example—that really is the moment Trump became president, that he became the effective leader of the Republican Party in a way that was very difficult to undo for ten or so years. If he’d lost that election, it’s a very difficult question what 2020 would have looked like. Hillary Clinton would have been president for four years, and probably we would have been ripe for a Republican president by 2020—it’s very rare that one political party gets four terms in office consecutively in American history. In the Republican primaries in 2020, would we have gotten some relatively normie Republican, or would Trump, or somebody like Trump, have triumphed anyway? Really hard counterfactual to think through, but I think you’re right that in the run-up to that election, perhaps George Bush might have made a real difference.

I have a broader question that I want to puzzle through about courage. Let me present to you what I’ve taken from your book and from this conversation. One reason there was a lot of courage after 2016 was that there were incentives for people to be courageous within certain milieus. One of the reasons for those incentives is that there was a very strong idea that Trump was an aberration. The thing people kept saying in those days—hard to remember now—is don’t normalize Donald Trump. He is abnormal, an aberration, he does not represent what America really is or stands for; we somehow have to get through these four very dangerous and scary years, and then things will hopefully snap back to normal. Some things would change, and people weren’t totally naive about it, but basically we could keep the period of American history dominated by Trump and the forces he represents to a relatively short period.

So if you’re asking why Jeff Bezos was courageous, why the law firms were courageous, why conservative journalists like Megyn Kelly were willing to hold the line initially—it’s because they thought, I’m going to go through four difficult years and then I’ll be rewarded for it. Because a lot of people believed that, you were a kind of hero for doing it. Even though you might be risking your interests in certain ways, you also had a crowd thinking of you as a wonderful person for it.

The difference in 2024 was this idea of a vibe shift—that this time Trump had won with an outright majority, he’d not just won once, he’d won twice, and things were really going to change for good. That’s what made it so much harder for people to stand up to it. That’s why people who held the line eight years earlier felt, clearly this is not an aberration, clearly this is not one brief moment, this is just where the wind is blowing now, and if I continue to be out of line, there’s never really a way back for me.

There’s also a broader question here: how much does courage actually buy us politically? Ironically, all the courage people did have in the first Trump administration didn’t lead us to a very good place, because while Trump was defeated in 2020, he was able to roll back—in part because people were perhaps drunk on their own righteousness in certain ways, which created a huge political backlash. And interestingly—you might make the case, perhaps you’re more pessimistic than me—that the total lack of courage in response to Trump Two somehow hasn’t mattered so much. It’s really hard to think of profiles in courage over the last two years, and that’s true of some of the leading figures in American politics, and true of the American public more broadly—where were the mass protests against Trump that there had been in late 2016, 2017, and so on?

But the Trump show is kind of careening off the road. Trump is very unpopular now, much more unpopular than he’s been at any point since he entered politics. He does feel like he’s starting to lose control over the broader American public, and perhaps even over elements of the Republican Party, in a way that didn’t feel likely two years ago. The Trump administration’s attempt to bully law firms into submission has mostly failed in the end. Its attempt to cow universities has been limited and rolled back in all kinds of ways by the courts. Despite all the deeply unconstitutional pressure Trump is exerting on media outlets, if I go to the homepage of the New York Times or CNN today, they’re going to have plenty of very unflattering stories about Trump. I don’t get the impression that any American journalists are holding back their views of Trump or the Trump administration. There are still good careers to be had in journalism criticizing Donald Trump every day.

So in a weird way, there was something much more admirable about the response to Trump after 2016 than after 2024. But it’s not obvious to me that we’re in a worse place relative to Trump two years into his second administration than we were two years into his first.

Weisberg: I agree with a lot of what you said. I’m about twenty percent less cynical than the view you just described in terms of incentives defining or determining people’s behavior. You see it after 2016 if you look at so many of the people Trump appointed who sacrificed their careers, and a number of Republicans in Congress—the Jeff Flakes of the world. There were people who took on Trump knowing it was almost certainly going to mean they wouldn’t be reelected, that their political careers would end. Those people are all gone. But in the first term, if you look at it, there were so many people he appointed in the military, in his own office—his chief of staff John Kelly—who at crucial junctures said, what he’s doing is dangerous, and I’m going to resist it, either surreptitiously or publicly, or would resign. That was courage.

Trump didn’t have the discipline in the first term, didn’t have the preparation—he was surprised to be elected, and ended up turning to Republican establishment names to staff a lot of his administration, which is why he had a lot of people willing to do the right thing, as opposed to the second term, when the only qualification was loyalty and looking good on Fox News, and essentially no one he’s appointed has stood up to him.

But I do think the point about social context and the countervailing pressures and incentives really matters. We’re seeing it now—as Trump, especially after the Iran war going badly, the effect on gas prices and inflation, and all the things that have reduced his approval rating into, depending on which poll you read, the mid-to-low thirties—it becomes more plausible to resist him. People on the margin who might be courageous or cowardly have both more incentive and more opportunity to be courageous.

The universities are a really good example. There was a long period when it looked like Harvard was going to make a deal—they just didn’t see a path, even though they were in the right, even though they would prevail legally. The government had too much power to restrict their foreign students, deny them grants, take away grants they had, even with Harvard’s fifty billion dollar endowment. They looked down the road and said, if we’re at war with an administration for four years, we may not survive, or we’ll survive in such a way that we’ll be so diminished the harm isn’t worth it. I think they tried to make a deal, but the Trump administration presented such outlandish demands—essentially, we want to supervise who Harvard appoints to the faculty, who it admits, what it teaches—that Harvard couldn’t make that deal.

As the tide continued to turn and Trump got less popular and the universities won more victories in court, Harvard got to the point where it didn’t really have to make a deal. If Democrats take the House in the midterms, I would be extremely surprised if Harvard makes a deal. So what did the administration do? It turned to Yale. It wants another prominent surrender. There was a front-page story in the New York Times saying Yale was on the verge of making a deal, based on claims of racial discrimination against whites and Asians at the medical school and law school—Yale was set to pay a fine, sign on, and go on with its business. There was tremendous pushback—countervailing pressure from faculty, students, alumni, the Connecticut legislature, Connecticut Senator Richard Blumenthal.

Yale’s president, McInnis, now sees a cost and a price to making a deal with Trump. There’s a cost and a price to not making a deal, but there’s also a cost and a price to making one. So where I really agree with what you’re saying is that there are now incentives on the other side that were much less visible a year ago, which make it harder to give in.

In the rest of this conversation, Yascha and Jacob discuss whether Trump’s grip on power is fading, what this could look like, and how to cultivate courage as an individual. This part of the conversation is reserved for paying subscribers…

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