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[upbeat music] Oh.
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[upbeat music] [groans] Now, ladies and gentlemen, uh-
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Can I please have your attention? Can you dig it? [crowd cheering]
Jonah Goldberg
Greetings, dear listeners. This is Jonah Goldberg, host of the Remnant Podcast, brought to you by The Dispatch and Dispatch Media. Very excited for today’s… He’s technically not a new da- new guest, but he’s a new guest for me. I was traveling once, and Brother Starwalt had today’s guest on to talk about, among other things, the, the bogiosity of, uh, rural rage. You might wanna go back and check that episode out. I met our guest, Tyler Austin Harper. The fact that all serial killers and presidential assassins have three names should not freak anybody out.
Tyler Austin Harper
[laughs]
Jonah Goldberg
I met him speaking at Bowdoin College, where he was my interlocutor. We kind of hit it off and just did a lot of nerding out on
Jonah Goldberg
just nerdy intellectual history stuff. He’s a staff writer at The Atlantic. Prior to that, he was a professor of environmental studies at Bates College, where, as one would expect of environmental studies professors, he taught courses on [laughs] literature, film, and the history of science. Is… Was this a boutique understanding of what environmental studies meant?
Tyler Austin Harper
Well, the great thing about environmental studies, if you’re a humanities person, is everything has the environment in it, right? So, like, I would teach courses on Ja- you know, I teach Jaws in my courses. Like, you know, shark is in the environment, right? So-
Jonah Goldberg
Sure. Sure
Tyler Austin Harper
… yeah, as, as a, as a, uh, you know, educator, it’s, uh, good to be in those interdisciplinary programs, because they’re pretty capacious, and you can usually chase whatever particular whims you have or find reasons to justify, you know, why you wanna teach things you like. Uh, so-
Jonah Goldberg
So you could just blow the doors wide open on the real environmental state of Walden Pond-
Tyler Austin Harper
Exactly
Jonah Goldberg
… for example.
Tyler Austin Harper
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Jonah Goldberg
Okay. His writings appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Slate, Jacobin, um, and other outlets. He has a PhD in comparative literature for NYU, and he is a co-host of the podcast, Time to Say Goodbye. Tyler Austin Harper, welcome back to The Remnant.
Tyler Austin Harper
Yeah. Thank you, man. It’s good to be here.
Jonah Goldberg
As I warned you, I have no grand agenda. I… and I did tell you in, in advance, I’ve been looking for a,
Jonah Goldberg
a- a- atypical sui generis, uh, fun lefty that I can bat about. So I’m not going to hold you accountable-
Tyler Austin Harper
You got it
Jonah Goldberg
… to every crazy left-wing thing, but I may ask you to explain some of them, and-
Tyler Austin Harper
Sure
Jonah Goldberg
… and, and you defend what you wanna defend. On that front, so I just wrote my LA Times column about this. I hate,
Jonah Goldberg
with a blinding passion, the cycle of hypo- hypocrisy policing that happens any time there’s political violence.
Tyler Austin Harper
Mm. Mm-hmm.
Jonah Goldberg
Insofar as I have not seen a person who has come out and said, you know, like, “There are a bunch of right-wingers who want Jimmy Kimmel fired, but if the situation had been reversed and it was a right-wing political actor, these would be the first people saying, ‘We can’t go all PC,’ blah, blah, blah, blah, blah,” and you go, just go down this list. And the problem with the hypocrisy, it seems to me, isn’t the hy- inconsistency itself. It’s that it gives permission structure to partisans to say
Jonah Goldberg
the other side is in favor of political violence when it’s on their, for their cause, and, um, and they only condemn politi- violent rhetoric when it’s from the other side.
Tyler Austin Harper
Yes.
Jonah Goldberg
And I brought up two examples of this that predate the White House Correspondents’ Dinner shooting, and then I’ll shut up. One was the discourse about Nick Fuentes-
Tyler Austin Harper
Mm-hmm
Jonah Goldberg
… and the other one’s the discourse about, uh, Hasan Piker. Now, I have no brief for either of them. I think both of them should be beyond the pale of polite discourse. But you have Democrats saying, like Ro Khanna and others saying they’re not apologizing for appearing with Hasan Piker, saying that, uh, we shouldn’t have purity tests. And then you have people like J.D. Vance saying about Nick Fuentes or Fuentes’ fans and defenders saying, “Of course, I don’t agree with everything he says, but we shouldn’t have purity tests.” The whole idea of a purity test assumes
Jonah Goldberg
100% agreement, and that’s not what a… It’s a sort of a intellectual stolen base, right?
Tyler Austin Harper
Mm-hmm.
Jonah Goldberg
‘Cause it imagines, like, if it’s not 99 and 44/100% pure like Ivory Soap in agreement, then we’ve gotta throw people out. That’s not what people are talking about. People are saying, “Okay, here’s the zone of the permissible, and here’s the zone of the not permissible, and if someone falls outside of that…” Like, I’m not gonna hang out in a tent with a left-winger or a right-winger who says the world would be better off if my family was in an ashtray at Auschwitz.
Tyler Austin Harper
Right. Yeah. That’s pretty reasonable.
Jonah Goldberg
How do you think about all of this stuff?
Tyler Austin Harper
Yeah, I mean, the first thing I would say is I would distinguish arguments about purity tests or, you know, no enemies to the left or no enemies to the right, as it is sometimes called, from arguments around platforming. So I think it is one thing to say, “Oh, we can’t criticize Fuentes,” or, “We can’t criticize Piker because we’re in this moment of grand political contestation, and so we can’t afford to, like, clean house or, or have those particular arguments.” I think that’s completely nonsensical. But at the same time, I think that’s a different question of whether it’s okay for politicians to go on-… people’s shows who have big platforms that millions and millions and millions of people are already listening to, and contest their ideas. And I, I think on both sides of the aisle, there is this sense that ideas are somehow contagious, and that if you show up and argue with somebody, that you are going to get, like, secondhand bad ideas from them. And that’s just not how argument or debate works. I mean, if you are somebody who thinks Hasan Piker is a moron, um, and beyond the pale in a whole host of ways, and there are certainly people who do, a- and if you’re a smart person who has the strength of your conviction, then go on and make his ideas look silly. You know, I would argue that there is, I think, and l- I, I would say I’m not a Hasan Piker guy. I have no special, um, rancor directed toward him. He’s not somebody I listen to. I think I view him as an entertainer and a kind of shock jock, is how I, I think about the category of figure he is, and I think, um, and that’s true of Fuentes, I think, in a, in a different way for people who listen to him. But Fuentes is somebody who makes horrific statements on a routine basis about Jewish people, Black people, et cetera. I disagree with a lot of things Hasan Piker has said in the past. I thought his comments about 9/11 were horrifying. I think his flirty embrace of authoritarian states overseas like China, I find baffling. Like, I am not a pro-China leftist. I think that’s bananas. Uh, it’s, you know, an authoritarian country that locks religious minorities into camps. So, I mean, that is, you know, those are not my foreign policy views. However, Hasan
Tyler Austin Harper
has made efforts to say, “Look, antisemitism is a real problem, X, Y, and Z,” and, like, those are sorts of statements that you just do not get from Fuentes, uh, ever. And I think Hasan has said things I really disagree with, that I find offensive and morally objectionable, but, but I do think there is a, a qualitative difference between, between the two of them. At the same time, I have no problem with politicians saying, “I’m not doing Hasan Piker.” I think it’s fine. What I do have a problem with, though, is the selective application of standards in the media. Gavin Newsom had on Steve Bannon on his podcast, a man who is an antisemite and a racist, and I think more importantly, has advocated for Trump serving a third term and trying to undermine, openly undermine the 2026 midterms. Uh, Gavin Newsom has him on because Gavin Newsom is coded as a kind of moderate, sensible Democrat. The fact that he’s sparring with Steve Bannon, that’s so, you know, this election denier who’s trying to subvert American democracy, well, that’s okay. It’s just political pragmatism, right? But if Ro Khanna or somebody wants to talk to Hasan Piker, um, that is somehow behind the p- beyond the pale. So from my point of view, it’s like, just tell me what the rules are. Like, I don’t care about Hasan Piker one way or the other, but, like, in what world is Steve Bannon okay for p- uh, you know, on the Democratic side of the aisle for people to, to converse with, but Hasan Piker is not? Like, I just wanna know, what are the rules? I wanna feel like those rules are consistently applied. And I think a lot of my frustration with this whole discourse is just it’s so transparently about political cynicism and, and, uh, not a sincere effort to establish, like, what are the p- moral parameters on the Democratic Party. It’s just, you know, yeah, it’s, it’s just cynicism. So I don’t disagree with you, but I just, I find, I just find the whole thing exhausting, to be honest with you.
Jonah Goldberg
Yeah, no, look, I agree it fucking exhausting, which just makes me, uh, trepidatious somewhat to, to, to go for a second round. But just to push back on a couple things.
Tyler Austin Harper
Yeah, go for it.
Jonah Goldberg
I agree with you on a bunch of things, but first of all, the whole argument, which I am happy to concede, that Fuentes is worse than Hasan Piker, okay. That, that, that doesn’t bother me. It’s like, to me, it’s analogous, I use this point all the time, is there is a very serious intellectual debate, historical debate about who was worse, Stalin or Hitler.
Tyler Austin Harper
Mm-hmm. Yeah.
Jonah Goldberg
Now, because the Holocaust is coded as this moral, this unique moral horror of the 20th century, Hitler usually wins, and, you know, Menace II Society Goldberg, that doesn’t bother me in the slightest.
Tyler Austin Harper
Sure, sure, sure. Yeah.
Jonah Goldberg
That there’s just something about the most advanced, industrialized, enlightened country in the world going to systemized slaughter of concert violinists and what- Okay, that’s great. So Hitler’s worse. Being almost as bad as Hitler [laughs] should not be, be turned into this binary that you’re not bad then, right? I mean, like, Hitler was supposed to be the 10 on badness, and the idea that somehow if you only make it to nine, you’re therefore free and clear, I just don- That logic doesn’t work for me. I’m not saying it’s your logic, but it’s, it’s, it’s a rhetorical point you find all over the place, that if you can just prove that so-and-so isn’t as bad as the bad guy on your team, therefore there’s nothing wrong with my guy, and I want higher standards for that all over the place. I could have used Tucker instead of Fuentes, and I think you can make an argument that Hasan Piker is worse than Tucker, but I also am totally sympathetic to people who say, “No, it’s the other way around.” You know, we can have diff- x and y axis about influence versus idea. Fine. They’re all bad, as far as I’m concerned. The second problem I’ve got with that is with, with, with your… Or the ob- the second objection I have is that,
Jonah Goldberg
look, I agree with you. If Ro Khanna had gone on Hasan Piker’s thing and said, “Look, what you’ve said about Hamas is simply beyond the pale and unacceptable, and I’m here to challenge you on it,” I’d have a lot of respect for Ro Khanna. Ro Khanna doesn’t want to go on Hasan Piker’s show or meet with, with him to contest Piker’s ideas. He wants to court Piker’s fans. The just shining [beep] of The Heritage Foundation’s defense of Tucker having Fuentes on was you had Kevin Roberts going on saying, “We’re gonna contest these ideas. This is what the First Amendment is all about.” But Tucker didn’t contest Fuentes’ ideas. He gave him a softball interview. The only hard interview that Tucker has given, to my knowledge, in a c- last few years, was of Ted Cruz.Right? But when you have Holocaust deniers on, he’s like, “Oh, tell me more. That’s interesting.” And so the debate about how the First Amendment’s supposed to work about combating ideas, and you can go talk to evil people or bad people or wrong people or liars, it’s a bit of a bait and switch because that’s not the dynamic that’s going on here. And if you’re seeking the endorsement and support of bad people and then doing this Motte and Bailey thing of running back and saying, “Well, this is just about how the First Amendment works in the marketplace of ideas,” that’s a d- not a defense for what these guys were actually doing.
Tyler Austin Harper
I think there’s two g- genres of argument here that are being wheeled out, uh, depending on the circumstance, right? Uh, which is that, like, “Oh, yeah, these people are objectionable, but we have to, like, First Amendment, blah, blah, blah, rational debate, have the arguments,” et cetera. Then the other argument, which, which you mentioned, you know, Ro Khanna wants the audience, right? I think that’s true, um, is like, look, this … We have the media ecosystem we have. These people have millions of followers. I don’t agree with them on a lot of things, but we are in a political emergency in this country where we are in the grip of authoritarianism, and we need all the support we can get. And if I have to hold my nose and go on a show, uh, and avoid the, the things I disagree about to focus on the things I do to hopefully peel off some of that audience because the stakes are so high. That’s, that’s an argument I also understand, but again, I, I just circle back to what are the rules? And, and for me, it’s frustrating as, you know, somebody on the left side of the aisle who generally votes for Democrats. We just went through a year after the election of the Democrats needed Joe Rogan. The Democrats needed Joe Rogan. And setting aside that they had a Joe Rogan and then pushed him out by being insane, uh, but, like, setting that-
Jonah Goldberg
Rogan voted for Bernie Sanders in ’20, right?
Tyler Austin Harper
Right. Exactly.
Jonah Goldberg
Yeah.
Tyler Austin Harper
Setting that whole thing aside that you had Joe Rogan and then you exiled him. But Joe Rogan had, I believe, Daryl Cooper, who flirts with Holocaust denial, on his podcast. None of these Democrats in the sort of establishment wing are saying, “Oh, don’t do Joe Rogan,” right?
Jonah Goldberg
Right.
Tyler Austin Harper
So again, it’s just like, what are the rules? It seems that the establishment Democrats have one set of rules for, um, centrist-coded people or, or even conservatives, right? Bannon is okay, Rogan is okay, et cetera, but then another set of rules for people on the sort of left populist side of the aisle. Yeah, I just … Again, I, I, I think if we’re going to take principled stands, and I am a, a moralizer, so I think we should take principled stands. But
Tyler Austin Harper
I just wanna feel that those are applying to everyone in the political tent [chuckles] and not just, you know, uh, we’ll make all sorts of exceptions for bad behavior if it’s coming from the center or the right. But when it’s coming from the left, well, we have to, you know, morally preen our feathers and, and get up on our podium and, you know, shake our fists and, and I just have no patience for that, even as I don’t entirely disagree with you about … You know, uh, there are a lot of things Hasan Piker says that I don’t like. There are some things he says that I do like and think are very sensible. I don’t think he’s a hateful and evil person. I just think he’s wrong on foreign policy broadly conceived. I mean, excepting a couple, couple issues, but certainly wrong on sort of China and some other things. Uh, but yeah, I, I don’t know. I just, I want the rules to be applied evenly, and I think that’s why this discourse is so galling.
Jonah Goldberg
Yeah, I mean, look, I, I, I’m very sympathetic to the idea of clear rules for everybody, right? That’s fine. I just do wonder sometimes whether or not the problem is trying to come up with that in politics where
Jonah Goldberg
you’re ne- you’re just, y- you’re always going to … An era of nutpicking, right? And, and, and out-group homogeneity where we think all Democrats are alike and, and, or all Republicans are alike or whatever. All you need is one outlier. I remember when the second as- th- the Butler, PA assassination attempt on Trump, Jesse Waters, he sticks out in my memory just because he’s so unctuous, but, like, there are lots of people who are saying this. Uh, the Trump sons were saying this too. “They want to kill you,” right? And the they meant you-
Tyler Austin Harper
Mm-hmm
Jonah Goldberg
… Chuck Schumer-
Tyler Austin Harper
[laughs]
Jonah Goldberg
… and every other Democrat because of one deranged loser doing this kind of thing. And so this idea of one size fits all things, which as a Hayekian kind of guy, I very much like cl- simple rules for complex society kind of stuff. I just wonder if the better way to do it is just simply have politician … ha- have an expectation that politicians
Jonah Goldberg
can defend whatever rule they’re following. You know what I mean, right? It’s like, like, I don’t … I mean, Christopher Hitchens wasn’t a politician, but, like, Christopher Hitchens could give you an argument about why he would go talk to the craziest, weirdest people and be able to defend himself because he had a well-thought-through way of thinking about these things. I think John McCain could, could do that to a certain … Certainly Daniel Patrick Moynihan was capable. There are people who could do that. My friend Ben Sasse in his day, you know, could, could do that. I think the problem is that an enormous number of politicians, they just simply rely on pretext and solidarity arguments rather than arguments, right? L- and that’s what makes the inconsistency and hypocrisy stuff seem so annoying.
Tyler Austin Harper
I think that’s totally right. Actually, I agree with that completely. I mean, it’s, um, never clear what animates the set of decisions beyond political convenience, and political convenience is itself an argument. So again, if your argument is like, “Look, brass tacks, these people have an audience. We need to win, so we can do good things for the American people. I don’t like it, but, like, I don’t like a lot of things about the way our society’s organized and them’s the breaks, right? This is just what you gotta do.” Like, that is, that is an argument. That’s a certain kind of ethic. That is, that can be consistently applied. But I think you’re right. It’s apparent often that these are … you know, these people are weather vanes who are constantly putting a finger up, uh, to the wind to see which side of that finger gets cold so they know where the wind is blowing and, and making their decisions accordingly. And so I, I, I don’t disagree with that point, and I think it’s part of an obvious character deficit in American politics, which is not a novel observation but is certainly, uh, an evergreen one.
Jonah Goldberg
I’m not gonna ask you to defend Hasan Piker any further.
Tyler Austin Harper
Yeah.
Jonah Goldberg
Um, w-we all know what a running dog communist you are. No, I’m just kidding.
Tyler Austin Harper
[laughs]
Jonah Goldberg
But, um, but you know, one of the things that Piker claims to be is a Marxist, right? Uh, with, with Maoist flavor, which, you know, for that extra tangy evil. I know you like… I wanna say like Marx. You, you have, you fi- you have, you find Marx useful, and the Marxian framework helpful. I’m with you as far as those claims go, but, like, how much headroom there is, uh, you know, left over once you hit the point of diminishing returns of Marx’s utility, we probably disagree on. But it is useful. Si- simply by virtue of his influence, it’s useful to be familiar with Marx and do- and read some Marx, and sometimes he could be a really good writer, and sometimes not. So I guess what I’ll do, I’ll do this in two parts. One is, what does it say about left of center people who I think are absolutely legitimately concerned about the th- the threats implicit and explicit posed by Trump and some of his super fans to democracy, norms, rule of law, all of that. Those are perfectly legitimate concerns. How far you take them, reasonable people can, can differ.
Jonah Goldberg
But o- all of that democratic norm discourse, how do you square it with
Jonah Goldberg
a, someone like a Piker and other people who call themselves Marxists who… Look, Marx was not a Democrat, right? There is social, there is social democracy, which is influenced by Marx, but, like, Marx himself and Mao, not a Democrat, right? The Marxist regimes that go by the name Marxist regime rather than social democratic regime were post-liberal before post-liberal was cool.
Jonah Goldberg
And then, so secondly, like, put Piker aside and just yourself,
Jonah Goldberg
where do you find Marx to be
Jonah Goldberg
the a- the most useful, at his most useful in illuminating the problems that we see today? You can take it anywhere you want.
Tyler Austin Harper
Yeah. So responding to that, I mean, I would say there are as many varieties of, uh, Marxism as there are people who claim to be Marxist. I mean, there is nothing on the planet that leftists love more than having bizarre doctrinal fights about matters of esoterica. I, uh, I won’t speak for Hasan Piker’s views, as I, I, like I said, I don’t listen to Hasan Piker very much, and so I’m not, not, uh… I couldn’t speak to them. But what I will say is that I am not a, uh, Orthodox Marxist or, or revolutionary Marxist, right? I don’t think… Uh, I don’t militate in favor of the dictatorship of the proletariat, the withering away of the state, and the installation of a communist utopia of milk and honey. Um, I am basically a sort of bland Berniecrat for the most part. But I am a Marxist in a kind of methodological sense, which I think, uh, by which I mean that I think Marx provides the best account of the relationship between the economy and culture and society and culture and politics. And I think as a journalist and as somebody who writes about culture and as somebody who writes about politics and society, I think as a starting point, where I begin is from the assumption that, uh, as Marx would have said, the, the ruling ideas are the ideas of the ruling class. So, so the ideas that are powerful, that are circulating at a time in society or, or within certain corners of society are often, not always, but are often, um, ideas that are somehow conducive to ruling class interests. Sometimes that, that is explicit and pretty obvious. I think AI is a really clear example of this, where we’re having this shoved down our throats, and it’s very clear whose, uh, interest the, the AI cultural push comes from. But other examples are, are less obvious. I’ve, I’ve written about wokeness as one of these ruling class kinds of ideologies that was actually, uh, very… E-even as it was dressed up in radical language and, and often even sort of, quote-unquote, “anti-capitalist language,” um, it was a really useful way for the elite to take some of the pressure off, allowing them to cosplay as good people who are interested in the benefit of soc- betterment of society, um, and who use that kind of progressive social justice cultural rhetoric to bleed attention away from financial crisis and simmering economic discontent, and to redirect it toward cultural issues, right? My joke is always that, you know, the concern was not BlackRock, the concern was that the correct, uh, the demographically appropriate percentage of Blacks work at BlackRock, right? And so that is the sense in which I’m a Marxist. I, I start from the presupposition that ideas and economies intersect, that, that ideas are usually downstream from the economy. Which doesn’t mean that in the last instance, every single cultural war, debate we have, et cetera, is a mere reflection of, of material conditions or economic reality, or what Marx would have called the base or whatever. I think there’s a complex interaction between those things. But I, I do just think if, if you are not attentive to those dynamics, you’re probably getting something wrong. And as somebody who comes out of higher education, this is a place I think you can see this really acutely. I agree with a lot of conservative critiques of higher education. I agree that there is a degree, a, a strong degree of ambient censoriousness, that there is a, uh, pretty narrow restrictions on speech that are informal, if not always formalized, but very deeply felt, um, that there have been forms of biases against, you know, white applicants for jobs and Asian applicants for jobs in service of various kinds of social engineering schemes. I, I, I agree with a lot of those points. I agree that grade inflation has, has, has gotten out of hand, that colleges are, are too soft, that their standards have dropped, there’s a lack of rigor. I think all those conservative complaints are right, but I think, um, and this is, uh, why I think these kinds of frameworks can be helpful. I think what conservatives get wrong is they, they treat a lot of this stuff as a battle of ideas where the wrong ideas won, right? Like wokeness won, softness won, anti-Americanism won. It was a battle of ideas. Our ideas didn’t win, and now look where we are. And those ideas are downstream from concrete material conditions that, that produced them and that made, made the time ripe for them, right? Just to give you one example I’ve been thinking a lot about lately is, is grade inflation, right? Conservatives want to say, “Oh, everyone’s getting an A at all these elite universities. It’s because the professors are soft and woke and whatever.” And it’s like, no, it’s because for US News and World Report ranking-Time to degree. In o- in other words, uh, whether or not you complete a degree in four years is an extraordinarily important metric for determining your ranking, because parents do not wanna pay for a college where the average graduate takes five or six years to complete their degree. So time to degree, getting people on four years, super important for college rankings. And so the reason there’s so much pressure not to fail students, so much pressure to give As, is really just about getting students out on time because that determines the college ranking, and the college ranking in return determines donations coming in. Because parents and alumni don’t wanna donate to schools, right, that are dropping in the rankings. So if you don’t understand the way that something like grade inflation, which might seem like a soft left-wing cultural issue, is related to this underlying set of economic incentives, then you’re, then you’re completely misunderstanding what the problem is or, or how to fix it. Um, the last example I- I’ll give before I stop rambling about Marx is, you know, artificial intelligence. Um, when I was in college, cheating was a, a death sentence, right? Like if you got caught cheating, at minimum you were failing the course, you were probably gonna be suspended from school for a semester, and you might even be expelled depending on the kind of college you were at. Now, with AI, uh, I have a lot of friends still in academia who basically can’t fail students even for a course or assignment if they catch them cheating, where the, somebody from student affairs will say, “Well, they’re having a really hard time. Can you give them a do-over? Can you actually just like let them rewrite the paper themselves and, and give them a good grade for it rather than failing them, let alone expelling them?” And so that is a clear instance where our moral ideas about propriety and, and academic integrity have changed in response to underlying economic and technological changes. We have this new thing, which is artificial intelligence, and that’s changing our assumptions about what is, what is moral, what integrity looks like, um, and what the standard should be. And so again, I’m not dogmatic. I don’t think every single culture war is explained by underlying economic circumstances. But I do think that’s a pretty good starting point, and I think a lot of the muddiness in our political discourse stems from just operating in this purely battle of ideas space, you know.
Jonah Goldberg
Yeah. So I agree with a lot of that. Th- it’s a running theme on here that I’m sort of a broken record about it, about how a lot of ideas are lagging indicators rather than leading indicators, and the technology often drives things. Like, I mean, I, I guess where the Venn diagram between us would overlap is that when I say technology, you say means of production. That makes it more of an eco- economics thing. That’s fair. All right. So the idea that class interests drive a lot of things,
Jonah Goldberg
we attribute it to Marx.
Jonah Goldberg
I understand why we attribute it to Marx.
Jonah Goldberg
It’s not like Marx invented that idea, right?
Tyler Austin Harper
[laughs] Sure.
Jonah Goldberg
And, um, you know, you go back to Cicero or whoever the Roman jurist he was quoting, you know, he’s the guy who sort of popularized cui bono, right? You know, like who benefits, right? And that mode of thinking, I think, is as old as the city state. Um, like, “Oh, this happened. This benefits that faction. It must have been the Etruscans,” or whatever, right? That kind of thing. And the idea that the rich benefit from things is very, very old as well, right? I’m not attributing this to you per se, but my, pa- part of my problem with Marxist discourse, including from the vulgar Marxist to the sophisticated vibes Marxist, and I, I think you’re more of a vibes Marxist, is intentionality.
Tyler Austin Harper
Mm-hmm.
Jonah Goldberg
And I… You know, first of all, a lot of the unintended consequences of technology were exactly that, unintended, right? Like the, Henry Ford, he may not have liked the Jews, but like, and he may have had some weird political ideas beyond that, but the things that the car did to society were not planned by him.
Tyler Austin Harper
Yeah, yeah.
Jonah Goldberg
Right? The US News and World Report thing, I think
Jonah Goldberg
those guy- the, the people who put that thing out had a very clear idea of what they wanted to do with those rankings, other than make money, and the consequences of those rankings were not
Jonah Goldberg
foreseeable or foreseen or necessarily welcome. And so the, the, the pr- part of the problem I have with the sort of Marxian approach to things is this assumption that people are motivated by their class interests, and when they know their cla- quote, unquote, “class interests,”
Jonah Goldberg
the next steps are all obvious and inarguable, right? And one of the things is the w- weird moral disconnect I have, maybe you can explain it to me, I’ve never understood why the height of virtue for a certain moral strain of Marxism is for, you know, the sort of Thomas Frank kind of school of like workers to vote on their economic interests, but the height of political evil and sinisterness is for upper middle class to people to vote on their economic interests. Like, either it’s wrong to vote your economic interests, or it’s right to vote your economic interests, or it’s neither, but it can’t be right in some cases, wrong in other cases, and evil in other cases. And, and so I agree with you about the AI stuff, and there’s certainly some people who are benefiting enormously, you know, from it. It’s in part because some of these companies are not publicly held, so it’s really like 100 guys getting crazy rich rather than a h- 100 million people getting crazy rich. But my problem with the Marxian anal- like we, we talked about this a little bit when we were having dinner is like I think Marx was a romantic and comes out of the romantic tradition, and the greatest, second only to Satan telling the world that he doesn’t exist, the second greatest con ever was that there was something scientific-
Tyler Austin Harper
[laughs]
Jonah Goldberg
… about Marxism when in fact it’s, it’s very vibey and very resentment and envy based in how it actually manifests itself, and I, I think like-I don’t know that you help– I mean, I, I understand that it’s a shibboleth in certain quarters that you’re much more comfortable in than I am-
Tyler Austin Harper
Yeah, sure
Jonah Goldberg
… to talk, to be fluent in Marx.
Jonah Goldberg
But if you’re trying to persuade people outside of that milieu,
Jonah Goldberg
why not, you know, talk about Richard Rorty or, you know, like, I hate Herbert Crowley or something like that.
Tyler Austin Harper
Yeah.
Jonah Goldberg
But why, why signal to people your, um, connectivity
Jonah Goldberg
a mode of analysis
Jonah Goldberg
that really doesn’t depend on Marx? It’s more of a signaling thing to talk about it in, in a Marxian context.
Tyler Austin Harper
Well, I’ll say a few things in response. One is that Richard Rorty is a great American, so on that we agree, or was a great American. So your question about, um, why is it unjust for the elites to pursue their class interests, but it is just for the working class to pursue their class interests. I think, and it’s not a hill I would die on, but I, I think the Marxist response to that would be that, that the elite class interests depend on exploitation, and working class interests do not, right? That they are not doing the exploiting, they are being exploited, and so there’s like a fundamental difference in the sort of, um, moral algebra there. Um, but I think your question about intentionality, right? Like that there’s no scheming elites that are intending to produce the consequences that are being produced, um-
Jonah Goldberg
I mean, sometimes there are.
Tyler Austin Harper
Sure. Sure, sure.
Jonah Goldberg
My, my point is it’s not an iron law, right?
Tyler Austin Harper
Yes. Yes. I actually totally agree with that. I… In fact, I think that’s what separates vulgar Marxism from more sophisticated kinds of Marxism, which is that I don’t think anyone at the US News & World Report was planning this particular set of externalities or whatever. And I think, in fact, what, what sophisticated versions of Marxism, um, take seriously is that like by some kind of miracle, and I don’t mean that in a positive sense, but just like it’s an amazing kind of phenomenon, that our economy, our society tends to produce cultural ideas organically without a lot of scheming, without people in a smoke-filled room sort of like making these decisions about w- you know, what ideas we should lift up because they’re in our class interests and what we shouldn’t. But sort of organically, these kinds of ideas that, that are conducive to ruling class interests tend to sediment. And again, I’m gonna use a higher education example. One, because that’s the world I come out of, but two, because I think it’s where you can see a lot of this stuff most acutely, right? What does elite higher education in the United States exist to do? It exists, one, reproduce its donor class, but two, it exists to train people to enter the, uh, big tech, uh, consulting, finance, et cetera, right? Like if you look at the Ivy League, about fifty percent of graduates, that’s what they’re going into, big tech, finance, consulting, uh, that, that, that, these big extremely ruling class, um, kinds of, kinds of organizations, right? Um, what is the culture? What kind of, uh, people do– What kind of values do the people coming out of those institutions tend to have? Well, they are people who tend to think it’s a good idea to delay, uh, having children till much later, if they even have children at all, because climate change is so bad, maybe we shouldn’t even be having children. And they’re the kind of people that think, well, you know, it’s, it’s, uh, you know, rural places are backwards swamps of, of violence and racism, et cetera. Urban places are good, like San Francisco and New York City. Um, they tend to think, well, uh, you know, in your, your twenties are for having fun. You shouldn’t put too much stock in relationships. You shouldn’t, certainly shouldn’t avoid moving to take a better job for the sake of a relationship, et cetera, right? Those are all cultural values that come out of these elite institutions, cultural values that are coded as progressive or liberal, right? But that happen to be completely, perfectly i-i-in line with, uh, producing efficient workers, right? People who don’t have roots, who don’t wanna live in the countryside, who are willing to pick up and move at a moment’s notice, who think, uh, urban centers in America are, are the, the lights of, of, of beacon and illumination i-in this country. People who don’t wanna have children immediately, if at all, people who are willing to put off being married and, and other forms of personal satisfaction make really, really, really good workers, right? My point is th-there was no one in elite universities saying, “Well, if we wanna reproduce our donor class, we need, uh, to be graduating students who are going on to make fabulous amounts of money. And if they’re going to make fabulous amounts of money, they really need to prioritize their career. And if they’re going to prioritize their career, that probably means deprioritizing having kids or having relationships. Also probably means they’re gonna need to be willing to live outside of where they grew up and move to these, these parts of the country where, where, where the big jobs are, where Google is, and where Wall Street is,” et cetera, et cetera. That conversation didn’t happen, but organically it does emerge that culture kind of finds its level within capitalism, and we, we kind of get the culture that reproduces it. And I think that’s what’s sophisticated about Marxism is that like, you know, there is an understanding that there’s no plot, there’s no conspiracy, right? But, but it does seem to be the case that that’s how things ultimately shake out, even if it’s, even if it’s unplanned. So I actually agree with your point that, that I also have no patience for conspiratorial iterations of Marxism or leftism in general that imagine there are these like plotting elites. Sometimes there are, but I don’t think that’s, that’s… Nine times out of ten, I don’t, I don’t think that’s really, uh, really what’s going on. And just in terms of your, your last question, then I’ll turn things back to you about like why identify as a Marxist. I mean, one, you know, it is not a flag I hang very often. Uh, you know, I, I put outside my, my metaphorical door, so to speak. It’s important to me because I, I do think
Tyler Austin Harper
coming from that persuasion, coming from that methodological framework, uh, has allowed me occasionally to get things right that I think other people are getting wrong, and they’re getting it wrong because they’re just in this culture war mode of everything is a battle of ideas. And so I, y- And I’m also an academic, and we like being clear about what our like theoretical, y-you know, uh, uh, biases are. Um, but I– it’s not important to me as an identifier. Like I don’t, I, I don’t identify this way in everyday life. I’m registered with the Democratic Party, uh, so obviously I’m not a, a, a revolutionary Marxist of, of any stripe. But yeah, I, I do think that the tradition, um, at least certain wings of the tradition have a lot to offer our, our present moment, just in terms of understanding where our ideas and arguments come from.
Jonah Goldberg
Yeah, I mean, I, I, I, I hear it, and I, I think it’s perfectly defensible in the, in the, in the Burkean little platoon that you’re in to hold onto it
Tyler Austin Harper
You’re tugging my heartstrings. I’m also a closet, uh, closet, uh, great admirer of Burke, so, uh [laughs]
Jonah Goldberg
Well, there you go
Tyler Austin Harper
… have, have at it.
Jonah Goldberg
I have, I have no doubt there have been people who called themselves Burkean Marxists in the past. I just can’t think of anybody off the top of my head.
Tyler Austin Harper
Conservatives used to be very critical of capitalism before the 1950s. A- not all of them, but people like Irving Babbitt, you know, there’s a whole, you know, trai- strain of traditionalists who, who saw capital as a threat to f- family and traditional values and so on, you know.
Jonah Goldberg
For sure. One of my favorite is Justus Moser, who was the… He was a w- he was like the l- one of the leading jurists of one of these little German principalities, like
Jonah Goldberg
Monrovia, Wallachstan, or, you know, whatever, whatever-
Tyler Austin Harper
[laughs]
Jonah Goldberg
… I can’t remember what it was. And, uh, some
Jonah Goldberg
Moser fan is gonna attack me now. And he writes about how
Jonah Goldberg
terrible it was that… It’s very Marxian, and now this sort of gets to my point, is that it was like, you know, this whole Marxist or Marxist-lite, Marx-ish argument, um, you get out of some of the Frankfurt guys about like, um, the system is designed to make, uh, luxuries into necessities-
Tyler Austin Harper
Mm-hmm
Jonah Goldberg
… and it’s a way to distract people, right? And the whole, the whole they live thesis.
Tyler Austin Harper
Mm-hmm.
Jonah Goldberg
Um, so he’s writing in, like, the 15th century, I wanna say, and he says, you know, these traveling salesmen who come in, and they, they sell their wares to our, our villages and hamlets and little cities, and-
Tyler Austin Harper
Mm-hmm
Jonah Goldberg
… they make women
Jonah Goldberg
set their sights higher than they need to be, and they, they sell convenience, um, rather than duty, and they’re, they’re destabilizing the settled order, and they’re, uh, they’re a problem ’cause they’re competition to the guilds, and they bring new products that, that, that unsettle traditional way of life. And then you look at what the products were, and it was like thimbles-
Tyler Austin Harper
[laughs]
Jonah Goldberg
… so you could sew without turning your fingers into a pin cushion. Or, like, little things to, like, you know, basically, like, oven mitt things to put over the handle of the cast iron skillet-
Tyler Austin Harper
Yeah, yeah, yeah
Jonah Goldberg
… so you don’t burn yourself, right? And these were supposedly these decadent luxuries that were being-
Tyler Austin Harper
Right, right
Jonah Goldberg
… introduced by, you know, by pre-capitalist market systems. And of course, they were being pushed, to a large extent, by Jewish salesmen, which is where a lot of the antisemitic stuff about, like, you know, “Don’t Jew me on this,” comes from.
Tyler Austin Harper
Oh, sure. Yep.
Jonah Goldberg
Which sort of gets, simply gets to my point, which is that, like, again, I’m, I’m, I’m, I’m, I’m a big skeptic of new ideas, and I think you can take almost any,
Jonah Goldberg
almost any idea in Marx, I haven’t tried to do this in a while, and find some precursor who said it first, right? The, I, I j- the fundamental insights just aren’t, weren’t as pathbreaking as people claim. You know, and my friend Phil Magness, he makes the case, you know, which I know he’s a demonic figure to some Marxists out there, but, uh, he makes the case that
Jonah Goldberg
Marx really just wasn’t that big a deal until the Bolshevik Revolution, where he was kind of put on, on stilts by, by the Bolsheviks. Uh, I think there’s something to that. But really, I just think that the, the, at this point, let’s put it this way. Carl Schmitt, I think, has a lot of interesting insights. I don’t think you need to name-check Carl Schmitt a lot. For listeners who don’t know, he was, like, the crown jurist of the Nazi Republic, and he was a brilliant legal scholar, and he’s the guy who wrote a book called, like, Your Enemy- The Enemy, and how, like, all this kind of stuff was very popular about 15 years ago, uh, in segments of the left, and now he’s super popular in segments of the right. And there is no insights in there, unless you’re an academic, where you’re trying to, like, have accurate footnotes, where you need to name-check
Jonah Goldberg
Carl Schmitt, unless the whole point is the name-checking. And I feel, I feel the same thing kind of works with, with Marx, but, you know, that’s the different worlds we travel in.
Tyler Austin Harper
Well, I, I don’t actually disagree with that. And, um, I would say that if you were a conservative journalist listening to this podcast, that I’m not suggesting you need to be a Marxist in order to be a better journalist. But I, I do think just starting from the basic set of assumptions, that material conditions are, uh, culture is downstream from material conditions very often, that changes in production often cause changes in culture and morality and, and politics, that, that, as you put it, you know, um, those are lagging rather than leading indicators. I think that is a really good set of biases to have. I think it will generally, not always, but generally put you in good stead. And so I don’t think at all that, that folks need to be Marxist. I, I do think Marx provides… Well, you’re, you’re right about these ideas are old, right? I mean, even, uh, Thrasymachus in The Republic is, you know, saying, “Well, just is whatever the stronger say it is,” you know? So, um, these are, these are really old ideas. I, I, I don’t, don’t disagree with that, but I think what Marx did do is put them in conversation with the Industrial Revolution and this, this new sort of, like, way of organizing the economy, which is, which is, which is capitalism. And I think he got a lot, lot right. What I’m strongly wedded to is that journalists should be materialists. I, I, I believe that very deeply. By materialist, I mean
Tyler Austin Harper
in- i- invested in understanding politics and society and culture in relation to ideas, or in relation to the, the material base, the, the economy. But I’m not at all wedded to the idea that all journalists should be Marxists. Very obviously, that’s a preposterous proposition, and, and I’m not even an orthodox Marxist, as I’ve mentioned. But I do think, um, y- you need to at least be a little bit of a materialist to get, get cultural debates right.
Jonah Goldberg
No, I think that’s fair. And there, you know, there was a muckraking kind of right-wing, alt-right, you know, like Mencken, not a Marxist, but, uh, he certainly would’ve agreed with that. So would Albert Jay Nock about a lot of things. He had this thing called-
Tyler Austin Harper
I mean, follow the money is a basically materialist presupposition, you know?
Jonah Goldberg
All right, we’ll get off Marx now. So I’m just kinda curious about this. I, I, I, not too long ago, I read… It’s weird, people get mad at me for saying these kinds of things. I read most of[laughs] A book. Um, I always think it’s better to be honest than say-
Tyler Austin Harper
I read most of books all the time, man. It’s, it’s … If you’re in this business, it’s sometimes necessary.
Jonah Goldberg
Yeah, you, you know, it’s like if I’m invited to a banquet and there’s a whole stuck pig, I, I, I can eat some of the tasty pieces and move on, right? Um, I don’t have to eat the whole thing. What’s his name? Uh, he has this new book out or with s- a co-author called Muskisms and it… Or Muskism, and it’s all about E- Elon Musk.
Tyler Austin Harper
Oh, sure, sure, sure.
Jonah Goldberg
Quin Hrabowski, right?
Tyler Austin Harper
Oh, yeah. Mm-hmm.
Jonah Goldberg
Yeah. And he makes an assertion in, in his previous book called Hayek’s Bastards, this is the book that I read a lot of, that I think is fundamentally right, but then what he does with it, I think, is just bat guano crazy. But we don’t have to get into the bat guano crazy part. He makes the ca- he ma- he just says the assertion is that, you know, something along the lines of all political ideas start with certain assumptions about human nature, and I think that’s true. I think that’s objectively true. Um, what annoyed me about the book was that he then uses that in an invidious way to sort of claim that libertarians and free market guys are all racist and eugenicist, and I think it’s all nonsense. But doesn’t mean there wasn’t a lot of interesting stuff in the book. Anyway, right of center-
Tyler Austin Harper
Mm-hmm
Jonah Goldberg
it’s very easy for me to give you a thumbnail sketch of what a whole bunch of different flavors of conservatives, libertarians, this kind of conservative, that kind of conservative think about human nature, and they, they generally think the same thing. It’s one of my real blind spots. What is the general left of center view of human nature,
Jonah Goldberg
and what are the different camps? If there’s a diversity of ideas about human nature,
Jonah Goldberg
what are those camps, and what are the disagreements about human na- And I’m, I’m putting you crazy on the spot here. Y- you can just take a stab. I don- I’m not expecting you to have a holistic answer to it, but just sort of on the sociology of it, human nature is a big part of conservatism rightly understood. You know, Alan Wolfe in his book about liberalism says that liberalism doesn’t need to… I’m giving you a little time to think about this ’cause I know it’s a complicated question. You know, the, the thing about human nature is human nature matters, but it just doesn’t matter a lot because human nature’s not that important a thing, and it’s malleable, and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Something like that. I’m not sure that’s right, but I think it’s a defensible proposition. I know what Marx thought about human nature, and I know a little bit about what Rousseau knew about human nature, and it’s very similar. And I, I could take a stab at John Dewey’s theory of human nature and maybe William James related, right? But, like, in today’s contemporary politic… I mean, this is my bottom line. Marty, Marty Peretz, about 20 years ago, accused American l- liberalism or American progressives of being bookless. That was his term, is that it was just did not have the relationship with ideas that the American right had, and I think that is broadly true in terms of the w- the, at least the right I grew up in was sort of obsessed with intellectual history and the Nash book and all that kind of stuff, and liberals were much more forward-thinking. A lot more of their heroes were activists rather than intellectuals. They didn’t like to be tied to dogma. I think that had a lot to do with American pragmatism, which I think is a not a great philos- philosophical school. Anyway, in all of that Sturm und Drang and Hazzurai or whatever you wanna call it, um, I’m just utterly confused about what, what the left broadly or in factions thinks about human nature.
Tyler Austin Harper
I think you’ve actually alighted on the,
Tyler Austin Harper
uh, in a submerged way, but what is, I think, the central defining question of debates on the left at this moment. I think there are a lot of people on the left who don’t believe in anything like human nature, that they tend to think human beings are sort of, um… And some of these people are, are, are Marxists, but they, they tend, tend to think human beings are kind of blank slates, that there is a,
Tyler Austin Harper
any cultural system can, can, is, can be conducive to human flourishing. And they have a very sort of, uh, relativist view of the world and people in it, and, and they, not only do they not think that there’s any core fundamental sort of, uh, basic set of traits, that there’s something fundamental that people are like. They think that idea is, like, kind of problematic and racist, and they will point out, not always, uh, in ways that are completely wrong, that the idea of human nature has often been wielded in the service of racism and, and whatever else, right? Because the British can say, “Well, this is what human nature means,” and it, it sure looks a lot like the exact opposite of, of the belief systems and customs of colonized people or whatever. So I, I, I don’t… I understand where the suspicion of human nature talk comes from. I think you can make intellectually honest and good faith accounts of, of why that kind of talk has often been problematic. But I think in the world in which we live, um, as the thinking machines are bearing down upon us, I mean, I don’t think the machines are so much thinking as, as parroting, but that’s, that’s neither here nor there, right? As, as artificial intelligence is coming online, as technology is intruding ever and ever, uh, g- more greatly into our personhood and our, our daily life, I think having firm ideas about what it is to be a person, like what are those human universals, I think is terribly important. And I think parts of the left have an extremely malleable view a- and, and even take having a strong stance at all on, on these questions as, as somehow, um, bigoted or ableist. You know, they will say, “Well, if you think wisdom-seeking is part of human nature, then what about people with intellectual disabilities? Are they subhumans?” Well, no. But it is to say that
Tyler Austin Harper
i- if, if you, you can’t seek wisdom in a certain way or, or exercise, um, normal cognitive abilities, then there’s a way in which there’s, there’s something you’re missing and, and it, it’s a tragedy to be missing that. And does it mean that we should treat those people horribly and not provide for their care? Of course not. But does it mean that there are these things that a- are really core parts of the human experience, and we should try to defend them from the intrusion of, of technology into them? Yeah, I think absolutely, and I think a lot of, including ideas we’ve seen around gender, have, are really predicated on this idea that nature and biology is malleable and changeable and not that important to begin with, and, and we can just use technology to remake the human body as we see fit, and that is all, all fine. And yeah, I just, I am a human nature leftist is how I would put it, I think, and I, I think it’s important to be oneAt the moment we are in, uh, where
Tyler Austin Harper
human life is under continual assault. And, you know, the core business model of the most influential industry in this country and in the world, Silicon Valley, is basically at this point automating human nature, right? Like, I think about the 21st century of technology in sort of two phases. You had social media, which was a process of algorithmic intermediation, right? Where we’re gonna put algorithms between human beings, between, uh… I- in place of these processes that humans used to do together, right? So dating apps are a great example of this, right? Rather than going to a bar, we’re gonna insert this algorithmic intermediary, this software that’s gonna help you find the ideal match, right? Hailing a cab, rather than you whistling on the corner of the street or waving your hand, um, we’re gonna add this algorithmic intermediary. But those were in the service of connecting humans to other humans, right? Say, like, whatever you want about the rise of online dating and Uber and all these other things, I think they’ve been mostly pretty bad, but, like, whatever. The model was connecting humans with humans. And the, the new business model we are moving into is, is removing the human on the other end, right? Where it is no longer using Zocdoc, right? Rather than calling a, a, a receptionist at a doctor’s office, booking an appointment, it’s n- it’s not simply that you are no longer booking Zocdoc to, say, book a therapy appointment, it’s that the robot will be your therapist, right? That you will have, uh, y- therapy through AI because it is cheaper than a human therapist. You don’t need healthcare. You can get a subscription service, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. That is the business model we’re moving into, one where technology as a way to connect humans with humans is being displaced by technology as a way to automate humans to, to take over core human endeavors, whether it’s something like cooking or dating or, or therapy or even romance. We’re seeing the rise of, of AI boyfriends and girlfriends that, that certain segments of the media seem to be very keen on normalizing. Um, and so this is a long, rambling response, but I, I think you’re completely right that there is a real disagreement that is so profound that it’s not even being named and isn’t even… we’re not even having the arguments on the left about, like, what are people? Like, what, what are they for? Uh, what is, what is a human being? And where are the places where we’re gonna say no, and we’re gonna draw limits and say, “No, technology can’t do that,” because that is going to… that, that crosses some fundamental, some fundamental divide. That touches something deep in human nature and perverts it in some kind of way. So yeah, I, I… that’s, I guess, a way of saying I, I completely agree with your, your assessment, basically.
Jonah Goldberg
Yeah, I, I, I don’t know that we have to, I mean, we might have to, uh, have a rule that says technology can’t do that.
Tyler Austin Harper
Mm-hmm.
Jonah Goldberg
I mean, I’m, I’m more… you know, I’m not on team Luddite in the original sense, but, you know, the AI thing, not so much for myself, I’ll be fine. My daughter, I worry about my daughter in this, this world and it, you know, the Butlerian Jihad from Dune seems more and more reasonable every day, right?
Tyler Austin Harper
It does.
Jonah Goldberg
Thou shall not make a machine in the likeness of the human mind. And I mean, just back on the point about the human nature thing is that I’ve always just been utterly fascinated by the way in which there’s a certain kind of mainstream, extremely sophisticated, serious person of the left or left of center. It goes from moderate liberals all the way to the hard left. They love to mock
Jonah Goldberg
people who are skeptical of evolution, right? In one way or another. They love… I mean, I remember getting calls from The New Republic 20 years ago, thinking they had some, you’re getting me on a gotcha. They were like, “Call all the…” Some editor told some, you know, young reporter, researcher, “Call every prominent right-winger out there and ask them, get ’em on the record about evolution.” And I, I remember being call, I was, like, in the
Jonah Goldberg
shoe department at some department store, getting this call.
Tyler Austin Harper
Uh.
Jonah Goldberg
And I was like, “What the fu- Yeah, I believe in evolution.” But anyway, the point is, is, like, they take great pride in this evolution stuff, right? And there’s this whole, you know, this, the Dawkins kind of thing of, of, of being contemptuous of people who have problems with it and all that.
Jonah Goldberg
And yet if you ask them, “Okay, so then what are human be- like, what is the hu- what is the nature of the human animal?”
Tyler Austin Harper
Mm-hmm.
Jonah Goldberg
They look at you like you’re, like you’re crazy. I was, “Well, wait a second. You just said that the only thing determining, you know, your whole position is the only thing determining the essence of what it is to be a human is this, the, these cold Darwinian processes,” which I’m, I’m, I’m Dar- I’m open to.
Tyler Austin Harper
Mm-hmm.
Jonah Goldberg
Then what is human nature? And they look at you like this is, this is either incredibly stupid or beside the point or forbidden. And I don’t know how you can have, be utterly agnostic on what human nature is
Jonah Goldberg
while at the same time preening about your belief in evolution. Because a human is not an elephant, is not a, you know, a tit swallow, is not, you know, an invertebrate worm. It’s, it’s what it is, and therefore there is something that it is not. And, you know, just by subtraction, that means human nature is something. And I wish that there were a lot of w- people on the left who, who believed in
Jonah Goldberg
the blank
Jonah Goldberg
slate, because I can argue with the blank slate. I think it’s a little worse. I mean, there’s obviously some.
Jonah Goldberg
I just think it’s worse than that because it’s, it’s… The worst thing about taboo, I, I’m in favor of many taboos. I think taboos are a good thing. I’m, I think slavery should be taboo. They’re all, like, sl- taboo, censorship, they’re all these words that we use for the taboos we don’t like. I think pedophilia, taboo.
Tyler Austin Harper
Yeah. [laughs]
Jonah Goldberg
Right?
Tyler Austin Harper
Mm-hmm.
Jonah Goldberg
But we live in a transgressive culture that says the second you call something a taboo, it has to be overturned because it’s, uh, therefore it’s some atavistic, irrational holdover from the past.I think that’s nonsense. I think there are, like, as a Hayekian guy, like, we learned over a long period of time that some things should be taboo, should be forbidden as a matter of dogma, right? No more slavery. Like, no more torturing of your children for fun. Just, it’s taboo. I don’t need to have an argument for it. It’s just forbidden. But the, the one pro- the real problem with taboos is it, it disconnects you from the arguments and then the consequences of it. And so if you just think it is outrageous to think about human nature and discuss it reasonably,
Jonah Goldberg
you’re gonna make all sorts of bad assumptions about what human nature is and allows you to do. And I think the history of the left in its extreme forms is always can be found very quickly to be a failure to appreciate the limits of human nature, right? I mean, that’s the problem with the Soviet, new Soviet man. That was the problem with the stupid commune that your, your guy Bernie Sanders got kicked out of-
Tyler Austin Harper
Yeah, sure
Jonah Goldberg
… ’cause he wouldn’t stop talking [laughs] to people rather than digging latrines like they asked him to.
Tyler Austin Harper
Mm.
Jonah Goldberg
Um, human nature, you know, the kibbutz doesn’t work in part over time because of human nature, and, like, I’m open that you can change culture, right, which is a way of sort of ameliorating or directing human nature. I just don’t think you can erase human nature, and I think it’s just weird how the left hates it so much.
Tyler Austin Harper
Yeah, I mean, I will give you my macro
Tyler Austin Harper
theory a little off the cuff, but it’s something I, I, I believe and have thought for a long time, and that is conservatives have a basically tragic sensibility often in that, uh, people on the left have a basically utopian sensibility. But I, I think there is a logical fallacy that comes with both of those dispositions. I think the logical fallacy the right and conservatives are most prey to is the naturalistic fallacy, that what is ought to be, right? That things as they are are as they are because that’s how they should be, right? So your, your ethics, uh, is, is derived from, or ought to derive from is. And I think folks on the left often have actually the mirror image of that fallacy that they commit, where the way things should be must be possible, right? That, that if it should be the case that, uh, we should be able to live together in a society without the strong hand of, of, without needing the police or prisons, then it must be the case that, that such a thing is possible, right? If we just, just get everything else right and do the tinkering around the edges, right? And I really think a lot of the problems on the left do stem from deriving their is’ from oughts, right? Uh, however, you know, whatever you believe ethically should be the case, it therefore must be possible for it to be the case, and that is the inverse of the kind of tragic sensibility that I see a lot of times on, on the right. And I think, not that I’m suggesting the left needs to go full tragedy, [laughs] and I’m certainly not suggesting we need to go full naturalistic fallacy, but I think a dose of tragic sensibilities would, would be good, that there, there are certain parts of, of human nature that must be corralled in some kind of way if we’re going to have social order and if we’re going to have human flourishing. I tend not to think of taboos, uh, or think in the register of taboos, but in the register of li- limits. I’m a big fan of, of Christopher Lasch, and he was, you know, a big guy about the sort of decline of the idea of, of limit in, in American liberalism, right? The idea that there are limits to human behavior, that there might be limits to progress, right? That knocking down barriers is, is not always the ultimate good, and sometimes it can, can be a disaster. And so I think the fight that I see, or at least that I’d, I’d like on the left right now is, like, really about, like, what are the limits going to be? And I think that’s another way of saying that what the left needs to decide is do they care about culture or do they care about the economy? I think there are … You, you know, most people on the left side of the aisle, and I’m including just sort of like, you know, moderate Democrats, have basically liberal views on the economy of varying degrees of, of, of flavor and, and basically liberal views on culture. Um, I think that’s pretty common across the, the left side of the tent. But I think there are some people on the left, if they’re forced to compromise, they are willing to compromise on cultural issues in the service of their economic agenda, and there are people on the left that are willing to sacri- sacrifice on economic issues in the service of their cultural agenda, right? So if push comes to shove, they will vote for somebody who’s going to, uh, protect abortion and, and, um, you know, not crack down on immigration and X, Y, and Z even if it’s somebody who is pretty moderate or even slightly to the right on economic issues. There are other people, and I tend to be in this camp, that says, “Well, I, I’m willing to be flexible on immigration or whatever, but I, I really think, um, so many of the problems in American life are, are downstream from do people have food or not? Is everything too expensive? Can, can, can people afford to have a dignified life?” And then we can figure out some of those social and cultural debates after we secure basic dignity for regular people. But I, I think that’s another version of this limit conversation. Where are you willing to have limits on culture or, or the, the economy? Where are you willing to truncate your ambitions? And like the human nature thing, and I think it’s a sort of species of that fight, I think it’s, you know, that is the, the defining argument I think people on my side of the aisle are gonna be having certainly for the next several years.
Jonah Goldberg
Yeah, and it’s funny. I mean, I, I remember 20 years ago I wrote a piece about how we, we need a new metaphysic because I think the right left thing is increasingly blinding us to, like, you know, like your point about a US News world report ranking. There’s not a left-wing or right-wing take on that per se, right? It’s just the, like … And you could, I could, I could do it in right-wing speak. You know, you did it a little bit in left-wing speak, but, like, in right-wing speak you get what you measure, right? This is a classic sort of example of, of, of, um, unintended consequences and, and all the rest. I think that the guy from Reason wrote a great book about the history of conspiracy theories, and it’ll come to me in a bit, in a little bit. And one of the points he made which I really liked was that one of the places where Hofstadter got it wrong was, and I can name a few others, but, um-Is he treated the conspiratorial mind or the conspiratorial style as a fringe thing? And I think Hofstadter did it too much as a phenomenon purely of the right, ’cause there’s also a rich left-wing conspir- you know, paranoid style in Amer- in American politics. But the point that… Oh, God, it’s gonna drive me crazy not remembering his name. Um, the point that he made was that the
Jonah Goldberg
middle has conspiracy theories, too, or has a paranoid style, too. They just don’t call them, sort of like my point about censorship or taboos, they just don’t call them con- you know, paranoid or they don’t call them conspiracy theories. They call them, uh, they’re called moral panics. It’s like when the elites are just all of a sudden terrified about this next thing coming and, and the reason I bring that up is there, you know, like, I think there are a lot of things that qualify as centrist
Jonah Goldberg
that may be
Jonah Goldberg
politically centrist in the sense that they’re splitting the difference between, you know, the two parties or the two sides, or they may be moderate in terms of a compromise that can make it through a system. But metaphysically, conceptually, they’re actually
Jonah Goldberg
extreme. And, you know, this is one of the points I, I, I made in my underrated second book about, like, one of the other problems with centr- a certain kind of centrism is it can be worse than the extreme positions. And the, the illustration I’ll often use is, like,
Jonah Goldberg
w- the left says we need a bridge to cross this canyon. The right says we need no bridge at all. Both of these positions are utterly defensible positions.
Jonah Goldberg
The compromise position is let’s build a bridge halfway, right? And that’s worse than either of the extremes, right? I think if you were, if you’re doing this as sort of a visitor from Mars thing, there is a very mainstream Clintonian view that says, and Obama did it, too, about false choices. And the rhetoric of it, and I think rhetoric is important, takes the form of some say you can’t protect the environment without, uh, hurting the economy. Some say that you can’t do X without it costing Y. I say these are all false choices.
Jonah Goldberg
And the reason I bring it up is you’re talking about limits. This is, you know, this is Thomas, pure Tom Soul, right? Is that there are no policy solutions. There are only policy trade-offs. And there is a thing in the mainstream squishy center left that does not like the language of trade-offs-
Tyler Austin Harper
Yeah
Jonah Goldberg
… in a way that I think the far left is more comfortable with, even though they have their own version of this kind of problem, but, like, they’re willing to raise the t-taxes, I think foolishly, out the ying-yang on the 1% to pay for the stuff that they want, right?
Tyler Austin Harper
Yep.
Jonah Goldberg
Um, and but in the center there is this… And, and, and Trump has a version of this where he just basically
Jonah Goldberg
thinks that there’s no downside to anything that he does.
Tyler Austin Harper
Yeah.
Jonah Goldberg
And that’s, that rhetoric in the center is why we’re $38 trillion in debt.
Tyler Austin Harper
Yeah. Yeah, yeah. I, I think that’s a, a good take. I, I agree that the center is often radical in their own ways. It is, and I think our view is probably different on foreign policy, but it is the center of, of both parties that have drug us into war after war in the Middle East. It is not the left or the right fringes of it. Um, and so I think, I think of centrism, um, of, of the moderate stance increasingly as an aesthetic more than as a, a description of its political content, right? There is a certain kind of centrist aesthetic where you talk in a very reasonable way, and to your point, you say, “Just because we need to do X doesn’t mean we can’t also have Y,” right? Like, I, I think that’s totally right. I just saw Hakeem Jeffries say about AI, “We need to support innovation, but we also have to support, uh, l-limits to this uncomfortable new technology.” And it’s like, okay, well, you really can’t do both of, of… Th-there’s like a, a, a trade-off there that in your aesthetic register of smart and sensible, you are just completely eliding. So I agree with you. But I would go one step further and say, I think increasingly the center, we’ve talked a little bit about vibes, right? And I think increasingly the center is actually the, the, the vibes political faction.
Jonah Goldberg
Mm-hmm.
Tyler Austin Harper
And I think the, uh, like, l- I don’t mean the extreme left or the extreme right, but I mean, like, the populist right and the populist left is actually where the serious policy people are increasingly. Like, like, if you look at someone like Kamala Harris, she was not animated by, by grand views about the economy or deeply considered positions on foreign policy or whatever. She was a weathervane. Gavin Newsom, same thing. This is not a dude who has deeply considered views on matters of substance, right? He’s, he’s just … He has, uh, he has vibes of being reasonable and down the line, right? But he’s not, not a thinker. He’s not a policy guy. And a-again, however you feel about somebody like, uh, Mamdani or Graham Plattner, there is this rhetoric that I see coming from sort of like the establishment and from people in the center that, “Oh, those are vibes candidates.” Mamdani is a vibes guy with his big smile and his great social media campaign. Graham Plattner is a vibes guy with his work, work boots and Carhartt and his, you know, his gravelly voice and his marine stories. And it’s like, well, actually, in both of those races, they are, they’re the policy candidates. You might disagree with their policies, but they are the people who are articulating clear things they want to do with their power, and their opponents are the people that are like, “I have a record. I’ve done this for a long time,” but they won’t say what they’re running on. No one knows what, what, what they like, their animating issues are, what they wanna do when they, they attain their office, et cetera. Um, and so I really do think for a long time, the, the s- the claim the center made is that, like, we’re the serious policy people. We’re, we’re the, the big boys and big girls in the room with big ideas and who know how the real world works and, and who have vision and, and substance. And I think that is increasingly actually not true [chuckles] I think ’cause again, I, I’m not saying you have to agree with the policies, right?
Jonah Goldberg
Sure.
Tyler Austin Harper
But, but it is the populist who have, who are the wonks, and it is the center that is the vibesy empty airheads. And yeah, I don’t know. So I think that, that combination of like, um, to your point, the, the total denial of trade-offs, right? We can have X, but also have Y, lacquered on top of substanceless vibe-… stuff is one of the reasons why the establishment in, in the center is kind of collapsing.
Jonah Goldberg
Yeah, I mean, I, I will say that the last time you had someone in something close to the center, he was utterly demonized for it, but who actually talked about trade-offs and took
Jonah Goldberg
our fiscal house
Jonah Goldberg
seriously was, was, was Paul Ryan.
Tyler Austin Harper
Mm. Mm-hmm.
Jonah Goldberg
Democrats cast him as a guy pushing little old ladies off, off of a cliff, and-
Tyler Austin Harper
Doing those weird workout, uh, photo shoots, yeah.
Jonah Goldberg
Yeah. I mean, look, I mean, like, uh, did, full disclosure, Paul Ryan’s a, is a friend of mine, but like, you know, he, he’s one of these guys who actually prepared the groundwork for a serious argument about how to fix entitlement problems that we wouldn’t be in $38 trillion in debt for. And I get why the Bernie crowd hated all of it, but, like, the people who effectively demonized him weren’t the Bernie crowd, it was the mushy moderates in the center who said, “Oh, we don’t need to make hard choices.” And it’s like, y- they’re hard choices now, they’re only harder later, and that was the thing. I mean, unless, of course, when we’re all working for, in AI’s silicon mines for lavish pay, it’ll be different. I remembered, it’s Jesse Walker, the guy who wrote the book, ’cause I’ll, I’ll hear from people about this, uh, and it was, uh, The United States of Paranoia: A Conspiracy Theory, by Jesse Walker. Really interesting book.
Tyler Austin Harper
Oh, I’m gonna check it out. Always, uh, yeah.
Jonah Goldberg
You’d, you’d like it, I think. It’s-
Tyler Austin Harper
Yeah, yeah
Jonah Goldberg
… it, it has receipts on sort of, of everybody. And also, you know, I know we’re supposed to be stopping now, but, like,
Jonah Goldberg
one of the th- it’s, it’s funny, one of the things I think that really ruins a lot of discourse, or a lot of conversations, is, um,
Jonah Goldberg
just the profound recency bias that we’ve got. You know, I just listened to, I don’t know if you’ve ever listened to The Rest is History, the history podcast. Just listened to four episodes on the financial crisis of, like, 1975 Britain. It is eye-opening about, like, like, I mean, take the Israel stuff out of it, Tony Benn was more of a Corbynite than Jeremy Corbyn would ever be-
Tyler Austin Harper
Oh
Jonah Goldberg
… and, like, literally wanted to turn the UK into, um, Sparta. Like, uh, to- total tariffs on everything. He ca- he called it a siege economy. [laughs] Um, and it’s like, and that’s in, like, our living memory, and like, uh, you know, and the, the Jesse Walker book is great about all of this stuff that happened in the 1960s with talk radio and conspiracy theories and all of this stuff that gives you a little humility about the current moment that we’re in, that it’s not as actually as bananas in American history as we, we might think it is.
Tyler Austin Harper
I think about that with political violence, where, like-
Jonah Goldberg
Yeah
Tyler Austin Harper
… look, the, the ballroom shooting, horrible, the assassination attempts, uh, uh, uh, I, obviously I agree with all of that. But I think there’s been this way of talking about it as a, uh, we’re in this u- unprecedented moment in American history, and it’s like, well, uh, all of this stuff is bad, but the ’60s and ’70s made that look like child’s play. Like, we were having successful assassinations left and, left and right, you know, bombs, you know, radical [laughs] groups, you know, uh, and so that doesn’t mean the problems we have aren’t serious, but I think you’re right, some historical literacy and humility, uh, ’cause there’s just this narcissistic temptation that we are the, living the most interesting, uh, because bad times are interesting, most interesting bad times that have ever been interesting bad times. It’s like, oh, it’s usually not true. And actually, if you understand that it’s not true, it can give you a little bit of, uh, soft optimism, [laughs] you know, ’cause we have come through worse in the past.
Jonah Goldberg
All right, my friend, thank you for doing this.
Tyler Austin Harper
Yeah.
Jonah Goldberg
I’d love to have you back.
Tyler Austin Harper
Anytime.
Jonah Goldberg
And, um, uh, people should check him out at The Atlantic. Uh, and
Jonah Goldberg
see you soon. [whoosh] All right, uh, Tyler Austin Harper has left the studio. There’s something about the three-name thing that really I’m, I’m always like, is it Harper Austin Tyler, is it Austin Tyler Harper, Austin Tyler Harper, is it whatever, as like, it, it confuses me for reasons I, of having probably mostly to do with, uh, day drinking. I don’t know. Um, anyway, uh, Tyler’s left the studio. I enjoyed that. Um, I think some listeners will have enjoyed it, and some will have not, and so be it.
Jonah Goldberg
I, uh, coulda gone a whole bunch of different directions on this, and I stand by my view that, like, you know, it’s fine to be familiar with Marx, it’s fine to say that Marx provides useful insights about some things. I just
Jonah Goldberg
think that it’s more of a, it’s more of a shorthand or a bumper sticker of about the kind of a mode of argument, at its best. It’s more like a branding exercise or a shibboleth than it is, um,
Jonah Goldberg
a particularly, you know, vital necessity to identify that stuff as Marx. I think there’s a lot of stuff that gets called Marxist that is just actually observations or wisdom about human nature or, um, and the problem of trying to make socialism a scientific thing or a science of history or bound it up with Hegel and all that, um,
Jonah Goldberg
makes it analytically less useful as a tool than I think a lot of people appreciate. And the stuff that Marx is useful for, you don’t need M- Marxist theory to, to help you along. And that leaves out, you know, the point I was trying to get at, which is that the association for a lot of people with Marxism is that it led to the murder of tens of millions of people and the destruction of whole cultures and, um, and the immiseration of lots of people, um, in the name of Marxism. So, like, m- it would be nice if, like, there was a little more s- radioactivity and stink on the adjective, you know? We don’t generally
Jonah Goldberg
talk about people who are,
Jonah Goldberg
you know, Nazi philosophers as if, like, that’s a fine thing to be indebted to. Uh, again, I like Tyler a lot. I’m not accusing him of any, uh, y- any associations with any of the evil stuff. I’m talking about just there’s a baggage that comes with it that I think people outside of the tent who think it’s cool to be Marxist put a lot more emphasis on than people inside, and I think that explains some of the sociology of all of it. And beyond that, I, I don’t know. Uh,
Jonah Goldberg
for The Ruminant, I will be recording The Ruminant from Los Angeles, um, where I’m going out for the Turner Classic Movies Film Festival, where I’m doing the intro for A Face in the Crowd, which I’m very excited about. Um, and I just think it’s really cool, and I’m gonna see my daughter, which I’m even more excited about. And I think the next time I record this from the East Coast, it’ll be in my new office at the American Enterprise Institute, because I will be living in an apartment for a while after we move out of this house, which is a very emotional thing for me, but we don’t need to dwell on that. We’ll see how all that goes, and Victoria Holmes is gonna help me set up, uh, just a baller sound system at AEI. And, you know, I don’t thank Victoria enough on this podcast for all of her hard work, and Alex Hibbs, my research assistant at AEI, but really, this podcast would not happen were it not for Victoria, and I am grateful to her for that. And I’m grateful to all of you, so, um, with that, I’ll see you next time.
Tyler Austin Harper
No, you won’t. This is a podcast. [upbeat music]
Jonah Goldberg
Yeah.
Jonah Goldberg
[upbeat music]
