September 23, 2024 • 36 mins
Noah Rothman discusses his book 'The Rise of the New Puritans' and the concept of the new Puritans as an intellectual tradition rooted in progressivism. He explains how the new Puritans seek to impose their moral framework on every aspect of society, leading to the politicization and loss of enjoyment in various areas such as entertainment, sports, and hobbies. Rothman also explores the intersection of comedy and wokeness, highlighting the importance of comedy as an area that should remain outside of woke influence. He discusses the societal problem of attributing cultural cache to persecution complexes and the impact it has on individual agency and personal responsibility. The Karol Markowicz Show is part of the Clay Travis & Buck Sexton Podcast Network - new episodes debut every Monday & Thursday.
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Speaker 1 (00:04):
Hi, and welcome back to Carol Markowitz Show on iHeartRadio.
There was a story over the weekend about the singer
Macklmore saying fuck America at his show and the crowd cheering. Now,
Macklmore is well known for trashing Israel and for dressing
up in a Jewish costume complete with prosthetic nose. I
(00:28):
think it's a very easy leap from jew hater, Israel
hater to America hater. These things go hand in hand.
That's not what I want to talk about here. This
is a man who has made riches beyond our wildest
imaginations because of this country. He is among the absolute
luckiest people in history because of his accident of birth.
(00:51):
And he doesn't get it. He has no idea. Much
is made of how kids don't learn civics and certainly
don't have patriotism instilled in them at school. Of course
that's true. I had to push my kids Brooklyn Public
School when they were little to say the Pledge of
Allegiance despite it being state law to say it daily.
They told me the school has a lot of immigrants
(01:13):
and we're trying to cater to that. I informed them
that both my husband and I are immigrants, and we
came here to be American, not to be some side
nationality that never quite adjusts and doesn't get to pledge
loyalty in this country. I think our decline in patriotism
is by design, that we're pushed to pretend that we
(01:34):
didn't all wake up on third base just by getting
to be American, that America is not that great. Without
getting too much into politics, Kamala Harris is trying to
run a patriotic campaign because people do want that. Democrats
get why this country is so great, but largely have
to pretend otherwise to appease their leftist's flight. That's a problem.
(01:58):
Fixing it in schools only be a first step. Think
about how many generations have already been through an American
hating system. They've been just seeped in it. I'm not
sure what to do about that. I always think a
lot of important conversations start in the home. Anyway. Are
you raising your kids to understand their sheer luck of
being American? Are you telling them what makes this country
(02:21):
the best country in history? Don't be embarrassed to say
that it's true, we have something special here. It's okay
to say it out loud. We have to challenge the
Macalmors of the world who have no problem saying their
thoughts out loud. Thanks for listening. Launching tomorrow, I'm going
to have a second podcast. This one is about politics,
(02:42):
and I'll be co hosting it with my good friend
Mary Catherine Ham. I'm still going to continue doing this show,
which is, as you know, largely not about politics, but
I needed a political outlet too, and MK and I
have very similar world views. We hope to be funny
and to bring you perspectives you don't hear anywhere else.
(03:04):
The show is called Normally. It will run on the
Clay Travis and Buck Sexton podcast network on iHeartRadio. It'll
be posted on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and just like this show,
you can hear it anywhere you get your podcasts. You
could subscribe starting today. We talk about balance a lot
on this show. I think it's important to take breaks
from politics, as I try to do with the Carol
(03:26):
Markowitz Show. But look, there's also a time to talk
about important issues, the election, horse race, and so much more.
We'll be doing that at the Normally podcast. Please go
subscribe right now. Thank you so much. For listening, and
I appreciate you all so much. Coming up next and
interview with Noah Rothman. Join us after the break.
Speaker 2 (03:47):
Welcome back to the Carol Markowitz Show on iHeartRadio. My
guest today is Noah Rothman. Noah is a senior writer
at National Review and the author of the excellent book
The Rise of the New Puritans.
Speaker 3 (04:00):
So nice to have you on, girl.
Speaker 4 (04:02):
Thank you so much for having me. It's a pleasure.
Speaker 3 (04:03):
So who are the New Puritans?
Speaker 5 (04:05):
Just out of curiosity, Well, the New Puritans as distinct
from the old Puritans, both, by the way, the misconception
of Puritanism as Victorianism, as sort of staid, blue nosed,
condescending prudishness versus big p Puritans, you know, the sixteen hundred,
(04:28):
seventeen hundreds mainline Protestant New England or Congregationalist New England.
There's a lot of definitional.
Speaker 4 (04:34):
Mix up here.
Speaker 5 (04:36):
So the New Puritans, as I define them, are really
an intellectual tradition that dates back to the old Puritanism,
and its home is in progressivism. Properly understood. Progressivism arose
from the ashes of the Puritan experiment in mainline New
England and it was a moral crusade as as much
as it was a public policy endeavor, and it had
(04:58):
a moral element to quite quite a few of the
of the public policy preferences that this movement pursued. And
it was typified by an idea that all of society's
engines must be harnessed to all drive in the same direction.
So there could not be anything that exists outside politics. Right,
(05:20):
every every every facet of the social contract had to
be reflective of this overarching moral desire familiar. So you
couldn't have entertainment products that didn't, for example, serve a
useful purpose. That everything had to have a utilitarian aspect
to it. Athletics had to have a martial dimension. You
couldn't you couldn't have art for art's sake. You could
(05:42):
have furniture makers or headstone designers, or people who were
skilled at portraiture, because these were useful. You were leaving
a record for posterity. Anything else was idle and illness
as a sin. And you see this throughout the modern
progressive ethos, which and part of the book maintains that
(06:02):
on the left, the sort of the licentiousness and libertinism
that typified the sexual revolution, and that left leaning tradition
was an aberration and a departure really from their otherwise
moralistic framework when you start to see this moralistic framework
arise in this progressive left. So the book breaks this
(06:24):
down because there is a moral dimension to this is
not necessarily worth criticizing. The excesses of it are, but
the remoralization of society, as Gertrude Himmelfarb would have called it,
isn't necessarily something to look askance upon. So the chapters
are organized in virtues, piety, prudence, austerity, temperance, harmony, and
order of the fear of God. All these things are
(06:46):
good in their properly understood dimensions. It's when they become
expanded to apply to every aspect of society, even innocuous
stuff like the fashion you wear in the sports you
watch in your hobb these decoration and knitting and fishing
and gardening and all that stuff has become adulterated so
(07:06):
that a particular cast of people can peel back the
curtain and see the hideous hidden workings of the world
that they, with their exclusive sense of propriety, can see,
but you can't. It's a very psychologically satisfying outlook, but
it also leads you to madness. And this book identifies
the madness and tries to identify ways in which you
(07:30):
can mute the tendency that you, maybe as a progressive
puritan yourself, feel to impose your moral framework on the
world around you.
Speaker 3 (07:39):
How did you get interested in this?
Speaker 4 (07:40):
Like?
Speaker 3 (07:40):
What was the spark?
Speaker 5 (07:42):
So the origins of this book date back to early
twenty twenty, and it was the height of the pandemic
and I was just miserable. And so my job is
consuming the headlines and trying to tease out, you know,
thoughts and takes and what have you and publish them.
(08:03):
We're in the same business, you know, And that was
a really unsatisfying time to be doing that. So I'm
sitting in the bath of my wife and we're just
and I'm I'm commiserating because I'm miserable.
Speaker 3 (08:14):
Are you sitting in the bath with your life bathtub?
Speaker 1 (08:17):
Oh?
Speaker 3 (08:17):
With your wife?
Speaker 4 (08:18):
With my wife?
Speaker 3 (08:18):
Okayy's it.
Speaker 5 (08:21):
Trust me, It's not as sallacious as it sounds, because
I'm just having a glass of wine and I'm miserable.
And she's like, she asks me, I think you know
what what would you do to make yourself happy and
also drive some income in out of it so we
can pay the mortgage.
Speaker 4 (08:37):
It's like, well, you know, if I had my.
Speaker 5 (08:39):
Brothers, I would spend a lot of my time talking
to work in comics, professional stand ups, maybe screenwriters, and
maybe people who make food for a living or talk
about sports for a living. You know, stuff that is
supposed to, you know, be outside the political arena. But no, no, no, no,
you can't because nothing outside the political arena anymore. Everything
(09:02):
is hyper politicized. Everything has a political dimension to it.
So even that wouldn't be very fun. And she says, well,
that's that's the book, isn't it. Like you go out
and you talk to all these all these people who
you want to talk to and about the ways in
which they're a political vocation has been politicized and why
it's making them miserable too.
Speaker 4 (09:23):
Ah, that's a good idea.
Speaker 5 (09:25):
So the so I spent a lot of time talking
to comics when I was researching the book. Many of
them don't necessarily want to be named because they're contributing
to a political product. But you know, I was talking
to Nolan Dorman at the Comedy Seller, who plugged me
into a lot of people, Shane Gillis, who was at
the time on the Ropes and it was very dimished
with his time. Yeah, very generous to me, and you
(09:46):
know a variety of others, you know, chefs and screenwriters
and people in the business. But it was that was
just the war on fund. The subtitle of the book
is Fighting Back against Progressives, War on Fun, and so
it was a litany of all the ways in which
progressives are adulterating the things that you enjoy and making
the political and sapping them of their enjoyment. It was
(10:08):
my editor at HarperCollins, Eric Nelson, who helped identify the
intellectual tradition of Puritanism in the book. And the thing is,
this is something my dad told me a long time
ago that always stuck with me, is that when the
universe gives you a good idea, you can assume that
it's given it to fifty thousand other people and it's
(10:28):
just a race to get it to market.
Speaker 4 (10:30):
That is your job. Just get it to market as
fast as possible.
Speaker 5 (10:33):
And there was another book almost by the same title
called The New Puritans published in the UK, I think
about a month after.
Speaker 3 (10:42):
I published my book You Real Happy.
Speaker 5 (10:45):
Oh that's just thrilling. I haven't finished it all the way.
It's a fine book, and we all touch on very
similar subjects. The competition has a little more sour note
to it, like this is, you know, all depressing and
awful and things are going on in the wrong direction,
and my book takes a slightly different approach. It's supposed
to be fun, supposed to be supposed to be humorous,
(11:07):
because that was the mood I was in. I was
the sentiment I was trying to channel for myself. This
was all a very self indulgent effort to try to
pick myself up out of the dulgrums of the pandemic
and write about something fun and funny and make fun
of these people because they are parodic.
Speaker 3 (11:24):
It's funny.
Speaker 5 (11:24):
So it struck a different tone and maybe didn't meet
the moment in so far as people didn't really want
to be happy, right, they were miserable like me and
wanted to have their sense of fatalism confirmed. Perhaps. I
mean that's something you and I think encounter very far.
Speaker 2 (11:43):
Yes, So it's interesting. Dave Marcus, you know, also a writer.
He and I disagree on lots and lots of things,
but he once said this thing that I really agree with,
that comedy kind of has to be outside of woke influence.
Speaker 6 (11:58):
It's sort of one of the few air is that
just really can't be that influenced by wokeness.
Speaker 2 (12:03):
I mean they try, obviously, but you know, it's either
we laugh or we don't.
Speaker 3 (12:08):
So what do you think of that?
Speaker 4 (12:10):
Yeah, there's another.
Speaker 5 (12:12):
It dovetails with something that I once heard in I
think the mid two thousands when I was working in
and around comedy talk radio at the time, which is
that funny and sexy can't coexist.
Speaker 3 (12:27):
Really.
Speaker 5 (12:28):
Yeah, like you, there's a self seriousness associated with the
effort to seduce and seduction and pursuing a partner boldly,
aggressively assertively that steals from you self deprecation and makes
you a much more serious person. And serious isn't necessarily funny.
(12:48):
In fact, it's generally not funny, not a stand up myself.
When I write comedy, it's you know, it's for particular tastes.
So I can't say that I have an especially a
finally at tuned sense of what constitutes universally you know,
universally accepted humor or something that actually appeals to a
mass market when it comes to humor.
Speaker 4 (13:10):
But Dave's observation sounds sounds right to me.
Speaker 5 (13:14):
There's an element to wokeism, and we would probably have
to define our terms, but let's just assume you.
Speaker 3 (13:20):
All know I feel like that.
Speaker 5 (13:21):
Yeah, yeah, there's an element of that that is very severe,
very harsh, and its members fancy themselves particularly moral, righteous,
upstanding people, especially in contrast to the world around them,
the society around them, which just does not. And this
(13:42):
is a very puritanical outlook too big p puritan like
original Puritans, is that the mark of a morally virtuous
person is someone who devotes themselves holy to addressing the
ills of the world around them. If you're spending any
waking moment not thinking about the ways in which other
(14:03):
people are suffering and what you can do to alleviate
that suffering, which is again in the abstract and noble philosophy,
then you're indulging in a sinful almost a distance from
the world around you. You've you've isolated yourself, and you've
removed yourself from the existence that you should be as
(14:24):
a as a virtuous person working to improve.
Speaker 3 (14:27):
Sounds very communist.
Speaker 2 (14:29):
Actually like you should be thinking about the party at
all times, and how you can support the party and
improve the party and spread the gospel of the party.
Speaker 5 (14:38):
And everything exists within an inside inside of party politics
and nothing outside of it, because anything outside of it
is uncontrolled and wild and natural, and that's dangerous. And
one of the chapters in the book is about comedy.
It's about stand up comedy and food. There's two things
you wouldn't think would go together, save for the fact
(15:00):
that you need you need people to buy a meal
and two drinks to get out.
Speaker 4 (15:02):
Of the club.
Speaker 5 (15:04):
But the the tethering element is that these two conditions,
too to to two vocations evoke in you natural reactions
that are not intellectual exercises. Right when the laugh escapes
your gut, right exactly when you enjoy a meal that
(15:26):
has been culturally appropriated from natural indigenous peoples of x
y z I love you just enjoyed that meal you have,
you'll release a sigh of relief because you liked it,
not because it's an intellectual exercise. In fact, the intellect
has to intervene after you laugh, after you sigh, to say,
oh maybe.
Speaker 3 (15:42):
I maybe maybe I shouldn't have right.
Speaker 5 (15:44):
And that's so, and that's why it's threatening to a
particular sort of totalitarian not authoritarian totalitarian. Interesting that you
know that that sort of uh, your body betrays you
in those moments, and that's threatening if you intend to
control people's conduct, behavior, outlook, and even what they think. Yeah,
(16:04):
because that is that is nature intervening, right, and you.
Speaker 3 (16:07):
Can't do anything about that. Yeah. So what do you
worry about societally?
Speaker 6 (16:12):
Like, what do you think is our largest cultural problem?
Speaker 4 (16:15):
Yes?
Speaker 5 (16:16):
So I've done a fair amount of thinking on this,
and it's hard to narrow down, but I would say,
if I had to identify one, if not the largest,
but this is the largest social societal problem cultural problem,
I would settle on the increase in cultural cachet that
we attribute to persecution complexes. It is and conservatives properly
(16:42):
understood the right from the intellectual tradition from which I hail,
which has been under some renovation in recent years, is
the victimization has a has currency to it, and it's
a sort of way in which you can paper over
your individual deficiencies and prop yourself up on the backs
(17:03):
of those who have genuinely suffered or endured something resembling
persecutorial conduct that gets you over the hump, that advances
your career objectives, your interpersonal objectives, and it creates a
popular front mentality or at least incentivizees ones which and that.
(17:24):
So you if you all have this persecution complex, and
you can paper over the problems that you as an
individual have because you can lay claim to some sort
of persecution narrative, then you compel somebody who would otherwise
engage in basic social hygiene to subordinate that impulse, to say, Okay, well,
I guess you're part of the team too, because you've
(17:46):
got that same persecution story, and we can contribute to
that persecution story by shunning you or criticizing you or
correcting you. All these things steal agency both from the
individual who suffers from this outlook and from the people
around them who believe they have to genuflect before it
and declear fealty to it. If no one is responsible
(18:08):
for their own lots in life, then a lot of
people who have made very poor decisions, who are reckless
or irresponsible to created circumstances. Yeah for themselves and others.
They're they're sympathetic. Now they're not they're not the authors
of their own lots in life. Things have been done
to them by omniscient, unseen forces we can't even really define,
(18:30):
but you know they're out there and they're working to steal.
Speaker 4 (18:33):
That which is your due.
Speaker 5 (18:35):
It's a it's superficially empowering. People feel empowered by this outlook,
but it is debilitating, robs you of your capacity to
mold your environment, to navigate your environment.
Speaker 2 (18:51):
It's a sort of control of your destiny, really, the
control of your destiny.
Speaker 5 (18:54):
Absolutely, it's available. It's obvious across the political spectrum on
the left. I think intersectionality has has done a lot
of the leg work here because it's that intersectionality, which
is just this as a thought experiment, is not actually
wholly invalid, just to define the terms it. Essentially, it's
(19:15):
an academic theory posited by Kimberly Crenshaw Williams, which posits
that everybody experiences different prejudices in their life, so those
prejudices intersect and overlap if you are multiple things. So
if you're a gay black woman, you will experience more
prejudice in your life than a gay black man, because
(19:35):
women experience more prejudice than men, et cetera. So it's
just something that makes you think in stereotypes, so that
ostensibly you can navigate those stereotypes. But in the end
of that, at the end, if you're just thinking in stereotypes,
you're still a bigot. You're you're just doing it for
what you believe to be noble services, which, by the way,
all bigots.
Speaker 3 (19:53):
Believe that, of course they do.
Speaker 2 (19:55):
Yeah, and there's never been a bigot who thinks that
they are bad.
Speaker 6 (19:58):
Right, They're always trying to do good, they're always trying
to help.
Speaker 5 (20:02):
Yeah, but this is just layering a superficial academic gloss
over whether it's basically ancient tribal instincts, tribal impulses.
Speaker 4 (20:10):
And you see that there is.
Speaker 5 (20:11):
Something similar on the Trump right, the pro Trump right,
where Donald Trump who has argued that he is not
a conservative, that the Republican Party is not a conservative
party straightforward in those terms I'm not even paraphrasing. Yeah,
he has replaced that philosophy, a limited government philosophy which
emphasizes individual agency and individual responsibility both for your circumstances
and those around you, and replaced it with something of
(20:34):
resembling a persecution complex that all these things are being
done to us. There are all these forces around us
that we can't really define, but you know they're there
and they need to be crushed. There needs to be
some sort of vengeance, after which we will ascend to
the sunlit uplands of a world in which we can
finally resume control over our lives. But you'll never get there.
(20:55):
You'll never get to that place. You've already sacrificed the
agency you need.
Speaker 4 (20:58):
To get there.
Speaker 6 (20:59):
We're going to take a quick break and be right
back on the Carol Marcowitch Show.
Speaker 3 (21:06):
Is this solvable on either the right or the left.
Speaker 5 (21:09):
Yeah, it's a new innovation relatively. I mean, it's the
thing is that it's an intellectual exercise. Liberalism, classical liberalism,
is an intellectual exercise. It's the you know, it's it's
an effort that we engage in to subordinate what these
tribal instincts in order to pursue a more galitarian social compact.
(21:30):
And if you're beholden to the egalitarian social compact, most postliberals,
which are really preliberals, do not don't necessarily believe in
universal egalitarianism, and they have they have their own problems
with it. But if you do, if you do subscribe
to that ideal as an ideal, then yeah, you've got
to do a lot of thinking around it. There is
(21:51):
a robust enterprise on both sides of the aisle dedicated
to giving you license to not do that intellectual exercise,
to not engage in that it is a fruitless pursuit,
a flawed pursuit, something that is the sort of thing
(22:11):
that only point the eggheads would really care about, and
look at the circumstances that we're in, and all these
people have delivered us to this wholly undesirable place. It
is also something we're going to talk more about this
because this is very There's a lot of incentives towards
this line of thinking on social media, which is itself
a tribal enterprise of course, but if you commit yourself
(22:35):
to that line of thinking, you know you also risk
divorcing yourself from the rest of American civilization that does
not believe we have entered into the worst place we
have ever been in. People who are responding to polls
are very likely to say, I'm upset with my circumstances.
I'm upset with the economy. I think the country is
on the wrong track. These are close to universal propositions
(22:59):
at this point. But if you were to say, as
people who get really deep into this philosophy do the
post liberal philosophy do, that we are in some of
the worst, most unenviable circumstances that any generation before us
has ever experienced. And you say that with a straight face,
you are making a mockery of yourself.
Speaker 3 (23:18):
Right.
Speaker 5 (23:18):
Of course, you were demonstrating that you have no historical reference,
no historical memory.
Speaker 3 (23:24):
Yeah, I think the.
Speaker 6 (23:24):
Times might have been worse before.
Speaker 5 (23:27):
No, I mean, like I've had this argument with my
parents who lived through nineteen sixty eight, were in were
twenty or nineteen at the time, and this was these
sixty eight seventy seventy one. I mean, we're talking about
shockingly high crime rates, riots that erupted in every major
urban center in the country, a campaign of assassination that
(23:49):
was taking out American leaders left and right, a bombing campaign,
a domestic bombing campaign in which explosives were going off
in private homes, maiming and killing people.
Speaker 4 (24:00):
On a weekly basis. I wasn't there. I only read
about it.
Speaker 3 (24:04):
Yeah, But to.
Speaker 5 (24:04):
Say that that circumstance compares unfavorably with our own today.
Right seems to me kind of crazy, but it is,
And I don't I put my folks on the line here,
but there's everywhere not.
Speaker 2 (24:17):
To agree completely with the Rothmans. But you know, my
thing about that is, yes, times were worse, but for
example crime, we got things to a much better place,
and then we threw away everything that helped us get there.
We decided that all the policies that fixed a place
(24:38):
like you know, my beloved New York City were no
longer needed. And so while I totally get that, we're
obviously in a much better place than nineteen sixty eight,
and you know, crime rates for example, and all the
different cities are lower than they were then. We got
them far lower than they are now, and now we
have to battle our way back to that. So it's
(25:00):
not that it's worse. It's clearly not worse. But it
concerns me in a different way because I don't think
you had to talk anybody into believing crime was real
in nineteen sixty eight, and now it's like acceptance is
the first step and we haven't gotten there.
Speaker 5 (25:14):
That is, I would totally subscribe to all that, and
I would probably pause it that there is a deliberate,
politically motivated unlearning of history's lessons that has contributed to
a lot of those factors. The way that let's just
talk about crime briefly, the way that people talk about
(25:35):
how to deliver American cities from the unrest that they're
currently experiencing is as though it all needs to happen
at once, and it all needs to happen from the
top down, right, as though we just we elect the
right mayor, we let the revity council, and everything changes,
and it is not how it happened in New York
City exactly. Your city was a ground up thing. I
(25:57):
mean the first of all, a lot of it is
attributable to these neighborhood associations, which block by block associations.
Times Square was the last thing to be affected by
this process. You know, the idea here that we could
clean up the streets by dealing with quality of life crimes,
as represented, for example, by the existence of smut shops.
(26:19):
You know, that was first tried under the Queensboro Bridge
and successfully before it migrated to the rest of the city.
The broken windows theory promulgated by, among others, James Q.
Wilson in the Manhattan Institute. Was an idea before it
was adopted, before it was you know, came up from
the bottom up. What we're contending with now are the
fruits of ideas that have spent many years incubating in
(26:42):
far left right campuses and intellectual salons.
Speaker 2 (26:46):
Yeah, don't prosecute crime, you know, it's just it's an
idea that has now become implemented.
Speaker 5 (26:51):
And was popular in the nineteen sixties when we're talking
about root causes and poverty, for example, as being the
primary indicator of future criminality, which is utterly false and
has been proven false. But it was a fashionable idea
at the time. But that spent, you know, a decade
and a half percolating before it doubled up to the
surface and became public policy. We're talking now about ideas
(27:13):
that were incubated in the late eighties, early nineties, implemented
in two thousands, and are coming to fruition today. These
are decades long processes. If you want to get in
the ground and do the work and you know, make
create consensuses on the ground that can be that are
replicable and that can be duplicated and put and implement
(27:33):
it at scale. It begins small begins small scale. It's
not the sort of and it does begin with talking
about it as we've been talking about it, grand ideas
and grand visions, but the actual nitty gritty of implementation
and creating consensuses across political coalitions to implement this sort
of thing for the general good. That's a that's a
(27:54):
laborious process and it's not why you can.
Speaker 2 (27:56):
Try how quickly they undid it. Yes, you're absolutely it
is a long process. But like, wow, it got undid,
you know, in four years.
Speaker 5 (28:07):
I mean just because it exploded really into twenty and
with this fashionable moral panic in the George Floyd are
around the notion that police were just slaughtering African Americans
on it on the daily basis. I just weren't seeing it.
That was the sort of thing that I mean, you
can only call it a moral panic, it was, But
it lit a fire under what were underlying ideas that
(28:30):
had been attractive to a particular type of left wing
social reformer for a very long time. They had the
plans ready to go in the drawer, It just needed
the space to implement them, which is, you know, that's
something I actually lived by because it's a story about
Robert Moses was this New York City, a very powerful
person in New York City, was responsible for love of
the infrastructure there. But the story about him is that
(28:53):
he always had the plans ready to go. He had
the legislation written, he had the plan to generate more
revenue for his agency, and the construction plans.
Speaker 4 (29:02):
It was all laid out.
Speaker 5 (29:03):
Only needed was the political space to implement them. That's
what conservative right needs to have is a framework, intellectual framework,
and the really detailed policy paper to implement these philosophies
when they're ready to go. And part of the reason
why Democrats are doing so much to demonize project, which
(29:25):
is like nine out of ten pages of that gigantic
document are really anodyne. They're basic accepted conservative policy preferences,
and sometimes the way they talk about them is rather comical.
Democrats talk about them, it's rather comical, like, oh, my gosh,
Trump wants to subordinate all executive agencies to the president?
Speaker 6 (29:47):
Yes, can you even imagine?
Speaker 5 (29:50):
But but you know, it's it's a controversial stuff around
social doctrine that really generates traction with demo cratic voters.
But a lot of the stuff in there that seems
kind of silly to us, I think probably sounds pretty
silly to most other people, like the idea that the
president should be responsible for his own executive agencies.
Speaker 2 (30:12):
Of course, right, So, Noah, you come up with book
ideas in the bathtub with your wife. You have a
very nice perch at National Review, where you can write about,
you know, most things that interest you.
Speaker 3 (30:26):
Do you feel like you've made it?
Speaker 5 (30:27):
So sometimes I do and sometimes I don't. The times
I do are predicated on again, kind of in intellectualization
of my circumstances. Because I have the family that I
always wanted. That's nice, that is n the house and
the community that I've always wanted. I really don't even
(30:48):
plan on moving. Like my material circumstances are great, and
I am satisfied. I have the career that I always wanted,
like my I'm fulfilled in that sense, but not professionally. Professionally,
I don't feel like I've I've done everything that I
want to achieve, and that would be kind of awful.
Speaker 4 (31:07):
If you did, then what else we'd all be?
Speaker 3 (31:10):
Like chilling on islands?
Speaker 5 (31:12):
Yeah, right, No, I have some ambition. I don't think
I've written enough books. I don't think I get on
camera enough. I get down and depressed when the pieces
that I write don't get the engagement or the shares
I think they deserve.
Speaker 3 (31:24):
This is genius. Why don't you all see this?
Speaker 4 (31:26):
You know?
Speaker 5 (31:26):
And and when the feedback you know that you get
as is negative, which is very frequently, you know, sometimes
it can be a bit of a downer. So do
I feel like you know I've I've I've hit all
my marks in life?
Speaker 3 (31:37):
No?
Speaker 4 (31:38):
All right, well there's a lot more.
Speaker 3 (31:40):
Watch to see where you go next and what the.
Speaker 5 (31:42):
Next, but there's a lot that will be I mean,
but those two things are in conflict, right. I'm not
sure how you navigate that or if you experience that,
but if your material circumstances are pretty well set, you
risk losing ambition.
Speaker 4 (31:57):
Right.
Speaker 5 (31:58):
I don't feel any particular age urgency to write another book.
I'd like to write another book about something that needs
to be written, not just to write another book. Right,
So looking around for whatever that overarching topic is that
doesn't can't just be truncated down into an essay and
would be better as an essay, and just you know,
the lack of material urgency there does limit my you know,
(32:23):
desire to pull this.
Speaker 4 (32:25):
Out of the universe.
Speaker 5 (32:27):
Like I'm looking, I'm not scouring the landscape for something
because I so desperately need, you know, to get an advance.
Speaker 2 (32:35):
Right, absolutely, I mean I don't know. I'm a year
plus past my first book, and I still say it
will be the only book. I have no interest in
ever doing that ever. Again, I don't know how we'll
do it. Oh no, I don't know.
Speaker 3 (32:49):
I don't know. I just found it really hard.
Speaker 4 (32:51):
And it was hard. You didn't think it was rewarding.
Speaker 6 (32:54):
Rewarding, Yeah, I mean I it was rewarding.
Speaker 3 (32:59):
I don't know.
Speaker 2 (32:59):
I stayed on book tour a long long time, which
everybody you know says is a great positive, But I
just didn't love all of that.
Speaker 3 (33:08):
Yeah, it's tough, and I love meeting the way. Yeah,
selling is not great.
Speaker 6 (33:14):
But you know, negotiating how many books are you going
to speak for?
Speaker 3 (33:17):
And all of that.
Speaker 6 (33:19):
But I love meeting people. I love having conversations with strangers.
I'm all about that.
Speaker 2 (33:23):
But you know, I do feel like I've made it
and I want to be home with my family, enjoying
the you know.
Speaker 6 (33:29):
The things that I consider having.
Speaker 4 (33:31):
That's me too, and that's just poison.
Speaker 5 (33:34):
Anytime somebody asked me to get on a plane, really,
is it worth it?
Speaker 4 (33:41):
Is it necessary?
Speaker 3 (33:42):
Now?
Speaker 4 (33:43):
I'd rather be hanging out in my basement.
Speaker 3 (33:45):
That's it. That's that's really what it's all about.
Speaker 2 (33:48):
So well, Noah, thank you so much for coming on
and here with your best tip for my listeners on
how they can improve their lives.
Speaker 5 (33:58):
So this is kind of tails with what we've been
talking about previously, but really best for you to limit
your social media intake to including getting rid of all
your accounts if you don't need them. I have a
Twitter account and need it for work. I don't have
any other account, and I make a scrupulous effort to
(34:19):
log the hell off really on the weekends and even
at night. Sometimes I have to be on that at
night because I have no idea what I'm writing about
in the morning, and I just need some sort of inspiration.
But if you can hack it, limit your social media
exposure as much as possible. That's not just that you're
absorbing all this the toxicity that this environment insensivizes, but
(34:40):
it creates an incentive structure for you to be a liar.
You lie to your audience if you want to get
the kind of food pellet to drop down and give
you the reward structure that you get from engagement, positive engagement,
not negative engifts. So a lot of people get jazzed
by negative engagement too, but those people have other psychologic.
Speaker 3 (35:00):
Right have problem.
Speaker 5 (35:01):
But if you start developing a brand for yourself, who
it's the worst possible thing you could do a temptation
to say things to maintain the brand you're you will
be confronted with the temptation to say things you don't
believe or not say things you do believe. Just by
virtue of the you'll be committing sins of omission and commission,
(35:21):
and you'll be therefore inauthentic. Your brand, such as it is,
will not be worth very much because it's not real.
It's just it's and risking. The backlash on social media
feels very real because there's you know, hundreds, if not
thousands of people telling you thought, yeah, I mean, that's
psychologically taxing, it's unrewarding, it's uncomfortable. Anybody would want to
(35:43):
avoid that circumstance and get the funds part, the fun
part being, you know, the engagement, the positive feedback, the reinforcement,
the sense of community that develops around that. It's all fictional,
none of it's real. And if you can get out
of that environment for a sustained peereriod of time a
weekend for example, yeah, you get to reconnect to what
(36:04):
is real and how and restore a sense of perspective
on what these forums actually are.
Speaker 4 (36:10):
So my suggestion is to log off as much as possible.
Speaker 2 (36:15):
I like that he is Noah Rothman. He is a
senior writer at National Review. Check him out there and
pick up his book, The Rise of the New Puritans.
Thank you so much for coming on, Noah.
Speaker 1 (36:24):
Thank you, Kerl, thanks so much for joining us on
the Carol Marco which show. Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.
Hi, and welcome back to Carol Markowitz Show on iHeartRadio.
There was a story over the weekend about the singer
Macklmore saying fuck America at his show and the crowd cheering. Now,
Macklmore is well known for trashing Israel and for dressing
up in a Jewish costume complete with prosthetic nose. I
(00:28):
think it's a very easy leap from jew hater, Israel
hater to America hater. These things go hand in hand.
That's not what I want to talk about here. This
is a man who has made riches beyond our wildest
imaginations because of this country. He is among the absolute
luckiest people in history because of his accident of birth.
(00:51):
And he doesn't get it. He has no idea. Much
is made of how kids don't learn civics and certainly
don't have patriotism instilled in them at school. Of course
that's true. I had to push my kids Brooklyn Public
School when they were little to say the Pledge of
Allegiance despite it being state law to say it daily.
They told me the school has a lot of immigrants
(01:13):
and we're trying to cater to that. I informed them
that both my husband and I are immigrants, and we
came here to be American, not to be some side
nationality that never quite adjusts and doesn't get to pledge
loyalty in this country. I think our decline in patriotism
is by design, that we're pushed to pretend that we
(01:34):
didn't all wake up on third base just by getting
to be American, that America is not that great. Without
getting too much into politics, Kamala Harris is trying to
run a patriotic campaign because people do want that. Democrats
get why this country is so great, but largely have
to pretend otherwise to appease their leftist's flight. That's a problem.
(01:58):
Fixing it in schools only be a first step. Think
about how many generations have already been through an American
hating system. They've been just seeped in it. I'm not
sure what to do about that. I always think a
lot of important conversations start in the home. Anyway. Are
you raising your kids to understand their sheer luck of
being American? Are you telling them what makes this country
(02:21):
the best country in history? Don't be embarrassed to say
that it's true, we have something special here. It's okay
to say it out loud. We have to challenge the
Macalmors of the world who have no problem saying their
thoughts out loud. Thanks for listening. Launching tomorrow, I'm going
to have a second podcast. This one is about politics,
(02:42):
and I'll be co hosting it with my good friend
Mary Catherine Ham. I'm still going to continue doing this show,
which is, as you know, largely not about politics, but
I needed a political outlet too, and MK and I
have very similar world views. We hope to be funny
and to bring you perspectives you don't hear anywhere else.
(03:04):
The show is called Normally. It will run on the
Clay Travis and Buck Sexton podcast network on iHeartRadio. It'll
be posted on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and just like this show,
you can hear it anywhere you get your podcasts. You
could subscribe starting today. We talk about balance a lot
on this show. I think it's important to take breaks
from politics, as I try to do with the Carol
(03:26):
Markowitz Show. But look, there's also a time to talk
about important issues, the election, horse race, and so much more.
We'll be doing that at the Normally podcast. Please go
subscribe right now. Thank you so much. For listening, and
I appreciate you all so much. Coming up next and
interview with Noah Rothman. Join us after the break.
Speaker 2 (03:47):
Welcome back to the Carol Markowitz Show on iHeartRadio. My
guest today is Noah Rothman. Noah is a senior writer
at National Review and the author of the excellent book
The Rise of the New Puritans.
Speaker 3 (04:00):
So nice to have you on, girl.
Speaker 4 (04:02):
Thank you so much for having me. It's a pleasure.
Speaker 3 (04:03):
So who are the New Puritans?
Speaker 5 (04:05):
Just out of curiosity, Well, the New Puritans as distinct
from the old Puritans, both, by the way, the misconception
of Puritanism as Victorianism, as sort of staid, blue nosed,
condescending prudishness versus big p Puritans, you know, the sixteen hundred,
(04:28):
seventeen hundreds mainline Protestant New England or Congregationalist New England.
There's a lot of definitional.
Speaker 4 (04:34):
Mix up here.
Speaker 5 (04:36):
So the New Puritans, as I define them, are really
an intellectual tradition that dates back to the old Puritanism,
and its home is in progressivism. Properly understood. Progressivism arose
from the ashes of the Puritan experiment in mainline New
England and it was a moral crusade as as much
as it was a public policy endeavor, and it had
(04:58):
a moral element to quite quite a few of the
of the public policy preferences that this movement pursued. And
it was typified by an idea that all of society's
engines must be harnessed to all drive in the same direction.
So there could not be anything that exists outside politics. Right,
(05:20):
every every every facet of the social contract had to
be reflective of this overarching moral desire familiar. So you
couldn't have entertainment products that didn't, for example, serve a
useful purpose. That everything had to have a utilitarian aspect
to it. Athletics had to have a martial dimension. You
couldn't you couldn't have art for art's sake. You could
(05:42):
have furniture makers or headstone designers, or people who were
skilled at portraiture, because these were useful. You were leaving
a record for posterity. Anything else was idle and illness
as a sin. And you see this throughout the modern
progressive ethos, which and part of the book maintains that
(06:02):
on the left, the sort of the licentiousness and libertinism
that typified the sexual revolution, and that left leaning tradition
was an aberration and a departure really from their otherwise
moralistic framework when you start to see this moralistic framework
arise in this progressive left. So the book breaks this
(06:24):
down because there is a moral dimension to this is
not necessarily worth criticizing. The excesses of it are, but
the remoralization of society, as Gertrude Himmelfarb would have called it,
isn't necessarily something to look askance upon. So the chapters
are organized in virtues, piety, prudence, austerity, temperance, harmony, and
order of the fear of God. All these things are
(06:46):
good in their properly understood dimensions. It's when they become
expanded to apply to every aspect of society, even innocuous
stuff like the fashion you wear in the sports you
watch in your hobb these decoration and knitting and fishing
and gardening and all that stuff has become adulterated so
(07:06):
that a particular cast of people can peel back the
curtain and see the hideous hidden workings of the world
that they, with their exclusive sense of propriety, can see,
but you can't. It's a very psychologically satisfying outlook, but
it also leads you to madness. And this book identifies
the madness and tries to identify ways in which you
(07:30):
can mute the tendency that you, maybe as a progressive
puritan yourself, feel to impose your moral framework on the
world around you.
Speaker 3 (07:39):
How did you get interested in this?
Speaker 4 (07:40):
Like?
Speaker 3 (07:40):
What was the spark?
Speaker 5 (07:42):
So the origins of this book date back to early
twenty twenty, and it was the height of the pandemic
and I was just miserable. And so my job is
consuming the headlines and trying to tease out, you know,
thoughts and takes and what have you and publish them.
(08:03):
We're in the same business, you know, And that was
a really unsatisfying time to be doing that. So I'm
sitting in the bath of my wife and we're just
and I'm I'm commiserating because I'm miserable.
Speaker 3 (08:14):
Are you sitting in the bath with your life bathtub?
Speaker 1 (08:17):
Oh?
Speaker 3 (08:17):
With your wife?
Speaker 4 (08:18):
With my wife?
Speaker 3 (08:18):
Okayy's it.
Speaker 5 (08:21):
Trust me, It's not as sallacious as it sounds, because
I'm just having a glass of wine and I'm miserable.
And she's like, she asks me, I think you know
what what would you do to make yourself happy and
also drive some income in out of it so we
can pay the mortgage.
Speaker 4 (08:37):
It's like, well, you know, if I had my.
Speaker 5 (08:39):
Brothers, I would spend a lot of my time talking
to work in comics, professional stand ups, maybe screenwriters, and
maybe people who make food for a living or talk
about sports for a living. You know, stuff that is
supposed to, you know, be outside the political arena. But no, no, no, no,
you can't because nothing outside the political arena anymore. Everything
(09:02):
is hyper politicized. Everything has a political dimension to it.
So even that wouldn't be very fun. And she says, well,
that's that's the book, isn't it. Like you go out
and you talk to all these all these people who
you want to talk to and about the ways in
which they're a political vocation has been politicized and why
it's making them miserable too.
Speaker 4 (09:23):
Ah, that's a good idea.
Speaker 5 (09:25):
So the so I spent a lot of time talking
to comics when I was researching the book. Many of
them don't necessarily want to be named because they're contributing
to a political product. But you know, I was talking
to Nolan Dorman at the Comedy Seller, who plugged me
into a lot of people, Shane Gillis, who was at
the time on the Ropes and it was very dimished
with his time. Yeah, very generous to me, and you
(09:46):
know a variety of others, you know, chefs and screenwriters
and people in the business. But it was that was
just the war on fund. The subtitle of the book
is Fighting Back against Progressives, War on Fun, and so
it was a litany of all the ways in which
progressives are adulterating the things that you enjoy and making
the political and sapping them of their enjoyment. It was
(10:08):
my editor at HarperCollins, Eric Nelson, who helped identify the
intellectual tradition of Puritanism in the book. And the thing is,
this is something my dad told me a long time
ago that always stuck with me, is that when the
universe gives you a good idea, you can assume that
it's given it to fifty thousand other people and it's
(10:28):
just a race to get it to market.
Speaker 4 (10:30):
That is your job. Just get it to market as
fast as possible.
Speaker 5 (10:33):
And there was another book almost by the same title
called The New Puritans published in the UK, I think
about a month after.
Speaker 3 (10:42):
I published my book You Real Happy.
Speaker 5 (10:45):
Oh that's just thrilling. I haven't finished it all the way.
It's a fine book, and we all touch on very
similar subjects. The competition has a little more sour note
to it, like this is, you know, all depressing and
awful and things are going on in the wrong direction,
and my book takes a slightly different approach. It's supposed
to be fun, supposed to be supposed to be humorous,
(11:07):
because that was the mood I was in. I was
the sentiment I was trying to channel for myself. This
was all a very self indulgent effort to try to
pick myself up out of the dulgrums of the pandemic
and write about something fun and funny and make fun
of these people because they are parodic.
Speaker 3 (11:24):
It's funny.
Speaker 5 (11:24):
So it struck a different tone and maybe didn't meet
the moment in so far as people didn't really want
to be happy, right, they were miserable like me and
wanted to have their sense of fatalism confirmed. Perhaps. I
mean that's something you and I think encounter very far.
Speaker 2 (11:43):
Yes, So it's interesting. Dave Marcus, you know, also a writer.
He and I disagree on lots and lots of things,
but he once said this thing that I really agree with,
that comedy kind of has to be outside of woke influence.
Speaker 6 (11:58):
It's sort of one of the few air is that
just really can't be that influenced by wokeness.
Speaker 2 (12:03):
I mean they try, obviously, but you know, it's either
we laugh or we don't.
Speaker 3 (12:08):
So what do you think of that?
Speaker 4 (12:10):
Yeah, there's another.
Speaker 5 (12:12):
It dovetails with something that I once heard in I
think the mid two thousands when I was working in
and around comedy talk radio at the time, which is
that funny and sexy can't coexist.
Speaker 3 (12:27):
Really.
Speaker 5 (12:28):
Yeah, like you, there's a self seriousness associated with the
effort to seduce and seduction and pursuing a partner boldly,
aggressively assertively that steals from you self deprecation and makes
you a much more serious person. And serious isn't necessarily funny.
(12:48):
In fact, it's generally not funny, not a stand up myself.
When I write comedy, it's you know, it's for particular tastes.
So I can't say that I have an especially a
finally at tuned sense of what constitutes universally you know,
universally accepted humor or something that actually appeals to a
mass market when it comes to humor.
Speaker 4 (13:10):
But Dave's observation sounds sounds right to me.
Speaker 5 (13:14):
There's an element to wokeism, and we would probably have
to define our terms, but let's just assume you.
Speaker 3 (13:20):
All know I feel like that.
Speaker 5 (13:21):
Yeah, yeah, there's an element of that that is very severe,
very harsh, and its members fancy themselves particularly moral, righteous,
upstanding people, especially in contrast to the world around them,
the society around them, which just does not. And this
(13:42):
is a very puritanical outlook too big p puritan like
original Puritans, is that the mark of a morally virtuous
person is someone who devotes themselves holy to addressing the
ills of the world around them. If you're spending any
waking moment not thinking about the ways in which other
(14:03):
people are suffering and what you can do to alleviate
that suffering, which is again in the abstract and noble philosophy,
then you're indulging in a sinful almost a distance from
the world around you. You've you've isolated yourself, and you've
removed yourself from the existence that you should be as
(14:24):
a as a virtuous person working to improve.
Speaker 3 (14:27):
Sounds very communist.
Speaker 2 (14:29):
Actually like you should be thinking about the party at
all times, and how you can support the party and
improve the party and spread the gospel of the party.
Speaker 5 (14:38):
And everything exists within an inside inside of party politics
and nothing outside of it, because anything outside of it
is uncontrolled and wild and natural, and that's dangerous. And
one of the chapters in the book is about comedy.
It's about stand up comedy and food. There's two things
you wouldn't think would go together, save for the fact
(15:00):
that you need you need people to buy a meal
and two drinks to get out.
Speaker 4 (15:02):
Of the club.
Speaker 5 (15:04):
But the the tethering element is that these two conditions,
too to to two vocations evoke in you natural reactions
that are not intellectual exercises. Right when the laugh escapes
your gut, right exactly when you enjoy a meal that
(15:26):
has been culturally appropriated from natural indigenous peoples of x
y z I love you just enjoyed that meal you have,
you'll release a sigh of relief because you liked it,
not because it's an intellectual exercise. In fact, the intellect
has to intervene after you laugh, after you sigh, to say,
oh maybe.
Speaker 3 (15:42):
I maybe maybe I shouldn't have right.
Speaker 5 (15:44):
And that's so, and that's why it's threatening to a
particular sort of totalitarian not authoritarian totalitarian. Interesting that you
know that that sort of uh, your body betrays you
in those moments, and that's threatening if you intend to
control people's conduct, behavior, outlook, and even what they think. Yeah,
(16:04):
because that is that is nature intervening, right, and you.
Speaker 3 (16:07):
Can't do anything about that. Yeah. So what do you
worry about societally?
Speaker 6 (16:12):
Like, what do you think is our largest cultural problem?
Speaker 4 (16:15):
Yes?
Speaker 5 (16:16):
So I've done a fair amount of thinking on this,
and it's hard to narrow down, but I would say,
if I had to identify one, if not the largest,
but this is the largest social societal problem cultural problem,
I would settle on the increase in cultural cachet that
we attribute to persecution complexes. It is and conservatives properly
(16:42):
understood the right from the intellectual tradition from which I hail,
which has been under some renovation in recent years, is
the victimization has a has currency to it, and it's
a sort of way in which you can paper over
your individual deficiencies and prop yourself up on the backs
(17:03):
of those who have genuinely suffered or endured something resembling
persecutorial conduct that gets you over the hump, that advances
your career objectives, your interpersonal objectives, and it creates a
popular front mentality or at least incentivizees ones which and that.
(17:24):
So you if you all have this persecution complex, and
you can paper over the problems that you as an
individual have because you can lay claim to some sort
of persecution narrative, then you compel somebody who would otherwise
engage in basic social hygiene to subordinate that impulse, to say, Okay, well,
I guess you're part of the team too, because you've
(17:46):
got that same persecution story, and we can contribute to
that persecution story by shunning you or criticizing you or
correcting you. All these things steal agency both from the
individual who suffers from this outlook and from the people
around them who believe they have to genuflect before it
and declear fealty to it. If no one is responsible
(18:08):
for their own lots in life, then a lot of
people who have made very poor decisions, who are reckless
or irresponsible to created circumstances. Yeah for themselves and others.
They're they're sympathetic. Now they're not they're not the authors
of their own lots in life. Things have been done
to them by omniscient, unseen forces we can't even really define,
(18:30):
but you know they're out there and they're working to steal.
Speaker 4 (18:33):
That which is your due.
Speaker 5 (18:35):
It's a it's superficially empowering. People feel empowered by this outlook,
but it is debilitating, robs you of your capacity to
mold your environment, to navigate your environment.
Speaker 2 (18:51):
It's a sort of control of your destiny, really, the
control of your destiny.
Speaker 5 (18:54):
Absolutely, it's available. It's obvious across the political spectrum on
the left. I think intersectionality has has done a lot
of the leg work here because it's that intersectionality, which
is just this as a thought experiment, is not actually
wholly invalid, just to define the terms it. Essentially, it's
(19:15):
an academic theory posited by Kimberly Crenshaw Williams, which posits
that everybody experiences different prejudices in their life, so those
prejudices intersect and overlap if you are multiple things. So
if you're a gay black woman, you will experience more
prejudice in your life than a gay black man, because
(19:35):
women experience more prejudice than men, et cetera. So it's
just something that makes you think in stereotypes, so that
ostensibly you can navigate those stereotypes. But in the end
of that, at the end, if you're just thinking in stereotypes,
you're still a bigot. You're you're just doing it for
what you believe to be noble services, which, by the way,
all bigots.
Speaker 3 (19:53):
Believe that, of course they do.
Speaker 2 (19:55):
Yeah, and there's never been a bigot who thinks that
they are bad.
Speaker 6 (19:58):
Right, They're always trying to do good, they're always trying
to help.
Speaker 5 (20:02):
Yeah, but this is just layering a superficial academic gloss
over whether it's basically ancient tribal instincts, tribal impulses.
Speaker 4 (20:10):
And you see that there is.
Speaker 5 (20:11):
Something similar on the Trump right, the pro Trump right,
where Donald Trump who has argued that he is not
a conservative, that the Republican Party is not a conservative
party straightforward in those terms I'm not even paraphrasing. Yeah,
he has replaced that philosophy, a limited government philosophy which
emphasizes individual agency and individual responsibility both for your circumstances
and those around you, and replaced it with something of
(20:34):
resembling a persecution complex that all these things are being
done to us. There are all these forces around us
that we can't really define, but you know they're there
and they need to be crushed. There needs to be
some sort of vengeance, after which we will ascend to
the sunlit uplands of a world in which we can
finally resume control over our lives. But you'll never get there.
(20:55):
You'll never get to that place. You've already sacrificed the
agency you need.
Speaker 4 (20:58):
To get there.
Speaker 6 (20:59):
We're going to take a quick break and be right
back on the Carol Marcowitch Show.
Speaker 3 (21:06):
Is this solvable on either the right or the left.
Speaker 5 (21:09):
Yeah, it's a new innovation relatively. I mean, it's the
thing is that it's an intellectual exercise. Liberalism, classical liberalism,
is an intellectual exercise. It's the you know, it's it's
an effort that we engage in to subordinate what these
tribal instincts in order to pursue a more galitarian social compact.
(21:30):
And if you're beholden to the egalitarian social compact, most postliberals,
which are really preliberals, do not don't necessarily believe in
universal egalitarianism, and they have they have their own problems
with it. But if you do, if you do subscribe
to that ideal as an ideal, then yeah, you've got
to do a lot of thinking around it. There is
(21:51):
a robust enterprise on both sides of the aisle dedicated
to giving you license to not do that intellectual exercise,
to not engage in that it is a fruitless pursuit,
a flawed pursuit, something that is the sort of thing
(22:11):
that only point the eggheads would really care about, and
look at the circumstances that we're in, and all these
people have delivered us to this wholly undesirable place. It
is also something we're going to talk more about this
because this is very There's a lot of incentives towards
this line of thinking on social media, which is itself
a tribal enterprise of course, but if you commit yourself
(22:35):
to that line of thinking, you know you also risk
divorcing yourself from the rest of American civilization that does
not believe we have entered into the worst place we
have ever been in. People who are responding to polls
are very likely to say, I'm upset with my circumstances.
I'm upset with the economy. I think the country is
on the wrong track. These are close to universal propositions
(22:59):
at this point. But if you were to say, as
people who get really deep into this philosophy do the
post liberal philosophy do, that we are in some of
the worst, most unenviable circumstances that any generation before us
has ever experienced. And you say that with a straight face,
you are making a mockery of yourself.
Speaker 3 (23:18):
Right.
Speaker 5 (23:18):
Of course, you were demonstrating that you have no historical reference,
no historical memory.
Speaker 3 (23:24):
Yeah, I think the.
Speaker 6 (23:24):
Times might have been worse before.
Speaker 5 (23:27):
No, I mean, like I've had this argument with my
parents who lived through nineteen sixty eight, were in were
twenty or nineteen at the time, and this was these
sixty eight seventy seventy one. I mean, we're talking about
shockingly high crime rates, riots that erupted in every major
urban center in the country, a campaign of assassination that
(23:49):
was taking out American leaders left and right, a bombing campaign,
a domestic bombing campaign in which explosives were going off
in private homes, maiming and killing people.
Speaker 4 (24:00):
On a weekly basis. I wasn't there. I only read
about it.
Speaker 3 (24:04):
Yeah, But to.
Speaker 5 (24:04):
Say that that circumstance compares unfavorably with our own today.
Right seems to me kind of crazy, but it is,
And I don't I put my folks on the line here,
but there's everywhere not.
Speaker 2 (24:17):
To agree completely with the Rothmans. But you know, my
thing about that is, yes, times were worse, but for
example crime, we got things to a much better place,
and then we threw away everything that helped us get there.
We decided that all the policies that fixed a place
(24:38):
like you know, my beloved New York City were no
longer needed. And so while I totally get that, we're
obviously in a much better place than nineteen sixty eight,
and you know, crime rates for example, and all the
different cities are lower than they were then. We got
them far lower than they are now, and now we
have to battle our way back to that. So it's
(25:00):
not that it's worse. It's clearly not worse. But it
concerns me in a different way because I don't think
you had to talk anybody into believing crime was real
in nineteen sixty eight, and now it's like acceptance is
the first step and we haven't gotten there.
Speaker 5 (25:14):
That is, I would totally subscribe to all that, and
I would probably pause it that there is a deliberate,
politically motivated unlearning of history's lessons that has contributed to
a lot of those factors. The way that let's just
talk about crime briefly, the way that people talk about
(25:35):
how to deliver American cities from the unrest that they're
currently experiencing is as though it all needs to happen
at once, and it all needs to happen from the
top down, right, as though we just we elect the
right mayor, we let the revity council, and everything changes,
and it is not how it happened in New York
City exactly. Your city was a ground up thing. I
(25:57):
mean the first of all, a lot of it is
attributable to these neighborhood associations, which block by block associations.
Times Square was the last thing to be affected by
this process. You know, the idea here that we could
clean up the streets by dealing with quality of life crimes,
as represented, for example, by the existence of smut shops.
(26:19):
You know, that was first tried under the Queensboro Bridge
and successfully before it migrated to the rest of the city.
The broken windows theory promulgated by, among others, James Q.
Wilson in the Manhattan Institute. Was an idea before it
was adopted, before it was you know, came up from
the bottom up. What we're contending with now are the
fruits of ideas that have spent many years incubating in
(26:42):
far left right campuses and intellectual salons.
Speaker 2 (26:46):
Yeah, don't prosecute crime, you know, it's just it's an
idea that has now become implemented.
Speaker 5 (26:51):
And was popular in the nineteen sixties when we're talking
about root causes and poverty, for example, as being the
primary indicator of future criminality, which is utterly false and
has been proven false. But it was a fashionable idea
at the time. But that spent, you know, a decade
and a half percolating before it doubled up to the
surface and became public policy. We're talking now about ideas
(27:13):
that were incubated in the late eighties, early nineties, implemented
in two thousands, and are coming to fruition today. These
are decades long processes. If you want to get in
the ground and do the work and you know, make
create consensuses on the ground that can be that are
replicable and that can be duplicated and put and implement
(27:33):
it at scale. It begins small begins small scale. It's
not the sort of and it does begin with talking
about it as we've been talking about it, grand ideas
and grand visions, but the actual nitty gritty of implementation
and creating consensuses across political coalitions to implement this sort
of thing for the general good. That's a that's a
(27:54):
laborious process and it's not why you can.
Speaker 2 (27:56):
Try how quickly they undid it. Yes, you're absolutely it
is a long process. But like, wow, it got undid,
you know, in four years.
Speaker 5 (28:07):
I mean just because it exploded really into twenty and
with this fashionable moral panic in the George Floyd are
around the notion that police were just slaughtering African Americans
on it on the daily basis. I just weren't seeing it.
That was the sort of thing that I mean, you
can only call it a moral panic, it was, But
it lit a fire under what were underlying ideas that
(28:30):
had been attractive to a particular type of left wing
social reformer for a very long time. They had the
plans ready to go in the drawer, It just needed
the space to implement them, which is, you know, that's
something I actually lived by because it's a story about
Robert Moses was this New York City, a very powerful
person in New York City, was responsible for love of
the infrastructure there. But the story about him is that
(28:53):
he always had the plans ready to go. He had
the legislation written, he had the plan to generate more
revenue for his agency, and the construction plans.
Speaker 4 (29:02):
It was all laid out.
Speaker 5 (29:03):
Only needed was the political space to implement them. That's
what conservative right needs to have is a framework, intellectual framework,
and the really detailed policy paper to implement these philosophies
when they're ready to go. And part of the reason
why Democrats are doing so much to demonize project, which
(29:25):
is like nine out of ten pages of that gigantic
document are really anodyne. They're basic accepted conservative policy preferences,
and sometimes the way they talk about them is rather comical.
Democrats talk about them, it's rather comical, like, oh, my gosh,
Trump wants to subordinate all executive agencies to the president?
Speaker 6 (29:47):
Yes, can you even imagine?
Speaker 5 (29:50):
But but you know, it's it's a controversial stuff around
social doctrine that really generates traction with demo cratic voters.
But a lot of the stuff in there that seems
kind of silly to us, I think probably sounds pretty
silly to most other people, like the idea that the
president should be responsible for his own executive agencies.
Speaker 2 (30:12):
Of course, right, So, Noah, you come up with book
ideas in the bathtub with your wife. You have a
very nice perch at National Review, where you can write about,
you know, most things that interest you.
Speaker 3 (30:26):
Do you feel like you've made it?
Speaker 5 (30:27):
So sometimes I do and sometimes I don't. The times
I do are predicated on again, kind of in intellectualization
of my circumstances. Because I have the family that I
always wanted. That's nice, that is n the house and
the community that I've always wanted. I really don't even
(30:48):
plan on moving. Like my material circumstances are great, and
I am satisfied. I have the career that I always wanted,
like my I'm fulfilled in that sense, but not professionally. Professionally,
I don't feel like I've I've done everything that I
want to achieve, and that would be kind of awful.
Speaker 4 (31:07):
If you did, then what else we'd all be?
Speaker 3 (31:10):
Like chilling on islands?
Speaker 5 (31:12):
Yeah, right, No, I have some ambition. I don't think
I've written enough books. I don't think I get on
camera enough. I get down and depressed when the pieces
that I write don't get the engagement or the shares
I think they deserve.
Speaker 3 (31:24):
This is genius. Why don't you all see this?
Speaker 4 (31:26):
You know?
Speaker 5 (31:26):
And and when the feedback you know that you get
as is negative, which is very frequently, you know, sometimes
it can be a bit of a downer. So do
I feel like you know I've I've I've hit all
my marks in life?
Speaker 3 (31:37):
No?
Speaker 4 (31:38):
All right, well there's a lot more.
Speaker 3 (31:40):
Watch to see where you go next and what the.
Speaker 5 (31:42):
Next, but there's a lot that will be I mean,
but those two things are in conflict, right. I'm not
sure how you navigate that or if you experience that,
but if your material circumstances are pretty well set, you
risk losing ambition.
Speaker 4 (31:57):
Right.
Speaker 5 (31:58):
I don't feel any particular age urgency to write another book.
I'd like to write another book about something that needs
to be written, not just to write another book. Right,
So looking around for whatever that overarching topic is that
doesn't can't just be truncated down into an essay and
would be better as an essay, and just you know,
the lack of material urgency there does limit my you know,
(32:23):
desire to pull this.
Speaker 4 (32:25):
Out of the universe.
Speaker 5 (32:27):
Like I'm looking, I'm not scouring the landscape for something
because I so desperately need, you know, to get an advance.
Speaker 2 (32:35):
Right, absolutely, I mean I don't know. I'm a year
plus past my first book, and I still say it
will be the only book. I have no interest in
ever doing that ever. Again, I don't know how we'll
do it. Oh no, I don't know.
Speaker 3 (32:49):
I don't know. I just found it really hard.
Speaker 4 (32:51):
And it was hard. You didn't think it was rewarding.
Speaker 6 (32:54):
Rewarding, Yeah, I mean I it was rewarding.
Speaker 3 (32:59):
I don't know.
Speaker 2 (32:59):
I stayed on book tour a long long time, which
everybody you know says is a great positive, But I
just didn't love all of that.
Speaker 3 (33:08):
Yeah, it's tough, and I love meeting the way. Yeah,
selling is not great.
Speaker 6 (33:14):
But you know, negotiating how many books are you going
to speak for?
Speaker 3 (33:17):
And all of that.
Speaker 6 (33:19):
But I love meeting people. I love having conversations with strangers.
I'm all about that.
Speaker 2 (33:23):
But you know, I do feel like I've made it
and I want to be home with my family, enjoying
the you know.
Speaker 6 (33:29):
The things that I consider having.
Speaker 4 (33:31):
That's me too, and that's just poison.
Speaker 5 (33:34):
Anytime somebody asked me to get on a plane, really,
is it worth it?
Speaker 4 (33:41):
Is it necessary?
Speaker 3 (33:42):
Now?
Speaker 4 (33:43):
I'd rather be hanging out in my basement.
Speaker 3 (33:45):
That's it. That's that's really what it's all about.
Speaker 2 (33:48):
So well, Noah, thank you so much for coming on
and here with your best tip for my listeners on
how they can improve their lives.
Speaker 5 (33:58):
So this is kind of tails with what we've been
talking about previously, but really best for you to limit
your social media intake to including getting rid of all
your accounts if you don't need them. I have a
Twitter account and need it for work. I don't have
any other account, and I make a scrupulous effort to
(34:19):
log the hell off really on the weekends and even
at night. Sometimes I have to be on that at
night because I have no idea what I'm writing about
in the morning, and I just need some sort of inspiration.
But if you can hack it, limit your social media
exposure as much as possible. That's not just that you're
absorbing all this the toxicity that this environment insensivizes, but
(34:40):
it creates an incentive structure for you to be a liar.
You lie to your audience if you want to get
the kind of food pellet to drop down and give
you the reward structure that you get from engagement, positive engagement,
not negative engifts. So a lot of people get jazzed
by negative engagement too, but those people have other psychologic.
Speaker 3 (35:00):
Right have problem.
Speaker 5 (35:01):
But if you start developing a brand for yourself, who
it's the worst possible thing you could do a temptation
to say things to maintain the brand you're you will
be confronted with the temptation to say things you don't
believe or not say things you do believe. Just by
virtue of the you'll be committing sins of omission and commission,
(35:21):
and you'll be therefore inauthentic. Your brand, such as it is,
will not be worth very much because it's not real.
It's just it's and risking. The backlash on social media
feels very real because there's you know, hundreds, if not
thousands of people telling you thought, yeah, I mean, that's
psychologically taxing, it's unrewarding, it's uncomfortable. Anybody would want to
(35:43):
avoid that circumstance and get the funds part, the fun
part being, you know, the engagement, the positive feedback, the reinforcement,
the sense of community that develops around that. It's all fictional,
none of it's real. And if you can get out
of that environment for a sustained peereriod of time a
weekend for example, yeah, you get to reconnect to what
(36:04):
is real and how and restore a sense of perspective
on what these forums actually are.
Speaker 4 (36:10):
So my suggestion is to log off as much as possible.
Speaker 2 (36:15):
I like that he is Noah Rothman. He is a
senior writer at National Review. Check him out there and
pick up his book, The Rise of the New Puritans.
Thank you so much for coming on, Noah.
Speaker 1 (36:24):
Thank you, Kerl, thanks so much for joining us on
the Carol Marco which show. Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.
Host
Karol Markowicz
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