Ishare the fairly conventional conservative view that the strongest case for liberalism is as an effective technology for managing social peace in a complex society—but one that depends upon sources of meaning and purpose deeper than itself, which it struggles to generate on its own.

Those resources can be self-regenerative. I don’t fully buy the argument that, with the advent of Locke, there is an automatic decline into hyper-individualism. American history provides plenty of evidence that a liberal superstructure doesn’t necessarily prevent great awakenings. To the extent that it does so, it is under particular technological conditions. The vindication of the older conservative critique of liberalism as atomization—which looks more potent today than it did when I was at Harvard in the early 2000s; and looked more potent then than it did in, say, 1955—is technologically mediated. There have been technologies that accelerate individualism, ranging from things we take for granted, like the interstate highway system and the birth-control pill, through to the internet, a particular accelerant. As a metaphor, you can think of individualism’s tending towards atomization and despair as a gene within the liberal order, which gets expressed under particular environmental conditions, but doesn’t necessarily emerge if those conditions are not present. In recent years, the internet in particular has helped that gene be expressed more fully than it was.

An alternative theory of liberalism is that it is an ambitious way of life in its own right. That would be the argument of my friend Samuel Moyn, with whom I’ve taught classes on this. He would essentially agree with the conservative critique, but argue that this means you need a liberalism that is not just managerial but ambitious, Promethean, committed to self-creation and exploration. And that form of liberalism, in my view, is subject to strong and dangerous temptations. Sometimes they’re necessary temptations—a culture may need a little Prometheanism—but they can quickly lead it badly astray. The liberalism I described in Privilege tended towards a spiritually arid form of hyper-ambition; not Whitman and Emerson communing with the glories of creation, but: how do I get a job at McKinsey? Under conditions of prosperity, liberalism as a world-view had been transmuted into a purely instrumental, self-interested meritocracy.

Liberals themselves subsequently decided this was true. A whole spate of books came out after Privilege, from Harry Lewis’s Excellence Without a Soul—he was dean of Harvard when I was there; he wrote it as soon as he retired—to William Deresiewicz’s Excellent Sheep, Daniel Markovits’s Meritocracy Trap, Michael Sandel’s Tyranny of Merit. So in a sense, I was early to a critique of meritocratic liberalism that many liberals came to think was probably correct. Of course, I was already stealing things from Christopher Lasch.

There is a particular American conservative critique, which is related to the weakness of the left in the us. The original European critique of the liberal project—Oakeshott wouldn’t be the right example, he’s not hard enough—but if you read someone like de Maistre, the liberal idea is understood as a revolution against order, against God; it’s Satanic. That critique makes sense in a political landscape where there is an ancien régime and a social hierarchy that a traditionalist can ally with, and also a deeper form of radicalism than has usually obtained in the us. The reactionary case against liberalism in Europe finds its strongest purchase in the French Revolution and Soviet Communism—instances where there was a radical takeover, a lot of people were killed and a lot of priests were killed, too. America never had an ancien régime of that sort nor a really potent form of radical left-wing politics. So conservatism in the States has tended to focus more on the shallowness of liberalism than on its dangers.

Of course, there are moments when the liberal world is perceived to be more radical, and the conservative critique becomes more radical in turn; the late sixties were one such moment, and the period we’ve just lived through would be another. It’s no coincidence that post-liberals have emerged as important figures on the American right in the last five or ten years, with a more thoroughgoing, to-the-roots critique of liberalism, at the very moment when liberalism itself becomes more radicalized and aggressive in its desire for a cultural revolution. Whereas in the 1990s, with neoconservatives versus neoliberals, they were not that far apart. The George Will and Irving Kristol critique of liberalism differed from that of, say, Adrian Vermeule, who argues wokeness proves that liberalism was radical all along. But in periods when liberalism seems moderate, the conservative critique inevitably becomes more moderate. When I was writing Privilege, it wouldn’t have made sense to claim that Harvard in 1999 was run by Marxist radicals bent on destroying all of America’s traditional hierarchy, because clearly the liberalism of that era was fully adapted to American hierarchy and invested in the preservation of elite power. So, to the extent that I felt alienated from that, it was much more about what I saw as its moral and spiritual limitations, as opposed to its radical tendencies.

People like to say that, yes—I’ve heard that before.

It’s true that I’ve always worked inside elite liberal institutions. I was an intern for National Review and I’ve written for conservative publications. But I went to Harvard, I wrote for the Atlantic and, since 2009, I’ve worked for the New York Times. There’s never been a point in my career where I was doing anything other than primarily writing for a liberal-leaning audience from a conservative perspective. In that sense, there are ways in which ‘here I stand, I can do no other’. There was no other vocation that my career path prepared me for, and to some degree it’s felt natural to do what I do, even though it is a curious position. It seems to me a valuable thing to do—not to overestimate my own importance; I don’t look at America and think I’ve had a positive impact on easing the culture wars or anything like that. But it’s good for people who care about ideas to engage with the arguments on both sides. What is writing for, if not to speak to people who disagree with you at some level? Even though this means that there are certain kinds of writing that I don’t get to do, types of polemic that I avoid. The reality is that the job’s a tightrope, where there’s a danger of falling off on one side, going too far into the conservative world to be able to reach back and speak to liberals, or falling in the other direction and becoming a tame figure, the conservative that liberals can read to confirm their sense that Trump and the Republican Party are bad, challenging them only mildly. I’ve always been conscious of that.

There are certain conservatives who think ill of me and regard me as having been captured, a tamed figure. But most people to my right whom I respect understand what I’m doing and what the role is, and don’t regard me as someone who has sold out to the enemy. In a way the Trump era, by creating a large category of conservative intellectuals who didn’t like a Republican president, made it easier to occupy this role. From the liberal perspective, as long as you were on side about being anti-Trump, you could say conservative things and retain credibility. The never-Trump phenomenon hasn’t ceased to matter as a force in American politics, but I’m not sure what the future holds in that regard.

Yes, lots of people say that. But those who take that view and discount everything I have to say are not usually people I respect. On the other hand, I’ve written a number of pieces saying that the new Trump administration will probably mess up and blow this opportunity, and the response I’ve had from some people on the right whom I do respect has been, basically: ‘You don’t get it, you’re trying to finesse it but this is about power politics, we have to crush our enemies.’ But people like that can have the argument with me without assuming that I’ve sold out; they just think I’m too interested in everyone getting along. Which is a fair point; one aspect of my life and work is that I like people on both sides—I always have. It’s true, as you say, that my first book was a scathing critique of Harvard, but most of my friends there were nice liberal Harvardians. My life was formed there; it’s where I met my wife. I’m friends with people who voted for Trump and with people who think Trump is a fascist threat to American democracy. Maybe at some point that will become untenable, but I hope it doesn’t.

I think it’s both. There’s value in not burning your bridges every time you write an 800-word article. The role I play at the Times could not be played if I was constantly burning bridges; I would just be undermining my own vocation and my professional obligations as a writer. But experience has taught me a lot about the limitations of the influence a political columnist can actually have on American life. When Reihan and I wrote Grand New Party, we were part of a project that aimed to change the gop, to make it more working class-friendly—‘reform conservatism’, as it was labelled—with quite a few people involved. Then in 2016, Trump came along and vaporized that—while at the same time, realizing some aspects of the outreach to the working class. Things that we predicted came to pass, but not in the way that we predicted and certainly not through our own efforts. My period of maximal anti-Trumpism came after that, during the 2016 campaign and into 2017, when I wrote a lot of very anti-Trump columns.

The people in political journalism who hate me the most right now are probably those who agreed with me about Trump in 2016, but who then took it as an obligation to make anti-Trumpism their organizing theory. To someone like Jonathan Last at the Bulwark, for example, I’m a symbol of the failures of conservative punditry to grasp just how bad Trump is. Maybe in the weighing out of Trumpian history, he’ll be proven right—I don’t know. But the endless anti-Trump columns just seemed to be screaming into oblivion; I saw how little effect they had upon the world. In the end, I found a cooler and more analytic style, which in my view has been more helpful to the people who wanted to oppose Trump. The Democratic Party of the last eight years would have had more to gain from listening to me than to those never-Trump writers who became intense adherents of everything Biden decided to do!

There was a parallel between my most anti-Trump columns and my most vehement critiques of Pope Francis. Two things that I was deeply attached to—American conservatism and the Catholic Church—were being taken out of my hands by figures with whom I did not identify at all: Trump was a populist reactionary, the Supreme Pontiff was a liberal. This was a period when I was physically very ill, living in the woods in Connecticut, and very angry. That anger was expressed in those columns. In both cases, at a certain point I realized I needed to accept that I’m not in charge of the Republican Party, I’m not in charge of the Roman Catholic Church. I’m a newspaper columnist, and my fundamental role is to try to help my readers understand the world in which they live. I continued to be a critic of the Pope, but I tried to shift tone when writing about the Francis era—to write less about it, honestly, and not get in fights with liberal Catholic theologians where I call them heretics. It’s not that what I said was wrong. But a columnist is mostly trying to understand and describe history, rather than to change it. There are moments when a columnist can be a political actor, but I haven’t experienced many of those in my stint at the Times. The descriptive role is much more important right now, because we are entering into a very different dispensation to the post-1990 era. Maybe I have useful things to say about that, by virtue of having a weirder perspective on it than a lot of people. But being useful in the world requires being dispassionate, to some degree—or at least, not being seen as a spokesman for a faction. Which I haven’t been, since reform conservatism died ten years ago. My sense of myself as belonging to a faction just evaporated.

The simplest explanation is that the more stringent libertarianism of Republican elites has never been that popular here, even if America is, and will always be, a more libertarian society, to some degree, than western Europe.

No, I think we were reasonably aware of that. But to take a different case study, that’s why someone like Sohrab Ahmari, who was originally much more libertarian than I on economics, has now travelled well to my left. He wants actual Christian Democracy, or some version of it. But that particular fusion is in certain ways too Catholic—it’s a poor fit, ultimately, with America’s Protestant politics. But so is full-tilt libertarianism, zeroing out the government, cutting old-age pensions and so on, which is why the Tea Party hit a wall. We’ll see where things go, but part of what Elon Musk is doing may hit that wall, too. The quest for an effective right in America is always for the zone in between. You’re not trying to be Clement Attlee meets Konrad Adenauer. You’re going to be a little more right-wing than that. The other reality is that, because the Republican Party is libertarian, it’s just always going to have trouble being the party that creates an effective system.

Right. In hindsight, it was always unrealistic to imagine that you would get a successful Republican-led healthcare reform. What we ended up with, which was Obamacare reformed by Trump, was probably the more plausible path, but not one that a policy wonk in 2007 would sit down and design. Our view was: the libertarians are right that Medicare and Social Security need to be reformed, but we want to combine that with opportunity-enhancing Clinton-style programmes. Let Paul Ryan cut a deal on entitlements and then use the savings to do things on education, on family policy, and so on. But what Trump intuited was that voters actually want the big existing programmes. It’s more attractive to a lot of right-of-centre voters, who are not hard libertarians, to say we are not going to touch Medicare and Social Security, we’re going to protect them. If you map it, Trump found a different way to navigate between Christian Democracy and hard libertarianism than the one we were trying to push.

On trade and tariffs, though, we’ll see what happens. Our assumption was that those features of the global economic system were just fixed, that trade policy was not going to go back to the nineteenth century. It didn’t make sense to see those as the levers you would pull to make conservatism more working class-friendly. Clearly there are people around Trump right now who do think that. Trumpism 1.0 was: we’re making the Republican Party more working class-friendly by promising to protect entitlements, running the economy hot and cutting immigration. Trumpism 2.0 is: ok, we can’t run the economy hot any more because of inflation, and maybe we’ll have to cut Social Security and Medicare—who knows?—but we’re going to be populist by renegotiating all America’s trade agreements. Which, whatever else, is interesting.

American geography? The psychology of the kind of people who came to America? You don’t have to get into genetic determinism to say there is some psychological distinction between the sort of people who will set out on a long voyage, and then keep moving westwards across a continent, and those who don’t. If you spend time in Europe today, compared to America, then whatever explanation you choose for it, Americans have more appetite for risk. The old line about every American being a temporarily embarrassed millionaire—that’s real, and it’s a trait you see less of these days in western Europe. There is some dynamic interaction between settlement and the frontier, even now that the frontier is closed; the us is a vaster system, with easier migration inside it.

Plus, Protestantism. American Catholicism is important to our history, but America is a Protestant country that has a theological suspicion of hierarchy and authority, which extends to bureaucratic liberalism. People ask, why are Southern evangelicals so hostile to the government doing good things for the poor? Why don’t Southern Baptists support foreign aid? The reality is that some of them do—it’s not the case that Christian conservatives are all hard-edged libertarians—but if you’re asking, why are people who are deeply Christian so unusually hostile, by global standards, to the government redistributing wealth, I think it comes back to a low-church Protestant suspicion of all hierarchies, and of hierarchical power-wielding moral authority. That goes really deep.

Covid was instructive in this regard. According to the standard theory of moral sentiments, as in Jonathan Haidt’s The Righteous Mind, liberals are the cosmopolitans, while conservatives focus on purity and fear of contamination from without. That would lead you to predict what happened in the first month of the pandemic, when conservatives were concerned about ‘a flu from China’, and liberals were like: ‘Don’t be racist! Only Silicon Valley bros are freaked out about that!’ But then it flipped. There were some contingent reasons for that; Trump was president, of course. But the way it flipped also revealed something profound about red America and its ingrained hostility to bureaucratic managerialism. You might think it would be more afraid of disease, but no: it’s more afraid of bureaucratic power; the don’t-tread-on-me stuff is real, it’s culturally ingrained. I didn’t foresee how quickly anti-masking would become a thing, but I had friends who said, Americans are not going to go along with wearing masks the way people do in Japan and South Korea. They were right. Americans are not libertarians in the Cato Institute sense of the word, but they are folk libertarians in this sense of impulsive behaviour, which is a feature of American life that anyone who wants to govern the United States, Democratic or Republican, has to be aware of.

It’s in the interests of some people in the Republican coalition. It’s not hard to have an account of why business-class Republicans, country-club Republicans, are interested in slashing regulation. I don’t think the material self-interest argument applies as well to middle- or lower-middle-class voters, because most people in that position are not going to be John Galts, building huge businesses in a light-regulation society.

The car-dealership owner, yes. But the reason Republicans win elections is because they win the salesmen at car dealerships.

That’s true of America in the Reagan era, when there was inflation-linked bracket creep and higher marginal tax rates. But the us has lowered marginal tax rates to a point where a lot of Republican voters don’t benefit that much from the kind of tax cuts that the first Trump Administration passed. This was part of our argument within the party—that to win those voters, you can’t just do tax cuts, because they have a material stake in the welfare state. The left-wing argument about racial polarization—that middle-class and working-class white people don’t support welfare-state redistribution because it’s seen as going to African-Americans, or to immigrants, and away from white people—makes more sense than the frontier spirit per se as a reason why there is no socialism or social democracy in America. Immigration to the us also undermines welfare-state politics, to the extent that each new generation of immigrants is seen as suspicious or not worthy of material support; not seen as neighbours, in the way that Scandinavians traditionally see welfare beneficiaries. That argument would also help to explain why the peak of social democracy in America—from the New Deal through to the beginning of the Great Society—corresponded with an era of low immigration, when American society was seen as primarily white, with a small African-American minority.

But I would view this mostly as a supplement to the cultural argument I was making. If you look at places where there aren’t a lot of minorities, and drill down to the granular, you still find this suspicion of the welfare state. The classic example is white Appalachia. Alec MacGillis, a Times colleague, wrote about this during the Tea Party debates, showing how working-class whites in Appalachia can be very suspicious of poor whites for being on the draw, for being ‘addicted to welfare’. And these are people of the same race, the same religion, neighbours and so on. You see that elsewhere, too. Even at the peak of New Deal America, Social Security was sold as pay-as-you-go—paying in and getting something back. Even at moments in history when Americans were willing to back the welfare state, there was still the idea that you’re not getting something for nothing.

Because, to generalize wildly, Protestants in northern Europe belong to the established religion. Scandinavian Lutheranism was the religion of the state. In America, state-integrated Protestants, like the Episcopalians, were the elites, so they weren’t sceptical of state power. The scepticism comes from Methodists and Baptists, the dissenting, nonconformist Protestants. Now, you could say that in England, nonconformists often supported the welfare state; I don’t think it’s a necessary connection, but if you’re looking for the difference between Scandinavian Lutheran attitudes to the welfare state and Southern Baptists’ attitudes, it is partially that sense of nonconformism yielding suspicion of state power.

Fifteen years ago, I would probably have said, ‘Yes, hopefully’; much less so today. I’ve talked already about the limits of a newspaper columnist’s influence in this era. It’s especially hard for a conservative columnist for the New York Times to exercise anything like the kind of influence that, say, Lippmann or Buckley enjoyed, because each of them was writing directly for an audience who could put their ideas into effect. Unless I actually succeed in converting the readership of the Times to my idiosyncratic conservative, dynamist and Catholic views, I will always be writing for people who will never fully agree with me, while also being somewhat of an outsider to conservative politics as a whole. Generally, America is more resistant than European countries to people moving back and forth between journalism and politics. A figure like Boris Johnson is an imaginable prime minister in a way that William Buckley was not an imaginable president. It’s true that jd Vance was a journalist, but the brevity of his period as a pundit—and the sharpness of his pivot to a more Obama-like role, as a figure who narrates his own life and then turns it into a political story—seems like the exception that proves the rule. Someone who has a tv platform, like Pat Buchanan, can play a role in American politics; if Joe Rogan decided to run for president, it would get some attention. But in terms of shaping power politics directly, there are real limits to what journalists can do. So yes, I see myself in that tradition to some degree, but with a strong sense that it’s almost impossible for someone writing about politics to exert that sort of influence in this phase of our history.

To the extent that my evolution into conservatism was distinctive, it was due to the fact that I came of age in a family who were basically liberal Democrats but became very religious and, by virtue of that, got interested in religious arguments, and so subscribed to First Things while still voting for Bill Clinton, which was not the usual way. So, I was a religious conservative before becoming any other kind. Unquestionably the most influential politically connected figure in my teenage intellectual development was Richard John Neuhaus, the editor of First Things, though I haven’t returned to his work in a long time. Predictable names like C. S. Lewis and G. K. Chesterton loomed large, but they weren’t writing about American politics and they were fifty years back. I didn’t read Jacques Maritain then, but I read writers who saw their neoconservatism as in continuity with his thinking. He was not a neoconservative, but they adapted certain Maritainian views—on church-state relations, American democracy, how Catholicism should relate to liberalism—to a neoconservative politics.

Yes. That was a primary influence on me—but supplemented, because I had not experienced the seventies and eighties, when a certain conservative synthesis had settled in; I was always a little to the left of that. I retained more of the critique of capitalism, or globalization, than Neuhaus did. He started out as a radical, but became a real neoconservative. Still a defender of some kind of welfare state, but not anti-capitalist. In my early twenties, the chief influence was Neuhaus, plus a dose of Christopher Lasch; that’s probably how I would put it. Lasch’s later writings gave me a way of synthesizing my neoconservative scepticism of liberal elites with a suspicion of neoliberal capitalist politics, which he maintained to the end, even as he moved right—though never as far right as Neuhaus. So, Neuhaus, Lasch, even Chesterton—also a critic of capitalism, in his own way—were more important influences on me than anyone inside the movement-conservative world, whether Frank Meyer or Willmoore Kendall. I read those people later, but they were not formative influences.

The other distinctive point was that I wanted to be a novelist, not a political journalist. I majored in history and literature. I took political philosophy classes later, which was important for me. I studied with Harvey Mansfield and read his translation of Tocqueville in a seminar with him. I read Strauss and found it helpful. Without being a Straussian, I think that framework is a useful analysis of the ancients and the moderns. But even as I began a career as a journalist, the writers who were most important to me were people like Graham Greene, Evelyn Waugh and Anthony Powell; in American terms, Joan Didion and Tom Wolfe; not conventional liberals, but people who were writing critical cultural commentary for a liberal audience. Tyler Cowen once said that after reading my stuff, he thought I was interested in using narrative, in storytelling.

I don’t think it’s true of me exactly, but he was picking up on something. I don’t tell stories, I write arguments; but I may be shaped more than some political commentators by the idea of what a writer does as a story-teller. In the twentieth century, the most important Christian writers in English were novelists: Tolkien, C. S. Lewis—The Chronicles of Narnia, and then, for the deep cuts, The Space Trilogy, particularly That Hideous Strength, which is so like what we’re doing now—even Dorothy Sayers; they definitely had an influence.

Then later, Fukuyama’s End of History. I read it in the late 1990s, well after it came out, and just thought: this is right—this describes the world. In a way, my Decadent Society (2020) is a sequel to The End of History, asking what the end of history looks like twenty years on. Even if we’re maybe exiting the Fukuyamian dispensation, I’d still maintain his book was a profound account of what the world looked like after the Cold War. Peter Thiel’s essay, ‘The End of the Future’, was very influential for my thinking about decadence. I had been enough of a religious conservative to take for granted that, whatever else was happening, growth and technological change were accelerating. Without endorsing the entire Thielian world-view—God knows, it’s hard to parse what exactly that is; I’m not a Girardian, or anything like that—but some of his writing about the limits of Silicon Valley in the early 2010s was important for me in raising questions about that growth narrative.

I probably encountered Barzun’s argument when it came out and returned to it, as I returned to Fukuyama, in gathering my own thoughts on the subject in the early 2010s. In terms of contrasts, I’m just doing a very different kind of work. He was a prodigious scholar of Western culture and I’m a newspaper columnist, which meant I wouldn’t be doing his kind of sweeping cultural analysis. I tried to broaden some of the concepts that he applied primarily to culture, to encompass politics, technology, sociology and other developments—so a broadening of his basic idea, but on a shallower scale than he attempted. On popular culture, I’m not actually sure what I think of my own views on it. There is a kind of small-c conservative lament for the decline of high culture that underestimates some of the values of popular culture and I do somewhat self-consciously try to avoid being the kind of stuffy reactionary who insists that everything has been downhill since The Rite of Spring. Not that that’s what Barzun thought—

Yes, he has a more characteristically European view of the American contribution to Western culture.

It would be negative, yes. I’d concede the general point that there is a certain kind of decline going on, from the masterworks of Victorian fiction or Italian opera, to the great American novel and the high tide of Hollywood in the 1970s; some falling-off in artistic sophistication. But I do think the best of American popular culture strikes a certain balance appropriate to a democratic age, between making art that is serious and making art that is for the masses. Because of that, I would place the date of full exhaustion somewhat later than Barzun does. It might also be a symptom of a decadent age that even critics of decadence still want to insist that some forms of art in their own time are better than they actually are. Do I overrate The Sopranos because I myself am decadent? Maybe.

There are different ways that decadence can end. One is acceleration, renaissance, dynamism. The other is that decline becomes collapse. The point of the decadence thesis is to describe a society that is neither in catastrophic crisis, nor accelerating towards a radically different future. When I wrote the book in the late 2010s, I was confident that the thesis applied to a lot of different aspects of American life, including the first Trump presidency—it was a rebellion against decadence that participated in decadence itself. Since then, some things have changed. First, there is a more radical technological breakthrough on the horizon than there has been since the internet, and arguably since the mid-twentieth century, depending on what happens with ai. If you look at technology alone, America is less decadent in 2025 than it appeared to be in 2018. We’re closer to self-driving cars, to big medical advances. In the book, I made only a passing reference to ai. Like everyone else, I don’t have a strong sense of where it’s going. But even the ai we have right now is enough to be a turning point in a lot of different ways. So, technologically, it feels like we’re exiting decadence.

Sociologically, in large parts of the world, decadence is deepening into collapse. This is the demographic question that I’m obsessed with, but I think correct to be so. When I was writing The Decadent Society, fertility rates had settled somewhere between 1.2 and 1.8 births. From my perspective, that’s a zone of sustainable stagnation—a society that gradually slows down, gets older, gets more sclerotic, but keeps going. But in the last five to ten years, there’s been a step change, for reasons that may be partly to do with Covid, but also to do with smartphones. The range is now 0.7 to 1.4 births. South Korea is the prime example, but you see it in Latin America, in Argentina and Chile. That’s a range that is heading towards collapse—nations become unsustainable in that environment. So there again, the decadence thesis no longer applies.

You can frame it in material terms. Modernity grants life without children more extensive pleasures than existed for most people in the past—you can take a vacation, you can summon up any movie ever made on Netflix. There’s much more that you can do instead of having kids. It also removes the strong economic incentive, the prospect that kids are going to work on your farm or run your business. There are more economic costs to having kids and fewer economic benefits. That’s not a complete explanation, but it’s a strong one. The question then is what pushes against this tendency? The left tends to say, this is a material problem and so it requires material solutions. I agree with some of that argument. But the evidence is that those policies cost a great deal. You can’t spend $2,000 per child and expect to get anywhere.

Some conservatives would say that the core issue in modern life is intentionality. There’s an interesting divide here. On the libertarian pro-natalist right, there are some who argue that people do think intentionally about having kids but they leave it too late; what’s needed is a technological solution, pushing the menopause out. For me, it’s a cultural question: you need norms and scripts that encourage people to think intentionally about having kids. Even in a world where everyone got fifteen more childbearing years, you would still need to create stronger cultural structures that encourage family formation. How you do that is, of course, an impossible question. Then there’s the reality that, as I mentioned, something has changed in the last five or ten years that is not about political economy. The Scandinavians were doing okay, and now they’re not. East Asia was doing badly, now they’re doing terribly. Maybe it’s something else, but it seems likely to be a question of technological shock. But if people are not having kids because digital life makes it impossible for the sexes to get together, then redistribution—giving them all an extra $5,000—is not going to help. And this is where I really don’t have definitive answers. But it is killing us, literally, in ways that I wouldn’t have anticipated even ten years ago. So, with technology we’re exiting decadence upwards, towards dramatic change. With demographics we’re exiting it downwards, towards collapse.

With politics, I’m just not sure. Trump and the populist revolts have succeeded in defeating attempts to restore the status quo. With Biden’s win in 2020, Trump could appear as a spasm of resistance that had failed, and we were going back to the post-Cold War normal. We’re not in post-Cold War normal any more, and I don’t think it’s coming back. We’re in a weirder zone; and, once the left figures out what it’s doing, any left-wing politics is also going to be weirder than resistance liberalism. During Trump’s first term, the internet still acted as a tool of political consolidation and control. A few social media companies policed speech; there were some wacky outsiders, figures like Bronze Age Pervert, but they were marginal to the culture. In the last four or five years, it feels like that has broken down and the media landscape is now totally fragmented, in ways that no one can police. It’s, like, Hey, antisemitism! There’s antisemitism on Joe Rogan; you know, Luigi Mangione has a lot of fans. There is no mechanism to police that sort of weirdness. So, in that sense, politics is more destabilized than it was even in Trump’s first term.

Does that mean that a new form of politics has emerged—a post-decadent politics? If doge is tremendously successful, and Republicans sweep the 2026 midterms and consolidate a new majority, then maybe you could say that. I would not bet on it at the moment. It’s unclear what the effects of tariffs, doge, deregulation and everything else will be. But what I would bet on is more actual political instability, as opposed to fake political instability, over the next ten or twenty years. So, at the very least, decadence is being shaken. At the same time, American culture still feels decadent to me—movies, tv, everything. The internet is a tool of decadence, it traps everyone in an eternal present and kills off certain options for creativity. I don’t see anyone finding a way out of that yet. So, if you asked, what’s the most persistently decadent part of American life right now, I’d say pop culture and entertainment.

To work backwards: generally, escapes from decadence are remixes, they’re neither whole breaks nor whole returns. So I would argue that China’s emergence from decadence was a mixture of adopted Western elements from outside, state socialism and Western capitalism, with a revival of a particular version of Confucianism—capitalism with Confucian characteristics. That has hit some limits, but it did produce something distinctive for a while. The Renaissance itself was a merger of recovered Greco-Roman culture with new scientific advances; it looked back and it looked forward. With the space programme: if all we do is go back to the moon and potter around there—and maybe that’s all we can do—then that would seem decadent; just re-playing the greatest hits. A Mars colony doesn’t seem decadent, but the question is: can you get one?

Something similar applies to economic policy. I wrote a column at the time of Trump’s second inauguration, about Musk and Vance: the populist, protectionist Vancean impulse and the vaulting Muskian impulse of technological ambition. I argued that if conservatism was going to be successful, it would be through some new mixture of the two that would be different from the fusion of the 1950s. Now, there’s a version of that which could be unsuccessful; where tariffs slow growth and kill the stock market; where thousands of government employees get fired, everyone hates that and it fails. But if you’re looking for an escape from decadence, you’re looking for remixes, taking things from the past and marrying them to new ideas. The same would be true on the left; you would expect a new and successful left-wing politics to draw from the New Deal and Civil Rights traditions, but also import some entirely new model of politics: to be non-decadent, it would have to do something new.

On ai, I think it depends on how far the technology actually goes. If it stops where it is now, then I agree, it seems likely to resolve itself back into decadence, into internet slop—ai scriptwriters for terrible Netflix shows, no one ever speaking to a real person again, and so on. If it goes further, though, even if it has bad social effects—even if it destroys us all—it wouldn’t be decadent. If we’ve invented a robot mind capable of curing cancer, I don’t think that’s decadent any more. But there’s a related point, which gets us back to demographics. ai could deepen decadence to a point where it just yields collapse: a world of ai porn, ai girlfriends, ai entertainment, ai old-age retirement homes, and so on. That’s a world that gets everybody to South Korea really fast. It’s not a terrain of stagnation; it’s somewhere worse. Even a limited form of ai probably gets us somewhere worse than the decadence I was describing in 2018.

You could say that it is well adapted to the landscape of religious competition, in a way that more hierarchical forms are not. It’s non-denominational, it’s start-up-oriented, it’s entrepreneurial and merges well with a gospel of upward mobility, an emphasis on getting your life in order—quit drinking, get a job, these kind of things. In that sense, it’s more nimble and individual-oriented than other forms of Christian faith. And then, in the marketplace it supplies a real proof of concept in a secular world, in that you are clearly more likely to have a religious experience in a Pentecostalist church than in most Protestant and Catholic ones. And that’s important, not just as marketing, but as a counterpoint to disenchantment. The world may seem secular and disenchanted, but you can go to church on Sunday and speak in tongues. You’re going to get a word from the Lord, the Holy Spirit will enter into you. That’s a powerful thing to offer. As a kid, I saw it happen to my own parents. That’s not the only reason that I’m religious today, but I am, in my own way, a testament to the effectiveness of charismatic Christianity as a counter to a disenchanted world.

In terms of its political effects: the problem with supernaturalism is that, as an epistemology, it lends itself to a general openness to weird beliefs in every shape and form. It’s anti-intellectual. Once you’ve accepted that the pillars of secular knowledge have various holes in them, you see the holes everywhere. This isn’t just true for religion. People who have one bad experience with the medical consensus become open to every weird idea about medicine—this is rfk Jr, all the way. Once you have accepted that the supernatural can intrude on your life, you become more open to every kind of strange theory. I think it is correct to think that the supernatural can intrude, but it does also create epistemological dangers for thinking about politics. Under decadent conditions, fewer people are going to believe in the devil; under non-decadent, revivalist conditions, more people will believe in him. But with that come big risks that don’t obtain at the end of history. The end of history is a tamer and safer world.

During Trump’s first term, there was a lot of intellectual ferment on the right, partly because there was so little content at the top that everyone could project their own theories—Oren Cass and Julius Krein versus, say, Sohrab Ahmari, Adrian Vermeule and Patrick Deneen. The second Trump Administration has more energy at the top that people want to associate with. But an unsuccessful government will quickly alienate many of the groupings that currently support it. In addition to the older tendencies, you could distinguish three new factions. First, there’s a kind of neo-neoconservatism which is really just anti-woke liberalism that’s moved right. Let’s call that the Free Press constituency. Then there is the alienated-populist masculinity constituency, the Joe Rogan constituency. The Free Press grouping is more likely to become alienated and swing politically away from maga. The Roganites are more likely to become alienated and depoliticized, or else could drift towards conspiratorialism. You see some of this already, with Rogan entertaining the podcaster Darryl Cooper, who’s into quasi-antisemitic conspiracy.

Then there is a technocratic faction, in parallel to the Ezra Klein–Derek Thompson abundance-agenda liberals, coming out of Silicon Valley. These people expected Musk to be their champion, to some degree, and are currently perturbed and disappointed by what doge is doing. They are state-capacity libertarians, very invested in the idea that the government should spend less on old-age pensions and more on scientific research. I think they are torn right now between justifying some of the things the Trump Administration is doing, and feeling that it’s all just about Elon’s obsession with headcounts in Federal agencies, which is not what they’re all about. Of the older groups, religious conservatism, which I suppose is where I belong, is adrift right now. There is a cultural interest in religion, which may be a post-decadence indicator. But religious-conservative politics doesn’t know what it’s doing right now. It’s won some victories and is playing defence around them, on abortion, for example. But it has jettisoned some of its compassionate conservatism and is subordinate to populist impulses. Religious conservatism has a lot of voters behind it, but is not a big player in the debates of the Trump Administration.

How much influence Vance will have remains to be seen. The people with the most influence over policy right now are Trump himself, Stephen Miller and perhaps the Vice President. Of course, we’re only a couple of months in, but overall I don’t think this is an administration that’s trying to translate some broader intellectual programme into policy. The things it’s doing bear some resemblance to some of the ideas that were argued about by populist and nationalist intellectuals, by the people writing for American Affairs, by Yoram Hazony. Those views have had some influence, but to understand the fundamental formula, it’s better just to think of it, so far, as an expression of Trump himself. There’s a particular vision of government reform, embraced by Musk, that dovetails with older libertarian small-government ideas. But it’s a weird fusion of that with Musk’s Silicon Valley ‘fire ten people and then rehire them’ model. I don’t think you would have predicted the doge experiment by reading the journals of the right from 2016 or 2020. You might have predicted it by combining a little Grover Norquist with what Musk did at Twitter.

There was a lot of intellectual work done on the right around the idea of how to capture and reshape institutions. If there was a through line of new-right projects and arguments, prior to Trump’s return to power, it was the idea that the gop should not just be a limited-government party—it was interested in using the tools of government to advance its own ideas. A lot of what is being done now is just a return to government cutting, but with a stronger dose of the friend-enemy distinction. It’s cutting plus trying to figure out how to purge your ideological enemies from the government. But that combination is ultimately much narrower than what my reading of the new right would have been. The ambitious thing would have been to use the Department of Education to further a conservative view of what study could be. Dismantling the Department of Education is just what Reagan wanted to do: it’s typical fiscal conservatism. The fact that we’re back to ‘if we cut this everything will work out well’ is a disappointment. Remaking the Federal bureaucracy is not what’s happening, as far as I can tell, with the National Institutes of Health cuts or Centers for Disease Control reorganizations. It’s just saying, ‘How many people can we fire without having the institution stop working?’ None of that seems like the culmination of a grand intellectual new-right project. It’s classic conservative government-cutting married to trying to eliminate wokeness and dei.

To the extent that there is a bold new set of ideas, it is arguably the policies on trade. There, you do have a group of dissident intellectuals, from Oren Cass to Robert Lighthizer and Peter Navarro, and some figures on the left, who are having their moment. The President does seem to want to reorder the global trade landscape, but even there, is it actually their ideas at work? Or is it just that Trump himself has believed that trade deficits are bad since the 1980s and now he’s in power, he’s going to do something about it? There are ways in which, even there, the intellectual argument feels stapled on to Trump’s own impulses and desires. There are these factions, there are the populists, there is the tech right; it’s hard to say where religious conservatism is going; it’s hard to say exactly where libertarianism is going. Finally, I’d just say again that we’re only two months into the Administration, so all analysis will probably look a bit foolish a year from now.

I think of myself as a custodial realist rather than a custodial liberal, if that makes sense. The writers you’ve named have pungent critiques of the failings of American empire. My take on this is similar to my view on decadence: a system can be non-ideal, but you don’t just want to unwind it; you need to be careful while you’re changing it. For all its flaws, the American empire is a force for a certain kind of stability in the world. Trump is right that there are a lot of free-riders in the system but we’ve also benefited from it a lot; we’re not doing badly. I’m sceptical of attempts, left and right, to leave the empire behind. I’m attracted to the version of Trumpian foreign policy that wants to rebalance American commitments rather than abandon them. I’m sympathetic to the view that Europe needs a stronger security architecture while the us operates more in the Pacific, at least on a ten- to fifteen-year horizon, because the big challenge is managing China. But within Trumpism there is also something more like a McGovernite ‘Come Home America’ plus a dose of Monroe Doctrine imperialism—it wants to withdraw and simultaneously consolidate American power. Greenland and the Panama Canal are synecdoches for that impulse. Let the Europeans and East Asians take care of themselves, but, by God, we’re going to control our own hemisphere. I have some long-term sympathy for that vision of a greater North America, but I don’t think tariffing Canada and bullying Denmark is a good foreign-policy strategy. I would prefer the realist mode to the Jacksonian mode. But we may be getting full Jacksonianism.

One could imagine a synthesis of Biden’s Ukraine policy and Trump’s impulses that would be correct. The us overextended itself in making guarantees to Ukraine that it was never going to be able to fulfil; like our failures in Afghanistan, that was an example of imperial overreach. Once Russia invaded Ukraine, it made sense to support the Ukrainians. The failure of the Biden Administration was not recognizing the moment to cut a deal—which is hard to do. But there was a window, when Ukraine had regained a certain amount of territory, when the Administration should have said, ok, this is the frontier of our empire. Ukraine is never going to be in nato, it’s not going to get all its territory back; but they could have cut a deal to end the war in a way that would have allowed Ukraine to retain territorial integrity. There are people in the Trump Administration who want to do that. But there is also an impulse to just wash our hands of this. The outcome will depend on which impulse prevails. But Russia is in a better position now than it was two years ago. A Harris Administration would have ended up pushing in a similar direction. But Trump’s wash-his-hands impulse might leave Ukraine in a more unsustainable position than it should be.

And Gaza?

There, too, there’s a version of the Trump position which says we’re broadly on the Israeli side, but we’re not letting them just set the agenda, that could be correct. But the absence of a solution for Gaza is an intractable problem. Biden was in an impossible position, caught between his own base and the Republican Party, and his own senility and inability to be an effective actor on the world stage, which made America basically a bystander. Notwithstanding rising sympathy for the Palestinians, America’s going to retain a basic pro-Israel alignment for the next twenty years, but within that it needs to exert more influence over Israel than Biden was able to do. But toward what endgame, I don’t know. If I knew that, I’d be Jared Kushner.

‘Bystander’ in the sense of the Biden Administration not exerting any clear strategic influence over Israel, over the conduct of the war or over the larger regional drama. That largely reflected Biden himself being effectively checked out as a major actor in his own presidency. The us remains a patron of Israel and remains directly involved in the conflict. By virtue of being a hegemonic power, the us is not a bystander in any absolute sense.

Yes. It would have been very surprising if the fundamental us alliance with Israel had been adjusted negatively after the attacks of October 7th, given America’s longstanding conflict with Iran. What was notable was that the us seemed to exert no tangible influence on the war. It seemed to have no concrete sense of what it wanted strategically from Israel, or as an outcome to the conflict.

A President Bernie Sanders might have exerted a stronger restraining influence to limit the scope of the war. I don’t think he would have radically changed America’s overall relationship with Israel, though this is obviously highly speculative. But just as Trump struggled in his first term, I suspect there would be more foreign-policy constraints on a President Sanders than some of his supporters imagine. I don’t think that as president he would have ended up taking an especially radical line. It would be more like one standard deviation to the left, whatever that means, of Biden’s policy. I’ll be honest, I haven’t studied all of Bernie’s pronouncements in the last six months, but he seems to me to be somewhere between the overtly pro-Palestinian campus left and the hawkishly Zionist Democratic establishment.

I think it will re-emerge, but material conditions are not propitious at the moment. There was a window for aggressive economic-policy ambition in the mid-2010s, created in part by an environment of persistently low interest rates, which helped give rise to both Sanders and Trumpian populism. The dilemma for the economic left now is that under inflationary conditions, where do you find the money? That’s part of the appeal of mmt: you don’t need to find the money, you can just spend it. But mmt always had a proviso, that you can spend the money until you get inflation. One of my basic beliefs about all economic-policy visions is that they can be directionally correct without being comprehensively correct. So, mmt as a descriptor of the world from 2011 to 2020 was directionally correct: there really was a lot more fiscal space than either the Tea Party right or the Obama Administration thought. But then the situation changed, and mmt doesn’t have a lot to say about an inflationary environment.

Here we can perhaps see the resilience of decadence. Just as I don’t know how Musk can actually cut Medicare and Social Security to make his libertarian transformational change, I don’t see how the Democratic Party can get Americans to sign on to the tax increases necessary for a Sanders programme. The Sanders vision worked in an environment of fiscal space, and it could make a big comeback when those conditions return—but they’re not returning yet. With this caveat: if there’s a big ai-driven step change in growth, that could create such a space, because it will create new inequalities, new sources of wealth and therefore, maybe, new demands for redistribution. But you need something like that. Sanders can’t just walk out there tomorrow and win the presidency on Medicare for All, because there is not a strong enough constituency. For that to change, you need either borrowing space, new forms of wealth that are amenable to taxation or a 2008-level economic crisis. Absent that, I don’t think you can conjure that constituency into being through the force of eloquence alone.