Episode 59

Populism and “The Worst of Both Worlds”

Published on: 31st October, 2022

Today with returning guest Robert Tracinski who is here discussing his two recent articles on populism and illiberalism.

At the end of the show, Martin is giving a shout-out to fellow podcaster, McIntosh of Generational Wealth with Cryptocurrency podcast, for his support and boostagram with Satoshis (bits of Bitcoin).

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Show notes with links to articles, blog posts, products and services:

Episode 59 (54 minutes) was recorded at 2030 Central European Time, on October 27, 2022, with Ringr app.. Martin did the editing and post-production with the podcast maker, Alitu. The transcript is generated by Alitu.

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Transcript
Blair:

Alright, ladies and gentlemen, this is another episode of the Secular Foxhole podcast

Blair:

and today we have a great returning guest.

Blair:

Rob Krasinski is here with us.

Blair:

Rob, how are you?

Robert:

I'm doing well.

Robert:

How about you guys?

Blair:

Doing great, doing great.

Robert:

Glad to be here.

Blair:

Thank you.

Blair:

It's always great to have you.

Blair:

The reason I asked you back is because of two of your most recent articles.

Blair:

I think it's important for to get both of these ideas and issues out to the wider

Blair:

audience.

Blair:

So that's why I want you here.

Blair:

Your Discourse article.

Blair:

Do the populist have a point?

Blair:

And the unpopulist article on illiberalism.

Blair:

I think they actually probably go hand in hand

Blair:

in a certain sense.

Robert:

Yes, they certainly do.

Robert:

They certainly do because the one in the

Robert:

unpopulous is talking about the populist leader, Georgia Maloney, the new populist

Robert:

Prime Minister of Italy.

Robert:

So it's sort of tying into what populism looks

Robert:

like.

Robert:

Populism looks like in the current era.

Blair:

Right.

Martin:

We have closed, at least for my view here in Sweden also, and more established part

Martin:

of it.

Martin:

So maybe we'll come back to that, but I see

Martin:

the parallel, so please continue there.

Blair:

Yes, I think Britain is another quick example of populism's perhaps terrible

Blair:

influence.

Blair:

I mean, what was her name?

Blair:

Liz Truss.

Blair:

She was a well, she wanted to be saturated,

Blair:

she wanted to be a saturate.

Blair:

And I guess those ideas just got blown out of

Blair:

the water of low taxes, less government.

Robert:

Well, okay, so we can talk about this trust in it because she's got lower taxes, but

Robert:

she wasn't going to reduce any spending.

Robert:

And then the bond market freaked out.

Robert:

Some people said she was scuffed by the bank of England.

Robert:

That created this exchange rate and interest rate crisis in response to that.

Robert:

But it really came from the fact that she was trying to be Market Thatcher, but she was

Robert:

elected here's where populism comes in that she was elected by the Tory party membership,

Robert:

which is this tiny little membership.

Robert:

It's like a couple of hundred thousand people

Robert:

in a nation of something on the order of 70, 8100 million people.

Blair:

Oh my gosh.

Robert:

So it probably has to do with how the British parties are oriented.

Robert:

That Boris Johnson, you could call him a populist, but he at least had the best

Robert:

character of a populist, which is he was actually popular.

Robert:

He actually got voted into office in an election and so he had a sort of popular

Robert:

mandate to do the big thing he wanted to do, which was Brexit.

Robert:

And when he left, they replaced it with Liz Trust, who was sort of chosen by this very

Robert:

interior inside the party, just a small number of people making the decision.

Robert:

And she didn't have popular backing, she didn't have a popular mandate.

Robert:

And I think that explains sort of how she lasted four scaramuchis in office.

Blair:

Right, well, first let's in a broad definition.

Blair:

What is populism compared to, like, Republicanism and democracy and so on.

Robert:

Well, that's a really interesting question because I think you sent me a couple

Robert:

of links and things like that that I thought were interesting because it is an interesting

Robert:

question.

Robert:

What is populism?

Robert:

Because it's a kind of an illdefined thing and oftentimes people don't have a clear idea what

Robert:

it is.

Robert:

I define populism as basically an idea that I

Robert:

think it's more of a style of politics than it is an actual agenda because there's populism

Robert:

of all different types.

Robert:

There was something for a while that people

Robert:

called the Tea Party movement libertarian populism.

Robert:

And now with Donald Trump in America, with some other leaders overseas, you have what is

Robert:

a very much not a libertarian populism.

Robert:

It's a sort of right wing, big government

Robert:

populism.

Robert:

But we've also had times in the past when you

Robert:

had left wing populism, when you had the populism was we represent the little guy as

Robert:

opposed to those big businessmen on Wall Street.

Robert:

And so you had almost a socialist or a big government, left wing style of populism.

Blair:

Sure.

Robert:

So populism is more a style of government or style of politics rather than an

Robert:

agenda because it could be a harness for different agendas.

Robert:

But the defining characteristic of populism, as I see it, is the appeal to we represent the

Robert:

people, the ordinary people, the regular man of the street, as opposed to the elites, as

Robert:

opposed to some sort of real or imagined minority cabal of people who are separate from

Robert:

it and hostile to the great mass of the people.

Robert:

Now, go ahead.

Robert:

But in practice, now, that sort of in theory,

Robert:

populism was an appeal to popularity, to we represent the people, the ordinary man, the

Robert:

common man in practice.

Robert:

And here's one of the ways that populism goes

Robert:

wrong in practice, it tends to end up referring to what we're for the real people.

Robert:

We're for real America and real Americans in the populist imagination.

Robert:

And one of the articles you sent me, links to me had a good summary of this.

Robert:

Basically, the idea of a unitary people, the people, quote unquote, the people sort of a

Robert:

trademark symbol on it, right? The people are one unit.

Robert:

And it's one unit that is supposed to all agree.

Robert:

And they all agree on something that just by coincidence, happens to be the exact agenda

Robert:

that the populist leader wants to pursue at this moment.

Robert:

Right? So it's this idea that the people is this one

Robert:

entity that are all agreed, and it's only this tiny little cabal.

Robert:

It's George Soros or this small group of people in Hollywood and Washington DC.

Robert:

They're the only ones who are on the other side.

Robert:

And so we're for the real voice of the real people.

Robert:

And anybody who's not part of that imagined majority in reality, of course, there is no

Robert:

such unified single voice of the majority of the people.

Robert:

There's a whole wide diversity of opinions.

Robert:

So I'm practice populism, come down to the

Robert:

idea that anyone who doesn't share the opinions of my particular faction is not a

Robert:

quote unquote, real American.

Robert:

He's one of the elites.

Robert:

He's one of these people, this small cabal or faction that needs to be pushed down and

Robert:

suppressed so that the real people can have their say.

Robert:

So in reality it sort of builds itself as being we're for the people, but in reality it

Robert:

always ends up being we're for a little minority or faction among the people.

Robert:

We've got 30% or 25% or sometimes less people who sign up for our full agenda, but we paint

Robert:

them as if they are the real people and everybody else is a tiny minority and then use

Robert:

that as an excuse to run roughshod over them and to suppress them.

Robert:

And you see that a lot in Europe where it takes on this very overtly ethnic character of

Robert:

populism.

Robert:

The real people are basically whoever has been

Robert:

here for 1000 years or 500 years or however far back, whoever came over with the Maggie's

Robert:

when they first came over into Europe.

Robert:

Those are the real Hungarians and immigrants

Robert:

and foreigners and especially refugees and people like that.

Robert:

Those are the threats to the real people.

Robert:

So it takes on this very ethnic

Robert:

majoritarianism that kind of casts to it, I would say.

Blair:

Then here in America, then it would be the Christians who are trying to pick up that

Blair:

mantle.

Blair:

Then would you say that?

Robert:

Absolutely.

Blair:

Christian nationalist?

Robert:

I think Christian nationalism is becoming basically kind of a mainstream

Robert:

philosophy of the Republican Party.

Robert:

Unfortunately, from ten to twelve years ago

Robert:

you had the Tea Party movement, which I saw as a sort of rapprochement between the

Robert:

conservatives and the libertarian wing of the right and the legitimately libertarian wing of

Robert:

the right, the small government wing of the right focusing around economic issues and all

Robert:

of that.

Robert:

And now what's happened is the religious

Robert:

conservatives have struck back and they've come back and taken over the ideology of the

Robert:

Republican Party.

Robert:

And so their form of populism is real America,

Robert:

is basically white Christian America and they adopted the sort of Christian nationalism.

Robert:

But I think one of the things that's common with all forms of populism is it's an

Robert:

assertion, this assertion that my particular faction of people, my 20% or 30% of the

Robert:

voters, they're the real people, they're the real Americans, they are the unitary voice of

Robert:

the people themselves.

Robert:

It is a reaction, it seems like this

Robert:

overclaiming that how come my little faction represents the entirety of the people.

Robert:

Well, I think that is in reaction to the fear underneath that that in fact they are becoming

Robert:

a minority.

Martin:

All right, Robert, I will not interrupt you, but I do that anyway because I

Martin:

was for a second almost getting depressed there.

Martin:

But I know that you have written in your letter two big trends, and one was the

Martin:

richness of the country and also the secular trend.

Martin:

So thanks for coming to that.

Robert:

Yeah, that's what I was coming to, which is that at the same time that the

Robert:

populist, the sort of rightwing populists in this country are trying to sort of claim the

Robert:

majority voice of the people on behalf of Christianity.

Robert:

There's new polls out showing that the number of Christians in this country, the number of

Robert:

people who declare themselves to be Christians, is rapidly decreasing.

Robert:

I think just recently, the number of people who describe themselves as none of the above

Robert:

may have no specific religious affiliation.

Robert:

Some atheists, some agnostic, some simply not

Robert:

having any formal religious set of beliefs.

Robert:

Those people now outnumber evangelical

Robert:

Christians in America.

Robert:

So evangelical Christians are like the most

Robert:

fanatical Protestant group in America.

Robert:

I think they either outnumber or just about

Robert:

outnumber Catholics.

Robert:

And the projection is by 20, 50, 20, 60,

Robert:

america will no longer be a majority Christian nation.

Robert:

It will be more like, well, what has happened in Europe, in many European countries, where

Robert:

the number of sort of practicing, committed religious believers is a minority in the

Robert:

population, that the large population is largely secular.

Robert:

And so I think it's a combination of that sense of feeling like they ought to be the

Robert:

majority, but then fearing that they are becoming a minority, that fuels this sort of

Robert:

populism, that in a way, they need the populism even more because they need the

Robert:

fantasy that, no, it's only the small minority that's causing people to be secular.

Robert:

We are the real Americans.

Robert:

We're the real majority.

Robert:

And if only we just asserted ourselves as the real majority, then we wouldn't have to be

Robert:

afraid that religious belief is going to be fading away and.

Blair:

They assert themselves by appealing to government force.

Robert:

Well, that's the other thing about populism is it's always about if we represent

Robert:

the voice of the people, therefore we should be unobstructed.

Robert:

We should have the complete ability to impose whatever the people want.

Robert:

So majoritarianism is another ingredient of populism, which is this idea that if you

Robert:

represent people, then therefore the limitations of government procedures and

Robert:

protections of the rights of minorities, protections of the rights of the individual,

Robert:

shouldn't be brought up as obstacles.

Robert:

They shouldn't get in your way for whatever

Robert:

your agenda has to be, because after all, you represent the people.

Blair:

Yeah. Now, in your Discourse article, I do admire how you've defended liberalism

Blair:

institutions like the rule of law, limited government, obviously individualism, which is

Blair:

all but unknown today.

Blair:

Can you expand on that a little bit?

Robert:

Yeah. The Discourse article, what I did is it sort of had an audience of one, at

Robert:

least when I first started out, because it's Scott Schiff, who I've done some things with

Robert:

when I know that I work for the Atlas Society.

Robert:

He's often there as sort of like a host to

Robert:

introduce the clubhouses that we were doing there.

Robert:

Clubhouse is another one.

Robert:

It's sort of like a combination of a podcast

Robert:

and talk radio because you get audience feedback.

Robert:

It's kind of nice, but unfortunately, the medium is not really growing that much.

Robert:

So we're sort of reevaluating what we're doing there.

Robert:

But Scott is sort of one who always expresses this sort of quasipopulist exasperation with

Robert:

the elites, basically.

Robert:

Well, in defense of the populist, basically

Robert:

said, what about the elites? Aren't the elites corrupt?

Robert:

Aren't they foolish? Don't they impose these intellectual fads on

Robert:

people? Basically, isn't the corruption of the elites

Robert:

an excuse for populism or a justification for populism?

Robert:

And so I was looking at that and saying, well, what about the elites part of it?

Robert:

I think the elites are not as bad as they're made out to be.

Robert:

So another aspect of populism in this idea that we represent the people as opposed to the

Robert:

elites, is there in populism, there's a contempt for expertise.

Robert:

And so anyone who is in a position of authority in academia or who has worked in

Robert:

government, or who has some sort of position where they are endowed with some kind of

Robert:

intellectual authority, is considered suspicious just by virtue of being an expert,

Robert:

right? And so they love to use the term the socalled

Robert:

experts to imply that all these people who are experts in academia or in science or in

Robert:

scientific institutions, et cetera, are all frauds.

Robert:

They say they're experts, but they're not really experts.

Robert:

And that's incredibly exaggerated.

Robert:

So oftentimes what you end up with with

Robert:

populism is by saying, oh, the elites are terrible.

Robert:

The experts don't know what they're talking about.

Robert:

So therefore, I'm going to do my own research.

Robert:

And doing my own research means watching some

Robert:

random guy who has a YouTube video in which he makes crackpot claims.

Robert:

So it's not substituting invalid expertise with real expertise.

Robert:

It's often throwing out all expertise and simply going on whatever you feel to be true,

Robert:

or whatever sort of random idea has been popping around that somebody has been

Robert:

promoting that you either haven't tried to check or that you don't have the knowledge of

Robert:

the background to check.

Martin:

QAnon.

Robert:

Yeah. QAnon because that's why you get an element of populism, is these rampant

Robert:

conspiracy theories.

Robert:

Because if you don't have a base of knowledge

Robert:

and you reject all the knowledge given to you by the experts and the fact checkers and

Robert:

everybody else, then you're going to be, what are you left with?

Robert:

If you don't have your own expertise and you don't have anybody else's expertise, then

Robert:

you're going to have to go with, well, whoever told me what I wanted to hear most recently,

Robert:

that's functionally, what's going to happen? And so somebody who's out there connecting the

Robert:

dots of some conspiracy is going to be able to get your ear.

Robert:

So the article is talking about that and talking about the fact that, yes, the elites

Robert:

do make mistakes sometimes things like Latinx.

Robert:

Here this idea you have to refer to people

Robert:

with Hispanic background, who, by the way, when you pull them overwhelmingly, we'll tell

Robert:

you we like to be referred to as Hispanic, but you say, no, the proper term is Latinx.

Robert:

The greatest thing about Latinx is it makes absolutely no sense in the Spanish language.

Robert:

Right.

Robert:

It doesn't even fit it with the Spanish

Robert:

language.

Robert:

You're trying to show how sensitive you are to

Robert:

Spanish speakers.

Robert:

I know.

Blair:

It's really absurd.

Robert:

Yeah. So oftentimes you said middle school.

Robert:

I remember they're like fads going through a middle school, that these weird ideas will go

Robert:

through the elite media or academia.

Robert:

And yet the problem is that the populace don't

Robert:

really have an alternative to that.

Robert:

They don't have an alternative way of saying,

Robert:

well, how do we counteract what's going on among the elites?

Robert:

They say, no, we're going to install our own elite.

Robert:

Our own elite of sort of political demagogues.

Robert:

So we're going to install our own people in

Robert:

power, give them even more power than anybody had under the old system.

Robert:

And we're going to be selecting people not who were selected because they're greater and

Robert:

better experts, but they're selected because they achieved Internet celebrity, or in the

Robert:

case of some of the older ones, tabloid journalism, celebrity back in the old days,

Robert:

right? But we're going to choose people who came up

Robert:

through the Internet or through television as celebrities.

Robert:

We're going to put them in place, and we're going to get a new elite that has even less

Robert:

expertise than the old one.

Robert:

So I go on and talk about what we actually

Robert:

need to have as the alternative to both sort of what you might call elitism and populism,

Robert:

is you need to have the institutions that were actually put in place as part of the a liberal

Robert:

society precisely to deal with this problem.

Robert:

So one of the things I point out is this

Robert:

problem of the elites might be corrupt is not new at all.

Robert:

The Founding Fathers were very well aware of it.

Robert:

They were dealing with the entrenched elite of an aristocratic society, and whoever had the

Robert:

ear of the king or whoever did the mechanisms to get his way up in parliament, and they were

Robert:

trying to come up with mechanisms that would limit the power of those people and allow

Robert:

competition and allow criticism.

Robert:

And they created all the institutions of a

Robert:

liberal, a bad liberal, I mean, a free society liberal in the political philosophers.

Robert:

And so those are the institutions that a lot of the populists want to tear down or shove

Robert:

off to the side and make an end run around instead of revigorating them and using them.

Blair:

Right.

Blair:

Now, let me throw this in there real quick.

Blair:

In my mind, there has always seemed to be a strain, if that's the right word, of, like,

Blair:

anti intellectualism in the culture.

Blair:

And then even in Rain wrote, the breach

Blair:

between the intellectuals and the American people, would that have anything to do with

Blair:

the rise of the populist ideas?

Robert:

Well, I think anti intellectualism is in a way I think it's the default mode of

Robert:

humanity because the idea of mediating the world through ideas, of doing deep and serious

Robert:

thinking about a subject in a relatively new way historically.

Robert:

So there's this unfrozen cavemen idea that I don't like, which is that we're all just

Robert:

cavemen really under the surface.

Robert:

And this modern, sophisticated society where

Robert:

we deal with ideas and principles and abstractions is artificial and sits very badly

Robert:

on.

Robert:

Jonathan Goldberg wrote a whole book based on

Robert:

this, where I described it as being sort of like a it's the old conservative argument from

Robert:

Depravity or original Sin, but it's active, right?

Robert:

So the idea is that the original sin is we have a caveman's mind and psychology, which on

Robert:

top of which there's a thin veneer of intellectuality.

Robert:

I don't think that's true because human beings have been thinkers from the very beginning.

Robert:

But it is true that intellectuality, that being able to think about things is an

Robert:

achievement.

Robert:

It's something that people need to learn how

Robert:

to do, and it's something that a culture needs to be able to support, and a culture needs to

Robert:

as a whole needs to learn how to do that.

Robert:

And we're often very bad at that.

Robert:

And there's a lot of institutional and I see especially in the media business.

Robert:

I often say that the market signals from the media business to me.

Robert:

Tell me I should be running a grift.

Robert:

That is.

Robert:

I should be I should be running a con.

Robert:

I should be starting a podcast where I lie to

Robert:

people and tell them whatever they want to hear.

Robert:

Or start a substantial newsletter where I do that.

Robert:

And then I would get huge numbers of subscribers and people would love me and I

Robert:

hate my work.

Robert:

But there are people out there who do that.

Robert:

So there is a lot of there's always this sort of ground for people who want to be told what

Robert:

they want to hear and to not want to have to think very deeply or very independently about

Robert:

what's going on in the world and about morality and about politics and about what

Robert:

ought we to be doing.

Robert:

So there's always that tendency of anti

Robert:

intellectuality.

Robert:

And so I think you're always going to have

Robert:

that sort of populist movement underneath that sort of gives people permission to say, you

Robert:

don't have to think about this.

Robert:

Just go with your emotions, go with what you

Robert:

feel, go with your tribal affiliation.

Robert:

Whichever group you happen to identify with,

Robert:

you can go with that.

Robert:

And that's all you need to do because it is a

Robert:

certain freedom from effort that populism is selling to people.

Robert:

You are right, because you are one of the quote unquote, the people.

Blair:

I hear you now you mentioned the irony of the left answer to today's elites is to

Blair:

hand over even more power to the unelected bureaucracy.

Robert:

Well, actually, I think the right answer to today's elites is to put our

Robert:

populist debit cards in place and give them more power.

Blair:

Okay?

Robert:

Now, the elites on the left that they're complaining about are yes, they're the

Robert:

people who become more entrenched in the permanent bureaucracy, which is a real

Robert:

problem.

Robert:

That the populist.

Blair:

Right.

Blair:

I want to push back a little bit on that, but

Blair:

not necessarily the deep state, but the administrative state, the unelected people in

Blair:

the administrative state.

Blair:

There's so many agencies and miles and miles

Blair:

of laws.

Blair:

I know my wife who ran a business.

Blair:

She was constantly, what if I do this, I break the law, but if I don't do it, I break the

Blair:

law?

Robert:

Yeah.

Blair:

So she had to choose.

Blair:

And finally, it just wore out again.

Robert:

Yeah. Hernandezotto, who dealt with this even more chaotic environment societies,

Robert:

he's looking at, like, Third World countries and South American countries.

Robert:

He has some very interesting things to say about that, about how basically, when you have

Robert:

enormous amounts of regulations to start a business, and often in these Latin American

Robert:

countries, tons and tons of paperwork you have to fill out.

Robert:

And he says, basically, what happens is it means that the average a poor person who's not

Robert:

well educated basically cannot legally start a business.

Robert:

Now they start them anyway.

Robert:

They just run them in the, quote, unquote,

Robert:

informal economy, the black market economy.

Robert:

They run them without a legal basis.

Robert:

But then they're always sort of on the edge of ruin because they have no legal claim to

Robert:

anything, right? They could be shut down at any moment.

Robert:

They're in a legally precarious position, and they can't raise capital or take out loans

Robert:

because, again, they have no legal organization.

Robert:

It ends up being basically a subsidy to lawyers, and it ends up giving a monopoly to

Robert:

people who can afford lawyers.

Robert:

So if you are well off and can afford a lawyer

Robert:

to do all the amounts and amounts of paperwork, then you can legally run a business

Robert:

in that society, and you get all the advantages of being the one person who can

Robert:

legally do this, and it shuts out everybody else who could potentially compete with you.

Robert:

So, yes, that is a serious problem.

Robert:

We don't have it in America as badly as they

Robert:

have it elsewhere, but it is a problem.

Robert:

But one thing I want to point out is that a

Robert:

lot of that bureaucratic administrative state, ironically, it is the leftover of a previous

Robert:

wave of populism.

Robert:

And these are the people actually called

Robert:

themselves populists the capital P. This is the early 20th century progressives, and they

Robert:

were the economic populists.

Robert:

They were the left wing populist who said, oh,

Robert:

no, we have to have we can't have these big businessmen running them up.

Robert:

We have to have big government, we have to have more regulations.

Robert:

And they're the ones who pushed for the massive regulatory state with the idea that

Robert:

being, well, we're going to be tying down JPMorgan and all these other malefactors of

Robert:

great wealth, I think that was FDR's phrase.

Robert:

And we're going to tie them down with all

Robert:

these regulations to make sure they can't run roughshod over again, quote, unquote, the

Robert:

people.

Robert:

So it was an economic populism that then

Robert:

produced big government as a reaction to the elites on Wall Street.

Robert:

And then, of course, big government became its own group of elites that were.

Blair:

Less susceptible to the permanent bureaucracy.

Blair:

The permanent bureaucracy.

Blair:

What is liberalism's answer to today's

Blair:

epistemological? Chaos.

Blair:

That's how I look at it.

Blair:

It's all about epistemology how you think

Blair:

about it.

Robert:

Well, okay, so liberalism has several answers, and I guess that liberalism has

Robert:

actually developed as an answer to this.

Robert:

Yes, that if you go back to the Enlightenment,

Robert:

into the Founding Fathers, and to the Lockyer ideals that led to this, among other things,

Robert:

freedom of speech was one that the institutions of freedom of speech were created

Robert:

as a way of basically preventing dogmas and groups of insiders from being able to control

Robert:

what people believe and to control what people thought was true.

Robert:

And so they created these standards where the standard of free speech, which is that you

Robert:

have to allow criticism, you can't shut out criticism, you can't ban anybody.

Robert:

You have to allow a vigorous debate to go back and forth.

Robert:

And so the institutions of freedom of speech are tremendously important.

Robert:

I also think political institutions, that the institution of free elections is a way of

Robert:

basically saying that the leaders have to answer to the people at regular intervals.

Robert:

They have to constantly be defending and being put on the spot for, well, you did this and

Robert:

people don't like it, so why justify yourself? And then somebody can come up with a better

Robert:

argument.

Robert:

Free markets are one of the great liberal

Robert:

institutions that are meant to fight corruption.

Robert:

The irony of the left wing populace is they see all those are free markets that cause all

Robert:

these big businesses that have too much power, not realizing that actually free markets are

Robert:

one of the institutions that helps distribute power.

Robert:

Because what it means is that anybody can come compete with you.

Robert:

And also, it means that free markets also mean that you are not dependent on the goodwill of

Robert:

a politician to be able to make a living and to be able to run a business and to be able to

Robert:

survive.

Robert:

And that's hugely important.

Robert:

That one of the character we talked about, the different characteristics of populism.

Robert:

Right.

Robert:

One characteristics of populism, it generally

Robert:

ends up leading to sort of what we used to call very inaccurately called crony

Robert:

capitalism.

Robert:

It's not capitalism at all.

Robert:

It was just called cronyism.

Robert:

But it's the idea that you have a system where

Robert:

you have a government controlled either by unelected bureaucrats or by demagogues,

Robert:

depending on your style of populism.

Robert:

But the government has so much control over

Robert:

society that in order to survive, all businesses have to basically be on good terms

Robert:

with whoever's in charge politically.

Robert:

And so you see this, the right has developed

Robert:

this, adopted this.

Robert:

They've gotten very enamored with this idea

Robert:

that well, wait a minute.

Robert:

So Ron DeSantis in Governor of Florida

Robert:

basically said, well, Disney opposed me on a piece of anti woke legislation and so

Robert:

therefore now I'm going to use my power as governor to cause problems for them.

Robert:

And he went and revoked the basically took the organizations in charge of the utilities and

Robert:

the power and the sewers at Disney World in Florida and said, well, I'm going to basically

Robert:

exert control over this.

Robert:

I'm going to appoint people as governor to run

Robert:

that.

Robert:

And basically Disney will then be disney World

Robert:

will then be at my mercy.

Robert:

I could shut it down.

Robert:

If I don't like the way they're acting, I'll have them by the throat.

Robert:

And this is very much populist thinking.

Robert:

And of course there's the bureaucratic left

Robert:

wing version of that because they love to do the same thing too.

Robert:

But it's this idea that if you don't have free markets and everyone is dependent for their

Robert:

livelihood and their ability to run a business and make a living, they're dependent on the

Robert:

goodwill of politicians.

Robert:

Politicians get this tremendous amount of

Robert:

power over people and ability to crush dissent, which we see in a lot of popular sort

Robert:

of quote unquote populist silent dictatorships, right?

Blair:

Well that's a perfect segue into your unpopular article about the illiberal

Blair:

synthesis between which is what I call the worst of both worlds, the liberal left and the

Blair:

liberal right.

Robert:

Can you so the jumping off a point for that.

Robert:

Now by the way, I love the fact that I just got published in the unpopulous.

Robert:

I love the name of it.

Robert:

This is a longtime libertarian writer

Robert:

sympathetic to objectivism.

Blair:

Nice.

Robert:

She said dealings and connections over the years.

Robert:

She started this thing called the unpopulous, which basically meant to oppose populism.

Robert:

But I quickly got a kick out of being published there because I've been writing

Robert:

unpopular things for years.

Robert:

So it's great that I'm in the unpopulous.

Robert:

Anyway, that piece launched off with there was a speech given by Georgia Maloney.

Robert:

She was the presumptive.

Robert:

She's now the new Prime Minister of Italy and

Robert:

her party won like 26% of the vote.

Robert:

But in the crazy coalition politics of Italy,

Robert:

that meant she got the prime ministership and she gave this fiery speech.

Robert:

And the interesting thing about the speech got a huge reaction among conservatives here in

Robert:

America about, oh, this is a great speech.

Robert:

And when I looked at it, what I found is

Robert:

there's this conspiratorial anticapitalism that's mixed in with the traditionalist anti

Robert:

woke conservative social policy, right? So you have the conservative traditionalism,

Robert:

the pro religion profamily traditionalism, combined with this anticapitalist rhetoric

Robert:

about how well the reason why corporations are forcing this wokeness laws.

Robert:

Is that we'll be perfect consumer slaves and we'll be at the mercy of financial

Robert:

manipulators.

Robert:

And what I saw there, this is basically

Robert:

something I've been dreading for.

Robert:

I've been dreading constant fear of mine for

Robert:

decades, which is that the Right or left would finally discover how little difference there

Robert:

is between them and join forces.

Blair:

Yeah, the ominous parallels, one of the.

Robert:

Things that helped us over the years is that the Left will come with terrible,

Robert:

terrible policies.

Robert:

And because they have these superficial

Robert:

differences with the Right, the Right will oppose them.

Robert:

The Right has its own terrible policies, but because they disagree on certain in the style

Robert:

and oftentimes superficial differences around the margins, they never figure out how to make

Robert:

common cause.

Robert:

And my great fear is that maybe someday

Robert:

they'll figure out how to make common cause.

Robert:

And that's why this synthesis of this

Robert:

anticapitalist rhetoric with the social conservatism, the traditionalism, that

Robert:

basically we should be using government to support traditional religious values and

Robert:

impose them on people, that is the thing that I've been looking for, and I'm starting to see

Robert:

more signs of in the west.

Robert:

And I think it's the big thing to be concerned

Robert:

about.

Robert:

Now, in that piece, I also look at how that

Robert:

applies, how that parallels a speech recently given by Vladimir Putin, a fairly recent one,

Robert:

where he's reacting to the war in Ukraine, where he does the exact same thing.

Robert:

And in Putin's case, it's really funny because you can see how, like, a whole section of the

Robert:

speech is basically warmed over anticapitalist, anti imperialist rhetoric from

Robert:

his old KGB days in East Germany, right? Yeah.

Robert:

It's the old Sovietstyle, anticapitalist propaganda, but then combined with him quoting

Robert:

a Russian fascist philosopher and talking about authentic cultures and traditional

Robert:

values.

Robert:

So he's doing the same thing there, where he's

Robert:

taken the social and religious conservatism and then combined it with the world, with

Robert:

parts of the old world view of the Communist, this anti capitalist conspiracy theory that

Robert:

America is this horrible capitalist empire he's taken us to and combined them.

Robert:

And I think that's how he's providing a model that is now being adopted by American

Robert:

conservatives and European conservatives.

Blair:

Yes, he was even saw something where he was blessed by the Russian Orthodox Church.

Robert:

Well, he formed a true attila in the witch doctor partnership.

Robert:

This is one of Ein Rand's analogies, right? You have atilla is the man of muscle and

Robert:

strength, and the witch doctor is the man of mysticism.

Robert:

And they have this partnership in Russia.

Robert:

That partnership is totally there.

Robert:

It is Vladimir Putin as the mystic of muscle, the attila.

Robert:

And the witch doctor in that partnership is Patriarchy, who's the leader of the Russian

Robert:

Orthodox Church.

Robert:

And the partnership is the Russian Orthodox

Robert:

Church gets official support, it gets legal support.

Robert:

The Russian government goes out and tries to actively suppress other kinds, other

Robert:

religions, including other versions of Christianity.

Robert:

Underneath this conflict, in Ukraine, there's actually a bit of a religious conflict, which

Robert:

is the Ukrainians, just in the last few years, petitioned to create a Ukrainian Orthodox

Robert:

Church that's separate from the Russian Orthodox Church.

Robert:

And it's basically under the leadership of the Patriarch of Constantinople, who is based in

Robert:

Istanbul and not the Patriarch of Moscow.

Robert:

So there's this sense if the Russian invasion

Robert:

of Ukraine had succeeded, there's this sense that while Archbishop Kuro would have made

Robert:

sure that all the Orthodox churches in Ukraine were Russian Orthodox and under his control

Robert:

because he's in this sort of struggle for power with the Patriarchal constant snaple.

Blair:

Oh, my goodness.

Blair:

All right, a side story I didn't know.

Robert:

Yes, that's something to look at, but it shows you it's something that seems

Robert:

medieval in a way, that power struggle between the Patriarch of Moscow and the Patriarch of

Robert:

contacts in Opal.

Robert:

But that stuff is still there.

Robert:

It's still around.

Robert:

It's still a basis for geopolitical

Robert:

wranglings.

Robert:

Yeah.

Blair:

So the answer today, though, is advanced towards liberalism.

Blair:

Again, the rule of law, the reimbursement of individualism, and the proper definition of

Blair:

capitalism.

Robert:

I also think, too, is that I said earlier, this poll showing Americans becoming

Robert:

a secular nation.

Robert:

Yes.

Robert:

All of those Christians will probably be a minority sometime in the middle to second half

Robert:

of this century.

Robert:

And I think it also creates the need for if

Robert:

we're going to be secular, we have to decide what that means.

Robert:

We have to have a secular ideology, a secular philosophy, a secular morality above all else.

Robert:

I think the thing is people and you can see Europe became secular and it did not

Robert:

immediately fall apart.

Robert:

Most people actually live according to, I

Robert:

think, a fairly decent secular morality.

Robert:

They live it implicitly in their regular life.

Robert:

Most people go out and they get a job.

Robert:

They find the work they want to do, they buy

Robert:

houses, they have families, they do all the things that, you know, peaceful, productive,

Robert:

decent, normal do.

Robert:

They live according to an implicit morality of

Robert:

what I call rational selfinterest or enlightened selfinterest.

Robert:

But at the same time, they don't have the theory, they don't have the idea to defend

Robert:

that and to define fully what that means.

Robert:

And that's what leads to the sense of over

Robert:

going off a cliff and we don't know what we're doing.

Blair:

Right.

Blair:

Martin, do you want to step in?

Martin:

Yes, please.

Martin:

Yeah. I have some short questions and also

Martin:

ending on we haven't had a good note here in between, but also a shout out, but an

Martin:

expression or a word called your boning job.

Robert:

You want to explain that one?

Martin:

Yes, please.

Robert:

Okay. Jawboning is an example.

Robert:

So this is an example of one of these free

Robert:

speech issues.

Robert:

This is an interesting one because it's kind

Robert:

of a gray area or a hard to define issue.

Robert:

But jawboning is a word used.

Robert:

So, yeah, your job boating, you're moving your jaw, you're talking to somebody sort of flying

Robert:

term for talking to someone.

Robert:

But what it refers to is when a government

Robert:

official goes out.

Robert:

And so, for example, the example being used

Robert:

here is during the beginning of COVID you had some government officials, including people

Robert:

from the Centers for Disease Control.

Robert:

So these are scientists or people in the

Robert:

science bureaucracy who are in charge of dealing with infectious diseases.

Robert:

And they were going to places like Facebook and saying, well look, these are what we see

Robert:

as the main sources, including sometimes specific people.

Robert:

We see these as the main sources of disinformation of wrong information about

Robert:

COVID And we think you should be and basically suggesting that they should do something to

Robert:

prevent the spread of that misinformation.

Robert:

And in many cases they were actually really

Robert:

correct about the misinformation that the people who were spreading this were people who

Robert:

were crackpots, who were denying provable scientific facts about the pandemic.

Robert:

But the problem comes in.

Robert:

And when you have a government official now,

Robert:

on the one hand, a government official in charge of fighting infectious diseases has a

Robert:

responsibility that can be communicating to the public.

Robert:

It's part of his job to say here's what we think is true and here's what we think is not

Robert:

true.

Robert:

On the other hand, whenever somebody who works

Robert:

for the government says something or suggests something, it's not 100% just a suggestion or

Robert:

just somebody's opinion.

Robert:

It also carries the implication that, well,

Robert:

maybe there would be some legal repercussions should you not comply with what I'm

Robert:

suggesting.

Robert:

And so that's one of the things that we sort

Robert:

of have to deal with here is that and this technique of jawboning is not just a pyramid,

Robert:

it's been used on other things.

Robert:

But there's the sense of what happens when you

Robert:

have people who work for the government who express their opinion about what you ought to

Robert:

do.

Robert:

And even if it's not an explicit direct

Robert:

threat, it is still someone from the government saying, gee, it's a nice business

Robert:

you've got here.

Robert:

It'd be a shame if something were to happen to

Robert:

it.

Robert:

So it could be an implicit threat.

Robert:

And so I had a link to some fascinating discussions about ways to sort of determine

Robert:

the certain legal standards and this has been adjudicated in certain Supreme Court cases

Robert:

about what constitutes a legitimate, quote ungovernment, speech, the speech that's

Robert:

permissible for because you can't say to somebody just because you're a politician or

Robert:

just because you work for the CDC, you can't state your opinion on anything.

Robert:

But at the same time you have to have like, under what conditions can you state it?

Robert:

Under what disclaimers you have to state it.

Robert:

And I think the big issue here comes this is

Robert:

another example of why you need capitalism, why you need free markets, because the less

Robert:

power government has to force people to do something, the less danger there is that a

Robert:

politician shooting his mouth off or a government official expressing an opinion

Robert:

could be even remotely conceived as an implicit threat.

Robert:

Right.

Robert:

Because to threaten you, they have to have

Robert:

power over you.

Robert:

The less power they have over you, the less

Robert:

possibility that they could implicitly abuse that power.

Martin:

Great.

Martin:

Could you clarify and tell a little bit more

Martin:

about the label the new classical liberal?

Robert:

Classical liberal? Yeah.

Martin:

The neoclassical it's a new term, you could say, but at the same time.

Robert:

A couple of people have used it occasionally referred to something.

Robert:

It never really caught on.

Robert:

So I figured it was available out there to be

Robert:

granted.

Robert:

So I grabbed it.

Robert:

I use it as a title for my column at Discourse magazine and it's sort of my attempt to appeal

Robert:

to or try to make.

Robert:

So if we're going to have this alliance

Robert:

possibly forming of left wing and right wing populists of the right wing traditionalism

Robert:

combined with the left wing anti capitalism as I was describing this liberal synthesis.

Robert:

My attitude is we better have our own coalition.

Robert:

Liberal coalition to go against that and to basically do if people are going to see what

Robert:

they have in common across party lines or across left and right lines when they're

Robert:

opposed to freedom.

Robert:

We should be making efforts to try to reach

Robert:

across ideological lines and across traditional sort of divides to make an

Robert:

alliance of liberals.

Robert:

And so neoclassical liberal comes from it's

Robert:

sort of a portmanteau, a combination of the classical liberal.

Robert:

And so most people who are premarkers, we usually describe ourselves as classical

Robert:

liberal.

Robert:

The idea is that liberal, the word liberal

Robert:

just means pro freedom.

Robert:

And so liberalism in the 19th century referred

Robert:

to being a pro free marketer, being basically free speech and free markets.

Robert:

That's the classical liberalism.

Robert:

And then in the 20th century, the progressives

Robert:

and the populists came along and the big government guys came along and stole the term

Robert:

liberal to refer to this big government ideology.

Robert:

But more recently, there's been a wing that calls themselves the neoliberals and they sort

Robert:

of define themselves as more market friendly.

Robert:

They're sort of left of center, but more

Robert:

marketfriendly.

Robert:

And they're more likely to be, for example, to

Robert:

be YIMBYs.

Robert:

So NIMBY means not in my backyard.

Robert:

It's the sort of person who opposes any development project that's happening.

Robert:

You want to build a 20 story apartment building and they'll turn out at the local

Robert:

meeting and they'll yell and scream and try to block it and they'll sue you.

Robert:

Well, these are the yes in my backyard people where they say, no, we need to be building

Robert:

more housing.

Robert:

If you don't build housing, it gets expensive.

Robert:

People can't afford.

Robert:

And sort of from a more of a leftist center

Robert:

perspective, they said, well, if you're going to be able to have affordable housing for the

Robert:

poor, you need to be building more housing.

Robert:

So we should be more open to profit driven

Robert:

free market approaches in housing.

Robert:

So these are what's called the neoliberals and

Robert:

they've kind of tried to make a brand out of the term neoliberal.

Robert:

So I said, well, what if we could get some sort of coalition or cooperation between the

Robert:

neoliberals, the center left neoliberals and the center right classical liberals?

Robert:

As I said, let's call that neoclassical liberalism.

Robert:

And so that's sort of what I'm trying to promote as a liberal synthesis where we try to

Robert:

find this even though there are disagreements and philosophy and disagreements and

Robert:

priorities.

Robert:

We try to find the things that we can

Robert:

cooperate on and work together on because I think if we don't.

Robert:

Then the advantage of forming a big coalition could potentially flip over to the illegal

Robert:

symphony that I've been worried about.

Martin:

Great, thanks for that.

Martin:

And you have also recently a course fair on

Martin:

effective writing.

Martin:

Do you want to tell a little about that?

Martin:

And your articles there, all your work that you're doing?

Robert:

Well, yeah, so this is something I've been wanting to do for a while because 20

Robert:

years or so ago I used to do a course it was through the Ingrand Institute.

Robert:

I did a course on writing where I was dealing I did some with undergraduates and some with

Robert:

graduate students and got a tremendous amount out of teaching that to those students and

Robert:

have wanted to do it again.

Robert:

So a friend of mine convinced me last spring

Robert:

to sort of do another round of it as she set up a group of people.

Robert:

And I said, well, I decided having gone back to that and realizing, oh, I not only was able

Robert:

to put back together a lot of the old material that I had, but I was able to approve on it

Robert:

because I've been writing for 20 years since then, doing a lot of writing and I've learned

Robert:

even more.

Robert:

So I decided to do other round of it.

Robert:

So I got a group of students going through it just started on Tuesday.

Robert:

And it's one of the things that I feel strongly about is basically having learned so

Robert:

much of sort of passing on those skills and the hard run wisdom and not just about little

Robert:

tips.

Robert:

Tricks and techniques but I've also done a lot

Robert:

of thinking about the process of writing and I think most people find the process of writing

Robert:

to be very difficult.

Robert:

To be very psychologically brutal and

Robert:

challenging.

Robert:

I got one of the people who interested in the

Robert:

class said I think I'm actually I like the product of my writing but I find the process

Robert:

to be incredibly painful and difficult.

Robert:

And that's exactly trying to sort of address

Robert:

is there's a whole process of how you have to manage the actual act of writing, how you can

Robert:

break it down into sort of smaller constituent parts that are not as sort of brainbustingly

Robert:

complicated or as anxiety inducing.

Robert:

And so they turn it into something where you

Robert:

have a series of discrete steps you can take that will make it manageable.

Robert:

And I think it's one of the keys to doing a lot of writing.

Robert:

As I've done over the years.

Robert:

Is being able to have that sort of to know the

Robert:

process you need to go through to keep just to keep chugging away at being able to do it

Robert:

without stumbling over the process of how do you manage this ability to take this complex.

Robert:

A lot of facts.

Robert:

A lot of ideas.

Robert:

And you have to put them together in an order and give them a structure.

Robert:

How do you go about doing that? Well, I've got a series of techniques that

Robert:

I've developed over the years, insights into how to break that into a manageable process.

Martin:

That's great to hear, Robert.

Robert:

The funniest thing is one of the people in the class said they asked what is

Robert:

your writing process? They got something more specific because I

Robert:

never voluntarily get up, I have frequently stayed up till 05:00 a.m. A lot of my writing

Robert:

is done in a dark room alone at 03:00 in the morning because then nobody will interrupt

Robert:

you, I hear you.

Martin:

So we will do a bit of call to action here and then outro and thank a fellow

Martin:

podcasting called Mac in Torch and he has podcast called Crypto

Martin:

Generationwealthcrypto.com and he sent us a booster gram, like a digital telegram with a

Martin:

note and says 48 Satoshis.

Martin:

That's a bit of a bitcoin.

Martin:

Part of a bitcoin, yeah.

Martin:

And he says, Good job, gentlemen.

Martin:

Keep stacking those sets, Macintosh.

Martin:

And that was sent after the latest episode

Martin:

there, episode 58 and in October, so that was great to hear.

Martin:

At 11 October.

Blair:

Very good.

Martin:

Thanks Macintosh, for your support and for your note.

Martin:

That may be something.

Martin:

What's your crystal ball for that in, Robert,

Martin:

with how you could support content creators and writers and podcasters and others in a

Martin:

more direct, in a free way.

Martin:

Do you have any thoughts about that?

Robert:

Yeah, you can subscribe to my Substack.

Robert:

It's resistantletter substack.com.

Robert:

They have to shoot me if I lose my writer's

Robert:

card if I don't put that out there.

Robert:

I love substative platform.

Robert:

It's actually the platform.

Robert:

For a long time I was basically doing a

Robert:

Substack, but before Substack existed because my career sort of started a little before the

Robert:

beginning of the blog era and blogs were great, but there was no way to get make money

Robert:

at it, right? You could put all this information out, you

Robert:

could get it out there for free and people get used to everything for free.

Robert:

The thing I hate, the slogan I hate the most is information wants to be free because it's

Robert:

usually set by people who are getting paid well to build the technological

Robert:

infrastructure, not to actually provide the information.

Robert:

So my view is information needs to get paid, right?

Robert:

We need to find a way that people who are producing good ideas and producing good

Robert:

information can actually make a living at it, because there's no way I could do as much as I

Robert:

do if it weren't what I'm doing full time.

Robert:

If I were doing this on the side, I could do a

Robert:

small fraction of it.

Robert:

So finding ways that people can get rewarded

Robert:

for doing this and unfortunately, in the digital era, the media business has been going

Robert:

the other direction.

Robert:

So, definitely, if you have a podcast you

Robert:

like, like this one, if you have a newsletter you like, subscribe to those things.

Robert:

Find ways to support them financially.

Robert:

But the great thing is the barriers to entry

Robert:

have been knocked out.

Robert:

They've been knocked down.

Blair:

That's true.

Robert:

Anybody with interesting idea can go and start writing.

Robert:

Anybody with an interesting idea, I can start a podcast so you don't have to get into The

Robert:

New York Times, get over the parapets of the boiling oil and all of that, and to get into

Robert:

the citadel of the mainstream media, you don't need to get there anymore to get an audience.

Robert:

The downside of that is it's very hard to make money at doing it.

Robert:

But if you want those barriers to enter, to be open, if you want people with your ideas that

Robert:

you like to be able to find an audience, then the responsibility goes to you individually to

Robert:

say, well, if I want that to happen, I should find the people I like and find ways to give

Robert:

them support.

Robert:

You guys probably have, like, a tip jar kind

Robert:

of thing where people can send in support and you can subscribe to my newsletter and

Robert:

substack.

Robert:

It's a way of supporting what I do at the

Robert:

various ventures that I do.

Blair:

Yeah. All right, Robert, we're coming up on the hour mark, so I know you've got to

Blair:

go.

Blair:

And once again, we thank you for manning the

Blair:

Foxhole with us today.

Robert:

It's always a pleasure.

Martin:

Thank you very much.

Robert:

Bye. Thank you.

Robert:

Bye bye.

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The Secular Foxhole
Separation of Religion and State
As a freethinker, are you looking through binoculars out at the world in the safety of a foxhole? Get fuel for your soul and intellectual ammunition by listening to The Secular Foxhole podcast, in order to fight for the separation of religion and state.

Blair chose this name (The Secular Foxhole) to dispute the myth that there are no atheists in foxholes, but also as a place to share ideas and defend Free Speech. The co-hosts both advocate the separation of Church and State, but also Economics and State. In short, Liberalism, Individualism, and Capitalism.
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About your hosts

Blair Schofield

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I'm a 'lapsed' blogger who turned his blog into a podcast. Now the task is to keep both up to date! My co-host Martin Lindeskog and I have already celebrated our one year anniversary, with the podcast.

Martin Lindeskog

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Creator, ✍🏻 Tea Book Sketches. Indie Biz Philosopher ⚛️ & New Media 📲 Advisor, TeaParty.Media. Blogger since 2002 and podcaster🎙since 2006. First podcast: EGO NetCast. Latest podcast: Pluck the Day. Support 💲My Work and 🗽 Freedom of Expression: https://bio.link/lyceum