Real Progress: Why We Ignore How Good We Have It

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Zachary Karabell: What could go right? I’m Zachary Karabell, the founder of The Progress Network, and as is likely obvious by now, the host of What Could Go Right?, which is my weekly podcast where I talk to scintillating and interesting people about scintillating and interesting things — or at least that’s the conceit and that’s my hope. We’ll find out if it is merited by the following conversation.

If you were an alien and looking at the planet — well, first of all, you wouldn’t really be able to tell the difference between any of us, and you would be confused at the constant incessant squabbling, let alone wars. But if you were looking at the United States, you would probably assume that everybody was either a Democrat or a Republican and was deeply at odds with each other, and everything was divided along absolute, clear, binary partisan lines. And yet we know statistically and observationally and from polls that that’s absolutely not the case. So we’re going to use this as a starting point: the assumption of partisanship may simply be a story. And in the What Could Go Right? vein, it may be a story that is constantly self-reinforcing — an idea of complete and utter division that is actually at odds with the reality that we find ourselves in.

And in that spirit, I’m going to talk to somebody who’s been thinking about this for years and years and years. I don’t mean that, like, he’s so old. I just mean he’s been cogitating about these things for a long time, and that is Nick Gillespie, who is editor-at-large of Reason magazine, and the host of the Reason podcast. We’re only having him on because his podcast is probably bigger than this podcast now, and it’s kind of a one-hand-washes-the-other situation, where there’s really never any sincere engagement of ideas. He has had a rock-and-roll life. He’s a quirky dude who’s been characterized as a libertarian, but I think has probably simply been marching to the beat of his own drummer, or singing to the lyrics of his own song.

I’ve got to read this line because you can’t really pay for publicity like this — or for all that I know, Nick did pay for publicity like this. “Nick Gillespie is to libertarianism what Lou Reed is to rock and roll, the quintessence of its outlaw spirit.” I really want someone to define me as the quintessence of anything.

Nick Gillespie: No, that is just a self-licking ice cream cone. It’s really fantastic.

Zachary Karabell: It’s seriously good, man.

Nick Gillespie: Yeah, it is.

Zachary Karabell: All right. So I’m going to start and ask you a question that I’ve been asking a lot, and it’s in line with a lot of the writing you’ve done and thinking you’ve done, that never before in human history have more people on the planet had more of what human beings from time immemorial crave and need — caloric abundance, physical security, a certain amount of voice. Even our authoritarian societies these days, with the exception maybe of North Korea, there’s more individual security and freedom, more financial means and leisure time. And you could argue that at the same time never have more people had more — and been more pissed off. And the question today, I feel, of the 21st century is: how does one explain that seeming conundrum? Meaning that more has not led to satisfaction. That abundance isn’t creating a feeling of, hey, we got this.

Nick Gillespie: Yeah. I mean, I agree with you. This is the question of our time. There’s a demographer at Brookings Institution named Homi Kharas who, about 10 years ago, wrote a book and started writing about the global middle class, in which he said that sometime around the mid 20-teens, more than half of the population of the globe had discretionary income, after they cover all their stuff, and that this was unimaginable at the start of the 20th century, even at the end of the 20th century. And how is it that in America — and I think this is broadly true of North America and Europe — people seem to be less and less happy? And there are two things I want to kind of footnote before I suggest the main reason I think this is happening. One is that when you look at things like Gallup polling going back 50 years or more, when people are asked, how are things going in your life? Are you doing pretty well? Between 70 and 80 percent of Americans typically say, you know what? Things are going pretty well for me.

Zachary Karabell: And you have that about education. You’ve got that about your congressional rep. It’s like, “I hate them, but I like him.”

Nick Gillespie: Right. Yeah. And then when they ask, well, what about the direction of the country, or how’s the country going? And then there is a steep divergence.

And that’s kind of fascinating, and it’s worth thinking about that. Like, how are we all thinking we’re doing well, but this society is going to hell?

But I think more broadly, and this goes to that question of a global middle class, we have not been taught, and I’m not talking about, like, evolution, it’s just that in our lifetimes — I was born in 1963, so I’m a very late Baby Boomer, Gen X person — we were not taught to live in a post-scarcity world. I certainly wasn’t. And we are not psychologically equipped to deal with a choose-your-own-adventure world.

I have two adult children, and I have a four-month-old, and I think when I look at the ways in which my generation has raised children, we have simultaneously told them all things are possible and that this is the most terrifying of all possible worlds. So choose whatever you want, but don’t fuck it up. And we have just created a mass kind of psychosis where it’s almost impossible to be happy with any individual choice people make, or to believe that you deserve your fate, that you deserve your good luck, and that the world is going to keep moving forward.

Zachary Karabell: You know, I’ve also thought a lot about the yes-but problem. So if you articulate problems — of which there are many, manifold, and constant, like, there’s still too many neonatal problems in underserved communities in the United States, or literacy post-COVID, all these negatives — you can state those facts and people will engage those. If you state a constructive fact, like there is now early childhood education in New Mexico that’s free — I mean, nothing is free, everything’s taxed now — every one of those statements has to be followed by, yes, but there’s also still all this.

Nick Gillespie: Right. Yes, but there were starving children in China, when I was growing up, which was one of the yes-buts and things like that.

Zachary Karabell: And you were told to finish your food because there are starving children in China.

Nick Gillespie: That’s right, yeah. None of it made sense then, but I totally agree with you that one of the things that we are incapable of as a society — and I don’t want to be glib about this — but we can’t acknowledge progress. So material progress and moral progress. And it’s like, when you look back over the past decade, politics have become insane in America. And we’re talking just after Trump released an AI slop generated image of himself, which he’s taken down, as Jesus ministering to somebody who looks like Jon Stewart of The Daily Show, and then said, well, no, I wasn’t Jesus. I was just a doctor, because I make people feel better.

Like, we live in a truly insane, deranged political world, and yet even after COVID, even as we are going through multiple wars at any given moment, median household income in real terms is higher than it’s ever been. People, in most profound ways, are doing better than ever, and we cannot even see that because we are arguing over ridiculous small ball stuff.

Zachary Karabell: And you do then have this whole progress movement, which I’m aware of. You have people like Hans Rosling, who’s passed away, but he’s the progenitor of his own institute, and then Our World in Data, which has been compiling all this. And people like Steven Pinker, who’s part of The Progress Network.

So there’s clearly data out there that indicates this. The other real conundrum, right, is that data in the face of feelings — feelings always win. So if someone feels like the world is messed up and you quote statistics to them—

Nick Gillespie: Right —

Zachary Karabell: They will not only not believe you, but they are likely to get angry.

Nick Gillespie: I tend to agree with you, and certainly in the moment, you’re never going to win somebody who has cancer when you tell them, oh, you know what’s great, though, is that if you were nine other people, you would be surviving, right?

But over time, I think some of that changes, and I think what we’ve done is just, everybody’s up at the top of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, right? And we have to come up with our own meaning on a daily basis, which is very hard to do.

On the other hand, I do think that people do respond to facts, and people respond to history, and I think one of the things that is most lacking in our contemporary society — and this is me being a very old man — is that people don’t remember history.

And I think one of the reasons for that is because at least since the end of World War II, we’ve lived in a mass abundance society. And so when you talk to people who are two or three or more generations removed from the ghettos, removed from poverty, even in America, people don’t ever care about the past.

I feel lucky. We’re in midtown Manhattan. My father was born in Hell’s Kitchen to Irish immigrants in the ‘20s. I am one generation removed from a working-class white ghetto where he had very little to look forward to. That sense of history helps me navigate, like, I don’t want to blow this because I am living a life that my parents literally could not understand. My father didn’t even graduate high school. When I went to college, he was like, oh, that’s great. Where is that? And when I got a doctorate, they were happy for me, but literally, I was living in another universe. And we take that kind of abundance for granted, and we devalue it.

Zachary Karabell: So I’m going to be the contrarian to this one, which is, I don’t think people are particularly amenable to facts, not just in the moment, but in general. I think over time societies are amenable to facts and analysis. And I don’t think Americans ever really knew or respected history. They knew or respected certain glib narratives of what America was that you ingested in your civics class in high school or that you learned from a kind of facile textbook that told a story that we wanted collectively to be true. So I’m not as on top of the —

Nick Gillespie: If I may. I’m thinking of it more — it ends up having a social effect, but it’s a personal narrative. If you can remember bad times, or if you are living with somebody who is like, wow, I didn’t think I would ever own a car, and now I own two. It’s not the textbook history. And it’s interesting, when people say, oh, well, the solution to everything in America is to teach civics. Nobody ever was like, by the way, not only were the founders beautiful and fresh-smelling people, and yeah, they had some problems, but they were great. Nobody ever said, like, most of the people in their world lived horrible, desperate lives, of barely having enough calories to conceive, to have children, much less flourish.

Zachary Karabell: This book that I just finished, which is oddly enough about a multi-thousand-year history of corn as a technology we eat — the amount that Americans, particularly outside the East Coast, were drinking in the 1820s and 1830s —

Nick Gillespie: It’s amazing.

Zachary Karabell: They’re essentially drunk all the time, right? Because they often used alcohol as a source of non-toxic water. But they were just drunk all the time. So you have a temperance movement not because you’ve got a bunch of ninnies who are like, we shouldn’t drink. You have a temperance movement because everybody’s drunk.

Nick Gillespie: Yeah, and it’s also you realize, if you’re a little bit wasted or a little bit buzzed, you’re not going to be productive, even apart from technology. My brother, who’s a couple years older than me, he graduated college in 1981, and he got a job at Graybar Electric, which was one of the original tenants of Rockefeller Center. I don’t even know if it still exists, but it’s not what it was. But he had a mentor there who was going to sell electrical conduit and everything, and he went to lunch with his mentor, who had three martinis, and he was like, wow, that is amazing. And then after lunch, he went to the guy’s office to ask him a question, and he was just sacked out and snoring. You know, if you drink a lot, you’re not going to be very productive.

Zachary Karabell: I mean, the martini glasses were small. It was more like one and a half martinis.

Nick Gillespie: I don’t know. All I’m saying is, we can argue whether it’s progress or not, but it’s certainly different. Americans today have, compared to 50 years ago, drink less, they do drugs less, or intoxicants less, and we’re more productive. That’s probably not, you know, just a vague correlation.

Zachary Karabell: I think part of it, though, is everybody sets their set point to their highest memory. There was an old joke that everybody remembers their lowest costs and their highest income as being simultaneous.

And then you do have the issue that we live in our moment. We don’t live in comparative time. So when I was giving a lot of speeches, I would kind of use — I’ll do this game with you. Levittowns. The burgeoning of the American suburb, car class post-World War II, starts in Long Island and then makes its way elsewhere. And a Levitt house was the dream of a returning GI or a young aspiring family. How big do you think a Levittown house was?

Nick Gillespie: Oh, they were like 700 square feet or something.

Zachary Karabell: They were like 750 square feet.

Nick Gillespie: It’s amazing when you look at pictures of them. And of course it’s also interesting that they became modular homes almost, where if you go to the original Levittowns or early — I grew up in New Jersey. I was born in Brooklyn, I grew up in New Jersey in a town that was started in the 17th century, but blew up in the ‘50s, starting in the ‘50s and onward. And the houses that I grew up in, you have to look to find that nucleus because people added on as they got wealthier.

Zachary Karabell: But if you tell people that, and where the average house size now is over 2,000 square feet, and has electronics and TVs, and that a Levitt house had an icebox — didn’t even have a refrigerator — and the car was a jalopy in the driveway that got eight gallons to the mile and didn’t have seat belts, but it did have ashtrays, so at least you could kill yourself —

Nick Gillespie: Well, they had their priorities.

Zachary Karabell: There were things you did, and things you did. But even if you recognize intuitively, like, wow, we’ve come a long way materially, people, I think legitimately, say, well, there has been progress, and therefore just noting it doesn’t change what’s broken in the present.

Nick Gillespie: I agree, but I feel like a lot of the anger and discomfort in contemporary America — and I think a lot of it is generational and it’s to be expected, and in many ways it’s to be encouraged — but younger people, I remember having an argument with a Gen Z, a Zoomer, who was 25 years old, and they were like, I should have a house by now. And I was like, what world did you grow up in where a 25-year-old has a house?

And this is something where, talk to your parents about when they got their first house, or your grandparents. And it’s not to say just shut up and take it and you’ll get yours when the old people die, at all, because this is the flip side. We’ve made a lot of progress, but progress should continue. But a little bit of perspective, I think, would really be helpful in making people be more realistic about what’s going on in society.

And then more importantly, how do you make smart decisions if I’m 25 and I’m at the start of my career. I have so many options. How do I narrow them down? How do I find out what’s the Venn diagram of the things I like, the things I’m good at, and the things people will pay me for? And start to create a process, because we are in a place where everybody expects everybody to be equal automatically, and I think that really becomes corrosive.

Zachary Karabell: It’s funny, you wrote recently about something that feeds this narrative, particularly in kind of millennial and Gen Z land, and I guess now Gen Alpha land. It’s getting a little hard to do the whole generation thing.

Nick Gillespie: There was a while where people were starting to talk about a generation called Gen Beta, and it’s like, don’t do that.

Zachary Karabell: Skip to the next Greek letter. Go to sigma or theta. Just don’t do beta.

Nick Gillespie: I don’t even know what comes after alpha and beta. And you don’t want an alpha and beta generation simultaneously because that’s stacking the deck in a really unfair way.

Zachary Karabell: But there’s this narrative, certainly a Bernie Sanders one, certainly a progressive one, of young people drowning under a mountain of student debt. And there are big figures to show it. I don’t know if it’s like a trillion dollars or it’s more than that.

Nick Gillespie: It’s usually cited somewhere between $1.6 and $2 trillion in student debt.

Zachary Karabell: But then when you look at that data granularly, which I know you’ve done, a massive amount of that debt was accumulated by for-profit schools, which were often scams —

Nick Gillespie: Actually not so much. But it’s mostly graduate schools.

Zachary Karabell: That’s what I was going to say. It’s a combination of the for-profit schools, like Grand Canyon University, and then people doing very expensive master’s degrees.

Nick Gillespie: Or getting an MD, because people who get MDs generally take out a couple hundred thousand in loans, because they know once they get the degree they’re going to be able to pay it back very quickly. And, it’s cheap. The student loans, one of the reasons why people want them is because they’re not dischargeable in bankruptcy proceedings for a while, but they’re also unsecured loans that are usually sub-market rate. What’s interesting is when you look at student loan data, wealthier households tend to have carried more student debt because if nothing else, the parents are saying, take out the money and then we’ll invest it, and it’s at a low market interest rate, so we’ll do better in the market with it.

Zachary Karabell: But this is one of these other areas where you have this conversation and you say, look, the bulk of the debt is not being held by four-year college undergraduates.

Nick Gillespie: Right. The data points are worth coming out. In the article I wrote recently, in the class of 2024 undergrads, 47 percent of students took out loans, which is less than most people would think. And it’s actually been trending down, the percentage of undergrads who borrow in order to go to undergrad. And the average amount was about $30,000, which works out to around $300 or $325 a month as a repayment. So it’s kind of like a car payment. Maybe you drive a used car, or you inherit a car, or you don’t have a car.

But considering that a college degree correlates with making over a million dollars more in your lifetime, it is a pretty good bet, if the only thing standing between you and college is taking out $30,000 in loans while you’re an undergrad that you’ve got to pay off, it’s a good bet.

Zachary Karabell: So all true, but there will be many people, assuming they’re listening to this conversation, or many people who listen to that, who are 25 years old who go, “Give me a break.” You’re X age. You’re well past that. You don’t understand the world. You don’t understand how hard it is. I don’t really believe those numbers. My friend Joey’s got $72,000 in debt, can’t find a job, living in his parents’ basement.”

The emotional experience and the physical, literal experience of a set of people is always going to — this gets back to, are people amenable to facts, right? And I’ve had the experience of trying to have this debate, where the statement of that is heard as kind of the following: “Wah, wah, wah, wah. You’re a ninny and should shut up about your problems because I don’t believe they’re real.”

Nick Gillespie: And it’s also the “wah, wah, wah,” which of course is calling back to the Peanuts specials. And if you ask most people under 40, they really don’t know who Charlie Brown is.

Zachary Karabell: So they think the “wah, wah, wah” is actually even more pejorative and not a reference.

Nick Gillespie: Well, have you had any success in talking to people? Because you realize of course in a debate nobody’s going to back down. But over time — and I paid for my undergrad, as well as my MA. I have two MAs and a PhD, and I covered it all.

Zachary Karabell: Me too. Except I have an MPhil and not — and an MA.

Nick Gillespie: And the extra MA is on the way to the PhD.

Zachary Karabell: Yeah, they just sort of hand it to you as a kind of — it’s a candy.

Nick Gillespie: It’s an amuse-bouche.

Zachary Karabell: This was the we’re-going-to-compare-degrees-size portion of the conversation.

Nick Gillespie: Your degrees are better. No question, I’m sure.

Zachary Karabell: Certainly more expensive.

Nick Gillespie: But the important thing is, I went through this. I know what it is like to be white-knuckling every month, a student loan payment, and the one thing I know about the student loan payment with everything else, it’s like, if you screw that up, your credit will be wrecked for the rest of your life. I had shitty jobs. I had to patch together gigs here and there and things like that, so I know that it’s difficult.

But I also know the difference between me and my high school graduating class, only about 40 percent of whom went on to some form of college immediately, is the college degree. And it’s not simply a signaling device. I majored in English and psychology, which are both pretty useless. They were great. It was exciting. I became interested in the world. Things opened up to me. I’m happy to talk to people about student debt. I guess my main point is, they’re not going to agree with you in the moment, but I think a lot of people understand, yeah, this is actually a pretty good deal.

Zachary Karabell: Yeah, I mean, I’ve certainly talked a few younger people off the ledge of fear around just taking on some student debt in that twenty to thirty thousand dollar range, of saying not all debt is bad. This is a legit investment in the future. This is likely to make sense going forward. Totally different than taking on $200,000 of debt for an MFA.

Nick Gillespie: That’s right. Or $200,000 for a house that you’re not going to be able to really afford, or all sorts of things, right? Or $200,000 in credit card debt for meals. If you’re not building any human capital —

Zachary Karabell: Consumption debt versus investment debt, basically.

Nick Gillespie: Yeah. And this goes to part of, I think, one of the problems in contemporary society and in a wealthy society. Nobody in America — and my degree is in American literature, and my PhD is from the University at Buffalo, which was SUNY Buffalo when I went there. And I went there mostly to study with Leslie Fiedler, who’s one of the great wild men of American literary and cultural studies. And I raise that partly because he was interested in showing how society worked, how people moved up and down ladders, and showing a means of ascent.

Ben Franklin is like this. The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin is the first how-to book in American literature. Like, here is how, I was the seventh son of a seventh son, here is how I made my way in the world, and you can do it too.

I think one of the problems with an abundant society is that people immediately want to start pretending that they were always rich, or they were born this way, and they don’t want to share their grubby climb up the greasy pole, which is a terrible metaphor, obviously. I was not attentive in the rhetoric classes. But the more that we can tell people, this is how things work, and here are different models of success, here are different models of making your way in the world, and it’s not all pretty, and it’s not all guaranteed — I think we will have a richer society, both emotionally as well as financially.

Zachary Karabell: You do know that some of your lines are also music lyrics entitled “Seventh Son of a Seventh Son,” “Born This Way.” It just kind of works out that way. Granted, they took it from the same sources you were quoting, but —

Nick Gillespie: A lot of things come back to Ben Franklin, right? He’s a phenomenal person to think about.

Zachary Karabell: So you’ve thought about this too. I mean, there is a global dimension here. There’s the affluent society issue, which is certainly true of Western Europe, right? I mean, when you look at Western Europe and go, Jesus.

Nick Gillespie: Oh, man. I’m so glad all of my grandparents left. My mother’s parents were from southern Italy, my father’s parents from what became the Republic of Ireland. They left before it was such. When I’ve gone there, I’m just like, oh my God, thank you for leaving.

Zachary Karabell: But the affluent part is undeniable, right? I mean, Italy too. If you’re going to just deal with quality of life, you’re not working bare-knuckled anymore. You are taking August off, and that’s true of the middle class. This is not a privileged thing in these societies. But that doesn’t preclude those societies from having the same degree of agita and anxiety and anger.

Nick Gillespie: Well, and it’s also because it’s declining, right? I mean, same thing in Japan. My stats may not be correct anymore, but as of recently, Japan is the only OECD country that has fewer people than it had in 2000. And in many ways, it is the canary in the coal mine.

Zachary Karabell: Japan’s the future.

Nick Gillespie: Yeah. And Japan has a tremendously wonderful quality of life for the people who are alive now, but you can see it kind of degrading over time.

Zachary Karabell: Well, but that gets to our question before. I once wrote this piece about Japan of, if Japan is our collective future, you could think of worse things. Meaning, in the great arc of human existence, if a highly affluent, literate, low-crime, well-fed, aesthetically pleasing, very little civil strife society is your worst-case scenario, most generations of humanity would’ve taken that one to heart.

Nick Gillespie: Yeah, absolutely. But of course, and this is where I suppose I am an American exceptionalist, that America is not Japan, and America is not Europe. And now you’re forcing me to question whether I’m living a nostalgia act here. But the America that seems to be great, and the America that draws people from all over the world, and excites people and produces the popular culture, as well as the technology that seems to make the world a better place — we need to do better than that.

We can’t preserve a slowly declining standard of living for most people. We need to be growing. And I feel like one of the ways that we can do that is by reminding people of the recent past, not 250 years ago.

Which, by the way, the bicentennial — which I assume you remember, right?

Zachary Karabell: Tall ships, going down the Hudson.

Nick Gillespie: Yeah, and I grew up in Middletown, New Jersey, which is near Sandy Hook, where the tall ships docked, and weighed anchor, and the Polish ships came a year late, which was a big joke at the time. But the bicentennial was a flop from a money-making point of view, because nobody cared.

Nobody cares about the 250th anniversary. So let’s just talk about the 70 years since the end of World War II, or even the past 50 years, or what comes after the Baby Boom and Gen X fade from the stage.

I think we need to be having a more productive conversation about how you make your way in the world, and then what kinds of large-scale regulatory and public policy issues make it more likely that we’ll produce more wealth and include more people.

Zachary Karabell: And I wonder what you think about this, because you’ve thought and written a lot about — you know, libertarianism is both a nonpartisan, i.e. not Democrat or Republican, but it’s also a different view of the role of government in relation to individuals and freedom.

Nick Gillespie: Well, the way I think about it is as a pre-partisan kind of philosophy. I’m a libertarian with a small L. I always typically vote for the libertarian presidential candidate. I don’t think I’ve ever actually joined the party. But small-L libertarianism is pre-partisan, and I know libertarian Democrats and libertarian Republicans. These terms really have worn out. They don’t make sense anymore, like “big government.”

Somebody like Ronald Reagan described himself as an FDR Democrat, or a New Deal Democrat, in the ‘80s. And he talked about how his really terrible Social Security reforms, which jacked up FICA to the current levels, he said that was his greatest accomplishment, was saving the solvency of Social Security for a generation or so.

Well, this is the new thing, which you’ll probably enjoy. There are a small number of libertarian academics, mostly in England, who are talking about how Friedrich Hayek and Michel Foucault actually have a lot in common. And one of the things that they share — and Foucault, it’s translated in various ways, but it comes down to, we are always governed too much, and he thinks particularly in politics, there should be fewer laws, and they should be applied equally to people, but there should be fewer of them, which is kind of Hayekian or liberal, where you just make a basic matrix of, okay, this is what’s allowed, this is what’s not allowed, and then you let people figure it out as much as possible. And that is certainly the way I feel about politics, and I think that can take a Democratic version or a Republican version, and unfortunately it’s in very short supply in either party.

Zachary Karabell: So you do have this system, which we loosely call capitalism —

Nick Gillespie: Well, I would actually say it’s liberalism, which just means limited government, maximum autonomy, individual autonomy, and freedom of association. And the economic application of that is something like free enterprise.

Zachary Karabell: And that system — at least globally, right? Because we live in a capitalist world.

Nick Gillespie: Right. Yeah.

Zachary Karabell: China included. Which has clearly led to abundance globally, materially.

Nick Gillespie: Yeah, absolutely.

Zachary Karabell: Clearly not led to human satisfaction commensurate with —

Nick Gillespie: No, no, no. It’s the one thing it doesn’t deliver.

Zachary Karabell: And seems to be more and more divergent. And there’s that whole — I don’t remember who it was, who talked about the income rising makes people happier to a point, and then plateaus —

Nick Gillespie: I think the first one was Richard Easterlin.

Zachary Karabell: Yeah, the Easterlin Paradox. Which people have also said maybe is wrong or right. But the idea being, rising incomes create contentment to a point, and then it ceases to —

Nick Gillespie: It either stops to increase or it actually starts to decline.

Zachary Karabell: And we certainly see the decline now. Rising incomes, declining contentment globally.

What do you think of this? I’m going to do my question of, here’s my pet theory, which is, much of the discontent around the world, which has outlet — meaning the one thing about phones and social media is that everybody has a voice. No one may listen, but everybody has a voice. Never before have more people been able to both articulate their discontent with things as they are, articulate their passionate desire for better governance, better society, things being improved. And never before have more people believed that they have the right to do so. And to me, I actually find that unbelievably heartening at a human aggregate level.

Nick Gillespie: I totally agree with you. Quiet desperation is out, and the only reason it was there is because nobody had an outlet, or it was hard to reach an audience. I think it’s also worth saying it might be oversold, because when you ask individuals, how are you doing, they tend to say, pretty well. In most international surveys I’ve seen — and I haven’t looked at the methodology of this — America and Europe are really low in terms of overall happiness.

I’m also, I was raised Catholic, so I’m not sure that happiness is a good thing. That may not be what we’re after, and it may be that feeling put upon, or feeling like you’re getting ripped off, or you still have something to prove, is one of the ways in which you actually live the life that you want, which is one about action and accomplishment or achievement or attempt rather than satisfaction.

Zachary Karabell: Yeah, I don’t know if it’s about happiness as much as the absence of a roiling, angry discontent. There’s some Goldilocks between la-di-da and everything sucks.

Nick Gillespie: Well, and also being able to enjoy what you have. This is something I think about a lot on a more personal level. My parents grew up poor, and then they ascended the lower ranks of the middle class after World War II. But because of the circumstances in which they were raised, and psychologically, they could never really enjoy it, because they didn’t think they deserved it, and they thought they were going to be unmasked as not belonging. So it’s one version of a classic American story where they were very fastidious in how they presented themselves, because if my father wore the wrong tie or the wrong shoes with something, he would be kicked out of whatever place he was masquerading as middle class.

So there’s that too, of where yeah, you should never be satisfied, but also, goddammit, enjoy the luck that you have for being born in this time and in this place and doing something with it.

Zachary Karabell: There too, you did it again. That’s like a line from Hamilton. “I’ll never be satisfied.”

Nick Gillespie: Well, it’s funny. I’m a Burr-ite. I love in William Carlos Williams’ In the American Grain, there’s a long essay about how Aaron Burr is the real individualist American. And it’s so funny, it’s like an Amiri Baraka answer play to Hamilton written 100 years before it came out.

Zachary Karabell: Wow. So you’re like Burr got the short shaft historically.

Nick Gillespie: Oh, definitely. Although I still think Gore Vidal’s Burr is better than Hamilton the play, but obviously the masses have spoken, and 50,000 Elvis fans can’t be wrong.

Zachary Karabell: That’s a good one. I like that.

So on the libertarian part again, because it’s interesting for the United States, one of the really striking things about our moment contemporarily is just how prominent the courts have become. Now partly that’s a response to the Trump administration’s attempts elastically to expand the boundaries —

Nick Gillespie: And also Congress’s complete abdication of anything other than showing up to pick up a paycheck every couple of weeks.

Zachary Karabell: But you do have this phenomenal rise of the courts as a central, if not just adjudicator, but actually determiner of things. And one thing that’s kind of going on in the Supreme Court, back to the nonpartisan, meaning it doesn’t easily fit Republican or Democrat — I’m not talking about Alito and Clarence Thomas, who clearly are in their own world of anger and angst and therefore very predictable.

Nick Gillespie: And Catholicism. And Alito is from Trenton, New Jersey, so yeah, he’s got a lot of grudges.

Zachary Karabell: And he is acting upon them on a regular basis. But you do have this kind of interesting narrative, back to what you were saying, that the administrative state has gotten too big and too unaccountable, trying to pare it back.

Nick Gillespie: And Trump — Steve Bannon, who is what Mary McCarthy said of Lillian Hellman, such a liar that even when he uses the word “and,” “if,” or “but,” those are lies.

Zachary Karabell: Sorry, that was a famous line, for those of you who don’t know, where there was a defamation suit and these two critics in the ‘40s —

Nick Gillespie: Wonderful literary feud.

Zachary Karabell: — said every word that Ms. Hellman says is a lie, including “and,” “if.”

Nick Gillespie: And she said it on The Dick Cavett Show or something, right?

But in any case, the point is that Steve Bannon had said that Trump was going to deconstruct the administrative state, and that’s why you should support him. And Trump is — that would be like saying Charles I of England was going to end God’s appointed kingdom in England or something. It’s the exact opposite.

Zachary Karabell: Although there is this problem of the court trying to do that, but the sequencing is off. Meaning, they’re simultaneously trying to end the independent administrative state and give the president more power over the executive branch without actually defanging the administrative powers that have been ceded by Congress.

Nick Gillespie: Yeah. Well, this is so banal, I’m embarrassed to even say it. Obviously the constitution and the founding are spectacular and wonderful, et cetera. But I don’t think anybody expected Congress to be so out to lunch for so long. And I have to admit, I don’t exactly understand how that happened to the extent that it has, and it’s not a Republican or Democratic thing. It is an institutional problem. And as a result, I don’t see how that changes.

So I think you’re pretty much right, because in the end, it’s going to be Congress that reins in the administrative state. The Supreme Court can say, no, you can’t do this, but that only gets you so far.

Zachary Karabell: Yeah, and it’ll be interesting to see what the next wave is. So in this vein, do you see any hope of an actual third-party movement? We’re recording this, for those who know, on the heels of Viktor Orbán losing in Hungary.

Nick Gillespie: Good for Hungary.

Zachary Karabell: To a party and a person that didn’t exist a year ago. Which is the same thing that happened in France with Macron. It’s the same thing that happened in Argentina with Milei, where you basically have a political movement that forms out of nothing and storms the gates, as it were.

Nick Gillespie: I wish something like that was likely to happen. The Democrats and the Republicans have been the major parties since before the Civil War, or the Republicans right around that period, and I don’t know that that’s going to change. What the parties stand for can change dramatically, and Trump is a great example of that, the Republican Party that he is leading. And when you have people saying, it’s just amazing to me, like a line of free market economists who worked at places like the American Enterprise Institute who are now saying, you know, when you think about it, tariffs are totally consistent with free markets and everything that I’ve said as a laissez-faire economist for my entire life, until I got within a whiff of power. It’s stunning how quickly Trump has completely drained the Republican Party of its last 50 or 60 years of rhetoric, maybe going back to Barry Goldwater. Grover Cleveland did something similar with the Democratic Party. If you look back at the Democratic Party that Grover Cleveland became the head of, and was pretty successful, like Trump, he won two terms, not continuous terms, but he was free markets, he was pro-civil rights to the extent that those existed, he was anti-tariffs, he was anti-imperial, anti-empire. You could see a figure emerging in either of these parties who really kind of changes what that party stands for in a profound way. I don’t know who that person is right now.

Zachary Karabell: Your analogy, of course, makes Joe Biden Benjamin Harrison.

Nick Gillespie: That’s right. He just needs the beard.

Zachary Karabell: The beard would’ve helped, actually.

Nick Gillespie: One of the other lines of work that I have done, and this started, God, these are like olden times, when George W. Bush left office, I was given the opportunity to write the critique of George W. Bush the day before Karl Rove — if you remember, Bush’s brain, wrote his hagiography, which was really pornographic about how everything was better now that Bush, who was leaving office with like 25 percent approval ratings at the time. But one of the things that I harped on when Bush was leaving was that the decline in trust and confidence in institutions, particularly politics, particularly the federal government in America, had been in an almost straight-line decline from the early ’70s, when Gallup started tracking it, to Bush, and it’s continued to go down. And this is something that affects politics profoundly, but it’s something before politics. This is something that worries me.

And in a way, Trump is delivering on his promise to burn everything down, including belief that the government or the state is legitimate and should be followed or taken seriously. But I don’t know what you do to turn that around. I don’t want a state that is able to dictate every part of my life, but I want a state that has a certain amount of capacity to be effective and efficient and to be seen as legitimate.

Zachary Karabell: You want a more competent, less expansive state.

Nick Gillespie: Yeah, pretty much. And along with saying to people, you have it so good. Don’t blow this opportunity. And how do we figure out how to make better choices in our lives because we have so many of them. The flip of that is how do we create better institutions — primarily government, but also the Catholic Church, which has not accounted for itself in a way that it’s declining. Charities, the United Way never accounted for itself since a major scandal. We don’t believe in as many things as we used to, and part of me likes that because I’m antinomian and I like the idea that authority needs to earn our respect. But it’s terrible to live in a world where you can’t trust anything or anybody.

Zachary Karabell: We’re going to be unpacking Trumplandia for a really long time. And the second season of the Trump show is nastier, more vicious, more chip-on-shoulder. What you said about Alito — never have so many people with so many grudges assembled in one place. That I think alone is the defining characteristic of the second season of the Trump show.

Nick Gillespie: And I think coming on the heels of Biden and the way — I did not like Biden, and I’m still getting smacked in the head on social media for saying, between Harris and Trump, I’ll roll the dice with Trump. I would rather have him win than Harris. It has not worked out well. Biden was bad when he showed up in 2021, but then the way he left, I think we need to understand what’s going on where you have somebody who is mentally diminished, who was going to run again, probably conceivably could have won. He was an idiot for doing that debate. Thank God that he did. But how does that happen? Both in terms of media watchdog stuff, but also the people around him. Who cared about the country? Who was putting the country first?

Zachary Karabell: We’re beginning to think about this question of what comes after the second season of the Trump show. And in spite of the fears of endless Trump and rigging the elections for the Republicans, which I think is mostly a hysterical fantasy or nightmare, as the case may be — not impossible, but that doesn’t make it probable. You are left with this question of, we’ve got a whole series of problems. I think there’s a constructive reality of Trump having been the articulation of the dark American id that’s always been there.

Nick Gillespie: Or the shadow self.

Zachary Karabell: Right. If we’re going to use the way we grew up in new-agey ‘60s—

Nick Gillespie: Well, and it’s also fascinating because it would be one thing if Trump was Richard Nixon, who had grown up poor and on the outside. But he was the son of a multimillionaire, and he’s the ultimate insider.

Zachary Karabell: But this question of, what is the United States on the other side of this? I grew up, and I think probably shared with you, a feeling of the self-satisfying mantras. There’s a difference between the pride that you express of being an American and being the children of immigrants, and this country having a lot to offer, and the move into a kind of self-congratulatory hubris that was very much characteristic of the United States essentially from the end of World War II. We went from an existential victory over both an economic crisis and a World War crisis to a constant evocation of our own greatness. Except for this weird moment in the ‘70s. Except in the ‘70s, we did the same arrogance, which is instead of the best, we were the worst. So there was no balanced articulation.

Nick Gillespie: I think there was a little bit of a synthesis in the ’90s. There was a moment after the Cold War before we became hubristic again, particularly in terms of foreign policy, where we were like, oh, you know what? We can kind of navigate this better than we did in the ’70s or certainly in the ’60s with organization men running everything.

Zachary Karabell: So where do we go from here as you think about it?

Nick Gillespie: Well, it’s funny. When you started to say, the second season of the Trump show, I was thinking, okay, what do TV shows do when their ratings are sagging and the franchise is about to end? They always bring in an adorable moppet, like Cousin Oliver on The Brady Bunch or something. Or that horrible kid on whatever became of All in the Family, Archie Bunker’s Place, you know?

And part of this will be solved by millennials and Gen Z, because boomers and Gen Xers, we’re never going away obviously, and we’ll live rent-free in our children and grandchildren’s heads for a long time. But we are not going to be the ones dealing with this. And that does not make me sleep any better, because in many ways I think millennials and Gen Z, part of the problem is that they’ve learned the meta-lesson, or the meta-message, the meta-narrative we were sending them, which is you’ve never had it so good, and by the way, the earth you’re inheriting is uninhabitable. Of course millennials and Gen Z are mad and angry because we’ve taught them that you have everything we never had, which is a mantra from the Greatest Generation, and by the way, it’s all ending because of global warming or because of racism and homophobia, et cetera. All of which is, in a documentable way, better than it’s ever been. Less of a problem.

So I don’t know. But I think one of the ways to think about this is to try and find out what happened in moments within the past 100 years of a kind of renewal of American spirit. And to go back to my parents, they were both raised poor. My father fought in World War II. He was shot. My older uncle, he was an Italian American whose father had left Italy partly to avoid getting embroiled in World War I, who was then very proud that his son was going to invade Italy. He was in the invasion of Italy. But when World War II stopped, they were like, okay, well that’s good. We’ll still be poor because the Depression didn’t end with World War II. But at least people won’t be dying as much. And then by 1950 things had cranked up and they didn’t think about that anymore. There was something new in the air that really started a lot of very positive things.

And I think about this more because this was in my lifetime, what happened between ’78, ’79 and maybe ’81, ’82, where whatever was going on, the beige Me Decade and the national malaise of Jimmy Carter, and it wasn’t just him, it was the end of the ’70s, and it wasn’t Reagan just being sunny and optimistic, but American society restarted in a way that gave us a long boom, which we’re out of now, and we need that.

So I know it’s possible, but I don’t know exactly what it is. But I think a big part of it is reminding ourselves the lessons of history and of recent history, and of the idea that people do better when they are given more choices and they are held responsible for those choices, and that we build institutions that are accountable to people and kind of fess up when they screw up.

And this is the libertarian in me — we need to be more comfortable with more ways of being in the world because all of our gods are dead. You’re going to have to create that meaning again and again and again, and let’s figure out how we do that without driving each other insane.

Zachary Karabell: Well, on that ecclesiastical Joseph Campbell valedictory note, everyone should listen to The Reason Podcast, read Nick’s columns. You’ve got a Substack. Everybody’s got a Substack.

Nick Gillespie: A podcast, a Substack, and children. I guess that one’s the rare thing, though, right?

Zachary Karabell: So thank you.

Nick Gillespie: Thank you.

Zachary Karabell: Feedback is always welcome. Go onto the progressnetwork.org site and click on the feedback tab, and I will take it in and listen and respond to it.

I want to thank the people at Kaleidoscope for producing. I want to thank my team at The Progress Network for continuing to do the work they’re doing, and I want to thank all of you for your thoughtful attention.

And we’ll be back with you next week.