The conversation swerves (as it tends to) into the subcultures forming in the vacuum: the looksmaxxing/manosphere influencer “Clavicular,” who embodies male energy redirected inward — away from courtship and community and toward obsessive self-modification and performative detachment from women. Damir pushes an uncomfortable adaptation thesis: maybe this is simply what “winning” does to advanced societies, whether we like the aesthetics of it or not.

Required Reading:

* “The truth about population decline,” by Martin Wolf (Financial Times).

* “Get Married Young,” by Brad Wilcox (Compact).

* “1-in-3: A Record Share of Young Adults Will Never Marry,” by Lyman Stone (Institute for Family Studies).

* The Human Flourishing Program’s “Flourish” measure (Harvard IQSS).

Henry starts off the conversation asserting that AI already has a kind of “agency,” even if it’s not yet the full kind that some skeptics are looking for. Damir and Sam push back on AI’s reliability and proclivity to hallucinations, and wonder whether AI can create anything genuinely novel or creative.

The conversation turns to autonomy and risk. Can “artificial superintelligence” ever be reached, asks Sam? Henry points to AI coding agents already improving themselves. Damir objects to anthropomorphizing AI and prefers treating these systems as powerful tools capable runaway failures — but nothing more. Henry disagrees, ending the conversation with a plea for AIs getting consideration as moral entities at some point.

Required Reading:

* “Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies,” by Nick Bostrom (Amazon).

* The Creative Mind: Myths and Mechanisms, by Margaret Boden (Amazon).

* “Disambiguating Anthropomorphism and Anthropomimesis in Human-Robot Interaction,” by Minja Axelsson and Henry Shevlin (arxiv.org).

* “Real Patterns,” by Daniel C. Dennett (Rutgers).

* A relevant tweet by Séb Krier (X).

* AlphaGo Move 37 analysis (DeepMind).

* Conway’s Game of Life (Wikipedia).

Shadi draws on themes from The Case for American Power to defend a position that has fallen out of favor across much of the political spectrum: that American power, when used with moral purpose, can still play a necessary role in reducing global suffering. His argument is aimed in part at a disillusioned left that has come to see U.S. power primarily as a source of harm rather than a potential instrument of humanitarian good. Against this, Trita — one of the most incisive critics of American interventionism — offers a sustained challenge, grounded in historical failures, unintended consequences, and the limits of even well-intentioned power.

Does the world need the United States to act, and if so, when — and at what cost? How should past disasters constrain present ambitions? And if American power is curtailed, what realistic alternatives exist, and who bears responsibility when things go wrong? This debate doesn’t resolve those questions — but it models what it looks like to take them seriously, in conversation with someone who sees the world very differently.

Required Reading/ Listening:

* The Disagreement podcast.

* Shadi Hamid, The Case for American Power. (Amazon)

* Shadi’s 2024 debate with Daniel Bessner hosted by The Disagreement.

Laura explains how she came to write about this subject, and how she became convinced the movement wasn’t going to take an off-ramp after January 6. The three trace how these ideas migrate from argument to power. They dissect liberalism’s blindspots, which somehow persist to this day. And they look at the right’s internal fractures — and what those tensions might mean for the coming succession fight in the Republican Party.

Required Reading:

* Furious Minds: The Making of the MAGA New Right, by Laura K. Field (Amazon).

* Why Liberalism Failed, by Patrick Deneen (Amazon).

* “The Flight 93 Election,” by Publius Decius Mus (Claremont Review of Books).

* “Inside Stephen Miller’s Dark Plot to Build a MAGA Terror State,” by Greg Sargent (New Republic).

* “Why the MAGA-DOGE Coalition Will Hold,” by Patrick Deneen (UnHerd).

Shadi pushes Damir about the implications of his commitments, who in turn says ugly things you probably won’t like.

Required Reading:

* “Venezuela and the End of Hipocrisy,” by Shadi Hamid (WoC).

* “The Great Unraveling Has Begun,” by Oona Hathaway (NYT).

* “On the Legality of the Venezuela Invasion,” by Jack Goldsmith (Executive Functions).

Required Reading:

* Autocrats vs. Democrats: China, Russia, America, and the New Global Disorder, by Michael McFaul (Amazon).

* The Case for American Power, by Shadi Hamid (Amazon).

Osita argues that it is time for a new American founding. The clash between our democratic principles and our long term inequalities requires a gradual but fundamental reworking of the American constitutional order. Goldman dissents, arguing both that, for all its flaws, the American system is superior to any comparable existing democracy of comparable scale—and that any plausible step to dismantle it is likely to lead to ruin. Kimbriel tries to keep the peace.

Abandon arguing with your family over the holidays and argue with us instead!

Required Reading:

* The Right of the People, by Osita Nwanevu (Penguin Random House).

Why do some causes, projects — and people — provide meaning while others fall flat? For example, why is Trump’s nationalism more politically effective than calls to global climate action? And is there a better way to create meaning in an increasingly fragmented world?

Required Reading:

* Nils Gilman, “Climate Leviathan” (Substack).

* Nils Gilman, “The Duopoly of Doom” (Substack).

The conversation then shifts to Trump and a possibly looming war with Venezuela. The Trump administration has cowed many a politician, but the fear seems to be ebbing. But have we gotten over our addiction to the thrill of political populism?

Required Reading:

* Damir Marusic, “My Night in Dnipro” (WoC).

* Christine Emba, “Vibe Shift 2.0” (WoC).

* Jason Willick, “There’s No Middle Ground on the Boat Strikes” (Washington Post).

A few years ago, Lea Ypi was scrolling through Facebook when she came across a family photo she had never seen before. Someone had discovered a photograph of Ypi’s grandparents on their honeymoon and posted it on a public Facebook group. Ypi — a philosophy professor from Albania who teaches at the London School of Economics — was dismayed by the comments on the photograph, which ranged from inaccurate to judgmental to just plain mean. Were the husband and wife in this photo Albanian aristocrats? Fascist collaborators? Victims of Communism?

Responding to the trolls — as well as, as she puts it, “taking the trolls seriously” — Ypi decided to write a book reconstructing her grandparents’ story. The result is Indignity: A Life Reimagined, a book which asks, among other things, what does human dignity really mean? What makes this book even more interesting is that Ypi’s grandparents lived through some of the most dramatic moments in the twentieth century: the fall of the Ottoman Empire, the rise of Fascism, and World War II.

Ypi joins Damir and Santiago, who want to understand Ypi’s own philosophical priors. Damir wants to know where moral responsibility ends and and the structural forces of history begin. Santiago asks whether dignity, as a concept, has a metaphysical foundation. The result is a wide-ranging conversation that covers history, literature, philosophy and more.

In our bonus section for paid subscribers, Santiago asks Ypi about the difference between Fascist and Communist decision-making; Damir presses Ypi on the question of free will; Ypi discusses her two-point prescription for a better Europe; Santiago asks Ypi whether it’s hard to write about one’s country in a foreign language; and finally, Ypi’s hot take on Zohran Mamdani.

Required Reading:

* Lea Ypi, Indignity: A Life Reimagined (Amazon).

* Lea Ypi, Free: Coming of Age at the End of History (Amazon).

* Immanuel Kant, Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals (Amazon).

* Friedrich Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man (Amazon).

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Today’s guest is one of the best people, apart from Mamdani himself, to answer these questions. Ross Barkan is a political commentator and novelist who, in a previous life, ran for office in New York City. His campaign was run by none other than Zohran Mamdani. So he has a first-hand knowledge about Mamdani’s thinking about politics and governance. He is also a dyed-in-the-wool New Yorker who has lived in the city his entire life, and has intimate acquaintances with the nuances of local politics and the different ethnic communities which make up New York City.

Shadi Hamid asks Ross about how Mamdani came to have such a mass appeal, even though he calls himself a democratic socialist and openly supports Palestine. Ross agrees that Mamdani’s positions on several hot-button issues herald a big transformation in the Democratic Party.

Damir Marusic takes a more skeptical position. Do the foreign policy positions of a New York City mayor really matter, or is it all symbolic politics? What Damir is impressed by is Mamdani’s talent for politics: his visit to the White House shows that he is a pragmatist, and that he just might have what it takes to do to the Dems what Trump did to the GOP.

Since interest in Mamdani is peaking right now, we are making this conversation free for all subscribers. The conversation covers a lot of the nitty-gritty of practical politics. Is it true that keeping Jessica Tisch as Police Commissioner is Mamdani’s way of offering an olive branch to the Democratic establishment? What does the appointment of populist anti-monopolist Lina Khan into Mamdani’s transition team mean on a political level? And was it a good idea for Mamdani to visit Trump?

Finally, Ross makes a case for Mamdani: “Even if you’re not a socialist or progressive, he is a young mayor who is willing to take risks and who is willing to hire young people into his administration who think outside the box.”

Required Reading:

* Ross Barkan’s interview with Zohran Mamdani (New Statesman).

* Eric Adams’ “New York City is the X of America” supercut (YouTube).

* Ross’ political commentary in New York magazine.

* Ross’ columns in the New Statesman.

* Ross Barkan, Fascism or Genocide: How a Decade of Political Disorder Broke American Politics (Amazon).

* Ross Barkan, Glass Century: A Novel (Amazon).

* “Lina Khan’s populist plan for New York: Cheaper hot dogs (and other things)” (Semafor).

* “Defund the police no more: Zohran Mamdani seals coup with deal to keep Jessica Tisch as NYPD Commissioner” (Fortune).

* “Mamdani issues broad public apology to NYPD” (Politico).

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Joining Shadi Hamid and Damir Marusic is special guest Matt Duss, former foreign policy advisor to Bernie Sanders, executive vice president of the Center for International Policy, and co-host of the Undiplomatic Podcast. “I am certainly not against the idea of American power,” says Matt. But his question is: “Which America?” Duss is less optimistic that US power can be put to good use because, he says, we are currently having a national debate about “what is the nature of the American project.” It’s unclear how that debate will end.

Nevertheless, Shadi argues, American democracy, however imperfect, is still superior to the regimes in the other global hegemons, Russia and China. We should not fear our own home — oikophobia is a real issue, Shadi says, using the term for “fear of one’s home,” the opposite of xenophobia. Duss partially agrees, but says that being a democracy does not necessarily imbue American foreign policy with moral authority. “International law does that.”

The topic of international law prompts Damir to steer the conversation towards the topic of Gaza. Does American collaboration with Israeli war crimes disprove Shadi’s thesis? Or does it paradoxically strengthen the argument that the world needs morally-guided American power? At this point, Shadi utters one of the best lines of the night: “To be seen as hypocritical is the cost of trying to being better than you actually are.”

We are making this episode completely free for all subscribers, including the Q and A section, which covers topics like: hypocrisy in foreign policy; why working with China is preferable to the US for some nations; how Gaza will change the Democratic Party; the crisis in the MAGA coalition; and more!

Required Reading and Listening:

* Shadi Hamid, The Case for American Power (Amazon).

* Shadi, “A Genocide is Happening in Gaza. We Should Say So” (Washington Post).

* Shadi, “Everyone says the Libya intervention was a failure. They’re wrong.” (Vox).

* Our 2024 podcast with Matt Duss (WoC).

* Rod Dreher, “What I Saw and Heard in Washington” (Substack).

* Roger Scruton, “Oikophobia” (Journal of Education).

Wisdom of Crowds is a platform challenging premises and understanding first principles on politics and culture. Join us!

Anti-semitism may be the oldest hatred, something different feels afoot today. Generational shifts in attitudes on Israel, partly fueled by the Gaza war, have given unscrupulous charlatans an opening into the mainstream. But why are mainstream conservative institutions not fighting back? And what does this say about the future of the Republican Party once Donald Trump eventually leaves the scene?

Required Reading and listening:

* Tucker Carlson interviews Nick Fuentes (YouTube).

* Ben Shapiro’s Nick Fuentes Supercut (YouTube).

* “Visa Applicants Don’t Have First Amendment Rights,” by Jamie Kirchick (Politico).

Wisdom of Crowds is a platform challenging premises and understanding first principles on politics and culture. Join us!

Are human beings by nature suspicious of each other? Or is harmonious communal life our default mode? The answer to this question has implications for politics. Today’s episode is a live discussion about just this question, recorded last summer at the Aspen Ideas Festival. The guest is philosopher Tamar Gendler of Yale University, whose work deals with …

We need to get better at asking for help.

So argues author Leah Libresco Sargeant in her new book, The Dignity of Dependence: A Feminist Manifesto. The core thesis of the book is that “women’s equality with men doesn’t depend on their interchangeability with men.” But the book also has many insights that apply to men as well as women. All of us need to get better at asking for help.

Hosting this episode are Shadi Hamid and Christine Emba, who each bring their political perspectives to bear upon the conversation. Christine asks Leah whether the physical differences between the sexes affect the scope of political equality. Shadi asks whether Leah’s practical proposals, which are rooted in her religious convictions, are feasible in a contemporary society formed by modern ideas. The conversation also touches upon the limits of personal autonomy, as well as the recent discussions about the so-called “feminization” of the workplace.

In our bonus section for paid subscribers, Leah discusses her conversion to Catholicism from atheism; whether or not religion factors into her thinking about the morality of abortion; different strategies for asking for help; why it’s better to ask for help first before you offer help to someone else; and more!

Required Reading:

* Leah Libresco Sargeant, The Dignity of Dependence: A Feminist Manifesto (Amazon).

* Leah Libresco Sargeant’s Substack, Other Feminisms.

* Leah Libresco Sargeant, Building the Benedict Option: A Guide to Gathering Two or Three Together in His Name (Amazon).

* Christine, Rethinking Sex: A Provocation (Amazon).

* Shadi and Kristina Tabor Saccone, “Provocation: Am I Unhappy Because I’m Unmarried?” (WoC).

* Helen Andrews, “The Great Feminization” (Compact).

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“This is one of the greatest historical eras mankind will ever see.”

So says Tyler Cowen, economics professor at George Mason University, renowned author and chairman at the Mercatus Center, a think tank. He is also a writer, and famous podcaster whose books, like The Great Stagnation and Average is Over, which for over a decade have helped readers under…

— Santiago Ramos, executive editor

A special treat from the Aspen Ideas Festival: a panel discussion about American community and politics, featuring a father–son philosophical duo.

Michael J. Sandel is a professor at Harvard University, where he teaches political philosophy. His famous “Justice” course has been viewed by tens of millions worldwide. His son, Adam Sandel, is a philosopher, award-winning teacher, and holder of the Guinness World Record for most pull-ups in one minute. Together with Samuel Kimbriel, Wisdom of Crowds’ in-house philosopher, they discuss community, democracy, the evolving nature of justice, the importance of constructive visions for community, and the role of music in bridging divides. Tune in for a substantive and inspiring reflection on the meaning of democracy.

Required Reading:

* Adam Sandel, Happiness In Action: A Philosopher’s Guide to the Good Life (Amazon).

* Michael Sandel, The Tyranny of Merit: Can We Find the Common Good? (Amazon).

* Samuel Kimbriel, Friendship as Sacred Knowing: Overcoming Isolation (Amazon).

Wisdom of Crowds is a platform challenging premises and understanding first principles on politics and culture. Join us!

Malley begins the discussion with an arresting suggestion: that the war in Gaza has brought Palestinians and Israelis back to where they were before 1948 — before the twentieth century, even. Looking back at the Oslo Peace Process, Malley argues that liberal peacemaking was too dismissive of those who are motivated by history or faith. Yet it is precisely those attachments — Zionism’s pull toward Eretz Yisrael, the Palestinian longing for the right of return — that define the conflict’s soul. Any peace plan has to take these deep yearnings into account from the get-go.

Shadi insists that resilience itself has become the Palestinians’ act of resistance. Their struggle, refracted now through moral discourse and digital mediation, animates the conscience of a younger America. He predicts that one day this generation will alter U.S. policy in a way that may make peace truly possible — by putting significant pressure on Israel to make concessions it has rarely been willing to make. Malley wonders how one persuades a people that their yearning is wrong; Shadi replies that after genocide, there is no moral equivalency between the competing narratives. And Damir reminds everyone that peace without victory is only surrender.

Given its timeliness — Israel and Hamas are currently deciding whether to adopt Trump’s Gaza peace plan — we are making the episode free for all subscribers. The tail end of the episode has several golden moments: Robert discusses the details of Trump’s peace plan; Shadi asks Robert why he thinks that October 7 was “Palestinian to the core”; Robert explains his support for the Abraham Accords; the real problem with the blockade and sanctions on Gaza; Shadi asks what Obama really believes about the conflict; “Obama is a speech that has been cut mid-sentence”; why Obama’s presidency hurts Shadi more than Trump’s; “Something fundamentally rotten about the foreign policy establishment despite their pretense to morality?”; some Bernie nostalgia; and more!

Required Reading:

* Robert Malley and Hussein Agha, Tomorrow Is Yesterday: Life, Death, and the Pursuit of Peace in Israel/Palestine (Amazon).

* Elliott Abrams, “There Never Will Be a Palestinian State. So What’s Next?” (Mosaic).

* Damir, “Hamas’ Bid for Revolutionary Legitimacy” (WoC).

* Shadi, “A Genocide is Happening in Gaza. We Should Say So” (Washington Post).

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Last week, Wisdom of Crowds philosopher-in-residence Samuel Kimbriel wrote an essay about the political use of Christianity within MAGA, contrasting the sincerity of Erika Kirk’s piety with the propagandistic use of the Lord’s Prayer in a recent military recruitment video. Shadi Hamid reflected on Samuel’s piece and more, writing a column about it for the Washington Post. Today, we bring both men together to discuss the central questions of both articles: do Christianity and politics mix?

Damir Marusic adds his own take on the debate, trying to dissuade both Samuel and Shadi from thinking that there is a “true” Christianity that can be saved from the corrupting influence of political power. Shadi says that he does not care whether there is a true version of Christianity: what he wants is a healthy, forgiveness-centered version of Christianity to triumph politically, that is what is good for America. Meanwhile, Samuel talks about the inherent tension between living a radical faith while also being politically successful.

In our bonus section for paid subscribers, Shadi discusses the Islamic idea of politics as a “site of imperfection”; Samuel explains why he is “especially attracted to acts that happen under conditions of scarcity”; Damir explains why he would not want any of his Christian friends to become powerful politicians; the three discuss the difference between the politics of conviction and the politics of responsibility; and more!

Reading and Watching:

* Shadi, “Two Versions of Christianity Battle for America’s Soul” (Washington Post).

* Sam, “What Christianity Isn’t” (WoC).

* Military recruitment video w/Our Father (X).

* Erika Kirk speech at Charlie Kirk memorial (YouTube).

* Matthew Rose, A World After Liberalism: Philosophers of the Radical Right (Amazon).

* Max Weber, “Politics As A Vocation” (Internet Archive).

* Ezra Klein interviews Ta Nehisi Coates (New York Times).

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Shadi Hamid and Santiago Ramos ask Jordan about the themes of his book; frustrated masculinity; how to get out of your head; whether weightlifting is a good spiritual practice; and whether novels can be political. Shadi wonders whether Santiago and Jordan are too negative about modern life. Santiago responds that Jordan’s novel is not about modern man as an abstraction, but about contemporary life, as a concrete challenge. Jordan starts a long disquisition about the works of Søren Kierkegaard.

In our bonus section for paid subscribers, you get the full Jordan Castro take on Kierkegaard; the three men talk about love; Jordan explains marriage; is Sabrina Carpenter wise about love? Santiago and Jordan talk about their respective wedding songs; Shadi wants to know why the Muscle Man main character doesn’t have a girlfriend; and more

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Required Reading and Viewing:

* Jordan Castro, Muscle Man (Amazon).

* Jordan Castro, The Novelist (Amazon).

* Cluny Journal, the Substack of the Cluny Project.

* Our previous episode with Jordan (WoC).

* Santiago’s review of Jordan’s first novel (Commonweal).

* Shadi’s interview with Jordan (Washington Post)

* On Nietzschean ideology, see: Mana Afsari, “Last Boys at the End of History” (The Point).

* The hockey stick graph (Marketplace.org).

* Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes from Underground (Amazon).

* Søren Kierkegaard, The Present Age (Amazon).

* Søren Kierkegaard, Either/Or (Amazon).

* Søren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling (Amazon).

* Søren Kierkegaard, Works of Love (Amazon).

* Mikhail Bakhtin, “Epic and the Novel.”

* Knut Hamsun, Hunger (Amazon).

* King of Comedy (IMDb).

* Taxi Driver (IMDb).

Wisdom of Crowds is a platform challenging premises and understanding first principles on politics and culture. Join us!

Today’s guest is Geoff Shullenberger, the managing editor of Compact and a writer whose articles and reviews have appeared in American Affairs, The Chronicle of Higher Education, The New Atlantis, UnHerd, and more. Last week, after the assassination of Charlie Kirk, Geoff wrote an incisive piece titled, “The Return of the Assassin.” In it, he observes that the nature of violence has shifted in recent years, away from the mass shooting and towards the targeted political assassination. Why this is the case, and what it bodes for the future, is the subject of this week’s podcast.

The conversation provides historical perspective by comparing contemporary political (or quasi-political) violence to radical groups from the 1960s and 1970s like the Baader Meinhof group, the Red Brigades, the Black Panthers, and figures like Huey Newton and Eldridge Cleaver. Shadi Hamid distinguishes between left-wing violence (utopian, seeking new systems) and right-wing violence (preservationist, maintaining hierarchies). Geoff challenges this framework, noting that recent shooter profiles don’t fit neatly into these categories. Damir Marusic notes that human beings always want events to “mean” something, but it may very well be that all this violence is essentially senseless.

In our bonus section for paid subscribers, the guys discusses Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver; Geoff explains why he doesn’t think we are on the brink of civil war; was the Charlie Kirk assassination an “honor killing”?; was January 6 a “mobilization”?; what Trump does next; were we living under a liberal dictatorship in 2020?; Damir on “the rotten Democratic Party”; Shadi says: “Nobody is blameless, but that doesn’t mean everyone is equally to blame”; and more!

Required Reading and Viewing:

* Geoff Shullenberger, “The Return of the Assassin" (Compact).

* Geoff Shullenberger, “Popular Justice” (The Point).

* Tom Wolfe, “Radical Chic” (New York).

* Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish (Amazon).

* Martin Scorsese, Taxi Driver (IMDB).

* Oliver Stone, JFK (IMDB).

* Oliver Stone, Talk Radio (IMDB).

* Eric Bogosian, Talk Radio (Amazon).

* La Verkin City, Utah, United Nations-Free Zone Ordinance.

* Punk rock picture of Oswald and Ruby.

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In light of how Trump has reacted to the Kirk shooting, Shadi begins with a mea culpa for having criticized the Left for its illiberalism in the past: it looks like the Right is worse. But Damir disagrees: what we are seeing now is an “inversion of what we had a few years ago,” though perhaps a bit worse. Shadi thinks out loud: “you’d think that having power would make you more magnanimous,” while instead, both sides “when they’re winning, they act like they’re losing.”

So what is the prognosis? Shadi thinks the Right is an existential threat to American democracy. Damir says, “we are a turd spiraling down a toilet,” and we are currently on the Right side of the spiral — but “the spiral began before.”

We are making this episode free for all subscribers — the issues discussed touch at the core of our mission at Wisdom of Crowds. As Shadi put it, Charlie Kirk, however different his ideology was from our own, was “someone I could’ve known, who could’ve been at my house.” The episode concludes with discussions of possible civil war, whether political categories make sense with regard to assassinations, and why the Years of Lead might be an apt analogy for what is developing in America right now.

Required Reading and Viewing:

* Donald Trump’s appearance on Fox & Friends (YouTube).

* The Years of Lead in Italy (Wikipedia).

* Shadi, “My Faith in America is Being Sorely Tested” (WoC).

* Ukrainian woman stabbed (ABC).

* Shadi, “Think you’re above conspiracy theories? Don’t be so sure” (Washington Post).

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This year, the Festival’s theme was trust. We hosted an episode about trust and technology, a topic on everybody’s mind. Our two guests were Daniel Corrigan, a philosophy professor at Iowa State University who focuses on the theory and practice of rights, and August Lamm, an artist, activist and writer who has distinguished herself by leading an active creative life completely off the grid — in New York, to boot. This was an engaging conversation about AI, work, time and happiness. I think it’s one of our best this year.

Santiago Ramos starts the conversation with a quote from the late Henry Kissinger, who claimed that trusting AI requires more blind faith than the scientific method. Are we becoming less modern when we trust the “mechanical oracle” of AI? What does it mean to trust AI? Daniel, in his philosophical way, clarifies the terms. We can only trust people, he says, not machines. Machines can be reliable, but not trustworthy. So the question is: do we trust the companies that make the machines? August, for her part, says that we need to go back to first principles. Why do we need these machines in the first place? Why do we need social media? Why do we need AI? Why do we need everything to be so fast?

The episode concludes with some interesting questions from the audience, about AI and natural resources; the difficulty discerning reality from fantasy; and how we can make software better. It’s well worth your time.

Required Reading:

* The Kissinger quote comes from this article.

* Palantir’s one-pound contract with the British NHS.

* Lyceum Movement.

* Tallgrass Festival of Ideas.

* Daniel Corrigan webpage on Philpapers.

* August Lamm’s homepage.

* Santiago Ramos, “The People v. the Oracle” (WoC).

Wisdom of Crowds is a platform challenging premises and understanding first principles on politics and culture. Join us!

Michael J. Sandel is a professor at Harvard University, where he teaches political philosophy. His famous “Justice” course has been viewed by tens of millions worldwide. His son, Adam Sandel, is a philosopher, award-winning teacher, and holder of the Guinness World Record for most pull-ups in one minute. Together with Samuel Kimbriel, Wisdom of Crowds’ in-house philosopher, they discuss community, democracy, the evolving nature of justice, the importance of constructive visions for community, and the role of music in bridging divides. Tune in for a substantive and inspiring reflection on the meaning of democracy.

Required Reading:

* Adam Sandel, Happiness In Action: A Philosopher’s Guide to the Good Life (Amazon).

* Michael Sandel, The Tyranny of Merit: Can We Find the Common Good? (Amazon).

* Samuel Kimbriel, Friendship as Sacred Knowing: Overcoming Isolation (Amazon).

Wisdom of Crowds is a platform challenging premises and understanding first principles on politics and culture. Join us!

American Primeval on Netflix. The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives on Hulu. Ballerina Farm on Instagram. American culture is living through a Mormon moment. It is a sign that the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is growing in confidence and strength. But what are the drawbacks to becoming mainstream? What are the trade-offs involved in American liberalism? What can those of us who are not part of the LDS Church learn from the Mormon moment?

Here to discuss this and more is Zachary Davis, the Executive Director of Faith Matters and Editor of the LDS magazine Wayfare. Zach is also a veteran podcaster, having hosted the podcasts Ministry of Ideas and Writ Large.

The discussion begins with Santiago Ramos asking Zach for an account of LDS history, contrasting it with its depiction in American Primeval, the Netflix show. Christine Emba then asks about the various pop culture phenomena that have emerged within LDS culture. The conversation covers recent LDS history, as well as reflections on the costs of assimilation and how American liberalism can benefit from the growth of the LDS Church.

In our bonus section for paid subscribers, Christina and Zach discuss Ballerina Farm; Zach explains LDS attitudes toward Trump; Santiago asks Zach whether he has hope for the future of America; Zach explains that Mormons believe the American Constitution is a sacred document; why Mormons love Muslims; rethinking first (theological) principles; and more!

Required Reading:

* Wayfare magazine.

* McCay Coppins, Romney: A Reckoning (Amazon).

* Jonathan Rausch, Cross Purposes: Christianity's Broken Bargain with Democracy (Amazon).

* Jon Krakauer, Under the Banner of Heaven (Amazon).

* Public polling re: LDS (Pew Research).

* American Primeval (Netflix).

* Ballerina Farm (official website).

* Secret Lives of Mormon Wives (Hulu).

* The Soloists (Substack).

* Romney’s 47 percent comment (MSNBC).

* Utah rankings (U.S. News and World Report).

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Yes, Trump’s use of emergency powers to justify the takeover is constitutional, even if he is stretching the concept of what counts as an emergency. But Damir Marusic feels like things took a much darker turn this week, and nobody seems to have noticed. Weren’t people in the streets at the mere suggestion that Trump would deploy troops to American cities four years ago — when doing so was arguably much more justified? Shadi Hamid thinks many Democrats are just too disgusted by their own party to be able to muster a response. What’s the point? Anyway, like most Trump stuff, this is all just theater — Potemkin policing. Our democracy is still fine, isn’t it?

…isn’t it?

Required Reading:

* “Trump has brilliantly orchestrated a legal coup,” by Kathleen Parker (WaPo).

* “Donald Trump, DC Police Commissioner,” b y the Editorial Board (WSJ).

“ ‘Barbarism’ is a word that keeps coming to my lips lately,” writes Damir Marusic in a brilliant new article this week. Barbarism seems to be the only real word that describes what comes after the liberal international order. But Damir isn’t pointing to the supposed barbarism of our enemies. His article points to the ways that we in the West — and in the United States — are becoming coarser and more egocentric. Like the poet said, barbarism begins at home.

Shadi Hamid interrogates Damir about his piece in Socratic fashion. Is Damir maybe making a moral equivalence between the Trumpist Right and the hapless Left? While it’s true that the Left isn’t very effective, it can hardly be said to be barbaric. In the course of his answer, Damir discusses Alligator Alcatraz as the symbol of new American barbarism: kind of silly, but also, openly cruel.

For Damir, barbarism isn’t just Nazism; it is the strong turn toward selfishness and narcissism that has taken place since the middle of the twentieth century. And he has a theory of why the turn took place: secularization and the death of God. On this point, Shadi agrees, but he still has questions. Is it political structures or innate nature that make us turn toward evil? If it is the former, how can politics help in this moment to keep us from becoming truly barbaric? It is a timely and intense conversation.

In our bonus section for paid subscribers, Damir and Shadi discuss why “war is a force that gives us meaning”; Shadi compares violence to orgasms; Damir’s Calvinist sympathies make an appearance; Damir opposes “vulgar Nietzscheanism” with a “moral law” forged out of our “broken humanity”; Shadi wonders if Damir has finally become a moralist; can morality survive Pax Americana?; Gaza and barbarism; Christopher Hitchens and faith; the origin of the phrase, “Beyond the pale”; and more!

Required Reading:

* Damir, “Back to Barbarism” (WoC).

* Thérèse Delpech, Savage Century: Back to Barbarism (Amazon).

* Curzio Malaparte, Kaputt (Amazon).

* Friedrich Nietzsche, “The Parable of the Madman” (Fordham University).

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Women and men are having a hard time finding each other. A lot of women are giving up on finding a mate. Some women with mates are worried that their men don’t have any friends. Everyone hates dating apps. People are having fewer babies.

These are among the many depressing stories that the media is telling about love and marriage today. How true are they…

Dead almost six years, Jeffrey Epstein is back in the news. The sordid details of his crimes, and the elaborate conspiracy concerning elites that he may or may not have been a part of, have become a central issue within the MAGA coalition. Conspiracy theories in general are now a part of daily political life. None of us can escape them. Most of us probably half-believe in at least one of them. Why is that?

Today’s guest is the writer Matthew Walther, editor of The Lamp, biographer of John Henry Cardinal Newman, and a columnist for The New York Times. He has written extensively about Epstein, Russiagate, and the place of conspiracy theories in American politics. He joined Shadi Hamid and Damir Marusic to ponder the Epstein saga and its potential to hurt Trump’s coalition.

“We live in an awesome country, why do we have to make up stories about a decline that doesn't even really exist?” Shadi says near the beginning of the conversation. Walther explains how conspiracy theories are politically useful, and how they “almost on a dime can become useful to one side or another.” Damir agrees about the bipartisan nature of conspiracy-mongering: “For the Left it was the Pee Tape, and for the Right it’s this [Epstein] stuff.”

The conversation goes deep into the nature of conspiracy theories and the psychological need they satisfy. Epstein, Stop the Steal, Russiagate and of course, the Kennedy assassination are all discussed. Walther quotes the English philosopher Gilbert Ryle as a guide: “A myth is, of course, not a fairy story. It is the presentation of facts belonging to one category in the idioms appropriate to another. To explode a myth is accordingly not to deny the facts but to re-allocate them.”

In our bonus section for paid subscribers, the gang discusses the work of Seymour Hersh; Damir and Shadi argue whether the Democrats have ever had a cult of personality equivalent to that of Trump; Matthew argues that Obama is a lot like Trump; Matthew explains why Nixon was “the last, great technocratic leftist”; Shadi distinguishes emotional versus material self-interest in order to explain why MAGA won’t break with Trump; Damir and Shadi disagree about technocracy; and more!

Required Reading:

* Matthew Walther, “Sorry, This Epstein Stuff Isn’t Going to Hurt Trump” (New York Times).

* Matthew Walther, “The Pointless Triumph of a Hapless President” (New York Times).

* Matthew Walther, “The Jeffrey Epstein case is why people believe in Pizzagate” (The Week).

* Matthew Walther, “The most respectable conspiracy theory in Washington” (The Week).

* Matthew Walther refers to Paul Fussell’s concept of “high proles” in “Talking About Class in America” (American Conservative).

* Jonathan Chait, “What If Trump Has Been a Russian Asset Since 1987?” (New York).

* “The CIA Reveals More of Its Connections to Lee Harvey Oswald” (Washington Post).

* Gilbert Ryle, The Concept of Mind (Amazon).

* Musa al-Gharbi, “No, America is not on the brink of a civil war” (The Guardian).

* “Airline Deregulation: When Everything Changed” (Smithsonian Air and Space Museum).

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At the festival, our house philosopher, Dr. Samuel Kimbriel, hosted a discussion with three distinguished thinkers. Adam Sandel is a philosopher and assistant district attorney in Brooklyn whose latest book is titled Happiness in Action: A Philosopher’s Guide to the Good Life. Agnes Callard is a philosophy professor at the University of Chicago who just published Open Socrates: The Case for a Philosophical Life. Finally, David Brooks is a well-known opinion columnist for the New York Times whose 2016 book, The Road to Character, explores the development of a good personality.

Samuel sets the stage by reading off startling statistics showing that Americans are by and large less happy today than they were even five years ago. Adam advances the idea that what makes us happy is “an activity for the sake of itself, [an] activity that is intrinsically fulfilling in the moment.” This could be sports — he cites Roger Federer as an example of a happy man, at least during tennis tournaments.

Callard counters: “We can’t will ourselves to do a thing for its own sake. When we know what the good is, we will do it for its own sake. Until then, we have to inquire.” She proposes an “intellectualist” approach to happiness, arguing that a life of inquiry is the best prelude to happiness.

Brooks enters the fray by arguing against Callard’s intellectualist approach, saying that what moves human beings is “intensity” and “surrender,” and that the things that bring us joy are necessarily plural, not singular. Callard argues back, contending that Brooks confuses those things which human beings want with those things that are actually good.

It’s a rollicking discussion complemented by Samuel’s deft moderation and questions from the audience concerning grief, internal versus external goods, and the common good. Free for all subscribers — you will not want to miss this episode.

Required Reading:

* Samuel Kimbriel, Friendship as Sacred Knowing: Overcoming Isolation (Amazon).

* Adam Sandel, Happiness in Action: A Philosopher’s Guide to the Good Life (Amazon).

* Agnes Callard, Open Socrates: The Case for a Philosophical Life (Amazon).

* David Brooks, The Road to Character (Amazon).

Wisdom of Crowds is a platform challenging premises and understanding first principles on politics and culture. Join us!

It’s the summer doldrums, so this week, Wisdom of Crowds is taking a break from politics and war and Trump. Instead, we are talking about culture. Our guest, Paul Elie, is one of the leading culture and religion writers in the United States. His words have appeared in the New Yorker, the Atlantic, and the New York Times. Paul’s latest book, The Last Supper: Art, Faith, Sex, and Controversy in the 1980s, tells the story of artists in the 1980s who grappled with religious ideas and stirred up controversy while doing so. U2, Madonna, Andy Warhol, Piss Christ, Sinead O’Connor and many more play a role in a masterful, novelistic retelling of that fateful decade in American cultural history.

Damir Marusic is curious about Paul’s concept of “crypto-religiosity,” which Paul uses to describe an abiding sensibility in 1980s art and culture. Is it actually a unique category? Aren’t all Americans crypto-religious to a greater or lesser degree? Isn’t that the legacy of Protestantism? Santiago Ramos pursues a different line of questioning. What might a healthier relationship between institutional religion and cryptically-religious artists look like?

In our bonus section for paid subscribers, Damir and Paul compare the 1980s music scene with that of the 1990s; Damir explains why the 1990s felt “less devotional and more ecstatic”; Paul talks about his first time listening to “Smells like Teen Spirit”; Santiago and Paul discuss the coming culture of “ex-vangelicals”; Santiago confesses to not having his s**t together in his 20s; Damir asks: “How can you do good punk rock if Bill Clinton’s the president?”; the three discuss why Trump hasn’t yet generated a counterculture or artistic resistance; Santiago mentions Macklemore’s Gaza song; Paul and Santiago discuss “radtrads,” and the coming rebellion against radtrads; Paul tells Damir why he should be religious; Paul explains why electoral politics is our modern day bread and circuses; and more!

Required Reading:

* Paul Elie, The Last Supper: Art, Faith, Sex, and Controversy in the 1980s (Amazon).

* Paul Elie, The Life You Save May Be Your Own: An American Pilgrimage (Amazon).

* Julia Yost, “The Scandal of Dogmatism” (Compact).

* Damir Marusic, “The Pursuit of Passion for its Own Sake” (WoC).

* Damir’s discography from his punk rock days (Discogs).

* Damir’s music with his band, The Miss (Bandcamp).

* CrowdSource, “Protest Music” (WoC).

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The conversation ended up being a quasi-“state of liberalism” address, perfect for July 4th weekend.

The conversation begins with Frank discussing the current challenges to liberal societies, addressing why some in the West today might be dissatisfied with it, but also why people living in autocratic regimes throughout the world still long for liberalism. He talks about the lassitude and dissatisfaction that permeates liberal societies, and the contradictory desires for ever-greater equality and spirited competition that drive citizens to rebel against liberalism.

During the question and answer session, Fukuyama takes questions about recent events. He discusses the rise of right-wing parties in Europe, as well as recent developments in France, Germany and Romania. He touches upon citizenship, borders, deportations and Trump’s immigration policies. And he answers the question that was on everybody’s mind that night: Is history still over?

Required Reading

* Francis Fukuyama, “The End of History?” (National Interest).

* CrowdSource, “Fukuyama’s Children” (WoC).

* Damir and Shadi’s 2022 conversation with Francis Fukuyama (WoC).

* Santiago Ramos, “Kicking the Ladder” (WoC).

Wisdom of Crowds is a platform challenging premises and understanding first principles on politics and culture. Join us!

“War is the father of all and the king of all; and some he has made gods and some men, some bond and some free.”

So said the ancient Greek philosopher, Heraclitus. In his essay this week, Santiago Ramos says the opposite: “… war is a necessary evil; it is not what preserves the great achievements of the human race. War threatens those achievements, and we are lucky that more has not been destroyed already.” Santiago believes that pro-war voices which emerged during the recent Israel-Iran kerfuffle are expressing something more than the need to fight wars for self-defense and world order. They are voices which celebrate war as an essential, creative activity in history.

Damir Marusic shares Santiago’s distrust of those pro-war voices. But he thinks Santiago goes too far in a utopian, kumbaya direction. War, Damir says, will always be part of the human condition. It is folly to believe that human beings will progress enough to one day beat their swords into plowshares forever. In response, Santiago accuses Damir of believing in original sin but without the possibility of grace. Damir denies this and clarifies this position: “I want no heroes among human beings.”

This rollicking debate reaches a climax in our bonus section for paid subscribers. Damir discusses Iranian incentives after the recent American bombing and ponders the possibility of a future war. He challenges Santiago to consider Trump’s oft-repeated slogan, “Peace through strength.”

Also in the bonus section: How much moralizing did Santiago do in his essay? the two men wonder. Santiago explains what he means by “a weird conscience-element in the air.” Why didn’t Venice get destroyed? Why did Dresden get destroyed? Can you disentangle justice from sovereignty? Can you have morality without God? Damir explains to Santiago why he (Santiago) needs to talk more about Jesus. Santiago tells Damir the story of the Catonsville Nine.

Required Reading:

* Santiago Ramos, “War Will Not Save ‘the West’ ” (WoC).

* Damir Marusic, “Is Israel’s Attack on Iran Legal?” (WoC).

* Josep Borrell’s “Garden v. Jungle” metaphor (Euronews).

* David Brooks, “I Detest Netanyahu, but on Some Things He’s Actually Right” (New York Times).

* Edward Luttwak interview in Asylum magazine (Wayback Machine).

* Heraclitus fragment about war (Wikisource).

* “Heraclitus” (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy).

* “Russia fired new ballistic missile at Ukraine, Putin says” (Reuters).

* “The 10 greatest controversies of Winston Churchill's career” (BBC).

* Tim Bouverie, Allies at War: How the Struggles Between the Allied Powers Shaped the War and the World (Amazon).

* Daniel Berrigan, SJ, The Trial of the Catonsville Nine (Amazon).

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The Israel-Iran war is about to enter its sixth day. As of this recording — Wednesday evening, June 18 — President Trump has not announced whether the United States will join the Israeli war effort.

During this unpleasant lull, Shadi Hamid and Damir Marusic invited Sohrab Ahmari to discuss what we can expect from the war and its aftermath. In recent days, Sohrab has emerged as an essential commentator on the Iran Israel war. His article, “The Regime Change Maniacs are Back” is one of the most informative and talked-about pieces to come out in the early days of this crisis. Sohrab was born in Iran, and so direct personal experience of the country informs his analysis.

“Collapsing regimes willy nilly does not create good outcomes,” Sohrab tells Damir and Shadi, and he should know. Sohrab was once a neoconservative hawk, a supporter of US interventionism abroad. But time has been a teacher and he has become, in his own words, “penitent.” He discusses the ways that Iranian society in particular could fracture in catastrophic ways should a state collapse follow regime change. Iran has a “perennially unsettled relationship between state and society,” Sohrab says. They have a word for it: estebdad, or arbitrary rule.

Shadi and Damir pressure test Sohrab’s alarming prognostications, but in the end they find little to disagree with. The discussion shifts toward American perceptions of Iran and Israel, and how these are shifting both within the MAGA coalition and among Americans as a whole. They compare Tucker Carlson's recent interviews with Steve Bannon and Ted Cruz and what these say about the political dilemma faced by Trump as he decides whether or not to join the war.

In our bonus section for paid subscribers, the three men discuss the role that evangelical Christianity plays in pro-Israel American sentiments. Shadi asks Sohrab whether Catholics are different from evangelicals in this regard. Sohrab teases out the differences between “Deep MAGA” and the GOP establishment that has learned how to “speak MAGA”; Damir and Sohrab both have heard that younger GOP staffers on the Hill are in despair over this war; and much more.

Required Reading:

* Sohrab Ahmari, “The Regime Change Maniacs are Back” (UnHerd).

* Sohrab Ahmari, “Iran’s Devastating Hubris” (UnHerd).

* Sohrab Ahmari, “America’s dime-store Nietzscheans” (New Statesman).

* Sohrab Ahmari, From Fire, by Water: My Journey to the Catholic Faith (Amazon).

* Brent Scowcroft on the Iraq War (PBS).

* “How Trump Shifted on Iran Under Pressure From Israel” (New York Times).

* Tucker Carlson interviews Ted Cruz (YouTube).

* Tucker Carlson interviews Steve Bannon (YouTube).

* “Azerbaijan: Israel’s Quiet Friend” (Middle East Eye).

* “American Sympathy for Israel Reaches 'All-Time Low' in New Poll” (Newsweek).

* “Less Than Half in U.S. Now Sympathetic Toward Israelis” (Gallup).

* Jason Willick, “Why Israel would benefit from defeating Iran on its own” (Washington Post).

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The war between Iran and Israel is bound to determine the future of the Middle East and, possibly, the whole world.

The time is fitting, then, to release Shadi Hamid’s and Santiago Ramos’ conversation with Abbas Milani, professor of political science and Iran Studies at Stanford University. Professor Milani is a world-renowned authority on Iran, having published Lost Wisdom: Rethinking Modernity in Iran and The Shah, a definitive biography of Mohamed Reza Pahvalvi, the last Shah of Iran, among many other books. He joined us this past December to discuss Iranian politics, secularism and the future.

“A giant with a feet of clay, but with more staying power than some in the opposition think.” This is how Milani describes the state of the Iranian regime months before the war with Israel. The regime’s “base of support is fragile … has no unity of purpose,” and yet, “ten, fifteen, twenty percent of the population is [still] willing to go along with it.” It teeters on the brink of collapse while some international players, including Russia and China, “more or less” support it. Unfortunately, the regime faces no “cohesive opposition.”

Milani explores the future possibilities for Iran. Iranians want a secular democracy, he argues, and an “Islamic democracy” is not possible, he says, because “democracy is acceptance of ambiguity in the human condition.” Santiago and Shadi push back on this point. Santiago points to figures like Harriet Tubman and Martin Luther King, Jr., who embraced both religion and democracy, while Shadi argues for the role that reason plays in Islam. Milani counters that there can be an Iranian modernity — if not an Islamic democracy — and that a future Iran need not follow “the path of Atatürk.”

Our bonus section for paid subscribers will be useful to future historians of the Iranian revolution. Santiago asks Milani, “When did you stop being a Stalinist?” Milani discusses his ideological evolution. Milani talks about his year in prison — 1977 — where he shared the same cell block as many of the current leaders of the Islamic Republic. He talks about why he was arrested, what he read while in prison, why he wasn’t allowed to read the Koran in prison, and why it’s the case that “you understand the mettle of people very quickly in prison.” You will not want to miss this bonus section.

Required Reading:

* Abbas Milani, “Iran’s Incremental Revolution” (The Atlantic).

* Abbas Milani, The Shah (Amazon).

* Abbas Milani, Lost Wisdom: Rethinking Modernity in Iran (Amazon).

* The Islamic Golden Age (Wikipedia).

* Rūmī (Britannica).

* Clifford Geertz (Institute for Advanced Study).

* Leszek Kolakowski, Main Currents of Marxist (Amazon).

* Antonio Gramsci (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy).

* Richard Rorty (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy).

* Roberto Mangabeira Unger (Harvard Law School).

* Profile of Mahmoud Taleghani (New York Times).

* Mikhail Bulgakov, The Master and Margarita (Amazon).

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Wisdom of Crowds executive editor Santiago Ramos joined Damir Marusic for a live-streamed emergency q&a about the latest Middle East crisis. What do we know? What can we expect in the near future? What does this mean for the Middle East in the long term? And why does Damir think that Israel is America’s “junkyard dog”?

For those who missed it, here is the video!

If you missed the live stream and wish you hadn’t: there’s never been a better time to subscribe to Wisdom of Crowds! We are growing and we have new ideas coming down the pipeline. We are including two special offers below — a 14-day free trial and a 20% discount — for those of you who want a taste of what we’re trying to do here.

We’d love to have you. Give us a spin. You’ll get much more, including the full episodes of our weekly podcasts and subscriber-only posts and open threads.

Required Reading:

* Richard Holbrooke junkyard dog metaphor (The Economist).

* Damir Marusic on junkyard dogs (X).

Wisdom of Crowds is a platform challenging premises and understanding first principles on politics and culture. Join us!

Why do artists try so hard to shock the public? Why is Kanye West singing about Hitler? Why are New York artists dabbling with fascism?

The novelist and cultural critic Țara Isabella Burton joins Damir Marusic and Santiago Ramos to discuss these questions and more. Last week, Tara published an essay on Wisdom of Crowds titled “The Point of Pissing People Off.” In it, she tries to figure out whether there is something positive at work in transgression and provocation — something good that comes out of shocking art.

All three of our conversationalists agree: Kanye is not really being transgressive. But is there a good version of transgression? Tara suggests that we should think about transgression as a genre, with a certain form and structure, that can either succeed or fail. Damir is skeptical of analyzing transgression, and prefers to think of it as a moment of ecstasy. Santiago wonders if transgression is important for self-knowledge, and something valuable for society as a whole.

In the course of the conversation, many transgressive works and artists are discussed, among them: Piss Christ; Madonna; Georges Bataille; the Marquis de Sade; and more.

In our bonus section for paid subscribers, Damir talks about the difference between analyzing transgressive art and consuming transgressive art, and why he prefers the latter; Damir discusses the difference between the punk rock of his day, where Reagan was the enemy, and the transgressive art today, which hails Trump as a leader; Tara, Santiago, and Damir trade thoughts about the French Revolution; Santiago tries to get Damir to explain what he means when he talks about “the stuff”; they discuss the question of whether love is as powerful as transgression; Damir talks about his favorite part of the Gospels; and Tara talks about kitsch.

Required Reading and Listening:

* Tara, “The Point of Pissing People Off” (Wisdom of Crowds).

* Tara, Strange Rites: New Religions for a Godless World (Amazon).

* Tara, Self-Made: Creating Our Identities from Da Vinci to the Kardashians (Amazon).

* Damir’s discography from his punk rock days (Discogs).

* Damir’s music with his band, The Miss (Bandcamp).

* Kanye West, “Heil Symphony” (Spotify).

* “Kanye West’s ‘Heil Hitler’ Song & Controversy Explained” (Yahoo! Entertainment).

* The new Fiume Gallery in New York.

* Piss Christ by Andres Serrano (Artchive).

* Madonna, “Material Girl” (YouTube).

* Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish (Amazon).

* Georges Bataille, Story of the Eye (Amazon).

* Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary (Amazon).

* Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina (Amazon).

* Previous podcast episode where Damir says, “That’s the stuff!” (Wisdom of Crowds).

* Something Beautiful for God by Malcolm Muggeridge, a book about Mother Teresa (Amazon).

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Is tech replacing humanity? Or is it sharpening the question of what it means to be human? What does it mean to live a good life — as opposed to passable life? What features of humanity become more important by contrast and necessity in the technological age? Is it possible to find a higher version of humanity in order to thrive?

For this week’s episode — a live taping of Wisdom of Crowds — we invited Santi Ruiz to discuss these questions, and more. (Our other guest, Christine Rosen, unfortunately got sick in the last moment and had to cancel. We missed you, Christine!) Santi is Senior Editor of the Institute for Progress and edits Statecraft, a newsletter about public policy. But he is also an essayist and humanist who has written about culture and tech in his personal Substack, Regress Studies, as well as magazines like the American Conservative.

Samuel Kimbriel and Damir Marusic interviewed Santi, with Damir taking on a more pessimistic view about the possibility of reconciling tech and the humanities, while Samuel remained open to optimistic scenarios.

In our bonus section for paid subscribers, you will be able to listen to the audience Q&A, which includes questions about the End of History, the future of war, the British philosopher Nick Land, the future of coding, good versus bad friction, and an encounter between Good Santi and Evil Santi.

Required Reading:

* Santi Ruiz, “Technocapital is Eating My Brains” (Regress Studies).

* The Statecraft newsletter.

Wisdom of Crowds is a platform challenging premises and understanding first principles on politics and culture. Join us!

We live in an increasingly weird world, where the weirdness is facilitated and accelerated by the Internet. We live in a world full of instantly-available bizarre pornography and terrorist attacks inspired by misanthropic ideologies whose manifestos are published online. Katherine Dee, an Internet ethnographer, writer and friend of Wisdom of Crowds, joins Christine Emba and Shadi Hamid to talk about the recent terrorist attack on an IVF clinic in California and Christine’s recent New York Times article about the social damage wrought by porn.

Shadi shakes things up by posing a blunt question at the very beginning: Should we ban porn? It hurts men as well as women. Why not? Can we reconcile the ideals of liberalism with a state effort to suppress pornographic content? This question inspires Christine and Katherine to reflect about the ethics of sex work, the perils of reporting on dangerous and soul-crushing topics, as well as signs of hope in American culture.

Throughout, Katherine applies her trusty reporter’s eye toward making an accurate, non-judgmental and perceptive account of what’s really going on with sex and ideology on the Internet. Christine, for her part, makes the case of norms and shame as useful tools for making society better. Shadi, in Socratic fashion, tests the strength of his interlocutors’ arguments.

In the bonus section for paid subscribers, Katherine explains the nuances of “efilism” and “promortalism”; Shadi reflects on the meaning of suffering and how belief in God changes one’s approach to suffering; and Christine reflects on “cold, rational logical measure — suffering v. pleasure. Pleasure v. nothing.”

Required Reading and Listening:

* Christine Emba, “The Delusion of Porn’s Harmlessness” (New York Times).

* Katherine Dee, “An Efilist Just Bombed a Fertility Clinic. Was This Bound To Happen?” (default.blog).

* Katherine Dee, “The Nihilism of the Mass Shooter” (default.blog).

* Katherine Dee, “The Trouble with Being Born” (default.blog).

* Sophie Gilbert, Girl on Girl: How Pop Culture Turned a Generation of Women Against Themselves (Amazon).

* Dan Savage on kinks (AV Club).

* Andrea Dworkin, Pornography (Amazon).

* XO Jane (Wikipedia).

* “Supreme Court case on age limits for porn sites could affect 19 states” (Axios).

* “Palm Springs IVF clinic bomber ID’d as Guy Edward Bartkus, a ‘pro-mortalist’ who opposed people being born ‘without their consent’” (New York Post).

* Last week’s podcast: “How to Think about Power and Morality” (WoC).

* Sin-eaters (Wikipedia).

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The conversation eventually shifts when Damir tells Shadi that he is an “activist” when he writes in favor of a cause, and Shadi disagrees. Writers want to change the world, too, and that does not make them activists. Even Damir (Shadi argues) wants to change the world in some way with his writing. Even Damir has a preferred outcome. But Damir denies this: “My preferred outcome is that people recognize the world is fallen and irredeemable.” Instead, Damir says that it is precisely Trump’s “superpower” of being morally indifferent to norms and human rights that has, paradoxically, brought a few positive developments in the Middle East.

This is a tense episode, one that digs deep into the psyches of both Shadi and Damir. “Then what?” Shadi retorts. “What’s the point of persuading people that the world is irredeemable?” Writing is just playing with words and power, Damir says. It’s “a slug trail I leave behind myself.”

This episode cuts to the core of Shadi’s and Damir’s convictions, so we have made it free for all subscribers. You will not want to miss their conversation about Dresden, Hiroshima, Bucha, Trump and the Middle East, and more!

Required Reading

* Shadi’s essay, “I’m Not As Open-Minded As I Used To Be” (WoC).

* Shadi’s new column, “A genocide is happening in Gaza. We should say so.” (Washington Post).

* “Counting the dead in Gaza: difficult but essential” (The Lancet).

* “Gaza will be entirely destroyed, Israeli minister says” (The Guardian).

* Pankaj Mishra, “Unholy Alliances” (New Yorker).

* Yglesias and Shadi exchange about Trump and the Middle East (X).

* Damir’s Bucha essay (WoC).

* “Trump announces US will stop bombing Houthis” (Politico)

Our special guest this week, David Polansky is a political theorist and commentator who lives in Canada. A frequent contributor to Wisdom of Crowds, he joins Shadi Hamid and Damir Marusic to discuss two excellent recent essays. The first one, titled “Does Canada Exist?” is about Canadian national identity, an issue that has become more relevant since Donald Trump has taken to calling Canada the 51st state, and while some in the western Canadian province of Alberta has floated the idea of seceding from the rest of Canada. Polansky’s article was quoted in the New York Times and National Post.

David’s most recent peace, “Michael Jordan Yes; Winston Churchill No?” is about what makes politicians great and whether political greatness (in terms of impact) can be distinguished from moral goodness. After one hundred days of Trump, it is an important question to ask.

What follows is a rollicking and often hilarious conversation in which various politicians — Justin Trudeau, Bill Clinton, Donald Trump — are sized up according to the standards of classical greatness and found wanting. Damir and Shadi nevertheless argue that Trump is the most consequential president since FDR. Polansky argues that Trump’s impact is in large part due to the fact that the Left is lost right now. It is lost, he argues, because it cannot create a new identity, and instead tries to forge unity around “niche issues,” like the Palestine question.

In our bonus section for paid subscribers, the gang muses on Trump’s relationship to shame; Polansky distinguishes between courage and guts, and why Trump has the latter but not former; Shadi asks, “What do you think about Stalin?”; Damir explains why Trump is like a character in a science fiction novel; Polansky argues that “there’s a grandeur to America, but there’s also a ridiculousness to America”; Shadi interrogates Polansky on hierarchy and greatness; and the three men ponder whether Eisenhower was a great president.

Required Reading and Viewing

* David Polansky, “Michael Jordan, Yes; Winston Churchill, No?” (WoC).

* David Polansky, “Does Canada Exist?” (WoC).

* David Polansky, “Pundit Don’t Preach” (WoC).

* David’s Substack, Strange Frequencies.

* Where the “Worthwhile Canadian Initiative” meme comes from (Paul Krugman’s Newsletter).

* “What to Know About Alberta’s Potential Separation From Canada” (TIME).

* Carl Schmitt (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy).

* Chantal Mouffe on “agonistic” democracy (Pavilion).

* Stephen Kotkin talk about Stalin (YouTube).

* Isaac Asimov, the Foundation trilogy (Amazon).

* “Trump says Houthis showed ‘bravery,’ believes they will honor truce deal” (Times of Israel).

* Polansky’s “Cabots and Lodges” reference (Berkshire Edge).

* Analysis of Bill Clinton’s 2012 DNC speech (CNN).

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Trump has been in office for one hundred days, and Damir Marusic thinks America deserves him: “I do tend to intuitively see Trump and Trumpism as a correction on a social order that has lost its way and is somehow badly out of tune,” Damir wrote earlier this week. “Something is broken and unsustainable, and has been so for a while.”

Christine Emba and Shadi Hamid have questions. Why is Damir still “ebullient” (his words) and “giddy” (also his words) about the current political situation? Why does Damir still believe that Trump is “a symptom, not a cause” of the nation’s problems? In response, Damir argues that “immigration and the war in Ukraine” are two of the issues that the Democrats were not addressing and that were unsustainable in the status quo.

Shadi, for his part, feels much more appalled by Trump than he ever expected he would be, and is rediscovering is “left populist” roots. Christine offers an interesting couterfactual: “Not totally joking here … four to eight years of a sort of Kamala Harris-led Democratic party with, you know, a tech alliance could have eased us into sort of Brave New World-esque Soma-induced quiescence once AI had grown up a little bit and the Internet and mega-tech corporations were given even more power.”

Ultimately, disagreements emerge: Christine believes that the Democrats, for all their faults, still follow the basics of rule of law — unlike Trump — and she argues that what Damir thinks of us a failed system might actually be, for most people, just the normal, mediocre running of a democracy. Shadi ponders the Great Man theory of history, and argues with Damir about whether history is determined or whether free will plays a role.

In our bonus section for paid subscribers, Christine muses on the importance of TikTok in American politics; Damir utters the phrase, “nation of Trumps”; Damir argues that, without Trump, “by 2030 we’d be constitutionally in the same place”; Shadi argues that “postponing the inevitable seems good”; Christine muses on the theoretical reign of President Rahm Emmanuel; the gang discusses whether the GOP is an effective political party; and more!

Required Reading:

* Damir’s Tuesday Note: “We Deserve It All” (WoC).

* “ ‘I never thought leopards would eat MY face,’ sobs woman who voted for the Leopards Eating People’s Faces Party.” (X).

* Ross Douthat, “Donald Trump, Man of Destiny” (New York Times).

* First Trump inaugural address (possibly written by Steve Bannon): “American Carnage” (White House Archives).

* Pat Buchanan’s 1992 “Culture War” RNC convention speech (C-Span).

* Joseph De Maistre, Considerations on France (Archive.org)

* Second Lincoln inaugural address (Constitution Center).

* “Fact Check: Did Biden Ignore Supreme Court Over Student Loan Forgiveness?” (Newsweek).

* Aldous Huxley, Brave New World (Amazon).

* Great Man theory of history (Wikipedia).

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This episode is a bit “meta”: it’s about what it means to keep an open mind, how to trust your conscience, why we should all avoid groupthink, and the phenomenon of “self silencing” — keeping your views to yourself when you’re afraid it might be too costly to say them out loud.

But of course, this being Wisdom of Crowds, we link these meta-topics to the politics of the day.

Jenara Nerenberg is a journalist, producer, speaker, and founder of the Neurodiversity Project, which hosts bestselling authors in the arts and sciences who push for “innovation in research and media.” In her work, Jenara applies insights from psychology and public health to question of free speech and the exchange of ideas. Her new book is titled, Trust Your Mind: Embracing Nuance in a World of Self Silencing. You can see why we are excited to have her on Wisdom of Crowds.

“I don’t think that self silencing is inherently bad,” Jenara says, “but I think that we want everyone to be empowered to know that many people are conditioned to fall into self silencing and they’re not doing it consciously.” The goal is to help people become free thinkers. Instead, groupthink and ideology are the default for many people, because “people who are high in self uncertainty are drawn into something with clear boundaries and sense of belonging.” But if you want to think freely, you have to do the work.

Shadi Hamid brings up politics. Where we wrong to focus so much on cancel culture on the Left, given the recent suppression of free speech on the Right? “Right has no respect for free speech, they were pretending,” Shadi says. “It was a pretext, they used the language of free speech as a cudgel.” Samuel Kimbriel agrees that the Right is using “the power of the sword” to suppress speech.

Apart from the necessary political protection of speech, however, Jenara argues that free speech requires a particular disposition of personal character: “My book and my thinking are really about how do we see each other as human again? And that’s where we went wrong with this sort of excessive focus on labels and categories and check boxes.”

In our bonus section for paid subscribers, Jenara talks about whether it’s possible to be emotionally attached to the principle of freedom of free speech and open inquiry (as opposed to a particular point of view); Sam discusses “infinite proceduralism” and why we need to accept the truth once it’s been identified; Jenara talks about growing up in a very unique San Francisco “bubble”; Shadi ponders when it is appropriate to cut people off whose opinions disturb you; and Jenara discusses gendered conversations and people-pleasing.

Required Reading:

* Jenara’s book, Trust Your Mind: Embracing Nuance in a World of Self-Silencing (Amazon).

* Jenara’s initiative, the Neurodiversity Project (divergentlit).

* “A Letter for Justice and Open Debate” (Harper’s).

* “ ‘Have the courage to use your own understanding,’ is therefore the motto of the Enlightenment.” Immanuel Kant, “What is Enlightenment?” (Columbia).

* Agnes Callard on keeping an open mind (New York Times).

* Voltaire on free speech (The Guardian).

* Ross Barkan, “How Anti-Woke Went Intellectually Bankrupt” (New York).

* About Darryl Davis: “How One Man Convinced 200 Ku Klux Klan Members To Give Up Their Robes” (NPR).

This post is part of our collaboration with the University of Pittsburgh’s Center for Governance and Markets.

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Is it possible to move up in this world? Are Americans stuck? Our guest today is Yoni Appelbaum, an American historian and staff writer at The Atlantic magazine. His new book, Stuck: How the Privileged and the Propertied Broke the Engine of American Opportunity, explores the various ways the American dream has been stymied — by the consolidation of property and wealth, the abuse of environmental regulations, the legacy of redlining, among other factors. But the book is not a diatribe; it offers a hopeful program for how we can make America better. Samuel Kimbriel and Damir Marusic engage in a lively conversation with Yoni that will leave you looking at America in a different, more hopeful way.

Yoni’s book is personal in its inspiration: he found himself living in a working-class neighborhood — a so-called “zone of emergence,” where underprivileged immigrants once gained a foothold on the American dream — that was no longer affordable to middle-class families. But it is also a political book. Yoni got the sense that something had gone profoundly wrong in America: “This was a contrarian thought in the Obama era. Now it is conventional wisdom.”

What can be done to help the American dream become real again? Is mobility a “central American value”? Do policies that help communities stay alive and stable actually worsen inequality and class stratification? Should the Democratic Party become a party of economic growth, rather than regulation or even “degrowth”? These are the questions that Damir and Sam invite Yoni to wrestle with in a lively and deeply informed episode.

In our bonus section for paid subscribers, Yoni discusses how to harness market power in a way that “centers mobility”; the three talk about the gap between intent and impact in environmental regulations; Yoni explains why technocrats will always be needed but will never be enough; and Yoni speculates as to why Americans long for a strong leader — for better or worse.

Required Reading and Listening:

* Yoni Appelbaum, Stuck: How the Privileged and the Propertied Broke the Engine of American Opportunity (Amazon).

* Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America (Amazon).

* Reihan Salam, “Want Abundance in Housing? Acknowledge that Greed Is Good” (City Journal).

* Frederick Jackson Turner, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History” (Project Gutenberg).

* Jeffersonian democracy (CrashCourse).

* Podcast with Martha Nussbaum (WoC).

This post is part of our collaboration with the University of Pittsburgh’s Center for Governance and Markets.

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Required Reading:

* Shadi’s interview with Oren Cass about tariffs (Washington Post).

* Janan Ganesh, “The Hopeless Search for Trump’s Cunning Plan” (Financial Times).

This post is part of our collaboration with the University of Pittsburgh’s Center for Governance and Markets.

Wisdom of Crowds is a platform challenging premises and understanding first principles on politics and culture. Join us!

In 2012, New York Times columnist Ross Douthat published Bad Religion: How We Became a Nation of Heretics, a book about how mainstream American religion was devolving into the prosperity gospel, superstitious cults and other forms of heterodox faith. Thirteen years later, the American religious landscape has changed, and Ross wrote a new book tackling a much more basic question: why you should be religious at all. He joins Damir Marusic and Shadi Hamid to discuss that book, which is titled Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious.

This new book, Douthat says, “assumes a highly individualist culture” as its audience. This individualist culture is one where each person thinks of whether to believe in a god as a highly personal choice. The culture as a whole can no longer support any one person’s faith. The biggest individual challenge to Douthat’s thesis in this episode comes from Damir, who says: “I feel most religious people try to get through … happiness and/or meaning. I am not thirsting for those. I am not hungry for them. I feel I’m ok.”

Douthat responds by posing a hypothetical: “Suppose you die and you’re summoned before the judgment throne of God and God says, ‘Seems like were friendly for arguments for being religious, you weren’t one hundred percent convinced, but still: why didn’t you go to church?’” Douthat argues that, while he himself is believing Catholic, there are nevertheless many “commonalities of religious experience. [World religions] are not all saying the same thing, but they are real and suggest something.” This makes common ground with Shadi who, as a Muslim, disagrees with Douthat about the divinity of Christ, but who, as a believer, agrees with Douthat that we should all be religious.

In our bonus section for paid subscribers, Damir, Shadi and Ross talk about the philosophy of mind; whether AI will ever be conscious; what consciousness is for; whether Daniel Dennett is in hell; and why being lukewarm about whether God exists is a bad idea.

Required Reading and Listening:

* Ross Douthat, Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious (Amazon).

* Damir Marusic, “A Lost Sense of Wonder” (WoC).

* Nathan Beacom, “The Art of Hiking” (WoC).

* John Lennon, “Imagine” (YouTube).

* Daniel Dennett, Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon (Amazon).

* Revelation 3:16: “So then because thou art lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will spue thee out of my mouth” (King James Version).

This post is part of our collaboration with the University of Pittsburgh’s Center for Governance and Markets.

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It went pretty well! We hope to host more.

By popular demand, here is a video recording of that debate. Please continue the discussion in the comments below!

— Santiago Ramos, executive editor

Required Reading:

* Matthew Gasda, “A Few Doubts About Neo-Romanticism” (WoC).

* CrowdSource: “Hopeful Romantics” (WoC).

* Ted Gioia, “Notes Toward a New Romanticism” (The Honest Broker).

* Ross Barkan, “The zeitgeist is changing. A strange, romantic backlash to the tech era looms” (Guardian).

Recommendations:

Matthew Gasda:

* Terence Malick, To the Wonder (YouTube).

* Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, The Sorrows of Young Werther (Amazon).

* Any biography of Goethe (Amazon).

Samuel Kimbriel:

* Percy Bysshe Shelley, “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty” (Poets.org).

* Novalis, Hymns to the Night (Amazon).

Santiago Ramos:

* Ludwig von Beethoven, Piano Concerto Number 4, Second Movement (YouTube).

Wisdom of Crowds is a platform challenging premises and understanding first principles on politics and culture. Join us!

Friend of Wisdom of Crowds and frequent podcast guest Samuel Moyn is a professor of law and history at Yale University, and author of several books, including Humane: How the United States Abandoned Peace and Reinvented War (2021, Macmillan) and Liberalism Against Itself: Cold War Intellectuals and the Making of Our Times (2023). He is also the author of a recent article saying that no, sorry, the courts cannot save American democracy.

If you’ve been following our podcast lately, you’ll know that Shadi and Damir think differently. Both are preoccupied with the question of whether we’re in a constitutional crisis. And both have argued that it’s the Judiciary branch which can stop Trump from becoming a tyrant. We are in a state of “brinksmanship with the Courts,” as Damir puts it.

Moyn, however, warns that “Judicial processes can launder radical political change,” like the ones Trump is trying to make. The Supreme Court might cede a lot of ground to the Executive before we get a big decisive case that checks Trump. In fact, we might never even get such a case. The real test for democracy, Moyn argues, will come at the ballot box: “Do we have elections that stay competitive where the loser accepts his loss?” A lot will depend on whether Democrats can figure out how to make a popular platform. A lot, too, will depend on Republicans, and whether at least some of them will part ways with Trump.

Shadi asks Moyn for some historical perspective. Is this the biggest crisis in US history? Probably not, but what can we learn from historical perspective? What is the baseline against which we should judge ourselves today? Moyn argues that “The only use of the past is to make a better future. … Let’s try to understand why things broke before.”

In our bonus section for paid subscribers, Moyn and our hosts discuss recent White House legal challenges against birthright citizenship; anti-Trump lawfare; why Moyn believes that “what the law is is decided in the present political struggle”; why a parliamentary system is usually more democratic than a presidential one; whether the US is culturally attached to a strong executive branch; and much more.

Required Reading and Listening:

* Samuel Moyn and Ryan D. Doerfler, “Don’t count on the courts to save democracy” (Washington Post).

* Samuel Moyn and Ryan D. Doerfler, “We Are Already Defying the Supreme Court” (Dissent).

* Our last podcast episode with Samuel Moyn: “Did the Supreme Court Just Subvert Our System of Government?” (WoC).

* Live taping: “Samuel Moyn and Osita Nwanevu on Voters vs Judges” (WoC).

* Podcast episode, “Is Democracy Ending?” (WoC).

* Juan J. Linz, “The Perils of Presidentialism” (Journal of Democracy).

* CrowdSource about the Mahmoud Khalil case (WoC).

* Santiago Ramos, “From the Harper’s Letter to the Khalil Case” (WoC).

* “Judge warns of consequences if Trump administration violated deportation order” (Reuters).

This post is part of our collaboration with the University of Pittsburgh’s Center for Governance and Markets.

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Shadi thinks it’s the Mahmoud Khalil case: it’s a straightforward government action against freedom of speech, intended to have a chilling effect on the population. Damir believes it’s the deportation of Venezuelan migrants to Nayib Bukele’s megaprison in El Salvador: the policy relies on the bogus claim that we are at war with Venezuela, and it’s the clearest example yet of executive defiance of the courts.

How will we know when the constitutional order has truly taken a knock-out hit? Damir believes that, unless the Supreme Court votes 9-0 against Trump’s Venezuelan deportation, the “the cracks [will] start opening” on the balance of powers. “How do you break the Supreme Court? That’s the whole game right now. And you break it through pressure, through politics,” Damir argues. “Institutions are just beliefs,” he adds. “If you undermine these beliefs enough, it’s over.”

Shadi takes the conversation back to January 6 which, in retrospect, seems like it was the best opportunity to take down Trump. “Everyone seemed to make the wrong decision on how to deal with Trump, at precisely the time when it would have mattered most,” Shadi says. Shadi says that he is still surprised that more Republicans did not object to January 6. Damir is upset with how Democrats reached: “They had a theory of what is just and right, but no sense of politics or how to do things. They got the s**t kicked out of them and now the country is suffering for it.” What we are getting with Trump now, Damir says, is “a more lasting tribalism.”

We are making this timely episode free for all subscribers.

Required Reading:

* CrowdSource about the Mahmoud Khalil case (WoC).

* Santiago Ramos, “From the Harper’s Letter to the Khalil Case” (WoC).

* “Deported Brown University doctor acknowledged she attended Hezbollah leader’s funeral on visit to Lebanon, source says” (CNN).

* “Judge warns of consequences if Trump administration violated deportation order” (Reuters).

* En Boca de León - León Krauze, “The scale of El Salvador’s new prison is difficult to comprehend” (Washington Post).

* “Amy Coney Barrett Sparks MAGA Fury Over Trump Supreme Court Decision” (Newsweek).

* “Gavin Newsom and Steve Bannon find surprising agreement on Elon Musk” (CNN).

* Machiavelli on Savonarola (The Municipal Machiavelli).

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This post is part of our collaboration with the University of Pittsburgh’s Center for Governance and Markets.

Wisdom of Crowds is a platform challenging premises and understanding first principles on politics and culture. Join us!

Mana Afsari is a writer and sometime contributor to Wisdom of Crowds, whose career has taken her from the RAND Corporation, to a job as an assistant to a great American poet, to the position of Research Associate at the Aspen Institute’s Philosophy and Society Initiative. In January, Mana published an essay titled, “Last Boys at the Beginning of History,” a fascinating reported piece about the young men with intellectual ambitions who joined the National Conservative movement and voted for Donald Trump. The essay went viral and earned praise from both liberals and conservatives. Damon Linker of Notes from the Middleground called it “a remarkable essay that’s generated considerable (and well-justified) buzz.”

Mana joins Santiago Ramos and Shadi Hamid to discuss the essay and the general question of why ambitious, inquisitive and searching young men are attracted to the MAGA movement. “I am not a right wing zoologist,” Mana says, but it is important to understand where these men are coming form. These young intellectuals are not your average Trump voter. They are not the “DOGE boys,” either. But they are becoming a significant part of the GOP leadership class.

Shadi wants to know why an interest in culture and ideas has led these men toward right wing spaces. Mana responds that right wing spaces, at least until recently, had a less politicized approach to culture. Many of these young men are interested in things, like history or cartography, which some suggest are “right-coded.” “Most things that are supposedly right-coded should not be right-coded,” Mana says.

And what do they think of Trump? “They don’t think of Trump as Odoacer, they see him as Julius Caesar. They don’t see him as a barbarian, but as a restorer of the republic.”

In our bonus section for paid subscribers, Shadi talks about going to a recent right wing party and says it was “a safe space, it was inclusive”; Santiago asks Shadi if he ever went to right wing parties during the War on Terror; Mana distinguishes the desire for free and open discussion versus the desire to “say whatever you want,” i.e., slurs; and Santiago argues that the Israel-Palestine conflict has made all political sides rediscover the importance of freedom of speech.

Required Reading and Listening:

* Mana Afsari, “Last Boys at the Beginning of History” (The Point).

* Santiago Ramos, “Let Us Now Praise the Supermen” (WoC).

* Santiago Ramos, “Do You Know What Time It Is?” (WoC).

* Damir Marusic, “Barbarians at the Gate” (WoC).

* Shadi Hamid, “Why Half of America is Cheering for Chaos” (Washington Post).

* Wisdom of Crowds podcast episode, “The Masculine World is Adrift” (WoC).

* Henry Kissinger quote about Trump (Financial Times).

* Vittoria Elliot, “The Young, Inexperienced Engineers Aiding Elon Musk’s Government Takeover” (Wired).

* Norman Podhoretz, Ex-Friends: Falling Out with Allen Ginsberg, Lionel and Diana Trilling, Lillian Hellman, Hannah Arendt and Norman Mailer (Amazon).

* C. P. Cavafy, “Waiting for the Barbarians” (Poetry Foundation).

* Odoacer (Britannica).

* Anastasia Berg and Rachel Wiseman, What are Children For? On Ambivalence and Choice (Amazon).

This post is part of our collaboration with the University of Pittsburgh’s Center for Governance and Markets.

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With the Gaza ceasefire possibly collapsing any minute, we return to the topic of the October 7 Hamas terrorist attacks and the ensuing war in the Holy Land. Specifically, Shadi Hamid and Damir Marusic discuss the tension between a belief in universal human rights, on the one hand, and allegiance to one’s ethnic and religious roots, on the other.

Joining Shadi and Damir is friend of the pod Peter Beinart, contributing writer for the New York Times and editor-at-large of the magazine, Jewish Currents. In recent years, Beinart has emerged as a leading Jewish voice wrestling with the moral questions surrounding the Israel-Palestine conflict. His new book, Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza: A Reckoning, describes the different ways that Jews have wrestled with the morality of the war in Gaza. Peter is an observant Orthodox Jew, and this book documents how his criticism of the war has affected (and even broken) several of his friendships in his community.

Peter affirms a belief in the universality of human rights and obligations to all human beings. But, he confesses, “there’s another voice inside my head: don’t be naive, this is a world of power in which people either look out for their own, or nobody looks out for you.” Is it possible to reconcile these two thoughts?

Shadi argues for the universalist point of view: given the high number of civilian deaths in the Gaza war, shouldn’t it be obvious that our allegiance to universal values should take priority over everything else? Shouldn’t we have more “sensitivity for civilian deaths”? Damir presses from the opposite, particularist perspective. He’s been reading the Bible. There is, Damir says, a biblical sense for “the destiny of the Israelites to the land” of Israel. Moreover, Damir argues, even if Israel is powerful today, and even if Israel did not need to wage war on the scale that it did in Gaza, not too long ago, Israel actually was existentially threatened by its neighbors. Moreover, Iran is still a real threat today.

This is a heart-wrenching, wide-ranging episode that covers several controversial topics: the parallels between the war in Ukraine and the war in Gaza; whether Israel can be called an Apartheid state; how to interpret the historical books of the Bible, in particular the Book of Joshua; and much more.

In our bonus section for paid subscribers, Peter and our hosts discuss why the Israeli Left is dead and why Yair Lapid supports Trump’s Gaza mass expulsion plan; how liberal Americans internalize the ethnic framing of the Israel-Palestine debate; Israel’s right to exist; ethnonationalism on the rise around the world; what Steve Bannon really thinks about American Jews; and how to maintain friends with whom you might have deep disagreements.

Required Reading

* Peter Beinart, Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza: A Reckoning (Amazon).

* Peter Beinart, The Beinart Notebook (Substack).

* Peter Beinart, “Teshuvah: A Jewish Case for Palestinian Refugee Return” (Jewish Currents).

* October 2023 podcast episode with Peter: “Peter Beinart on Israel, Hamas, and Why Nonviolence Failed” (WoC).

* July 2020 podcast episode with Peter: “Arguing the One-State Solution” (WoC).

* “Lapid presents Gaza ‘day after’ plan in DC, urges extended Egyptian takeover” (Times of Israel).

* The Book of Joshua (Bible Hub).

* David Ben-Gurion (Jewish Virtual Library).

* Yeshayahu Leibowitz (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy).

* Micah Goodman, Catch-67: The Left, the Right, and the Legacy of the Six-Day War (Amazon).

* Amoz Oz, In the Land of Israel (Amazon).

* Simone Weil, The Iliad, or the Poem of Force (Amazon).

This post is part of our collaboration with the University of Pittsburgh’s Center for Governance and Markets.

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Ivan is one of the brightest minds in Europe — an incisive analyst, historian of ideas, and ever-present track-two diplomat who is always talking to absolutely everyone. He is chairman of the Centre for Liberal Strategies in Sofia, Bulgaria and Albert Hirschman Permanent Fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna. He writes regularly for the Financial Times and the New York Times.

Ivan tells Shadi Hamid and Damir Marusic that Trumpism, and its policy toward Europe is not conservative or isolationist, but “a revolutionary movement.” This revolution is what reconciles the populist and libertarian elements of Trump’s administration: “You’re trying to fight bureaucracy by concentrating power in a charismatic leader. Less state, more emperor.” You can see this, Ivan argues, in the way Trump runs his coalition like an imperial court, where opposing figures — like Steve Bannon and Elon Musk — vie for the attention of the emperor. You can also see it in the fact that Trump himself says contradictory things: “A charismatic figure can contain contradictions.”

What does this mean for Europe? “Empires fall when the center sees itself as a hostage not as a hegemon,” Ivan argues, and Trump, along with Republicans, long to divest themselves of the Empire. This means applying pressure on Europe to bend to its demands — be it about Ukraine, or Greenland, or immigration. It also means that, inadvertently, Trump has reawakened European nationalism: “The new European politics is nationalist, the populists are internationalist.”

This is a rich episode, full of insightful koans from a longtime observer of international affairs. Damir takes the conversation in the direction of what exactly fuels the Right and its “enthusiasm for destruction.” Shadi presses Ivan on the recently overturned elections in Romania, and what this means about the future of European democracy.

In our bonus section for paid subscribers, the three men discuss why charismatic political leaders can live with contradictions; the “fast track between [political] office and prison”; how Trump has inadvertently created a new US-European consensus on immigration and state intervention in the economy, and why “you can’t stop a revolution by defending institutions. You need your own version of tomorrow.”

Required Reading and Viewing:

* J. D. Vance’s speech at the Munich Security Forum (Foreign Policy).

* Zelenskyy, Trump and Vance press conference (C-Span YouTube page).

* Ivan Krastev and Leonard Benardo, “Democracy Has Run Out of Future” (Foreign Policy).

* Shadi Hamid, “Why Half of America is Cheering for Chaos” (Washington Post).

* “EU parliament votes to condemn overturning of Roe v. Wade” (Axios).

* German Revolution of 1918-1919 (Brittanica).

* Leo Strauss, “German Nihilism” (archive.org).

* Daniel Kehlmann, German writer (Wikipedia).

* “The Gender Gap is Growing and it Bodes Badly for American Politics and Culture” (The Hill).

* 2024 Romanian Elections (Wikipedia).

* Ezra Klein, Why We’re Polarized (Amazon).

* Eric Hobsbawm, Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century 1914-1991 (Amazon).

* N.S. Lyons, “American Strong Gods: Trump and the End of the Long Twentieth Century” (The Upheaval).

This post is part of our collaboration with the University of Pittsburgh’s Center for Governance and Markets.

“Something is happening here and you don’t know what it is,” goes the Bob Dylan track from 1965. That song was directed at the squares who weren’t yet hip to the Sixties. It sounded foreboding then, and it sounds foreboding now, because something is happening, again — something perhaps as great and consequential as the cultural changes of Dylan’s time. For several years now, people have been speaking about a cultural “vibe shift.” The MAGA electoral victory appears to have been the culmination of that shift. The Trumpist victory has ushered in a new political elite and with it, a cultural style that is more transgressive, crude, and rude than the once-liberal American mainstream.

Helping us understand what’s happening is this week’s special guest, Sean Monahan, one of the most perceptive cultural forecasters of our time. If you’ve ever used the term “normcore,” or if you’ve heard someone talk about a “vibe shift,” you’ve been influenced by Sean. And if you haven’t heard those terms, then you’re about to learn a lot about American culture in this episode. Sean is a writer, trend forecaster and brand consultant, whose Substack, 8Ball, is an oracle of cultural insight.

Sean joins Christine Emba and Shadi Hamid and they all get deep about vibes. What is a vibe? Can it be defined? If it can’t, then how is it a useful concept? Is it based on material conditions? How long does a vibe last? But the conversation soon ventures beyond these theoretical generalities. Shadi wants to know whether American culture has fundamentally shifted to the right since the rise of Trump. Christine detects a mean streak to this new culture: a certain cruelty or at least, ruthless competitiveness. Sean puts things in perspective, explaining how generations create, condition, and then abandon trends, and how the weird period of Covid lockdown had a unique effect on trend creation, one that still affects us to this day. He also describes the new aesthetic of the Trump era, which he believes is based primarily on desire for money, and which he has dubbed, “Boom Boom.”

In our bonus section for paid subscribers, Sean discusses why religion has become attractive to young people, especially young men, whether he sees good vibes or bad vibes in the near future, and whether he believes most Americans actually like Trump and DOGE.

Required Reading:

* Sean Monahan’s Substack, 8Ball.

* Sean Monahan, “Anatomy of a Vibe Shift” (8Ball).

* Sean Monahan, “Boom Boom: Anatomy of a Trend” (8Ball).

* Sean Monahan, “The Counter Elite Won the Meme War” (8Ball).

* CrowdSource: “Truth and Vibes” (WoC).

* Famous 2022 article from New York Magazine: “A Vibe Shift is Coming” (New York).

* W. David Marx, Status and Culture: How Our Desire for Social Rank Creates Taste, Identity, Art, Fashion, and Constant Change (Amazon).

* Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction (Amazon).

* Mana Afsari, “Last Boys at the Beginning of History” (The Point).

* Saddle Creek Records.

* Bright Eyes (Saddle Creek).

* “Cottagecore Aesthetic, Explained” (Country Living).

* MySpace.

* Matthew Walther on the origin of “Woke Capital” (American Conservative).

* “Dimes Square” (Know Your Meme).

* Alex P. Keaton (Wikipedia).

* Gordon Gecko (Wikipedia).

* Patrick Bateman (Wikipedia).

* Bret Easton Ellis, American Psycho (Amazon).

* American Psycho film (YouTube).

* Graeme Wood, “How Bronze Age Pervert Charmed the Far Right” (The Atlantic).

* “Yosemite Locksmith: 'The People Who Fired Me Don't Know What I Do'” (MSN).

* “Garry Tan for mayor? ‘Never, or 20 years from now,’ Y Combinator chief says” (San Francisco Standard).

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“I am done saying, ‘impossible’,” announces Damir Marusic. At least, with regard to what Trump might do or could do in the near future. We are still in the midst of a major shakeup in the administrative state. The so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) is combing through Treasury data and cutting government personnel. Trump is delaying the distribution of federal funds. Trump’s policies have full support of the GOP-majority Congress. Meanwhile, the White House foreign policy agenda has upended three years of support for the Ukrainian war cause and, apart from that, is strikingly imperialistic — annexing Greenland and “owning” Gaza are stated objectives. Will Trump become a dictator?

Shadi Hamid believes that Trump won’t become a dictator — America is too big for a dictator — but he very will might signal the end of the “liberal” part of our liberal democracy. Damir fears that, by the end of Trump’s second term, Congress will become a vestigial representative body with littler power, like the Senate in the Roman Empire. Both worry that the demise of democracy could come in a subtle, slow way — a “boiling frog” scenario.

Shadi and Damir move on ask whether what’s happening is what Trump’s voters asked for. Why is Trump popular right now? Why do people want to break the state? Shadi says, “[Trump voters] believe that the system is fundamentally broken. Certainly, for a majority of Americans, the system is broken.” Damir partially agrees, but adds: “It’s a lot more resentment-based … Not really an idea that ‘the system is broken’ for me, but that it’s populated by those people over there, and it’s time to hurt them.” But why so much resentment?

In our bonus section for paid subscribers, Shadi talks about the Democratic Party’s potential to resist Trump and why the working class likes Trump (hint: it doesn’t have to do with economics). Damir brings up the famous book, What’s the Matter With Kansas by Thomas Frank, and explains why he thinks it misses the mark.

Required Reading:

* Shadi Hamid, “How to Break Up with the News” (Contentions).

* CrowdSource about the possible constitutional crisis (WoC).

* Democratic Party favorability ratings among young people (YouGov).

* “How Biden is continuing to cancel student loan debt despite Supreme Court ruling” (CNN).

* Tyler Cowen, “Trumpian policy as cultural policy” (Marginal Revolution).

* Christine Emba’s piece engaging with Cowen’s article (WoC).

* Shadi’s post about the “The System is collapsing” meme (X).

* David Polansky’s reply to Shadi’s post (X).

* Lee Hockstader, “In Germany’s elections, a last, best chance to hold off extremists” (Washington Post).

* Thomas Frank, What’s the Matter with Kansas (Amazon).

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Donald Trump and Elon Musk are moving quickly, so we decided to release this episode a few days early. In a half-week of alarming developments, Trump has announced that the United States might send troops to Gaza to transfer the Palestinian population to Egypt or Jordan, and to aid in reconstructing the country. Elon Musk has become the undertaker of government agencies, the wrecker of the civil service. Through the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), Musk has effectively shut down USAID, offered payouts to members of other agencies, and more.

In an effort to make sense of all this, Shadi Hamid and Damir Marusic are interrogated by WoC executive editor, Santiago Ramos. Is Trump serious about Gaza? What do his statements suggest about the possible endgames for the Gaza war and the future of the Israeli-Palestinian question? Was Shadi wrong to suggest that Trump might be better on this question than Biden was? Is Trump acting according to what he thinks is the national interest? Or is this a random shot in the dark?

The second issue — DOGE — prompts a more serious set of questions. Are we in a constitutional crisis? If not now, then will we be one in a few months time, when the judiciary steps in to check DOGE? Why exactly are Trump and Musk interested in hollowing out the administrative state? Are we in a watershed moment in American history? Is there anything that we can do to preserve the rule of law?

In our bonus section for paid subscribers, Shadi explains why he believes that ideology is driving Trump and Musk, rather than just the desire for power; Damir argues that he concept of punishment is essential to justice; and Santiago describes the difference between Louis XIV and Napoleon.

Required Reading

* “Trump Proposes U.S. Takeover of Gaza and Says All Palestinians Should Leave” (New York Times).

* Shadi Hamid, “Why an Arab American who backed Trump stands by his choice” (Washington Post).

* Marco Rubio on Trump’s Gaza comments (NBC).

* Rich Kushner’s February 2024 comments on “waterfront property” in Gaza (The Guardian).

* Shadi’s post about Trump v. Biden on Gaza (X).

* Damir Marusic, “Brushfire of the Vanities” (WoC).

* Liam Cunningham post (X).

* Patrick Deneen (Communia)’s two X posts: first and second.

* Patrick Deneen, Regime Change: Towards a Postliberal Future (Amazon).

* Patrick Deneen, Why Liberalism Failed (Amazon).

* Francis Fukuyama, “The end of history will be a sad time” (“The End of History?, PDF UCSD).

* John Ganz, “Groyperification” (Unpopular Front).

* Gabe Fleisher, “When I Will Call Something a ‘Constitutional Crisis’ ” (Wake Up to Politics).

* Thomas Edsall, “ ‘Trump’s Thomas Cromwell’ Is Waiting in the Wings” (New York Times).

* Jack Goldsmith and Bob Bauer, “The Trump Executive Orders as ‘Radical Constitutionalism’ ” (Executive Functions).

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“The weird right wing men are coming out to the fore in joy,” announces Shadi Hamid. “They’re strutting more than they did in 2016,” observes Damir Marusic. “The counter-elite is becoming the elite,” says Shadi. “There is gonna be a bloodbath,” says Damir: “They will soon be drinking from a fire hydrant of sewage.”

Two weeks have passed since the Trump inauguration, as well as its attendant galas, balls and parties. Damir and Shadi have trained their weary eyes upon the new class of upstart right wingers arriving in the capital for a punchdrunk power-hungry scramble. There are the tech bros, the trad intellectuals, the libertarians living in unrecognized mini-states, the crunchy RFK-supporters, and who knows what else. All want a piece of the pie that Emperor Trump is slicing before them.

Shadi believes that a cultural shift has taken place — that Trump is not only a new president, but the usher of a new moment in American culture. “Something has changed,” says Shadi. “Liberal dominance of instutions seems weak and pathetic,” in retrospect, he adds. “The perception of dominance can collapse quickly.” Damir disagrees. “It was not a cultural shift,” he says. It was a repudiation of liberal overreach on cultural issues, and a “light-to-heavy insanity and a lot of stress on our institutions.” The Right is reactionary, Damir concludes, and as soon as they propose a positive program, their popularity will drop.

In our bonus section for paid subscribers, Damir and Shadi discuss the difference between “mysterious cultural forces” and “the wisdom of crowds,” Damir further explains why he believes the Right is not as powerful as they think they are, and Shadi tells us about an upcoming spiritual quest.

Required Reading:

* Liberland official website.

* Curtis Yarvin interview (New York Times).

* Mana Afsari, “Last Boys at the Beginning of History” (The Point).

* Who is Chris Rufo?

* Mark Zuckerberg on the Joe Rogan Experience (YouTube).

* Christine Emba, “Zuck is the Zeitgeist” (WoC).

* The Harper’s Letter (signed by Shadi).

* Richard Reeves on the podcast: “The Masculine World is Adrift” (WoC).

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Last week’s episode dealt with the state of the American Right post-election. Today we ask: Where is the American Left going? How will it respond to Trump? “There is a palpable sense of passivity on the Left,” says Damir Marusic. “What I’ve seen is resignation or weird, detached analysis,” says Samuel Kimbriel. Is there more going on than we see? We invited WoC contributor Osita Nwanevu, writer for the New Republic and author of an upcoming book about American democracy, to tell us more.

Osita begins by distinguishing between the Democratic Party and the movement Left. While the Democrats are a loose coalition in broad disarray, the Left simply stands for “a grand reform of political economy to empower workers.” The Left, Osita argues, was not surprised that Trump won. The problem lies it how it can create a platform that will appeal to American voters. There is too much despair. Too many on the Left, Osita argues, have been left in a state of “political hopelessness” after the election, wondering what to do in a country where most people voted for Donald Trump. But such an attitude is “antithetical to democratic thought and what we need to do for practical politics.”

Damir and Osita go on to engage the question of whether a Left that stands for universal human values, rather than in-group, national concerns, is able to win. Osita argues that there is not necessary contradiction between a universal value and a local interest. When it comes to climate change, for example, the Left isn’t asking voters to care about “the Maldives,” but about “fires in LA and storms in Florida.” Damir is not so sure.

The conversation touches on symbolic politics versus real politics, whether protest movements can actually transform society, whether Trump is the true revolutionary force in American politics, and whether the Left actually has intellectual leaders and a utopian vision today. In our bonus section for paid subscribers, Sam argues that the Left needs an idea of transcendence, Osita talks about transcendence without god, and Damir pushes both on whether personal philosophical convictions actually have any bearing on real-life politics.

Required Reading:

* Osita’s website.

* Sam on why the Left needs ideas (WoC).

* Damir’s post-election reaction (WoC).

* Osita on BLM (Pairagraph).

* Osita’s debate with Oliver Traldi about democracy and ideology (WoC).

* Vincent Bevins, If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and the Missing Revolution (Amazon).

* “Nancy Pelosi Insists the Election was Not a Rebuke of the Democrats” (New York Times).

* On the Gushers BLM post mentioned by Osita (New York Times).

* “Costco Teamsters vote to authorize US-wide strike, union says” (Reuters).

* “Costco shareholders just destroyed an anti-DEI push” (CNN).

* History of hospitals (Britannica).

* Scott Alexander, “Everyone’s A Based Post-Christian Vitalist Until The Grooming Gangs Show Up” (Astral Codex Ten).

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On the eve of Donald Trump’s second inauguration, Shadi Hamid and Damir Marusic sit down to discuss the state of the Right and the Left in American politics. The conversation picks up where the last podcast episode left off, in a discussion about Damir’s apparent rejuvenation in the wake of Trump’s victory. Given that he didn’t vote for Trump — in fact, he didn’t vote for anybody — why is Damir smiling?

Shadi suggests that “Democrats needed this defeat to learn important lessons.” Damir is not so sure that they will learn them. But one of the reasons he is giddy is that they will get their comeuppance for the political “villainy” of Russiagate, the Biden health coverup and other misguided Democratic gambits. Shadi, in turn, notes that many of his center-left acquaintances seem surprisingly at peace with the new government, and ready to entertain new ideas. “Very rarely did I hear despair,” he reports.

Both Shadi and Damir go deeper by asking about the status quo of the Left and the Right. Damir thinks that Trump has “cleared the field” of the conservative movement’s Reaganite past, and that the Right is now ready to debate issues in a more realistic way. Shadi laments that the Left has become boring by being too certain that they are correct about everything: they are the party of “facts, data and progress,” and think that they have “resolved all the big ideological debates.”

In our bonus content for paid subscribers, Damir discusses what he means by “tragic liberalism,” Shadi explains why he thinks atheism is over, and our hosts discuss the best and worst things that could happen during the second Trump presidency.

Required Reading and Listening:

* Damir, “We’ll Have to Rethink Everything” (WoC).

* Shadi, “Trump’s ‘madman theory’ worked in Gaza when all else failed” (Washington Post).

* Christine, “Zuck is the Zeitgeist” (WoC).

* Santiago questions Damir about his newfound conservatism (WoC).

* Tara Isabella Burton, “Believe for Your Own Sake, Not for ‘the West’” (WoC).

* Ezra Klein and Nate Silver on “peak Trump” (X).

* Elon Musk is an ‘Evil Person,’ Steve Bannon Says” (New York Times).

* “Corporate America embraces a new era of conservatism under Donald Trump” (Financial Times).

* “How the White House Functioned With a Diminished Biden in Charge” (Wall Street Journal).

* David Brooks, “Why People Are Fleeing Blue Cities for Red States” (New York Times).

* Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam, Grand New Party: How Republicans Can Win the Working Class and Save the American Dream (Amazon).

This post is part of our collaboration with the University of Pittsburgh’s Center for Governance and Markets.

Wisdom of Crowds is a platform challenging premises and understanding first principles on politics and culture. Join us!

Damir Marusic and Santiago Ramos discuss the nature of this new era. They begin with the question of fear: Are you afraid of the second Trump term? Santiago explains why the Trump phenomenon seemed more frightening in 2016 than it does in 2024. Damir asks whether finding historical analogues for Trump actually illuminates anything about the man, and makes him less scary.

Santiago then asks Damir about two of his latest pieces for Wisdom of Crowds, in which Damir seems almost giddy about the collapse of the liberal establishment and Trump’s rise. What exactly is Damir happy about? What good does he see coming from this historical moment? What is changing? While not defending Trump himself, Damir argues that Trump’s crushing of liberal illusions, and the exposure of the hypocrisy of our political class, are good things. What he hopes for is a new “positive program of skepticism and humility,” and a more limited version of liberalism.

In the course of the conversation, Damir and Santiago cover wide variety of topics: Damir’s newfound conservatism; Trump and Andrew Jackson; Kissinger on Trump; the USA and Latin America; NATO; Greenland; and the Cold War. Because this is our first podcast of the new year, and season-opener of sorts, we are making this episode free for all subscribers.

Required Reading and Listening:

* Damir, “The feeling of limitless possibility ahead of Trump's inauguration is dizzying” (WoC).

* Damir, “The Peasants, the People and God” (WoC).

* Santiago on Latinos and the election (Commonweal).

* Santiago on Trump and Latin America (Commonweal).

* Black Mirror episode Santiago mentions: “The Waldo Moment” (IMDB).

* Henry Kissinger: “I think Trump may be one of those figures in history who appears from time to time to mark the end of an era and to force it to give up its old pretences” (Financial Times).

* Jason Willick on Trump and Andrew Jackson (Washington Post).

* Samuel Goldman on why the US is more like Latin America than Europe (The Week).

* Antonio García Martínez on why the US is like Brazil (X).

* Our podcast episode with Yuval Levin (WoC).

* Video of Trump and Stoltenberg (YouTube).

* Jon Stewart on Nancy Pelosi’s “legal corruption” (The Wrap).

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Wisdom of Crowds is a platform challenging premises and understanding first principles on politics and culture. Join us!

For some people, “liberal socialism” sounds like an oxymoron. Liberalism is a political idea that promises to protect individual rights. Socialism, on the other hand, is about collective power: the power of workers to organize and, if not quite seize, at least have a say in the administration of the means of production. Liberalism is about freedom, while socialism is about equality.

Not so, argues Matthew McManus, political science professor at the University of Michigan. In his new book, The Political Theory of Liberal Socialism, McManus recovers the oft-forgotten tradition of liberal socialism. He tells the story of great liberal socialist thinkers while also crafting a contemporary version of liberal socialism, relevant for today.

Samuel Kimbriel and Santiago Ramos open the episode with a discussion about the 2022 “Freedom Convoy” trucker protests in Canada, which displayed some of the tensions between socialist and liberal ideals. The conversation moves on to the thought of Mary Wollstonecraft, whether John Rawls was a socialist, and how Matthew’s experience working for McDonald’s converted him to socialism.

Samuel and Santiago press Matthew about a core first principle: equality. Why does he hold to this principle? Where does it come from? How can it be philosophically defended and justified? Matthew considers the different sources of political conviction: personal experience, and political theory. Which one is more influential in a person’s mind?

In our bonus section for paid subscribers, Matthew criticizes the “nebbish incrementalism” of neoliberalism and the excesses of “postmodern skepticism,” while declaring: “Left wing intellectuals have a lot more that they could be doing.”

Required Reading:

* Matthew McManus, The Political Theory of Liberal Socialism (Amazon).

* Matthew McManus faculty page (University of Michigan).

* Matthew McManus and Carlo Lancellotti debate about conservatives and equality (WoC).

* Matthew McManus, “The Liberal Democratic Socialism of John Rawls” (Liberal Currents).

* “Canadian Trucker Convoy Descends on Ottawa to Protest Vaccine Mandates” (New York Times).

* Article about 2010 anti-G20 protests in Canada: “Police take ‘pre-emptive strikes’ with sweeping arrests” (CTV News).

* Santiago Ramos, “The Meaning of McDonald’s” (WoC).

* Samuel Kimbriel and Damir Marusic debate “What Politics is Really About” (WoC).

* Podcast with Alexandre Lefebvre, “Liberalism is Not Neutral” (WoC).

* Derek Parfit, Reasons and Persons (Amazon).

* Mary Wollstonecraft (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy).

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In the ensuing conversation, the three discuss Freemasonry, Protestantism, Catholicism, Predestination and how Christianity is receiving new attention in Silicon Valley. Then, the conversation turns to Christmas traditions, and how the contemplative and party-going sides of Christmas complement each other.

In the spirit of Christmas, we have made this a free episode for all subscribers. The conversation culminates in a discussion about time itself: what makes some moments in time different from others, and how Christmas is a necessary “break” from chronological time.

Required Reading:

* Damir Marusic, “The Protestant Deformation in America” (WoC).

* King James Version (Bible Gateway).

* Ruth Graham, “In a First Among Christians, Young Men Are More Religious Than Young Women.” (NYT).

* “Christians in tech drive religious revival in SF” (San Francisco Standard).

* Peter Thiel, “Against Edenism” (First Things).

* CrowdSource: “Tech-Trad Synergy” (WoC).

* Charles Taylor on secular time and higher time.

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So, did Trump’s victory signal a realignment for the working class? Or was it a one-off thing, an act of rebellion against a complacent Democratic establishment? In terms of first principles, what is an economy that makes sense for workers, and for all Americans? What are Americans owed? And do we have obligations toward undocumented immigrants? For this special live recording of the podcast, we invited Oren Cass from the conservative pro-labor think tank, the American Compass, to help us answer these questions.

Samuel Kimbriel kicked things off with a question about the “American dream,” which Oren contrasts with what he calls “the American promise.” The dream is about upward mobility, and the promise is about economic stability. The problem in America today, Oren says, “is not that you can’t rise to the top, but you don’t have this basic stability to work from.”

Christine Emba challenged Oren on immigration. On what grounds should the rights of American workers take precedence over the rights of workers in general? Why should we restrict immigration to people who want to join the American project? The conversation touched up the first principle question of “Who qualifies as a member of the political community?”, as Oren put it.

The recording of this live event is fully open and free for all subscribers. You can listen to the Crowd ask questions during the Q and A period at the end. Our holiday party followed the event — something which, alas, was not recorded. But you can enjoy these pictures!

Required Reading:

* CrowdSource about economic populism (WoC).

* “How Trump is giving the labor movement the blue-collar blues” (CNN).

* The American Compass’ mission statement.

* “This Conservative Wants to Change the Way Republicans Think About Economics” (New York Times interview with Cass).

* Oren Cass, “Workers Deserve Real Power. Unions Aren’t the Best Way to Get It” (New York Times).

* Oren Cass, The Once and Future Worker: A Vision for the Renewal of Work in America (Amazon).

* Oren’s Substack, Understanding America.

* Christine Emba, “What Would Society Look Like if Extreme Wealth Were Impossible?” (The Atlantic).

* Samuel Kimbriel, “Bonfire of the Vanities” (WoC).

This post is part of our collaboration with the University of Pittsburgh’s Center for Governance and Markets.

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In 2024, over 77 million Americans voted for Donald Trump. Friend of Wisdom of Crowds Michael Brendan Dougherty, a writer and conservative commentator at the National Review, was one of them. However, MBD (as he is known) did not vote for Trump in 2020 nor in 2016. In fact, he was an early conservative opponent of Trump. In 2016, MBD wrote: “[Trump] is clearly a product of a decadent society, not the scourge or redeemer of one.”

MBD did not disagree with Trump on his main issues: trade, immigration, and a restrained foreign policy. But he did not believe that the man has the character fit for office.

So, what happened? Did MBD change his principles, or did Trump live up to them? Why did MBD vote for Trump, and what does that tell us about the process of picking a candidate, and of the formation of political judgment in general?

Shadi Hamid and Damir Marusic join MBD to discuss this question and much more. Did MBD change his mind about Trump’s character? Which of Trump’s first term achievements turned MBD into a supporter? What can we expect from a second Trump term — both in domestic policy, as well as in the increasingly dangerous international scene? In the course of discussing these questions, MBD defines the “working class” in American terms, and talks about his own experiences working in a chemical factory.

In the bonus portion for paid subscribers, MBD explains the complicated relationship that pro lifers have with Trump, and debates whether the #Resistance movement will return.

Required Reading and Listening:

* Our 2021 podcast episode with MBD (WoC).

* “The Case Against Esoteric Trumpism” by Michael Brendan Dougherty (The Week).

* “My First Vote for Trump” by Michael Brendan Dougherty (National Review).

* My Father Left Me Ireland: An American Son's Search For Home by Michael Brendan Dougherty (Amazon).

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Last week, President Biden granted his son, Hunter Biden, “a full and unconditional” pardon for any and all offenses from Jan. 1, 2014, to Dec. 1, 2024. Because Hunter Biden has been a politically charged figure since the first Trump term, and because President Biden repeatedly promised that he would not use his power to protect his son, the presidential pardon was, for many, a strategic and moral mistake — an act of hypocrisy, in short.

In this week’s episode, Shadi Hamid and Damir Marusic question the assumptions that Biden’s critics are making. Is political hypocrisy inevitable? Might it actually be a good thing? Shadi has written extensively on the topic of hypocrisy, defending it in a unique way. Damir pushes back against Shadi’s moral interpretation of hypocrisy. Hypocrisy is not primarily a failure to live up to one’s morals, says Damir, but the failure of a powerful figure to live up to their morals. “Biden’s problem is that he did it [the pardon] so visibly,” says Damir.

The conversation progresses to a discussion of the how Islam and Christianity deal with hypocrisy. It becomes a discussion about hypocrisy and international justice, where Damir asks whether international law can be said to exist if it cannot be universally enforced. Perhaps, Damir suggests, Shadi is less of an advocate for international human rights as he is a booster of American imperialism. It’s a classic Shadi-and-Damir give-and-take.

In our bonus portion for paid subscribers, Shadi and Damir discuss whether the Department of Justice is ever truly independent of partisan politics, and explore an alternative history where the Democrats never pursued the Russiagate investigations against Donald Trump.

Required Reading:

* “Biden pardons his son, Hunter, after repeatedly saying he would not” (Reuters).

* Shadi: “Can Hypocrisy Be Justified?” (WoC).

* Shadi: “Why America Needs Hypocrisy” (WoC).

* King James Version (KJV) of the Bible.

* “ICC judges issue arrest warrants against Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin and Maria Alekseyevna Lvova-Belova (International Criminal Court).

* “Situation in the State of Palestine: ICC Pre-Trial Chamber I rejects the State of Israel’s challenges to jurisdiction and issues warrants of arrest for Benjamin Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant” (International Criminal Court).

* Jason Willick post (X).

This post is part of our collaboration with the University of Pittsburgh’s Center for Governance and Markets.

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In this week’s episode, Damir Marusic and Santiago Ramos turn the tables on Elizabeth, putting her in the interviewee’s chair. What is the source of the wisdom distilled in Elizabeth’s book? If it is religious faith, then is faith required in order to truly embrace that wisdom? Or is the grace of God required? What is “grace,” anyway? Santiago wants to understand how the wisdom that Elizabeth writes about can be appropriated for one’s self. Damir tries to distinguish that wisdom from self-help and therapy.

The conversation touches upon art and faith, whether “despair” or “preserving civilization” are good reasons to adopt religion, the necessity of community, and the role that doubt plays in faith. At the heart of the discussion is Damir’s question: “How do we live in this world, and how do we cope with the existence of the horror of this world?”

This episode is a searching, personal discussion that is just the thing we need this holiday season. In the bonus section for paid subscribers, Elizabeth talks about her experience of living in community, and also plunges deep into one of the biggest mysteries of the Christian faith.

Required Reading:

* Fully Alive: Tending to the Soul in Turbulent Times by Elizabeth Oldfield (Amazon).

* Elizabeth’s podcast, The Sacred (Apple Podcasts).

* Damir’s essay about therapy (WoC).

* Shadi and Damir podcast episode on therapy (WoC).

* Pensées by Blaise Pascal (Amazon).

* Ayaan Hirsi Ali column explaining “Why I am now a Christian” (UnHerd).

* Ayaan Hirsi Ali interview further explaining her conversion (UnHerd).

* Elizabeth’s “middle class commune” (profile in the London Times).

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The Declaration of Independence affirms that all human beings are “endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights.” Yet the Declaration is silent about who this Creator is. Is it the Jewish deity or the Christian God? Or is it the god of the philosophers — the blind watchmaker of the Enlightenment? The Constitution, on the other hand, doesn’t mention the divine at all, except for the phrase, “Year of Our Lord.”

Mainstream liberals and conservatives, whatever they may think of the silence regarding God in our founding documents, believe in the American experiment. But as Jerome E. Copulsky writes in his new book, American Heretics: Religious Adversaries of Liberal Order, throughout American history there have been those who do not, radical groups who opposed the American project, root and branch, for being liberal, as opposed to Christian. In his book, Copulsky, professor at Georgetown’s Berkley Center for Religion, Peace & World Affairs, writes about the Loyalist churchmen who opposed the American revolution, the proslavery theologians of the 19th century, the “Theonomist” theocrats of the 20th century, and the “Integralists” of our own time.

Jerome joins Shadi Hamid and Damir Marusic to discuss his book, but as often happens in Wisdom of Crowds, the conversation takes an unexpected turn. Early on, Shadi presses Jerome to specify exactly what a secular liberal Founding really means for religious practice in the public sphere. Then Shadi submits his own interpretation of the modern state as an inherently secularizing force.

Damir brings the question of the secularity of the American project to bear upon current events. To what extent was the American liberal state ever “neutral”? Or is technocratic liberalism the default, unspoken “religion” of the American state? Or was it, until Donald Trump came along? And is Trump, by filling his cabinet with representatives from various American ideologies, violating liberal neutrality, or simply exposing it for the fiction that it always was?

In our bonus content for paid subscribers, Jerome discusses the National Conservative movement, as exemplified by intellectuals like Patrick Deneen and Adrian Vermeule, and its influence on Vice President-elect J.D. Vance. In the second Trump term this movement will have unprecedented access to power and, Jerome argues, pose a serious challenge to — and even a “betrayal” of — the American system.

Required Reading

* American Heretics: Religious Adversaries of Liberal Order by Jerome E. Copulsky (Amazon)

* The Declaration of Independence (National Archives).

* The Constitution of the United States (National Archives).

* Everson v. Board of Education (FindLaw).

* George Washington’s Letter to the Hebrew Congregation in Newport, Rhode Island (National Archives).

* We Hold These Truths: Catholic Reflections on the American Proposition by John Courtney Murray, S.J. (Amazon).

* Common Good Constitutionalism by Adrian Vermeule (Amazon).

* Regime Change: Toward a Postliberal Future by Patrick Deneen (Amazon).

This post is part of our collaboration with the University of Pittsburgh’s Center for Governance and Markets.

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Official WoC house philosopher Samuel Kimbriel joins Shadi Hamid and Damir Marusic to discuss the role that ideas had in the recent elections. Specifically, they focus on whether it was bad ideas or bad political strategy that doomed the Dems.

Sam insists that the Democrats failed because liberalism as we understand it has become weak, devoid of ideas and moral persuasion. Liberals, Sam insists, constantly shift from wanting to be a player in the political contest, to a referee of the same. They argue for their side and its views, until they start losing in the contest. If they start losing, they shift to a referee role, and try to rule out the legitimacy of certain opposing ideas (for example, immigration restrictionism). What we need, Sam says, is a renewed liberalism that is unafraid to make moral claims — one that plays and plays well, without tying to also be the referee.

Damir disagrees. He isn’t sure whether what happened on November 5 will be seen as revolutionary — that is, an overthrow of a previous order — or merely “an empty, peasant backlash,” though he is leaning toward the latter. Regardless, “what happened is a failure of rulership, not ideas,” he says. “It was not a failure of metaphysics, but of arguments.”

Shadi stands between Sam and Damir, sometimes as referee, sometimes as a player on Sam’s side. He supports democracy and the idea of moral politics. And he believes that Damir “always attacks us [Sam and Shadi] for having beliefs,” while hiding or being in denial of his own implicit metaphysical convictions.

In the bonus segment for paid subscribers, Sam and Shadi corner Damir into finally admitting that he does indeed have metaphysical convictions of his own, even if that conviction is materialism. Damir talks about how he’s reading the Bible this winter, and he gives us his own definition of the word “politics.” It’s a rollicking discussion that you won’t want to miss!

Required Reading:

* Western Civilization: Paleolithic Man to the Emergence of European Powers — the textbook Sam cites at the beginning of the episode (Volume I, Volume II).

* The Problem of Democracy: America, the Middle East, and the Rise and Fall of an Idea by Shadi Hamid (Amazon).

* “Republicans See a Better Economic Outlook. Now It’s Democrats Who Don’t” (New York Times).

* Sam’s piece on the French Revolution and the contemporary Left (WoC).

* Ordinary Vices by Judith Shklar (Amazon).

* Damir’s piece about peasant revolts (WoC).

* “How the Ivy League Broke America” by David Brooks (The Atlantic).

* “A Letter Concerning Toleration” by John Locke (WikiSource).

This post is part of our collaboration with the University of Pittsburgh’s Center for Governance and Markets.

Wisdom of Crowds is a platform challenging premises and understanding first principles on politics and culture. Join us!

Will Donald Trump become a dictator? What is he capable of? What might be the worst aspects of his second term? Damir discusses mass deportations as the biggest risk. Shadi worries about Trump’s foreign policy in the Middle East. More than that, Shadi worries about a Donald Trump who all of the sudden has everything he’s ever wanted — a revenge victory — and finds it still unsatisfying. “What now?”

Damir and Shadi are not very fond of the Harris-Walz campaign. Shadi laments that Harris never seemed comfortable on the campaign trail, and could never quite communicate authenticity. Damir says that Walz is an irrelevant politician, a “weirdo” with no discernible contribution to the Democratic cause.

Two minds trying to figure out where things stand in the wake of what seems to be like a momentous election. The first of many attempts at Wisdom of Crowds where we will try to read the signs of the times.

Required Reading:

* Tim Alberta on the dysfunction in the Trump campaign (The Atlantic).

* Politico piece why Kamala lost (Politico).

* Shadi: “The Democrats can’t blame anyone but themselves this time” (Washington Post).

* Turkish migrant interview (YouTube).

* “What Do Men Want?” podcast with Shadi and Richard Reeves (Washington Post).

* Megan McArdle, Jim Geraghty and Ramesh Ponnuru podcast: “Are Republicans Kamala-curious? Not so much.” (Washington Post).

* Ruth Marcus, Dana Milbank and James Hohmann podcast: “Ruth Marcus, Dana Milbank and James Hohmann” (Washington Post).

* Andrew Sullivan’s Election Night Notes on Substack.

* Donald Trump’s interview with the Wall Street Journal editorial board.

* Barack Obama roasts Donald Trump at the White House Correspondent’s Dinner (YouTube).

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Joshua spoke from a more communitarian and conservative point of view, citing the drawbacks that come with the growth of the state: “When you have a regime founded on small government and mediating institutions, you have to develop personal and collective competence. … Early on, happiness is linked to competence and to doing. But as the state has grown larger, and more and more the functions of living have been left up to the state, we’ve become more isolated and we come to think of happiness more as feeling and self-expression.”

Osita spoke from a left-liberal perspective. It might be less the case that we are unhappy, he argued, than that we think we ought to be unhappy, given the way life is structured today. “We think that Americans should be less happy than they are. If you think that Americans should be less happy, because they use smart phones a lot, then you should own that. … Liberals always are in the business of saying less than they actually mean. The pursuit of happiness is not just material well-being … happiness for the Founders … also meant moral and spiritual well-being.”

This was a robust and rich clash of perspectives that generated much more light than heat. Osita cautioned against romanticizing the old America of traditional communities, arguing that the “freedom to seek what the good life is, without having it given to you by father or pastor, is an important part of what American civilization is.” Joshua agreed that sometimes the state has to intervene in local communities for the sake of justice — for example, to desegregate the schools in Little Rock — but he also cautioned that we will never be fully satisfied without some “concreteness of embodied relations with others. … We [Americans] are all cowboys … the rest of the world can’t believe the level of unboundedness we live with.”

Free for all subscribers, this is a valuable and — crucially during this moment — civil conversation that will be interesting to anyone who cares about the soul of America. Give it a listen.

Required Reading:

* Joshua Mitchell (Georgetown faculty webpage).

* Osita Nwanevu (personal website).

* Surgeon General’s Advisory on Loneliness Epidemic (Department of Health and Human Services).

* Declaration of Independence (National Archives).

* Democracy in America by Alexis de Tocqueville (Amazon).

* Friendship as Sacred Knowing: Overcoming Isolation by Samuel Kimbriel (Amazon).

This post is part of our collaboration with the University of Pittsburgh’s Center for Governance and Markets.

Wisdom of Crowds is a platform challenging premises and understanding first principles on politics and culture. Join us!

In our pages earlier this week, Shadi and Haroon Moghul debated the merits of voting for Harris or not voting at all. You can read their full exchange here. This podcast episode continues that conversation, but goes deeper. It is, in essence, about voting: is there a duty to vote? In a two-party system, must we accept the lesser of two evils?

Moghul is director of strategy at The Concordia Forum and author of Two Billion Caliphs: A Vision of a Muslim Future. Haroon shares all of Shadi’s misgivings about Trump and Harris, and has publicly chosen not to vote. “I don’t think you can get to democratic ends with a candidate who is at war with democracy,” Haroon says, “and I don’t just mean Trump, I mean Harris.”

Shadi, on the other hand, takes a more pragmatic point of view: Sitting an election out doesn’t do anything real; it would be better for Muslim and other pro-Palestine voices to continue supporting the Democratic Party, hoping to influence it from within. Meanwhile, Damir Marusic applies his trusty sense for realpolitik to the question. He challenges Shadi, arguing that he’s conflating two very different strategies: electoral pressure and intra-party influence. He questions Haroon whether there is an actual “theory of a change” behind his choice not to vote.

This is a passionate discussion, not so much about electoral politics as about the first principles undergirding citizenship. And it also asks an intensely personal set of questions: how do we ultimately make what can seem like an impossible choice?

Required Reading and Viewing:

* Shadi Hamid and Haroon Moghul debate: “Should Americans Vote for the Lesser of Two Evils?” (WoC).

* Haroon Moghul, “What I Told My Muslim Students about Gaza” (WoC).

* Biden’s comments admitting Israel’s “indiscriminate bombing” while also saying “we’re not going to do a damn thing other than protect Israel.”

* “Prominent Muslim Democrat Demands Answers After Being Kicked Out of Harris Rally in Michigan” (Democracy Now!)

* “Trump in Michigan makes play for Arab American and Muslim voters angry over war in Gaza” (CNN).

* An emotional debate with our friend and Christian Zionist Robert Nicholson weeks after Oct. 7 (WoC).

* Haroon Moghul, Two Billion Caliphs: A Vision of the Muslim Future (Amazon).

This post is part of our collaboration with the University of Pittsburgh’s Center for Governance and Markets.

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While searching for an answer to this question, Damir and Santiago cover a lot of ground. They discuss the story of Abraham and Isaac, as well as the different ways that philosophers have interpreted it. They talk about Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Kant. They come to the conclusion that, while we all have different words for it — terrifying, mysterious, sublime — everyone must grapple with the stuff. Grappling with the stuff is an essential part of living a human life, for believers and unbelievers alike.

This episode covers the Bible, philosophy, art, music, and much more. It is not a debate, but an exploration of what exactly it is that makes certain stories, works of art, and experiences so moving, compelling, terrifying. We enjoyed recording this episode so much that we decided to make it free for all subscribers.

Required Reading and Listening:

* Damir, “Why We Need Nightmares” (WoC).

* Damir, “The Pursuit of Passion for Its Own Sake” (WoC).

* Damir, “It’s Not Really About Cancel Culture,” about Tár (WoC).

* “Ending Summer on Violence and Despair, with Twitter’s Audrey Horne” (WoC).

* The story of the binding of Isaac in Genesis 22 (King James Version).

* Immanuel Kant (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy).

* Søren Kierkegaard (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy).

* Friedrich Nietzsche (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy).

* “Time of tension between dying and birth” quote by T. S. Eliot, in “Ash Wednesday” (Best Poems).

* Mozart, Symphony No. 40 (Leonard Bernstein and the Boston Symphony Orchestra, YouTube).

* Roger Scruton on pop music as addictive (YouTube).

* Keith Richards on heavy metal, “No lift, no bounce, no syncopation” (YouTube).

* Caspar David Friedrich, “Sea of Ice” (painting of shipwreck/example of the sublime).

* The Rolling Stones, “Gimme Shelter” (YouTube).

* Nirvana, “Radio Friendly Unit Shifter” (YouTube).

* Shellac, At Action Park (YouTube).

* Arvo Pärt, Cantus in memoriam Benjamin Britten (Norwegian Chamber Orchestra, YouTube).

* Leonard Bernstein, “The Unanswered Question,” lectures (YouTube).

This post is part of our collaboration with the University of Pittsburgh’s Center for Governance and Markets.

Wisdom of Crowds is a platform challenging premises and understanding first principles on politics and culture. Join us!

Musa al-Gharbi is a sociologist and assistant professor in the School of Communication and Journalism at Stony Brook University. He joins Christine Emba and Damir Marusic to discuss his new book, We Have Never Been Woke: Social Justice Discourse, Inequality, and the Rise of a New Elite. Don’t worry: the book is not another culture war polemic. Instead, it’s something much more useful: a work of social science that explains what “woke” means in terms of class and culture in the United States.

In our conversation Musa describes the inner workings of a group that has gone by many different names: the PMC (Professional-Managerial Class), the New Class, the cognitive elite or the symbolic capitalists. This group enjoys higher wages and more autonomy than most workers, and its power is derived from knowledge-based work, which requires (at the very least) a college degree.

Damir thinks that the PMC is merely hypocritical and self-interested, while Musa sees things differently. He argues that while this group has sincere interests in advancing social justice, they also have an interest in maintaining their own elite status. This contradiction is the source of so much of the insanity we see in American society today. Christine presses Musa for details about this insanity: to what extent is the symbolic capitalist class actually sabotaging positive social change, in order to preserve their privileges?

Among the topics discussed is the nature of symbolic capital; whether self interest and political idealism are necessarily contradictory; how wokeness and anti-wokeness have similar incentives; violence and social change; and the economics of victimhood. This practical and illuminating episode will make you smarter about how America works.

Required Reading:

* We Have Never Been Woke: Social Justice Discourse, Inequality, and the Rise of a New Elite by Musa al-Gharbi (Princeton University Press).

* Alex Press, “On the Origins of the Professional-Managerial Class: An Interview with Barbara Ehrenreich” (Dissent).

* Musa al-Gharbi, “Social Movement Requires Force” (Salon).

* Musa al-Gharbi, “The Symbolic Professions Are Super WEIRD” (Substack).

* Musa al-Gharbi, “The Absurd Spectacle at Columbia Occludes the Grim Realities of Gaza” (Compact).

* “Georg Simmel” (Encyclopedia Britannica).

* Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction (Amazon).

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We decided to release the podcast early this week, before it is overtaken by the swiftly-moving events. What is this war about? What should the US do about it? Does anyone in the US political class truly believe that the Arab world is capable of democracy? Were the Abraham Accords foolish — or racist? How do you define a “rogue state”? What is Netanyahu right about?

Joining Shadi Hamid and Damir Marusic to discuss these questions is Matt Duss, Executive Vice President of the Center for International Policy, co-host of the Undiplomatic Podcast, and former foreign policy advisor for Senator Bernie Sanders.

“A lot of [Arab Americans] are not going to pull the lever for Kamala Harris,” Shadi reports. Matt lambasts the “racist logic” of the Abraham Accords, which swept the Palestinian question aside and decided that “this is the best [America] can hope for, deals with modernizing autocrats.” Damir applies a realpolitik analysis, explaining the Israeli military strategy and arguing that American and European diplomats have no choice but to strike deals with the autocrats that rule the world. Shadi responds: “Realpolitik is supposed to be effective.”

It’s a passionate, intense discussion that strikes at the core preoccupations of Wisdom of Crowds: justice, war, and the state. Free for all subscribers: You will want to listen to the whole thing.

Required Reading:

* Shadi’s responses to subscribers’ provocations about the Middle East (WoC).

* Bruno Maçães’ article on the end of Western hypocrisy (Time).

* Jeffrey Goldberg’s 2016 article on “The Obama Doctrine” (The Atlantic).

* James Baldwin on the Dick Cavett Show (YouTube).

* The Abraham Accords (US State Department).

This post is part of our collaboration with the University of Pittsburgh’s Center for Governance and Markets.

Wisdom of Crowds is a platform challenging premises and understanding first principles on politics and culture. Join us!

These are only some of the many questions that Damir Marusic and Santiago Ramos talk about in a slow-burn, philosophical episode of Wisdom of Crowds. Because Santiago is executive editor of Wisdom of Crowds, Damir wants to learn more about his bedrock convictions. He cross-examines Santiago about his religion, politics, and formative experiences.

At first, Damir finds in Santiago a kindred spirit: both are skeptical about power and about big political theories. But Santiago does have one fundamental conviction that he is not skeptical about: universal human dignity. Damir presses Santiago on this topic. What is human dignity? How do you know it exists? And do only human beings have dignity? What about other intelligent animals? What about … octopi?

The ending is one of the richest parts of the conversation, so we made this episode is free for all subscribers.

* Daniel Patrick Moynihan documentary (PBS).

* Song about the guerrilla priest: Victor Jara, “Camilo Torres” (YouTube).

* “Of New Things,” Pope Leo XIII (Vatican.va).

* “On the Progress of Peoples,” Paul VI (Vatican.va).

* Jacques Maritain and the UN Declaration of Human Rights (UNESCO).

* The Cold War in Latin America (RetroReport).

* Michael Novak obituary (New York Times).

* Iraq War timeline (Council on Foreign Relations).

* Thomas Aquinas on the human soul (Summa Theologiae, New Advent).

* Valladolid debate on the rights of indigenous people (In Our Time, BBC).

* Octopus intelligence (Natural History Museum).

This post is part of our collaboration with the University of Pittsburgh’s Center for Governance and Markets.

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How does order emerge from anarchy? How do human beings create institutions? Can big problems — like climate change, income inequality, or AI alignment — find solutions “from below,” through collective action, rather than “from above,” i.e., imposed by regulatory bodies?

Today’s guest is a fascinating economist. Professor Paul Dragoș Aligică is a senior research fellow at the Program for Advanced Study in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, and a Professor of Governance at the University of Bucharest.

Paul believes that we are living through the third great moment in human history, after the transition to agriculture and the industrial revolution. What will this third moment be about?

Far too broad to pigeonhole, he’s a visionary public choice theorist and a student of renowned economists Vincent and Elinor Ostrom (the latter won the Nobel Prize for Economics in 2009). Paul has thought long and hard about the strange inflection point our world seems to be hurtling towards. It’s a slow burn of an episode, one where interesting and complex ideas are laid out carefully, before Damir and Santiago engage Paul in sussing out their implications.

Does Paul think that public choice theory means the world has hope? How do we fix the seemingly intractable problems posed by capitalism and globalization? Tune in to find out.

Required Reading and Viewing:

* Paul Dragoș Aligică’s personal website.

* Elinor Ostrom, Governing the Commons (Amazon).

* What is the Tragedy of the Commons? (Harvard Business School).

* Elinor Ostrom on Ending the Tragedy of the Commons (Big Think on YouTube).

* Santiago Ramos, “What Does McDonald’s Mean?” (WoC).

This post is part of our collaboration with the University of Pittsburgh’s Center for Governance and Markets.

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Professor Taylor has spent a long and fruitful career trying to understand the basic questions of modern life. What does it mean to be a modern person? How do we form our sense of identity? How do we relate to the sacred? What does it mean to be secular? What happened to religion? In Cosmic Connections, he tells the story of how the Romantic poets of the nineteenth century sought to reconnect with nature through art, after the rise of modern science and the industrial revolution left many people wondering about man’s place in the universe.

Appropriately enough, Sam called in from a log cabin somewhere in the Rocky Mountains, and he enthusiastically supported Professor Taylor’s thesis that a connection with nature is an essential component of a healthy society. The more city-bound Santiago took a more skeptical approach, at least at first. He questioned Professor Taylor’s claim that a connection with nature entails a connection with a transcendent, spiritual reality. Along with these heady topics, the conversation touched upon Beethoven’s symphonies, A.I. “friends,” and the idea of progress.

Required Reading (and Listening):

* Charles Taylor, Cosmic Connections: Poetry in the Age of Disenchantment (Amazon).

* Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Amazon).

* Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Amazon).

* Damir Marusic, “Beauty and Niceness in an Accidental World” (WoC).

* Romanticism (School of Life).

* Henry David Thoreau (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy).

* Beethoven, Ninth Symphony, Fourth Movement (YouTube).

* Beethoven, Sixth Symphony “Pastoral” (YouTube).

* “Wear This A.I. Friend Around Your Neck” (Wired).

* Joni Mitchell (Official YouTube Page).

* Leonard Cohen (Official YouTube Page).

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The Harris-Walz campaign is having a moment. It is polling well. Harris made a good speech at the Democratic National Convention. The Democratic Convention as a whole got better TV ratings than the Republican one. Harris’s campaign is all about joy. Even Shadi’s parents are feeling the vibes (and using the word, “vibes,” probably for the first time).

But Shadi and Damir aren’t feeling it. No joy. No vibes. No excitement about the current moment in American politics. What’s going on is at best groupthink, at worst, the manufacturing of consent. Our podcast hosts are skeptical about the fact that the media made an abrupt 180-degree turn on Harris: someone who was once considered a political dud is now seen as “the second coming of Barack Obama.”

But soon Shadi and Damir start interrogating their assumptions. Is it necessarily a bad thing that large numbers of people are feeling positive emotions? Could large trends and coalitions develop organically, through common affinity, rather than through the machinations of politicians and propagandists? Could a campaign based on good vibes actually be more efficient at creating a Democratic Party platform that appeals to the median American voter? Maybe the Harris-Walz campaign is forcing us, as Damir puts it, to “update our priors on what democratic politics is.”

In the bonus concluding section for our paid subscribers, our hosts make a 180-degree turn of their own. They explore learning to like Harris and embracing the vibes. “No one is talking about threats of civil war anymore,” Shadi observes. This is a good thing. “People want to feel good about their country.” Maybe Harris is making that possible for millions of voters.

Required Reading:

* “Harris has upended years of Democratic dogma. That’s good,” by Shadi Hamid and Aden Barton (Washington Post).

* “The Peculiar Moderation of Donald Trump,” by Shadi Hamid (Washington Post).

* Full text of Kamala Harris’ speech at the Democratic National Convention (PBS).

* Our CrowdSource about “vibes” (WoC).

* Noam Chomsky on “manufacturing consent” (YouTube).

* Matt Yglesias on “popularism” (Slow Boring).

* Matt Yglesias on the “unhinged moderation” of the Republicans (Slow Boring).

Wisdom of Crowds is a platform challenging premises and understanding first principles on politics and culture. Join us!

Elon Musk just started tweeting about the Iliad. But our guest, Twitter’s Audrey Horne, has been talking about Homer with Samuel Kimbriel and Damir Marusic for at least two weeks now — well before Elon turned his attention to these kinds of things. We figured this was an excuse to share some of the offline chatter with the Crowd. If Elon’s interested in it, it has to be relevant, right?

Christians and Greeks both agree that the world is cruel: one must not look away from the despair we all face. And yet the Greeks face it with “no consoling prospect of immortality,” as Simone Weil puts it. Leaving aside whether it’s true, is the Christian approach better?

This is a classic Wisdom of Crowds rambler: a free-wheeling conversation about faith, meaning, purpose and the very nature of reality. What better way to wrap up the dog days?

Required Reading:

* Twitter’s Audrey Horne tweeting about butter (X).

* “Talk to Me Nicely,” by Twitter’s Audrey Horne (WoC).

* “How to Think About Fallenness,” by Damir Marusic (WoC).

* “Why Give a Damn,” by Samuel Kimbriel (WoC).

* “What Are Children For?” with Anastasia Berg and Rachel Wiseman (WoC).

In this special live recording from the Lyceum Movement’s Tallgrass Ideas Festival in Des Moines, Iowa, Sam was joined by Hannah Kim, philosopher at the University of Arizona and associate editor of the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, to discuss why storytelling has become such a prominent part of our cultural conversation, the philosophy of stories and narratology, and dig into how “storification” can limit our ability to understand our own lives.

Join the Crowd in getting the real story on stories themselves.

Required Reading:

* More about the Lyceum Movement.

Wisdom of Crowds is a platform challenging premises and understanding first principles on politics and culture. Join us!

The international drop in baby-making is currently in the headlines, and it’s been constant preoccupation for us at Wisdom of Crowds (including in our latest edition of CrowdSource). It concerns us not only because of the possible long-term economic consequences but also because a people’s inability — or lack of desire — to reproduce itself might be the consequence of serious moral or social problems.

Enter philosophers Anastasia Berg and Rachel Wiseman. Anastasia is a professor at University of California at Irvine, while Rachel is managing editor for The Point. Berg and Wiseman have written a book that asks the fundamental question right in the title: What Are Children For? Why should people reproduce? Should people desire to do so? And why has there been a drop in birth rates? What are the issues underneath the decline of fertility in the United States and around the so-called developed world?

Damir presses Anastasia and Rachel on the question of false consciousness. Are the young people telling themselves stories or giving themselves excuses instead of just … making a choice? In response, Anastasia and Rachel say that they take a sympathetic approach. They analyze the objective factors that seem to hinder family formation — cost of living, inability to find a mate, fear of the future, etc. — and see whether they truly are insurmountable. As philosophers, their goal is to enhance the free choice of individuals. If what you choose “by inertia” (because it is the cultural default) is not what you would choose if you had thought about things more clearly, then you are not truly free.

The conversation runs deep, but it is also extremely relatable for Wisdom of Crowds listeners who, on average, tend to be on the younger side. Stick around for a quasi-defense of Millennials, too. They’re not immature; in fact, they might be too “old” for their age …

Enjoy!

Required Reading:

* What are Children for? On Ambivalence and Choice by Anastasia Berg and Rachel Wiseman (Amazon).

* “On Choosing Life,” by Anastasia Berg and Rachel Wiseman (The Point).

* Rethinking Sex: A Provocation by Christine Emba (Amazon).

* “The Real Reason People Aren’t Having Kids,” by Christine Emba (The Atlantic).

* “Wham! Choose Life” T-shirt (Amazon).

This post is part of our collaboration with the University of Pittsburgh’s Center for Governance and Markets.

Wisdom of Crowds is a platform challenging premises and understanding first principles on politics and culture. Join us!

For almost a century, American intellectuals of different political stripes have been in thrall to dictators. They’ve either projected utopian ideals on to them, or been seduced by their charisma and alleged effectiveness. The story of left wing intellectuals falling for figures like Stalin or Castro has already been told. In a new book, America Last: The Right’s Century-Long Romance with Foreign Dictators, Jacob Heilbrunn, author and editor of the National Interest, tells the story of the American political right and its dalliances with overseas despots. Joining Damir as co-host is friend of the pod Professor Jennifer Murtazashvili, head of the University of Pittsburgh’s Center for Governance and Markets, which graciously supports our work.

As usual, Damir veers the discussion towards first principles. Are people more likely to be seduced by dictatorships when liberalism is perceived to be failing? Is liberalism perceived to be failing more often during wartime or peacetime? Just what is attractive about despotism? Should liberals accept that a certain amount of “ineffectiveness” is part and parcel of the liberal order? Tune in for a riveting discussion of these questions and more.

Required Reading:

* “Apologists without Remorse,” by Jacob Heilbrunn (American Prospect).

* America Last: The Right’s Century-Long Romance with Foreign Dictators by Jacob Heilbrunn.

* “Trump’s anti-Ukraine view dates to the 1930s. America rejected it then. Will we now?” by Robert Kagan.

* U.S. Military Interventions since 1890 (Evergreen State College).

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Joining us to debate these questions is the author Freddie deBoer — one of the most influential and provocative leftist thinkers writing today. Freddie runs an extremely popular Substack. His latest book, How Elites Ate the Social Justice Movement, is about how progressive institutions betrayed their own ideals. In the elevation of Harris to the presidential ticket, deBoer sees the same betrayal at work.

Damir and Shadi press Freddie on what democracy actually is, and how it would manifest itself within the workings of a modern political party. Were the contested electoral conventions of yore really less democratic that the process as it exists today? And what is the future of democracy within the Democratic Party?

Due to the special circumstances of our crazy electoral season, we are making this episode free for all listeners. Make sure you listen to the very end, so you can find out who is Freddie’s candidate for best Democrat president of his lifetime (it’s not who you think).

Required Reading

* “So Just Literally No Democratic Process From the Democrats,” by Freddie deBoer (Substack).

* “I Do Not Need to Defend Myself for Believing That Political Candidates Should Be Chosen Democratically,” by Freddie deBoer (Substack).

* How Elites Ate the Social Justice Movement by Freddie deBoer (Amazon).

* The Cult of Smart: How Our Broken Education System Perpetuates Social Injustice by Freddie deBoer (Amazon).

* “Kamala Harris and the End of Democratic Debate,” by Shadi Hamid (Substack).

* “Planet of Cops,” by Freddie deBoer (Substack).

This post is part of our collaboration with the University of Pittsburgh’s Center for Governance and Markets.

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Greetings, dear Listeners!

We are releasing our podcast early this week. We figured that an episode about the unity of the American people would sound good right about now, given the circumstances. Damir’s Tuesday Note — which will respond to a Provocation — will be published this coming Thursday.

What holds the United States together? Three hundred million people of different races, religions, and histories, spread out over half a continent — do we have a system that truly represents all of them? Who is that “We” in “We the people” and “We hold these truths”?

Yuval Levin’s answer to these questions might seem quaint at first: The Constitution. A scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and editor of the policy journal National Affairs, he has written several books about American politics and institutions. His latest is called American Covenant: How the Constitution Unified our Nation and and Could Again. In it, he makes a compelling argument that the Constitution is more than a list of laws, rights and limits to political power. It is a set of institutional structures that safeguard social peace. It is a text about how to live together.

This is an ambitious reading of the Constitution, to say the least. And we had questions. Christine asks how the Constitution can be a unifying force when it has effectively become a tribal marker in our culture wars. Damir wants to know whether the need to reform the Constitution can be reconciled with Yuval’s basically conservative impulse to preserve and revere it.

This is a timely, serious conversation which takes a sober look at the most important tool we have to face this season of crisis. We urge you to give it a listen!

Required Reading

* American Covenant: How the Constitution Unified Our Nation and Could Again by Yuval Levin (Hachette).

* A Time to Build: From Family and Community to Congress and the Campus, How Recommitting to Our Institutions Can Revive the American Dream by Yuval Levin (Hachette).

* The Fractured Republic: Renewing America’s Social Contract in the Age of Individualism by Yuval Levin (Hachette).

This post is part of our collaboration with the University of Pittsburgh’s Center for Governance and Markets.

The subject, very broadly, is forgiveness. Is it good or bad? Do we know what it means? Can one forgive wrongly? And could forgiving foreclose the possibility of achieving justice in this world?

On July 1, the Supreme Court ruled that Donald Trump, as President of the United States, enjoys “absolute” immunity for “his core constitutional powers,” but that he “enjoys no immunity for his unofficial acts, and not everything the President does if official.” The ruling has an obvious immediate impact on the upcoming presidential elections. But it also suggests far-reaching questions about political sovereignty, and our system of government.

In this episode, Sam and Damir get together to hash out the theoretical implications of the Court’s ruling. Joining them is Yale Law professor and friend of the pod Samuel Moyn. Moyn argues that the Court’s decision was as much a product of “comparative risk assessment” of our current and near-future political situation, as it was a theoretical statement about our political system. Damir pushes on the question of the meaning of sovereignty, and what immunity implies in terms of the limits of presidential power. Sam sums up the decision as having reached “the limits of business as usual.”

In the bonus section for paid subscribers, the discussion strikes a philosophical note. Sam describes his views about the “Platonic” and “prophetic” sources of law, Damir asks whether Thomas Hobbes is still relevant, and Moyn explains his idea of “collective self-creation.” Law, politics, philosophy, and prophecy — this episode is packed with the drama of our time.

Required Reading

* Trump v. United States, the Supreme Court Immunity Ruling (supremecourt.gov).

* Richard Tuck, The Sleeping Sovereign: The Invention of Modern Democracy (Cambridge).

* Eric Nelson, The Royalist Revolution: Monarchy and the American Founding (Harvard).

* “Broad Reflections on Trump v. United States,” by Jack Goldsmith (Lawfare).

* Plato, Euthyphro (Internet Classics Archive).

* Summary of the Kelsen-Schmitt debate (YouTube).

This post is part of our collaboration with the University of Pittsburgh’s Center for Governance and Markets.

Wisdom of Crowds is a platform challenging premises and understanding first principles on politics and culture. Join us!

What happened on Thursday night was a debacle for Joe Biden and an embarrassment for the nation. About this, our three hosts — Christine, Damir and Shadi — all agree. And they are all angry about it. But who is to blame? Biden himself? The DNC? The media? Trump? All of us?

Shadi, Damir, and Christine work through their post-debate anguish and anger — and try to figure out who is responsible for the predicament that the country finds itself in today. “We are gripped by an inability to call balls and strikes anymore,” says Damir. In this episode, they try anyway.

Required Reading:

* Derek Hudson, “We Need to Talk about Biden” (Wisdom of Crowds).

Wisdom of Crowds is a platform challenging premises and understanding first principles on politics and culture. Join us!

You might have noticed that Wisdom of Crowds got a facelift this week. We touched up our homepage and added two new features: CrowdSource and Provocations (read more about both here). In this spirit of renewal and relaunch, on the podcast we are getting back to our bread and butter with a classic Shadi and Damir episode.

This week’s episode deals with the virtues of resignation. Is giving up ever the right choice to make, either in politics or in one’s personal life? Shadi has been reading a book about “settling” — On Giving Up by Adam Phillips — and he muses on the topic in latest piece in Wisdom of Crowds: “Giving Up is Good for You.” Damir worries that giving up means resignation, a rejection of life, a denial of adventure. He considers Shadi’s mention of the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. Does Shadi understand the full implications of Nietzsche’s philosophy? Damir wonders. In the bonus section for paid subscribers, the talk turns toward war and geopolitics, where Shadi discusses how wars end in" “settlements” — a form of giving up. Finally, the conversation wraps up with a reevaluation of Damir’s personal philosophy, and a look back at last week’s podcast episode with Phil Klay.

Required Reading:

* “Giving Up is Good for You” by Shadi (Wisdom of Crowds).

* Adam Phillips, On Giving Up.

* Friedrich Nietzsche (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy).

* Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra.

* Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals.

* Friedrich Nietzsche, The Joyful Science.

* Adyashanti official page (YouTube).

* Podcast episode with Phil Klay (Wisdom of Crowds).

Wisdom of Crowds is a platform challenging premises and understanding first principles on politics and culture. Join us!

Joining Shadi and Damir to discuss this heady topic is Phil Klay, a novelist and essayist whose first book, the short story collection Redeployment, won the National Book Award in 2014. An Iraq War veteran, his work has focused on themes concerning war, citizenship, and the postwar life of veterans. His latest book is titled Uncertain Ground: Citizens in an Age of Endless, Invisible War. 

This episode does not have the usual verbal sparring and back-and-forth. The tone is meditative and the questions are profound. Shadi opens the conversation with a direct question: What does morality have to do with war? Phil responds with a description of the Medieval practice of imposing penances on soldiers, even those who fought in just wars. Damir presses Phil with the nagging question of where the “shoulds” and “oughts” come from in Phil’s recent article about the war in Gaza. Phil develops a clear standard for sending citizens of a democracy to war. It is a fruitful idea, which Shadi and Damir chew on for the remainder of the episode. You won’t want to miss this one!

Required Reading:

* Redeployment by Phil Klay.

* Missionaries by Phil Klay.

* Uncertain Ground: Citizenship in an Age of Endless, Invisible War by Phil Klay.

* “U.S. Support for Israel’s War Has Become Indefensible,” by Phil Klay (The Atlantic).

* Phil’s interview with the New York Times.

* “What Do I Owe the Dead of My Generation’s Mismanaged Wars?” by Phil Klay (New York Times).

* Wisdom of Crowds episode with Samuel Moyn.

* Humane: How the United States Abandoned Peace and Reinvented War by Samuel Moyn.

* “Uncomfortably Numb” by Damir Marusic (“the Bucha essay”).

This post is part of our collaboration with the University of Pittsburgh’s Center for Governance and Markets.

Wisdom of Crowds is a platform challenging premises and understanding first principles on politics and culture. Join us!

This week, Wisdom of Crowds hosts a fluid discussion about violence and sex in movies, where the “shoulds” of life come from, and whether liberal values can be based on something other than religion. The discussion is more meditative than contentious, an exploration prompted by recent pop culture hits and a probing comment from the Crowd.

Violence is entertaining. That’s the conclusion that Damir draws after watching the movie, Civil War, which he thoroughly enjoyed. Christine questions Damir about his taste for violent movies, and wonders whether we are slowly becoming numb to violence, just as we are — as recent studies suggest — becoming numb to sex in film. The discussion moves toward the question of values and where they come from, drawing from a recent reader comment that prompted some soul-searching in the Wisdom of Crowds masthead.

In the bonus section for paid subscribers, Damir asks Christine how she can overcome Nietzsche’s critique of Christianity and its values, while he launches into a defense of liberalism based on what he calls “mystery.” Finally, Damir explains why he believes that most moral truth claims “end up in tears.”

Required Reading (and Viewing):

* Civil War trailer (YouTube).

* Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga trailer (YouTube).

* The Mad Max movie franchise.

* “UCLA Study: Gen Z Wants Less Sex Onscreen, Prefers Platonic Relationships Depicted to Romantic Rollercoasters,” (IndieWire).

* The Hays Code.

* Lauren Bacall movie line (YouTube).

* The Big Lebowski: “Fight a stranger in the alps” (YouTube).

* “Why Give a Damn?” by Samuel Kimbriel (Wisdom of Crowds).

* Reader comment (Wisdom of Crowds).

* Rethinking Sex by Christine Emba.

* Friedrich Nietzsche (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy).

This post is part of our collaboration with the University of Pittsburgh’s Center for Governance and Markets.

Conservatives often argue that liberalism is not a neutral political system. Liberalism, they say, has values of its own. It sneakily promotes these values as normative, and even good, for the citizens of liberal societies — whether those citizens like it or not.

The philosopher and self-proclaimed liberal Alexandre Lefebvre believes that, empirically speaking, this conservative critique is pretty much true. As the title of his new book, Liberalism as a Way of Life, suggests, liberals should own up to the fact that they believe in more than a political system. They believe in a way of life. But a way of life requires values, and where do liberals get their values from?

Christine and Shadi talk to Alex about these questions and more in a probing, contentious examination of Alex’s book. How does liberalism ground its preferences? How does it defend the idea of human dignity? Why is personal freedom a good thing? Moreover, how do religious people, who want to live in a liberal political society without necessarily believing in liberalism as a way of life, fit into Alex’s theory?

In the bonus section for paid subscribers, Alex explains why becoming a true liberal requires overcoming your “inner Karen,” and Christine and Shadi quiz Alex on his list of the seventeen joys of liberalism. How does liberalism lead to playfulness? What about redemption? Find out by listening to this rapid-fire, ideas-packed episode.

Required Reading:

* Liberalism as a Way of Life by Alexandre Lefebvre.

* Alex’s personal website.

* “Natural Law” (Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy).

* Justice: Rights and Wrongs by Nicholas Wolterstorff.

* Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World by Tom Holland.

* “John Rawls” (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy).

* Ordinary Vices by Judith N. Shklar.

* Disney Princess (tvtropes.org).

* “Carl Schmitt” (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy).

* Irving Kristol: A conservative is a liberal who was “mugged by reality.”

* Surgeon General’s Advisory on Our Epidemic of Loneliness and Isolation (hhs.gov).

* “Long Term Trends in Deaths of Despair” (US Senate, Joint Economic Committee).

* “Karen” meme origin.

This post is part of our collaboration with the University of Pittsburgh’s Center for Governance and Markets.

The war in Gaza is dividing Israeli opinion, but not along the same lines that it divides American opinion. What are Israeli priorities? How important is the return of hostages relative to total victory? What is Netanyahu thinking? What is the Israeli Left thinking? Is there an anti-war movement in Israel? Do American categories make any sense within the Israeli political context?

Washington Post political columnist Jason Willick joins Shadi and Damir to answer these questions. He just returned from a fact-finding mission in Israel, and the news he brings is complicated. On the one hand, there is more widespread support for the war in Israel than there is anywhere else. On the other, the divisions within Israeli politics run deep, especially regarding the details of a post-war settlement.

As discussion of Israeli views develops into a critique of those views, Jason and Damir question Shadi’s abiding moralism, asking whether ideas like “just war” and “proportionality” are helpful in making sense of war and combat. The debate then turns to whether Hamas is a legitimate representative of the Palestinian people. Could the Israeli government ever accept Hamas as a negotiating partner in establishing a post-war Gaza? Would doing so give a tacit victory to Hamas, and legitimize political violence? Can anything be resolved without continuing this war? And will this war ever end? Tough questions, discussed with wryness and charm. This is a Wisdom of Crowds episode you will not want to miss.

Required Reading:

* “If Biden thinks Israel’s liberals are doves, he’s dreaming,” by Jason Willick (Washington Post).

* “Hamas’ Bid for Revolutionary Legitimacy,” by Damir Marusic (Wisdom of Crowds).

* “In the Israeli-Palestinian debate, you might be wrong. So be humble,” by Shadi Hamid (Washington Post).

* “Just War Theory” (Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy).

* “Occupation and Reconstruction of Japan, 1945–52” (Office of the Historian, US Department of State).

* “Give Peace a Chance,” by John Lennon.

This post is part of our collaboration with the University of Pittsburgh’s Center for Governance and Markets.

Martha Nussbaum teaches philosophy, ethics, and law at the University of Chicago, and is one of the most influential and cited philosophers of our time. She’s written dozens of books on Greek philosophy, the importance of emotions in politics, justice, feminism, and many other topics. She joins the podcast to discuss her new book, Justice for Animals: Our Collective Responsibility.

Shadi begins the conversation by inquiring about the moral motivations behind Professor Nussbaum’s advocacy for animal rights. He also wonders how human beings can, given their finite resources and time, focus on animal rights over other issues, like war or poverty. Nussbaum pushes back, arguing that animal rights is only one part of a web of issues, like overpopulation and climate change, that have to be addressed holistically. Sam provides some philosophical background, placing Nussbaum’s thought within the context of her work as a whole, which is focused on justice, freedom, and human flourishing.

It’s an energetic episode, where three sharp minds constantly challenge each other to clarify their thoughts. Ultimately, the question of the meaning of life—both for animals and humans—emerges, as Nussbaum asks whether death should be perceived as something negative, and Shadi considers the significance of belief in the afterlife.

Required Reading:

* Justice for Animals: Our Collective Responsibility by Martha Nussbaum.

* “Mortal Immortals: Lucretius on Death and the Voice of Nature,” by Martha Nussbaum (Philosophy and Phenomenological Research).

* “The Dilemmas of Living in a Post-Religious World,” by Shadi (Washington Post).

* 1966 Animal Welfare Act.

* 1918 Migratory Bird Treaty Act.

* R. M. Hare (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy).

* Epicurus (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy).

* Lucretius (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy).

Do Arab Americans support pro-Palestine protests because of identity politics? What about American Jewish support for Israel? Are both groups being “tribal” or are they fighting for universal values — as they understand them?

Recently, policy guru and Ur-Blogger Matt Yglesias pointed out that some of the political thinkers who, just a couple years ago, were aligned in opposition to identity politics today find themselves on opposite sides over Palestine. One of the names Matt mentioned was our own Shadi Hamid. What happened?

Matt joins Damir, and Shadi to figure it out. In their conversation, they discuss the demands of pro-Palestine protestors, whether conditioning aid to Israel would be effective, whether global justice claims are “nonsense,” and of course the nature of identity. Why do we believe what we believe, and how do come to hold the positions that we hold?

Towards the end of the episode, the conversation gets more personal, when both Shadi and Matt go deeper on how their own religious identities have been affected by the Gaza war. Matt, a liberal Jew who supports a two-state solution, says: “Playing dice with the existence of Israel is dangerous, it’s a lot for my heart.”

NOTE: We felt the final 20 minutes of the conversation with Matt were fascinating and surprising in the best way possible, capturing something important about this American moment — so we are dropping the paywall and making the full episode available for all subscribers. We hope you enjoy it.

Required Reading:

* Slow Boring, Matthew Yglesias’ Substack.

* “A Letter on Justice and Open Debate,” AKA “The Harper’s Letter” (Harper’s).

* Martin Luther King, Jr. and Israel (Washington Post).

* “Israel’s Two Wars” by Matthew Yglesias (Slow Boring).

* Shadi’s tweet, drawing on his book The Problem of Democracy, on how U.S. support for Israel undermines Arab democracy: “Our relationship with Israel distorts U.S. policy in the Middle East. We support Arab dictators in part because they are more likely to accept Israel's dominant position in the region. Democracy, however, would elevate anti-Israel parties to power.”

* Matt Yglesias on X: “It’s interesting that a bunch of people who I read who four years ago were in agreement about the perils of identity politics now sharply disagree about Israel/Palestine and the disagreements exactly track Jewish vs Arab or Muslim backgrounds.”

* The Mexican-American War.

This post is part of our collaboration with the University of Pittsburgh’s Center for Governance and Markets.

Last December, the highest court in the State of Colorado ruled that Donald Trump’s involvement with January 6 disqualified him from holding the office of president. On May 4, the Supreme Court voted unanimously to overturn this decision, clearing the way for Trump to appear on the ballot in all fifty states.

Naturally, at Wisdom of Crowds these events got us thinking about the big questions. When it comes to eligibility for office, who should have the final say — the Supreme Court, or the voters? What is more important for a democracy: Elections or rights? And where do rights come from, anyway?At the moment, these questions are mostly being discussed on the Left side of the aisle, so we invited two prominent left-wing writers to argue about them in a live show. Osita Nwanevu is a journalist for The New Republic, currently writing a book about American democracy. Samuel Moyn is a law professor at Yale University, whose latest book is titled, Liberalism Against Itself: Cold War Intellectuals and the Making of Our Times. For paid subscribers, the bonus content includes a raucous Q & A session with our live audience.

Enjoy a highly informed discussion about the most important political questions of our time, find out why Damir considers both Osita and Sam to be “revolutionaries,” and think about which branch of the US government really deserves to be called “a Council of Elders.”

Required Reading:

* The Colorado ruling.

* The Supreme Court decision.

* “Resisting the Juristocracy” by Samuel Moyn (Boston Review).

* “The Constitution is the Crisis,” by Osita Nwanevu (The New Republic).

This post is part of our collaboration with the University of Pittsburgh’s Center for Governance and Markets.

Pro-Palestine protests have spread to college campuses across the country. Our social media feeds are flooded with images of chanting students and clashes with police. Meanwhile, Congress has passed a bill to deliver more aid to Israel, and there’s signs that the IDF is about to move on Rafah. In this episode, Shadi explores what it means to stand in solidarity with the protests, while Damir teases out their effect on brass tacks politics The two discuss what the right approach should be toward the anti-Semitic elements in the protests, whether anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism are the same thing, what the Democrats might be thinking, and how Shadi wishes the United States would leverage its relationship with Israel.

In a spicy Part 2 for paid subscribers only, our hosts get into tricky territory while discussing Shadi’s pro-woke turn and the philosophical question of group affinity. In times of crisis, do human beings stand on principle? Or do they rally to their own ethnic or religious side? As Shadi observes: “Wokeness is able to grasp something important about the world that maybe I unfairly dismissed.”

For more, please subscribe!

Required Reading:

* “Anti-Zionism is Deadlier Than Antisemitism,” by Joshua Muravchik (WSJ).

* “Why it matters that some Democrats voted against aid for Israel,” by Shadi Hamid (Washington Post).

* The Arc of the Covenant: The United States, Israel, and the Fate of the Jewish People by Walter Russell Mead.

* Matthew Yglesias on X: “It’s interesting that a bunch of people who I read who four years ago were in agreement about the perils of identity politics now sharply disagree about Israel/Palestine and the disagreements exactly track Jewish vs Arab or Muslim backgrounds.”

This post is part of our collaboration with the University of Pittsburgh’s Center for Governance and Markets.

Required Reading and Listening:

Hamid v. Bessner, Round 1: “Is a Better World Possible without American Power?” (Wisdom of Crowds)

Shadi’s recent post about completing his manuscript: “The Art of Losing Well” (Wisdom of Crowds).

The Disagreement homepage.

Christine and Damir kick things off by discussing a memoir about the fall of Communism in Albania. Damir reflects on his own post-Communist background, and ponders why Communist nostalgia affects only some countries, while others are not looking back. He wonders whether Christine is becoming a Communist herself after reading her essay about “Limitarianism,” a school of political thought that favors a cap on extreme wealth. Christine unpacks her own ideas about economic justice and democracy, and considers whether the Communist past in Europe should influence American political ideas for the future.

For paid subscribers, the bonus part of the episode focuses on whether the United States or Europe has the better economic system, and whether European dreams of a “green” economy can survive competition with China.

Required Reading:

* Free: Coming of Age at the End of History by Lea Ypi.

* The full story behind Joyce Carol Oates’ infamous tweet.

* Damir’s Monday Note about Lea Ypi’s book.

* Limitarianism by Ingrid Robeyns

* “What Would Society Look Like if Extreme Wealth Were Impossible?” by Christine Emba (The Atlantic)

* “The Price of Peace is Stagnation” by Janan Ganesh (The Financial Times)

This post is part of our collaboration with the University of Pittsburgh’s Center for Governance and Markets.

This week’s podcast is a recording of a live event. Rachel M. Cohen, a senior policy reporter for Vox, recently published an essay where she asks: “To our generation, being a mom looks thankless, exhausting, and lonely. Can we change the story?” As listeners know, this question speaks right to the heart of Wisdom of Crowds. Christine and Shadi invited Rachel to discuss her piece before a live audience in Washington, DC on March 20. The topics of conversation included marriage, singleness, hope, dread, and love. For paid subscribers, the bonus content is an intense Q&A with the audience, where the Crowd challenges the panelists on several points.

Required Reading:

* “Why Millennials Learned to Dread Motherhood,” by Rachel M. Cohen (Vox).

* “Men are Lost. Here’s a Map Out of the Wilderness,” by Christine Emba (Washington Post).

* Shadi Hamid, “The Dilemmas of Living in a Post-Religious World” (Washington Post).

Many attempts have been made to deal with polarization. A lot of it has to do with putting people with diverging perspectives face-to-face in an attempt to try to find common ground. Here at Wisdom of Crowds, we have tackled the problem by taking only half of this approach: we insist that people in disagreement confront each other, but with no expectation of common ground emerging.

We frequently talk about “deep difference.” We believe it’s naive to think that through reasoned discourse we can reach compromise positions. That does violence to the power of ideas and the strength of belief. We think it’s both healthier and more realistic to acknowledge that certain differences can’t be reconciled, and to instead direct the conversation toward respectful mutual interrogation — where the discussants push each other to excavate why they believe what they believe.

Jen Murtazashvili is one person who is profoundly aligned with what we’re doing. She first came on the Wisdom of Crowds podcast in August of 2021 to talk about America’s withdrawal from Afghanistan. But both Shadi and Damir had gotten to know her almost a year earlier, during the start of COVID, when she kindly invited them both to participate in an online seminar about modus vivendi liberalism. Jen’s extensive work on Afghanistan had given her cause to be suspicious of top-down thinking that nation-building requires. She understands that societies are built from the bottom-up, from local insights, from particularism. Difference can’t be papered over.

We have been planning to collaborate more with Jen’s Center for Governance and Markets at the University of Pittsburgh for some time. Today, we’re pleased to announce that collaboration is kicking off. In the coming months, you will see podcast episodes and essays that will carry the CGM logo, featuring guests and writers and thinkers that the three of us have decided we need to engage with. First principles and the spirit of modus vivendi will animate all of it.

To launch the collaboration, we wanted to have Jen on the podcast. We didn’t explicitly set out to model exactly what we hope to achieve with the collaboration. But with the Gaza War in the background, it was impossible that we wouldn’t get to discussing it. As you’ll hear below, the conversation is deeply felt and argued — and remains unresolved. That’s as it should be.

(The paywall is down on this one, so everyone can give it a listen.)

We walked away from it energized to do more. We hope, dear listeners, you feel the same way. And you join us as we continue our Governing Deep Differences project.

Required Reading (and Listening):

* “Community Before Politics,” by Jennifer Brick Murtazashvili (Discourse Magazine).

* “Two Friends — One Jewish, One Muslim — Have an Answer to Campus Conflict, by Jennifer Brick Murtazashvili and Abdesalam Soudi (Tablet).

* “All Aboard the Compassion Bus — with Jen Murtazashvili,” on Ask a Jew Podcast (Apple).

* A tweet by Senator Fetterman (X).

* “The U.S. has more in common with South America than Europe,” by Samuel Goldman (The Week).

* “Hamas’ Bid for Revolutionary Legitimacy,” by Damir Marusic (WoC).

This post is part of our collaboration with the University of Pittsburgh’s Center for Governance and Markets.

Wisdom of Crowds is a platform challenging premises and understanding first principles on politics and culture. Join us!

—Shadi Hamid, co-founder, Wisdom of Crowds

What’s it actually like to be a novelist? And how does literary success—and some amount of fame and notoriety—change how people think of you?

Special guest Jordan Castro joins Shadi and Santiago to talk about his novel, The Novelist, internet culture, converting to Christianity, his heroin addiction, love and, of course, literature.

At nearly two hours it’s a rich and, dare we say it, epic chat on the stuff of life. If you’ve ever wanted to get in the brain of a writer, you won’t want to miss this. Really.

Required Reading:

* The Novelist by Jordan Castro

* Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on René Girard

* New anthology of Girard’s essential writings

* Varieties of Religious Experience by William James

* The Present Age: On the Death of Rebellion by Søren Kierkegaard

* Dante: “I found myself within a forest dark …”

* Plato’s Myth of the Cave in the Republic

* Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert

* The Perpetual Orgy: Flaubert and Madame Bovary by Mario Vargas Llosa

* Maxime du Camp

* Substance Abuse National Helpline: 1-800-662-HELP (4357)

In a late-night confab, Damir and Sam explore the meaning of experiences of wonder, which they each have written about for Wisdom of Crowds.

For Sam, these unique experiences are the foundation for his beliefs about the nature of the world and human life. Damir, on the other hand, does not believe that the experience of wonder necessarily leads to metaphysical questions. This freewheeling, stay-up-all-night fever dream of a conversation covers the pitfalls of therapy, the science of happiness, and lots of ancient Greek literature.

Required Reading:

* Damir’s piece, “A Lost Sense of Wonder,” Wisdom of Crowds

* Sam’s piece, “Desire, Sadness, and the World,” Wisdom of Crowds

* Oliver Traldi, “Do You Know What You Want?”, Wisdom of Crowds

* Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self

* Charles Taylor, A Secular Age

* Parmenides’ fragments

A recently-published memoir making headlines suggests a trend: Polyamory is going mainstream among high-status Americans. Culture critic and environmental studies professor Tyler Austin Harper joins Christine and Shadi to make sense of this fad, and explain why it’s both an upper-class luxury and a raw deal. Along the way they discuss happiness, self-expression, race, love, self-immolation, parenting, and a better way to live.

Required Reading:

* Tyler Austin Harper, “Polyamory, the Ruling Class’s Latest Fad.”

* Tyler Austin Harper, “I’m a Black Professor. You Don’t Need to Bring That Up.”

* Tyler Austin Harper, “The 100-Year Extinction Panic Is Back, Right on Schedule.”

* Shadi Hamid, “Is Polyamory the Future?”

* Molly Roden Winter, More: A Memoir of Open Marriage.

* Janet W. Hardy and Dossie Easton, The Ethical Slut.

* Philip Rieff, The Triumph of the Therapeutic: Uses of Faith after Freud.

* Christine Emba, Rethinking Sex: A Provocation.

This post is part of our collaboration with the University of Pittsburgh’s Center for Governance and Markets.

Wisdom of Crowds is a platform challenging premises and understanding first principles on politics and culture. Join us!

Christine and Damir discuss two personal essays from New York magazine that went viral last week. The first deals with divorce, the second with getting scammed. A flabbergasted Damir can’t believe they were published; he wonders if anyone outside New York would care to read them. Christine finds ironic wisdom buried in both essays. The conversation ends on a high note, with Christine explaining how one of the essays breaks new ground in the media monoculture.

Required Reading:

* Emily Gould, “The Lure of Divorce,” New York magazine.

* Charlotte Cowls, “The Day I Put $50,000 in a Shoe Box and Handed It to a Stranger,” New York magazine.

* Christine’s three theories about the above essays.

* Elizabeth Wurtzel, Prozac Nation.

* Kristen Roupenian, “Cat Person”.

* Ross Douthat, The Decadent Society.

Jason Blakely of Pepperdine University joins Shadi and Damir to discuss his new book, Lost in Ideology: Interpreting Modern Political Life. A professor of political science, Jason claims that everyone has an ideology. The point is to be aware of it, and to remember that there’s always more to reality than your ideology can explain.

Damir doesn’t buy it. The quest for power, he thinks, is what ultimately drives politics, not ideas. Meanwhile, Shadi tries to figure out Jason’s ideology.

Required Reading:

* Jason’s new book, Lost in Ideology: Interpreting Modern Political Life

* Jason’s controversial Harper’s essay, “Doctor’s Orders”

* Jason’s old book, We Built Reality: How Social Science Infiltrated Culture, Politics, and Power

* Jorge Luis Borges, “On Exactitude in Science”

* Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan

* Niccolo Machiavelli, The Prince

* Thomas More, Utopia

* Desiderius Erasmus, In Praise of Folly

* Anthony Fauci, “I represent science” statement and backlash

This post is part of our collaboration with the University of Pittsburgh’s Center for Governance and Markets.

Wisdom of Crowds is a platform challenging premises and understanding first principles on politics and culture. Join us!

Our brand new Executive Editor, Santiago Ramos, joins Shadi and Damir to discuss his first-ever essay for Wisdom of Crowds, “Empathy for the Devil.” The essay is about the need for cognitive empathy in politics. But Damir wants to discuss something slightly different: Whether “the Good,” as a category, is something real, out in the world, or whether it is completely contingent on tribal allegiances. Santiago comes to the Good’s defense, and Shadi joins him in a good cop/also good cop situation.

Required Reading & Listening:

* Shadi’s big announcement

* Santiago’s writing

* Santiago’s debut Wisdom of Crowds essay, “Empathy for the Devil”

* Robert Wright’s Nonzero Newsletter

* The Rolling Stones, “Sympathy for the Devil”

* Mikhail Bulgakov, The Master and the Margarita

* Maurice Blondel, in the International Encyclopedia of Philosophy

* Amy Winehouse, “You Know I’m No Good”

Wisdom of Crowds is a platform challenging premises and understanding first principles on politics and culture. Join us!

Are ideas overrated?

Shadi’s recent column (and controversial tweet) exploring the reasons behind Trump’s popularity launches a discussion about what exactly drives politics. Are politicians motivated by winning more than ideology? Do voters respond to strong personalities, rather than policies and promises?

As expected, Damir makes a case for “materialism” over ideas. Shadi isn’t totally convinced.

Required Reading:

* Shadi, “The Peculiar Moderation of Donald Trump,” Washington Post, 1/25/2024

* Shadi’s tweet

* Bruno Maçães’ tweet

* David Ignatius, “The Midwest Tacks Hard Toward a Mideast ‘Moment of Truth’,” Washington Post, 2/1/2024

* Eduardo Porter, “Republicans’ Immigration Bill is Not Serious Legislation,” Washington Post, 2/2/2024

* Thomas Friedman, “A Biden Doctrine for the Middle East is Forming. And it’s Big,” New York Times, 1/31/2024

* Bruno Maçães on Wisdom of Crowds

Three months into the Israel-Gaza war, Shadi, Damir, and Sam get philosophical about morality and international relations. Is it realistic to expect states to behave morally? Is the Western concern for human rights real? Or is it merely a mask for self-interest and imperial rule?

The American attitude toward the war has caused Shadi to doubt his conviction in the goodness of American power. Damir thinks he sees an opportunity to drag Shadi to his amoral way of analyzing the world. A familiar tussle follows, with each citing examples from history to make their case.

Is America just another empire, doing what empires always do? Or is it an agent of democracy, prosperity, and moral progress, despite its many failings?

In the full episode (for paying subscribers only), Sam increasingly intervenes in the debate, forcing Shadi (and to a lesser extent Damir) to justify their moral priors. Is democracy good in itself, or does the good come from faith and religion?

Required Reading:

* Shadi’s growing doubts (Twitter/X).

* Damir growing glee at Shadi’s doubts (Twitter/X).

* I Saw Satan Fall Like Lighting by René Girard.

* Sam’s essay, “Relinquishing Utopia”

* Humane: How the United States Abandoned Peace and Reinvented War by Samuel Moyn

* Wisdom of Crowds episode with Samuel Moyn

* Our now legendary episode with pseudonymous Muslim writer Dragoman

* Dragoman’s essay, “I wanted to love America”

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Longtime member of the Crowd and WoC contributor Tom Barson once called episodes when Shadi and Damir just chew over stuff “train wrecks”. (He meant it in an affectionate way — we think.) Well that’s what this episode is: a classic back and forth that ranges far and wide.

Shadi asks Damir how his year ended. Damir admits he’s feeling properly burned out. Does following two bloody wars all too closely contribute to a feeling of helplessness? And isn’t feeling drained by reading about war itself a product of extreme privilege and luxury? With signs of wider conflict spreading in the Middle East, we still can’t properly wrap our heads around what a world-changing war might look like.

In the full episode (for paying subscribers only), Shadi reveals how the rise of urban violence — DC surpassed Baltimore in murders last year — has him thinking about zombie movies, and the gnawing uncertainty that was the hallmark of the early days of COVID.

Required Reading:

* “The Unserious Generation,” by Damir Marusic (WoC).

* “Unconstructive Ambiguity,” by Damir Marusic (WoC).

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Aaron Sibarium, a star reporter over at the Washington Free Beacon covering the campus culture wars, joined us this week to talk about Claudine Gay’s resignation. Aaron’s reporting on Gay’s plagiarism was instrumental in her eventual downfall.

We start the episode discussing the merits of the case, but quickly switch gears to talk about first principles. What does it mean for our society if culture war becomes a war of personal destruction? Will it lead to a better world, in universities and more broadly, or have we just descended into another level of vengeful retribution?

In the full episode (for paying subscribers only), we discuss the parallel with the Supreme Court, and the railroading of Robert Bork in 1987. The Court has never been the same since, and is arguably quite degraded since its mid-century heyday. Maybe this is all just the product of the inherent, glorious messiness of democracy? Or are we going the way of Weimar Germany?

Required Reading:

* “Fresh Allegations of Plagiarism Unearthed in Official Academic Complaint Against Claudine Gay,” by Aaron Sibarium (Washington Free Beacon).

* “Harvard Itself Unearthed New Case of Plagiarism,” by Aaron Sibarium (Washington Free Beacon).

* “Harvard President Claudine Gay Hit by Six New Charges of Plagiarism,” by Aaron Sibarium (Washington Free Beacon).

* “Harvard’s President Claudine Gay Should Resign,” by Ruth Marcus (Washington Post).

* “The Rise and Fall of Claudine Gay,” by Shadi Hamid (WoC).

* “The Weimarization of the American Republic,” by Aaron Sibarium (American Purpose).

This week, our in-house philosopher and very own Editor-at-Large Samuel Kimbriel returns to the podcast for a one-on-one discussion with Shadi Hamid about wealth, ambition and whether they are the paths toward happiness.

How do societal values, especially those in American culture, influence our sense of fulfillment? The guys probe why those who are perceived as the most successful — like tech entrepreneurs and posh weekend travelers — seem to be the least happy. This opens up questions about how those who face adversity find forms of happiness be it through a craft, a spiritual pursuit, or the broader expectations baked into their life circumstance. This deep and free-wheeling episode opens up rifts between Shadi and Sam’s perspectives on the utility of the happiness literature, the role economics and material success play, and what we sacrifice in the pursuit of what we think will ultimately bring us contentment.

In the full episode (for paying subscribers only), Shadi and Sam continue exploring the tension between ambition and spiritual fulfillment. They explore how societal values, rooted in seeing humans as economic entities, lead to existential despair. Shadi calls attention to how religious practices, like Ramadan, compel individuals to break from a regimen of relentless productivity and consumption. This episode is a real treat and we’re excited to share it with you.

Required Reading:

* Friendship as Sacred Knowing: Overcoming Isolation by Samuel Kimbriel (Amazon).

* “Thinking Is Risky” by Samuel Kimbriel (Wisdom of Crowds).

* What Money Can't Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets by Michael Sandel (Amazon).

* The Sickness Unto Death: A Christian Psychological Exposition For Upbuilding And Awakening by Soren Kierkegaard (Amazon).

* More about Aspen Institute’s Society and Philosophy Initiative.

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We’re thrilled to publish the audio from our first major event in collaboration with Aspen Institute’s Philosophy & Society Initiative. P&S and Wisdom of Crowds have grown up together and are both relentlessly focused on getting down to first principle questions. Click the link below and add your email to the mailing list to find out when we’re doing more of these kinds of events.

In this episode, we take on the crisis of masculinity. Damir Marusic asks our own Christine Embaand Washington Post nonfiction book criticbecca rothfeld whether the crisis is in fact real, and if so, what can be done about it.

Christine argues there is hard evidence that young men are struggling — young men are dropping out of school, their unemployment rates are up, and deaths of despair are rising. Becca is less convinced — she thinks we may be misdiagnosing the problem, and in doing so are entrenching harmful stereotypes and gender norms.

In the full episode (for paying subscribers only) the audience chimes in with questions, and the conversation takes some surprising turns. Is modernity making heterosexual relationships more difficult? Is technology making re-evaluating gender roles easier? And who has the advantage on dating apps?

Required Reading:

* The Aspen Institute’s Philosophy and Society Initiative.

* “If attitudes don’t shift, a political dating mismatch will threaten marriage” by Editorial Board (The Washington Post).

* “How to be a man? Josh Hawley has the (incoherent) answers” by Becca Rothfeld (Washington Post).

* “Men are lost. Here’s a map out of the wilderness” by Christine Emba (The Washington Post).

* “‘The Two-Parent Privilege’ gets caught in the trap of convention,” by Becca Rothfeld (Washington Post).

* “Single moms know marriage would be ideal, but how do they get one?” by Christine Emba (Washington Post).

* “An uneasy political marriage... or not” by Christine Emba (Wisdom of Crowds).

* The Two-Parent Privilege: How Americans Stopped Getting Married and Started Falling Behind by Melissa Kearney (Amazon).

* Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women by Susan Faludi (Amazon).

* Rethinking Sex: A Provocation by Christine Emba (Amazon).

* Manhood: The Masculine Virtues America Needs (Amazon).

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What constitutes justifiable warfare—and how should the overall impact of conflicts be evaluated? With the United States being so closely associated with Israel’s war, is it possible to still envision America as a “force for good” in the world? One of America’s leading leftist intellectuals, Samuel Moyn, joins us to debate these questions and much more. Sam is the Chancellor Kent Professor of History at Yale University and the author of Humane: How the United States Abandoned Peace and Reinvented War and most recently Liberalism Against Itself: Cold War Intellectuals and the Making of Our Times.

Amid the ongoing war in Gaza, the conversation dives into the potential for humane wars and whether progress, even in war, is possible. While Sam acknowledges that the conduct of war has become more “targeted” and “proportional,” he argues that relatively more humane wars can distract us from more ultimate questions of whether wars are just or moral in the first place. The questions at hand sharply divide Sam, Damir Marusic and Shadi Hamid in this charged conversation. In the post-9/11 era, the U.S. has pioneered a new way of waging war, with lawyers present at various levels of military decisions. But what has resulted is a world where wars are endless in part because they are less lethal. Is this “progress” or is it something more sinister?

In the full episode (for paying subscribers only), the three clash over moral warfare in the real world, including whether American hegemony has prevented large-scale conflicts and can continue to do so, including between China and Taiwan. Has American dominance been good for the world, on balance? Yes, less people die and there may be less major wars, but Sam argues that this is an unacceptably minimalist standard for judging progress. What, then, is the alternative? The conversation ends with Sam’s optimistic vision for a narrative of progress that focuses on pivoting the U.S. in a leftward direction that avoids repeating the mistakes of an overly interventionist era.

Required Reading:

* Humane: How the United States Abandoned Peace and Reinvented War, by Samuel Moyn (Amazon).

* Liberalism Against Itself: Cold War Intellectuals and the Making of Our Times, by Samuel Moyn (Amazon).

* Black Snow: Curtis LeMay, the Firebombing of Tokyo, and the Road to the Atomic Bomb, by James M. Scott (Amazon).

* The Hamid-Moyn cage match on whether America is a force for good in the world, hosted by Intelligence Squared (YouTube).

* “The Moral Dilemmas of Total War,” by Tom Barson (Wisdom of Crowds).

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Why do Americans struggle so much to understand Palestinians? A former advisor to the Palestinian leadership and a participant in the doomed 2008 Annapolis peace talks, Khaled Elgindy has written arguably the definitive account of America’s blind spot. In Blind Spot: America and the Palestinians, from Balfour to Trump, Khaled chronicles how time and time again the U.S. has failed to see the Palestinians as actors in their own right.

But beyond the specifics of policy, there is a question of humanity—specifically, the seeming inability or unwillingness of American politicians to extend any genuine consideration towards Palestinians’ suffering. The White House’s empathy gap has surprised even Khaled. He traces this back to an affinity for Israel’s Western liberal values but also the various and entrenched mythologies that obscure the dispossession of Palestinians. Khaled, Damir, and Shadi clash over whether Cold War geopolitics is what drove America to deprioritize the ethical considerations of Palestinians and whether Israeli consensus sees a distinction between Hamas and Palestinians broadly.

In the full episode (for paying subscribers only), the three debate how much blame Hamas deserves for provoking a war whose burden ordinary Palestinians would have to bear. What was Hamas thinking—and when the fighting stops, will Palestinians direct their anger towards Hamas and other militants? Is it possible to envision a future scenario where Hamas, now chastened by its first total war with Israel, fully commits to politics and eschews armed struggle?

Finally, the three discuss whether it’s reasonable to expect Israeli officials to care about Palestinian suffering. This is the reality of states, particularly after the other side has been dehumanized: they simply don’t care. Why should Israel care? This leads into a sobering consideration of nightmare scenarios in which tens of thousands of Palestinians may die, including from the “slow death” of hunger and disease.

Require Reading:

* Blind Spot: America and the Palestinians, from Balfour to Trump by Khaled Elgindy (Amazon).

* “A cease-fire in Gaza isn’t a fantasy. Here’s how it could work.” by Shadi Hamid (The Washington Post).

* “Thinking About Peace” by Damir Marusic. (Wisdom of Crowds).

* Khaled’s Twitter page.

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After nearly a month of being consumed by the Israel-Hamas war, Shadi Hamid and Damir Marusic take a step back to evaluate the prospects of an end to the violence, while still probing their own priors.

Damir argues that “moral clarity” is often anything but clarifying, but concedes that “realism” can be self-defeating, because people can’t help but think in both emotional and moral terms during a conflict like this. Meanwhile, Shadi opens up about his inner struggles reconciling his sympathy for the plight of Palestinians and his role as an analyst called on to come up with meaningful solutions to intractable problems.

The conversation turns to rifts opening up at home. Support for President Biden among Arab Americans has plummeted, and a generational divide is also becoming apparent. But has youth activism on the Palestinian question actually succeeded in shifting U.S. policy and attitudes towards the conflict more broadly?

In the full episode (for paying subscribers only) Shadi and Damir discuss their experiences in Israel. As early as 2019 (when both of them last visited), even the left-wingers in Israel sounded pretty right-wing. What will this war mean for the future of Israeli politics? Are Israeli and American interests aligned in any meaningful sense? And is “democracy vs. autocracy” really the best framework for thinking about the world?

Required Reading:

* “Ceasefire, Plans and Activism” by Shadi Hamid (Wisdom of Crowds).

* “Hamas’ Bid for Revolutionary Legitimacy” by Damir Marusic (Wisdom of Crowds).

* “Is ISIS rational?” by Shadi Hamid (The Atlantic).

* Our previous podcast episode, “The End of the World As We Know It”, with Robert Nicholson.

* “Israel’s two wars” by Matt Yglesias (Slow Boring).

* “Dick Durbin first U.S. senator to call for Gaza ceasefire, tied to Hamas' release of hostages” (CBS News).

* Zack Beauchamp’s tweet about Hamas spokesman’s crappy propaganda.

* American attitudes on support for Israel (Matt Yglesias on Twitter).

* Americans blaming Hamas for Palestinian casualties (Aaron Astor on Twitter).

* Quinnipiac poll of registered voters on sending weapons to Israel.

* Data For Progress poll on likely voters support for a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas.

* Zogby-Arab American Institute poll, including declining favorability of Biden among Arab Americans.

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Robert, a Christian and self-described Zionist, expresses empathy for the Israeli perception of an existential threat next door. Hamas’ attacks have undermined, perhaps fatally, any hope that Israelis might have had that peaceful co-existence is possible not just with Palestinians but with Arabs more broadly. The three consider alternative scenarios, including a reoccupation of Gaza or a policy of complete and total separation.

In the United States, meanwhile, Arab Americans are reacting with despair at President Biden’s stalwart support of Israel. Shadi finds himself in the unenviable position of writing a book subtitled “The Case for American Dominance.” If this is what American dominance looks like, Shadi wonders, can he really support it? And how is he supposed to make the case to Arabs and Muslims that America is, on balance, a force for good?

In the full episode (for paying subscribers only), Shadi, Damir and Robert delve into tricky territory, debating whether “Islamic exceptionalism” makes it difficult for Muslims to ever really accept a U.S.-led order and to ever accept a world in which Israel is as powerful as it is. Were the religious passions that are now being unleashed across the Arab world inevitable—or could they have been tamed and contained by democracy?

Damir and Robert argue that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict isn’t really about Israel or Palestine but is a proxy for a deeper set of religious, cultural, and civilizational fault lines. In this sense, there may be no way out and no room for compromise. And Arabs and Muslims—as well as much of the Global South—may feel compelled to choose between two drastically different visions of world order: one led by the United States and the other led by America’s growing list of adversaries. There is, as they say, no alternative.

Required Reading:

* “The Death of the Two-State Solution,” by Damir Marusic (The American Interest).

* “Eight Steps to Shrink the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict,” by Micah Goodman (The Atlantic).

* “Support for Mass Protest on the Rise in Gaza and the West Bank,” by Catherine Cleveland (The Washington Institute for Near-East Policy).

* Public Opinion Poll Number 89 (The Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research).

* Islamic Exceptionalism, by Shadi Hamid (Amazon).

* ‘I Have No Pain Left to Feel,’ by Shadi Hamid (Substack).

* Our first episode after Hamas’ attacks in Israel, a classic Damir and Shadi conversation.

* Our conversation with Peter Beinart on Israel, Hamas, and why nonviolence failed.

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Two weeks after Hamas’s brutal attack on Israeli civilians, tensions have skyrocketed as Israel begins an offensive against Gaza from the air and the ground as the area home to over a half million Palestinians is plunged into darkness. What could have been done to avoid this renewed war and what are the best possible paths toward ending violence?

This week, Shadi Hamid and Damir Marusic invite Peter Beinart on to discuss. Peter writes at his Substack, The Beinart Notebook and is editor-at-large of Jewish Currents as well as professor of journalism and political science at the City University of New York. Peter emphasizes the importance of viewing the conflict in its historical context, one that includes severe violence on either side of the border. After Hamas’ brutal massacre of Israeli civilians and now Israel’s siege and bombardment of Gaza, how can we speak with moral clarity and consistency about the many lives that have been lost?

Hamas is a terrorist group, but that’s all the more reason to try to understand how and why the group has changed since it won the 2006 Palestinian elections. Were opportunities to tame the organization missed? Why did Netanyahu prefer Hamas’ rule over Gaza? As Peter and Shadi note, Israel undermined repeated attempts at Palestinian unity that would have brought the Palestinian Authority back to Gaza with Hamas stepping down from governing responsibilities. Was Hamas’ radicalization inevitable? Why does terrorism happen?

Regardless, it’s too late now. After what Hamas has done, there is no going back. Which raises the question: is there any way to move forward? What does a post-Hamas Gaza look like, especially now that Hamas appears to be gaining popularity in the West Bank? All of these questions can only be answered by addressing the question of violence head on. Why do some revolutionary movements turn to brutality while others counsel a principled resistance that takes pains to spare civilians?

In the full episode (for paying subscribers only), the three discuss the Biden administration’s approach to the Middle East policy and the role of the media in framing the war. They find historical parallels to the conflict, including the ANC in South Africa after Apartheid. Shadi asks whether it’s possible for the U.S. and the international community to “incentivize” nonviolent resistance, while Peter underscores the role of Arab citizens of Israel as potential mediators for a longer-term solution.

Required Reading:

* “On Addressing Jews,” by Peter Beinart (Jewish Currents).

* “There is a Jewish Hope for Palestinian Liberation. It Must Survive,” by Peter Beinart (New York Times).

* “West Bank Protests Spread Over Gaza War,” by Miriam Berger (Washington Post).

* Hamas Contained: The Rise and Pacification of Palestinian Resistance, by Tareq Baconi (Amazon).

* The 2017 Hamas charter.

* The 1988 Hamas charter.

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After Hamas fighters massacred hundreds of Israeli civilians, Israel is now massed on Gaza’s borders ahead of an operation that will likely devastate the Palestinian population. This week, Shadi Hamid and Damir Marusic sit down and unpack their complex thoughts and feelings about what is going on. What is the appropriate way to speak about atrocities after the fact?

In the imm…

What are the most valuable parts of our transient lives and how does our appraisal of them change as we age?

This week, Shadi Hamid and Damir Marusic take a step back from larger questions around current events to visit a recurring theme at Wisdom of Crowds around meaning. The episode centers around Damir’s recent Monday Note, “A Lost Sense of Wonder”, where he reflects on the pursuit of enchantment including in close relationships but also after witnessing a wondrous meteor shower in the Shenandoah Valley. The guys discuss how to think about the failure to recreate precious memories just as people they know move away and cities they remember visiting change. Should we feel melancholy in our nostalgia or continue finding comfort in the things that bring us happiness now? Meanwhile, Shadi dwells on judgement in the afterlife. He observes how the relationships that make life valuable are not enough for some, including those at ease with their own mortality — a disposition to which Shadi cannot quite relate.

In the full episode (for paying subscribers only) the two discuss the balance between pursuing virtue for potential rewards in the afterlife and doing right by people in the present. Shadi, a believer, admits to genuine fear about what happens after death. After all, if there is a heaven, there is also a hell. Damir, a non-believer, places more emphasis on finding purpose in oneself rather than adhering to otherworldly incentives. Is a balance between these two paths possible?

Subscribe to the listen to the full episode.

Required Reading:

* “A Lost Sense of Wonder”, by Damir Marusic (Wisdom of Crowds).

* “The Virtue Politics of Mitt Romney” (Wisdom of Crowds).

* “The Watusi bull riding shotgun is what makes America great” by David Von Drehle (The Washington Post).

* “This Really Is Europe” with Ben Judah, podcast episode (Wisdom of Crowds).

* “An Extremely Online Existence” podcast episode (Wisdom of Crowds).

* Shadi’s conversation with Sam Harris about meditation and being Muslim on Sam’s podcast, Waking Up.

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As the leaders of the major political parties show stark signs of advanced age, their supporters are bending over backwards to defend their own while criticizing their opponents. Politics at its purest.

This week, Shadi and Damir return from summer break to dive into the latest developments in D.C. as the next election looms. They discuss the self-interest and rank hypocrisy of the Republican Party conveyed in a new, fascinating profile of Senator Mitt Romney. Is the GOP irredeemable? The conversation heats up as the guys arrive at the intersection of hypocrisy, politics, and morality. Damir the cynic questions whether Romney’s pieties are all that impressive. Shadi, the moralist, lauds Romney as an exemplar of virtue politics—inextricably linked to Romney’s Mormon faith. Hypocrisy, Shadi argues, entails rather than negates morality. But of course there is such a thing as too much hypocrisy. Where to draw the line?

In the full episode (for paying subscribers only) Shadi and Damir grapple with how events shaped by establishment politicians dating back to the nineties ought to be viewed today. The guys discuss how fear of worst-case political outcomes scrambles an adherence to one’s moral and political beliefs. Damir argues that while he sympathizes with anti-Trump Republicans like Romney, their moral posturing doesn’t resolve fraught political questions. Shadi expresses concerns about the situation Democrats find themselves. In their obsession with avoiding a Trump victory, they may be making the the very outcome they fear more likely.

Required Reading:

* “We Need to Talk About Biden,” by Derek Hudson (Wisdom of Crowds).

* “What Mitt Romney Saw in the Senate,” by McKay Coppins (The Atlantic).

* “President Biden should not run again in 2024,” by David Ignatius (The Washington Post).

* “Democrats are crazy to insist only Biden can beat Trump,” by David Von Drehle (The Washington Post).

* "Is ‘Peak Woke’ Behind Us or Ahead?’ by Ross Douthat (The New York Times).

* “Mitt Romney Has Given Us A Gift” by David Brooks (The New York Times).

* CNN polling showing Trump remaining competitive against Biden.

* Political Hypocrisy by David Runciman.

* Hypocrisy and Integrity by Ruth Grant.

* “Better Man” by Pearl Jam.

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This week, we’re pulling one of our favorite and most explosive episodes from the archive. This one, from May 2022, with socialist intellectual Daniel Bessner on the role of America on the world stage. We encourage all of you, especially our newest Substack subscribers, to have a listen and tell us what they think in the comments. And if you aren’t yet a subscriber, …

Capitalism is a revolutionary force. It is not conservative. So why have conservatives gone along with market fundamentalism for so long?

Sohrab Ahmari, a convert to Catholicism, has been known as a culture warrior. This time he returns to the podcast to make a surprising argument. Ahmari, the founder and editor of Compact magazine, argues in his new book Tyranny, Inc., that it’s the economy, stupid. Private power is imposing its own tyranny through tools of economic coercion that exploit workers. It’s time to redirect attention from the hysteria over “wokeness” and toward establishing social democratic protections in America. That’s a view ubiquitous on the left, but a similar case is being made on the populist right.

Sohrab, Shadi, and Damir debate America’s economic order, its social contract, and whether the cruelty is the point. Embracing the label “pro-life New Dealer,” Sohrab laments the right’s obsession with the culture wars and argues that conservatives are losing sight of glaring problems in the economy. The three also delve into how an emboldened state may collide with Sohrab’s socially and culturally conservative values.

In the full episode (for paying subscribers only), Shadi, Damir, and Sohrab discuss whether the United States needs to stay “cruel” in order to remain the world’s economic leader. If politics is about tradeoffs, is this the one that Americans have to accept? They cover the GOP’s economic stance and what Sohrab sees as the incongruity between the party’s culturally conservative and pro-market positions. Conservatives appreciate the need for constraints on freedom when it comes to culture and morality. Why are they so resistant to constraints on economic freedom then? Finally the three consider to what extent Protestants and Catholics diverge on key questions of social and economic justice—and whether Republican Senators like J.D. Vance, Marco Rubio, and Josh Hawley can succeed in ushering in pro-labor policies.

Required Reading:

* Tyranny, Inc.: How Private Power Crushed American Liberty--and What to Do About It, by Sohrab Ahmari (Amazon).

* Compact Magazine, where Sohrab is founder and editor.

* Sohrab’s first appearance on Wisdom of Crowds.

* The meme Damir referenced about why America doesn't have universal health care.

* “On Conservatism and Capitalism,” by Damir Marusic (America’s Future).

* The Great Transformation, by Karl Polanyi (Amazon).

* The Market Revolution: Jacksonian America 1815-1846, by Charles Sellers (Amazon).

* Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation, by Kristin Kobes Du Mez (Amazon).

* Abraham Lincoln’s speech at the Wisconsin State Fair.

* Of Boys and Men, by Richard Reeves (Amazon).

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We’re living in the most prosperous time in human history with more material abundance and comfort — and yet something just feels… off. This week, Shadi Hamid and Samuel Kimbriel take a trip to the heartland to find out what that something is.

In this special live recording from the Lyceum Movement’s Tallgrass Ideas Festival in Iowa, Shadi and Sam join political theorist Susan Laehn to grapple with whether a sense of meaning precedes or succeeds happiness. With the live audience jumping in with comments and questions, the three delve into the balance between personal desires and finding collective meaning in a society. Then there is the question of whether freedom, to be truly “free,” requires constraint. On this there may be some differences.

In the full episode (for paying subscribers only), Shadi, Sam, and Susan take on the increasingly challenging question of how to balance individuality and community. There are dangers of going too far in the latter direction. As one audience member challenges the panel, many have fled societies because there was too much communal feeling. And then the Crowd finishes with a conversation about the role of love. It might sound corny, but trust us—it’s not. How can there be meaning without love? And is it possible to have a deeper love—with the unconditional forgiveness that that sometimes calls for without God.

Required Reading:

* Welcoming the Other: Student, Stranger and Divine, by Susan Laehn (Amazon).

* “A Radically Condensed History of Post Industrial Life,” by David Foster Wallace.

* Escape from Freedom, by Erich Fromm (Amazon).

* Friendship as Sacred Knowing: Overcoming Isolation, by Sam Kimbriel (Amazon).

* More about the Lyceum Movement.

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At a time of disruption in the workforce, rapidly shifting gender norms, a dearth of role models and declines in mental health, men are facing a distinct set of challenges that are prompting a renewed understanding of masculinity. For the last few years, viral right-of-center personalities have dominated the conversation offering men guidance that much of mainstream media has viewed as radioactive. But as the challenges men face become more apparent, others are recognizing the issue at hand isn’t just a right-wing conspiracy.

This week’s guest is our very own Christine Emba who recently wrote a brilliant long-form essay in The Washington Post, “Men are lost. Here’s a map out of the wilderness”. Christine scrutinizes both the provocative influencers on masculinity as well as mainstream commentators who’ve denied the problem exists, all while asking what a healthier masculinity looks like that isn’t simply femininity. The conversation with Shadi Hamid and Damir Marusic dives into how the decline of religion along with social and economic dislocation have impeded relationship-building. Can a softer masculinity emerge and thrive, or is it simply incompatible in a vigorously competitive world? And what do the world’s societies risk by leaving men to the wilderness?

In the full episode (for paying subscribers only) the three wade into a conversation around how the aspects of masculinity and religion interplay with fascism as they explore variants represented in religious figures including Jesus, King David and the Prophet Muhammad. They also discuss how periods of wartime have shaped men’s sense of purpose.

Required Reading:

* “Men are lost. Here’s a map out of the wilderness,” by Christine Emba (The Washington Post).

* “The Ideal Man Exists,” by Christine Emba. (Wisdom of Crowds).

* Our epic episode with the pseudonymous writer The Dragoman

* Rethinking Sex: A Provocation, by Christine Emba (Amazon).

* “What if We’re the Bad Guys?” by David Brooks (The New York Times).

* Of Boys and Men, by Richard V. Reeves (Amazon).

* War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning, by Chris Hedges (Amazon).

* An interview with author Beverly Gage on her book, G-Man, about J. Edgar Hoover (Reason).

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Are Muslim communities increasingly tilting to the right? After about two decades of being alienated by Republicans, American Muslims continue to align themselves with the Democratic Party. But as the country polarizes and the progressive agenda makes gains, writers like our guest find it increasingly untenable for Muslims to continue nodding along with the left’s conceptions of gender identity, sexuality, and secularism.

This week, Shadi Hamid and Damir Marusic talked to The Dragoman, a pseudonymous writer who wrote a fiery provocation in The American Mind titled “Meet Your New Allies”, where he makes the case for why Muslims should align themselves with the right to counter the left’s excesses. This is a provocative and wide-ranging conversation that really gets at how deep difference and philosophical disagreements are difficult to reconcile. You won’t want to miss this one.

The three discuss Dragoman’s decision to remain anonymous, whether he considers himself a reactionary, his appeal to the dissident right-wing, and his plans to leave the United States to raise his children. As a believing Muslim himself, Shadi challenges Dragoman to articulate the threat to Western civilization posed by the left and the implications of aligning with the Trump wing of the GOP.

In the full episode (for paying subscribers only) Shadi and Dragoman diverge on the role of Islam and democracy in shaping a moral society. It gets heated, leading to one of the more charged exchanges in recent WoC history. They also delve into the influence of Western academia on Muslim thought and the Anglo world’s limitations in understanding non-Western perspectives. The conversation concludes with a reflection on the generational differences among Muslims.

To listen to the full episode, subscribe here.

Required Reading:

* “Meet Your New Allies,” by Dragoman (The American Mind).

* Islamic Exceptionalism: How the Struggle Over Islam Is Reshaping the World, by Shadi Hamid (Amazon).

* “Subversive with Alex Kaschuta” (Apple Podcasts).

* “Muslims vs. Democrats: A Story of Betrayal,” by Shadi Hamid (Wall Street Journal)

* The Liberal Archipelago: A Theory of Diversity and Freedom, by Chandran Kukathas (Amazon).

* “Navigating Differences: Clarifying Sexual and Gender Ethics in Islam,” the statement signed by dozens of American Muslim scholars and imams.

Wisdom of Crowds is a platform challenging premises and understanding first principles on politics and culture. Join us!

Does the United States Supreme Court’s legitimacy hang in the balance — or is it itself the balance keeping the union centered?

After handing down blockbuster decisions this term on gerrymandering, executive authority and affirmative action, the highest court in the land is facing fierce criticism from progressives in the media and in elected office. This week, we welcomed Washington Post columnist Jason Willick back on the podcast to help us unpack it all.

Jason discusses how the Court’s decision to outlaw affirmative action in higher education was straightforward and popular. But after the Court’s unpopular decision last year striking down a constitutional right to an abortion, the grounds for accepting the high court’s rulings based on popularity appears to be all but dependent on whether one finds any given outcome favorable. Shadi Hamid questions the coherence of liberal arguments when it comes to popular decisions that go against the left’s expectations. Meanwhile, Damir Marusic makes the case that despite it being undeniable the Court operates with political considerations, pretense is a critical aspect to the institution’s survival.

In the full episode (for paying subscribers only) Shadi raises concerns about the perception of the Court’s legitimacy among Democrats. After threats against the justices and warnings from Democratic lawmakers, the three discuss scenarios that could provoke efforts to stack the deck. The conversation winds down as the guys acknowledge that when it comes down to it, the law is not neutral; it is political.

Wisdom of Crowds is a reader-supported publication. To support our work and receive the latest, please subscribe.

Required Reading:

* “Sorry, Democrats, there is no Supreme Court ‘legitimacy’ crisis,” by Jason Willick (Washington Post).

* “How John Roberts is outmaneuvering his critics,” by Jason Willick (Washington Post).

* “This is the most mischaracterized Supreme Court case in recent history,” by Jason Willick (Washington Post).

* “The Supreme Court will increasingly control U.S. elections,” by Jason Willick (Washington Post).

* “Trump’s Justices Didn’t Doom Affirmative Action. Demography Did.” by Christopher Caldwell (New York Times).

* “What’s Behind the Conservative Rift on the Supreme Court,” by Sarah Isgur (Politico).

* Jason’s interview with sociologist Nathan Glazer (Wall Street Journal).

* Inventing the People, by Edmund Morgan (Amazon).

Wisdom of Crowds is a platform challenging premises and understanding first principles on politics and culture. Join us!

The broad topic of the conversation was decline. We don’t always know how to express it, but many of us feel it: There’s something wrong with America today. The mood is tense. More Americans say they won’t have children because of climate change and other future catastrophes. But are things really as bad as they seem? Is decline something we need to accept—or is there a case for a new optimism?

You won’t want to miss this one.

Required Reading:

* Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets, by Svetlana Alexievich (Amazon).

* Rethinking Sex: A Provocation, by Christine Emba (Amazon).

* Friendship as Sacred Knowing: Overcoming Isolation, by Samuel Kimbriel (Amazon).

* “Five Ancient Secrets to Modern Happiness”, lecture by Tamar Gendler (YouTube).

There is the Europe of politics. There is the Europe of ideas. But there is also the Europe of actual people, who live, love, die, and dream. How they live and how they hope is shaped by mass migration, climate change, the war in Ukraine, and any number of other disruptions. Who are they and what do their lives actually look like?

This week, British journalist Ben Judah talks to Shadi Hamid and Damir Marusic about his outstanding new book This Is Europe, a work of heartfelt and immersive storytelling about individuals amidst the forces reshaping the continent’s landscape.

Ben eschewed coverage of superficial political debates and dedicated the book to tell 23 gripping stories of ordinary people — an ex-Muslim porn actor, a Romanian truck driver, a refugee olive production line worker — embedded in this new European life. In addition to relaying parts of these narratives, Ben discusses the unique approach he took, including removing himself from the frame and closely collaborating with subjects to add depth to their stories.

Instead of asking them what they thought, Ben chose to ask them “how did this make you feel?” Interestingly, few of them seem to have any distinct politics or ideology, something which seems to especially intrigue Shadi.

In the full episode (for paying subscribers only) the three discuss Islam’s growing footprint on a largely secular but still superstitious Europe. Ben also discusses the increasingly blurred cultural lines between Europe, Africa and Asia as well. The conversation winds down with Ben explaining the absence of Jewish stories from the book and the three circling back to a fundamental question: How do we live?

Subscribers will also receive the full video of the conversation, available below.

Wisdom of Crowds is a reader-supported publication. To support our work and receive the latest, please subscribe.

Required Reading:

* This Is Europe: The Way We Live Now, by Ben Judah (Pan Macmillan).

* This Is London: Life and Death in the World City, by Ben Judah (Amazon).

* The Decameron, by Giovanni Boccaccio (Amazon).

Wisdom of Crowds is a platform challenging premises and understanding first principles on politics and culture. Join us!

How important are ideological labels and how might they change over the next generation? A lot is on the minds of Shadi Hamid and Damir Marusic this week as the two go on a winding discussion about political identity and ideological shifts amid a tribalistic political culture.

The guys discussed the rarity of prominent figures publicly changing their political identity and the friction among Americans in mixed ideology relationships.

Having never felt confined by labels, Damir questions Shadi’s preoccupation with belonging to a “team” as Shadi ponders whether he should prioritize perceptions of his political identity, including as a critic of woke orthodoxy. Are we on the cusp of another Cold War era-like realignment?

In the full episode (for paying subscribers only) the conversation pivots to declining fertility rates in the United States and the role of immigration in staving off population decline in America and other emerging economies. Damir pushes back against Shadi’s claim implying that something inherent about autocratic regimes make them more distinctly restrictive of immigration compared to democracies. The debate concludes with Damir positing that a coming ideological shift could prompt Shadi to become an apologist for colonialism.

Required Reading:

Zia Haider Rahman’s tweet about Shadi’s supposed existential crisis (Haider Rahman is also the author of Shadi’s 2nd favorite novel of the 21st century).

“Millennials Just Keep Voting,” by David Leonhardt (New York Times).

“The greatest threat to democracy isn’t what Republicans or Democrats think,” by Jason Willick (Washington Post).

“A Note About Polarization,” from Murtaza Hussain’s terrific Substack.

“Lower fertility rates are the new cultural norm,” by Charles Lane (Washington Post).

“The Unstoppability of Mass Migration,” from Andrew Sullivan’s Weekly Dish.

America at the Crossroads: Democracy Power and the Neoconservative Legacy, by Francis Fukuyama (Amazon).

Colossus: The Rise and Fall of the American Empire, by Niall Ferguson (Amazon).

Wisdom of Crowds is a platform challenging premises and understanding first principles on politics and culture. Join us!

Why is therapy replacing God on dating apps? If bad things happen, were they “meant to be”? When we say that everything happens for a reason, what do we even mean?

This week, Shadi and Damir are back on the podcast together with close friend and guest Rachel Rizzo to discuss her stunning new essay, “Do Liberals Have a God Problem?” Recently, Rachel noted a striking contrast on dating apps: men who openly state their involvement in therapy and the dearth of those professing religious faith. This opens up one of the most personal and searching episodes in WoC history. The three delve into free will, sin, and why spiritual alternatives like therapy and “self-care” are, perhaps insufficiently, supplanting belief in God.

Rachel draws on her upbringing in Utah as a non-Mormon among Mormons and as a professional struggling for personal fulfillment in Washington’s environment of brute ambition.

In the full episode (for paying subscribers only) the conversation turns to how a distinctly American emphasis on “freedom” creates a series of dilemmas for young Americans searching for meaning and structure. They also debate the influence of generous welfare states on religious identity and how Rachel’s essay may contrast with the experience of a European. And a very special bonus that you won’t want to miss: how easy (or hard) is it to convert to Islam, according to Shadi Hamid?

Required Reading:

* “Do Liberals Have A God Problem?” by Rachel Rizzo (Wisdom of Crowds).

* “Among the Believers” by Rachel Rizzo (Wisdom of Crowds).

* Religiosity in Europe from Ryan Burge ‘s Substack.

* Eric Clapton’s “The Presence of the Lord”.

Wisdom of Crowds is a platform challenging premises and understanding first principles on politics and culture. Join us!

As organized religion declines, particularly among younger Americans, a constellation of spiritual and sense-making phenomena appear to be taking its place. This week, Damir Marusic and Editor-at-Large Christine Emba are joined by the author Tara Isabella Burton whose upcoming book Self-Made: Creating Our Identities from Da Vinci to the Kardashians, chronicles how our sense of self has evolved over time alongside political, religious and societal change.

Damir and Christine interrogate Tara’s argument that in adhering excessively to individualism, a principle with deep roots in both liberal and Christian traditions, an imbalance has neglected the importance of integrating self-desire, direct contact and communal ties to find meaning. As a result, a renaissance of alternatives to traditional faith — from fitness and astrology to post-rationalism and cosmic vibes — have culminated into a crisis of spirituality.

In the full episode (for paying subscribers only), Christine, Damir and Tara discuss the necessity of defining progress, particularly among believers, and how these new belief systems are themselves indicative of “frivolity” and “decadence”. The three also contemplate the uniqueness of human beings and the potential for new versions of spirituality to emerge with greater technology advancement.

Wisdom of Crowds is a reader-supported publication. To support our work and receive the latest, please subscribe.

Required Reading:

* Self-Made: Creating Our Identities from Da Vinci to the Kardashians, by Tara Isabella Burton (Amazon).

* Strange Rites, by Tara Isabella Burton (Amazon).

* “Rational Magic,” by Tara Isabella Burton (The New Atlantis).

* “The Man Who Spends $2 Million a Year to Look 18 Is Swapping Blood With His Father and Son,” by Ashlee Vance (Bloomberg).

* “On animate intelligence,” from Dhananjay Jagannathan’s Substack.

* “An entire generation is losing hope. Enter the witch.” by Christine Emba (Washington Post).

Wisdom of Crowds is a platform challenging premises and understanding first principles on politics and culture. Join us!

Are big ideas still possible? Are there any “new” ideas left—and what makes an idea new in the first place?

If we need new ideas to shake ourselves out of decadence, we should be careful what we wish for. Wokeness is one such “comprehensive framework.” Others might prove similarly frightening.

This week, Shadi is joined by New York Times columnist and author of The Decadent Society Ross Douthat and the political philosopher Samuel Kimbriel. Recently, Sam wrote an essay “Thinking is Risky”, which was cited in Ross’s newsletter, calling on academics to be more intellectually courageous. Sam’s call to action relates to a recurring theme in Ross’s work — namely that society faces “decadent” stagnation (or worse, decay) on a number of fronts. To transcend modern mediocrity, the three discuss a path to renewal, but as Shadi argues, the risks of doing so are real.

In the full episode (for paying subscribers only), the three discuss the extent a break from decadence can be achieved through religion. After all, if what makes an idea “big” is that it offers up a metaphysical/cosmic account of the universe, then cultural renewal may require religion. Anything less would be limiting and finite. Ross makes the case that religious belief is “obviously appropriate”, predicting that elites will eventually recognize its value. But is it enough for people to instrumentally appreciate the importance of religion, or must they believe themselves?

Required Reading:

* The Decadent Society, by Ross Douthat (Amazon).

* “Thinking Is Risky,” by Samuel Kimbriel (Wisdom of Crowds).

* “Why Journalists Have More Freedom Than Professors,” by Ross Douthat (New York Times).

* Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life, by William Deresiewicz (Amazon).

* “At least it’s an ethos” from The Great Lebowski.

* “Nude” lyrics, by Radiohead.

Wisdom of Crowds is a platform challenging premises and understanding first principles on politics and culture. Join us!

This week, Damir stages an intervention for Shadi.

Lately, Shadi’s become gradually detached from the world of current events and political media. Damir probes to understand why, therein unraveling an episode that goes off the beaten path to discuss progress, happiness and meaning at a time when everything feels existential.

Shadi maintains that while he isn’t divorcing himself from the commentariat, he’s recognizing the limited fulfillment political awareness can deliver — particularly when progress can never seem to be satiated.

Scoffing at Damir’s notion he’s become a conservative, Shadi laments what he sees as more pressing matters, including crime and the unintended impacts of legal marijuana dispensaries in D.C. All of this prompts Damir to press Shadi on how he reconciles this detachment with participation in democracy.

In the full episode (for paying subscribers only), the guys pivot toward a critique of the mental health subculture. Damir believes the level of introspection offered by therapy may make us more miserable. Shadi agrees and questions how healthy it is that we seem to be seeking out more reasons to seek therapy. The pod ends on a higher note, however, with Damir and Shadi finding contentment in pursuing Wisdom of Crowds’ mission.

Paying subscribers will also be able to watch the whole conversation on video and take note of our facial expressions. We’re really excited to be offering this new subscriber benefit, so please consider joining us.

Required Reading:

* The Open Letter to President Biden that Shadi helped organize on Tunisia.

* “Is It Enough to Tie Your Camel and Trust in God?” by Shadi Hamid (Wisdom of Crowds).

* Oliver Traldi's tweet thread

* “Pot and Pathology,” by Charles Fain Lehman (Institute For Family Studies).

* “How I Changed my Mind About Marijuana,” by Charles Fain Lehman on his Substack, The Causal Fallacy.

* “You’re Better Off Not Knowing,” by Shadi Hamid (The Atlantic).

* Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals, by Oliver Burkeman (Amazon).

* The Unbearable Lightness of Being: A Novel, by Milan Kundera (Amazon).

* “ChatGPT and Me,” by Damir Marusic (Wisdom of Crowds).

* “How AI could change computing, culture and the course of history,” (The Economist).

* Shadi Hamid’s essay on suicide (Washington Examiner).

* “It’s not too late: How to save Tunisian democracy,” by Shadi Hamid and Sharan Grewal (Brookings Institution).

Wisdom of Crowds is a platform challenging premises and understanding first principles on politics and culture. Join us!

Can a cohesive nation survive without a common identity or shared values?

That question is at the heart of this week’s podcast with political theorist David Polansky. Last week, David’s essay in Wisdom of Crowds rebutted the claim that the Israelites can be understood as a modern nation. Throughout history, various peoples, David argues, have coalesced around a shared sense of “peoplehood” without a claim to a nation. From here, a rich conversation ensues as to whether a people—and democracy itself—can endure without anything more than a commitment to peaceful coexistence.

Shadi maintains that his conception of democratic minimalism and a belief in “the people” (even if they’re not real) are enough to sustain a democracy. Damir finds this to be insufficient. While a degree of myth-making is necessary to constitute a nation, more is required to undergird an enduring society. But what exactly?

In the full episode (for paying subscribers only), Shadi presses David on his assertion that the modern Canadian state, despite being democratic, has far more power over individual citizens than under pre-modern dictators. The three also discuss whether the West’s response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine means that democracy is rebounding, ebbing, or headed for a different trajectory altogether.

Lastly, not only will paying subscribers have access to the full episode—including an awkward but vaguely touching coda from Shadi on his doubts over the future—but they will also be able to watch the whole conversation and take note of our facial expressions on video. We’re really excited to be offering this new subscriber benefit, so please consider joining us.

Required Reading:

* “Why Ancient Israel Was Not a Modern Nation,” by David Polansky (Wisdom of Crowds).

* “Populism and Democracy Conflict: An Aristotelian View,” by David Polansky (The Review of Politics).

* Leviathan, by Thomas Hobbes (Project Gutenberg).

* “For the People to Exist, You Must Believe in Them,” by Shadi Hamid (Wisdom of Crowds).

* How Democracy Ends, David Runciman (Amazon).

* Shadi and Damir debate “democratic minimalism” in a special live recorded episode in Pittsburgh (Wisdom of Crowds).

* Shadi’s book The Problem of Democracy

* “On Hindutva,” by Murtaza Hussain on his excellent Substack

Why is Trump such a formidable candidate, despite everything? How can someone who lies so readily be seen as authentic? With the Republican presidential campaign heating up, Sam Adler-Bell—co-host of “Know Your Enemy” and one of the most fascinating leftist writers around today—returns to the podcast to argue that Trump has something special that Ron DeSantis doesn’t have and likely never will.

Pundits often argue that DeSantis represents a stable and “competent” version of Trump that can win the presidency for the GOP. Sam disagrees. DeSantis, he argues, is reflective of a well-educated elite bumbling to co-opt Trump’s style without understanding the former president’s essence. Not only that, DeSantis may even be a “technocrat,” that dreaded word. Sam makes the case that Trump’s conning authenticity, charm—but especially his “anti-competence” and distinct resentment of elitism and expertise—help explain his staying power.

In the full episode (for paying subscribers only), the three discuss the rampant apocalypticism of the current moment and how Republicans and Democrats leverage the premise that the end is near. Damir posits that the doomerism may be justified whereas Shadi is more cautiously optimistic. Also, Sam discusses the discipline required—as someone on the political left—to not define one’s politics around the most annoying features of one’s opponents.

Required Reading:

* Sam Adler Bell’s must-listen podcast “Know Your Enemy” with Matthew Sitman on the intellectual origins of the American Right.

* Sam’s epic first appearance on Wisdom of Crowds, discussing the New Right.

* The classic “Know Your Enemy” episode on Nixon’s resentments and obsessions.

* “The One Thing Trump Has That DeSantis Never Will,” by Sam Adler-Bell (The New York Times).

* “The Jeffrey Epstein case is why people believe in Pizzagate,” by Matthew Walther. (The Week).

* Dave Chappelle monologue on Trump’s appealing hypocrisy (Saturday Night Live).

* The Confidence Man, by Herman Melville (Amazon).

* Chris Christie takes down Marco Rubio in 2016 (CBS News).

* Trump Inaugural Address, “American Carnage” (ABC News).

* “The Humiliation Factor,” by Thomas Friedman (The New York Times).

An anti-natalist subculture has flourished for years online. These days, it feels like it’s taking hold in the real world.

This week, writer and internet historian Katherine Dee and Editor-at-Large Christine Emba join Shadi and Damir to make sense of this underground phenomenon—and its broader implications for how we live today.

Do people really believe that suffering makes life not worth experiencing? And what is the source of the breathtaking idea that one can and should spare the unborn the pain of existence?

As the conversation continues, the Crowd starts to zero in on the source of the problem: there’s something unhealthy about being online all the time. Katherine reveals her struggles with climate anxiety, and how she eventually snapped out of it.

In the full episode (for paying subscribers only), the conversation turns to the identities we inhabit online and in-person, and how that causes us to lose our ethical moorings. Katherine points out that detachment and anonymity afforded by the internet breeds isolation and existential dread. Is there a remedy to this “psychosis”? Closing up, we hit on a cheeky solution.

Required Reading:

- “We Need to Talk About Extreme Anti-Natalism,” by Katherine Dee (Unherd).

- “Can You Pair-Bond During Cybersex?” by Katherine Dee (Substack).

- “Computer Love,” by Katherine Dee (Comment).

- “Tumblr Transformed American Politics,” by Katherine Dee (American Conservative).

- Rethinking Sex: AProvocation, by Christine Emba (Amazon).

With the world feeling increasingly unstable, Damir and Shadi turn to foreign policy. Can the United States can back its bluster abroad, including in defense of Taiwan? 

All of this is happening as Donald Trump re-enters the national spotlight. The guys contrast the former president's manic approach to deterrence with the current and preceding administrations. Shadi is comforted the White House is staffed by vaguely smart and competent people, but thinks there may be something to Trump's saber-rattling.

Damir then challenges Shadi on the Biden Administration's democracy versus autocracy approach to foreign policy. How do we understand Brazil's democratically elected president willingly embracing China?

In the full episode (for paying subscribers only), Damir makes the case for how we might not go to war with China over Taiwan, while Shadi wonders whether Trump's madman routine may have been more effective than we dare imagine.

Required Reading:

- Tucker Carlson interview with Donald Trump.

- China After Mao: The Rise of a Superpower, by Frank Dikotter (Amazon).

- "Blinken: I press Saudis on LGBTQI issues ‘in every conversation’" (Politico).

- "The West hoped Lula would be a partner. He’s got his own plans" (WaPo).

- "When might US political support be unwelcome in Taiwan?", by Alastair Iain Johnston, Tsai Chia-hung, and George Yin (Brookings Institution).

With artificial intelligence threatening to take over our imaginations, Shadi and Damir this week decided to talk through some of the philosophical quandaries with none other than political philosopher and Wisdom of Crowds contributing writer Samuel Kimbriel. The Crowd takes on ChatGPT, existential risk, "the simulation", navigating uncertainty and whether we can know what is real.

After a recent encounter with ChatGPT, Damir is impressed that AI is now well on its way to modeling language, an advancement he thinks could upend the elite publishing world. On the potential existential threat posed by AI, Shadi's faith leaves him less than panicked about technological doomsday. Meanwhile, Sam reminds us that humanity lives in a state of uncertainty subject to inquiry which can breed distrust with political institutions that insist they have it all figured out.

In the full episode (for paying subscribers only) Damir and Sam differ on whether ChatGPT is a new version of an old mechanism or whether it's something more sophisticated. Shadi asks whether such a technology can ever feel longing, wistfulness, and regret. How do we seek to understand human consciousness let alone that of artificial intelligence? A rich conversation ensues.

Required Reading:

- "You’re Better Off Not Knowing," by Shadi Hamid (The Atlantic).

- "ChatGPT and Me," by Damir Marusic. (Wisdom of Crowds).

- "Why I Am Not (As Much Of) A Doomer (As Some People)," by Scott Alexander (Substack).

- A very politically incorrect tweet about ChatGPT and Joe Biden.

Shadi made his case for decoupling democracy and liberalism—what he calls "democratic minimalism." Instead of viewing democracy as a means to other ends, it should be seen an end unto itself. In other words, let us lower expectations and like (and perhaps even love) democracy for its more modest pleasures. Democracy is not about delivering economic growth, competence, or consensus. And it may even produce the opposite.

The argument, expressed in its more provocative form, is that democracy is about a way of making choices, while liberalism is one choice among many. Citizens in conservative societies may choose otherwise—including by passing restrictions on abortion, alcohol consumption, and even "blasphemy laws" that prohibit insulting divine texts and prophets.

Losing no time, Damir and Jen (and audience members) pose a series of challenges to Shadi's idiosyncratic view of democracy. Is this minimalistic conception of democracy realistic, even if it were desirable? Jen thinks that there needs to be a classically liberal limited state whereas Damir isn't so sure that ethnically and religiously divided countries are places where democracy flourishes. Is it enough to simply ask citizens to accept democratic outcomes not to their liking? Or must there be a deeper, shared cultural bond before anything else?

On foreign policy, things get even more thorny. Can the United States truly promote democracy without doing damage to its own national security interests? The problem is that reasonable observers no longer agree, if they ever did, on which vital interests are, in fact, "vital." And, if America is a superpower, presumably it could absorb the costs of a democracy-first policy in the Middle East if it really wanted to.

As the event became more of a free-for-all, extending into 2 hours of spirited exchanges with the audience, the crowd debated sharia courts, India under Modi, whether Obama actually had a dislike for Muslims, whether Israel was the ideal "illiberal democracy", what making America "more democratic" means, and the resiliency of American institutions over the last six years.

Required Reading: 

- The Problem of Democracy: America, the Middle East, and the Rise and Fall of an Idea, by Shadi Hamid (Amazon).

- Jen Murtazashvili’s personal website.

- The Center for Governance and Markets at Pitt.

- Full YouTube video of this conversation.

This week, we were excited to have author Luke Burgis on the pod, to talk about a hot topic: desire. Specifically, mimetic desire—the idea that desires are often generated through our human propensity to copy each other. He's written an excellent book, Wanting: The Power of Mimetic Desire in Everyday Life, that affected both of us deeply.

First theorized by the French philosopher Rene Girard, and present in everything from The White Lotus to the writings of Peter Thiel, mimetic desire is everywhere around us.

We talked about how to identify the power of mimetic desire in our society: in ever more adversarial politics, in an economy increasingly focused on attention, and especially in social-media-mediated quests for collective scapegoats (Shadi shares how he became a scapegoat for Philadelphia sports fans last week).

We discussed if it was possible to ever break the cycle of scapegoating, and how knowledge of this dynamic should change how we view politics. What does it mean to be a "political atheist," as Girard, a Catholic, called himself? And is Damir going to Hell?

In the full episode (for paying subscribers only), we also pondered what the more pessimistic conclusions of the theory of mimetic desire might be. What does it mean that societies are to some extent bound to engage in cycles of mimetic imitation, rivalry, and scapegoating? Do citizens in democracies really deliberate rationally, or are they just following the leader? Is Shadi's insistence that democracy is an end in itself in peril?

We closed by asking what implications this could all have for our personal lives. How can we determine which of our desires are "thin"—mimetically taken from others—or "thick"—coming from a deep sense of self? Do we have to consciously restrain our own choices? And what might our lives look like if we regain our sense of self-possession?

Required Reading:

- Wanting: The Power of Mimetic Desire in Everyday Life, by Luke Burgis (Amazon).

- Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World, by Rene Girard (Amazon).

- Shadi’s bad sports tweet.

In recent months, Shadi has drawn a lot of online ire for saying that liberals were needlessly (and harmfully) catastrophizing ahead of the November midterms. We decided to talk to one of Shadi's smartest and most eloquent critics on this count—our friend Damon Linker, a former columnist at The Week and current author of the excellent Substack, Eyes on the Right.

We argue about what's "normal" polarization, and what arguments end up making democracy less workable. Is Shadi really too complacent, or is he just being prudent? Is the Muslim Brotherhood "better" on democracy than the GOP? And why does the center-left have a newfound respect for military and intelligence agencies?

In the full episode (for paying subscribers only) Shadi shares some insights gleaned while attending a far-right birthday party (don't ask). Why does the new generation of young conservatives feel so alienated from American politics, and can their grievances ever be accommodated? What can we learn from populist victories in Israel and Hungary? And can a convincing Ron DeSantis victory be the best thing that could happen to us in 2024?

Required Reading:

- “The ‘Democracy Panic’ of 2022 Was Fully Justified,” by Damon Linker (Eyes on the Right).

- Our first podcast with Damon, “Reassessing the Reactionary Right.”

- Fiona Hill’s podcast with us.

- “General Milley says he wasn’t trying to undermine Trump in China Call,” by Teaganne Finne (NBC News).

This was one of the richest conversations we've recorded in a while. Our guest this week is Robert Nicholson, the founder of The Philos Project, an organization that promotes Christian engagement with the Middle East, and host of The Deep Map, a new podcast that explores the religious and historical roots of conflict in the region.

We asked Robert about what he thinks Westerners misunderstand the most about Middle Eastern politics: the role religion does, and doesn't play in the region's conflicts. Will countries need to craft collective identities that rise above religion for societies to progress? Robert thinks that goal is wildly unrealistic, and not even necessarily desirable.

Veering from from minimal democracy to forced population transfers, the conversation only gets more contentious—and weirdly philosophical—from there.

In the full episode (for paying subscribers only) Damir tries to push Shadi's fundamental commitments to a breaking point. If democratic minimalism requires that we respect the basic outcomes of the democratic process, then why should we be particularly concerned about illiberalism in Middle Eastern countries (or France, for that matter)? What higher principles can we appeal to, other than notions of liberal universalism that voters in the Middle East may not respect? And finally, we close out the discussion by asking Robert about the incoming Israeli coalition government—and the likelihood of things getting seriously ugly on the ground in the coming months.

Required Reading:

- Shadi’s appearance on Robert’s podcast, The Deep Map.

- “Benjamin Netanyahu: What Drives Israel’s Incoming Prime Minister?” by Michah Goodman (The Jerusalem Post).

- The Problem of Democracy: America, the Middle East and the Rise and Fall of an Idea, by Shadi Hamid (Amazon).

- The Mossawa Center, an advocacy organization for Arab citizens in Israel.

The boys are back in town! Damir is back from yet another globetrotting trip, so the Crowd is returning to podcasting after a brief hiatus. Beginning with Kanye West's recent antisemitic interview with Alex Jones and dinner with Donald Trump, we discussed the success Democrats have had with pinning crazy candidates and viewpoints on the GOP. Shadi is concerned that overheated rhetoric about the death of democracy may be harmful in the long run, while Damir, ever the cynic, is impressed by the dirty politics.

Of course, propping up crackpot candidates in a primary so that they can be beaten in the general election is a risky maneuver. Will covertly helping Donald Trump stay in the race invite divine judgement? Less theologically, how many people who seriously believed rhetoric about encroaching fascism will ever let that belief go? Shadi and Damir consider whether the "split personality" created by lives lived increasingly online leads to belief in outlandish, alarmist claims.

In the full episode (for paying subscribers only), Shadi, on a characteristically theological tangent, wonders what Heaven will be like. Will we be able to know the deepest thoughts of our friends and acquaintances? Will we even have the identities and selves that we do now?

Damir, also considering a (relatively) "undiscovered country" fills the Crowd in on his recent trip to Japan. What about Japan do Westerners not understand? Is it a modern, "Western" country, or some other, stranger, form of modernity. And are the media's representations of Japan as a deeply dysfunctional society all that accurate?

Required Reading:

- “Can You Pair Bond During Cybersex?” by Katherine Dee (Default Friend).

- “Why Liberals Should Support a Trump Republican Nomination,” by Jonathan Chait (New York Magazine).

- Patrick Stewart’s scene with Ricky Gervais on Extras.

This podcast came after a whirlwind few weeks for the Crowd– Damir returned from his odyssey through the Balkans, and Shadi was the recipient of several Twitter pile-ons. Oh, and the Queen died.

Before getting to all that, though, we ramble through a potpourri of other subjects. Damir gives relationship advice.  Shadi tells us why he's against pets and hiking. A conversation about whether animals have souls turns into a discuss of creationism and free speech, touching on some recent arguments in the pages of The Atlantic.

We also continue our conversation about national conservatism from last week, addressing statements made by national conservatives about the nature of rights in the international system. Are rights only real if they're enforceable? And if not, should the very concept be thrown out the window?

In the full episode (for subscribers only) Damir discusses some of the takeaways from his trip to the Balkans: what he saw on his travels made him wonder whether authoritarians like Vladimir Putin imposed themselves on unwilling societies, or if "the people" were more active participants in the process. In other words, are the Russian people as victimized as Western media makes them seem? Finally, Shadi shares his surprise at Britons; depth of feeling for their monarch, as well as his thoughts on what role monarchs play in Western democracies.

Our conversation about the common good led to deep questions about the nature of politics and law. What are the practical implications of saying, as Martin Luther King did, that "an unjust law is no law at all?" If all humans have souls (even Damir) what does that mean about how we should organize political communities? And how can citizens with fundamental differences be reconciled?

We also discussed the recently released National Conservative Statement of Principles: a manifesto signed by many leaders of the post-liberal right. All four of us had significant disagreements with the Statement—but for different reasons. Will its advocacy for a more robust role for Christianity in public life crowd out religious minorities, as Shadi notes? Susannah, as a self-identified Christian post-liberal herself, goes further, wondering if a Christian conception of the good can even be the foundation for an American political movement.

We also talked about how Christian ideas of justice cohere—or don't—with liberalism. Damir makes a bold claim: articulating a "common good" can't be done without reference to religious principles, and anyone claiming otherwise is deluding themselves. Needless to say, everyone else on the podcast disagrees (the word "Satanic" comes up).  

Required Reading:

- The National Conservative Statement of Principles.

- The open letter responding to the National Conservative Statement of Principles (The European Conservative).

- “Our Post-Liberal Moment,” by Susannah Black Roberts (The Spectator World).

- Why Liberalism Failed, by Patrick Deneen (Amazon).

- The AP’s recent report on Canada’s euthanasia policies (The Associated Press).

The FBI's surprise "raid" on Donald Trump's residence in Mar-a-Lago this week has been hailed in some quarters as a triumph for the rule of law, and seen in others as signs of a slide into banana-republic status. We invited Jason Willick, a Washington Post columnist who writes on legal issues, to sit down with us and discuss the deeper implications of the event.

True to the Crowd's ethos, we focused on fundamental issues. Jason argued that the polarized reactions to the raid show the difficulty of having federal-level law enforcement in an increasingly divided political climate. Shadi and Damir went back on forth on the question of justice: should law enforcement be entirely impartial, or must prosecutors exercise discretion based on the political context? Does one side bear more blame for our current spiral of mistrust and polarization, or is the problem systemic?

In the subscriber-only part of the conversation, things got a little heated, as we debated what might restore Americans' belief in democracy. Shadi went (in his own words) "unplugged," talking about his hopes for restoring democratic values. Might a South-Africa-style "truth and reconciliation" commission be appropriate? Damir is skeptical.

And finally, the three conclude with a discussion of whether America can pull out of the spiral. Shadi believes that we need a recovery of civic virtue. Damir thinks the national culture is no longer able to sustain democratic values. And Jason raises the point that full scale democratic backsliding is unlikely, given the size of our country. Ultimately, the choice to reject the polarization cycle will be up to voters– a conclusion both optimistic and pessimistic.

Required Reading:

- "An Informer Told the FBI What Docs Trump Was Hiding, and Where," by William H. Arkin (Newsweek).

- Bill Barr's speech at Hillsdale College.

- "The Problem of Donald Trump Didn't Start with Donald Trump," by Damir (Gen, on Medium).

- Jason Tweeting about the Espionage Act.

- Florida Governor Ron DeSantis Tweeting about the American "regime."

- "Is Trump Crazy— or calculating? His opponents have to decide," by Jason (The Washington Post).

We welcomed a truly important thinker onto the podcast this week. Walter Russell Mead joined us to discuss his latest book The Arc of a Covenant: The United States, Israel, and the Fate of the Jewish People.

Many critics of American foreign policy have long pointed to our long-standing relationship with Israel as proof of the power of the "Israel Lobby" to influence American politics. Mead's latest book shows that reality is far more complicated: the struggles of Zionism in the 19th and 20th centuries have deep resonances with America's self-conception as a nation blessed by Providence. We see a little bit of ourselves in Israel, and act accordingly.

We then moved on to broader questions. How has the American conception of the "arc of history," and our place in it, changed over time? Have modern Americans really lost faith in the American project to a greater degree than previous generations?

In the full conversation (for paying subscribers), we discussed the future of American engagement with the wider world. How much do we need to pursue human rights abroad? And does a foreign policy based on human rights make us stronger (Damir, of course, is skeptical)?

Mead offers an answer, drawn from his own belief in "Christian realism." In the closing moments of the episode, we talk about the Biden administration's failures and successes in foreign affairs, as well as the reasons recent Democratic administrations have struggled to achieve their geopolitical aims. And finally, how does Providence figure into our future struggles with a rising China?

Required Reading:

- Walter Russell Mead's latest book, The Arc of a Covenant: The United States, Israel, and the Fate of the Jewish People (Amazon).

- God and Gold: Britain, America, and the Making of the Modern World, and Special Providence: American Foreign Policy and How It Changed the World, by Walter Russell Mead (Amazon).

- "Democratic Primaries Are Embroiled in Debate Over Support for Israel," by Jonathan Weisman (The New York Times).

- Huey Long: A Biography, by T. Harry Williams (Amazon).

- All the King's Men, by Robert Penn Warren (Amazon).

- The Jungle Grows Back: America and Our Imperiled World, by Robert Kagan (Amazon).

This week, we had writer Nick Burns on the podcast. Nick's recent essay, "Why Live in America?" prompted Shadi to write his Monday Note for July 4th. We delve into the ways America is different than Europe, for good and for ill. Size, geography, culture, dynamism—all these twist and disfigure many European imports when they land on our shores.

When educated Americans pine for a more European lifestyle, are they simply reflecting their own class biases? Is the building of high speed rail really a sign of decline? And are democratic values incompatible with the modern university?

We then turned to foreign policy. Nick's recent article in the New Statesman questioning the core assumptions of realism was our jumping-off point for a broader discussion of morality in foreign affairs, and the role of the public's sentiments in states' decision-making. Shadi and Damir of course go at it on the question of a values, with Nick caught in between.

Is arguing for human rights a universalist claim? And is arguing from the vantage point of neutrality its own kind of moralism? And was the 19th century French reactionary Chateaubriand the world's first neocon?

Required Reading:

- The Red Scare podcast.

- The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy, by Christopher Lasch (Amazon).

- "New York's Hipster Wars," by Nick Burns (The New Statesman).

- "America's Medieval Universities," by Nick Burns (American Affairs).

- "What Realists Get Wrong About Putin," by Nick Burns (The New Statesman).

- The Benedict Option: A Strategy for Christians in a Post-Christian Nation, by Rod Dreher (Amazon).

- Sam Haselby's Twitter account.

- "Unlearning the Language of Wokeness," by Sam Adler-Bell (New York Magazine).

We return to a question that the Crowd has been chewing over for the last month or so: why do things– political systems, regimes, parties– change? Do ideas really change the world? And can individual actions really have any effect on larger systems?

Climate change, and whether we think world governments can mend their ways in time to avert the worst of the crisis, begins the discussion. We discuss whether governments will ever be able to cooperate to the extent needed to "solve" climate change (Damir, predictably, is less sanguine) and whether humanity will find some way to muddle through. Have we, as a species, finally run into a Malthusian limit on progress? How much faith should we have in the prospect of progress?

We later move into a wider ranging discussion of the role of ideas in world politics, and whether the modern world is heavily influenced by abstract ideas, as authors like Francis Fukuyama would argue. Shadi also talks about his personal effort to get his own ideas across– and hopefully accepted by– to American policymakers, in the face of political systems that seem unbearably sluggish and unresponsive.

Finally, in the bonus portion of the episode, available here for subscribers, we use the proliferation of diverse candidates in the Tory leadership race as a springboard into a discussion of democracy. Does the handpicked selection of women and minorities for leadership by party leaders in the United Kingdom showcase the virtues of democracy? Or does its top-down nature show how non-democratic means are sometimes needed to achieve social goods?

Required Reading:

A sample of the Matt Yglesias tweets about European appliances.

"One Billion Americans," by Matt Yglesias (Amazon).

"The Great Stagnation," by Tyler Cowen (Amazon).

This week was a first for the podcast– we welcomed two guests, Michael Wear and Jane Coaston. Michael is a rare fish, an Evangelical Christian and a Democratic political strategist who worked as President Obama's director of faith outreach in the 2012 campaign, going on to lead Evangelical outreach for the Obama White House's faith based initiative. An article he recently wrote for his Substack, "This is How to End Abortion Politics as We've Known It," has sparked vigorous discussion among the online set. In it, Wear argues that what "is needed now is legislation which provides a national framework that would contain our abortion debate, even if it would also mean codifying the nation’s long-held consensus that abortion is not a social good, even if a majority also believe it necessary to (re)establish the right to have one."

Jane Coaston, a New York Times opinion writer and host of "The Argument" podcast, thinks that Wear is mistaken. In her view, both sides see their position as absolute, and any compromise will be seen as an unacceptable betrayal of the cause. We decided to invite them both onto the pod, to hash it out and discuss the political fallout from the Dobbs decision.  

In the full episode (for subscribers), the conversation shifted towards a discussion of first principles and political strategy. We asked Michael how he squared working for President Obama with his own pro-life position, and questioned Jane on whether she thought a "settlement" on abortion was even desirable, let alone possible.

Will Republicans after the fall of Roe v. Wade be like the dog who caught the car, as Damir argues? Will Democrats be forced to moderate their strategy on abortion to meet voters where they are? Will either party be able to extricate itself from the demands of its activist class? And finally, we all debate the extent to which Democrats could, or should, have moderated their views on abortion over the past decade.

Required Reading:

- "This is How to End Abortion Politics as We've Known It," by Michael, on his Substack.

- "Democrats Shouldn't be so Certain About Abortion," by Michael (The New York Times).

- "How Will We Punish Women Who Have Abortions?" by Jane, (The New York Times).

- "The Argument" episode discussing the Dobbs decision, with Ross Douthat and Michelle Goldberg (The New York Times).

- "Making Abortion Illegal and Unthinkable," by Ryan T. Anderson and Alexandra Desanctis (National Review).

- Kevin D. Williamson discussing his email exchange with Jane, in National Review's online blog.

- "The Abortion Stories We Didn't Tell," by Rebecca Traister (New York Magazine).

- The full transcript of 2016's third presidential debate (Politico).

This week we sat down to debate America's greatness—or lack thereof. Somewhat to our surprise, we found a source of agreement between us: our belief in American exceptionalism, even if we have very different conceptions of the role of morality and "progress" in forging the American idea.

Countries in Europe may have a more leisurely pace of life and higher levels of reported happiness, but is that really what Americans want? Should it be what they want? Central to all of this are the questions of the state, democracy, and the double-edged sword of meritocracy. If, contrary to popular belief, a certain degree of dysfunction is what makes American society so dynamic, are we better off being a "failed state" then having a strong, efficient state like in Norway, Denmark, or France?  

In the full episode (for subscribers), we turned to the question of whether the main problem facing American democracy is Trump himself or Trumpism as a movement. If it's the latter, do intellectuals' dire warnings of the threat to democracy really matter, especially if Trumpism is all about resentment? Many American pundits compared the rise of Trump to the rise of Hitler, adding to their sense of urgency in "stopping" him. But, we ask, would a greater awareness of the dangers of Trump really have prevented his rise? Is it possible—or morally appropriate—to stop a criminal before the crime is committed?

The debate over January 6 hinges at least in part on whether it qualified as an "attempted coup." If the coup had succeeded, would it have blocked Biden's transition to power—or was America's messy, dysfunctional democracy a protection against such an outcome?

Required Reading:

- "America is Great Precisely Because it's Not," by Shadi Hamid (Wisdom of Crowds).

- "Why Live in America?" by Nick Burns on his Substack.

- Damir's Twitter thread on America's supreme adaptability.

- Damir retweeting Garry Kasparov on Europe's struggles with innovation.

- Shadi's Twitter thread on humiliation, resentment, and Jon Stewart's decline.

- William Galston on Tyler Cowen's Average is Over (The Wall Street Journal).

- "How Life Became an Endless, Terrible, Competition" by Daniel Markovits (The Atlantic).

- Shadi's infamous Atlantic piece from before the election.

- Jason Stanley's Twitter.

- Our episode with Bruno Macaes.

- "Notes Towards a Dreampolitik," in The White Album, by Joan Didion.

Jamie Kirchick joins us to discuss the triumph and sorrow of the gay experience in the nation's capitol. This is the story of The Secret City, Kirchick's genre-defining and panoramic history of the gay men and women who served in the halls of power, all the while in constant fear that they would lose their jobs and perhaps even their lives.

It got worse before it got better. We discuss how the national security state—born after World War II—both brought down immense suffering upon countless individuals (including in a string of shocking suicides), and helped shape the consciousness of the country as a whole. There was the red scare, but there was also the "pink scare," with fears of political perversion driving fears of sexual perversion and vice-versa. But was there progress in the end?

The Reagan Administration, despite its homophobia and failures to act on AIDS, could also claim perhaps the largest number of gay political appointees up until that point in U.S. history. And then the closet began to open, so much so that it is difficult to imagine just how horrific it was mere decades ago for gays serving in government. But is this really "progress"—and does it mean we should be optimistic about America's future, despite everything?

In the full episode (for subscribers), we dig deeper into just how lasting the triumphs of the gay rights movement will be. On one hand, homosexuality has become so normalized that no one (except radical gender activists) even thinks twice about Pete Buttigieg running for national office. On the other, the culture war over trans rights is taking a nasty turn, with room for dissent rapidly closing. We debate whether the LGBTQ+ community can stay united in victory, and whether Queer ideology is actually homophobic.

Required Reading:

- Secret City: The Hidden History of Gay Washington, by Jamie Kirchick.

- "The Long, Sordid History of the Gay Conspiracy," by Jamie Kirchick (New York Magazine).

- "The Struggle for Gay Rights is Over," by Jamie Kirchick (The Atlantic).

- Notes on Camp, by Susan Sontag.

- Virtually Normal: An Argument About Homosexuality, by Andrew Sullivan.

- Masha Gessen on Judith Butler (New Yorker).

A few weeks back, a book title caught our eye. It was called Two Billion Caliphs, written by Haroon Moghul. Mixing personal narrative and theological ruminations, it promised to offer a bold new vision for Muslims living in the 21st century. Being that we frequently talk about the importance of religion in the modern world, inviting Haroon on was a no-brainer.

A rich episode ensued. We talked about how 9/11 did (and didn’t) change everything for Muslims in America and how secularism and liberalism drive assimilation for good and for ill. If the Islamic tradition is being subsumed under liberalism, particularly in the West, does Islam's future include so-called "atheist Muslims"? And when it comes to politics, does the future of Islam in America include a Trumpist Republican party that, despite its anti-Muslim sentiments, still manages to run candidates like Dr. Mehmet Oz?

In the full conversation (for subscribers), Shadi and Haroon debate whether Islam can (or should) be de-politicized and what that might mean in practice. Haroon then goes on to explain why he has parted ways with Sufism, and why everyone must become a caliph.

Required Reading:

- Two Billion Caliphs: A Vision of a Muslim Future, by Haroon Moghul.

- "American Islam gets this beautiful thing right," by Haroon Moghul (CNN)

This week we invited the author Oliver Traldi on the podcast to talk about the role of experts in society and how we assess different kinds of skill, talent, and truth. Oliver, a writing fellow at Heterodox Academy and a doctoral candidate in philosophy at the University of Notre Dame, is one of the most exciting young thinkers and writers around today—as evidenced by his recent tour-de-force of an essay titled "With All Due Respect to the Experts."