Certain point of view. Often, being a writer right now writers are treated as politicians, sometimes people will say who do you speak for, who is your constituency . The represent and i will say nobody. Im not running for office. We live in a time of politics as team sports and the team sport aspect of politics has displaced almost everything else, all the other intellectual content and policy considerations and now it is tribe on tribe action and the question of whos gaining is bigger. I dont think having a bigger gang is something that tells you whether an idea is good or not and the fact that 50 of the population plus one likes something to me is more likely to mean it is wrong that it is right to be honest. If you watch broadcast television a look at the bestsellers list. Great big crowds of people i dont trust. The original sin of the journalist is his or her desire to be liked. Yes. I think it is i do a lot of things that freedom fest where you can shop for opportunities to invest in gold coins and things like that and there are a lot of writers particularly journalists who are unable to resist the urge to play to the crowd, deliver applause lines, engage in constituent service, that sort of thing. They act like members of the house of representatives running for reelection is what they are like and i understand the desire to want to be popular to an extent because weve got to sell books. Thats how you pay the bills and you can sell a lot of books, it is financially better than selling only a few books but they want to be popular the way president ial candidates are popular. They want to have devoted cultish followers and to be part of that world. A cliche that is true, in britain, journalism is part of the literary world and the United States, journalism is part of the political world and that is true and i think journalist in the state act too much like politicians. Host you spend quite a bit of time on social media in your book. You dont spend time on social you personally. I dont use any social media. Host you talk about social media. I want to read a paragraph. If youve ever been to the monkey house in one of those downscales, the way you imagine Bernie Sanders probably smells faintly. You know what these particular monkeys are like. They jerk off and slink who all day. Generally using the same hand for both and they dont do a lot else unless theres mcdonalds all day. Jerk off, sling who, jerk off, sling who, jerk, sling, jerk, sling, twitter basically. Twitter is a lot like that. I think i dont think social media is the cause of our current toxic, i hate the word toxic, distasteful political culture, social media is like alcohol. Doesnt change who you are underneath that makes it, lowers the inhibitions and willingness to express i use to live in this place in india, covered up with monkeys because you cant miss with the monkey for religious reasons and i got to dislike it because new york subway rats and higher iqs making them a little dangerous. I think this tribe ballistic social media driven political culture reduces us, makes us less human and brings out the inner monkey in people and causes them to behave in the same primitive self gratifying ugly fashion. Hasnt social media allowed everyone to have a voice more than we did before . That is the problem. Not Everybody Needs a voice. In principle it is good everyone is allowed to speak. Im a free speech absolutist. Im glad people can do what they want to do but the truth not just with social media but the internet in general is a lot of people dont have a lot to say. A lot of people dont have anything interesting or useful to add to the conversation but still feel the need to participate so that is where you get a culture of talking points, cliches conspiracy theories and the rest of the stuff that fills up the space because people feel compelled to speak and they dont have anything really to say. This is an old idea. The british philosopher wrote about individuality is a burden to some people who arent wellequipped to make the most of it but still feel the demands of it so they feel they need to participate as individuals, they need to participate in this conversation in this exchange but doing so is not something they are particularly wellsuited for and not something they particularly enjoyed. It is more of a burden than an opportunity for a lot of people. Is the smallest minority that you refer . The smallest minority is the individual. That the line i stole from irans, i took it from her because she doesnt deserve it. It is a good line but shes not a very good writer i dont think. She is a good writer who misused her talents, could have been a very fine novelist but wanted to write propaganda instead. I borrowed that from her. The problem with our culture the way it is in politics right now is we cant interact with one another as individuals, we interact as representatives of warring tribal groups, enhancing the monkey like to swinging. You are the tribal groups . Team red and team blue, liberals and conservatives roughly, republicans and democrats. These are short answer broader social groups i think. Weve got a largely but not exclusively coastal urban leftleaning progressive culture, weve got a largely rural and exurban left rightleaning conservative culture and the conservatives feel like they have been robbed of power and diminished and the progressives feel like they havent been given enough because they live in what they believe to be the most important places and theyve got an argument for that. One of the weird things about conservatives, they spend about lets make America Great again, the parts of america that are really successful and influential, like Silicon Valley and wall street hate these places, in hollywood, you have a culture industry and other things, so theres this sense of the 0sum status game between these groups and the president is from team red, team blue is damaged and feels humiliated and the president is with team blue and team red feels the same thing so they go nuts. That is part of why we have these inexplicable swings from bush to clinton to bush to obama to donald trump of all people and this is not the result of a political culture that is being driven by policy or reason or anything else, it is pure tribalism and pure identity politics. We seem to spend a lot of time being outraged. We do. I think thats Performance Art and partly group therapy. I dont think anyone is nearly as angry as they pretend to be or they are angry but not angry about politics but other things. Largely status anxiety. It is a weird time for a lot of people in rich parts of the world in the sense that financially, economically, physically, medically better off than we have ever been better status is less fixed than it used to be. You dont keep a job your whole life, dont associate yourself with a Big Corporation and stay with it for 40 years. That lack of certainty makes people nervous and anxious and when people feel anxious about the status they look for new sources of status and new sources of meaning, new sources of addictiveness. Family doesnt do it, theres been a decline in religious life and family life, people are more mobile than they used to be and move a lot so theres politics, particularly tribal form of politics, my team versus these other guys as a source of meaning and status and a place in life where their values are played out and expressed and i think that is the source of the a, not because people are really mad about whether the top tax rate is 39 or 34 . One of the things you say in your new book the smallest minority independent thinking in the age of mob politics is both progressives and nationalists come from the same tap. Yes. It is collectivism for lack of a better word. The idea that we gain value in groups rather than as individuals. It is a primitive way of looking at the world. It is the same intellectual shape as racism, it comes from the same place, the desire to find something to which to belong to give meaning to oneself that is larger and broader and hopefully immortal or closer to it. You have a word in here i want to ask the definition. Archilochus he. This comes from the greek term that goes back to plato. Essentially it means mob rule but it is a particular kind of mob rule. I didnt want to do is just that phrase because you talk about mob rule people think about big crowds of people having riots and lynchings and things like this. This is really more when the mob leans on institutions whether it is churches or things like that to do their bidding for them. To say what the law says, what rules are what is right this is what we want and we expect these agencies and institutions to comply with it so weve seen a lot of it in the emergence of the employer in political discipline. This isnt especially in the case of people like me who are professionally involved in political ideas, people managing starbucks or work at fast food restaurants or people who have jobs that dont touch on Public Affairs or politics in any particular direct way who nonetheless are being chased out of their jobs are having unapproved and unpopular political jamie more . The google guy is a good example of that and examples are the key to the thing. Because they make examples of these sorts of people and other people just never express themselves and learn to keep quiet and learn to conform and so we have this terrible culture of aggressive conformism and intellectual homogeneity that makes it difficult for us to deal in a useful productive way with complex problems and the complex thinking that needs to be done to deal with it. The social media aspect of the mob add on to this group think . It is a loaded gun. It is a tool that enables either bad behavior or Good Behavior to be propagated more quickly and efficiently. It can be used for good things are bad things like any other instrument, any other piece of technology. Social media makes it a little worse in the sense that people dont go there to learn things, they go to get affirmation and you get affirmation, the angrier, more personal, more ad hominem, more outrageous you are and i know as a writer occasionally i write something well reported and thoughtful and nobody reads it or a smaller number of people read it. The number of people who read a particular story a and every now and then i will write something angry and this guy is stupid and heres why and 1000 times as many people read those stories. If you are looking for that kind of feedback and the desire for popularity. You are going to go in that direction, going to be more outrageous, angrier, more emotional, more ad hominem because unfortunately that is what people respond better to. Have you been the target of a social media mob before . I did sort of famously work at the atlantic for three days and fired for having not so much for my political ideas although it was nominally over that. It was more about again these internal status games of people thinking this is not a conservative outlet so if we hire this conservative he has been elevated and status somehow and we are diminished and that is what that was about it the atlantic but i came up with my ideas about abortion and Capital Punishment and transgender issues and those sort of things. If it wasnt one thing it was going to be the other. It was less about i can tell you was less about my political ideas because i believe the New York Times wrote 9 stories about that affair and no one ever called me out on what i thought about anything. It was about my opinions, you would think they would want to know what they were. You got hired, did you shop at the office . I did. I wasnt originally going to work from their office in the watergate building. It is funny for a writer like me to walk around the watergate building. I would spend some time. I went to washington and spent three days at the office there. What was your experience . A lot of institutions like that are strange because the culture divide on this stuff is very strongly generational. There are a lot of older very leftwing senior editors at the atlantic who were mystified by people calling for me to be fired over having rightwing political ideas, we knew you were rightwing monster when we hire you and that is why you are here. So the older folks on the staff for a lot less angry and outraged at all this sort of stuff and it was largely knuckleheads in their 20s, a relatively small group i think, it was strange because i think none of the people at the atlantic. The situation in the atlantic was entirely given by stefan turley. It wasnt about social media stuff. That was the pretext but no one ever spoke to me about it, no one ever said lets talk about this. Jeff goldberg, the editor there, right before it was supposed to happen, i cant put you in front of this group. Im ready to go, lets do it. So that was that. What do you write that got you fired to q nominally. Host had you written it prior to q i only wrote one article for the atlantic and it was how libertarianism is an unpopular idea that nobody likes much. That was fairly uncontroversial. It was a discussion i had on twitter years before i went to work for the atlantic so im opposed to abortion. I think it should be criminalized. Im opposed to Capital Punishment but i argued in the past if were going to have Capital Punishment we shouldnt do this creepy medical thing where we do it through lethal injection and put him on a gurney in a hospital situation. Of the state is going to take logic to do so in a forthrightly violent manner. We should use a traditional form of Capital Punishment like hanging or firing squad or Something Like that. These things came together as kevin wants to hang one who had abortions which is not exactly a fair statement of my views on the issue but who instigated the attacks . Partly folk like media matters, kind of professional leftwing pressure organizations, people on staff were the more significant ones. I dont really know who, never get to speak to people about it. You write in your newest book the smallest minority that social medias mob politics with many heads. You talk about something called instant culture. What is that . The ways in which we of lowered the amount of work we are willing to do to engage with culture. This placement of books by twitter, displacement of essays by 120 characters, displacement of long commitments to deal with political ideas and other kinds of intellectual development, religious ideas with what is going on right now in the Second Coming in this minute. It is a substitute for real culture. It is the world of Reality Television in social media and instantaneous transmission of things that dont really last and a shallow, snarky sarcasm driven way of this mode of communication which i think can be fun and useful for short periods of time but it is like if you had a world in which political 1liners delivered on latenight comedy shows were the only form of communication you would be losing them and we moved in that direction. Communication is only incidental to social media. Yes. Social media is not about exchanging ideas. It is about getting nice feedback, people paying attention to you. Willy loman, attention must be paid. People go there for affirmation, confirmation, to be told they are doing the right thing, to be told the people they dont like are evil and wrong and the political equivalent of adolf hitler and all the rest of it. They dont go there to learn things from you dont go to twitter to say, hayek had interesting ideas about the use of information in a market it and why socialism wasnt able to avail itself of that exchange of information and therefore take Central Planning difficult. Thats not why you go to facebook or twitter. It is why you go to books and i wish people would spend a little more time with books. We have a president who has used twitter once or twice. We do. What does that say to you . My last book was called the case against trump which was ineffective apparently. I think donald trump is the perfect example are in some ways of the moment in which we are in because obviously nobody, no serious human being voted for donald trump because of his subtle and sophisticated policies. That is not why people went to donald trump. There are fine reasons to vote for donald trump as i wouldnt myself but if your conservator and you say donald versus hillary i choose donald okay, fine. That is a defense of will idea but people want to trump as a mascot, trump has a kind of wrecking ball and trump as as the tribune, there are these people and their the swamp, in washington in new york, and they are ripping you off and condescending to and im going to go and make things right and im going to do so by writing mean things about them on twitter and giving them demeaning nicknames and things like that. People who voted for this guy and made him president of the United States because they liked the way he gave people schoolyard nickname central people on twitter, that is still why they like him. This is why i am skeptical about the value of democracy. It is useful because it is a utilitarian matter because it is a substitute we have for war, hitting each other on the head when you have a disagreement but it can also bring out what our Founding Fathers called the passions. They didnt like the word passion. They like the word democracy either. Trump is the mascot of the democracy john adams warned us about. Host quote, procedural democracy is a convenience. It has authorized the chimps in the electorate and gives us an alternative to ritual combat for the chimps in office. Guest there are certain decisions we have to make collectively. We are the libertarian festival a lot of irans people are walking around. Ive written about individuals, thats not how societies organize. There are certain things we have to decide is groups. There are good ways to go about it. We can fight about it and whoever wins gets to decide which is how we did things for a lot of human history. We can have votes about it, we can use the law which is a useful piece of social technology we should probably rely on more. Democracy as a convenience is when we get together and say we have a real disagreement how to handle state healthcare. We are going to vote and choose people to work out that on our behalf and try to stick together through it because it is the only way to go about it. Democracy ever sacrosanct thing, sanctified in the idea that this is important because people endorsed it and this is what democracy produced, democracy produces bad things. If you had to vote on slavery in the 1800s they would have voted for slavery. Host where did you grow up . Guest in texas. My mother was a s