Bret Stephens is an opinion columnist for The New York Times and the founder and editor-in- chief of SAPIR, a new quarterly devoted to issues of Jewish concern.
In this week’s conversation, Yascha and Bret discuss how Donald Trump has changed political culture, why moderates around the world are struggling, and what makes the United States uniquely innovative.
This transcript has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.
Yascha Mounk: I had this thought the other day that Trump really is winning, and he is winning in part because he is much more effective and efficient in imposing his will on the American Republic than he was in the first term. But he may be winning more broadly because he seems to be teaching our entire political culture to operate by his rules.
One of the things I admired about Barack Obama was his insistence that when they go low, we go high. At this point, it feels as though Democrats—and really the entire political culture—have decided that we are in a mudslinging match, and the only way to win is to bring as much mud as possible. That does not mean that the two sides are the same or that they pose equivalent dangers, but it is still depressing.
I found the response to Charlie Kirk’s assassination attempt, and to the text messages by Jay Jones, the candidate for attorney general in Virginia wishing for his moderate Republican opponent and his children to be killed, deeply troubling—especially the excuses made for it. The fact that the frontrunner for the Democratic nomination now appears to be Gavin Newsom because he has decided to emulate Trump as much as possible on social media just reinforces that sense.
It feels like we are on an inexorable slide toward a generalized culture of Trumpism. Am I being overly pessimistic here?
Bret Stephens: I think, Yascha, that tracks some of my thinking from even his first term. I remember saying at some point in that era that the problem with Trump is not that he is catastrophic; it is that he is corrosive. Corrosion can lead, in time, to catastrophe, but what he was really doing was degrading the soft tissue of American democracy in a way that was ultimately going to harm—if I have to extend the metaphor—more essential organs.
American democracy held itself up, to a large extent, through the kind of manners and morals—in Burkean terms—that sustained our way of doing business. You can trace the corrosion back years, and people will argue about when it really began, but Trump gravely accelerated it. Now the Democrats believe they can find political advantage by adopting a symmetrical approach.
My intuition–although I worry it is more of a wish–is that this is profoundly wrong. If the average independent or undecided voter is left with a choice between Donald Trump and MAGA-ites behaving as they do, and the left behaving like MAGA-ites, the MAGA-ites will win almost every time. Not everywhere, but almost every time. For a variety of reasons, the best strategy for opponents of Trump—including conservative opponents like me—is exactly that Michelle Obama strategy: to go high.
There is a yearning in a healthy segment, or what remains of a healthy segment, of the American Republic for a totally different kind of discourse. Having the Adam Schiffs of the world drop F-bombs to show their coarseness, toughness, or everydayness does not serve the Democrats well. But maybe that is because I wish for a more genteel period in American politics that is not coming back. I don’t know.
Mounk: There are two questions here, I suppose. One is how we actually protect our democratic institutions and regain the kind of politics we want in the long run. The way I have put this since the beginning of this debate is that you are put into a terrible dilemma when you are trying to play soccer and your opponent shows up with baseball bats. If you keep playing soccer while they are threatening you with baseball bats, you are going to be beaten up.
I certainly think that the Trump administration is doing things at the moment that are deeply threatening to the rule of law and the separation of powers in the American Republic. Trump sending what, according to reporting by The Wall Street Journal, appears to have been meant as a private message to Pam Bondi instructing her to go after his political opponents, and James Comey being indicted five days later on a slapdash, cobbled-together indictment made by a just-appointed prosecutor for that purpose, is a baseball bat. That is dangerous for the American Republic.
Of course, the problem is that if, in response, you get a bunch of baseball bats as well, perhaps you have a better chance of winning, but you are no longer playing soccer. If the purpose is not just to win the next election but to preserve the American Republic, then there is a very serious dilemma here.
The other point you are making is that perhaps, in terms of electoral politics, it is not actually that smart to go low. Gavin Newsom has, I think, boosted his chances of becoming the Democratic Party nominee by mocking Trump on social media and posting fake AI videos of J.D. Vance—which, by the way, legislation he supported in California would have made criminal—and engaging in these antics. But he may not be boosting his chances of actually winning the 2028 presidential election against someone like Vance if he is selected. So what is the way forward?
Stephens: I think Democrats are under a misapprehension—or many Democrats are—that they have a communications problem. They actually have a substance problem. I do not think Gavin Newsom is going to become president, not because he is not telegenic or good at debate, but because California is a visibly misgoverned state.
It is a state where more people leave than enter, a state where businesses struggle to survive. Talk to any entrepreneur in California who is not in high tech and they live under a vast weight. It is a state that has made every conceivable mistake, and it is wholly governed by Democrats, so there is no escaping political accountability.
I have said this for years: the secret of successful demagoguery is not to traffic in lies, but in half-truths. Hitler had a point about Versailles. Many Germans who objected to what John Maynard Keynes called the Carthaginian Peace of 1919 had a point. He made it in the most angry way, and of course, the program was evil and insane. But Trump has cannily picked up on a number of issues that were politically legitimate, genuine, and treated as unmentionable by most Democratic politicians.
Migration and the border crisis, which swept the United States under Biden because of his policies, was one of them. Trump alighted on that. The extent of urban disorder—whether recorded as crime, juvenile delinquency, or simply scary-looking streets—is another legitimate issue. The cover-up of Joe Biden’s mental health is a third. Trump picked up on these when the entire Democratic establishment said there was nothing to see.
The secret for Democratic revival, to my mind, comes from acknowledging those mistakes—some of which were very serious—and proposing real solutions. Trump is right that there is a real immigration issue, but Democrats can follow the model of Barack Obama, who was not afraid to deport illegal migrants and to call them illegal migrants rather than wander in the semantic waters of “undocumented workers.”
At the same time, Democrats can have an immigration policy that welcomes the Yascha Mounks of the world—and more than the Yascha Mounks—because the country does not just need intellectuals. It needs agricultural workers and people coming with dreams, big hearts, and ambition. That message would resonate with Americans. Simply sounding like Donald Trump, then proposing progressive solutions while refusing to acknowledge the failures of progressive governance, is a losing strategy. It hands the keys to Trump.
Mounk: Let’s disentangle two different positions here, Bret. I agree with you on the merits of Gavin Newsom’s presidential run. He owns the record of California far too much and does not seem to have a political core. He has gone along with and advocated very progressive and culturally far-out measures in California, then tried to pretend that he was a heterodox thinker with right-leaning influences on his podcast. Now he is swinging back to this social media stuntman phase. I do not think people will believe who he is.
I also think his good looks are as much a detriment as an advantage. Good looks, in general, are an advantage in politics, but he lacks authenticity. He would have been right for an era of soundbite politics in the late 1990s or early 2000s. His suaveness and his ability to produce the right phrase written by a team of PR advisors at the right moment would have created just the right seven-second clip for the evening news. In an age when people crave and prize authenticity, he does not seem appealing to a broader audience.
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I have argued many times that the problem is that Republicans are far outside the American mainstream in many of their positions and policies, but so are Democrats. That includes not only the far left but also the relative moderates, or whatever one might call Gavin Newsom.
There are two possible conclusions from that. The first is that Democrats need to go back to Barack Obama—to a party that talks unapologetically about securing the border, that values a social safety net but also takes pride in rapid economic growth and a functioning market economy. On cultural and economic issues, they need to go back to being normal and return to the center of American politics. There is a large grain of truth in that. If Barack Obama were eligible to run for president in 2028, he would have a very good chance of winning.
On the other hand, that does not explain why moderate political parties that have not gone to the extremes of the Democrats in the United States are struggling all over the world. Why are the Social Democrats and Christian Democrats in Germany both in decline? Why is Emmanuel Macron limping toward the end of his second term, hugely unpopular and without a majority in parliament? Why is Keir Starmer, who bent the Labour Party back toward the center-left, so unpopular?
If we had a Barack Obama–like politics without the personal charisma and exceptional political talent of Barack Obama himself, would we not just end up like the last German governments, like Macron, like Starmer? Is there not a deeper problem with the ability of that kind of politics to inspire enthusiasm in the electorate?
Stephens: I know I have just been saying nice things about Obama’s migration policy and his wife’s wise words about going high, but I actually think Obama’s presidency will not be well remembered by historians—not least because it paved the way for Donald Trump, but also because Obama introduced a kind of progressivism in American politics that ultimately served the Democrats poorly, even if, at the time, his political skill made it seem successful.
The figures we need to go back to are Tony Blair and Bill Clinton. Bill Clinton profoundly understood, in a way that Obama never did, the concerns of middle and lower-middle America. He understood—even though his personal behavior belied it—that the country was socially fairly conservative. He understood that what people wanted above all was prosperity and order, beyond the progressive goals of social reform. He was broadly able to deliver on that. He left the country with a budgetary surplus, peace, and prosperity, while also helping bring crime down to record lows.
Tony Blair likewise, after years of failed progressive leadership in the Labour Party, especially under Neil Kinnock, captured the center. Both of them did so with genuine charisma. One of the challenges today is that moderate politics often require a kind of anti-charisma. A moderate political leader I admire is Michael Bennet, the senator from Colorado. When he ran for president in 2020, he said, if you vote for me, you won’t have to think about what’s going on in the White House for weeks on end, because we’ll just quietly go about the business of government. Lovely message in theory, but he went nowhere in that race–though I suspect he will be the next governor of Colorado, which will be good for that state.
Democrats need to do two things. First, not only shelve but disavow the more radical progressive positions of the past ten years—soft on crime, indifferent to mass migration, far left on cultural issues—and understand that those were not just political mistakes, but mistakes in principle. Second, they need to find someone with genuine political charisma who can communicate a position of muscular centrism. The only Democrat I see clearly running for president who has that is Rahm Emanuel. He is immensely energetic and well-spoken, but right now he is far outside the mainstream of the Democratic Party. The final point is that the qualities that would make for a successful Democratic nominee in a general election are precisely the qualities that will doom a nominee in the primary.
Mounk: A couple of thoughts on that. I agree with much of what you say, but precisely for that reason, I am trying to challenge myself—and I am challenging myself by challenging you. When you go back to Tony Blair and Bill Clinton, I wonder whether part of what made those electoral coalitions work is a world that no longer exists.
They were leaders of left-leaning political parties at a time when they could still take for granted at least part of the working-class vote. Of course, there were working-class Tories persuaded by Margaret Thatcher and many working Americans who voted for Ronald Reagan. But there were still states, constituencies, and voters throughout both countries who unthinkingly voted for the left because that was what their parents and grandparents had done. They were still grateful for the New Deal, or they had fathers and grandfathers who were members of trade unions in mining towns across the United Kingdom. It was part of a social culture—of a class identity—that assumed you would always vote for the left.
Clinton and Blair could therefore expand that coalition by appealing to middle-class, more urban swing voters who wanted a somewhat more cosmopolitan outlook on the world, a more inclusive outlook, one that would not remain silent about the AIDS crisis in the United States, and that recognized Britain had become more multiethnic. Their candidacies offered excitement, a sense that the modern age had arrived, that voters were moving beyond the staid world of John Major and George H. W. Bush. This created an amalgamation of quite different sets of voters.
Now, the right has become smarter. Despite its supposed nostalgia, the populist right today has found ways—especially through social media—to appeal to young people and to present itself as the future as much as the left ever did. More profoundly, that sociological rootedness of the working class in the left has vanished. There is no longer any presumption that if you are from a mining town in Britain, you must vote for Labour, or if your great-grandparents benefited from the New Deal, you must vote for the Democratic Party. That assumption is gone.
Douglas Alexander, the former Scottish Labour leader, once told me—either on this podcast or in private conversation—that when he went back to his old constituency, a mining town, to help campaign for one of his successors, Labour was offering voters a nostalgic trip back to the mining museum. But what those voters actually wanted was a weekend at Euro Disney. The cultural rootedness in left-wing politics that once secured those constituencies has disappeared. Those same areas now vote for the Tories under someone like Boris Johnson and likely for Reform in the next election. The same dynamic explains why so many Midwestern states went for Trump in 2016.
Stephens: All of your points are well taken, and I would add one more. Both Tony Blair and Bill Clinton benefited from leading parties that were desperate to win, even if that meant sacrificing ideological purity. Democrats under Reagan’s two terms and George H. W. Bush’s first had been drubbed in three consecutive elections. They were not going to nominate another anti–death penalty liberal like Mike Dukakis. They were lucky to find Bill Clinton. The same was true for Tony Blair after eighteen years of Conservative rule under Thatcher and Major.
At the same time, I think it is a mistake to assume that the party holding the working class automatically wins elections. Democrats held the working class for generations and still lost plenty of elections, both in Britain and in the United States. Every political era presents a unique set of challenges but also unique opportunities. The United States right now presents a major opportunity for Democrats—one they seem too divided, inept, or radical to seize.
Many Americans support Trump through gritted teeth. They are embarrassed by the way he conducts himself, alarmed by his authoritarian instincts, and disgusted by his family’s self-enrichment. They do not want to turn the American Republic into a neo-monarchical order. Yet they look at the alternative and see weakness and radicalism—typified by figures like Zohran Mamdani, who, barring a political miracle, will soon be one of the most visible faces of the Democratic Party.
A few years ago, during the lockdowns, one of my kids showed me a TikTok video. A voice off-camera says, would you rather (A) go into lockdown with your mother-in-law or— and before the next option is spoken, the man immediately says, B. At this moment, for a critical mass of Americans, anything is better than governance by left-wing progressives who seem more alarmed about pronouns and misgendering than about twenty million illegal migrants crossing the border with no plan for integration.
Democrats have to understand that whatever legitimate faults they can point to in Donald Trump will not compensate for the distrust and disgust many Americans feel toward them. I voted for Kamala Harris because I believed January 6th was an unforgivable sin. But if she had run against almost any other Republican, I would not have voted for her. She represented a style of high-handed, dishonest, radical progressive politics that would have been destructive to America and its place in the world.
Many of my friends on the right who share my concerns about Trump said to themselves, forget about January 6th and his anti-democratic impulses; Kamala would be worse. They voted for Trump. The challenge for Democrats is how to win back those voters—people just a few degrees to the right of me—into a small-d democratic coalition.
We are not talking about a huge number of voters. We are talking about a few hundred thousand in six or seven key states, many of whom are not working-class but middle or upper-middle-class people. They are straining under the weight of Trump’s tariffs and other economic policies and are just looking for a Democrat who is above the line of what they can accept from a liberal politician.
Mounk: Yeah, I wonder about how we should define the goal here, actually. The minimal goal for people who are worried about what the Trump administration is doing and would undoubtedly continue to do under the administration of JD Vance or whoever the likely Republican candidate is in 2028. I’m excluding scenarios in which somebody like Spencer Cox becomes the nominee of the Republican Party, which would diffuse the situation very significantly, but that doesn’t seem likely at this juncture. Is it enough for Gavin Newsom, Josh Shapiro, or Gretchen Whitmer to win in 2028 because they flipped those five or six hundred thousand votes distributed across states in the right strategic way? Or do we need something more fundamental to get out of this political moment?
I think part of my relative pessimism about this moment, and part of the reason why I actually think that the Democratic Party may need to transform itself in an even more radical way than you’re saying, is that I don’t think that would be enough to protect American politics in the long run. It might give us an interval of two or four years of relative calm.
We’ve seen in many countries around the world that populists who lose power for a little while then quickly come back. A year ago, the great story of hope and success was Poland. Donald Trump himself in the United States, of course, but there are examples from other countries as well. In Poland, the success story was the Law and Justice government, which was destroying democratic institutions in Poland quite rapidly, being displaced after eight years in power at parliamentary elections. But they kept the presidency and then were able to install a handpicked successor to that right-wing populist president into office. The more moderate governing coalition is now embattled, and there’s a real question about whether it’s going to be able to retain its parliamentary majority when the next parliamentary elections take place.
You could very easily imagine that Gretchen Whitmer somehow squeezes out a victory in 2028 and does a decent job governing. We’re going to like some things she does and complain about other things she does, but she’s not going to frontally attack democratic institutions. Then in 2032, Donald Trump Jr. or whoever else comes back with a significant majority, retakes the White House, and has control of Congress. We’re right back in the middle of the kind of problems we now face.
I think our ambition needs to be for Democrats to win for 10 years with 55 to 60 percent of the vote in such a way that Republicans are forced to come back to the negotiating table, as Labour was forced to come back to the negotiating table in the 80s and 90s because the Conservatives were consistently winning significant majorities. The party realized it needed to transform itself significantly to be able to actually compete electorally.
Is that realistic at all? If that is not realistic, is all we can do to somehow squeeze out these singles and ground doubles and try to win the game this way? Or does that just speak to the thesis that we have to be very pessimistic about where American politics is going to lie in 15 or 20 years?
Stephens: Look, step one is to win an election. Step two is to govern well. The lesson of the Biden presidency is step one was accomplished in 2020 and step two was a dismal failure. Why? Because Biden campaigned as a moderate and governed as a leftist. Not uniformly, but basically he governed as one. I think his government was more left-wing than he himself realized because he was often, by many eyewitness accounts, without a clear sense of what his administration was actually doing and proposing.
The key is simply that you have to make yourself electorally palatable. I think electorally palatable to the center, not simply finding a way to eke out voters on the left. Then you have to govern in a way that gives middle-of-the-road Americans a sense of comfort that you are governing effectively in their interests, in their language, and in their moral comfort zone, which in too many cases Democrats stopped doing in recent years.
Now there’s a third issue, which is a serious one. You mentioned Keir Starmer in passing earlier. I think Keir’s problem is that he says things which voters feel he doesn’t really believe. He says, we’ve got to get a handle on the migration crisis. But the spirit is that it’s a political problem, not that there is a really serious issue with the levels of migration that Britain has experienced over the past four or five years—under Tory governments for the most part, by the way.
There has always been a problem with the center left, which is that they are viewed with a lot of suspicion by many voters who think that they are wolves in sheep’s clothing, so to speak, that their heart is essentially beating far to the left. In their heart, they are Oskar Lafontaine, but they are presenting themselves as Gerhard Schröder, to speak in your language.
Mounk: This is a deep cut. Yes, this is the very poor man’s equivalent of Bill Clinton and Tony Blair: Gerhard Schröder, who was elected as the head of a red-green, Social Democrat–Green coalition in Germany in 1998. He pretended to be more of a third-way politician, which he was in economic policy, but not really on foreign policy.
Schröder went on to be on the board of Gazprom and was a close ally of Vladimir Putin. His internal party rival was Oscar Lafontaine, who came from a much more traditional left-wing social democratic tradition.
Stephens: Yeah, Lafontaine. He was the Bernie Sanders of his time, in effect. Democrats have to adopt the right tone and the right policies, but the third aspect is that they’ve got to believe it. They’ve got to believe in their hearts that this isn’t just a phase on the way to the next round of progressive social experiments. They’ve got to believe that they really want a thriving capitalist society in which profit-seeking is not viewed as a sin.
They’ve got to believe that law and order in American cities is not the antithesis of civil liberties; it is the handmaiden of civil liberties. They’ve got to believe that in order to have a sovereign country, you have to have control over your borders and know who’s coming in, in what numbers, where they’re from, and whether they have criminal records. You have to believe that American power rests in part on military efficacy and military might, and that it is a pillar of American democracy. In effect, the Democratic Party has to become the party of Harry Truman and John F. Kennedy and, in his way, of Bill Clinton once again.
There is that tradition in the Democratic Party. By the way, you have to believe in one more thing, and I should have mentioned this earlier. You have to believe that people should be judged by the content of their character, not the color of their skin. The identity politics trap that the Democrats got themselves into was not only philosophically at odds with the real Democratic tradition, but also politically toxic and dangerous. If you can play minority identity politics, you can play white identity politics. They have to move away from that.
I would conclude with this thought: Donald Trump is doing them a giant favor by doing the dirty work of getting rid of the DEI apparatus that had seized so many corners of American life. DEI was ultimately not only in its execution and practice antithetical to the American creed, but it was bad for the Democratic brand.
Mounk: It is striking that there was an expectation of broad outrage if the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade. Not in all of American society, since it is a very divided issue, but certainly among Americans who are left of center, among Americans who are pro-choice. I think there was a genuine reaction to it across the population, and it probably helps to explain why Biden did comparatively well, though unexpectedly, in the midterms in 2022.
There was also an expectation that a lot of Americans who are left of center would be angry and outraged when the Supreme Court overturned affirmative action. It is very interesting that never materialized. One part of that reason is that it seems many universities are basically continuing to engage in affirmative action and are effectively defying what the Supreme Court ruled. We will see how that plays out in terms of legal challenges to some of the practices that Ivy League and other schools continue to engage in.
I think it is also partially because there was never the level of broad-based commitment to affirmative action that Democrats perhaps thought there was. In electoral terms, there is now no real attempt to reinstate it. You did not see even Kamala Harris in 2024 campaigning on it. Perhaps somewhere in the platform of the DNC it may have been mentioned, but certainly on the campaign trail she was not saying, I am going to appoint judges that make sure that affirmative action will once again be legal in the United States. That was not a central plank of her campaign.
It may be that if the Trump administration succeeds in dismantling much of the DEI bureaucracy, Democrats will quietly drop the issue when they return to power, realizing they cannot reinstate it. I know we have returned to the Bill Clinton comparison a lot, and I was not planning to make so much of this conversation about him, but it does get to an interesting point about what a new paradigm for a non-Trumpist center or left in the United States would look like.
Clinton came at a time of optimism. The Soviet Union had just fallen apart. America was at the zenith of its power. It was a unilateral moment in international relations. Clinton was building in some ways on the optimism of Reagan, and toward the end of his presidency there was a major economic boom. It felt as though the future was going to get better. More Americans were going to go to college, get educated, and have more opportunity in the knowledge economy, which was expected to serve Americans well. The impact of automation, deindustrialization, and China’s entry into the WTO was not yet felt in a broad way. Under those circumstances, that form of politics could win.
I was just invited to speak at the launch of a project called France 2050, in which the Ministry of the Plan—founded by de Gaulle to make the five-year plans of the post-war period, now a government think tank and forecasting agency—tries to imagine what France might be like in 2050. They conducted an opinion poll, and it found that people in France consistently expect the country to be more or less the same in 30 years, except worse. They do not think there will be radical changes, but they expect France to be less powerful, less influential, with less money, pensions more at risk, and the state of democracy worse. Everything is expected to be a little bit worse.
There are reasons to be pessimistic about France’s future, and French citizens certainly are more pessimistic than there is reason to be about America’s future. Americans in general may be more optimistic and probably have reason to be more optimistic at the moment. Yet there is a parallel. Most Americans do not think the country will be stronger, safer, or better 25 years from now. That may make it much harder to rerun something like Bill Clinton’s politics in our time. So the broader question is: how can a political center succeed in a moment of broad-based pessimism?
Stephens: I’m not sure you’re right for a couple of reasons. Looking back in American history, you find repeated recurrences of broad national pessimism. The 1970s was a very pessimistic era, and there was a lot of evidence to justify it. People thought the Soviet Union under Leonid Brezhnev was an unstoppable force.
There was a succession of political, economic, and geopolitical crises—Watergate, Vietnam, stagflation, the oil embargo—that entrenched this feeling of pessimism. Reagan won in 1980 on a message of deep optimism about the American experiment, that America could overcome its problems. Americans were hungry for an optimistic messenger. One of the things that made Jimmy Carter such a flaccid politician was that he seemed to adopt the spirit of pessimism, of limits, of an era of American life that was diminished. That reflected the zeitgeist of the 70s until Reaganite sunshine burned off those clouds. Reagan came with a program that produced a great deal of prosperity, at least for a number of years. The same was true in effect with Margaret Thatcher.
Optimistic politicians who claim the spirit of America as one of possibility, hope, and resilience are always going to have a successful run. Trump’s success came from his cunning formula, “Make America Great Again,” which combined nostalgia for the past, optimism for the future, and a critique of the present. The word “make”—as in create, build—packed into four words. It was a slogan of genius. So I do not think living in a pessimistic era makes it impossible for a Democrat to be a “sunny warrior,” as Reagan was, with a different set of policies.
There is also what I call the “pessimism paradox of democracy.” Democracies are always inclined to a certain degree of pessimism. Not just the 1970s, but other eras as well. Even the 1950s, which we now look back on as a halcyon period, were saturated with pessimism about nuclear war and other threats. Open societies focus on their defects more than their virtues. Closed societies constantly advertise their virtues and hide their weaknesses, even from themselves. That often becomes their undoing. For example, China is not publishing statistics on youth unemployment to maintain the image of an unstoppable juggernaut, when in fact it faces deep-seated economic issues.
At any moment in America–although it often escapes media attention–a lot of good things are happening. Many are invisible because they are happening in the proverbial garage of the next Steve Jobs. Imagine an economic historian in 2075 at Johns Hopkins or the University of Chicago, talking to her students about the inventions that set the economic tone for the 21st century in the way the steam engine did for the 19th, or penicillin, airplanes, and telecommunications did for the 20th.
What would those inventions be? Likely artificial intelligence, immunotherapy, gene therapy, perhaps fracking and hydrocarbon superabundance. Whatever the list, almost all were made in America. That should be a source of optimism, because the United States continues to innovate in ways that France, Britain, and even China do not. China still struggles to make a commercial jetliner. When it comes to innovation beyond intellectual property theft, China suffers because its economic system sets political limits on free thinking. Free thinking is the engine of invention and entrepreneurship. That is a philosophical problem they cannot solve within their system.
One of the underappreciated achievements of the last few years is that America has overcome “wokeness.” People dislike the term, but everyone knows what it means: a censorious social justice ideology that classifies people by identity, seeks structural solutions to every problem, and looks on American institutions with grave suspicion. This ideology felt unstoppable six or seven years ago, not just at the government level but at the institutional level. Today, American institutions are racing to get away from it, at least paying lip service to viewpoint diversity and shaking up left-liberal media establishments to bring in different voices.
This is healthy. It happened organically in American society. It shows strength, like the roots of a tree bending around rocks in the soil. That adaptability is a source of resilience. Authoritarian systems like China’s appear strong, but they are brittle, like panes of glass. When they fracture, they shatter.
In the rest of this conversation, Yascha and Bret discuss the future of China, whether wokeness is really over, and the future of U.S. media. This part of the conversation is reserved for paying subscribers…
