ross douthat

I’m Ross Douthat.

david leonhardt

I’m David Leonhardt. And live from Times Center, this is “The Argument.” [APPLAUSE] [MUSIC PLAYING] You might notice that we are down one host tonight. Michelle is out with a cold. Just a cold. Michelle wishes she were here, particularly because whenever we do a live show, Michelle finds out that she is the host with the opinions that are most popular among our audience. But we wish her well, and we’ll see her back here next week. This week, the coronavirus, and what is the president’s job in a time of crisis. Then, we’ll quiz Ross about his new book, “The Decadent Society,” and play a little game that might divide us all. [APPLAUSE] So Ross, we’re here at The Times Center in Midtown Manhattan, with 300 some odd friends. Down the street, Broadway shows are getting ready to open with packed audiences. But some people are worried. We’ve all heard about the run on hand sanitizer and face masks. When the markets opened this week, stocks dropped so quickly that trading was briefly halted, part of a rule intended to avoid a panic. Ross, how do you think about the stage that we’re at right now? Will Broadway curtains be going up a week from now the way they are tonight?

ross douthat

So I’ve been sort of a professional alarmist throughout the entire progress of the coronavirus. So, you know, with that as background, my suspicion is that this is sort of the last normal week in the Northeastern United States, and that if you look at trends in infection rates that, as we ramp up testing, we will discover more clusters of infection, like the one that clearly exists in Westchester, not that far from here, not that far from members of my family. I don’t know when it actually gets to Broadway, but if you think of us right now on our current trajectory as being a few weeks behind where certain other countries that have taken more drastic measures are, I think it’s totally reasonable to expect some form of pretty dramatic closures of all kinds of public events, including podcast live shows.

david leonhardt

So I guess let me make the case that we’re overreacting a little bit, because I do think some people have questions that are understandable. So this has a mortality rate that we don’t yet know what it is. There’s a chance it’s — it almost certainly seems higher than the flu. We don’t know whether it’s many times higher or only somewhat higher. It’s too late to kind of stop its spread. I assume you agree with that. It’s going to spread. And so the idea of kind of shutting down our entire country for something that is very alarming but basically mostly seems to do the most damage to specific populations. Shouldn’t we at least have a more targeted strategy than essentially shutting down our entire economy? [ONE PERSON CLAPS] [LAUGHTER] I told you some people had questions. [LAUGHTER]

ross douthat

I’ll be shaking your hand later. [LAUGHTER] A firm grip. [LAUGHTER] So no, that’s completely wrong. [LAUGHTER] And let me tell you why. So one, yes, this does not have as high a mortality rate as some of the diseases — you know, Ebola, most famously — that have panicked people and inspired strong mobilizations in response. However, it has a combination of, you know, effectively slow development within the human body, which makes it easier to spread. You don’t get sick that fast, so you can easily become a super spreader, to use at least an internet term of art. And that combines with a mortality rate that we don’t know what it is, but we know pretty well that it’s substantially higher than the flu. So I could go on, but —

david leonhardt

Yeah, no, that’s —

ross douthat

I’ll get into the case for draconian measures in a minute.

david leonhardt

It’s interesting. I think when a lot of people hear this idea of we want to slow the spread, or at least I had this initial, wait a second, why does it matter the pace of the spread? But it does matter, I’ve come to understand, for a few different reasons. One, we hope we’re eventually going to have a vaccine. Right? That may be 12 months, it may be 18 months away, but if you can keep more people from getting it until then, that would be better. But two, there’s this whole question of what it means for hospitals and our public health infrastructure, right? And having a spread with maximum speed that overwhelms the hospitals is a very different situation with a slower spread.

ross douthat

Yes. And this is what is, as far as I can tell, happening in northern Italy right now. And it’s the reason the Italian government is taking very un-Italian, you know, steps — [LAUGHTER]

david leonhardt

Efficient.

ross douthat

You know, no mass, no pizza. I mean, you know, I’m joking, but the stories from northern Italian hospitals are terrible, that you are losing — you know, you’re making choices about which patients get a ventilator, which patients get hospital beds, in some cases, based — you know, there’s sort of this patient is too old or in too poor health to save. So yes, you know, you want to slow the spread, but you also want— I don’t— you know, the scenario that epidemiologists talk about where, well, 40 percent or 60 percent of Americans get it, if that’s going to happen, I want it to happen after we get the vaccine, basically. Like, I don’t see any upside in saying, well, it’s inevitable that 40 percent to 60 percent of the country will get this. I don’t think it’s inevitable. I think the effective responses suggest it’s not. And we should be taking those effective responses, and we should be — I mean, this is a moment for a kind of, you know, quasi-authoritarian public response, of the kind — so Michelle is not here, which is a tragedy because I feel that she and I, if you listen to the podcast know, have a long-running argument about whether Donald Trump is fundamentally a fascist or fundamentally a clown. And I feel that Trump’s disastrous reaction to the threat of a virus from a country that he has scapegoated that should be like — the true fascist response to this would be wild overreaction, militarization, all kinds of things. And all Trump cares about is trying to talk the stock market into going back up. But here tonight, I feel that my interpretation of Trump has been partially vindicated by his disastrous response.

david leonhardt

So our friend Ezra Klein tweeted that Trump’s turn from claiming this isn’t a big deal to having a really xenophobic, nasty set of blame-shifting is going to be ugly when it happens. And Ezra either said or implied it was going to happen soon. Do you think Ezra is right that we’re going to start to see some of Trump’s most intense, basest white nationalist impulses coming out soon?

ross douthat

I mean, look, I would expect that Trump’s lashing out, yeah, will take on some sort of toxic forms at some point. At the same time, what makes me hesitate with that argument is that, a month and a week ago, Trump did the one good thing that he’s done in all of this, was impose a complete, but partial travel ban for people who had passed through China. And when he did that, maybe not Ezra or yourself, but there was sort of a chorus of sort of right-thinking people saying this is xenophobia, and it’s going to end up scapegoating Asian people and Chinese people, and it’s just, you know, an extension of his Muslim ban. That’s just nonsense, right? Trump was right to do that. And there are a bunch of things that he could do now that would be more draconian that he should be doing or considering doing. And so until he actually does those things, I don’t sit around worrying about his xenophobic rhetoric because we actually need some action. We need a little more nationalism. Like, the thing that Trump sold of, hi, I’m the tough guy who’s going to protect you from foreign threats, I would take a little more of it right now.

david leonhardt

I think the thing that’s hard is, look, in some ways, although the details are very different, I’m taken back this week to, like, 2006, 2007, in particular, and then 2008 and the financial crisis, right? And I recall during that period really rooting for the Bush administration just to take control, right? I obviously had lots of disagreements with the Bush administration on all kinds of issues, but I was just rooting for them to take control. And they did, right? I mean, the Obama administration gets not enough credit for what it did to stop the financial crisis, but the Bush administration also doesn’t get enough credit for what it did, at least in 2007 and 2008. Its performance before that was much less good. I don’t have that same feeling where I’m just kind of rooting for the Trump administration to take control [LAUGHTER] because I have no faith in them, right?

ross douthat

You don’t want Mike Pence —

david leonhardt

Right.

ross douthat

— administering your quarantine.

david leonhardt

That’s exactly right. So yeah, I’m rooting for —

ross douthat

He’s got some nice red robes picked out.

david leonhardt

Yeah, and like various anti-science opinions that he’ll foist on all of us. I agree with you, restricting travel for people who were in China sounds like a smart idea. But we are also dealing with an administration that has shown itself repeatedly to be both racist and incompetent. And so it’s really hard to take any individual thing they do — or maybe more to the point, to have any hope that they’re going to do something decent over the next couple weeks.

ross douthat

So I mean, I certainly take the second half of the point. To the first half of the point, I mean, go back to the Bush administration and Obama administration response, right? In hindsight, there were tons of problems with that response. Tons of problems of sort of basic justice, right, where in the end, the steps we took to ward off a financial crisis ended up bailing out large financial institutions that had gotten us into the mess, in part, more than they bailed out ordinary taxpayers.

david leonhardt

And that’s why you’re supporting Elizabeth Warren for president.

ross douthat

And that’s why I’m here to support Elizabeth Warren, yes. You all failed her, but I am staying true. [APPLAUSE, LAUGHTER] And this, you know, sense of sort of basic injustice has fed everything from Occupy Wall Street to parts of the Tea Party to Bernie and Elizabeth Warren today. And I think it does — I think, you know, there’s a left-wing critique of the Obama White House that says the reason they lost so much ground to Republicans in 2010 was because of this, that you needed — essentially, that the response was practical but not moral, in —

david leonhardt

Yes.

ross douthat

—in a certain sense. And so I think it’s totally reasonable to fear a Trump administration response that, in some different way, would be practical but not moral. But I think in situations of crisis, you prefer a practical response with moral problems to no response at all, right? And I mean, that’s basically where I am right now. I don’t have tons of confidence in Mike Pence. I’m, you know, less worried about the theocratic stuff than you are, but you know, the sort of medical experts are not political actors in the final analysis. And if what you need is for the president of the United States to get on the phone to the governor of Washington and say, I need you to shut your state down, and I promise you an aid package from Washington that will prop up your state for the next six months, that’s something that only Trump can do.

david leonhardt

Right. Yes. But you see the ridiculousness —

ross douthat

Yes! I mean, look, this is — right at this moment, this does look like the vindication of a certain kind of “Never Trump” opinion that I held at the outset of this presidency and then I’ve sort of tiptoed away from. There was an expectation that Trump — not only that would Trump be unable to handle the demands of the office, but that the world would test him, right, in ways that led quickly to crisis. And in a lot of ways, that has not happened. That’s been the striking thing about these few years, that in foreign policy and in the economy and so on, you know, whatever you think about the moral dimensions of the Trump administration, it has not been a practical catastrophe. But this case is as far as we’ve gone towards the worst-case scenario that some Never Trumpers feared. And yeah, it leaves you with this awful realization that the person who you need to take practical steps may be actually incapable of doing them. And maybe I’ll have to go back and dust off my, you know, 25th Amendment columns from way back at the beginning.

david leonhardt

I mean, it seems more plausible than it did two weeks ago.

ross douthat

The 25th Amendment?

david leonhardt

I mean —

ross douthat

I’m not going back to that. [LAUGHTER] You know, I tried.

david leonhardt

What was sort of funny about the first half of this conversation is I feel like usually there’s such a normal dynamic between us, among the three of us, where Michelle and I —

ross douthat

I’m talking you guys off the ledge. —talking you guys off the ledge.

david leonhardt

Yeah. And like, now I’m trying to talk you off the ledge and you’re saying there’s no talking you off the ledge.

ross douthat

Now I’m on the ledge. I’m not on the ledge. I’m looking — no, I don’t know. I’m gonna lose the metaphor.

david leonhardt

What should we be rooting for in terms of if we have no faith in President Trump, what should we be rooting for from him?

ross douthat

I think we should be rooting for sort of substantially draconian measures undertaken by state and local officials.

david leonhardt

Because the alternative is worse, you’re saying.

ross douthat

Yeah. Well, and not only draconian. I mean, look, you know, I mean, there are lots of things we should be doing, right? Like, I mean, in certain ways, it was absurd, and in certain ways, it was immoral because it came from prison labor, but the fact that Governor Cuomo of New York’s got out today with his New York brand of Purell, I mean, that’s good, right? Some enterprising governor should be requisitioning a factory to make N95 masks right now. Like, this is — you know, this is the United States of America. Like, how can we have a mask shortage? I still have a case for optimism, in my case, for pessimism. I still think this can be contained, I just think we have to do it.

david leonhardt

Well, OK, let’s end it there and take a break. We’ll be right back. [APPLAUSE] So Ross, speaking of the job of the presidency —

ross douthat

Yes.

david leonhardt

—you had quite a critique of Trump’s social media habits in your new book, “The Decadent Society.” You mentioned that Trump as the actual real-life president is weak, not strong, and overwhelmed by the job. You wrote that his presidency resembles, unsurprisingly, reality television. On that score, I would guess that many of our listeners agree with you. So in the book, you define decadence as economic stagnation, institutional decay, and cultural and intellectual exhaustion at a high level of material prosperity and economic development. That is quite a definition.

ross douthat

It’s very pithy.

david leonhardt

What got you interested in the subject of decadence?

ross douthat

So I think that, in certain ways, this book is an attempt to capture pre-coronavirus this sort of weird problem in developed countries where, on the one hand, it’s very clear that people are unhappy with the broad situation. And that’s manifest in everything from, you know, in the extremes what we call depths of despair, rising suicide rates, opioid addiction, alcohol abuse and so on to disruptions and disturbances in our politics. Populism on the right, Bernie Sanders on the left, and so on. So if you looked at those aspects of our society, you would say, well, things must not be going very well. But then from the other corner, you’d hear the voice of, say, a Steven Pinker saying, what are you talking about? Things have never been better. The world has never been richer. Life expectancy has never been this long.

david leonhardt

We’ve never had so little violence.

ross douthat

We’ve never had — right, he wrote an entire book about the decline of violence that was debatable, but described a real trend, especially in America since the 1990s. And I think you can synthesize these two by saying, in fact, Pinker is right that, in material terms, we’re not in a crisis or a catastrophe. We have, in certain ways, never had it so good. But we have also reached a kind of — we’ve entered into a period that lives sort of past the peak, basically, where you achieve a certain level of prosperity, a certain level of technological proficiency, and then it gets harder to advance much further. And so economic growth rates don’t disappear. We still can muster 1.5 percent to 2 percent growth, but they slow down dramatically. Your deficits increase, and you end up essentially paying yourself to feel like you’re still growing the way you did 50 years ago. Or, you know, you run out of easy or relatively easy technological innovations. And so technological innovation in the Western world has been concentrated more and more in simulation and communication in Silicon Valley, basically. And there’s been a clear falling off in a lot of other areas relative to what people expected in the ‘60s. And then you have political decadence, which is the least controversial part of my argument. But basically the idea is that you have a sort overlay of several successful systems, right? The American Constitution is a very successful system. The American welfare state has been a very popular system for many years. But the way they combine and converge now means that the veto points of the Constitution, the polarization of the political parties, and the fact that the welfare state is huge and complicated and no one understands it, and every program has an interest group that wants to protect it means that you can’t change anything. It’s impervious to programs of reform. The best you can do is, like, build an extra mechanical arm on one side, which is what Obamacare basically did to the health care system. So that’s political decadence. It’s success followed by sclerosis. And then you have demographic decadence, which, again, is pretty, I think, obvious. You know, you can argue about how bad a thing it is, but since the 1960s, every rich society in the world has started having too few children to sustain itself. And again, it’s not a crisis or a catastrophe, it’s just something that makes society older, less innovative, less dynamic, and more resistant to reform. So that’s the broad sketch. And then I also tack on a more controversial argument that, in pop culture and intellectual debates, we’ve also been going in circles since the 1970s. And so I can deliver a whole soliloquy, and will if prompted, on the Star Wars movies and the arc — when and where decadence sets in as we pass from George Lucas to the J.J. Abrams era. [LAUGHTER] So that’s the argument, I guess.

david leonhardt

To what extent, though— isn’t this, in large part, an inequality story? So what I’m about to say doesn’t explain everything you just said, but is to some extent decadence the average between people at the top actually just continuing to do really well? Healthier. They have to deal with less discrimination in their lives. Not no discrimination, but less discrimination than in the past. They’re living much better. They take advantage of all kinds of advances, communications and otherwise. And then however you want to define that, a top 10 percent, maybe a top 1 percent, depending on your view. And then for everyone else, the quality of life has really stagnated. That it’s not a broad brush of decadence, but it’s really some sort of cleavage.

ross douthat

So I mean, I think that inequality is part of the tangle of all of these forces. And one of the things I try and argue in the book, rather depressingly, I guess, is that it isn’t that one of these forces is driving all the others. It isn’t that we have a broken politics, and so our economy is stagnant. You know, and I think the same is true of inequality. Inequality feeds certain kinds of decadence. It encourages rich people to spend on luxury goods, rather than transformative innovations. It is in a certain kind of feedback loop with economic stagnation because, in a slow growth society, it’s easy for the rich to sort of stay rich than in a more dynamic society. It feeds in with low birth rate. At the same time, I think if you look at— just look at the economy of the last 25 years, right? The one period of genuine dynamism in the United States was the late 1990s, right? This was the one period when productivity growth went up. We basically got the internet dividend, this one big technological breakthrough.

david leonhardt

And it’s the one period where we had really good rising wages and incomes up and down the spectrum. Some people would argue we’re getting it again, but we’re not really. We’d have to go on for a couple more years—

ross douthat

Yes.

david leonhardt

—but as of this morning, it appears like it might not.

ross douthat

It might not, yeah. But it was also an era when you had spiking inequality relative — there was more growth of inequality in the late ‘90s than there was in the 10 years after because you had people suddenly making these big fortunes in the internet economy. And so I don’t think— examples like that make me skeptical that it’s simple as, you know, if we just tax the rich a little more, redistributed wealth, that that would generate a sort of larger dynamism. It seems like, you know, you can have periods of strong growth, increasing prosperity that also generate a lot of inequality because some rich people are collecting outsized gains because they were lucky or corrupt or had some great innovation. So I don’t think you get out of decadence by solving inequality, even though inequality is clearly connected to the story. [APPLAUSE]

david leonhardt

OK, let’s play a game. So your book inspired us. We’ve come up with a little game that we’re going to call Decadent or Not.

ross douthat

Yes. [JAZZ MUSIC] Oh, the music.

david leonhardt

This is fulfilling all my childhood fantasies of growing up to be Wink Martindale. OK, here’s how it works. We’ll show you a piece of viral media.

ross douthat

OK.

david leonhardt

Maybe a poor choice of metaphor this week, but— and you will tell us if it is decadent or not. Are you ready?

ross douthat

Isn’t all viral media decadent?

david leonhardt

You’re going to tell us.

ross douthat

OK.

david leonhardt

OK. OK, here we go. First up.

archived recording Bernie. Bernie, I have a tattoo of you. I have a tattoo. I love you. Oh my god, I love you so much. Oh my — [LAUGHTER]

david leonhardt

OK, so that was a video of someone telling Bernie Sanders at a rally that she has a tattoo of Bernie Sanders.

ross douthat

OK, so—

david leonhardt

Decadent or not.

ross douthat

Tattoos are decadent. Tattoos of Bernie Sanders are not decadent. That— that is— that is—

david leonhardt

Please explain.

ross douthat

That is my — only in so far as tattoos, to the extent that decadence represents a sort of, at the psychological level, a sort of turn inward toward sort of the therapeutic cultivation of a personalized self identity that — where you’re abandoning action in the wider world and just navel-gazing, tattoos are decadent. But if you get a tattoo of Bernie Sanders, you’re not doing any of that. You’re committing yourself to the socialist cause in a permanent way.

david leonhardt

Excellent.

ross douthat

So that is the only undecadent way to get a tattoo, except for the huge crucifix under my shirt [LAUGHTER] and the Ben Affleck back tattoo that I wear everywhere I go.

david leonhardt

OK, next up. Earlier this year, a copywriter named Andrew Cushing sent out a tweet asking people to come up with fake startup names. And then he would write fake ad companies for the fake— fake ad copy for the fake startup companies.

ross douthat

OK.

david leonhardt

The whole thing went viral, and an art director named Julie Vaccaro got in on it too. She made these images for the fake company’s fake ads. I will read some of them. “Don’t worry, our kombucha lives in Coney Island, too.” “Bae Bae, the first dentist you can pay with your metro card.” And “Your plants are dying. Your apartment left a voicemail. Introducing GORF, the digital wallet for freelancers.”

ross douthat

Wait, why are the — why are the shrimp in the — OK — [LAUGHTER]

david leonhardt

Decadent or not?

ross douthat

I mean the — this econ — the economy satirized in these posters is decadent, but satire of decadence is the first step to escaping decadence. So these, too, are not decadent.

david leonhardt

They are about decadence without being decadent.

ross douthat

Exactly, like my book.

david leonhardt

So far — [LAUGHTER] OK, final one. [MUSIC PLAYING] So we’re now watching a video of a chicken quesadilla being assembled.

ross douthat

Right, so the chicken — I think we’ve speeded it, right. To the chicken gets cooked, and you think it’s a chicken dish. And then you think it’s a barbecue dish. And then they’re making a pizza, but it turns out to be a burrito with the chicken, yes. Yeah. You know, I mean it’s — it’s kind of incredible. See —

david leonhardt

Before we go on —

ross douthat

So this is a crucial, a crucial distinction.

david leonhardt

You’re going to have a moment here to think, though.

ross douthat

OK.

david leonhardt

We’re going to ask the audience.

ross douthat

OK.

david leonhardt

We’re going to give you two choices, decadent or not, for this final one. So if you vote decadent, give us a nice round of applause now. [APPLAUSE] If you vote not decadent, give us a nice round of applause. [APPLAUSE]

ross douthat

That sounded kind of —

david leonhardt

You’re the judge of all things decadent. You’re going to have to —

ross douthat

So obviously in the conventional definition, this is as decadent as a weekend in Vegas. This is what you eat the morning after you went to, like, the bondage den in Vegas, or something right? So in that sense, it’s obviously decadent. But in my sense, this is old-fashioned American ingenuity. I mean, it’s not quite the spirit that put a man on the moon, but it’s at least like Gemini Mission level invention. So I’m going to go with not decadent here, too.

david leonhardt

Excellent. OK, it is now your turn. We have some time for audience questions. Those are always our favorite part of live shows. I understand there is a mic in each aisle. Thank you for coming out.

audience member

Hi. Um, a notice popped up on my cell phone just before we started before about Louie Gohmert, I think that’s how you say his name, having been exposed to the Corona virus at CPAC. And he said he’s not going to do anything about it. He’s going to continue going about his life and being with other people. And I wondered especially what Ross thought about that — [LAUGHTER]

audience

And whether something should be done to stop people like that.

ross douthat

To him, to stop him.

david leonhardt

This is one of our favorite — this is one of our favorite kinds of segments for the show. It’s, Republican did outrageous thing. Ross, please respond. [LAUGHTER]

audience

Well, I think because it seemed to me that it’s part of Trump’s argument about, this isn’t a big deal, and so let’s all go about our lives and go to work.

ross douthat

Yeah, I mean, the first two — Ted Cruz and another congressman, Paul Gosar, if I’m pronouncing his name right — both are self-quarantining. And I mean, that’s not a good idea, basically. Continuing to meet with people is not a good idea. It does sort of— I mean, there has been this weird flip because of Trump, right? Where you know, four weeks ago when Trump did the initial travel ban, I didn’t write about it because I’m not an epidemiologist. But I probably should have written about it, because I’m a columnist. But I felt like there was sort of an alignment of natural reactionary tendencies with good policy. And then thanks to Trump’s decision to sort of go the route of unconcern, that has flipped. And you know, normally I feel like to the extent that there is a sort of reactionary brain, it tells you to, like, distance yourself from contagion, right? But there’s — I guess it’s a testament to the power of partisanship over deep ideology. That people whose ideology should make them panicked about a foreign threat, because of their partisanship feel like they have to say no, everything’s fine. I’m hitting the rope line. But that is independent of what a president can do legally, and so on. At the very least, a strong president should be able to call up congressmen of his own party and tell them to stay home for two weeks. So.

audience

Thank you.

ross douthat

Thank you.

audience

Hi. In mid-January I actually started reading about the coronavirus because it seemed less depressing than what was going on in politics. And now that it’s hit here, I’m weirdly hopeful because I’m kind of — maybe I’m delusional, but think that this actually might be the thing that sinks Trump. Because he can’t — [APPLAUSE] I mean —

ross douthat

Now, we definitely are channeling Michelle. Do you want to come and join us?

david leonhardt

Is your name Michelle?

audience

I mean, what are the — like, because this is not going to go away in a month, so.

david leonhardt

I’ll do the analytical bit, and then you can explain why we shouldn’t be rooting for coronavirus, Ross. [LAUGHTER] You can do the —

ross douthat

OK, yeah. [INTERPOSING VOICES] You do the political analysis.

david leonhardt

I think this is really bad for Trump, right? I think the stock market is an extremely imperfect gauge of the economy. But to the extent that it is a gauge, and a meaningful one, which it is — it’s forward looking, right? And so — so this isn’t telling us what the economy is doing today. It’s telling us what people who actually have money at stake think the economy is going to do over the future. And I actually, although I do sometimes think there’s a level of panic that is unjustified, I do really think — I agree with Ross. I think we’re on the cusp of things feeling very different. The only other thing I would add before Ross explains why we shouldn’t be rooting for the virus is there are almost eight months until election day. Think about how much has changed in the last two weeks, right? Two weeks ago, the economy was great and the Democrats were about to nominate a socialist.

ross douthat

Those were good times.

david leonhardt

Yeah. [LAUGHTERE]

audience

But people are still locked down in Wuhan.

david leonhardt

Yeah.

ross douthat

Yes.

audience

This is not going away in two weeks.

david leonhardt

No, I think you’re right.

ross douthat

Right. China has controlled it by continuing to lock down a major province. So that’s— it’s clear that the steps you need to contain it are steps that probably are not going to lead to a v-shaped recovery that helps Trump in the fall. You know, I mean, again this obviously goes back to questions about how bad Trump is to begin with. And the closer you get to regarding Trump as, like, a true fascist menace, the more people will sort of root for a catastrophe that might seem to derail him. I think to bring this back to my argument in the book, available outside, you know, I think Trump is a manifestation of decadence. And decadent is bad. And it’s not just bad because you, you know, eat too many fancy foods, or you eat that ridiculous piled high burrito, or what — burrito pizza, or whatever it was. It’s bad because it includes misgovernment, corruption, cruelty, all the things that liberals, and not only liberals, rightly dislike about Trump. But there are worse things than decadence. And in any era when it feels a little decadent, there’s a temptation to root for the things that are ultimately worse. And the politics of anti-decadence — and to be clear, I’m anti-decadence — but the politics of anti-decadence has a long history of leading to, you know, more disastrous things. People were worried about decadence in 19th century Europe, and you got World War I. People were worried about decadence in Weimar, Germany and you got he who shall not be named. My conservative friends after 9/11 happened said, well, this is the wake-up call that America needs. And now we’re going to leave our Bill Clinton era decadence behind and spread democracy around the world. And that did not go well either. This isn’t a case like that. We’re not choosing the coronavirus. But it still — to root for the catastrophe is to take a really big risk. And you know, I think that there are — it is, yeah. In many cases, rooting for a catastrophe to end decadence is something that you end up regretting later.

audience

Hi. My name is Reed. I’m 24, and I don’t know if either of you have read it but I recently started reading “The Coddling of the American Mind” and “how good ideas and bad int— or good intentions and bad ideas are setting up a generation for failure.” And I guess my question is, as a person who graduated from a college in New York City almost two years ago, how do we incentivize administrations and students to listen to dissenting opinions? I mean I’m a gay woman, and I would consider myself fairly liberal. But I definitely witnessed and experienced in classrooms people advocating for safe spaces and things of that nature, which just to me feels like completely antithetical to progress. And being able to sit across from somebody who doesn’t agree with you on everything I think is super important. So how do we get administrations to, you know, not let students protest speakers that they don’t agree with, and things of that nature?

david leonhardt

What a good question.

ross douthat

That was a great question. [APPLAUSE]

david leonhardt

You’ve got to take that one, right?

ross douthat

Well, my speaking fees are very reasonable. [LAUGHTER] And I never — I never had protested, I’m so — I was at Middlebury recently, and everybody was very friendly. Unserious answer. The serious answer is, I think there is a problem that isn’t just — I think the problem in colleges, in my estimation, is that the administration of colleges often doesn’t have any kind of moral vision for what the school is supposed to be. And so the reaction against that, the sort of social justice reaction, is an understandable one. That I think it’s understandable that college kids want a kind of — you know, they want a moral education. And so there’s — it’s not as simple as saying, we just need administrators to be sort of, to defend free speech. You need to have some some way to have both a commitment to freedom of expression, but also some sense of a purpose-driven education. I think that would, in certain ways, satisfy some of the impulses that lead to protest politics and protests against speakers. And obviously, the answer is for all universities to become Catholic. [LAUGHTER] There you have it.

david leonhardt

Much more narrowly and quickly —

audience

I actually went to Fordham, so. [LAUGHTER, APPLAUSE]

ross douthat

I said Catholic. [LAUGHTER] No, sorry, sorry, sorry. No, no, no, forgive me. Much more narrowly, I would say, make your case. I bet you’ll win most arguments when you do.

audience

Thank you.

david leonhardt

And that’s our show. Thank you so much to everyone for coming out to see us tonight. Tonight’s show was produced by James T. Greene and edited by Sara Nics for Transmitter Media. We had help from Phoebe Lett, Ian Prasad Philbrick, Tyson Evans, and Katie Kingsbury. Our executive producer is Gretta Cohn. Our music is by Alison Leyton-Brown. A very special thanks goes to the folks at the Times Center, Abby Perpich, Carmen Ingerman, and Sam Barnes. [APPLAUSE]

ross douthat