Noah Smith on Wokeness, Right Wing Muckrakers, and Class vs Identity

Hey everyone. Today on Upstream, I want to share a conversation I had with economist and writer Noah Smith this week about hiring practices in academia and what it says more broadly about social and economic trends of the elite in the United States. We go on to discuss the future of the right, And who we think are the smartest conservative and liberal voices. Noah and I have a weekly show together called Econ 102, usually relaxed and entertaining discussions that break down current events from an economics lens, as well as deep dives on Noah's essays. Check it out at the link in the show notes.

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Amazing. Shall we get into it? I apologize for the technical difficulties. Let's, we got some good questions. Shall we get right into some?

Let's do it. But first, do you want to talk about the blowup on Twitter yesterday and that post I wrote this morning?

Yes, please. Let's get into it. First, the blowup. I actually missed it and some of our audience might have too. So please educate us.

Right. So this, this guy, David Austin Walsh, everyone thinks it's Austin because that's his handle. David Austin Walsh, he's a postdoc, history postdoc at Yale, writes about 20th century American history. And he's this big leftist. He's always like yelling like, Joe Biden, you're, you lost my vote. You know, like he's been yelling that about everything from Gaza. He's yelling especially hard about Gaza, but he's been, he was yelling about like, you know, Biden, you didn't give enough, you know, student loan relief or whatever. You've lost my vote. And he just like does this constantly and just yells. about how, like, neoliberalism is dead and, you know, the leftists need to take over and blah, blah, blah. And he's a very angry guy. He's postdoc, can't get an academic job. And 2 days ago, a day and a half ago, he wrote a post. He wrote a long thread explaining that it's because he's a white man. That basically being a white man makes you unemployable in academia, or at least history academia in America today. So he writes this, and then he just gets absolutely dogpiled by both sides of the political spectrum, from the you know progressives who think like, oh, you're just one more mediocre white man who thinks you're more qualified than you know black and brown people blah blah. But then also from you know conservatives who are like, oh, you made your bed now lie in it, you leftist! Ha ha ha ha ha! And so just by the way, the the degree of personal arrogance on this guy is. off the charts. See, he tweeted, one of his tweets was, one of his tweets was, see, when I'm ready, finally ready to pull the plug on my academic career once and for all, I'll do a thread about every job I've ever applied for and discuss in detail why I would have been a better choice than the person they ended up hiring. And one time, just to see if he could go to law school, he took an LSAT, bombed it, practice LSAT, bombed it. And then blamed it on the questions being too right-wing.

This guy is getting so owned. Yeah, I— wow. By both sides. I mean, it's really—

I have not seen a single person, you know, be sympathetic. He's just boxed himself out from every single possible source of sympathy. And like, he issued like some apology that was just kind of confused and not very, you know, It was kind of the rambling, confused apology because when you said I was literally more qualified than every specific individual that they hired instead of me, and someday I'm going to write a thread about it. When you said that, there's no going back from that. Like you, you said that, bro. Like that's, you know, and so, so everybody agreed that they hated David Austin Walsh. But I wrote a post late last, so late last night. My friend James Cham, I was about to publish a different post, which I'll publish today instead. My friend James Cham, because I write my posts in the morning usually and publish them at night. So they're available first thing in the morning the next day because I realize I'm on the West Coast, blah, blah, blah. Anyway, so my friend James texts me and he's like, dude, you have to write a post about the David Austin Walsh thing. I was like, well, no, it's some stupid Twitter beef. And then he said, no, no, no, you gotta write it. So I wrote it. And basically I think that, you know, you can read what I wrote, but it's all about elite overproduction. Do you remember when I wrote about that back in the day?

Yeah. Yeah. This is an example in the wild, basically.

Exactly.

Yeah. Not enough jobs, too many elites fighting over kind of—

Right. Because history jobs collapsed after the Great Recession and, you know, history professors haven't been able to get a job. since like 2008. I mean, like a few people get jobs, but they're, you know, budgets were cut and, you know, like people stopped, like enrollment at colleges fell and stuff like that. And, but the most important thing was that history majors fell off a cliff. So history majors were something like 2.5% of all bachelor's degrees, you know, now they're down to like 1% and still falling. That's like an utter collapse in the amount. And that's with overall enrollment in American colleges also falling partly because of the shortage of youngsters, partly because they charge too much for a product whose value is depreciating. We can talk about that. But I guess the point is that nobody wants history professors because there's no history majors anymore. And that sucks. And like for history professors, I mean, maybe, I don't know if it's good for America. I don't know how much we need to learn history, but, you know, yeah. So, so basically, There's no jobs anymore. And so when you have a whole bunch of people who have these very high expectations of themselves and no jobs, they're going to get mad. And I think that you look at David, I don't want to say that all his political stuff is directly downstream of his being mad about not getting a job, but like, it can't help, right?

Well, that— it is interesting because you would think that someone who is sort of implicitly blaming DEI would then shift a little bit to the right. But it seems like he's not willing to— he doesn't want to do that either.

So he's not. That's right. So Chris Rufo, the right-wing muckraker, wrote— but by the way, we should, we should do a whole episode on the rise of right-wing muckrakers. So we've got like, you know, Mike Solana, Chris Rufo, Aaron Savaryam, and all these guys who are actually like, they're doing a decent job of what, you know, progressive muckrakers used to do, but from the conservative side. And this is not Anyway, we'll talk about that someday. But so Rufo wrote him an email saying like, this is your redemption arc. And it was patronizing. And I don't think Rufo expected him to bite at all and was kind of just like, you know, having a little fun. But he was like, no, no, I'll never, you know, I'll never join you. I'll never join you. And like, but like, what's he going to do now? I mean, like, I think, you know, being sort of a failed history prof, you could You could join like the Roosevelt Institute. So there's this guy Marshall Steinbaum who's like 10 times as arrogant and like 10 times as awful as David Austin Walsh has ever been, who joined the Roosevelt Institute and now proceeds to say like YIMBYism is bad all day on Twitter. He's just a useless person who thinks he's a genius. David Austin Walsh could have just done that, except that now he's written this whole thing that makes him politically absolutely toxic to progressive employers. So like, He can't just go into the progressive think tank circuit and sort of disappear into that world. Right. Yeah. So I don't, you know, he could go be a lecturer somewhere, lecture, like they don't care. Like some, you know, like, you know, CUNY or something like that is not going to care about hiring a history lecturer with the history of writing these tweets. They don't care. They just want someone to fill a seat. But like, it definitely doesn't comport with his vision of himself and his intellectual, like his importance to the discourse. And so I don't know what he's going to do. You know, probably the right wing, you know, becoming completely flipping and becoming a right-wing commentator would be by far the most lucrative option he could do. But I don't think he cares about money. I think he cares about intellectual sort of prestige. You know, anyway, so I wrote this post about him.

Yeah. And it is interesting because, you know, sort of it What I do wonder is if his point, if he had some point when he mentioned that it's harder for him as a white person for specific roles to get a job. And maybe if it was, if he said Asian person or something, people might be more sympathetic to that. It's just kind of the white thing that people don't like as much.

But, you know, no, I think, I think, you know, the departments are making this huge effort to hire Black people specifically, a little bit, you know, Latino, Native American, and maybe a little bit Asian, but almost mostly Black people. You know, the departments all woke up in 2000. They were like, we don't have any Black people. We need some Black people. Let's get them right now. And the way you get, you know, you could do explicit hiring discrimination saying, hi, 20th, we want 20th century historians. We want people to talk about like, you know, Nixon and Vietnam and whatnot. Like, but we want them all to be Black. Well, that doesn't work because, A, there's just not like this massive ocean of Black people out there studying 20th century American history, waiting, like knocking at the door, waiting to like fill those positions. So the question is, how do you— but also because, I mean, explicit racial discrimination is illegal. And even if you can somehow get it past the courts, which you probably won't, you'll get really bad publicity for some sort of explicit hiring criteria. So the question is, what can you do if you want to hire a bunch of Black people for your professorship? You know, you expand positions in African American history.

Yeah.

Because A, most of the people who study African American history are Black to begin with. And B, you can very plausibly claim, in fact, it is correct, that an African American person is probably gonna have an advantage in studying African American history. And so, so then you can try to redress some of the racial disparities in your department. Really quickly by, by beefing up your, your African American history area.

And you can do that.

And when you look at the numbers, you see they've been absolutely doing this. So, you know, when in another tweet that I can't find a screenshot of because he deleted all the tweets and protected his account and blah, blah, blah. But in another tweet, he was like talking about, you know, all these African American history positions. He was applying for a lot of these and got rejected from them. And it is, it is right that he was rejected from them. He's not a scholar of African American history. He does not study that. He was not qualified for those jobs. But his, his argument that, that he, you know, when he said, I'm going to write about why I was more qualified than everyone who got those jobs, well, that means he's going to write a thread about why he was more qualified to study Africa, to research African American history than a bunch of Black historians. That's not going to go over well. I don't think we're ever going to see that thread. But he's thinking, you know, he's like, he's thinking like, oh, they hired these Black people who've been studying Black history for like a long time. Like, I was more qualified to study Black history than these guys. No, no. But like, anyway, so we can have this discussion about whether or not it makes sense to try to very rapidly remove racial disparities. You know, and so I think people have been having that discussion a lot. Like, does this make sense? Is this good? Is this bad? So from one point of view, you can be like, okay, well, for years people just neglected Black historians, let's say, neglected Black historians. And that's why all these departments are choked with all these old white guys, like, you know, 70-year-old white guys. The departments are just full of them, right? You can't get rid of any of those people because that's how tenure works. So you have to redress the entire disparity from the new hire side. You can't, you can't, you know, say, well, you know, 70-year-old white guy actually haven't been producing very good history lately, which is true for a lot of these guys. Like, you know, like a lot of these people reach the end of their career and they're not producing much at all. Like in, in the natural sciences, when you, you're 70 years old, 65 years old, you are the manager of a lab. You have postdocs and assistant professors working under you. You have this army of smart people. And all you do is kind of identify who looks like the smart people and hire them and place them in roles. And you know what, actually old people are pretty good at that. But in history and humanities, like you're doing all your own stuff, you're just sitting there writing scholarly stuff and your ideas have really begun to stagnate by that time. And so there's all these old people that probably should be replaced. I'm sorry, like it's just true. And so, and there probably are a lot of, you know, qualified Black people. But, you know, honestly, more qualified Latino and Asian people than they are going to be hiring. Like the focus, I think, you know, obviously there was a dearth of Black people, but there's also a dearth of Hispanic people at these institutions. And that has not been addressed nearly as much as the dearth of Black people. But the thing is, you don't need that many profs. There's not as many kids going to college in America anymore. Funding is dried up from states. People that they made up for that by charging, you know, higher tuition. And then, you know, people are now balking at that because the college wage agreement has fallen. So they really can't hire a ton of history profs. So if you want to correct racial disparities, whether you think correct is the right word or not, if you want to eliminate these racial disparities in your department, you know, the tenure system combined with all these other factors means you have to do it all through new hires. Does that mean that it's going to be very hard to get a job in these things as a, as a, you know, white man for a number of years? Yes, it does. So, you know, was, was David Austin Walsh factually wrong? Probably not. Was he wrong about the fact that he was more qualified than everyone else that they ended up hiring? Yes. Yes, he was wrong. And if you look at the guy's personality, you can see that there's obvious, there's, there's an obvious soft skill issue here. It's not just about what history he's researching. It's the fact that he's a querulous, arrogant guy. You know, he loves starting fights and he thinks he's the smartest guy on earth. Who wants to hire a guy like that for your department? I don't. Like, unless he's got really damn good research.

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Let, let, let me bring us back to your, your original point. You talked about how elite overproduction sort of, you know, foments a certain kind of politics. And what I don't understand is why aren't there a lot more people like this guy that we're talking about? Because there are a lot of white academics who probably, you know, who are struggling or, you know, please wait for production, who probably feel the way that this guy feels and yet are still sort of progressive through and through. Like, I understand, you know, some people might put even DEI as sort of this a way for elites to make sure that they have good jobs who fit, who are underrepresented. But people who are on the outside of that, you would expect them to have an anti-DEI case. And we do see that in certain areas, right? But I don't see it in academia, which is a place where there are a lot of, you know, a lot of people fighting for very few jobs. And if If you're white, like our friend is, you have even less of a chance, or Asian, let's say.

Right. So, I mean, that's absolutely true. But here's the thing, like, so, so Americans are of two minds on, on discrimination in favor of underrepresented groups, which in the past typically included Black people and women, now might include Latinos as well, or Asians in some areas, etc. In psychology, it would include men, but let's not talk about that. But okay, so, but the point is that Americans have always, you know, if you say like, do you support affirmative action? Most Americans will say, I do. They will support the name affirmative action. When you say, do you support, you know, racial taking, taking race into account, taking gender into account in hiring, in college admissions? Americans overwhelmingly, well, not overwhelmingly, but like, you know, 60%, 70% will say like, no. I don't support that. But then those numbers, those numbers almost entirely flip. It'll be like 55% will say, yes, I like affirmative action. So I think that Americans are of 2 minds. They want to see underrepresented groups given a boost. You know, they want— they have this idea of group egalitarianism, or equity, as you might call it.

Yep.

But then I— but they also have this extremely strong desire for individual fairness. And I think the way, you know, they want to evaluate people at the group level and at the individual level. And of course, at some point, one of those has to take precedent. I mean, you can weigh both of them with some weighting factor, right? But like, there is a tension there. And I think Americans feel that tension. And the way that they— there's 2 ways they typically resolved it. The main way they typically resolved it is to support tacit discrimination where you say, okay, you know what, we're going to just all agree to sort of silently agree that, you know, this, this Black guy has probably had more hardship in life and he's probably come from a harder background. So we're going to, we're going to try to give him a little boost, try to help him. And, you know, if that attitude becomes pervasive throughout management, right, as I think in some circles it now has, in many circles not, but in some circles it has. If that attitude becomes pervasive in management, that is a form of tacit widespread discrimination that I think Americans like and want in general. But as soon as you write it into law, as soon as you say we're going to have this percent of people be reserved for Black people, this percent for Latinos, this percent for Asian people, et cetera. Once you have that, people just balk. They're like, no, no, we won't take that. Right? And so there's this You know, as soon as, as soon as you write, you know, an official law where, where immutable characteristics that you can't affect matter a lot, Americans suddenly start opposing it. And so they have this very strongly wired idea of individual fairness that conflicts with their idea to have sort of tacit widespread discrimination in favor of underrepresented groups. It's in tension now, but when the economy is growing and when positions are growing, when everything's growing and everything's positive sum, You can, you can't ever square the circle exactly, but you could always sweep it under the rug. You can always say, well, you know what? Fine, guys, like we gained 20 positions, right? Let's say, let's say we gained 20 positions and 20% of people are underrepresented minorities and we gave, or 20 positions. So we gave, you know, like we gave 8 of the positions to underrepresented minorities, right? That's 40%. But instead, you know, so, so we gave proportionally more of the positions to underrepresented minorities. But guess what? 12 positions still went to, you know, whatever, white guys, whoever, whoever the overrepresented group is like. So, so you still did fine, right? And so like, yes, proportionally you didn't do as well because we gave this boost to the underrepresented group, but you did fine overall. You know what? You're making your money at the end of the day. You have a, You know, nice position, blah, blah. That's during a time of abundance. That's during a time of positive-sum growth. Now you get to a zero-sum or even negative-something where it's like this tooth-and-nail competition for this tiny shrinking number of history professor spots, right? You get to this world of scarcity. Now this doesn't work. You can't sweep this under the rug like you used to do.

Yeah. Let's actually go into right-wing muckraking if you're open to it, because you brought up You know, Solana, Chris Rufo, Aaron Severin, you know, people who are doing interesting work, getting a lot of traction. So what do you find kind of interesting about what's happening here?

Well, so what's happening is that you can only muck rake if— you can only rake muck if there's muck to rake, right? What happened is that progressivism became institutionalized in a way that it used to not be. In 1910 or whatever, like Upton Sinclair was around, I don't know, 1910, 1920. At this time, there was essentially no progressivism in any position of power. So you had to, you had to go and you had to appeal to the people. You had to be populist. You had to say, look, guys, there's these industrial abuses. Look, these workers are treated so poorly. Look, these customers are treated so poorly, etc., etc. Look, these parties are corrupt in these cities. And they were. All that was true. You know, to some extent, obviously we were a developing country at the time and we had many of the maladies typical of developing countries at that stage of development. So Upton Sinclair would go and he would, what, in America, we tolerate this? Rawr. And, you know, and then they'd vote for people who would enact things like child labor laws. And that worked really well, but it had, the abuses had to be real. It had to be institutionalized. And so I think fast forward to now, We still have conservatives and free marketers and such in some positions of power, but I'd say we have progressives in many positions of power, like in universities, for example, or in city governments, universities, sometimes the federal government, but more likely like local governments in blue cities like San Francisco. And then in NGOs, and then, you know, which often have a closer relationship with those local governments and state governments too. And then we also have, you know, universities. I would say progressives are just strongly in power at almost every university in America. And so there is now muck to be raked because these people are going to, you know, whoever's in power will make mistakes and they'll do things wrong, you know, and what's the check on that? Well, the check on that has always been the press, democracy, you know, all these open society institutions, muckrakers, right? And so now we have A natural predator has emerged for progressive institutions that mess up. And that natural predator is Mike Solana. And it is, and it is, you know, Aaron Sibarium and Chris Rufo. And whatever, you know, like, this is different because in— there's always been a huge amount of hysteria, conspiracy theorizing, and threat exaggeration within the conservative movement. Right? Like, if you go back to like the, the 1800s, you could see it like absolute, you know, people were like, the Irish are going to bring papism and genocide the Protestants or force us to convert to Catholicism. Great. How'd that work out anyway? So like, there was that. There's always been this, like, in some ways, progressivism has always been motivated by rage and, and conservatism by fear. Threat perception has always been very big in conservatism. And so this is not that. The point is that these people are starting to make some good points. And sometimes they exaggerate the stuff, you know, they'll, they'll, they'll, you know, pick one random stupid slide from like a, you know, teacher orientation in some Florida school or something. And, but, but the stuff is real and the stuff does suck. Like, so the muck they're raking is real muck. My request to the conservative muckrakers is the following. Please go after the NGOs more. So, so Solana's doing this, right? He's doing this. Siberium and Rufo are almost entirely focused on like DEI stuff right now. The NGO industrial complex is a giant fertile target for muckraking. It is much worse than any government. It is worse than any university. The, the degree of fecklessness, waste, and politicized bullshit within the NGO sector, the nonprofit sector, just puts any of the, the muck they're raking to shame. And I think Solana has realized this. So if you're watching this, Mike, good job. But then Siberium and Rufo and these guys have not yet realized it, and someday they're going to realize it. And I think we're a year to 3 years out from this general realization.

Interesting.

And what do we think we'll find when we do that? Just like gross incompetence, waste of money, and like actually making things worse?

Corruption. Correct. Massive corruption, massive amounts of— so local governments always tend to be more corrupt because it's much easier to know who votes for you and who campaigns for you.

Yeah.

This is just a general thing. So like, it's easier to get kickbacks when you know who's kicking, giving you kickback. So that's like true in China. It's true here. It's true everywhere. Local governments have always been very vulnerable to corruption. And now essentially in the, like, you know, '80s and '90s and whatever, we privatized large amounts of government functions. We privatized them. And conservatives were, if not okay with it, at least not as activated to fight against it. because it looked like small government. It looked like government jobs were disappearing. It looks like, you know, we didn't, we didn't have this big bureaucracy anymore. You had in like the '50s, '60s, we had like somewhat of a bureaucracy. We never had that big of one. We got rid of the New Deal bureaucracy and we replaced it with throwing wads of cash at NGOs. So conservatives are just like, okay, I guess you're cutting government because they're, you know, they didn't know what the fuck was going on. And so, so At the same— so we privatized things. And of course, progressives might not have been happy with, you know, the decline of big government, but they were certainly happy because they could all go personally get jobs in the nonprofit sector. And honestly, it was a lot easier than getting a job working for the government, probably. And so nonprofit became your dream job. So whenever you see a movie, like a progressive-coded movie about like aimless young people, you know, like, why don't I go after my dream? Why am I working at this heartless job where I just like sell ads for some big corporation? Why don't I, why don't I do my dream? The dream is always nonprofit. That's the, that's the progressive dream to go, you know, work at nonprofits, ultimately start your own nonprofit. That, that has become the dream for the progressive educated elites. And so a lot of talent is going into the nonprofit sector, but at the same time, it's incredibly exploitative because when you have all these, like, you know, smart history majors or whatever, English majors who, you know, who just want to, who don't want to make a bunch of money and who just want to have like a career that matters, blah, blah, blah. And of course, disproportionately, these will be women. But, you know, these educated progressive people who want to, want to make a difference, then nonprofit, then you don't have to pay them so much. You can get away with paying a nonprofit worker $60K a year, $40K a year. Right? These are like working-class wages, right? You can get away with paying working-class wages. You can get away with paying, you know, less than you'd pay like a manager at McDonald's, certainly, to these people who are like top talent at a nonprofit, right? Because people are just like finding themselves and figuring themselves out while they work to better the world and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, right? Eventually some of these people become lawyers. Other, you know, other people will advance up the food nonprofit food chain. And, but a lot of these people will just be permanently consigned to lower incomes than they otherwise would and will be angrily posting on Twitter because they can't afford, like, you know, waffles. I don't know.

Yeah, it's fascinating. Full circle. Just to flesh this out a little bit, because some people may not fully realize what these people have focused on. Chris Rufo kind of made his name for pointing out sort of a lot of excess, let's just say, you know, wokeness on in sort of the race direction as it relates to schools or companies like, you know, sort of the most extreme versions of DEI or sort of most extreme, you know, the 1619 Project kind of overstepping into the schools. But then also sort of the sexual education, trans stuff, gender stuff, whatever you want to describe that as happening at the schools and just like shedding light Just using their own word, like, you know, kind of what Libs of TikTok does a little bit, but more fleshed out around like, here's what your kids are learning. And that shocked, you know, half the country or whatever. Right. Is that a fair assessment of Rufo's kind of impact?

Yeah, absolutely. That's what Rufo does. I don't know Subarium as well, so I don't actually know what he's done. I've seen him do stuff in some of the vein.

I think there's a lot of college stuff, a lot of like stuff happening on campuses.

Yeah.

The, and Solana, so Rufo's a friend of mine. Solana's one of my closest friends.

You know Rufo? You're friends with Rufo? Really? How do you know him?

Just through the, you know, he's trying to build bridges with tech and he's heard from the guy.

I didn't know that. I didn't know that.

Yeah.

We've rounded up.

You're more conservative than I realized. I did not realize that.

I'm a pluralist. I've, I'm a student and I have friends on all sides. Got it.

But you don't think I'm like an evil woke lefty?

No, no, no, no. You're moderate. Come on. All right.

Well, it's interesting.

I mean, the people who traditionally, you know, you, Ezra Klein, Matt Yglesias, I feel like the left has just gone so far left that you're now centrists. Well, or center-leftists. Yeah.

I mean, I'm pretty much the same as I always am. I'm, you know, a Barack Obama liberal.

Yes, yes, exactly.

Right. And then like, well, although I think that like, when conservatives hear you're Barack Obama liberal, their vision, their fake vision of Barack Obama is just so far away from what Barack Obama really was. Yeah, because their threat perception got activated and they believed all these like extreme myths about Barack Obama. But Barack Obama is a really reasonable dude. So yeah, I'm right there with him. But like, yeah, that does— being a Barack Obama liberal gets you called a centrist in Most, many circles these days. Yeah.

And let me, and let me describe Solana's influence. Solana's one of my closest friends in the industry. And he, you know, in 2019, kind of before COVID I mean, he had, you know, great founders fund, but he wasn't famous. He had like 2,000 Twitter followers or something, you know, now he's got 300,000 or something. And he really rose to prominence with sort of the vibe shift in tech. He helped start the vibe shift in tech, maybe him, Balaji, maybe a couple others. But He noticed a few things. One was San Francisco and sort of the what was happening there on a governance level. And he called out a lot of the ridiculousness that was happening there. And then also just he started standing up for the tech industry. The tech industry was kind of getting— or this is what people in the tech industry felt— we were getting bullied by journalists who were saying everything we were doing was negative or getting CEOs fired or just kind of like taking it to the to the extreme, and he was the only person kind of pushing back. Tech was still in kind of an apologetic era.

Right, right, right.

You know, even things like Android at the time were seen as beyond the pale or too controversial, or people shouldn't be working on it. And he said, no, this is important. Like, you know, things like this are good. So he catalyzed the fight. He's also very funny, but he's not, you know, Chris Rufo was more focused on getting laws passed at kind of like a national level, you know, the critical theory thing, that race theory thing that Trump—

Sure.

Order. But Solana is more focused on activism within the tech industry. But then, of course, with Pirate Wire, he's trying to build a kind of— I don't know if he would describe it right-wing New York Times, but he's trying to build a real media company. Now, one thing that's interesting about Solana, though, is he's not like a traditional conservative. He's a transhumanist. Like, he's like, you know, a techno-optimist, pro-markets, pro-freedom, almost libertarian. You know, instinctively.

Although this is going to trigger a Noah Smith rant.

Please.

So, you know, the reason all the— the reason all these people call themselves progressives now, nowadays we think of progressive as meaning more left than a liberal. But progressive was originally a euphemism because in the 1980s and '90s, every conservative commentator would get up there and scream, you're a liberal, a liberal, liberal, liberal. And it sounded bad. Right. And so then they're like, I'm not a liberal, I'm a progressive, you know? And so, so it became this, this euphemism. People didn't want to be associated with a liberal brand. And I was just like, no, dude, just say like, yeah, I'm a liberal. Liberal. Hell yeah. And so I just kept doing that. And now that works. And like it, but it didn't work for a long time, you know, because the, you know, the, the, the people on talk radio, Fox News, whatever, would be like, yeah, I'm a liberal. Anyway, so then like now I feel like the same thing needs to be done with conservative. And the most important phenomenon in our entire politics in America is education polarization. The smart people are not identifying with conservatives. They're not identifying with the conservative movement at all. And so you've got the Republican Party being dominated by— I'm going to be blunt with you— idiots, because they've been orphaned from their intellectuals. It— if you go back even to the George W. Bush administration, but certainly to the 1980s, you had, you had, you know, a majority of college-educated people would vote Republican. You know, you had, you had this robust intellectual infrastructure. And Democrats were the, you know, rabble-rousing populists. And you had this robust intellectual infrastructure on the right. Coming up with things like Reaganomics, whatever you think of Reaganomics, coming up with, you know, ways to tie conservative Christianity to like laissez-faire economic policy that took feats of intelligence. Honestly, like, that was a trick and they managed to do it. But you had this intellectual infrastructure on the right. And I feel like you don't anymore, but you could. There's a lot of smart people out there with beliefs that I would call conservative, but because of the tarnishing of the conservative brand over the last 15 to 20 years, partly because of George W. Bush, partly because of Trump, but partly just because, you know, social media, people like, like conservative became such a, such a bad word. You know, you had all these people who are fundamentally, in my view, conservative in their outlook, trying to distance themselves from that. And, you know, think I'm not one of those redneck conservatives, you know, like, and basically come up with some new idea for what they are. I'm not, I'm not red tribe, I'm gray tribe. Like Scott Alexander, that was one of his posts. Or, you know, all these, all these things. And then you just look at what, you know, over time, over the years, I was like, no, you're a conservative. And over time, what are these, you know, what do these people value? They, they start moving in their personal lives toward valuing things like childbirth and, you know, marriage and traditional roles and whatever, not through a Christian lens. You know, they're not going to go to the megachurch. And they're not going to like— they're not going to become Billy Graham fans, right? Because they're not working class. They're intellectual conservatives, but they're conservatives. And they need to say it because, because the, the conservative intelligentsia could make a comeback. It could lure smart people into the conservative movement. And then you'd have a balance of, you know, like just 60-year-old working-class conspiracy theorists in like rural Iowa. With like smart people who know that we're spending too much government money, and here's why we need to do some austerity with smart people who, you know, who understand all the stuff and understand like, you know, why conservative approaches sometimes work, right? Who can articulate why DEI fails instead of just like activating people's threat perception. We need smart conservatives in the world. And I am not going to do it because fundamentally I am not a conservative. But, but, but Mike Solana, you are a conservative. That is what you are. Like, it's fine. You're an urban metropolitan educated intellectual conservative.

Yeah.

And that's fine. And that's good. And that's a perfectly good thing to be. And stop trying to think like, I'm gray tribe, I'm neutral. No, you're a conservative. You can also be gray tribe on top of that, right? You can be like a tech person with like tech-specific beliefs and identity and cultural markers. And of course you can do that. You know, I can do that. I'm not even in tech. But the point is that conservatism, it's like, have you ever seen Princess Mononoke, the anime?

Yeah.

And at one point they shoot off the forest spirit's head. There's this forest spirit and they shoot off its head. Right? I like, I don't know, some, some factory owner shoots off its head and then it turns into a giant blob creature that's like destroying the entire countryside. And they're like, okay, well, we need to give it back. Forest creature, forest spirit, we give you back your head. And then it like incorporates the head and it falls back into the earth or whatever. So then the conservatism is, the conservative movement is the forest spirit and the Bush administration. And then the Trump years, cut off the head of this forest spirit and we need to give it back its head. And Mike Solana is the head, you know, like he's the head of the forest spirit that we need to give back to the forest spirit. There's a cold open.

I love that. I want to comment on that. But first I want to establish my centrist bona fides, you know, friends with Ezra Klein. Who's the smartest, most left person you know? Like the most left, But, but person who you're like, wow, this person is really smart.

The most left person?

Yeah.

Oh man. I mean, like, Matt Bruenig is pretty, he's pretty left. He's like, he, to an almost ludicrous degree sometimes. Who's the smartest? Like, and Matt Bruenig is really smart, by the way. Who's like a super, like, smart, super lefty person that I know? The problem is there's 2 left. There's socialist left, which Matt Bruni counts as. And then there's sort of like, you know, progressive, like, identitarian. I know, I mean, I know Antifa people. I go to their concerts. I go to their shows. I hang out with them, you know, backstage.

Ones that you respect or ones that you're like, okay, this is an intellectual. Like, I met this guy, Nick Pinkston, recently. I don't know if you ever met him.

I know Nick.

Yeah, he's pretty leftist. And I was like, huh, you're smart. You're a pretty smart guy.

He is. Although he's super eclectic.

Yeah.

He's super eclectic. But like, I mean, you know, in tech there's, there's, you know, lefty kind of people like, like, I don't know, Roy Bahat is a good friend of mine. He's pretty, you know, on the, on the lefty side of things. But like tech people tend not to be as extreme as people outside it. So I'm trying to think of people I know like within academia.

Michael Lind?

Oh, sure. I know Michael Lind, but he's— I would not classify him as left at all.

Oh, got it. Got it. Well, he used to be, I guess, populist left. Now he's sort of populist right, maybe.

Yeah. No, I know a number of, like, you know, people involved in the woke movement. Like, I know Jeff Yang, you know, Jennifer Lee, people like this who are sort of involved in the kind of woke movement, and I like them. And yeah, so then, but in terms of like actual socialist left, there are some, but, you know, I've gotten increasingly contentious with those people in recent years. I've gotten more and more frustrated with that movement.

Yeah, weirdly, I'm maybe more sympathetic with that movement than the woke side of things. But TBD, we'll kind of see how that—

I'm more sympathetic with the woke side because they're more American.

Hmm.

Like, they're ultimately, ultimately, like, those people have always been, you know, they'll, they'll sometimes fall victim to the urge to, like, bash America as well. Like, Nikole Hannah-Jones falls victim to this. The leftists are always being very seductive to identitarians, to American identitarians. And in fact, this is what the book Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison is about. I would recommend that. It's about a guy who wants to, you know, fight for Black people's rights. And then he ends up getting sort of seduced by the really dorky communists in New York City. And then he's like, oh God, these guys. And then like, it ends with him just like quitting the communist movement, quitting the Communist Party and just like leaving.

Yeah.

And so, but, but so it's very, you know, good to get analogy today. But then, but then like wokeness, as we call it now, has always been very American. You know, you had, in fact, the term wide awakes is, you know, obviously stay woke was a, was a '60s, you know, Black Power term. But The Wide Awakes were in the early 1800s. It was a bunch of mostly white guys. They would, you know, have some Black people would march with them, but it was mostly white people who would march through the, you know, demanding abolition. They're a bunch of abolitionists, and they were called the Wide Awakes, you know. And so, so this is old. Like, you'd have the idea of wokeness combined with Christianity is American Christianity. Congregational Protestantism is really, really old. You have Congregational churches were the center of abolitionist activism, and they'd get all these Black preachers to come up, you know, from the South or from, you know, maybe some free Black preachers too. But then they'd have them come up and they'd have them preach sermons to congregational churches. And that became the hotbeds of abolitionism. This was all American. This is, you know, Karl Marx was watching these people and like trying to take notes from these people.

Yeah.

Like, this is, this is, this came before Marx. This is, this is all American. We invented this shit. America invented, you know, this, this like modern egalitarian movement. And we, and we, it was originally more about identity than it was about like the working class and all this stuff because, because Marx was trying to take this stuff and repurpose the American identitarian egalitarianism for Europe. And Europe didn't have minorities at the time, despite what British TV shows will try to tell you. They did not. And so they didn't have racial minorities. Everyone was what we would now call white, but they had ethnic minorities. They had, you know, they had Jews, they had, you know, like Roma, people like that. But most importantly, they had the working class.

Yep.

Right. They had the— so the working class were the oppressed people that you could call upon to rise up analogously to how, you know, in America you could talk about freeing slaves. In Europe, you could talk about freeing the workers. You know, and so Karl Marx copied us. Wokeness is more American. It's always been more American. It's one reason why we've actually resisted communism as an idea. Because, you know, we focused on identity groups, visible things, instead of like trying to arbitrarily separate people into classes. And so it's more And when you look at the main figures of like progressive wokeness from the 2010s, some of them have like drifted off into leftist bullshit. Like, you know, Genocide Joe, I support Russia, you know, Jack off. Anyway, those, I hate those people. But, but, but some of them have drifted into that bullshit. But most of them have like, are, you know, strong America supporters who would support, for example, a robust defense against Chinese military power.

Right.

And are supporting, like, you know, industrial policy and things like that and all the things that I consider to be essential to, like, building up America as a nation. So that's why I'm, you know, although wokeness has many problems, you know, and I think those problems are now getting massive pushback from across America, and that's fine. I also think fundamentally it is not the enemy. And the people who want to tell you, like, this is the great enemy, the wolf at your throat, Like, this is wrong. This is a fundamentally American movement that crops up every 50 years and inevitably goes overboard in some ways and has to be pushed back on and then will crop up again the next 50 years. This is— it's part of America, whereas the socialist stuff, like all those people are all like, you know, those people are all supporting Xi Jinping. Those people are like soft supporting Putin, trying to get away with as much Putin support as they can and like supporting Iran pretty strongly. Right. And I'm like, that's a, that's a real threat. It's not a threat because we've marginalized those people and they're not going to take power. But like, they would threaten us if they could. They would destroy this country if they could. They would bring it down.

I want to jump in here because you've made some interesting points I want to comment on, which is, so it's interesting. We just said, hey, there are 2 lefts. There's a socialist left and there's, there's a sort of a woke left. Another way of putting it, there's a, there's a left that's focused on sort of, you know, race and gender. And there's a focus— there's leftists focused on more class. And now, you know, they think that they're— both sides think that there's like an oppressor-oppressed, but one is focused on race and gender and sort of other characteristics, and one is focused on class. And, you know, the reason I'm more sympathetic to the socialist lens is not because I believe in centrally planned economies. I'm a capitalist, I'm a market guy, but because I think the class, you know, I certainly don't want communism. And the good thing you could say about the woke side is that they are capitalists. Right. So that's good. But what I— yeah, yeah, yeah. Most of it. Yeah. But what I don't— what I sympathize with on the class analysis is the group of people that is— they're saying, hey, there's kind of this technocratic class that is exerting too much control over the working class in a bunch of subtle and insidious ways. And they go overboard in this. But— and sometimes these people end up going right, like Michael Lind, I guess.

Right.

But my biggest problem with that is less so that there is this Technocracy, but more so that they've seemed to have not done a great job in the last, you know, 5 years, maybe a bit longer. And we should get it, get a better class or sort of disperse power, disperse, you know, power a bit more. And it's the group of people that say, hey, look at where my kids are going to school. Look at, you know, what's happening with sort of COVID You sort of like, they're not happy with how things are being handled. And they sometimes have bad solutions. But their identification of problems might be accurate, though you could say the same thing for the woke left too. But I think their solutions are maybe even worse than the— anyways, I'm—

I don't think they have solutions for the class problem because they don't think about it. Right. And they try to get people not to think about it in order to think about more identitarian stuff. You're absolutely right. Progressivism, wokeness, if you want to say that, has been institutionalized at universities, NGOs, and some governments in a way that allows— and even at a few businesses, although I think that's proving to be more transitory than anyone realized. Woke capital is kind of on the way out. But then I think that woke university is not on the way out and woke NGO is like definitely not on the way out. And so, but yeah, like So, so I think the fact that they have power makes them less populist, right? So like, if you're going to have a system that allocates jobs to people in a way to redress disparities and blah, blah, blah, you don't want to tear down that system entirely from the outside, right? So you're not going to be a populist. Like, if you, if you want to reallocate college degrees, professional degrees, and the jobs that go to those people, the idea of reallocating jobs in general to people who have vocational degrees you know, who got vocational education or apprenticeships or whatever, that the true working class, the idea of allocating jobs to those people instead of to people with the degrees that you're trying to reallocate is anathema to you. And so, so there's this institutionalism within the woke progressive movement that, that makes it very hard to address lots of the class problems we have around education in America because they've done such a good job of repurposing our educational system to redress the disparities that they perceive, that they— that the needed winnowing and diminishment of the hegemony of our education system is a threat to them.

Yes.

And so that's the big problem with, you know, wokeness, I think, is that institutionalism of it makes it very difficult to clean house, right? Like, You know, you've just had the CDC adopt like DEI guidelines. Now here comes people who say, oh, the CDC failed during the pandemic, so it's time to tear down the CDC. No, we just got them to implement DEI. We can't tear them down now. So I think that that's like, you know, that's, that's the big problem with them. I think you're absolutely right that there's so many problems in America that are related to class, you know, that cut across racial lines. And We need to address those. What frustrates me is that socialists aren't addressing them because, like, socialists just want to, like, use any excuse to, like, tear down America and whatever. Because so socialism is just purely anti-Americanism with whatever, like, writer of the week on it, right? And that's— so I'm very against them. You might, you might say I have some negativity, feelings of negativity toward that movement.

Yes.

So, but then, but they haven't done much for the working class. You know, like Biden has done a ton for the working class. Socialists revile Biden. Like Biden has thrown tons of money at like working class jobs in healthcare and, you know, whatever. And he's done all this. This was an elite project run by the Washington Center for Equitable Growth and the Roosevelt Institute to do all that. I have some disagreements with that. I think we can't necessarily afford that. Right now, but it's super pro-working class. And Biden is like a, you know, blue-collar dude, an old-style blue-collar dude, and they hate him for it. They're like, what about my student loans? All the socialists are like, what about my student loans? If you don't want the educated elite, don't go with the movement that privileges like student loans over everything else. Okay. And they got mad at Biden because Biden did student debt relief. for working class and poor people and not for rich people. He income capped it and they got so mad. They're like, what about, you know, what about my $40,000 in student loans that I took to, you know, get an art degree from University of Michigan? Sorry, my friend who actually did that. I just used you as a mental example. But then the key here is that everyone I know went to either Stanford or University of Michigan. So, but the point is that That, like, the socialist movement is an elite-educated movement. You know, they profess concern for the working class. When you ask them who's the working class, they think it's adjuncts, lecturers, public school teachers with advanced degrees, things like that. They think it's them. They don't think it's the actual real working class with whom they have no contact and no sympathy. So the socialist movement doesn't represent the working class. Conservatives now make a lot of noise about supporting the working class. And I think that there are some conservatives like Marco Rubio who really want to do this. You know, and I think that J.D. Vance, if he weren't like, you know, like obsessed with like politicking, you know, whatever, would want to do this. I think he does have genuine concern for the working class that is, you know, obscured by his weird politicking. But like, but I think that, and I honestly, Josh Hawley probably has on some level some amount of concern for the working class, maybe less than those other 2, but But some, but like your average conservative still doesn't like the working class because I, I'm not going to say why. There's many reasons. There's a long tradition of not liking, of not liking the working class, of conservatism being based on used car dealers, the car dealer class and like the local bosses. You know, so there's, there's a lot of antipathy toward the working class among, you know, sort of rural and small town and suburban conservatives.

But aren't they the working class?

No, they're not. So if you, if you have a car dealership, you're not the working class. You're the, you're the business class, right? You make money. You're the, you know, you're, you're just the non-educated, you know, upper, upper business class because it's actually, class is actually multidimensional. We have education, income, and, you know, these people do not want their, their workers getting uppity and demanding more wages. Right. But at the, you know, at the same time, they get resentful of all these, like, you know, fancy, like, Harvard people who have all these fancy degrees and stuff. And so, like, they're not working class, but they're not the educated class either. So we have a multidimensional class structure. I guess the point is that conservatives are now starting to talk a game about supporting the working class, but it has yet to be shown what policies that will be That will manifest in. I think you've seen conservatives try to connect their pre-existing policies like anti-immigration, like, you know, and Trump tried to connect tariffs too to the working class. And maybe that maybe there is a case for that. That's a topic for another day. But but certainly they just they try to take a lot of culture war stuff and connect it to the working class. Like Rob Henderson does this. It's like but but just just bashing neo pronouns does not help the working class.

Yep. Yeah. Well, they try to redefine the working class to be on education polarization, which is sort of, you know, 1/3 of the country goes to college, 2/3 of the country doesn't go to college. And they say, hey, why do the views of the 1/3 of the country get to dictate the views over the 2/3 of the country? Not— I'm generalizing wildly, but that's kind of how they think about it.

Right.

Yeah.

So, so, yeah. So, so I think Who's really standing up for the working class in this country in a real tangible way? Old man Biden. And that's about it. And some like think tankers that you've never heard of. Like, that's it. I want to support the working class, but I don't know who I can join to do that. Not the socialists, you know? Yeah. Not the Republicans.

Let me get back to your last point. I'll let you go in a few minutes.

Yeah.

Mike Solana. So, you know, the Republican Party has been a mix of, you know, evangelicals, libertarians/business people, and neocons, you know, foreign policy hawks, right? Over, you know, in sort of the— that was kind of this great fusion.

Right.

And I think it's not the reason why Mike Solana wants to avoid the term conservative. This is my projection. I haven't talked to him about this, but I'm just guessing, is not only because it's low status, but also because I think there's an intellectual disagreement there. Like, he's fundamentally a progressive. He's a technological progressive. He's like, we need to go, we need to build the future, right? He's not both economically and socially, like, he's not like, hey, we need to return to 1950s and have to, you know, he's gay, you know, so he is a social liberal, basically. He's like, people should just do whatever they want to do. He's even supportive of the drag stuff. He doesn't want it taught in our schools, but he's like, people should do whatever they want to do. So he's socially forward in that way. And then he's also economically forward in that way. And there are conservatives who are both conservative on both economically and socially. And so he wants to say, these are not my people. But should he reclaim— him and his sort of people reclaim the right? Yes, I would be excited about the right if that were the case. So that's just one nuance I wanted to add.

Sure, of course. And, you know, but if you go back to the 1980s and you looked at, you know, social conservatives at like churches in small town America, and if you looked at, you know, stockbrokers who wanted their taxes cut, there was not— there were massive disagreements between those. And I remember reading this book called The Right Nation, which was about this conservative coalition. It was mistimed because it came right before a decade of progressive dominance. But it, but it certainly had interesting points. And it said, it said, you know, conservative Christians disapprove of alcohol and adultery. If you're a stockbroker in Connecticut, other than alcohol and adultery, there's really not much to do. And I remember that line. I remember reading that line in my room in Japan thinking, hmm, if I ever get to the point in life where I have nothing to do except alcohol and adultery, please mercy kill me.

But you have the need for that.

But the point is that conservatives were always a big tent that never saw eye to eye on a lot of things, but saw eye to eye on the things that were most important to them. And that could happen again. People like Mike Solana will never be influential within the Democratic bloc or the progressive movement, no matter how many idiosyncratic progressive-type beliefs they hold. They will never be influential in that movement because they will never be accepted as an insider in that movement, someone who can lead that movement to better days. And that's fine. And that's not a criticism. I'm not saying he should go become woke and blah, blah, blah. I'm saying—

I know he's from the right, but I'm just saying, is there a different term on the right than conservative? Because he's not conserving anything. He's all about the future.

Well, okay. So what liberals did is they invented this new term progressive that they could then put all their new stuff onto and then leave some of the old baggage behind. And then I came and scooped up the old baggage and, you know, now made it my own. But, and I am liberal, right? And that's why the socialists hate me because they hate liberals. Anyway, but—

What's that on the right?

We need some, we need some new terms and we need vocabulary. Unfortunately, you know, like you need educated people to make vocabulary. So what we need is for Mike Solana and guys like that to create a term that encompasses conservatives, but also encompasses them.

Yes.

You know, they need to just create that term and they need to onboard the conservatives because honestly, like, you know, Like, smart people are idea leaders. That's what they're made for. And, you know, and the progressive movement has a lot of them and the, you know, the generalized right of center does not. And David Frum isn't going to frickin do it. Who's going to do it? You know, like, like those guys aren't going to do it. Who's going to do it? The guys at Breitbart aren't going to do it. It has to be someone with brains. It has to be people from the tech industry and it, and That's why whenever I hear people in the tech industry be like, I'm not a— I'm, you know, like, I think people should get married and have kids and we should clean all the homeless people off the street and we're spending too much government money through NGOs and wokeness has gone too far and blah, blah, blah. But I'm not conservative. Yes, you are in some generalized important sense. Perhaps you're gay. Perhaps you, you know, like, think it's okay to have drag queen story hour. But yeah.

I agree. That's a good way to wrap. Good call to arms. We should have Mike Solana on. We should. We could brainstorm that. No, I'll let you get to your lunch. This is a great episode as always.

And absolutely, actually, I'm not even getting to lunch. I'm just getting to another podcast with Andrew Sullivan.

Oh, amazing. Also conservative.

To his credit, I believe identifies as a conservative.

Yes.

Yes. And so anyway, cool. All right. Until next time.

Yeah, until next time.

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