Is America broken?

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0:01:15 Hi, I’m Jorge Just.
0:01:17 I’m the editor of the gray area, and I’m
0:01:20 taking a very short break from my new hobbies of doom
0:01:23 scrolling and disaster refreshing
0:01:25 to tell you about this week’s episode.
0:01:28 It’s a conversation between Sean and Alana Newhouse
0:01:29 from two February’s ago.
0:01:32 And at least for me, it helps put into context
0:01:34 all the chaos and cluster effery that’s
0:01:35 taken over the United States government
0:01:37 the last couple of weeks.
0:01:40 In the episode, Newhouse uses a concept
0:01:41 that she calls brokenism.
0:01:44 She uses it to argue that the most important political divide
0:01:47 in the country is not between the left and the right,
0:01:49 but rather between those who want to repair America’s
0:01:52 institutions and those who want to destroy them.
0:01:54 It’s a real eye opener.
0:01:55 After listening, I kind of wanted
0:01:58 to go back in time to when it was first published.
0:02:01 So I could play it for everyone, tell people, pay attention.
0:02:02 This might be coming.
0:02:05 But that is impossible.
0:02:09 So instead, we’ve brought the episode forward in time to now
0:02:13 to play it for everyone, to tell people, pay attention.
0:02:15 This might be happening.
0:02:19 OK, here’s the show.
0:02:22 If this country doesn’t give us what we want,
0:02:26 then we will burn down this system and replace it.
0:02:29 There’s a lot of outrage across the country right now.
0:02:31 Often, it’s hard to define, but it’s
0:02:36 rooted in a fundamental belief that the country is broken,
0:02:40 that our institutions are rotten and dysfunctional.
0:02:42 Let’s talk about how Joe Biden said
0:02:48 his Build Back Better agenda cost zero American tax dollars.
0:02:51 This union representing more than 4,000 Columbus teachers
0:02:54 and staff striking for the first time in roughly 50 years,
0:02:59 a sign experts say of mounting frustration nationwide.
0:03:01 This outrage is one of the very few things
0:03:04 that people on the left and right share.
0:03:09 And it’s a source of widespread pessimism about our future.
0:03:14 Of course, there will always be many cleavages in the country.
0:03:18 But maybe the biggest, most salient division right now
0:03:21 is between those who want to fix the institutions we have
0:03:24 and those who want to burn it all down and start fresh.
0:03:30 I’m Sean Elling, and this is the gray area.
0:03:46 My guest today is Alana Newhouse.
0:03:48 She’s the editor-in-chief of an online magazine
0:03:51 called Tablet, and she’s the author of a recent essay
0:03:55 for the site called “Brokenism.”
0:03:57 “Brokenism” isn’t just the title of her piece.
0:04:00 It’s also a term she’s coined.
0:04:02 And while I’m still not entirely sure what
0:04:05 I think of her broader thesis, Newhouse
0:04:08 did something valuable in that piece.
0:04:11 She gave me a new language for thinking
0:04:14 about this political moment.
0:04:17 This distinction between what she calls brokenist,
0:04:21 the people who think we need a total reset,
0:04:23 and the status quoist, the people who
0:04:26 think we can reform our current order,
0:04:28 is certainly provocative.
0:04:31 And even if you reject her basic framework,
0:04:35 it’s very much worth wrestling with.
0:04:39 So I invited Alana onto the show to talk about it.
0:04:42 [MUSIC PLAYING]
0:04:50 Alana Newhouse, welcome to the show.
0:04:52 Thanks so much.
0:04:57 So we’re here to talk about your essay on brokenism, which
0:05:01 I have to say really landed for me.
0:05:04 And I’m still working out what I think about it, frankly.
0:05:07 But I just wanted to start by saying that.
0:05:08 I’m still working it out, too.
0:05:11 So maybe we can work it out together.
0:05:12 Let’s try.
0:05:15 So let’s actually just start with you summing up your thesis
0:05:16 in that piece.
0:05:18 Tell me about what you think is now
0:05:23 the most vital debate in America.
0:05:25 The debate that I find the most interesting
0:05:27 and that I think is going to be the one that
0:05:31 is going to take us through the next, call it five to 10 years,
0:05:34 isn’t a debate between Republicans or Democrats
0:05:36 or between the left and the right,
0:05:40 or even between progressives and conservatives.
0:05:43 The debate that I find myself most drawn to
0:05:46 and that I think a lot of other people increasingly
0:05:50 want to participate in is a debate about our institutions
0:05:55 and about the viability of them and the health of them.
0:05:59 The two sides that I saw emerging,
0:06:04 I roughly call brokenists and status quoists.
0:06:08 And in the piece, I try to articulate the vision
0:06:11 that each side has.
0:06:14 And I hope that I express sympathy and interest
0:06:18 in both arguments because I feel drawn to both sides.
0:06:21 My sense of the status quoist argument
0:06:26 is that they feel with a lot of validity
0:06:28 that we have a lot of institutions in American life
0:06:32 that took many, many years to build that actually create
0:06:35 safety and predictability and opportunity
0:06:38 for a lot of people.
0:06:40 And that there’s an almost nihilistic,
0:06:43 burn it all down energy that they feel coming
0:06:47 from other people in American life
0:06:51 because inevitably they see problems in those institutions
0:06:52 and they want to fix them.
0:06:57 On the other side, there are people who I call brokenists.
0:07:01 And those are people for whom the broken aspect
0:07:06 of the big blocks of institutional life
0:07:08 that they have to interact with,
0:07:10 whether that’s a university,
0:07:12 whether it’s their health insurance,
0:07:15 whether it’s a government entity,
0:07:19 what they’re feeling in almost in a 360 way
0:07:24 is a sense of decay and a sense that these things
0:07:26 simply don’t work anymore.
0:07:29 And that I think in the case of many brokenness,
0:07:32 there’s a feeling that not only did those institutions
0:07:34 not work, but that they’re not reformable
0:07:37 and that we would be better off spending our energy
0:07:40 building new replacements for them
0:07:43 rather than trying to reform them.
0:07:47 So the tension is between those two sides.
0:07:50 – Yes, and I think you really do a service here
0:07:52 and giving us that language.
0:07:53 It’s a very useful distinction.
0:07:56 There’s a man you quote in the piece.
0:07:59 He’s a reader who reached out to you.
0:08:01 His name is Ryan.
0:08:05 And he said some very relatable things for me.
0:08:09 And his perspective, his frustration really,
0:08:11 serves as a kind of anchor for your essay.
0:08:13 Can you say a bit about him
0:08:15 and what he articulated to you?
0:08:19 – Yes, I met Ryan because two years ago,
0:08:21 I wrote a piece called “Everything is Broken,”
0:08:23 which was my personal creed accord
0:08:26 about the broken aspects of American society
0:08:29 that were affecting my life.
0:08:31 And in the wake of that essay,
0:08:36 I got hundreds of emails and DMs and texts from people.
0:08:40 One of them was from a man named Ryan,
0:08:42 who was about my age, lives in Ohio,
0:08:45 former vet, actually third generation,
0:08:47 African-American veteran.
0:08:49 And Ryan reached out and said,
0:08:51 this piece spoke to me so deeply
0:08:53 because this is what I feel too.
0:08:55 I feel that American society is so broken
0:08:56 and I don’t understand why.
0:08:58 We ended up actually becoming friends.
0:08:59 We had a lot more in common
0:09:04 than I think either of us expected when he reached out.
0:09:08 And over the course of a year of texting
0:09:11 and sharing articles and just becoming friends,
0:09:13 we were having conversations
0:09:16 about how our thought was developing.
0:09:19 And one day, Ryan said on the phone with me,
0:09:23 you know, I realized I’m having conversations with people.
0:09:26 Sometimes they’re people who see themselves as on the right.
0:09:29 Sometimes they’re people who see themselves on the left.
0:09:31 And the thing that determines whether or not
0:09:34 I can talk to them is actually
0:09:36 how they think about institutions.
0:09:38 I don’t care whether they come from the left
0:09:39 or come from the right,
0:09:42 whether they’re a libertarian or a socialist.
0:09:44 I care whether or not they look at these institutions
0:09:47 and they think they’re remotely healthy.
0:09:50 Because if they do, I think they’re nuts.
0:09:52 And if they don’t, I can have a conversation.
0:09:55 – Yeah, you know, I need to be honest
0:09:56 about my ambivalence here.
0:10:00 You know, I mean, I think of myself as an old school leftist.
0:10:03 I guess I’m a class warrior for lack of a better phrase.
0:10:06 I see that not only as the most important axis of power,
0:10:09 but also the most politically potent.
0:10:13 But you may be right that deep down the real debate now
0:10:16 is between brokenness and status quoist.
0:10:20 I mean, I guess I would say in the interest of maybe trying
0:10:22 to push a little bit against both of our instincts
0:10:25 that sometimes there’s a tendency
0:10:29 for the most engaged politically conscious types
0:10:31 like you and me to assume
0:10:33 that the rest of the country feels the way we do.
0:10:35 You know what I mean?
0:10:36 When the reality is that I think a lot of people
0:10:38 just live in their lives and while they may be caught up
0:10:42 in the general polarized atmosphere,
0:10:45 I’m not sure they have very deep ideological commitments
0:10:47 or even very strong opinions.
0:10:49 I just think a lot of people are very alienated
0:10:50 from all of it.
0:10:54 And again, maybe that kind of widespread detachment
0:10:57 is itself a symptom of the brokenness.
0:11:00 – The reason why I like the frame
0:11:03 is because as a reporter,
0:11:05 it actually allows me to hear people
0:11:08 and hear their concerns differently.
0:11:11 It takes me out of rubrics that are familiar
0:11:13 and allows me to really listen.
0:11:15 And so you brought up the issues of class
0:11:18 and of economic concerns.
0:11:23 I hear them more clearly and loudly
0:11:25 when I see them through the dichotomy
0:11:28 of how our institutions are serving people.
0:11:29 Let’s talk about Medicaid.
0:11:33 Can Medicaid actually properly get people
0:11:34 the support that they need?
0:11:36 That’s a class issue, right?
0:11:40 But it’s also a health of the institution issue.
0:11:44 And maybe if we take it out of the left, right dichotomy,
0:11:47 we can have the conversation that we wanna have
0:11:51 because it doesn’t get people rooted in their defenses
0:11:52 and their biases.
0:11:54 It allows us to say, well, wait a minute,
0:11:56 what if we say instead of whether or not
0:11:58 we believe in Medicaid or don’t believe in Medicaid,
0:11:59 believe in a social safety net,
0:12:01 what if we talk about the effectiveness
0:12:03 of the social safety net?
0:12:05 How is ours working?
0:12:08 And as long as we have it, can we improve it?
0:12:10 Is it possible even?
0:12:13 Because if it isn’t, that starts a whole new conversation.
0:12:16 For me, that’s generative and that feels exciting
0:12:19 because it also feels future oriented.
0:12:21 – Let’s take just a quick step back here
0:12:22 because I wanna make sure
0:12:25 that this is as not abstract as possible.
0:12:29 So if you were floating this thesis to an intelligent person
0:12:31 who maybe isn’t super political,
0:12:34 who doesn’t follow the news that closely
0:12:37 and they just asked you, what exactly is broken?
0:12:39 What institutions is it?
0:12:43 Public education, the Congress, the courts, whatever.
0:12:44 What would you say for someone who was looking
0:12:47 for concrete specificity
0:12:49 when you talk about the brokenness of institutions?
0:12:53 – What I would say is that a brokenness
0:12:58 would be willing to play with the idea
0:13:03 that the frustrations that you feel aren’t normal.
0:13:09 So I might ask the person a little bit about their life
0:13:13 and I may find out that they have a child with special needs
0:13:15 and if they have a child with special needs,
0:13:18 I am willing to bet unless they’re a billionaire
0:13:20 that within 10 minutes they will start to talk to me
0:13:23 about everything they had to pay for out of pocket,
0:13:26 about all the things they couldn’t afford,
0:13:29 all the worries they have about the future,
0:13:30 all the ways in which they do not feel
0:13:33 that American society has been set up
0:13:36 to make it possible for them
0:13:39 to not be afraid for their future.
0:13:43 It will take me, if it takes me 10 minutes, I’d be surprised.
0:13:46 So all I have to do, frankly,
0:13:50 is find a vulnerability or a soft point in any person’s life
0:13:53 and ask them how hard it is for them
0:13:56 to manage that soft point
0:13:59 and whether or not they remember their parents
0:14:00 having a similar soft point
0:14:04 and whether or not they imagined or recall their parents
0:14:07 having the same difficulty that they had.
0:14:10 And for many people, the answer is, no,
0:14:13 my life feels much harder
0:14:17 and the institutions that I have to wend my way through
0:14:21 feel like, as one reader said to me,
0:14:23 half the time they feel like concrete
0:14:25 and half the time they feel like molasses.
0:14:29 That’s not a functioning and well-organized society.
0:14:32 (tranquil music)
0:14:42 Coming up after the break,
0:14:45 are things really broken beyond repair?
0:14:48 The Civil War, reconstruction, the ’60s,
0:14:51 we’ve been through a lot in this country’s history.
0:14:52 What is so special about today?
0:14:55 (tranquil music)
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0:19:07 A lot of things are in a bad way, no question.
0:19:11 And as you know, to say that American institutions are broken
0:19:15 is not to say that they are unfixable.
0:19:19 What makes you so sure or mostly sure
0:19:23 that that’s more accurate, that it’s the latter
0:19:23 and not the former.
0:19:26 Because I mean, even as you acknowledge in your piece,
0:19:30 we’ve survived a civil war and reconstruction
0:19:33 and the industrial revolution and the chaos and violence
0:19:34 of the ’60s.
0:19:38 And somehow we always emerged on the other side
0:19:40 of that stuff, right?
0:19:42 So I had a friend who read my piece who said,
0:19:43 it doesn’t make sense.
0:19:46 How did everything break at the same time?
0:19:49 What’s your theory about how is that possible?
0:19:51 All these institutions started different times in history
0:19:55 and they all just decayed simultaneously.
0:19:57 So what’s your smart explanation for that?
0:19:59 Which of course is the easiest question to answer
0:20:02 because it’s technology.
0:20:04 We had an economic revolution.
0:20:06 And I think we all thought we were just
0:20:07 going to get email or something.
0:20:10 Like it was just going to make our lives easier.
0:20:13 But just like with the industrial revolution,
0:20:16 these revolutions are comprehensive
0:20:18 and they change every aspect of our lives.
0:20:23 That change has a cascading effect
0:20:25 and what technology did to all of those institutions,
0:20:32 it forced a coming to terms with how modern it could be.
0:20:36 Which meant, if you create basically a new goalpost,
0:20:37 now all of a sudden you can judge
0:20:40 how far everything is from that goalpost.
0:20:42 So you create a new technology and you say,
0:20:47 every system has to be immediately responsive.
0:20:50 Every system is going to try to become immediately responsive.
0:20:54 Some of them will be able to get to the standard you just said.
0:20:56 A lot of them are going to fall apart
0:20:59 on their way racing toward their new goalpost.
0:21:03 So to me, it seems kind of obvious
0:21:06 that technology created this demand.
0:21:09 And it set up a new system that all of these institutions
0:21:11 were going to have to be a part of.
0:21:13 And some of them are going to make it
0:21:15 and a lot of them are not going to.
0:21:18 And I have no idea which ones are and are.
0:21:21 What I feel though is they’re all facing the same challenge.
0:21:24 And that’s what I think is interesting to look at.
0:21:27 You talk about following the cracks in the foundation
0:21:30 of society, the way a seismologist tracks slips
0:21:32 in the tectonic plates.
0:21:34 And I still don’t really know where the cracks are
0:21:35 or where they lead.
0:21:36 I mean, I guess I have vague ideas,
0:21:40 but it’s very hard to isolate causes.
0:21:43 And precisely because of some of these technological changes,
0:21:45 I worry all the time about getting
0:21:49 a distorted picture of the world by viewing it
0:21:53 through the funhouse mirror that is the internet.
0:21:56 Is it possible that things really
0:21:58 aren’t as broken as they seem?
0:21:58 Yes.
0:22:00 Maybe it just feels that way because we’re
0:22:05 more aware of the brokenness that was always there.
0:22:08 And we’re just confronted with it all the time.
0:22:10 Yes, absolutely.
0:22:11 The same parent I just described,
0:22:13 parent of a special needs child, who
0:22:15 could tell you everything that’s broken
0:22:18 about the health insurance landscape, about Medicaid,
0:22:19 about everything.
0:22:22 In the same sentence that they will say,
0:22:25 Medicaid is deeply broken, they will also
0:22:28 say, and don’t you dare take it away.
0:22:30 I need it desperately.
0:22:32 The imperative for those of us who
0:22:35 want to think about these things is also,
0:22:37 even if it’s not fixable, we probably
0:22:41 have the responsibility to create its replacement
0:22:45 before we burn the original down to the ground.
0:22:47 Because if not, we might as well live
0:22:51 with this half or mostly broken system.
0:22:52 It’s better than nothing.
0:22:55 I mean, just in terms of your question about the cracks,
0:22:58 that’s kind of the reason why it’s
0:23:03 really important to stick with seeing what those cracks are
0:23:05 and to talk to the people who tell you
0:23:07 they’re falling into them.
0:23:10 Because they’re the only ones who know.
0:23:13 They’re the only ones who can help you walk that crack back
0:23:15 to its origin point.
0:23:18 I have some brokenness and some status quo tendencies.
0:23:21 I can be either depending on the day you ask me.
0:23:23 I don’t know what the hell that makes me.
0:23:24 I guess if I’m hearing you, it makes
0:23:25 me like a lot of people.
0:23:26 Right.
0:23:28 Somewhere in the middle.
0:23:32 I was probably at my most brokenness in the throes
0:23:33 of the pandemic.
0:23:40 The experience of watching even that be so easily and neatly
0:23:42 subsumed by our partisan rancor,
0:23:45 that was a kind of tipping point for me in a realization
0:23:47 that the information environment now,
0:23:49 in conjunction with all these other forces,
0:23:55 has really combined to create an incredibly unstable situation
0:23:57 that I do not think is sustainable.
0:24:00 I think if you can maintain having both brokenness
0:24:03 and status quoist ways of looking at the world,
0:24:08 or you can feel comfortable with either one of them or both,
0:24:12 what that allows you to do is judge things
0:24:16 at a local level, which is where I think all things are
0:24:19 going to get built or fixed anyway.
0:24:21 It’s a little bit like cleaning out your closet.
0:24:24 So there’s a bunch of stuff that you’re going to take,
0:24:25 and you’re going to throw it away.
0:24:27 But not every item of clothing.
0:24:29 Then there are a bunch of things that you’re going to take
0:24:31 and be like, these are really important to me.
0:24:33 I’m going to get them fixed.
0:24:35 And then there are things that work great.
0:24:36 They do great for you.
0:24:38 So you keep those.
0:24:41 If you have a philosophy about your closet,
0:24:43 you’re going to end up with a bad closet.
0:24:45 If you’re like, nothing here has to change.
0:24:47 We’re not changing anything.
0:24:49 You’re just going to end up with a bunch of stuff you can’t use
0:24:51 and a bunch of stuff that doesn’t look good on you.
0:24:55 And if you walk in and you’re like, we’re throwing everything out,
0:24:57 you may lose something that was really important to you
0:25:00 that actually worked really well that maybe was from your grandmother.
0:25:02 You don’t want that.
0:25:05 And I think that American society right now is at a place
0:25:11 where it would be amazing if we could almost assess everything,
0:25:16 look at everything and say, how can we make this better for more people?
0:25:20 How can we make this work better and help more people
0:25:24 and make better, safer, more enriching lives for more of us?
0:25:26 You’re not a finster, though, right?
0:25:28 You’re a brokenist, right?
0:25:30 I mean, although you do say there’s this caveat,
0:25:31 maybe I should ask you about that.
0:25:34 The way you say it in the piece is to say that you’re a brokenist
0:25:39 with respect to American institutions, but not with respect to America itself.
0:25:41 I’m not exactly sure what that really means.
0:25:44 And I don’t know what America is, if not a bundled institutions
0:25:46 girded by a culture, I suppose.
0:25:51 So maybe you can just unpack that and explain your staunch brokenism.
0:25:54 I wouldn’t say it’s staunch.
0:25:55 I took some liberties there.
0:26:01 Right. I think that I have a hot hand with my brokenism,
0:26:07 meaning I’m not slow to look at something and say it’s broken beyond repair.
0:26:11 That’s a difference between me and I think some of my more status-quo as friends
0:26:15 is that their default is to say, can we fix this?
0:26:19 And to take that conversation, I think sometimes too far
0:26:23 past the point of usability and past the point of the legitimate use
0:26:26 of anyone’s time and resources and energy.
0:26:31 So I see too many people throwing too many resources down what I think
0:26:36 is just an abyss of institutions that seem like they’re obviously failing
0:26:39 and shouldn’t be given those kinds of resources.
0:26:42 So I am quicker than a lot of other people I know
0:26:47 to consign things to the dustbin of history now.
0:26:53 So that’s what I mean when I say I tend to be brokenist in my impulses.
0:26:58 In terms of sort of the America question, I mean, here’s where I get a little woo-woo.
0:27:03 I guess I think one of the best things about America and one of the most
0:27:10 gruesome in some ways things about America is its ability to forget the past,
0:27:13 to almost like forget the past the minute it happens,
0:27:18 which is responsible I think for both its capacity to be so future-oriented
0:27:23 that it constantly morphs, like it molts almost.
0:27:28 But also then brings trauma with it, like drags its own trauma with it
0:27:30 constantly into the future because I won’t deal with it.
0:27:35 But for me, what that means, though, is that America has at least historically
0:27:38 been fertile ground for pretty radical change.
0:27:42 And because America has been very open to the idea of, well,
0:27:44 why don’t we just all wake up tomorrow and do something else?
0:27:50 I feel excited about the idea that we could fix stuff and maybe replace stuff.
0:27:53 And again, I’m not European.
0:27:56 I was on British radio and the interviewer said to me,
0:28:00 so do you believe that maybe that the British government’s going to fix
0:28:03 everything, right, that they could fix it and we could all be OK?
0:28:05 I was like, I have no idea.
0:28:11 I don’t feel super hopeful about that, but I have no idea.
0:28:15 Europe is different and Europe in some senses lives in its own past.
0:28:17 America doesn’t.
0:28:22 And so when I talk about feeling like I immediately will consign
0:28:25 an American institution to the dustbin of history,
0:28:30 it’s almost because America doesn’t mind like you want to throw out
0:28:32 all of the Ivy Leagues, literally just throw them in the middle of the ocean.
0:28:34 America will be fine.
0:28:37 It will just make a new thing and it’s brutal.
0:28:41 It can be violent, but that ability to simply replace what needs
0:28:46 to get thrown in the garbage means that I feel like there’s going to be
0:28:50 something new in 20 years, whether we can see it now or not.
0:29:02 So before we put this episode in the dustbin of history,
0:29:07 can we talk about why things have gotten so extreme on the right and left?
0:29:12 Alana and I discuss after one more quick break.
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0:32:32 [Music]
0:32:54 You remind me of that great Gore Vidal line.
0:32:57 We are forever the United States of Amnesia.
0:32:59 We learn nothing because we remember nothing.
0:33:02 I think there’s a lot of truth to that.
0:33:08 One, perhaps, symptom of some of this brokenness, for you at least, is the fact that our
0:33:13 conventional ideological categories are sort of meaningless now.
0:33:17 I kind of don’t even know what the hell the left and the right really even refers to at this point.
0:33:22 Which is why you invoke something that’s called the horseshoe theory.
0:33:27 Yeah, the horseshoe theory is the idea that the extremes are closer to each other than
0:33:31 they are to the mainstream cohorts on their own side.
0:33:33 So you go so far right that you sound like the left.
0:33:35 You go so far left that you start to sound like the right.
0:33:40 And of course, that’s a perfect status quoist argument.
0:33:45 Because you basically say the extremes are ignorable.
0:33:54 Both of them are fringe and moderate centrists on both sides need to come together and
0:33:55 we’re the adults in the room.
0:34:01 On the one hand, I’m sympathetic to that idea because it’s very hard to look around
0:34:04 American politics and not see examples of horseshoe theory.
0:34:05 And I mentioned some of them in the piece.
0:34:08 You see Glenn Greenwald on Tucker Carlson.
0:34:10 Glenn is a historic leftist.
0:34:14 Now he’s on Tucker Carlson, which is obviously a right wing program with a right wing host.
0:34:18 And you see these elements happening all the time now.
0:34:24 And so you do see this coming together of voices and platforms that feel like they’re
0:34:27 taking the extremes of the left and the right and they’re combining them.
0:34:35 So it’s hard not to see that status quoists are right when they identify that coming together.
0:34:43 On the other hand, the point of the horseshoe theory, which is rhetorical, is to tell you to dismiss them.
0:34:50 And that’s where I feel it starts to actually be its own political argument, which you can
0:34:50 then disagree with or not.
0:34:56 Now it’s not actually about who’s legitimate in politics, but that’s just not your side.
0:35:02 So the way that I see it is that instead of it being a horseshoe with extremes on both sides,
0:35:04 it’s just a new circle.
0:35:05 And there are two sides of the new circle.
0:35:12 On one side are people who would be considered on the far extremes of both of their
0:35:15 respective teams, and on the other side are people who are centrists.
0:35:18 Yeah, I mean, in some way, there’s there’s an alignment really.
0:35:22 The horseshoe theory sort of folds into your framework.
0:35:27 For me, at least to say that horseshoe theory is correct is not to say that the far left
0:35:30 and the far right share the same beliefs.
0:35:36 Instead, I think it’s about how a certain kind of dogmatism leads to the same posture
0:35:40 in people, regardless of where they start out ideologically.
0:35:46 So the far left and the far right may want to build very different worlds if they want
0:35:47 to build anything at all.
0:35:51 But they both probably agree that the system should be burned down.
0:35:55 And in that sense, they may have more in common with each other than normie
0:35:57 centrist types do on the left and the right.
0:35:59 And that, I think, is instructive.
0:36:05 To me, these frameworks are only useful if they actually help us understand what’s
0:36:06 happening in society.
0:36:11 And I’m not so sure that the left, right framework is useful anymore.
0:36:16 I don’t think it helps anyone understand anything, let alone convince anyone.
0:36:19 Let’s even put aside convincing other people as a goal, right?
0:36:22 I don’t even think it makes it clear to anyone.
0:36:27 But when I start talking to people about the health of institutions, all of a
0:36:29 sudden they come alive in both directions.
0:36:34 People want to defend the institutions that they feel are central to their lives
0:36:35 and they want to make them better.
0:36:41 Other people want to destroy the institutions that they see as obstacles
0:36:42 to them leading good lives.
0:36:48 But that becomes a great, exciting, generative conversation.
0:36:53 And the conversations around that that I’m in, people leave feeling good
0:36:59 because they feel like they thought about something and they kind of have marching
0:37:00 orders that are different.
0:37:02 Yeah, I think that’s part of the problem.
0:37:06 We’ve inherited this language really from the 20th century, this kind of left,
0:37:07 right liberal conservative.
0:37:12 That just doesn’t really map neatly onto the political reality now.
0:37:15 And we just don’t really have a new language that does.
0:37:21 And so we’re in this interregnum or whatever this in between space that
0:37:27 makes conversation really difficult and makes situating yourself in this
0:37:30 political space difficult.
0:37:31 I mean, I even struggle with it.
0:37:35 I mean, I still very much think of myself as of the left, but it’s not
0:37:36 so simple anymore.
0:37:41 And it’s because of this scrambled mess that that’s even a real word.
0:37:42 No, that’s right.
0:37:46 And the thing that I tried in the piece to basically talk about, I think I
0:37:51 use this metaphor of when I was in gym class and elementary school, our teacher
0:37:55 at some point, you know, we had two volleyball teams and our teacher at
0:37:59 some point split both teams and then we combine them to create new teams.
0:38:02 And that kind of is what I feel like is happening now.
0:38:05 There are still two teams.
0:38:11 They just look different and they’re sussing themselves out in unusual ways.
0:38:14 And as a result, a bunch of people who are standing in the middle are trying
0:38:19 to figure out which side they belong to because they’re in flux.
0:38:24 And we are clearly in a cataclysmic time of change.
0:38:32 The question I think for us is how do we get out of it with the most
0:38:34 possibility for a better future?
0:38:35 I don’t know.
0:38:40 I guess I find it easier to talk about the symptoms and the indicators that I
0:38:44 do about the solutions and something you definitely touch on.
0:38:48 And it’s a recurring theme for me in the show and in some of my writing.
0:38:54 This collapse of trust in authority and in mainstream institutions like
0:38:57 media is a major red flag.
0:39:02 And if you’re looking for symptoms of the brokenness, that’s a really good one.
0:39:08 But I also think it’s important to be honest and acknowledge that that collapse
0:39:15 of trust is not just a result of people being blinkered by misinformation online.
0:39:16 Right.
0:39:20 That there is an actual cultural divide and it is playing out in our dominant
0:39:25 institutions, like the conversation, for instance, about woke capitalism.
0:39:32 What’s interesting about that, to me, is that it illustrates this gap between
0:39:34 elites and a lot of the public.
0:39:39 And I’m setting aside here ideological questions about, you know, which right
0:39:41 or wrong or good or bad or whatever.
0:39:46 The relevant point here for me is that the intellectual and political culture
0:39:53 in a lot of our dominant institutions, from media to academia to corporate America,
0:39:59 often doesn’t reflect the ideological diversity of the country.
0:40:03 And that’s true, even if you think part of the problem is that huge
0:40:07 chucks in the country are just deeply wrong about deeply important questions.
0:40:08 And they believe awful things.
0:40:09 Maybe that’s true.
0:40:14 But the existence of this cultural divide is generating a lot of tension.
0:40:20 And if you’re a status quoist, that’s not helping your cause.
0:40:26 Yeah, like you see it on these massive corporations and you start to think
0:40:28 to yourself, it’s something that, that it makes me feel uneasy.
0:40:34 And I think that you’re right that on some level, we’re, we’re playing
0:40:36 out mistrust with these institutions.
0:40:42 I might take us one step back and say, I’m not trying to be, although
0:40:44 I feel sympathy with leadites.
0:40:48 I’m not actually a leadite, but it’s hard not to look at the past and say,
0:40:52 like local communities were high trust communities.
0:40:57 And a lot of things emerged from local communities.
0:41:02 Even America and the American elite used to be geographically organized.
0:41:03 So we had a Midwest elite.
0:41:04 We had a Southern elite.
0:41:06 We had a Eastern seaboard elite.
0:41:07 We had a West Coast elite.
0:41:12 And those elites were connected to the non elites in their region.
0:41:15 They’re invested in living in the same region.
0:41:17 It’s high trust.
0:41:22 And then they had corporations that were rooted in those geographical areas.
0:41:27 If you lived around IBM, IBM is a major multinational corporation.
0:41:31 But you also, it was your local industry.
0:41:33 These things created trust.
0:41:38 The trust has broken down all throughout the pyramid of our lives.
0:41:44 If we don’t have local life in this country that feels generative and
0:41:48 enriching and like potentially a place of opportunity for people.
0:41:52 I think a large part of what we’re trying to build on top of that will come apart.
0:41:56 You wrote something that was, I think, very important and very powerful in your
0:41:58 piece and now I’m quoting.
0:42:03 To see the cracks in the building before it collapses, that’s a Jewish experience.
0:42:08 To argue about whether the building can be saved or has to be evacuated.
0:42:09 That’s a Jewish debate.
0:42:13 To find a way to somehow invent an entirely new building.
0:42:19 That’s a Jewish act to dismiss the cracks as unimportant and suppress
0:42:24 questions so that the next day’s news shocks you all over again.
0:42:29 I wish you luck in your efforts, but don’t confuse your approach with the
0:42:31 values of Jewish engagement.
0:42:35 That’s a lovely piece of writing and there’s a lot going on there.
0:42:39 And I am not Jewish and I don’t have any connection with what you’re describing
0:42:43 really. So I want to give you space to explain what that passage really means
0:42:48 because to the extent I do think I understand what you’re saying, it’s important.
0:42:53 I talked a little bit about America’s brutal and terrifying kind of magical
0:42:58 ability to live outside of history or to forget the past minute it happens.
0:43:04 For me, the dynamic part of the reason why I can live inside of that country and
0:43:11 access that without it feeling almost inhuman is because I’m also rooted in
0:43:18 another tradition, which is deeply historical and actually demands constant
0:43:22 remembering almost in a daily way.
0:43:27 For me, the dynamic between those two has been very useful.
0:43:34 I feel that I can understand many sides and many arguments about the health of a
0:43:40 society because I both feel the imperative of the past and the whole of the future.
0:43:46 The argument that I was trying to make in that paragraph was that Jews
0:43:51 historically have lived in lots of societies that have come apart and they
0:43:54 either came apart internally or externally.
0:43:58 Usually they expelled their Jews or they murdered them.
0:44:03 Sometimes they came apart in ways that allow the Jews to leave before that
0:44:04 happened, but that was rarer.
0:44:12 So the point is, is that we have a diasporic history that has demanded that
0:44:22 we study our surroundings and that we watch for signs of decay or danger and
0:44:26 that we not take for granted the notion that just because the society has been
0:44:29 around for a little while, that it’s going to be around forever.
0:44:34 So what I was encouraging my readers, not just Jewish readers, but all
0:44:41 readers to do, sort of take that from the Jewish playbook and start to ask
0:44:44 yourself, what looks healthy here?
0:44:48 What looks like it could use a little firming up?
0:44:51 What looks like a building that’s about to fall down on my head?
0:44:55 Be honest with yourself because your loved ones are in that building with you.
0:45:02 Part of the key to Jewish history has been in being able to engage with the
0:45:11 world around us richly and creatively and smoothly, but also to be honest about it.
0:45:13 You’ve talked about it in this conversation.
0:45:18 You talk about it in the essay itself, how we’re in this cataclysmic period
0:45:19 of flux, something like that.
0:45:26 And I just worry that there is an impulse, a temptation to exaggerate the
0:45:33 stakes or to exaggerate the level of brokenness in order to imbue the moment
0:45:37 with a historical weight that maybe doesn’t quite merit, which is just
0:45:40 a really stuffy way of saying maybe things aren’t really that bad.
0:45:44 Comparatively speaking, they’re actually maybe as good as they’ve ever been.
0:45:44 You know what I mean?
0:45:49 And part of it is that just I continue to believe that it’s just really,
0:45:54 really hard to even determine what cleavages are real and unbridgeable and
0:45:57 what cleavages are being manufactured.
0:46:01 And in some ways are just sort of byproducts of our cultural and technological
0:46:04 environment, which doesn’t make them inconsequential, right?
0:46:05 But it does sort of make them contingent.
0:46:06 You know what I mean?
0:46:13 I suspect, particularly in this country, I don’t think that there’s a huge
0:46:20 threat of us throwing in the garbage institutions that are working really
0:46:25 well for a majority of the people they’re meant to serve.
0:46:31 I think I would ask you to ask yourself, or maybe I would just ask you,
0:46:33 what’s the worst that could happen?
0:46:38 I’m thinking about your question, honestly, it’s a good one.
0:46:40 And I don’t know what the answer is.
0:46:45 I suspect that whatever the worst that can happen is not just worse than we
0:46:48 imagine it, it may be worse than we can imagine.
0:46:53 And I guess I would say one thing I don’t think you quite do in the piece.
0:46:57 And if you think I’m wrong about this, please tell me.
0:47:02 But I’m not sure you really reckon with what it would mean.
0:47:03 And this gets at what you’re asking me.
0:47:11 What it would mean materially and politically to reject or abandon our institutions.
0:47:15 You know, like, I’m not sure you can rebuild society really until the prevailing
0:47:16 order has collapsed.
0:47:21 And the transition, at least historically, from one order to another is usually really
0:47:26 violent and bumpy and ugly, which is why I think a committed brokenness.
0:47:31 And as I said, on some days, I feel like I am one should really think long and
0:47:36 hard about what would come after and about how hard it was to build the society we
0:47:41 have, however, screwed up and flawed it might be.
0:47:42 And no doubt is.
0:47:45 We’re not making a movie here.
0:47:48 We’re actually talking about how things work in life.
0:47:56 And I think that the second state, maybe at this point, there are three of them has
0:48:04 just undone its requirement for a college degree in order to work for the government.
0:48:13 That is a move to quietly reimagine the importance of a college degree in the
0:48:16 American economy moving forward.
0:48:18 That’s a brokenness to move.
0:48:21 Nobody shut down all the colleges overnight.
0:48:26 Nobody decided that people with college degrees were going to be prejudiced against.
0:48:28 That they couldn’t get jobs, right?
0:48:35 What quietly happened and is happening is that some people are saying, what if we
0:48:38 don’t think about things the way that we’ve always thought about them?
0:48:43 What if we imagine that we add a second way of thinking about it?
0:48:48 To me, that’s what I see happening, and that’s what I want to encourage.
0:48:51 I don’t want to encourage people just taking things and throwing them in the
0:48:56 general the ocean, especially not before they’ve created some viable soil on the
0:48:57 ground to build something new.
0:48:59 But I don’t even think they should do it then.
0:49:04 I think we should be making moves like that, reimagining a future where maybe
0:49:07 people don’t have to go into massive debt in order to have jobs.
0:49:14 And so when I talk about brokenness, I don’t mean that we should burn things to
0:49:14 the ground.
0:49:18 I mean, we should imagine more.
0:49:22 Imagine that there’s more opportunity.
0:49:24 Imagine there were more options.
0:49:31 Imagine there were more ways of getting people better, safe, happier, richer in
0:49:34 whatever way you want to think about it, lives.
0:49:40 And what if the roots that we’ve created right now, what if we just make more of
0:49:43 them? That’s how I think of it.
0:49:45 I like that you went there.
0:49:50 I mean, in some ways, I’m talking to myself as much as I’m talking to you.
0:49:54 I am someone who, if I’m being honest and I try to be, I incline towards
0:49:59 cynicism and I’m working really hard to resist that.
0:50:04 And what I was getting at was maybe speaking to the brokenness out there and
0:50:07 to the brokenness in me, right, that to be a brokenness maybe isn’t necessarily to
0:50:10 be a fatalist or even worse, a nihilist.
0:50:12 And I think we’re seeing this a lot.
0:50:16 And I think we’re seeing more of it on the right than the left with all the
0:50:17 caveats that that implies.
0:50:24 But politics of contempt for the present order, however justified, can become
0:50:30 just pure negation in the absence of any coherent alternative vision.
0:50:35 And that is the road to ruin that I worry we’re on, particularly for people
0:50:37 who are feeling more like brokenness, right?
0:50:39 Because it’s like, whoa, what the hell is the next step after that?
0:50:42 If things are broken, then it’s like, you know,
0:50:45 you pack up your shit and you go home and you wait for the apocalypse, right?
0:50:48 But politically, that’s a dead end and I don’t want to stop there.
0:50:54 Yeah, I think that this is the challenge with the piece, actually, which is
0:50:58 that the language is at one’s evocative, but it’s also a little wrong.
0:51:01 A friend of mine said, you know, you actually don’t mean brokenness.
0:51:05 You mean we founders or another friend was like, I’m a brokenness, but I
0:51:06 call myself a billedist.
0:51:08 Like I want to build stuff.
0:51:09 I like that.
0:51:09 I like that.
0:51:10 You like billedist.
0:51:11 Okay, we’ll put you down.
0:51:14 Yeah, I mean, it’s a little clunky, but I like the sentiment.
0:51:14 Right.
0:51:19 The challenge for me, of course, is that I feel like what I was trying to do,
0:51:24 because I’m sort of a newspaper girl at heart, I believe in the idea of
0:51:28 mirroring back to readers, what I feel they’re telling me.
0:51:35 And so I was trying to mirror back the feeling that I feel right now in this
0:51:38 moment, which is a feeling of frustration.
0:51:42 And I was just trying to sit with people with their frustration, but you’re
0:51:47 right, that after you sit for a little bit with your frustration, the question
0:51:49 for me then is, well, then what?
0:51:55 What do we do when a reader looks at me and says, thank you for articulating
0:51:56 my frustration?
0:51:57 I realize you’re right.
0:51:59 I am exasperated.
0:52:01 I do want something new.
0:52:02 Now what?
0:52:06 And that’s where I think the term will start to fall apart a little bit.
0:52:08 So hopefully it’ll capture its moment.
0:52:13 Maybe we’ll move really quickly through broken-ism into build-ism and nobody
0:52:17 will remember my term because it was such a flash in the pan and everyone
0:52:19 just moved right into an optimistic building phase.
0:52:22 So I now have what to hope for.
0:52:26 I think that brought us to a natural conclusion.
0:52:31 I guess I’ll just end by echoing what I’ve said earlier, which is, I think
0:52:35 you did a public service by framing the debate in this way.
0:52:42 Regardless of how I feel, which as I said, varies by the day, I do think
0:52:46 it’s really important to have a language, to have terms that capture
0:52:50 a moment and clarify the stakes.
0:52:53 And I think you did that in this piece.
0:52:54 And for that, I commend you.
0:52:55 Thanks for this conversation.
0:53:01 It was really thought-provoking and challenging and maybe I’ll write about it next.
0:53:02 Oh, my new house.
0:53:03 Thank you so much for being here.
0:53:05 Thank you so much.
0:53:06 Thank you.
0:53:23 Eric Janikus is our producer.
0:53:26 Patrick Void engineered this episode.
0:53:27 It was edited by A.M.
0:53:30 Hall and Alex Ovington wrote our theme music.
0:53:39 I really enjoyed that conversation as I told Alana at the beginning and at the
0:53:45 end, I still don’t really know if I’m a brokenist or a status quoist.
0:53:49 And I suspect that’s where a lot of people are as well.
0:53:54 But that language, that distinction is genuinely useful.
0:53:59 And it did give me a new way to just think about what’s wrong and where
0:54:01 the real fault lines are.
0:54:05 Let us know what you think about this one.
0:54:07 Are you a brokenist or are you a status quoist?
0:54:11 Drop us a line at thegrayarea@vox.com.
0:54:15 And if you appreciated this episode, please, as always, share it with your
0:54:17 friends on all the socials.
0:54:27 [Music]
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