The midtown offices of the magazine First Things are guarded by a chocolate brown dachshund named Mabel. The dog’s yappy ferocity is matched by the tenderness it displays while playing with one of the editor’s children, an adorable red-headed boy Mabel nudges in exchange for belly rubs. The office Mabel guards is decorated according to serious-little-magazine aesthetics: dark wood floors and walls, interns and staffers pecking at computers balanced on communal desks, omnipresent bookshelves groaning under the weight of books and neatly arranged back issues of the magazine. Mabel belongs to R.R. Reno, the magazine’s editor since 2011. First Things was founded in 1990 by Richard John Neuhaus, a Lutheran-turned-Catholic priest who marched with Martin Luther King Jr. and later came to prominence through his 1986 book, The Naked Public Square: Religion and Democracy in America. Neuhaus edited the magazine until his death in 2009.
Before coming to the magazine, Reno, whom everyone calls “Rusty,” taught theology for twenty years at Creighton University in Omaha, Neb. He received his doctorate from Yale in 1990, but I first knew him at Haverford College, where he was class of 1983. Although Rusty was two years ahead of me at Haverford, he is four years older. He spent a year before college rock climbing in Yosemite Valley, living in a tent. After his sophomore year, he worked on an oil rig for a year, before returning to complete his degree in religion.
Haverford College circa 1982 was the kind of earnestly serious place where philosophy majors outnumbered economics majors, and students often addressed their professors by their first name. When we met, I was a second-semester freshman taking a seminar on the theologians Karl Barth and Dietrich Bonhoeffer. The seminar was composed of upperclassmen who had studied together for years. They spoke a language as foreign as the German I was struggling to master. A few weeks in, Rusty and his brilliant posse (his girlfriend, the writer Jennet Conant, and Ken Easterling, today an eminent hand surgeon who lives with his husband in Miami) invited me for an after-class beer. They had a way of discussing the material that fascinated me: casually, balancing seriousness and humor. And nobody talked like Rusty. A flood of words emerged when he opened his mouth, some insightful, some incomprehensible, some downright goofy. He loved talking about ideas, and he wasn’t afraid to say something outrageous (often very funny) to get to a larger point. “I have counter-revolutionary tendencies, which I have to check,” he tells me forty-two years later.
We ran into each other occasionally at Yale in the late 1980s, where we were both getting our Ph.D.s (he finished, I didn’t). A decade later, I was an editor at Harper’s magazine when I received a letter from him (yes, dear reader, a letter) asking whether I’d take a look at some non-academic pieces he’d written. Having written about intellectuals and academia, I regularly received such requests, and I agreed with a quiet sense of dread. Was I going to have to tell someone I admired to stick to his knitting?
To my great delight, the pieces were terrific: well observed, beautifully written personal essays about rock climbing and working on an oil rig, and a particularly moving piece about being a Christian at his Jewish daughter’s bat mitzvah. “She is being drawn near to God,” he wrote. “I can only witness. I cannot be by her side to hold onto the hems of her garments as she rises upward with each flourish of the canticle of recitation.” They weren’t right for Harper’s, but I told Rusty how much I liked them, and encouraged him to publish them elsewhere (several appeared in Commentary). He told me that my comments gave him confidence to write more, and I felt like I’d made good on the debt I’d incurred at Haverford.
After that, we shared an occasional cup of coffee, and he introduced me to his wife Juliana, whom he met at Yale, and their two children, Rachel and Jesse (who died in a car accident in 2021). In 2004, Rusty, who had been an Episcopalian, converted to Catholicism. “I put myself up for reception into the Catholic Church,” he said, “as one might put oneself up for adoption.” I wasn’t a regular reader of First Things, but I started browsing it after Rusty became editor in 2010.
I’m not Catholic, or even religious, so I skipped articles critical of Vatican II and Pope Francis. But I read with great interest the pieces about ethics and other issues I care about. Sure, they took a more conservative line that I was used to, but they were always well written and intelligently argued. “First Things is a good prophylactic,” says Massimo Faggioli, a professor of theology at Villanova University and contributor to Commonweal, a liberal Catholic journal. “They are very good at pointing out the inconsistencies and pieties that liberals tell themselves. They are smart, but sometimes get carried away.”
Rusty himself got carried away during the COVID-19 pandemic, when he wrote a series of columns and tweets that questioned the severity of the disease. In them, I saw the dark side of his puckish, question-everything style. “The coronavirus pandemic is not and never was a threat to society,” he wrote in his most extreme dispatch. “Coronavirus presents us with a medical challenge, not a crisis. The crisis has been of our own making.” It isn’t often that one is criticized simultaneously by the left and right, but Rusty had the dubious honor of being attacked by both The New Republic and Commentary. A critic in the National Catholic Reporter was most biting. “It has long been obvious that the people at First Things, editor Reno most prominent among them, operate from a different worldview from the one that animates me. Now, methinks we live on separate planets,” Michael Sean Winters wrote. Rusty later apologized for some particularly misguided tweets (“Masks=enforced cowardice,” he wrote in one, since deleted). “I used over-heated rhetoric and false analogies. It was wrong for me to impugn the intentions and motives of others, for which I apologize.”
But it was Rusty’s support for Donald Trump that made me want to speak to him now. I’d read a long 2017 interview he’d given to The Atlantic, and wanted to know whether he was still “guardedly optimistic.” We don’t know whether Trump will be elected in November, but one would have to be an idiot not to understand that aspects of his MAGA ideology have taken up permanent residency in the pantheon of American political thought. So I turned to Rusty for what I hoped would be an intelligent, coherent defense of ideas I’m skeptical of.
Robert S. Boynton: In March 1990, Richard John Neuhaus founded First Things, an ecumenical journal “whose purpose is to advance a religiously informed public philosophy for the ordering of society.” You took over as editor in 2011. How has the magazine changed?
Rusty Reno: The central mission is essentially the same: to make religiously informed interventions into matters of public importance. Neuhaus was a sixties guy who grew more conservative. When I took over the magazine, Jim Nuechterlein, one of the founding editors, commented on a piece we were publishing. He said, “Rusty, this isn’t conservative liberalism, this is liberal conservatism.” And I thought about it for a while and said, “Yeah, I think that’s me, actually.”
RSB: In your 2019 book, Return of the Strong Gods: Nationalism, Populism, and the Future of the West, you argue that we must move beyond the bipartisan, neoliberal, Cold War consensus that held sway from 1945 until recently. In your analysis, the consensus is the problem. “Insofar as there are totalitarian temptations in the West,” you write, “they arise from the embattled postwar consensus, which is becoming increasingly punitive in the face of political populism and its rebellion against the dogmas of openness.” You conclude, “Our danger is a dissolving society, not a closed one; the therapeutic personality, not the authoritarian one.”
RR: The cultural foundations of stability of society have been severely eroded, and I felt we had to double down on social conservatism. We need to be more articulate about the corrosive effects of unrestrained capitalism. I’ve pushed the magazine in a slightly different direction. First Things is part of the “new right,” and that means it is less skeptical of government intervention and involvement in civic and economic life. Our project has a cultural/moral dimension, and an economic dimension, and they’re united by the belief that the great problem of our time is disintegration.
Insofar as there are totalitarian temptations in the West, they arise from the embattled postwar consensus, which is becoming increasingly punitive in the face of political populism and its rebellion against the dogmas of openness.
RSB: I don’t have to ask when you decided to support Trump because there is textual evidence. In January 2016, you participated in a National Review symposium titled, “Conservatives Against Trump.” In it, you wrote, “A good number of voters are willing to gamble on Trump’s bluster. Bad bet. Our nation’s solidarity is being tested. It will only make things worse if we go Trumpster diving.”
A week later, in a piece for your magazine, First Things, titled “Trump, Sanders, and the Middle Class,” you wrote, “Trump is more symptom than cause of what ails us.” Then, two months later, in “What Trump Teaches Us,” you call the prospect of a Trump takeover of the Republican Party “an outcome I’d welcome,” praising him for “exposing a failing establishment,” which “needs to collapse so that it can be rebuilt on sounder foundations.” You conclude that “Trump’s successes at the polls have forced me to acknowledge a degree of blindness. A great number of people in America no longer feel at home, a greater number than I imagined.” What changed your mind?
RR: What happened was my colleague Mark Bauerlein sent me a YouTube link and said, “Rusty, you have to watch this montage of outtakes from Trump rallies put together by somebody on the left to show how bad Trump is. You’re gonna love it!” So one afternoon, I’m lying on my living room floor with my laptop, having a beer, and I watch it.
One of the first things Trump said was, “Our country is run by very stupid people!” And I think, “That’s ridiculous!” But then I think about it and realize he is right! That happened a few times, and, after a while, I realized that I agreed with a lot of what he was saying. I think it was the barbs about the status quo that drew me in. He was constantly attacking the “failing New York Times,” and all that. There’s that line from Flannery O’Connor, “To the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost-blind you draw large and startling figures.” I felt Trump’s hyperbole was necessary to break through. If you weren’t horrified—and I was not horrified—it seemed that things were possible. You can think heretical thoughts.
Trump’s “big beautiful wall” was a symbol of reconsolidation. I was really riveted by the rhetoric because I saw the symbolism, and the symbolism was, “I will protect you.” I don’t think Trump supporters just want protection from people coming across the border. They feel insecure about living in a world where there are few trustworthy places to stand. And they’re right. Marriage is not in great shape, the structures that used to stabilize the lives of working-class people are gone. Disintegration is the biggest threat, and populism represents this upsurge in demand for reconsolidating policies. It’s getting stale now, but in 2016 it was pretty exciting. In September 2016, I signed a “scholars and writers for Trump” document [actually called “Scholars and Writers for America”], but that was not a magazine endorsement. That really horrified a lot of people.
RSB: How did they react?
RR: I was having lunch with Philip Hamburger, who teaches law at Columbia. He asked me to make the case for Trump. And I said, “Well, he’s the enema we need.” Phil did a spit take with the glass of water he was drinking!
RSB: You describe the decision to support Trump in dramatic terms. He will hasten a collapse. He will cleanse the body politic like an enema.
RR: I compare choosing Trump 2016 to being like a prisoner scheduled for execution. Suddenly, there’s a prison riot, but the person leading the riots is a very bad man. What are you gonna do? Fight on the side of the guards? Or join forces with the “bad man” who might free you, and help you avoid execution? In that sense, it wasn’t really a choice at all.
RSB: Do you really believe America circa 2015 and 2016 was in such dire shape?
RR: When Obama was elected in 2008, everyone was so hopeful, and thought there was going to be all this change. But then you get Ferguson in 2014, and by the time 2016 comes along the rancor and division has gotten so much worse, not better. It used to be that if you were a conservative Christian, you believed you had to vote, and to fight for the causes you cared about, but that things were generally okay. They don’t think things are okay anymore. We believe we have to be much more intentional about where we live, where we send our kids to school, all those kinds of things. There is a growing recognition that things are disintegrating, and that we have to take deliberate action.
RSB: But the enema, or collapse, you called for was within the Republican Party.
RR: Yes. The Republican Party was blind to the damage done by capitalism, and the way it runs roughshod over communities and destroys people’s lives. Even the thinkers I most admired, the founders of First Things like Richard John Neuhaus and Michael Novak, were part of the post-war consensus that believed in the spirit of dynamic capitalism. The fact that high school–educated Americans are failing to flourish is the single biggest problem facing the country today. We’ve allowed one hundred thousand people to die of opioid overdoses in places like Indiana, and nobody cares. It has been completely ignored by both parties. That changed with Trump.
I don’t think Trump supporters just want protection from people coming across the border. They feel insecure about living in a world where there are few trustworthy places to stand.
RSB: Did First Things become more political with Trump in 2016?
RR: We became more relevant. Before that we were an entertaining, dissident commentary on Reaganism, but the magazine wasn’t salient to the political moment. Suddenly in 2016, the failure of First Things to fall in line and mobilize in defense of the Republican establishment was very controversial. Trump put tremendous pressure on what I call “rotting-flesh Reaganism.” People were, like, “Woah! Where does First Things stand now?!”
RSB: So you rejected the conservative Never Trumpers, and joined the conversation about what Trump could do for social conservatives.
RR: Yes. We published a lot of pieces in favor of disrupting the established dogmas, and in favor of the direction Trump was moving. Pieces like “Against the Dead Consensus” and Sohrab Ahmari’s “Against David French-ism” got a huge amount of attention.
RSB: In 2016 you wrote of Trump, “He is a very flawed candidate, but the success of his candidacy is not something for us to anguish over. It’s good, very good, that he is sweeping away the tired conservative orthodoxies.” Would it be fair to say that you are for Trumpism but not Trump? Or do you support the man and the project? If so, how do you accommodate yourself to his obvious vices?
RR: I’m indifferent to Trump. We’re not the kind of magazine that publishes commentary on campaigns. It’s not our job to repeat what everyone says over and over again. There are plenty of magazines and websites where readers can find that. That’s what the internet’s for.
RSB: Sure, but First Things writes about character and morality all the time. I can imagine a situation in which one says, “Okay, he is immoral, many times divorced, constantly lying, and bankrupt in many senses … but he is, wittingly or not, doing some things we approve of.” In fact, Matthew Schmitz published a piece in First Things called “Trump Is a Fool” (on April 1, 2016!) which made a similar argument.
RR: Like I said, we don’t cover these kinds of topics. Neuhaus wrote some critical pieces about Bill Clinton during the Lewinsky affair, but he did not take a “tut tut” attitude. The peccadilloes of our political leaders are to be criticized, but they are not decisive. You don’t elect people on the basis of their…
RSB: Character?
RR: Okay, you do, you do…. A man can be sexually undisciplined, as Bill Clinton was, but nevertheless have other virtues. Aristotle believed in the unity of the virtues, as I do. Show me the politician who has nothing but virtue. That man or woman doesn’t exist. Someone like Kamala Harris? Wow, her ability to pretend she never did or said or supported X, Y, or Z? Yes, Trump is a prevaricator of a different sort. He is a blatant one. But many politicians have a wonderful way of forgetting what they’ve done.
RSB: You don’t think Trump’s immorality is of a different order? That there is something twisted and strange and, to use a popular word, weird about him?
RR: I don’t agree. Sure, he suffers from great vices, obviously his hubris, his incredibly tender ego. I’m sure that impairs his ability to run a good administration, and he is shockingly disloyal to the people who serve him. But I never saw him as a demagogue or a threat to democracy. I always thought the rhetoric of the left was exaggerated and out of touch with reality. We have run a number of critical articles about Trump’s betrayal of the pro-life cause. But I feel like this character question is a tar baby.
The fact that high school–educated Americans are failing to flourish is the single biggest problem facing the country today.
RSB: You say that you care about labor and the plight of the working class. But all the people Trump appointed to the National Labor Relations Board were anti-union. And he recently praised Elon Musk for the ruthless way he fires people. Does Trump’s anti-union stances bother you?
RR: The important thing is that I think historians will look back and see that Trump ended the bipartisan, neoliberal consensus. Sure, some of his policies, like the 2017 tax bill, were retro neoliberal. Others, like tariffs on Chinese goods, undermined the liberal consensus. It’s a mixed bag, whether under Obama or Trump.
RSB: Does the Democratic Party support working-class people?
RR: No. The Democratic Party now is the party of university-educated, well-to-do white people, and their client populations. In 2008, Obama was the first Democrat to win the majority of voters making over $200,000 a year. Democrats are the globalist class: Wall Street, Hollywood, Silicon Valley. People like you and me still run things. We benefit from immigration and capitalism’s dynamism. But if you are a high school–educated American, you pay the price, because you’re subjected to relentless labor competition. Your kids attend increasingly dysfunctional public schools that have fewer and fewer English-speaking students. Whereas we send our kids to private schools.
RSB: Did Trump alleviate these problems?
RR: Trump at least addressed these issues in 2016, however ham-handedly. It was better than the alternative. If the political culture offers you “X,” and someone comes along and offers “X+1,” I’ll go with that. Sure, I’d like “X-squared,” or “10x,” but that wasn’t being offered.
RSB: Did Trump succeed in shaking up the system?
RR: Yes. Trump woke people up. Both parties were changed for the better. And but for Trump’s victory, none of these things would have happened. The Trump tariffs on China? Biden increased them. Biden is spending trillions of dollars on reindustrialization, under the guise of green transition. We’ve got new chip plants, under the guise of national security. So this administration is pursuing a policy of reindustrialization.
RSB: Is Biden simply executing the previous administration’s plans?
RR: The previous administration didn’t really have any real plans. You know the old joke: Democrats govern, Republicans hold office.
RSB: So, with Biden implementing parts of the Trump agenda, it doesn’t sound as if the 2024 election is an existential matter for you.
RR: Not really. I’ve got friends who think it’s over if Harris wins. I’m not one of those “gotta move to Canada” people. I would rather have a Trump Justice Department than a Harris Justice Department. I’d rather have a Trump Department of Defense than a Harris Department of Defense. I think we’re damaging ourselves globally by promoting a kind of rainbow-flag diplomacy, which alienates a lot of people.
I think historians will look back and see that Trump ended the bipartisan, neoliberal consensus.
RSB: So if Harris wins, what happens?
RR: The Democrats will continue to spend a lot of money on reindustrialization. But they will also continue to work on the cultural project.
RSB: What’s the cultural project?
RR: Bringing about the dream world of diversity. If we could just get rid of the residual normative center of the white, cisgender male, we’d have a world where everyone could live in peace and harmony. Then there are all the transhumanist, technological projects to give us mastery over the destiny of our bodies: IVF, transgender, doctor-assisted suicide. We’ll have artificial bodies and an artificial society. At some point having children the natural way will be considered the height of irresponsibility, like smoking. We’ll do genetic screening of embryos. We’ll do Nazi things, but under the guise of “choice.”
RSB: And what will happen to the Democrats if Trump wins?
RR: If the postmortem determines that immigration was the issue that put Trump over the line, the Wall Street lawyers and the Silicon Valley entrepreneurs are going to have some hard conversations with the left wing of the Democratic Party. It won’t be a post–George McGovern moment, because the victory will be narrow, whichever side wins. But Democrats are going to have to shift to the right if they want to win.
RSB: And what happens to the Republican Party if Trump wins?
RR: It becomes a working-class party, and not the party of business. The traditional Republican Party is over, and the shift away from the Wall Street Journal editorial page style of conservatism will be complete. It’ll be interesting to see if Trump is able, or wants, to change the country’s economic foundations. It’s pretty clear from his campaign that he’s not interested in social conservatism. The danger is that the kinds of people who read First Things become like African Americans in the Democratic party—voters whom the party can take for granted.
RSB: Is the presence of JD Vance on the ticket consequential? With Trump’s age, and the frequency with which people try to kill him, it’s a good possibility Vance—who is more ideologically aligned with your ideas—might one day be president.
RR: Sure, it’s encouraging, but our goal isn’t to elect Vance. As the Bible teaches, “put not your trust in princes.” Our goal is to influence JD Vance. In a broader sense, we’re trying to create an intellectual climate where certain changes are imaginable. From the founding of First Things, overturning Roe was a constant drumbeat. The magazine tried to make overturning Roe imaginable, and we succeeded. Now the question is how we create an intellectual climate where it is imaginable to do other things, like regulate IVF.
RSB: Regulate it, or prohibit it?
RR: Well, you can’t regulate it unless you convince people that it poses a moral problem. We’ve published a lot of articles to that end. Looking ahead, how do you create a climate in which the marriage of a man and a woman becomes normative? Where people are able to ask, “Was gay marriage a mistake”?
RSB: Why do you oppose the legal rights of gay people to get married?
RR: The institution of marriage is in terrible shape, and gay marriage drains its sacred character and makes it into a legal artifice. And I mean “sacred” not in the theological sense, but in the broadly cultural sense. Marriage rates are falling.
RSB: Because of gay marriage?
RR: Progressives find the notion that gay marriage has a cost oddly horrifying. Gay marriage is a luxury good for the rich, paid for by the poor. Marriage rates for the poor are plummeting. Your likelihood of being born to an unmarried mother increases dramatically, the lower you go on the economic scale. And for those higher on the economic scale, our view of marriage has become less Christian, and more Roman. We think of marriage as a necessary institution for transmitting social and financial capital to our children. That’s a Roman view. Our stance on gay marriage reflects something important about the magazine. We are the only mainstream conservative publication that has made no concessions to the sexual revolution. If anything, we’ve become more extreme over the last thirty-five years.
RSB: I’m still unclear precisely how you believe gay marriage hurts marriage. Are you making a slippery-slope argument: “If you tinker with marriage, soon you’re condoning things like transgenderism?” Or is there something wrong with gay marriage itself?
RR: The magazine and I view gay marriage as wrong in itself. And things that are wrong in themselves have consequences. Some are more hidden than others. For instance, I find the transformation of our laws on pornography quite extraordinary. The effects of pornography are getting worse in so many ways. I was at a dinner party with an adolescent psychiatrist, and she told me she was getting requests for Viagra from sixteen- and seventeen-year-old boys. They can’t maintain an erection because pornography has desensitized them. It screws up the erotic pathways in their brains. And yet, our society soldiers on, and makes no changes.
RSB: What kinds of changes do you have in mind?
RR: Why can’t we have a bipartisan agreement on age verification for pornography? States like Louisiana have done this, but the New York legislature has no interest in it. There is a huge amount of money in porn, and I’m told that if you make the slightest move to regulate it, an avalanche of money comes from the pornography industry.
RSB: So do you favor getting rid of gay marriage?
RR: People always ask me that. Turning that ship around is very unlikely. Sure, you can change laws about abortion, but can you suddenly tell all these people that they are no longer married? That doesn’t seem plausible.
RSB: So what, then, is the point of opposing gay marriage?
RR: The job of a magazine like First Things is to create doubts, to pose questions about whether the costs are worth it. Has it done more harm than good? The same logic applies to the sexual revolution. Who are the winners, and who are the losers? Those are important questions to ask. We’ve published pieces by writers like Darel E. Paul, Scott Yenor, and Mark Regnerus that question the progressive consensus that these changes have been for the best. Because unless you can create doubt about the premise, nobody is going to have second thoughts. Nobody is going to try to change the law unless you show that it is imaginable.
RSB: In 2015, the Supreme Court decided that gay marriage is legal in Obergefell v. Hodges. What is left to discuss?
RR: Not all change is for the best. And the transgender issue is even more extreme than gay marriage. With that, everybody everywhere is required to get on board, otherwise it doesn’t work. If I won’t call “him” “her” then I am undermining the possibility of “him” being “her.” We have no choice in the matter, which is why I use the term the “Rainbow Reich.” It is non-negotiable.
This is in contrast to gay marriage. Our friend Ken can get married, but I don’t have to go to his wedding. I’d go to the reception, but I would not go to a gay marriage. I want him to have a happy life, but his marriage doesn’t require me to be on board. But the transgender thing really requires everyone to get on board.
RSB: I think about how dramatically our perception of gay people has changed in the past twenty-five years, and wonder whether something similar will take place regarding trans people.
RR: Maybe, but I can’t imagine it will. It’s hard to be an adolescent. Add to that the uncertainty of deciding whether you’re a boy or a girl? I have trouble believing that the mental health challenge won’t get worse. I look at our society, and the incredible arrogance, and the refusal to think that there are no limits. But we’re a rich country, so maybe we’ll use prosthetics and therapy to palliate and remediate the problem. Still, saying it doesn’t make it so.
The magazine tried to make overturning Roe imaginable, and we succeeded. Now the question is how we create an intellectual climate where it is imaginable to do other things, like regulate IVF.
RSB: You taught theology at Creighton University for twenty years before coming to First Things. What has changed for your students since you and I were in college?
RR: Every year from 1990 to 2010, during good times and bad times, my students’ economic anxiety increased. It had nothing to do with the underlying economic situation. Their upper-middle-class parents conveyed their anxiety to their children: “It’s a very competitive world out there. You need to prepare.” Today, young people think you have to make money to be safe. That tells you everything you need to know about our society. We did not used to think that way.
RSB: But haven’t young people always been anxious about lots of things, including money?
RR: Sure, people want more, that’s just human nature. But there’s been a big shift in people’s sense of vulnerability. For upper-middle-class folks of my generation, whose parents were doctors and lawyers, we thought the system would take care of us, so we weren’t all that anxious. We weren’t thinking, “I gotta make sure all my ducks in a row. Because in this system, if you win, you win big. But if you don’t win, you’re finished.” That is a function both of a hyper-competitive economic system, and of the fact that the consoling institutions that used to support and anchor us are much weaker. What’s going to protect you if your community or church or marriage are not strong? What’s going to fend off the harsh world? Money. So we rely primarily on money. We hire security guards, opt out of the shitty healthcare system, and send our kids to private schools.
RSB: How have colleges and universities changed?
RR: Institutions are the anchor, the soul of society. When I went to Haverford College, I completely trusted the institution to tell me what I needed to do, think, and feel, in a broad sense. Young people today don’t trust educational institutions. They see them as necessary steps to get to where they want to be. They may have positive feelings about them, but they’re not going to let down their guard. It’s not like they oppose wokeness, so therefore don’t trust Yale. It’s more a question of whether they should trust any of these places? Students realize they are raw material being fed into a meritocratic machine. Nobody is loyal to anything. The faculty themselves are always angling for better positions.
RSB: In a piece you wrote for Commentary, you call Haverford “a wonderful monastery of establishment liberalism.” That struck me as a good description, and I don’t recall more than a handful of conservative students.
RR: That’s changed. Today, the cohort of socially conservative students is much larger and more visible. It’s still a minority, but it is large. From 2019 to 2022, a lot of college conservatives were fascinated by integralism [the belief that Catholic ideas should be the basis of law and public policy in secular society]. That fad has crested, but they were flirting with integralism because they understood the costs of the sexual revolution, and other progressive ideologies. This would have been unimaginable when we were undergrads. Left-wing radicals were reading the Frankfurt School. Radicalism on the right didn’t exist.
Today, young people think you have to make money to be safe. That tells you everything you need to know about our society.
RSB: First Things has been critical of the ideas around DEI and diversity in general. Why?
RR: Barack Obama used to proclaim that “diversity is our strength.” That’s so obviously false. Diversity isn’t our strength, it’s a challenge. Look, I sympathize with Obama. He probably recognized that demographic change in America posed serious challenges, and he put lipstick on a pig. But we need to be a little more honest: diversity is a challenge, pluralism is hard. You’ve got to find anchors of commonality in a pluralistic society. Otherwise, it’s a war of all against all. Look at Lebanon: is diversity its strength? Of course not! When a society becomes too fragmented you get a perpetual civil war.
RSB: Language matters. When one uses the language of “challenge,” the implication is you must somehow adjudicate or figure it out. When one labels something a “problem” it sounds like something that must be eliminated. When it comes to “diversity,” which is it?
RR: To “get rid of” diversity would be like to “get rid of” the human condition. That is obviously impossible, and not desirable. The question is how do you create a reasonably unified country or academic culture? How do you achieve comity, civility? These are all hard. These are the same questions at play when it comes to immigration.
RSB: You often compare the period in the 1920s, when the United States first began placing limits on European immigration, to what we are going through now.
RR: These days, the culture requires us to say that those laws were xenophobic. And certainly, many of them were. But they also reflected a recognition that a country’s national character has to have a coherent center, and I do think we’re in a similar place now. However rebarbative you may think the anti-immigration rhetoric was at the time, it is a kind of moral preening to fail to recognize that it was addressing an actual social problem. There was Sacco and Vanzetti, there was an anarchist bombing on Wall Street that killed thirty people. There was a legitimate concern about whether the country could hold together, with all these foreign influences. People felt their country was becoming unrecognizable, and the legislation was responding to that. Today, popular discontent over the demographic transformation of the country is growing.
RSB: Trump has also advocated decreasing legal immigration to the United States.
RR: I think that might be prudent. The Immigration Act of 1965 had unintended consequences. I don’t think legislators realized that family reunification would lead to such enormous numbers. They might not have adopted it if they had. I’m not anti-immigration. I’m pro–prudent limits. And that might mean fewer immigrants for a time.
RSB: So the overall goal is to acknowledge that diversity, and immigration, bring challenges?
RR: Yes, of course. I don’t see what is so controversial about that. Would you label someone who’s in favor of industrial policy an “anti-capitalist”? That’s absurd. Why would you assume that one violation of abstract free-market principles makes you a socialist? Similarly, why would you assume that one violation of DEI dogma makes you a fascist? But those are the kinds of charges that get bandied about.
RSB: There is a fine line between giving a controversial idea a critical hearing, and presenting it in a way that seems to condone it. How does First Things walk that line?
RR: I want our readers to hear intelligent, moderate expressions of extreme ideas. That’s why we ran a piece by Edmund Waldstein on the case for integralism. It’s not my job to defend a status quo that I think is in many respects dysfunctional. It is a thought exercise. Plato didn’t intend the Republic as a template for society. Rather, the idea is, let’s take these principles to the max, because doing so will leaven our ability to deal with really existing polis. So if I’m correct that our country suffers from economic and moral/cultural disintegration, then my readers need to entertain ideas of integration in every facet of life.
The consoling institutions that used to support and anchor us are much weaker. So we rely primarily on money. We hire security guards, opt out of the shitty healthcare system, and send our kids to private schools.
RSB: First Things is more than just a magazine. You hold events and intellectual retreats, and have become a training ground for young conservative thinkers and journalists. Some have compared First Things to what Leonard Leo has done with the Federalist Society, where he created a community of law students, professors, and judges, who support conservative legal ideas. His efforts led to the overturning of Roe. Do you see a similarity?
RR: With the Federalist Society, Leo was building an institution to get conservative judges seated. Whereas we want to be read by those judges. We’re providing an intellectual infrastructure.
RSB: Is First Things the software that runs inside Leo’s hardware?
RR: Well, they had an intellectual project about originalism, but it was narrow, and had to do with constitutional interpretation. We have debates about that in the magazine. Hadley Arkes has written several articles about originalism in which he argued that it wasn’t going to be able to do the job, and that law has to have a moral foundation. Otherwise, it loses its legitimacy.
RSB: We’ve talked a lot about the politics of abortion, gay marriage, and IVF. How would you describe the magazine’s theological commitments? It seems to me that one through line is the conviction that we must acknowledge that we aren’t masters of our fate, and that God has a plan for us.
RR: Yes, and to acknowledge that reality has a moral structure. It’s our home, and we were created for it. Happiness is living in accord with your nature. That comes from Aristotle, and the Bible.
RSB: So our role is to discern the moral structure? Or is the problem that we have discerned it, but fail to live up to it?
RR: Aquinas says that revelation has two purposes. One is to reveal truths we could not know by reason. And another is to reveal truths of reason that are obscured by sin. One is new knowledge, and the other is reinforcing the old knowledge that we forgot.
Look, I could be wrong about immigration, or economic policy, or the sexual revolution, or gay marriage. I might be right morally—and I think I am—but I could be wrong about the sociological implications of these things. But the magazine’s underlying conviction is that an ever-deeper obedience to God’s will humanizes us. We become more fully human insofar as we are in accord with reality. The royal road to that is to be in accord with the will of the author of reality. That’s the super-highway.