Mark Oppenheimer: Why am I the one here in this conversation with the traditionalist Catholic, you know, the person in the Elizabeth Anscombe never tell a lie tradition, saying, shouldn’t we just be saying true things?

Rusty Reno: Well, I would just forget about JD Vance or politicians. You, Mark, you can say all these things, and people, the Zoomers, will just laugh at you. So if your goal is to feel good about being Mr. Righteous and saying all the morally right things, and nobody listens to you, in what sense aren’t you, you’re failing really to be a moral force for the good,

MO: I guess. I don’t know any other way.

RR: So that’s what I’m thinking. How can First Things magazine influence these kids in a way to steer them away from these pernicious attitudes and views?

MO: Hello friends. I’m Mark Oppenheimer. I’m the host of Arc: The Podcast. It’s a production of the John C. Danforth Center on Religion and Politics at Washington University in St. Louis, and it’s the audio companion, the audio best buddy, the audio sidecar, if you will, to Arc the magazine, Arc: Religion, Politics, Et Cetera, which is on the web at arcmag.org.

Today’s guest is R.R. Reno. And two things about Reno that I think are just so crucial to know. The first is if you were in the know in the world of political commentary, religious commentary, religion journalism, theology, little magazines, et cetera, if you were in the know, you know that you don’t call him R.R. Reno; he is Rusty Reno. And in fact, when you’re talking to people in that world, you can just say, Rusty, “Well, did you see that article Rusty wrote the other day?” And I always … some of you who know me know that one of my obsessions is the disappearance of nicknames, that people just don’t give kids lifelong nicknames anymore. It’s so hard to imagine someone being out on the playground and saying, “Oh, that’s my little 2-year-old. Yeah, his name is Richard or Rollin or whatever, but he’s Rusty. We call him Rusty.” And then that nickname just sticking all the way up. You don’t see kids called Junior or Trip. You don’t see a lot of Charleses called Chuck. It’s just … they’re gone with the wind. And one reason you have to love Rusty Reno, even if you disagree with his politics, which in many cases I do, is that he’s Rusty. I mean, God bless him.

Rusty Reno, Rusty is a gentleman of some age. He’s in his seventies. He went to Haverford College and then got a PhD in religion at Yale University. He taught for many years at Creighton University Catholic School in the Midwest. And at some point along the way, he quite publicly, because he wrote about it, converted from the Episcopal Church to Roman Catholicism. In 2011, he became the editor of First Things.

First Things was a magazine founded by Richard John Neuhaus, who had been a Lutheran priest who then became a Catholic priest. And the magazine was about religion and public life. And I think that people would always have said that it was a relatively conservative, Christian-oriented magazine. Under Rusty Reno, it has lately become, I don’t know if you’d say, far more conservative. It’s become almost liberal. It’s become more and more skeptical of the American project, I think, as it’s currently constituted. And for a lot of people, the really interesting break in its history was that Rusty turned it into a magazine that was conservative but highly critical of Donald Trump into one that is right-wing and warmly in favor of Donald Trump. That doesn’t mean that they don’t have anti-Trump contributors; they do, but Rusty himself, after initially in 2015, 2016, having a lot of negative things to say about Trump, has become very positively disposed toward him, and quite clearly from his own writings in the magazine, thinks that the Trump presidency has been a good thing. As you will hear in this interview, he thinks that the emphasis on Trump’s character is overblown. That’s my word, not his. But you can listen, and tell me if you think that’s right. And the other thing is that he thinks that Trump is the most honest President we’ve ever had or had in a very long time. He believes that Trump said he would do things and has done them, and that they are, by and large, good things. Rusty is also the author of several books, including 2019’s Return of the Strong Gods, which is a statement of his belief that the old passions that fueled communism, fascism, and other movements are coming back and that we have to know how to harness them if we’re not to slide toward those authoritarian forms of government. It’s a fascinating interview, and if you want to hear me get frustrated and lose my temper a little bit, then I think this is the interview for you. Here’s my conversation with R.R. Rusty Reno. Rusty, first, let me compliment you on running a very literate and readable magazine.

RR: We try.

MO: It’s a magazine I disagree with much of the time, about 73.4% of the time, but I find it compelling, and that’s hard to do, and I think that means you’re a good editor.

RR: Well, we try to, we mean, we represent–I always tell people we’re kind of the religious right and tweed and upscale and intellectual, but we try to run a variety of voices so that we’re not monotone. And also, although people are very swept up in the political moment in which we’re now living, and as an editor, I try to keep the news cycle at arm’s length. Some of our web publications are obviously more tied to the news cycle, but a magazine keep at arms length and give people orientation to what’s happening in the 21st century and in 2020s, but also to give them articles and topics that are timeless so that there’s some sense that we are not captive to the moment.

MO: And I like that about it. We are going to get into all sorts of things that are of the moment: nationalism, immigration, antisemitism, JD Vance, your dog, sleeping beside you, all those things. But I hope listeners who don’t know about the history of First Things will indulge me for a moment. How is it a different magazine under you than it was under your–there were two predecessors, right? Neuhaus founded it, and there was one editor between the two of you, is that right?

RR: Yeah, Jody Bottum was editor for a couple years before me I was.

MO: So how has it been different in each of its three epochs?

RR: I don’t think it’s all that different from the magazine of the, we were founded in 1990, first issue of March, 1990, edited by Richard John Neuhaus, who was a Lutheran pastor who became a Catholic soon after the magazine got launched. I mean, it’s religion, culture, and public life. He used to use that term, rather than politics. And I think that the mix of those three remains pretty constant, even as certainly both the realities of Christian life are different in 2026 than they were in 1990. And certainly the political realities are quite different, but I think that the basic tone, level, foci are pretty constant. I knew Neuhaus very well, and I’m a very different person than him, to be sure. But both of us, I did my PhD in theology and taught theology, and he was a pastor and also very deeply read in theology. I think for both of us, the theological is the point of orientation, and then the political and cultural issues of our time kind of branch out from that. And that to me is the key to the DNA of the magazine: questions of faith forced, and first and foremost, questions of culture and politics secondary.

MO: Now, all three editors have been, except for the period when Neuhaus was still a Lutheran, have been Roman Catholics. Is it a Catholic magazine? And if not, what is it? Religiously?

RR: It’s not. We’re very influential in Catholic circles, but it’s not merely a Catholic magazine. I would put it. We’re ecumenical. We have Protestants writing about Protestant topics. We have Jewish authors writing about Jewish topics, as well as matters of concern to all of us. So we’re trying to, I want the magazine to be the meeting place for people who think that a deeper obedience to God’s will is a fundamentally humanizing path in life. And then in the secular world we live, that is a very unifying commitment. And as I joke, if we triumph culturally, then we can fall upon each other with bitter arguments about who’s got the correct view of what God’s will is. But until that time, we tend to be very strong allies over and against the opposite view, which is that obedience to God’s will is dehumanizing.

MO: I think that’s a contentious way of putting it. I’m not sure how people who disagree with you would describe themselves.

RR: Well, some people disagree about matters of politics and so on, but I think that the standard sort of, and I think it’s genuinely the case in the academic environment, is you don’t want to be duped by all these false claims on your identity. And so a great deal of emphasis goes on sort of critiquing the claims to authority. And John Henry Newman said he’d rather believe anything than doubt everything. And his view was, if you doubt everything, you’re never going to know the truth. You have to actually make an affirmation to know it, to have to embrace it, and bring it into your mind as an affirmation. And so if you believe everything or anything, you’ll at least have a chance of believing the truth. And I think that typical Newman puts it in a very stark way to draw out a conceptual point, which is that skepticism can prepare, it might be a necessary step, but it can’t be certainly the main object of pedagogy.

MO: So one of the things that–I’m somebody who has a lot of sympathies with what you’re saying in terms of religion, in terms of a tradition I would say, and in terms of belief and in terms of loves, which is a word you like a lot, and we’ll get to that later. I’m very suspicious at the extent to which people who talk in some of the ways you talk always end up finding that in secular politics, they’re right-wingers. And what it makes me think is that they actually begin as right-wingers who then retrofit religion to give it a kind of patina or gloss of authority. Why is it that so many of your writers, you’ve said nothing that indicates a particular stance on universal healthcare or labor unions or national defense or anything, and yet the great majority of your writers, and I read you pretty closely, so I hope we don’t quarrel about this.

I think it’s right, end up in what we’d call whether you want to say Republican, or conservative, or right-wing places. How can you persuade me that it’s not just a sort of con or a self-deception? I mean, the fact that you all end up in such similar places, not all of you, and I know there are exceptions, but so many of you end up conservatives in politics and on particular policy issues. Why should I not believe that it’s simply that a lot of Republicans found that you could dress it up in clerical garb and then have a claim to intellectual heft, tradition, authority?

RR: Well, I mean, I was a religious conservative before I became a political conservative. I mean, my own path was to read Karl Barth and realize that Christianity makes a claim about what’s true, not what’s meaningful. And that was a kind of Rubicon that I had to cross when I was 21, and I had to realize I had to make my mind about whether I thought it was true. And if it is true, then many things follow from that. You have to then put yourself under the instruction of that which God has authorized to convey the truth, so you begin to go down a certain path. And so I would say then I wasn’t really that interested in politics in my twenties. And so the political dimension really came through more cultural and moral matters.

Christianity has moral teachings, and the Bible has moral teachings, and we’ve embarked in the United States on, and broadly throughout the West, on a kind of descent from those traditional teachings. And so that kind of engaged me, obviously. And then, as I began to think more and more about the disposition, as you say, I mentioned Newman, the distrust of authority. I think conservatism does put an accent on, I guess we’d call gratitude for that, which is, and I think the progressive puts an accent on loyalty to that which might be some future condition of greater justice, greater inclusion, greater equality. And so those are very different dispositions. And I think the religious mind is when religion kind of cuts both ways because obviously Christianity makes a promise about the future, the triumphs of perfect justice in Christ, as well as obviously inculcating a disposition of receptive gratitude for that which has been given. So a lot of it depends on how you fall out in your sensibilities. I was very influenced by Eric Voegelin and his notion that modern politics is a kind of our usurpation of, we’ve become the agents of what Christianity ascribes to God’s actions at the end of time. So the so-called immanentizing of the eschaton, so I was influenced by that. So it made me increasingly critical of progressive politics in its most theoretical forms.

MO: I don’t mean to be cantankerous, but I don’t feel you’ve answered the question, right? There’s an enormously neat lineup for so many people who become, you want to say, small orthodox Christians or traditionalist Christians or whatever, and right-wing politics. I don’t believe this is just me, that if you, I’m not going to make claims that scripture is inherently socialist or left-wing. I’m not going to make any claims about it. I think that if you handed the Bible and even perhaps the catechism to a hundred people who are very bright but didn’t know anything about it, I wouldn’t bet that 80 or 90 of them would end up saying Republicans are the better party. But that is the way it falls out in political discourse in magazines like yours, and National Review, and some others. And I’m still suspicious that a lot of people, and maybe not you, I wasn’t saying you, but that a lot of people who feel comfortable with rightwing politics then find they feel comfortable with Catholicism and that there might be that there’s a kind of intellectual, neat fit that should make it suspicious that they’re not just kind of integrating themselves more than they are seeking

RR: Truth. Catholicism appeals to people who, I think, intellectual; it appeals to intellectuals who are at odds with modernity because the Catholic church is the only significant institution in the West that’s not a creature of the modern era. And so that can have a left-wing form, and it can have a right-wing form, but I think it appeals to people who are at odds with the modern project.

MO: But you found yourself more interested in or more persuaded by the right-wing form?

RR: Yes. Yeah. I mean, I gave, the example of Voegelin, I think as a pretty powerful analysis of the left-wing form as subject to certain kind of temptations. And the right-wing form is obviously also subject to various temptations as well. You baptize the status quo. If your disposition is one of gratitude and receptivity, then you can become indifferent to the injustices of the present. And if your disposition flows towards this bright future, there’s a kind of, you can become a kind of what I call idealistic nihilism. I mean, there’s nothing about the present that you affirm and all of your loyalty flows towards the future that’s going to finally usher in the perfect justice. You saw that with, I mean, communism, and you got to break an egg to make an omelet, so you’re breaking and destroying for the sake of a future. And we all know progressive people who are just really angry about the way things are. And we also know conservative people who are complacent about the way things are. And they both strike me as dispositions to be avoided.

MO: And they have conservative people who are very angry, like Donald Trump, who seems deeply unhappy and angry person. Does he seem gratitude-filled to you?

RR: I don’t see him angry. I don’t see that at all.

MO: Do you remember all this talk about how horrible the cities were, and they were cesspools, and the Somalis are garbage? And he strikes me as, he doesn’t seem serene, he doesn’t seem contemplatively calm or grateful.

RR: Well, I would not describe him as contemplative, that’s for sure. But there’s a kind of verbal performance there that is very difficult to penetrate, who the man is behind those verbal performances. And so I’m very reluctant to impute upon Trump to sort of assess his spiritual disposition because, like I say, I think there’s a tremendous, many, many layers of performance, really quite remarkable.

MO: I know you love him a lot. It’s very interesting to see. You wrote a book called The Return of the Strong Gods. What are the strong gods?

RR: The things that attract our love and our loyalty,

MO: But break it down like what I mean, what’s coming back?

RR: Truth is a strong God, meaning is a weak God, meaning as malleable as truth, as adamantine. We’re loyal to our families. There’s the ties that bind us as we’re teammates on our high school football team. That’s a kind of strong God operating there, patriotism, the nation, the collective is a strong God that always tugs at people’s hearts. And of course, the real God, the supreme being is a strong God. My elevator speech is the three Fs, faith, flag, and family are the kind of obvious focal points for people. And that’s basically my reiteration of Pope Leo the Thirteenth’s notion of the three necessary societies for the human, for human flourishing, the supernatural society of the church, the polity or the civic domain, and then family and domestic life.

MO: You’ve written liberalism “prunes but does not plant. It does not speak the language of love and devotion. Men can live in bondage and be human, but they cannot live without love.” And I’ve noticed increasingly, I think, though I haven’t run your entire corpus through any sort of a computer, you’ve talked about love, I think more so now than in your writing, say five or 10 years ago. And you write a lot about love and its importance in the political order. So why does love matter so much, and how is it that liberalism, in your view, fails to support love?

RR: Liberalism is vigilant in protecting the individual from coercion, from oppression, and it seeks to liberate the individual. And love has a binding quality. And so I would not say that liberalism is hostile to love, but it is itself a corrective to false loves, rather than an engine or a source of love. Now, there’s an American love of freedom, which is not insignificant, and, in fact, quite real and very powerful. So liberalism has its element, but in general, I would say solidarity is not a liberal project, strictly speaking. I could put it this way: that liberalism has an iconoclastic character to it.

MO: And to be clear, by liberalism, we’re not speaking about liberalism as in Walter Mondale and similar Democrats. You’re talking about–this would include free market capitalism, it would include libertarianism. Yes,

RR: Yes. So I mean, this was Leo Strauss. It’s low but solid. So liberalism has different aspects, but one aspect is to try to, and John Rawls wanted to limit or exclude the role of what he called comprehensive doctrines in public life, and we should focus on the things that we can all form a consensus about, and they turn out to be the very low and utilitarian questions about shared prosperity. It’s what I call the hearth gods of health, wealth, and pleasure. And we can come to some agreements about that because these are like, how do we generate and distribute utilities? That’s, I think, that’s a liberal achievement to drive out theological questions that were so destructive during the wars of religion to drive theological questions out of the political realm, and to allow for cooperation on lesser matters.

MO: You’ve also written that the Christian political enterprise can be done well or poorly. Where has it been done well?

RR: I’m a big fan. I’m a former mainline Protestant, and I remember years ago, Jody Bottum sent me a biography of–oh gosh, why am I spacing on his name–a great eminent Episcopalian bishop from the late nineteenth century. And, obviously, I was going to write some negative thing about how terrible he was. And after I read it, I said, actually, no, I mean, he did a great job, Phillips Brooks, he did a great job. He was part of a generation that sustained the influence of Christianity over American elites, well into the 20th century. And so I think American political life was leavened and tempered by this Christian influence. And so we avoided the excesses and some of the, both what I would call a kind of nihilistic, there’s a kind of nihilistic conservatism, and I would call a nihilistic progressivism that I think afflicted European politics from the late 19th and into the 20th century, ultimately culminating great disasters that we avoided in the United States, I think because of this soft and remote, but real Christian influence on our leadership class.

MO: So that’s where you would take us back to. I don’t mean that you would take us literally back in time and undo good progress and undo bad things. I just mean that if you’re looking for a model, a model of a polity that has a Christian flavor, you’d say late nineteenth-century America?

RR: Yeah, I think, yeah, Woodrow Wilson. I mean, was he such a great guy?

MO: No, no, no. I mean, I’m surprised to hear you say that. You’re basically saying, let’s look to a kind of, and I love these people. I did my PhD at the same school you did, but in church history, American church history, I love these sort of stuffy, starchy, high-wasp types. You’re basically saying, take us back to Philip Brooks and Henry Sloan Coffin and Woodrow Wilson and whatever.

RR: I mean, Endicott Peabody … at the Groton School. I mean, we could do with a lot…

MO: Love Endicott Peabody.

RR: We’d be in much better shape if the people running our country had been exposed to the sort of soft, it’s kind of muscular Christianity, very sort of easy on doctrine emphasized,

MO: But you’re talking about, but these are cultural, these are by and large, I mean, Wilson of course had many roles, including academician, president of Princeton, governor of New Jersey, et cetera. But you’re talking about cultural sway here. I mean, you basically were saying, you’re not saying we need Orban’s government or Putin’s orthodoxy, or even the way in which the British government, the Crown, is aligned in theory anyway still with the Church of England. You’re saying we need a certain kind of cultural disposition to return and be exalted. That’s the project

RR: That’s always been the First Things project. I mean, Neuhaus was convinced, and I share his conviction, that the American experiment in ordered liberty requires a religious people. Now, obviously, everybody doesn’t have to be religious, but it requires a kind of religious horizon in order to sustain itself. So the best achievements of liberalism need to be renewed through, achievements of our liberal culture, need to be renewed through the influence of religion. I think we talked about WASP and so on, but also I think the influence of Judaism are Jewish intellectuals, leaders from the end of World War II through the end of the 20th century, was quite significant. Many of them were secular, but they were influenced by Judaism’s strong emphasis on the common good and service to the community. And I think that that’s a story that needs to be told as well.

MO: Are you thinking about anyone, not to put you on the spot, but are you thinking about anyone in particular?

RR: No. I mean all these, whether everything, anybody from Lionel Trilling to Harold Bloom, I mean it’s a different, it’s both an intellectual project, but ordered with a keen sense of the social dimension.

MO: Well, in a tremendous reverence for the civilizational achievements as well.

RR: One of my concerns is when I went to college, gosh, started college in 1979, everybody I went to school with was exposed to either Judaism or Christianity, and maybe they weren’t raised going to synagogue or church, but they had been to funerals, bar mitzvahs, marriages, baptisms. And so they had a sense of the religious horizon. I got the impression now that you could go to, or some kids from Bronxville, went to Bronxville High School, and are now at Yale, that have got the slightest exposure to religious life. And that’s a change. We have to live in the country we actually are in, and we have to figure out how to deal with these realities. But I see that as a unhappy development.

MO: I don’t disagree. And here I’m going to enter into place … I’m going to be really candid here, right? We’ve talked before. I’ve interviewed before. I find you very, you’re smart and you’re smooth. And I feel like we never get to where the rubber hits the road. And by the way, people level the same thing at me. It’s like, well, he’s smooth. He’s a debater. I look at, I’m fundamentally a temperamental conservative, small C conservative. I hate change. I talk to my wife or children. Everything was better. Everything in my view peaked when I was a senior in college. My temperament is, if you want to say when was everything perfect, just the right amount of progress, but just the right amount of stasis, just the right amount of traditionalism, it seems like actually, whether you’re looking at tv, movies, politics, whatever, somehow it always comes back to 1996, preferably May or June, the moment I graduated from college.

RR: It sounds like you must like University of Austin.

MO: Well, no. Because,

RR: … college for the 1980s …

MO: No, because they’re actually, if you followed it, and I knew this from people I talked to who were there anyway, I mean, we can get to that, but they had that in there for a moment. I think it’s what Bari Weiss wanted. I think it’s what the first president wanted, but then they actually sold out to the tech bros. I mean, the money all came from Silicon Valley, and I think they’re much more interested now in a kind of Peter Thiel capitalist utopian vision than they are in classic books. I’ll also say, by the way, you may or may not know this, that I was talking to someone who was writing a piece for ARC who said, who was a philosopher, who said, I actually don’t get jobs at any of these great books, colleges that are starting up at state universities, because the people who fund them actually aren’t interested really in philosophy or theology.

Maybe they’ll have one job in it. They’re really wealthy men who read history, they read Founding Fathers books, and they want great man history, but they actually, they don’t read Aristotle. So I think the project is actually not as robust as you and I probably both like it to be. But look, so I’m temperamentally, you’ll find few people more sort of, I’ve been a fuddyduddy since I was four, okay? And so it is for those reasons, among others, that I look at, I mean, I wrote my senior essay in college on Williams Sloan Coffin. I was entranced by his Presbyterian heritage. I mean, all of this stuff resonated with me. And I see people, someone like Barack Obama or whatever, his flaws, not Bill Clinton, whom I didn’t like, and say, here’s somebody who fundamentally, whether religious or not uphold certain kind of cultural forms.

RR: I agree. I called Obama a post-Protestant WASP,

MO: Yeah. And then I see Trump, who seems congenitally interested in trashing them. And because I’m somebody who believes that politics is downstream from culture, which is somebody’s conservative insight, I forget whose …

RR: Breitbart was the one who said that.

MO: Really?

RR: I think he popularized it.

MO: I see somebody who actually, there’s a point of no return that, in fact, what’s happened is the fashionable way to be conservative. If you’re sort of coming up as a sort of Ill-formed, but aspirational, conservative as people are ill-formed and aspirational when they’re 18 or 20 or 22, that what you see is first of all aesthetically, I mean, you dye your hair and you get tooth veneers and enamels and you have sharp mafia looking suits, and all the women have to look like a certain kind of model. And, actually, there’s no restraint. There’s no sense of decorum or the old-fashioned kind of modesty at all. And that sort of the way to interact in the public square is to be brash, bold to over promise to, I mean, I would say lie, you would say he’s actually working this incredibly sophisticated long game that none of us understand because he’s so remarkable. But culturally, he’s trashed all those ideals, and he thinks that the people who held those ideals looked down on him, which they did when he was dealing with them in New York, right? The Skyler Chapins and stuff probably despised him. So I see him as having been extremely bad for that project. I guess one could argue he has other virtues, but could we at least come together and say that in certain ways he has moved the culture away from that model of modesty, restraint, traditionalism reserve, and in that sense has been harmful.

RR: Rousseau said, “Every country gets the government it deserves.” I think he’s a symptom, not a cause.

MO: Okay, but that’s still worth criticizing, right? You don’t get, I mean, we’re all symptoms of something and not causes, we’re all overdetermined in some small ways, but we still have to be held accountable. It would still be worth having a public witness for the fact that, in many ways, he’s bad for those virtues. He doesn’t model them. He exalts their opposites.

RR: I agree. And every historical moment calls for a different kind of character. My assessment is that we remain beholden to very, very rigid and superannuated political and cultural consensus, what I call the post-war consensus, the open society consensus. And its grip is very, very strong. And escaping its power is going to take, requires a certain destructive force, and Trump certainly can deliver that.

MO: So I want to pause that. I don’t mean to interrupt. I like to be non-interrupting. I want to pause there. My sense of your beliefs is that you probably secretly really think he’s pretty awful, but you think he’s necessary, and you don’t want to say he’s awful because you’re part of a political project that’s exalting his necessity.

RR: Oh, I find, kind of, embroiling of the family enterprise with the government, I mean, that stinks to high heaven. I mean, so I’m not … opposed to criticizing. Pardon?

MO: But your magazine is not terribly interested … Again, I’ve read a lot of it. I’m not going to give you percentage. You’re not interested in giving over a lot of real estate to the financial corruption …

RR: It’s not the kind of magazine I run. If I was running National Review or Commentary magazine or something like that, or maybe commentary, so monthly, so it’s more like us, but we don’t do investigative journalism. It’s not. We’re not commenting,

MO: Well, other people do the investigative journalism. I mean, it’s all out there, right? I mean, there’s a lot that’s very much in the public record. There’s a lot that’s come out in deposition. I mean, we know certain things with a more than sufficient certainty to opine on them. And I guess what I’m saying is

RR: I also try to tell my readers something that they don’t already know.

MO: I think a lot of your readers don’t know. I think they think it’s liberal agitprop that he, for example, is somewhat corrupt in his business dealings or tends to conflate his business dealings with government machination

RR: The crypto meme things at the very beginning of the, that was like, whoa, what’s all that about? But like I said, what do I have to say other than what’s obvious?

MO: Well, I mean, you’ve written pieces about what you like so much about him, but you don’t write pieces about what you don’t like about him.

RR: Hm. What have I written I like about him? I don’t remember writing about what I like about him.

MO: I guess the piece where you wrote about how remarkable he was. You were sitting watching the inauguration at the VW dealership, and you were sort of, you’d be hard to read that piece and not think that you were tremendously cheered by him.

RR: Well, it was a guy next to me. It was the African guy that was in the waiting room with me who I was saying, well, what did you think? And he goes, he looks at me and says, “That’s a big man.” And I thought, well, it takes somebody from a, I mean, I can’t see. I’m like you, habituated to be a certain upper middle class person with certain sensibilities, and to have somebody from a culture that is more oriented around the big men, it was like, whoa.

MO: But you’ve just told me you want the Christian project of the Phillips Brooks era. Don’t you think Trump is moving us in certain ways farther away from that? And do you regret that he’s, even if he does other things you like?

RR: I mean, certainly. I mean, let’s put it more concretely. I mean, the administration’s embrace of in vitro fertilization and its embrace of Silicon Valley accelerationism, I would call, are both, I think, that’s a kind of concrete way, Mark, of describing what I don’t like about this administration. And it fits with what you’re saying, which is that the part of the crisis of our time culturally is our, we not even accepting the authority of nature. And this is the young meme that the young have: go touch grass. It reflects their own recognition of how damaging our loss of any contact with the authority of nature has become very damaging. And there are aspects of the administration that certainly just seem to be embracing this trajectory, and also the social media,

MO: But sort of the cruelty, right? The pussy grabbing, that Somalis are garbage. I mean, as I said, I suspect you despise him. You can tell me otherwise or not. Be honest.

RR: I didn’t despise; I disagreed with many things about Barack Obama, but I never despised him. I wouldn’t despise,

MO: I suspect you find him distasteful, and he makes you uncomfortable. He’s not the conservatism you asked for.

RR: I would, yes, but he was … So I was writing,

MO: But wouldn’t you want him? Wait, wait, wait. Wouldn’t you want him but without the swearing, the sexual innuendo? So why can’t we have that? I mean, you’re saying it’s not all overdetermined

RR: Who’s on offer?

MO: But you run an influential magazine that people do listen to. I mean, the witness of your magazine could be, he’s right about certain things, but he’s a terrible messenger.

RR: Yeah, I mean, I suppose, but I wrote these things in, so I took over the magazine in 2011, and okay, I was a professor of theology. I had read a lot of political philosophy, but I really needed to dial in and figure out where do I stand, given the realities of American political life? So I burrowed in, I wrote things. I wrote a series of articles about Piketty’s book on capitalism, which were sympathetic to a lot of what Piketty had to say. And I wrote about how the country was facing a crisis of solidarity. These were critical, essentially of the late model Reagan consensus that had become so irrelevant to the problems facing our country. And then Trump appeared the scene, of course I disliked him, but I came to see that he was the only candidate in 2016 who was actually talking about the fact that the country was disintegrating, disintegrating at many levels, that the economic social contract between elites and the middle class have been fundamentally broken by economic globalization.

That mass migration was undermining the solidarity of our country. And that he gave his campaign speech, I mean his convention speech in 2016, I mean Ted Cruz, he let off before Trump spoke at the convention, and he gave a kind of Reaganism on steroids speech. He must’ve used the word freedom a hundred times, and Trump’s acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention, I don’t think he used the word freedom a single time. And he basically said, I’ll protect you. And okay, I mean, sure, I wish we had someone of composure, constancy, and I wish many things, I wish

MO: Well, lemme ask you this. I guess.

RR: Who else on the scene was actually talking about the problems that are the real problems?

MO: But it definitely required a reorientation, right? I mean, I think you would’ve agreed, maybe not. I won’t put words. I think I know people who would’ve agreed conservative, who would’ve agreed before him that somebody who spoke about women that way, and by the way, who was like thrice married and a serial adulterer and the porn star stuff and swore and then also talked about minorities in incredibly demeaning ways. I understand some of the times he’s been talking about immigrants, not minority, but some of the times he says things like Somalis are garbage would’ve been out of bounds. And I think we all would’ve agreed that was a good thing. And I think one of the things that’s happened is that people who have fallen for him or fallen into him or whatever, have decided we were wrong to draw those lines. Because it actually turns out that if what you need is somebody who is sort of has shady business dealings, seems to be a misogynist, seems not to know how to be a husband or father, but is right about immigration, let’s say we have to vote for that person. In other words, it required a recalibration of what we think a president is for.

RR: Well, people on the Democrats cross that Rubicon with Bill Clinton.

MO: Right, but you didn’t think they ought to. I mean that was bad.

RR: No, no, I did not think. I thought that the whole Monica Lewinsky thing, I thought Republicans were just being cynical in their effort to use that to damage him. And that, I mean, he had a reputation as governor of Arkansas. Everybody knew. My wife was a clerk for a circuit court that included Arkansas, and his nickname as governor was the golden zipper. So I would not, no, no. I mean, this is the problem of moralism in politics. One has to, I mean, obviously, it’s not irrelevant, but not, you have to make a decision as a responsible citizen about what’s the most important, what are the most important things.

MO: So, is there any level of depravity that would cause you to say, I can’t vote for him? In other words, what if he were using the N word? What if he weren’t saying Somalis or garbage, but just was just dropping that all the time? Or what if it turns out he had been sleeping with some of Jeffrey Epstein’s concubines, which I don’t think he was, but is there a point, and he’s just not there yet?

RR: I don’t know. It doesn’t interest me. I mean, what interests me is, I mean, we’ve got economic, cultural, and foreign policy. We had reached dead ends in our society, and we were at risk. I mean, obviously, we had populist uprising in the 2016 election in spite of every effort. The fact that he was able to win against every effort of every major institution of authority in our country to prevent him from doing so is an indication. The problems were running really deep.

MO: I don’t doubt it,

RR: So I focus on … what are those problems, Mark?

MO: But I’m not just playing. Gotcha. Because I actually believe in a kind of virtue ethics system or mode that says that actually if the people who represent you are particularly awful, it degrades all of us.

RR: Oh, I agree. But he is the most…

MO: I don’t think he’s exalted us.

RR: He’s the most…

MO: He’s degraded all of us.

RR: He’s the most honest politician in my lifetime in the sense that he did not tack to the center after winning the Republican nomination. When elected in 2016, he tried to do the things that he said he was going to do as he ran for office, and he was stymied as that’s how our system works. And then he’s now also doing the things that he said he was going to do in this administration, in contrast to read my lips or no new taxes, read my lips, or how many Republican candidates for president went and said what needed to be said at the Southern Baptist Convention meetings to get their votes. But you just, there’s more transparency and forthrightness in Trump amidst all this dodging and weaving and kind of crazy rap-like verbal behavior, the failing New York Times. And then at some press conference, and then the person who the New York Times reporter, he calls on and says, well actually, Mr. President, we have record numbers of subscribers. You’re only succeeding because of me. I mean, it’s ability to…

MO: Yeah. Do you think he won the 2020 election?

RR: Probably.

MO: Really? You think there’s substantial evidence of widespread fraud?

RR: No, but I would say that to me, the question about the vote count on election day, I mean, it was the biggest change in electoral laws in my lifetime. Well, maybe not because we had the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which was a fundamental change in our electoral laws, but it was a fundamental change, mail-in voting, and all that kind of stuff. The die was cast, I think in the summer of 2020, and as democratic, that Molly Ball article kind of bragging about how the kind of NGO democratic activist class was able to effectively rig the election. So I would say that to me, that’s where the action was. The final thing was a very close election. So are there discrepancies or always discrepancies? I thought that I certainly accepted the results of the election, and I wrote things to that effect at some point when the electoral college, I mean president is elected by the electoral college technically, and when electoral college cast its votes, it was game over. And it didn’t really matter what the vote count was in Georgia at that point.

MO: I was rereading Emma Green’s interview with you for the Atlantic in 2017, and you told Emma, I hope Trump implements immigration policies in a humane way, and I’ll certainly be a spokesman against him if he doesn’t. Do you think that he has implemented immigration policies in a humane way? And if not, have you been a spokesman against him?

RR: I have. I mean, I wrote a column about the need for the church to have a nuanced, some kind of moral reflection on deportation so that we could be effective voices in ensuring humane policies. And I made some analogy to the law. I mean the common law of adverse possession. That is to say, if you occupy some land for 20 years and nobody objects, it becomes yours by law. You can petition to have title to the land. So I feel the same way about people who are here long-term in our country, who are here illegally, but over long-term. At some point, there are not having deported them previously as a kind of tacit affirmation of their right to be here. And that needs to be …

MO: I guess I just meant I think there should be strong immigration enforcement. And I think Democrats and liberals have been very bad about figuring out how to talk about immigration in a way that respects those needs. I mean, a lot of people who are against ICE, I suspect, are just in favor of open borders, which I’m not. And it’s also true that I see videos of the way ICE treats people, and I think that’s horrific. And I see videos of people who have been picked up, turns out they’re citizens, they’re driven away, they’re terrified, and then they’re just sort of let out of the car, and no one apologizes. There didn’t seem to be any due process in that they don’t seem particularly accountable. Bovino seems like not a good steward or leader. It seems like it’s been terribly inhumane and poorly run.

RR: Probably in some aspects. It’s a mass. The administration’s trying to do something that hasn’t being done previously. And so yeah, I don’t doubt that there are things that I would find regrettable. I don’t follow these things closely. It’s very difficult to sift through. And as things escalated in Minneapolis, I think on both sides there were, I thought that the Archbishop Hebda of Minneapolis St. Paul had a good statement about the need to respect the dignity of the protestors and respect the dignity of the ice agents significantly. We published things in the magazine calling for de-escalation. I think, Peter Lightheart had a piece for us I thought was smart.

MO: Peter Lightheart seems to be among your more Trump-skeptical contributors. I don’t know if he is through and through, but he seems to be somebody.

RR: Oh yeah, plenty of Trump-skeptical contributors.

MO: I said, among your more Trump-skeptical contributors…

RR: I think George Weigel, a regular weekly columnist for us, counts as a very Trump skeptical.

MO: Very Trump skeptical. What do you think about the shooting, the killing of Alex Pretti?

RR: Well, we’ll see whether the agent was culpable. I mean, obviously, it’s horrific.

MO: So if he was, he should be put in jail, right?

RR: Sure.

MO: And if he’s not, is that something, if I pitch you a piece in a year and he’s not in jail, even though it seems like the evidence tends to suggest he’s, will you run it?

RR: Well, we’ll see what the courts have to say.

MO: Or shall I say that, would you be interested in a piece, that if Trump were obstructing the ability of the courts to get to it? Well … Is it fair to say he’s not interested in the accountability of the people who do work under his name?

RR: Well, it seems like he read the political tea leaves and Bovino’s out, and they’re shifting people out of Minneapolis, so they obviously thought something was going wrong.

MO: But I mean, I’ve seen those videos. It looks like they shot a man who was lying face down and wasn’t threatening anybody. I mean, you think it’s not that simple.

RR: No, I mean, the guy had, it’s a good article about the pistol that he had, which may have discharged actually as he was being disarmed because it’s a pistol that’s marketed precisely as not having a safety that would get in the way of a quick response. And so that pistol has got a reputation of discharging in unexpected times. So again, was he wrongfully killed? Of course, there can be no dispute about that, but were the circumstances such that ICE agent is not culpable? Well, we’ll see how things turn out, but I would be disinclined to publish you on this because this is going to become one of those things where it’s going to become something that people are not really interested in and of itself. It’s just going to be a synecdoche for their larger political convictions.

MO: No, I agree with you, and I think part of what I’m interested in is one of the things Trump does is he appoints people who are manifestly unqualified or stupid. I mean, Pete Hegseth should not have been Secretary of Defense. He was a Fox News analyst. Right?

Wait, wait. Linda McMahon works 40 miles from my home. She’s a longtime Connecticut operative. She’s run for everything here. She’s not a sophisticated human being. She’s not a shrewd thinker. She’s like, and I’m somebody who’s open to Republicans who run for stuff. I mean, he likes her because I don’t know, the same way like Betsy DeVos, it’s Amway money, it’s right-wing. It scratches a certain itch. There’s lots of right-wing thinkers about education that one could put in these jobs. He’s not a sophisticated appointer of people, and part of what’s happened is the ICE agents are famously untrained, they’re recruiting them very quickly. The videos they’re using to recruit them are not saying: have you ever wanted to serve your country? They’re basically saying, have you ever wanted to give someone a beat down? So then what happens is things go very badly, and some of that is a systemic issue. Some of that is culpability about management style, and you’re from the smash it and grab it camp of Trump support, which is, we had to go big. He’s a big man. But it should be interesting to you when going big and working fast and smashing and grabbing results in failure or loss of life or goes wrong.

RR: It’s funny. It is really always just about Trump, isn’t it? We’ve been talking…

MO: No, I mean I made about all of his cabinet.

RR: I mean we’ve been talking for quite a while, but it’s just about Trump.

MO: No, no, no, it’s about the whole government. If I personally loathe Trump, but he was a thoughtful steward of the country in all sorts of ways, if the appointments were good, if the legislation’s good, I’d be fairly uninterested in Trump at that point. I think.
RR: Yeah, I guess I don’t quite know what to say. He said in 2016 on his campaign trail, he’d say, our country’s run by very stupid people. And my first reaction is that’s the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard. And then my second reaction is, well, yeah, we did get kind of driven into a ditch, and how did that happen? All those smart people, Obama’s a very smart guy, and very, I think, admirable in many respects, but by the time we got to the end of his presidency, the country was very divided, and there was a deeper anchor. And so all these clever people who, with their advanced Ivy League degrees …

MO: I don’t mean to put too much a premium on cleverness, though we’re no less divided, that’s for sure. And I hold Obama culpable for some of that division.

RR: I’m always reminded of Saul Bellow’s aunt when he had his friends over as an undergraduate from University of Chicago, and they talked about the details of Marxist dogmas and so on, and when she was helping her wash the dishes after they’d all left, and she said to her said, Saul your friends are so smart, but so stupid.

MO: Right? Smart people can be very stupid, but stupid people can also, but stupid people aren’t always smart, right?

RR: No. Anyway, I don’t know. There’s a kind of, it’s not the way I view–I try to think about what are the larger directions, pressures, trends affecting our society, and things I worry about and things. If you look at, we peaked at maybe a hundred thousand people a year dying of drug overdose death, and nobody did anything about it. I dunno, right now in the Trump administration, there’s been a very dramatic decline, drug overdose death. I think it’s down from a little less than a hundred thousand to about 60,000 in the last 18 months.

MO: Why do you think that is?

RR: Well, maybe there’s a limit. Maybe muscular action to limit supply has had a consequence, and maybe electing a thuggish man who is a lot more like these white guys in Indiana has given them some sense that maybe they’re not just white trash.
MO: I’d open to, that’s an interesting turn in the conversation. I’d be open to those explanations. I’m not going to dismiss them. I also think our memory of the crack epidemic is that after about five or seven years worth of people had seen the people half a step generation above them die of crack. The 18-year-old stopped doing crack. Growing up in New Haven, where I see junkies every day by the on-ramp to the Merit Parkway, my kids, they might touch other drugs. They would never touch heroin. They see exactly what it does. So I do think these things are, to some extent, cyclical.

RR: Cyclical, could be, I hope … I hope you’re right.

MO: We will be back in just a minute with more from my conversation with Rusty Reno coming up on the podcast, so many cool episodes. I’ve recorded episodes with Christopher Beha, who’s the former editor of Harper’s magazine and has a new book out called Why I’m Not An Atheist, about his fascinating journey from a fairly religious Catholicism as a child into skepticism and atheism when he was away at Elite University to his return slowly to the Catholic church, and it’s a pretty beautiful story. That episode is coming up, so is my cantankerous episode with Ariel Angel, which I have begun to think of as a companion piece to this interview you’re listening to. The way that my conversation with Rusty Reno gets a little bit confrontational, and I think reveals some of my frustrations with him, I end up having similar frustrations in I think fruitful ways with Ariel Angel, who is the editor of the Left-Wing Magazine, Jewish Currents, and so I have begun to think of it as a lefty bookend to this conversation with Rusty Reno. I also have a great episode coming up with Zachary Davis, the Mormon or latter-day saint editor of Wayfair or magazine, which is trying to spark a cultural renaissance among Mormons who, he will be the first to admit, are better known for their missionary work and their business success than for their success in the art. So lots of great stuff coming up, but now back to my conversation with Rusty Reno.

I was telling a friend of mine that I was going to be talking with you, and he said, ask him this, and I’m now going to quote his text to me. He said, “I’m curious about the strong god’s myths of the past, which strike me as just as Arcadian as a left-wing hippie, matriarchal invented past nationalism, as we know it’s relatively new to the human story. A couple hundred years. The church did not see national borders as legitimate, and those borders were drawn mostly by the balance of military power among small groups of elites, royalty, and so forth, while the great mass of people led lives we would consider miserable. I suppose I’m curious for an example of the strong God past that he wishes to emulate, or if, like socialists, his is only a future-looking utopia, and if so, how in heaven’s name are we to believe that it’s feasible?”

RR: I think we could learn from Benjamin Disraeli. He was a great myth maker who was able to ameliorate the social, well, what used to be called the social question, which is how do the elites or how do those who prosper in a capitalist society have any kind of working kind of social contract with those who are losers in a capitalist society? And he recognized that nationalism functions as a glue that can hold those economic interests together. In fact, he kind of united the aristocracy and the working class against the capitalist class. It was a brilliant move, and it certainly, there’s myth making there to be sure, but never underestimate the reality of myth and its importance in civic life broadly, as T.S. Lewis pointed out, in the 19th-century German thought, myth was a praise word, not a kind of a synonym for fiction.

MO: I’m with you there. He also said, ask him about me, a married gay father raising a child in a two-parent household in the suburbs, and ask him whether he thinks that the force of the state, including perhaps prisons or other aspects of the criminal justice system should be used to, in some ways, render my family or force me into involuntary celibacy. I guess he’s talking about sodomy laws, he’s talking about gay marriage. Now that some of those questions for a time seemed mildly settled, where do you come back to them? How do you come back to them now?

RR: Well, yeah, where do we go from here? As an interesting question, I think gay marriage has done a great deal of damage to the institution of marriage. As I said before, Obergefell, it’s a luxury good for the rich that are paid for by the poor, and I still think that’s the case. Can’t help but disorient children to have classmates who have two fathers and no mother, just as it disorients children to tell them that they can’t be a hundred percent sure they’re male or female. But what does a social conservative like me do about that? I mean, are we going to sort of somehow declare that this fellow’s not married? Yeah. I think that there are a lot of questions there that have to do with what we’re back to the law of adverse possession at some point, society’s acceptance of things gives people a presumptive right to persevere in them. I’m one to say that the first step would be to do no harm, and that would mean to not do the DEI game of highlighting the outlier, in order to make for a more welcoming environment socially. But I, I’m not in favor of the state somehow criminalizing homosexuality. We had those laws, although they were not enforced because there was a recognition that enforcement does more harm than good. I mean, St. Thomas Aquinas thought that prostitution should be illegal because the consequences of criminalization would be worse than the consequences of toleration.

MO: Let’s talk about JD Vance for a minute. You’ve written about him a little. Some others in your magazine have written about him a little. What do you think of him?

RR: I mean, he seems like a nice guy. I guess he seems like a pretty good politician, in the sense, to navigate all the way from a contested primary to vice president of the United States. And what was that, four years? No, two years. I think he was, was he elected to the senate in 2022?

MO: 2 years in the Senate, I want to say.

RR: Yeah, two years in the Senate.

MO: He’s certainly adept.

RR: His comments, I mean, we wrote about it in the magazine because he adverted to the notion of the, ordo amoris, the order of love. And part of that’s like perfect for us when there’s a newsworthy moment that adverts in some way to some theological or moral concept. We want to flood the zone. We want to be the authoritative voice on was he right? What is the ordo amoris, what does it mean? I think he was clearly correct in his use of the notion of the order of love, that I have a greater duty to my children than I have to my neighbor’s children, and I have a greater duty to my fellow citizens than I have to those who live elsewhere.

MO: You have a greater duty to your dog than to mine.

RR: And I think it’s a kind of a common sense thing.

MO: It’s a common sense thing. But I guess he has come in for criticism a few times around what he says and what he doesn’t say. Particularly with regard to Jews. And this is a trivial thing. I don’t really care about Twitter, but a lot of people do. And I think, for some reason, his tweet on International Holocaust Remembrance Day didn’t mention Nazis or Jews. It was vague and exactly the way you’d expect a sort of far-left anti-Zionist tweet to be: on such a day, we remember the suffering of many people during World War II. It was, and he’s kind of like the people who don’t want to come down on one side or another. When it comes to Nick Fuentes and Tucker Carlson and the whole Heritage Foundation thing, he seems to be very careful not to want to speak truthfully or truthfully about antisemitism on the right, about how people talk about Jews. He seems to have no interest in, even though I think he would be an important spokesperson against some of the worst tendencies of the right. And it seems that he’s very adept, as you say, he’s very careful. And so it strikes me that he’s smartly realizing that every person he talks to, including some right-wing antisemites, however few there are, is a potential vote.

RR: I think it’s more somewhat like Bernie Sanders on immigration. And when it really was, he was a contending and had a potential to be nominated president of the United States, he aligned himself with the dominant democratic view on the matter. He had previously said that Open Borders was a, that’s a Koch brothers idea. So there’s a kind of activist base of the Democratic party where you just can’t go sideways with them.

MO: So what’s the view Vance is aligning himself with?

RR: I think there’s a, I would put it as, you get punished if you echo the old, what used to be called politically correct views, get punished if you echo them. So there’s a segment on the right, and it’s not insignificant that I would not describe it as antisemitic, but it reacts negatively to warnings against antisemitism. Again, it’s not racist, but it reacts negatively to, because what they see that is, oh, that’s the typical right-wing thing. You just echo the center left. It’s like the old joke. Democrats govern; Republicans hold office. The left tells us what’s permitted, and the right enforces it.

MO: But there’s no different set of rules for politicians on how to behave. If someone asked me, is antisemitism reasonable? Is Nick Fuentes reasonable? I’d say yes, because it’s true. Shouldn’t he be saying that because it’s true?

RR: Yeah, but I mean, you could say the same thing about, I mean, this is a standard behavior. I mean, there are plenty of center-left politicians who do not attack. They don’t attack hard-left activists or Twitter personalities.

MO: Well, I guess it matters, right? Although I should say …

RR: I mean the Hamas question and Israel, that would be a good example, I’m sure.

MO: But those are fair questions to ask of people on the left, right is like, why aren’t you…

RR: Sure. Sure. I’m happy to.

MO: I’m asking it of JD Vance on the right. I guess some of it depends on how concerned one is about antisemitism in the right. This is something contributors of yours have written about. It’s something Rod Drayer obviously wrote a great piece about. I was talking to a person I know who goes to one of the churches in New York City that has a lot of recent Catholic converts, many of them traditionalists. And this person said to me, and this person’s a conservative, a Republican, I don’t know if a Trump voter not, but this person said to me, you would be shocked at what people say about the Jews. It’s become perfectly to say things about the Jews that a few years ago you could say in these circles about the gays or the transgender people, but the Jews have moved into that. They’re not, nobody bats an eye. If at a party you say such and such about the Jews.

RR: I agree.

MO: And this person is really kind of struck by this and is looking for another church.

RR: Yes, this is a new phenomenon.

MO: How concerned are you?

RR: I’m concerned. Yeah. So we talk about it in the office, and we’ve run some things, and I’ve got some stuff in the pipeline to run on this issue, but as one of my young staff members said, antisemitism bad. That’s such a baby boomer thing to say. And it helped me understand that, right? We’ve going to have to figure out a way to combat this that doesn’t just echo what’s been said for the last 75 years because what’s happening is that you’ve got, again, on the left and the right, both extreme left, and whether it’s the Mamdani left or the Fuentes right, whatever you want to call it, or let’s not Mamdani we’ll keep them out, but whether it’s …

MO: I take your point.

RR: From the river to the sea, protesters at Columbia to the Fuentes characters, you’ve got a deep, people are saying that they’re rejecting the mainstream consensus in the West broadly. And so you and I, part of our job is to try to figure out how to defend what needs to be defended in that consensus in an environment where sounding like you’re defending the consensus will automatically get you dismissed. It’s a rhetorical challenge.

MO: What I find interesting here is, and I’m thinking on my feet here, I feel like I’m really interested in talking about the qualities of our leaders and people and honesty and taking tough stands, and you’re really interested in holding power and governance. So it seems easy for me to say JD Vance should be saying what really, what might matter is if a lot of these non-opioid addicted Indiana tough guys, macho men who may admire JD Vance and perhaps more of a kinship with him than they do to Donald Trump, if they heard him saying, Jew hatred’s really uncool, it’s really bad. Or at least it’s worth trying. And if you lost votes, well, that’s okay. Sometimes you lose votes when you say tough things, and you’re saying, well, look, politicians never say those things, and those things might not work anyway. And I’m like, why am I the one here in this conversation with the traditionalist Catholic, the person in the Elizabeth Anscombe never tell a lie tradition saying, shouldn’t we just be saying true things?

RR: Well, I would just forget about JD Vance and politicians. You, Mark, you can say all these things and people, the Zoomers will just laugh at you. So if your goal is to feel good about being Mr. Righteous and saying all the morally right things, and nobody listens to you, in what sense aren’t you, you’re failing really to be a moral force for the good,
MO: I guess. I don’t know any other way.

RR: That’s what I’m thinking. How can First Things magazine influence these kids in a way to steer them away from these pernicious attitudes and views?

MO: So what has your 23-year-old assistant editor come up with? And I ask that in all sincerity.
RR: Well, we got to make, I mean, I’m commissioning pieces. What’s the role of Judaism in the 21st century, a based case for Israel? In other words, make the case. I don’t think it’s going to work to, I mean, it’s not going to work. The old one was you take your high school class to the Holocaust Museum, and you bring them into this, what is an important mythology that emerged after the end of World War II? Not after the end of World II. It took until the sixties and seventies for it really to emerge. And so right, I think that’s to run its course because I agree it’s all related to, I like that mythology. I would like that to still work, but it’s linked to a social, and economic, and political consensus that the Gen Z crowd is saying: this has totally failed. And they’re rejecting it. Lock, stock, and barrel.

MO: What you’re saying feels fatalist to me. I actually, I agree with you, and I think that you can’t, as I say, as a Jew, and I know you have some Jews very well, I actually think you can’t do much about antisemitism. I don’t think we can do much about the antisemites. I actually think what we have a better chance of doing is marginalizing them and saying, well, you can run your own party, but you can’t get into, none of you can give a speech at the Republican Party or the Democratic Party. And I spend a lot of time talking about the antisemites on the left and to my left.

I mean, what we can do is make sure we’re the best people. We can be running the most virtuous, well-stewarded organizations as we can, keeping people out of the tent, so to speak. I actually don’t think we can do much to rescue people who are committed to a kind of mind-sickness like antisemitism from their antisemitism. So that, to me, doesn’t seem the project. The project is to try to make sure that we don’t kosher JD Vance if he’s not meaningfully compassionate or attuned to the problem of antisemitism. If he sees Jews as a kind of dispensable pawn in the game of his own election, then we can stand up and say he’s a bad person. And if that loses a slice of the electorate, and that means that Amy Klobuchar is the next president. That should be a price that you’re willing to pay.
RR: If it was only so simple.

MO: Well, last question for you. Where do you see things going? What do you think is going to happen at the end of this? I mean, some people I know would say Trump is going to try to nationalize all the elections, all the state elections, and stay in office. I’ll put it out. I suspect you don’t … What’s that?

RR: He’s an old man.

MO: What do you think is going to happen? I don’t just mean about the election. I mean, give me some predictions about the state of the country over the next four to six years.

RR: The John Q Voter’s just desperately hungry for something he can be loyal to and proud of. And the first party that can get to what I call the language of “we” is going to be the dominant party for the next generation. And that has an economic side to it, first party that can describe or at least achieve a fundamental reshaping of our globalized economy so that we get middle-class prosperity. That’s an element of it, a foreign policy that can actually be sold to median American as serving his interests and not the interests of Apple Inc. And then politically, culturally, that can talk about what is our shared project as Americans in the middle of the 21st century. So I see those as, I think the trend lines are so powerful. But as you know, the vested interests in the old consensus arc’s also extremely powerful.

Living here in New York, the financial industry has got a huge investment in the China trade, and any kind of disengagement with China is going to be very costly. And so even if they recognize that we need to do so for interests of national sovereignty, they would like it to be delayed as long as possible. And conversely, any kind of mean, the tariff regime, all those sorts of things, you could read the Wall Street Journal about this is the beginning of the end of civilization that we have tariffs now. And maybe the tariffs are not well-designed, maybe they’re not even the right idea, but it’s like, okay, you don’t like that plan takes a plan to beat a plan. So what is your plan for restoring middle-class prosperity?

MO: Yeah, I should say, by the way, nobody would’ve cheered harder if it turned out we were reshoring a lot of jobs. It turns out we’re not. But I mean …

RR: Time will tell, time will tell, and then maybe it’ll fail. But again, what is the alternative plan? Tell me the plan. Give me the Democratic party platform now that’s going to say, yeah, Trump tried, but he’s an idiot, and it didn’t work. But here’s our plan on how to restore middle-class prosperity. And typically, I think that Democratic party is, I think, universal basic income. So we’d get redistribution. So we realized we can’t really restore middle-class prosperity, but we can harvest more from society’s winners to remediate the consequences of being left behind. And Mark, I’m open to the fact that that may ultimately be the only solution.

MO: Is that better than nothing?

RR: It’s certainly better than nothing. But I would like to take a risk on trying to find a way where the median American has a productive role to play in our common life as a nation. And for most people, that productive role is you work, you do your job, and so on. So I mean, I’m very concerned about AI and replacing labor. We may be heading to a real crisis of what I would call this sort of the median college-educated who winds up getting really hammered by this, the way that the factory workers got hammered by the China shock and the early aughts. And now we’re going to get the AI shock to people in the 20th and 30th percentile who have college degrees, but there’s no strong value added in the AI-driven economy. And so these are really daunting challenges facing the country.
And then also, how do we, we’re a demographically transformed country. Your friend wanted to know, am I just a pie in the sky guy, just like the utopian leftists? No, I think I’m realistic. I mean, I grew up in a country that was black and white. You had to go to New York or San Francisco or Los Angeles to experience something other than that black, white country. But we’re so demographically transformed, by mass migration over the last two generations, that whatever kind of society, culture, or social compact, or covenant that we’re going to establish as a people, there needs to be a long, hard conversation about what kind of country we want to be. And that, unfortunately, in the last 20 or 30 years, we’ve been prohibited from having that conversation. It’s been a monologue of multiculturalism. And anybody who dissented from that view was silenced. You go back to the Samuel Huntington book, Who We Are, that was an attempt to raise that question, was denounced as xenophobic and racist.

MO: Well, not just him, but Robert Putnam, his book after one of his books after Bowling Alone, made the point that people who live in relatively homogeneous neighborhoods are happier. And I don’t think it was denounced, but nobody wanted to review it.

RR: So maybe the conversation is maybe we should, instead of diversity, maybe we want to say, yeah, let the Somalis have, I mean, it didn’t turn out well for a taxpayer, but yeah, maybe the Muslims and Dearborn. Okay, maybe we shouldn’t worry so much about that. We had ethnic communities in industrial cities from 1880 until really, until the suburbanization mixed everybody together.

MO: I was going to say, I mean, as somebody who doesn’t think, who thinks the Eisenhower interstate highways were one of our biggest mistakes. I mean, among other things, it destroyed ethnic neighborhoods.

RR: Maybe I’m enough of a creature of the second half of the twentieth century that I hope for a kind of revised, renewed, it’ll be a different, but recognizably continuous kind of Americanness that’s broadly shared across. And I see that, this one reason that you had rising numbers of Hispanic and black voters voting for Trump in the last cycle. They, like everybody else, they want that future.

And now of course, whether Trump can deliver it or whether Vance can deliver it or whether any Gavin Newsom can deliver it, I don’t know. But that’s what I foresee. There’s a strong hunger for solidarity in the United States. And I don’t think Trump can deliver it. It’s his nature, as a destroyer of things. I don’t think he has the character or the vocabulary or even the desire to be the one, the architect of whatever comes next. And so it’d be interesting to see if somebody emerges. People thought Obama would play that role, but it didn’t turn out that way.

MO: I guess, bonus last question. How are you feeling about the new Pope so far?

RR: I love the fact I hear so little about him.

MO: See, that’s what I want from a president. I liked that about Joe Biden. Just didn’t hear that much about him. Now we have an activist president. There’s something to that. There’s something to that. There is really something to that. And well, look, I think I have faith in you. I think your Trump fever will break, and you’ll say, oh my God, what was I thinking? I didn’t like Kamala Harris very much.

RR: I never met him. Never been in the same room.

MO: Well, you haven’t given enough money to be invited anywhere.

RR: Never been in the same room. So I have a very difficult time forming a firm opinion about what makes that man tick. He is a very mysterious character to me.

MO: I think there may be no, and I say this actually with compassion, I think there are people without stable selves. I mean, that is when you hear people talk about narcissism and not just as a cudgel to beat him with, but as a clinical diagnosis, one of the things that narcissists do is that they triangulate who they are to wield power. I do have compassion for him. I don’t think he doesn’t have any long-term friends. He doesn’t seem to be close to his children. His wife can’t abide him. I mean, he seems to be somebody. And part of the reason for that, I think, is no there there, that he obviously has a working brain and vocabulary and a kind of, a certain kind of cleverness. And I don’t discount that. But there doesn’t seem to be a stable self, I don’t think. I mean, he seems to be profoundly unpsychological, right? If you said, who are you? He would give you words, but they wouldn’t be about purpose or calling or … so, I mean, one of the things I’ve found interesting is that people like you attribute to him, you make him a beacon of all these things that he can’t even articulate. And I always wonder, is it accidental? I mean, if he’s actually right about all these things.

RR: … judge the gardener writ large …

MO: Did he just stumble into having a congeries of accurate views about the world? He doesn’t read, he doesn’t take advice, he doesn’t listen much. But it could be possible that he’s accidentally right about lots of things. It just strikes me as unlikely.
RR: Yeah, maybe he’s the last baby boomer, I hope, to be president. And maybe there’s a kind of nostalgia or a presumption about the country and what the country is and its strengths and its virtues that he inherits simply by virtue. He’s a peak boomer. I mean, if you look at it, Joe Biden, 44, Bill Clinton, 46, George W. Bush, 46, Donald Trump, 46.

MO: Yeah.

RR: It’s incredible how we’ve been dominated by these …

MO: I’m available! 1974.

RR: Yeah.

MO: I’m available.

RR: So I think maybe that is his strength is there’s a continuity there, or a presumption of continuity there that he falls back on. I don’t know. But I think your point is well-taken about, it’s quite plausible that there is not a strong center, and that it just bounces from one thing to the next.

MO: And didn’t solve Ukraine as you predicted he would.

RR: No, time will tell. Putin’s a tough character. So it’s sad, sad. To quote the president: sad. So sad. Very sad.
MO: Sad. So sad. Look, if you get an invitation, bring me along as your plus one. I mean, I realize you might bring your wife along, but I would behave myself, I promise.

RR: Alright.

MO: I would be starstruck and obsequious, and I thank you for your time and keep up the good work at the magazine.

RR: Alright, thanks.

MO: Well, that’s me and Rusty Reno. If you have thoughts, comments, complaints, concerns, send them to mark.o@wustl.edu. That’s Washington University, St. Louis, wustl.edu. Religious holidays coming up: February 17 was the lunar new year for people in Confucian, and Taoist, and Buddhist traditions. Ramadan also has begun the holy month of reflection, fasting, and prayer for Muslims. February 18 was Ash Wednesday, February 23 for Orthodox Christians. Great Lent begins. And there are other holidays coming up for other groups, but those are the biggies, and those are some big ones. March 2, I would say Ta’anit Esther. It’s important for Jews. March 2 and 3 is the holiday of Purim. March 4: Holi, the Hindu Spring Festival. You can check ’em all out on a religious calendar near you.

But I want to get to celebrity birthdays because we have some pretty bitching celebrity birthdays. February 16 was Ice-T. February 17, Billy Joe Armstrong of Green Day; February 18, Yoko Ono, John Travolta, Dr. Dre, and Molly Ringwald. Fun fact about Molly Ringwald. She records the audiobook for my new biography of Judy Bloom, which comes out March 10. March 1 is Justin Bieber’s birthday, and March 10, Bad Bunny. If you didn’t know who he was before the Super Bowl, you definitely know now.

Thanks for listening to Arc: The Podcast. Arc with Mark. I’m so grateful for our support at the Danforth Center on Religion and Politics at WashU. That support comprises the hard work of Sheri Pena, Debra Kennard, Abram Van Engen, and others. My deputy editor at the magazine and producer on this podcast is David Sugarman, who edits it with such skill and aplomb. And we have a great team of interns. Right now at WashU, we have Caroline Coffey and Ben Esther. And from the University of Chicago, we have added Ezra Ellenbogen and Sadie Davis-Suskind. We invite you to subscribe to Arc, rate it, recommend it to your friends as a belated Valentine’s Day present. And listen to us next time. So long.