Right Wing Counterculture: Vitality. Masculinity. Transgression.

New York Times

01-05-2025

transcript
Right Wing Counterculture: Vitality. Masculinity. Transgression.
Hey, how are you? Hey Ross, how are you? I'm great. I'm great. What an amazing head of- This is great. Thank you. You look fantastic. You look vital, one might say. This is a very important part of the discourse on the online right. Well, we're going to get into that. For New York Times Opinion, I'm Ross Douthat, and this is Interesting Times. There's been a lot talk about a vibe shift in American life since Donald Trump's return to power, a shift not just in American politics, but in American culture. Where right wing ideas and influences are suddenly driving or shaping the conversation, and a progressive cultural consensus is cracking up. And one way I've been thinking about this is in terms of a phrase that is traditionally applied to the left, and that phrase is counterculture. I think America has, for the first time in modern memory, a right wing counterculture. A kind of edgy, reactionary alternative to the status quo. And so I thought one way to talk about that counterculture was to invite someone who I see- we'll see if he disagrees- as one of its representatives. And that's you, Jonathan. So, Jonathan Keeperman, welcome to Interesting Times. Ross, it is great to be here. We've known each other for a while online, of course, and I- Purely, purely as digital entities. Well, I'm seeing your face across from me on the screen, and I'm reminded of watching Bloggingheads from 10, maybe even 15 years ago. So we've come a long way. Oh, that's- Since Bloggingheads. That's a deep cut. So that shows just how far back your online experience really goes. Yeah, that's right. Days when I had more hair and it was, me and other junior varsity pundits arguing on the internet, but I think, and you can correct me about this, I think the first time that we actually seriously interacted on the internet was after the 2020 election. And I was arguing with Lomez, who was/is your Twitter pseudonym. Correct. The persona through which you engaged with politics for a long period of time, about whether Joe Biden was legitimately elected. Correct. And at that point, you had a dual identity. As Jonathan Keeperman. You were still a lecturer, in English, at UC Irvine. Correct. That's right. And then you were Lomez, a right-wing Anon is the term that people use. That's right. Who wrote pseudonymously online. So that was 2020. And then in 2022, you founded a right wing publishing house called Passage Press. And that, I would say, raised your profile pretty dramatically to the point where you were important enough to have your real name exposed by a reporter for The Guardian. Correct. in 2024. And then by January of 2025, just recently, you were notable enough to host one of the big inaugural balls, which was called the Coronation Ball. So, did I miss anything? How is that for an account of- Those are the highlights. That all tracks and covers ground well enough for us to get started on this conversation. But I do want to point out that in 2020, when we first were having this dialogue and debate over the election, you also had something of a pseudonym. And, I was arguing as much with Ross Douthat as I was Italics Ross. And Italics Ross- you had written at least one column, maybe two, in which you made the case for why Trump might be a superior choice to lead the country, despite the amount of chaos that we'd have to endure under his leadership. And really I was trying, if I remember the whole episode correctly to get italics Ross closer to the surface of the real Ross, the underlying Ross. So we all are trafficking in certain kinds of multi-identities I guess. So those were columns that I wrote, where I essentially, deliberately cultivated a kind of split personality and drew up out of my Jungian subconscious a version of myself that would be pro-Trump, right. So I was never for Trump. I was part of 'Never Trump', whatever that may have been. Way back in the past. And I retained a basic view that it was a mistake for conservatives to latch themselves to the Trump phenomenon. And so for me, it was like, all right, Italics Ross was not the true Ross lurking below the surface. That wasn't how I thought about it, but I thought about it as a set of ideas that certainly existed in my consciousness. And that were really useful for understanding where American culture was, why people supported Trump, and that New York Times readers needed to engage with. I'm curious, before we dig into the ideas themselves, was there like a moment when you felt a kind of shift in the culture just in the last few years, where it seemed like you were going to exist as yourself as a public figure instead of an arguer online. Yeah, it's a good question when that might have happened. There certainly was a shift. But what's probably happening here is just the same old cycle of leftist excess that we've seen periodically over the course of American history, at least going back to Second World War and probably even before that. There's a decade of leftism that takes hold, creates a kind of counterculture. There's a period of pushback. And we saw this, for example, with the original neocons in the 70s. We see this cycle then play out again in the 90s with political correctness, another basically 10 year cycle. And then all we're just seeing is this same pattern emerge in the mid 2010s. I identified 2014 as this inflection point. That was the year of Michael Brown and Ferguson and the kind of rise of BLM. It's also this interesting period where the Academy at least, and I think probably this is happening within newspapers and in media is coming out of this interesting transition into the digital age and out of the recession. And there's new incentives kind of driving the content. And what happens there is that a bunch of conservatives and especially younger conservatives who are frozen out of the conservative movement or frozen out of mainstream politics or frozen out of the kinds of professions where they might have a platform to express new ideas that might regenerate conservatism, go online and go underground and start developing a unique and Native style of discourse all our own. And as that cycle of progressivism just naturally exhausts itself, which it always does, and it takes new form each time. But it kind of always follows the same plot. What we're seeing now is the emergence of this conservative. Some people counter-elite or countercultural force simply emerging in place of where the progressives have vacated. We could come up with all sorts of that's a boringly respectable story. Jonathan and I and I don't believe it. I mean, I do believe it, but I think what you're describing, there is a description of the trajectory that you see. For instance, with my former colleague Bari Weiss. And, and her publication, the free press, which has been tremendously successful. And has represented of a meeting place for former liberals disillusioned by progressivism, various eccentric people who wouldn't have called themselves conservative but have ended up on the right passage. Press you're not publishing, a respectable libertarian critique of the welfare state. You're publishing, fiction, weird stories and Radical Philosophy. You publish the Hardy Boys, the original Hardy Boys before some multicultural PC cleanups, correct. You publish a war memoir by a Russian general who fought against the Bolsheviks. Yeah you publish writing by Robert E Howard, the creator of Conan the Barbarian, HP Lovecraft. But someone like Curtis yarvin, who is an example of an author you've published. Curtis yarvin thinks that the United States should become a kind of based monarchy run by some kind of Silicon Valley esque chief executive. With a dissolution and revolution of the order of government in Washington, DC. Nick land is another example of subterranean, far right intellectuals who would not have fellowships at the American Enterprise Institute. Who would not operate in mainstream conservative or centrist or center right circles. So tell me, tell me about. Tell me about that stuff. So what are we trying to do. So we're trying to revive what is a genuine right wing cultural and ideological. I hate the word movement because it's not quite that, but a right wing that can form an enduring and meaningful counterweight to a dominant left and a dominant progressive March that we've seen taking place over the course of let's just say, the post-war period, certainly from the 90s and the end of the Cold War up until now. And the premise there is that the conservativism that came before. I was recently looking at a picture online of a book called Young Guns featuring Paul Ryan, Eric Cantor. I am familiar with this cover. O.K Yes. Eric Cantor, Paul Ryan and Kevin McCarthy. Yeah Kevin McCarthy. O.K, so that's the image of the failed conservative movement that what this new set of figures and cultural texts are trying to replace. So let's try and get into what is an authentic cultural right to me passage press. And the work you're doing is clearly linked to a bunch of different groups, right. So you have the Silicon Valley of someone like yarvin. Peter Thiel is obviously often invoked as a godfather in that zone. There is the Red Scare podcast. And the so-called dime square scene in New York, which is basically and again, for listeners who think this is a contradiction in terms. It's basically right wing hipsters. Yeah then you have the nietzschean former graduate student turned online essayist and influencer, Bronze Age pervert, who has received interesting profiles in mainstream publications. So those would be examples that I would see. But who do you see as your allies and fellow travelers in the cultural project. Oh Yeah. No, that's absolutely right. I think you've hit the primary people, the primary figures, and you're capturing what the zeitgeist is here, for lack of a better term. And it's still being developed. And I'd be lying to you if I said that I had some intentional project here or some intentional aesthetic that I was trying to cultivate with this. So the idea is that the future is discovered. O.K we're not going to be able to predict ahead of time what this new culture will look like. It is throwing these ingredients out there based on a kind of shared understanding at the highest level of abstraction, some kind of alignment that, at least for now, is defined in opposition of both the left and wokeness, which is easy, but it's also defined in some sense in opposition to the conservativism that has come before, not because it's antagonistic towards that kind of conservatism per se, but that kind of conservatism is limited in what it can produce creatively. And this is a lot of the frustration that people have had with the right is anytime anyone on the conservative side goes to make some kind of art or do culture. It's just bad. And the left is right about this. There's been at least for my lifetime, this critique that the right can't do art and why and why culture. So why is that. What is right wing art missing. That the right wing counterculture is trying to supply. What are the ingredients It's not. It's not historically true, but at least right in the last 30, 40 years. So I think partly it's fear of the unknown. It's a lack of tolerance for artistic license and the messiness and chaos of what is entailed by the creative process. And it's just the case that if you are going to embark on a new cultural project, you have to have some amount of taste for offense. And O.K, I'll say this. There's probably three aspects to why conservative art is bad or has been bad. And this is reductive, of course, but this might help frame things. It's moralistic. It's much too moralistic. It's didactic. It's always trying to tell you a self-consciously conservative message. It's overly sentimental. And then there's also this nostalgia thing. It's always looking backwards and and conservative art is always looking to the past because it's familiar. It's something that's already been established. It's something for which they already know what they're supposed to what's good and what's not good. So there's no risk in trying anything new. And then the third thing I'll say here is that it's grievance oriented. And this comes in two forms. It's either we're owning the libs or here's a story about all of the ways the libs are making our lives unbearable. Well, let's- I want to make this just a tiny bit more concrete and say from any period, not the last 20 years, any period in American life, modern Western history. Give me an example of something you consider successful right wing art that doesn't fall into the traps you've described. Sure, no country for Old Men as an example, but it's not self-consciously right wing, right. I doubt, the Coen brothers would call themselves on the right. And I don't even know if Cormac McCarthy, who wrote the book. It's based on. But to my mind, it is precisely right wing art, or David Lynch. Pretty much everything David Lynch touches, I think, has a certain kind of a right wing coating to it, certainly. So give me so what is the coding. What makes to a listener for whom it seems absurd to call no country for Old Men right wing. What makes that right wing to you. O.K because I like it. It's good. And therefore I want it to share my political preferences. But beyond that, and this is where there would be some points of disagreement, by the way, it also calls something like girls. The TV show girls is a right wing show. Well, that now you're just pandering to me because that was my that was my consistent view. Yes this is a hobby horse of mine Yes All right. So then we might share the premise here that what constitutes quote unquote right wing art, which is, by the way, some labeling we're grafting onto this thing after the fact. And so it's actually a very flimsy kind of labeling. But what these pieces of work are doing is telling the truth about the world in a way that is not compromised by artistic or ideological preferences references about how these events and these characters and these people. Society wishes were true about these people. So my thing is that if you are telling the truth about the world, then you are going to make right wing art. But isn't that then a little circular. Then you're saying all great art is somehow right wing. Like to me, for instance, I feel a TV show that I've enjoyed is and Andor. It's one of the few Star Wars shows that I've enjoyed. I see that as kind of left wing art. It's a show that uses the background of the empire and the Star Wars universe to tell a story about punishing militaristic tyranny and resistance to it in ways that are of left coded. But also it's a really good show. Whereas I would look at girls and say, look, it is in the end, it's a scabrous satire of a particular kind of upper middle class lifestyle in a liberal city. And so it is coming from a right wing perspective. I feel like- So do you think- Can there be great left wing art from your perspective. I suppose Yeah. But I'll say this I think it depends. I understand your point, that it's highly reductive to just simply say, if I like it, therefore it's right wing art, or if it tells the truth, it tells the truth is what you're saying. But O.K, so what I mean by that, though, is a point of clarification is there are certain, at least modern left wing premises that support their worldview and their political agenda that I think are belied by someone telling the truth about the world. And here's an example of this. The left takes as a foundational principle of its politics the idea of equality, quality that there's a kind of flattening people. And that through carefully managed social engineering, we can produce a society that either levels out any kind of natural hierarchy or produce a system that somehow can wrangle these natural, almost supernatural, entropic forces that are constantly creating chaos and constantly requiring our maintenance and management and authority to deal with. O.K, good. That's what. So that's what I was looking for. So this takes us into one of the phrases that I think gets used to describe what the counterculture is up to. And I know you're ambivalent about this phrase, but it's the idea that gets called vitalism. Which is this term that means, let's say, a celebration of individuality, strength, excellence and an anxiety about equality and democracy. As just the way you described as leveling forces enemies of human greatness, and it gets connected to Friedrich Nietzsche. I think there's an Ayn Rand who's of a very popular novelist on the American. Whatever you make of her actual books is in some sense in this school. But that, to me, seems like one common thread in including in the books that you yourself have published. Like what links the White Russian general standing athwart the Bolsheviks to the Hardy boys, to Conan the barbarian? It is some kind of idea of human greatness beset by mediocrity and so on. What do you think about that. Yeah, I think that's right. I wouldn't contest that basic summary. I don't want to overdue. Like how we're thinking about this word vitality. For the purposes of this conversation, it's enough to say it's something a thymus, O.K, spiritedness, a self-will, a aliveness or also, I want to say that there's a certain kind of eroticism to vitality that's very important and has often been missing from the conservative view of the world. And I think that's a mistake. I think you're leaving something very important on the table by not grappling with this notion of eroticism and what that means and why it might be valuable, especially. And here's the premise we're starting from, and I think we share this view that we're reaching this phase, whether it's cyclical or there's of this longer term linear path of civilizational exhaustion, decay, decadence. That's a word I know you've used a lot. And this all requires rebirth. And the process of rebirth is not gentle. It's It can be violent and difficult. So I would say that vitality has serves these two basic functions right now. And why it's valuable for us to take on board. One, it attracts young people, young people. I think men in particular, women too, though, are naturally attracted to this notion of vitality. They see it, they know it. And they want to be around it. The right has failed for a long time to attract young people. This is finally changing over the last few years. It's also a way of overcoming, a kind of defeatism of this idea that things are past the point of saving, that we can't do you anything that all there is left for us in the 21st century is to on the one hand, merely manage playing out this end of history period. This sense of vitality, I think, offers something else. It offers the human subject the opportunity to advance positively and affirmatively into the future. So that's my defense of idealism, right. And it's an escape from. And now I'm going to move to a second term that you yourself have used. Yes it's an escape from what gets called the longhouse. And you mentioned, men and women as each vital in certain ways. But the longhouse is a specifically feminine coded narrative of like, what's wrong with contemporary life. So what is the longhouse. O.K, so I wrote this essay called what is the longhouse for First Things magazine. So you can answer the question. Yes, I would encourage anybody who's who wants to know the precise details to go read that article because I spell out what I mean by it. And here I'm going to talk and maybe more vague terms, but it's essentially an explanation, explanation and exploration of what I perceive as a kind of over feminization of society. And I don't mean that as it's explicitly women who are taking over society, because often the longhouse is managed by men, and in some cases, it's better managed by men or more severely and strictly managed by men. But it is a kind of feminine way of social management that is distinct from a kind of male or masculine coded social management and group dynamics. There's a certain it's maybe a phrase is like a regime of maternal surveillance is a phrase I've used before that preferences, for example, inclusion, conflict avoidance, consensus safety. And these kinds of priorities supersede things like truth finding and competition and the kinds of violent often. And I don't mean necessarily physically violent, but it can be that but a kind of combativeness that better characterizes a kind of masculine way of thinking about ideas. And again, why this gets back to certain other things we've talked about is the longhouse is essentially flattening. It's horizontal. Whereas masculine way of doing things in this model is hierarchical, it's vertical. And what a more combative style of discourse, for example, does, is help establish those hierarchies and where the value of ideas are relative to one another. The longhouse doesn't allow for that, because it's more interested in making sure everybody's feelings are maintained and nobody's offended. And just so listeners are clear, this is a reference to I mean, there's a kind of I'm going to call it a pseudo anthropology, because I don't think you're actually making specific claims about the human past, but there's a contrast between of longhouse culture of a literal longhouse of a tribe, crowded together under one roof with what. The freedom of the steppe barbarian. Yeah, I mean, so this comes from Bronze Age pervert. O.K Bronze Age mindset, which is one of the great texts of the 21st century. And I encourage all the New York Times' listeners to read it. It's very important if you actually want to understand this stuff. I agree. So he talks about the longhouse and he's got his own take on it. I borrowed the term. And actually why I think the term is so valuable is because it is a kind of empty signifier. I don't mean to tie it to this historical context. It's an evocative image. It's this big, long, O.K, literal house that we're all stuck inside of and you're constrained in how you can behave, how you can act. And I think it's hostile towards men in particular, having a kind of freedom of assembly with one another. So concrete examples would be the crusade against Greek life at universities. You would see as longhouse in action corporate HR departments and sensitivity trainings, longhouse in action. Well, and you can see probably the most salient example of this precisely because it's where you would least expect this kind of long housed. Cultural framing to take root is the military. And actually, Pete hedges has talked about this explicitly. Is this integration of women into the military. We don't need to get into the politics of that. Just suffice to say, though, that these traditionally male spaces, our martial culture has been now, it's open to women. And this introduces new norms. It just has to in order for it to work. And this is going to necessarily change, and I would argue, degrade the culture of masculinity that preceded it to two objections or responses. The second one will be more specific to my own worldview, but the first one, I think, is a more general one that many listeners would have. They would say, look what has actually happened in the last 25 years in the longhouse era, as you describe it, is. Guess what. We removed restrictions on women's advancement and they started out competing men. They're not long housing men. They're just getting the promotions that men used to get. And succeeding in corporate America where men used to succeed. And Yes, there are specific cases like the military where physical differences between men and women matter. And maybe there you could say gender equality has gone too far because it ignores those physical differences. But when you're talking about corporate America or political America or any of these environments, women are succeeding, men aren't. And now men are complaining that women are oppressing them. Like, isn't this just isn't the longhouse just a long male whine about a failure to adequately compete and you're pretending Oh, for the days of the steppe barbarians. But maybe you should suck it up and actually compete on the grounds that we have in 21st century America. What do you say to that. Yeah I mean, it's a perfectly reasonable question to ask. And I do think over the last however many decades that there have been a number of changes in the workplace that can be attributed to women, very talented women taking on leadership roles and succeeding in those roles, and therefore introducing more women into the workplace based on that success. I think it's perfectly fine for me to concede to that. The point I'm making is that by introducing this new distribution of personnel into public life, it has an effect on how these institutions are run and the norms that these institutions run on. And then it becomes an empirical question. Have they changed for the better or have they changed for the worse. And I think most people look around at the various institutions, whether it's media, whether it's academia, whether it's the corporate boardrooms that have found themselves in all sorts of spasms over DEI stuff over the last decade. Are they more efficient or are they less efficient. Are they working properly. My argument would be that very self-evidently, the institutions in which all of these changes have occurred are now performing worse than they used to. And that is, at least in part, attributable to this change in norms. And this change in norms in turn, is attributable to this change in personnel. All right. Now, a more personal objection rooted in my own religious commitments, which is that as you say, I have a lot of sympathy for the broad view that modern, late modern life has become decadent and some kind of sense of possibility, some kind of sense of action, some kind of sense of human capacity is really important to getting us either out of this trench or through whatever weird bottleneck digital life and I are going to create. I agree with all of that. However, I'm also a Christian. And all of the authors that I've mentioned who are part of the vitalist tradition, Nietzsche, Rand, Bronze Age, pervert, see themselves operating in opposition to Christianity. They see Christianity as fundamentally it's either it's a religion of the weak. It's a religion of women. Perhaps it's against the erotic. And so when I look at when I look at the right wing counterculture right now, I see a force that has there are people who are really into traditionalist Catholicism and whatnot there. But there's also a lot of people who I think in their own story about what went wrong with the right, the Normie right, the boring right of Kevin McCarthy think at some level, it was a bunch of weak, thin, milk drinking Christians who didn't understand that what is actually best in life is to crush your enemies, to see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentations of their women. So I'm curious, what is your attitude towards those debates. What's your attitude towards Christianity and religion. Yeah, I mean, my belief is that there's actual tremendous amount of synchronicity between these two modes of operating in the world. And it's not just my belief my favorite author and actually a passage press comes from the book forest passage by Ernst jünger. And there's a great book of letters between younger and Martin Heidegger. And junger's Younger's view, actually, is that none of this kind of vitalism, none of this is sustainable without religion and actually Christianity specifically, and that our idea of poetics and the inscrutable forces of the universe against which are individual will is being tested at all times in which a kind of vitalist view of the world is insisting we're constantly pushing against all has to be live inside of this framework of Christianity. So I don't think these things are incompatible. But younger but so younger. If I'm remembering his trajectory correctly. He was part he's part of the German. Correct He's not a Nazi, but he serves in the Third Reich. He's not someone who listeners should think of as Heidegger, who just goes who goes Nazi in that way. But he remains very much on the anti-liberal right throughout that period. And my sense of him is that he did have that a view of Christianity, as you described to some degree, but it was Christianity as a kind of useful force for resisting the degradation of modernity and so on. And then he does actually become a Catholic in very old age. So it's like you get to be a vitalist for many decades. And then at the end, you're like, all right, all right, time to succumb to full Christianity. And it just seems to me that even in vitalism, there are people who are anti-Christian like Bronze Age pervert like the Nazis. And then there are people who want to put it to use. But I'm a little ambivalent about having my religion put to use in that way. Yeah I mean, your concern is that it's merely being, cynically operationalized, not even not even cynically, but it's more like Christianity is this great mythic structure that within which we can operate. And so on. And that's not what I believe about Christianity. So I think Christianity is a true myth and imposes constraints. I guess that's part of it, right. The Christian doesn't just think that nature imposes constraints. It's that God imposes constraints as well. But let's not let's not stay forever in the particularities of dogma. Because I want to talk about Donald Trump. Yes carry us, carry us from Ernst Jünger to Donald Trump, right. And so Trump himself, right. Again, we're trying to talk more about culture than politics. Trump starts as a cultural figure. Anyone anyone who's old enough to remember the Trump who existed before he became a politician remembers the tabloid fixture, the reality TV star, the self creator whose life is, in a weird way, its own kind of work of American popular art. But you've written a bunch about Trump as a heroic figure. You've explicitly compared him to Aeneas. Speaking of mythological heroes, talk to me about that Trump as hero. What does that mean. O.K I have a somewhat idiosyncratic view of Donald Trump. Yes as a kind of a man out of time. And so I wrote this article or essay called Aeneas in Washington. And the idea was that Donald Trump has revived or assumed really this kind of mythic stature. He's a mythic hero. And specifically, I have this concept. It's not my concept, but I've applied it to Trump, of retrocausality. Trump has this strange ability, in my view to reconstitute the past. How we understand Trump and his life before he entered politics is not a strict, linear thing that is unchanging in time. Actually, over the last five years in particular. So since he lost the 2020 election, this interim period where he was beset by these lawsuits and he was threatened with prison time and he was shot at and nearly killed. We can look back at his past and see a new narrative about his life that suggests the possibility of this kind of rebirth from this civilizational exhaustion that I think is really the core description of our present moment. Now, in this essay, I also point out this concept called charisma hunger. And there was a sociologist from the middle 20th century, Erik Erikson, quite prominent. And he had this idea that in the modern world and this has a lot to do with actually, the loss of religious conviction and religious life that we were in search of these figures, these heroes. I'm very aware of the possibility that I am succumbing to this charisma hunger that Erikson identified decades ago. And nonetheless, I do think and I think the people's reaction to Trump, their impression of him. I saw for the other day, did you see this wrestler who won the NCAA title and he's draped in the American flag, this gladiator, and he gives this great big hug to Donald Trump. And in so many ways, Trump is this kind of great father of the American people, or certain segment of the American people who have embraced him. And he's not just a politician. He's not just a president. He's not just a TV star. And to my mind, that speaks to this mythical character. Yeah I mean, look, my own view of Trump, as you probably has changed. I think we have of each moved and each shifted, and I've ended up closer to where you were four years ago, and you've gone a bit further. So I just had trouble from the beginning of seeing Trump as anything other than a symptom of decadence. The reality TV host becomes president of the United States because he's triumphing over all these mediocrities and failed politicians. And so on. But it's only and he is representing a kind of revolt against decadence, I agree, a desire for something more. But he manifests that decadence at the same time. That was my basic take. And then in over the same period that you have come to see him as a heroic figure, I've come to see him as. Yeah, someone who has a more providential place, a bigger place in history, who is still part of a decadent era, maybe is still more of an anti-hero than a hero, but is bigger than I thought. And there is some of that. Retrocausality once you have Trump surviving the assassination attempt, you read that back into the past. Yes but I wouldn't go as far as you do, I guess, for reasons. I think part of the reason maybe connects back to what we were just going back and forth about my Christian doubts, about vitalism. To me, I look at Trump, and I see someone who has more capacities than I credited with him at the start, but the capacities that he lacks are restraint, magnanimity, a sense of moral limitation. And I think that lack is connected to the fact that I don't think he's fundamentally religious. I think maybe he believes in Providence now that Providence saved him. But not in any kind of conventionally Christian way. And I think it's the reason why it's both reasonable for liberals to worry about where that appetite of side of him takes us, but also just to worry about again, the chaos and mismanagement and all the things that also come in from an absence of restraint. Yeah I mean, I think that's fair. But and I'd also say for others who share your view here in this conflict between your religious convictions and what Trump might represent, this is squarely within our Civil religious tradition. I mean, if you think about the way that for most of our history, really up until like the Obama years, we thought about our founding figures and the way that they're presented in art and the way they're written about in our political and civil religious texts. They are quite explicitly, divinely guided. I mean, the hand of God is like reaching down and moving. Thomas Jefferson, who also was not religious in any meaningful respect, and George Washington and John Adams, et cetera, and placing them, the hand of fate is on top of them. And so it's not these things like to imagine that Trump is reviving that tradition or is now occupying that same role is not in contradiction to this long tradition of civil religion that we've had previously. It might require more proof for you. You might need to see, I think the issue is more that, if you see the hand of Providence operating through George Washington and John Adams in the founding of America, you could see the hand of Providence operating through Donald Trump in the chastisement of America, right. That Trump, is a great man of history whose role is to chastise the liberal intelligentsia and the never-trumpers and all these groups that failed to govern America. But it doesn't mean that at the end of the day, he's actually saving America. Sometimes it's just a chastisement. Like that. I feel like that possibility deserves more consideration from people who have this kind of mystical reaction to the drama of the Trump era. But I wanted to just on that question of restraint part of what Trump does, part of his lack of restraint is a refusal to respect any taboos to push through whatever the taboos of progressive culture are. And in the same way, right part of the right wing counterculture is all about taboo busting. But one of those taboos, and this is something that connects Trump in some ways to the counterculture is taboos around race, right. Because there's a lot of racism in right wing counterculture in various forms. It's there in the online memes. It's there in the would be nietzscheans like bap. Anyone who goes from this conversation. And gets a copy of Bronze Age mindset and reads, certain paragraphs will say, well, this guy is a terrific racist, right. Sure and I want to offer before you interpret this, I want to offer three interpretations. Take the interviewer's privilege. I think you could say, O.K, this is just about this is about performative rebellion. A counterculture needs to shatter taboos. The taboos of liberal culture are around race and gender. Possibility to you want to reclaim and relegitimize parts of the American past. American past had a lot of racists. You're trying to restore and reconstitute a lost progressive world. It's inherent in the project that you're basically trying to rehabilitate writers and thinkers who contemporary piety would try and rule out because they held, at the very least, un-pc opinions. So those are two arguments that I see as justifications complete or not, for the kind of racist stuff. But then there's also the possibility that there's just a serious belief in racial inequality. And maybe it's not really legitimizing Nazism, but if you spend a fair amount of time online, it's not that many degrees of separation from the right wing counterculture to people on excom talking about what a great artist Hitler was such a great, such a great artist, which I so anyway, I wanted to offer those as interpretations. And then have you talk about why. Why is the right wing counterculture racist. Sure well, first, let me start by saying I don't think actually, Adolf Hitler was a great artist. I think he was actually deficient and technically deficient in certain ways that are very obvious when you look at his painting. But O.K, technically, the technical deficiencies of Adolf Hitler are definitely, definitely there in a few places in his life. Yes so this is actually this is a really interesting question. And of course, it's worth addressing. And I think all of the things you said can simultaneously be true. And I think there's a fourth point I want to add here, which is historically contextual. We started this conversation by trying to think back to where this current moment of our cultural, social, intellectual, ideological path began and we identified somewhere in the 2010s. Now everything I'm about to talk about has precursors. But something else happens here around 2012. And maybe you identify the Trevon Martin case into 2013, 2014. Certainly there's the Michael Brown, hands up, don't shoot Black Lives Matter simultaneously, that we have a kind of a discussion happening in this country around immigration. And what would happen to this country. If we started allowing people in from all over the world. Is everybody the same from everywhere. And if we're going to have a pluralistic democracy, what does that look like in a future where it's not a non-white, predominantly white country. These are legitimate things to think about a lot of people didn't want us having these conversations previously. But then what happens in 2013 14, and then scales up over the course of the 2010s. Is this insistence and again, I think this is important coming from the left, that we have our moment of racial reckoning. O.K, so a bunch of people then are being asked to have a difficult conversation about race and the prevailing view, which is taken on by the New York Times' by academia, by and large, is that any differences in outcomes among people can be ascribed to this infinitely amorphous, non-falsifiable, infinitely pervasive thing called systemic racism. And this is, if not intentionally facto, the fault of the White population in the country. So the question then is that true. Are we allowed to look at the actual causes of why these discrepancies exist. And it just is the case that when you look at these differences, they are not attributable to white racism. You can actually identify causes. So I think a lot of young people online who are finding themselves getting the short end of the stick on these, this new regime of DEI are reacting to it in. And so a lot of this kind of racialized conversation is a response, is an answer to the insistence that all of these differences are white people's fault. So I buy a version of that argument. And I think it's very clear just from watching the culture that the ascendance of certain kinds of DEI narratives Robin D'Angelo stuff, where it's like white people are conducting psychological self-scrutiny and so on to root out the hidden structural racism in their heart. All of that contributes to an emergence much more than at any point in my lifetime of a kind of distinct white racial identity among some conservatives. Younger conservatives, especially online conservatives, especially people in the orbit of the right wing counterculture, especially. This is all, I guess, several different questions, though, right. One that still might be bad, right. If it's bad to have a tribalist view of politics among non-whites, isn't it potentially bad to have a tribalist view among whites. Even if you're creating a cultural, political explanation where it's understandable. That's question one. Question 2 is more concrete. It's like, O.K, how far back are you. Are you trying to turn the dial. And I want to keep it in culture. So I'm going to give a cultural example. I grew up I was a big fan of the Tintin books. The Tintin comics, the boy detective captain haddock. And so on. Those were a huge influence in my childhood in the 1980s, 1990s. The Tintin books are from 1920 through 1960. One of the early Tintin books is called Tintin in the Congo. And it's super racist. Like it is a set of super racist caricatures of Africans that are not like friendly ethnic stereotypes. The way the appearance of like, Arabs and Italians are elsewhere in the book. They're more racist than that. Well, I'll just be really explicit. Would you publish Tintin like Tintin in the Congo. Disappeared, right. Was it good that it disappeared. I'm not familiar with this exact book. O.K well, in theory, imagine you could. You can pick another. But like is it. Yes is it O.K that certain things from the past that were very racist disappear. No so, so this is a very easy question for me to answer. And the answer is Yes. I would publish it on the assumption that it has a kind of literary value that is independent from these objections you have to these racial caricatures. So there have you seen who Framed Roger Rabbit. The movie Yes Yeah. The movie. O.K Yes. There's this great moment in who Framed Roger Rabbit, where Roger is handcuffed to the detective. And this is causing them all sorts of problems. And eventually the detective is trying to saw the handcuffs off. And Roger at one point just slips out of the handcuffs in this sight gag. It's funny. And the detective very angrily says to him, you're telling me you could do that at any time. And Roger Rabbit says to him, no, only when it's funny. And the upshot of this anecdote is that if it's funny, O.K, and funny, here now is a stand in for has artistic value independent of the thing happening, then it's worth preserving and worth participating in. So this Tintin book, or Tintin I don't is that Tintin is the snobby French way of saying it. Most Americans would say Tintin Yeah Yeah, real Americans. Which I'm a vulgar populist, Trump supporters. So I don't know how Trump supporters say Tintin. New York Times' columnists say Tintin. Yeah So the question, the operating question for me as a publisher is it funny. And again, does it have value. Does it have artistic merit. Then there's also the archival thing. The archival function is very important for a publisher. These are important texts. They tell us something not just about who we were, but in turn about who we are and simply forgetting that these things existed. Does nobody any good at all. I don't think we need to protect people from that kind of offense. The other point, which is isn't aren't these views bad, though. And so we should disarm on these questions. If I understand what you're putting to me. And I would say maybe kind of it depends, because these views do have consequences that we need to properly address. And the only way to address them is by being honest about causes. So if we're talking about, for example, crime rates and we want we see uneven incarceration rates. And our answer is, well, there's overpolicing. But then our solution to that is we get rid of police. Well that creates an increase in crime. And no, as long as disarming on these questions and not being honest about these questions allows for these kinds of social pathologies to rule over how we function in life, I think is bad, and we need to be honest about them. And this does not. Yeah Yeah. But what. But still there. There's a question beyond that about the cultural side of this. Like, again, the world of memes and discourse. And so on. Yes it includes some rehabilitation of traditional conservative arguments about problems with the welfare state or the necessity of policing that are familiar from the 1980s and 1990s, that the progressive consensus suppressed. That's different to me from kids online posting racist memes, right. And saying, it's just irony. I'm just being ironic. And busting taboos. O.K but at a certain point, doesn't the mask become the face. Doesn't the irony become indistinguishable from just being against kind of against Black people. And then for you, as a publisher. It's fine to say we should preserve these we should have historical memory. We should know what the past was like. But I don't think you'd want to be like you would have a certain audience if passage press, pivoted further. And was like, we're publishing, we're publishing Romel books by Alexander Stephens and confederates and so on. Wouldn't you worry about yourself in that scenario, even if you thought it was fine don't want these things banned, but do you want to be the person publishing all of that. No, not necessarily. I think there are publishers who are already like filling that niche. So it's not my responsibility to do that. But also if you're the kind of person who's interested in that content, it's been there and you can go find it and I'm glad you can. I think actually these things are important for us to be able to discuss. And I would say this to your concern about these racial taboos in particular. I actually don't treat them any different than any other kind of political or social taboo. There's some added, maybe vitriol or sharpness to some of these memes we're seeing now, but that's mostly because this is a topic of conversation, a category of conversation that has been entirely verboten for a while now. O.K, let's call it at least several decades. And the problem with this particular topic, in my view, is that it starts with the supposition that it's firstly a moral question, and any decent person, morally decent person already agrees with these basic anti-racist premises. So to even raise the questions, it's a mark against your character, and we can't even get to the point where we're having the policy debate. And what that creates, then, is this environment in which people who want to have this debate have to figure out a way to talk about it and get through these filters. And I think the kind of abrasive meme making that you're identifying when it comes to racial questions is a function of the manner in which this part of the discursive landscape has been previously closed off. And if we open it back up and allow for sober conversation, then it'll lose the power to carry these memes, they just won't be as interesting or funny because they're not as taboo. I guess I'm more skeptical of that. Not in the sense that I think that if you allow or encourage certain debates that suddenly the US turns into the antebellum South or Nazi Germany, but just that there are a lot of people and this there's versions of this on the left and issues around anti-Semitism, especially on the left that are of a separate conversation. But there is some overlap. I think it is bad for people to be in a position where they are questioning not what is the proper design of welfare policy and policing. But do we need to do. We need to give some reconsideration to Hitler's views about Jewish conspiracies? And I'm not saying I'm not. I'm not accusing you of taking that position. I'm just saying right now, when I look at these spaces, it's like I'm a child of the 1990s, right. I think it was O.K to live in a world where there were taboos about Nazi Germany and the Jim Crow South, and that didn't have to preclude having honest debates about race and crime and policing and all of these things. But I just when I look at, again, the moral character that is encouraged by racist meme culture, not worried they're going to take over. I'm just worried about them, I guess. O.K, but Yeah, I would just ask, what exactly are you worried about. So let me start with this. First of all, lies are brittle. Ultimately they fall apart. Truth is durable, O.K. And to build anything that's lasting, it has to rest on top of truth. And so we have to start there. That's my view O.K. And in order to discover truth, we need to be willing to test our assumptions about everything and continuously test those assumptions. And if we don't continuously test those assumptions, we not just forget what we believe, we forget why we believe those things. And I think this is actually something the left has fallen in. The trap of the left has kind of forgotten how to make the argument for their own beliefs, because they've denied anybody who objects to their underlying assumptions about the world. I think it would be a mistake for us to erect a kind of discursive force field around certain categories of questions in an effort to preclude the kind of discomfort. And again, this concern that you're articulating to me is very vague. I don't actually know what you're worried about. I mean, people have been questioning these narratives for a long time. David Irving has been challenging the Holocaust for a long time is like it better to not have those conversations. I don't think it is. I think we should just let it out. It can exist in the world. Yeah and again, this is the last thing I'll say. But I think it's partially like you started out talking about how your sense I think you would put it this way that there was anti-white racism at work in progressive politics and culture in the last five or 10 years that correct that there was a critique of whiteness as this miasmic force that was functionally like functionally applied, a kind of suspicion and hostility towards anyone who was white, certainly anyone who was white and male. And I wouldn't go as far as you with that, but I don't think that's wrong. I think it was bad. It would also be bad for there to be more and more anti-black racism, or anti-Semitic curiosity on the right, just because it affects our shared life. And I think in ways that have cultural effects, have political effects. I think they have effects on the Trump administration. I think one of the ways that the Trump administration may fail, as I said before, is that it is not a racial issue per se, but it regards some of its fellow citizens with a certain kind of contempt. That's a problem for a would be great leader. I think contempt is bad. I think racism encourages a kind of contempt. And so, yeah, I don't have a single like America is going to become Nazi fear. But I do have a fear about the impact of taboo busting around race on the kind of institutions that right wing people might build and so on. So, I mean, I understand where the concerns are coming from. I guess I think it's unfounded. I don't think it actually will materialize into something real and something we'll have to worry about. And I think actually the alternative presents a much worse possibility. And I think we saw some of that with the great awokening or this post-george Floyd 2020 impulse to not just blame white people for this kind of subordinate position of people of color per se, but then make actual policy choices or institutional choices to try to level that by harming white people. And so what I'd say here is the reason that was bad was not because it pointed to racial discrepancies, but because it was wrong, it didn't pass the test of evidence. But the question is not just is the discrepancy exists, the question is, why. And if we don't allow ourselves to have an honest conversation about that, what fills the vacuum is the most incendiary and most harmful explanations. So it's actually in my view, incumbent on people in positions of prominence who can look at these questions soberly, who can evaluate the evidence and make Frank statements about the explanations for these disparities. All right. Let's just talk briefly about the future. How lasting do you think that the vibe shift or whatever else is will turn out to be. So you're at the start. I introduced you right as the host of an inaugural ball. You're appearing on a New York Times' podcast. A very prominent position. But passage press is a boutique publisher. And there is. We didn't really get into this, but there is a mass, obviously, a more mass market side of the vibe shift. I think the Joe Rogan's and Theo Vaughn's the and all the way to Andrew Tate. Vitalist right. All of that, all of that is there. And part of the culture. But even that still, to me, exists in a pretty separate universe from the people who make pop musical TV or who publish mass market fiction. So I'm curious, do you see that part of the culture moving rightward? Books, movies, TV. What would that look like. Yeah, I do. I actually think it's going to be a full scale vibe shift and I full scale Reagan era level or bigger. Yeah, I do think it very well could be Reagan era level. Now, I wasn't a lot. I was alive, but I was too young to remember. What were Reagan era. You were absorbing his charisma. But I've watched enough John Hughes movies to understand how that expresses itself in popular culture. And I think we're going to have precisely the same kind of vibe shift that infiltrates these mainstream media forms. O.K, here's an example. I sit around with my family every once in a while, and we watch American Idol. And Carrie Underwood, who sang at The inauguration, is now one of the judges on American Idol. Just the mere fact that this massive pop star, who has one of the biggest platforms in pop music, is simultaneously affiliating herself with the Trump administration is enough to suggest that there is something meaningful and enduring and broad about this vibe shift. You also have, I believe it's Larry Ellison's son who just bought Paramount Pictures. He is a kind of conservative, they're going to be doing these Top Gun esque films that really embrace a kind of patriotic zeal, I guess you could say. Now, I warned at the beginning that it would be a mistake for conservatives to simply adopt a kind of nostalgia and sentimental patriotism. So I don't hope that is all there is. But that's a perfect place for that kind of ethos and aesthetic to exist in these big blockbuster movies, and I suspect they will. People are certainly exhausted by wokeness. So it's not just that the right and this right coded art is ascendant. It's as much to do with the fact that Snow White, this new Snow White release is very unpopular. People don't want this stuff anymore. And so there's going to be a natural opening for newer, let's just say vitalist kind of art. All right. So last question. Donald Trump calls you up and he says you're in charge of the National Endowment for the Arts, and you're setting up a program to celebrate America's 250th. And part of that program is you're going to ask every high school senior to public high school senior, maybe use the leverage remaining in the half dismantled department of education to enforce this, to read one book and see one movie. Yeah what do you recommend. This is good. You put this question. I'm not going to hide the ball from the audience. You put this question to me earlier this morning. I wanted. I wanted a good answer, right. Well when you ask it, suddenly you're like oh, God, are you going to say the godfather? Because it's. O.K, good. See there you go. That's always. I'm not going to say the godfather, although I did have difficulty spontaneously coming up with a good answer. What? one book encapsulates what I'm trying to accomplish with this. So the thing I'm the thing I've thought long and hard about and what I saw when I was a lecturer at UCI. There's been this kind of severing of a continuity between the past and the present, and I think it's an intentional severing. And these kids like, they just they're not well-read. They don't really know anything. I mean, I spent half of my classes just teaching like Wikipedia tier history, just so we can have enough context to have the conversation about the actual stuff we're talking about. So one thing that I would definitely, I think is much needed is to reestablish a kind of continuity, a literary intellectual, cultural continuity with the past. So the book I would choose for this is Moby Dick, and it's a very obvious cliché choice, but it's a thing that kind of everybody from all ages if you're an American, this is a book you just should know. I think Moby Dick is essentially American, and in particular represents a kind of East Coast American founding. And it's this man against nature and God. And there's also the chaos of the plurality of the cast. And it's very American in that way. It's this industrious, pluralistic almost democracy on the boat. So it's also transcendence through conquest, which is a very American idea. And then my counterpoint to that, which I think is a nice coda is no country for Old Men would be the movie. Moby Dick is conquest and it's the Atlantic. And now Cormac McCarthy and no country for Old Men. The film in particular, the Coen brothers film, is the border, the terminus of the West, the border with Mexico, it's also late epic. It's the exhaustion of American conquest. And we're also now there's this force at the center of the book, this inscrutable, mysterious, supernatural force. It's not in Moby Dick. It's the thing they're chasing. It's the whale in a no country for Old Men. It's evil. It's chasing them that has come right to now. Fate is coming to exact. It's payback for what America has become. So it's America at the end, at this moment of civilizational exhaustion. And it's precisely this point that we need to escape out of. And this is my hope for the future is how do we take the metaphysics of No Country for Old Men and create some kind of rebirth to our national identity, our national character, our inner primordial being, and find that life force that can once again extend beyond these borders. All right. On that chthonic note, Jonathan Keeperman, Thank you so much for joining me. Thanks, Ross. This was great.
Ross Douthat: There's been a lot of talk about a vibe shift since Donald Trump's election and return to office — a change not just in American politics, but in American culture, a sense that right-wing personalities are suddenly driving cultural discourse, that a progressive consensus is under threat or cracking up.
One way I've been thinking about this is in terms of a phrase that is traditionally applied to the left: counterculture. I think the best way to understand politics right now is that the United States, for the first time in my lifetime, has a real right-wing counterculture — an edgy, radical-seeming alternative to the status quo.
I thought one way to talk about that counterculture was to invite someone who I see — we'll see if he disagrees — as one of its representatives. And that's you, Jonathan Keeperman, welcome to 'Interesting Times.'
Below is an edited transcript of an episode of 'Interesting Times.' It has been lightly edited for length and clarity. We recommend listening to it in its original form for the full effect. You can do so using the player above or on the NYT audio app, Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube, iHeartRadio or wherever you get your podcasts.
Jonathan Keeperman: Ross, it is great to be here. We've known each other for a while online, of course.
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