David Leonhardt On The Dwindling American Dream

He has a new book on the rising economic inequality over the past several decades.

David is a journalist and columnist. He writes the NYT’s flagship daily newsletter, “The Morning,” contributes to the paper’s Sunday Review section, and co-hosts “The Argument,” a weekly opinion podcast with Ross Douthat and Michelle Goldberg. In 2011 he won a Pulitzer Prize for Commentary on economic questions. His new book is Ours Was the Shining Future: The Story of the American Dream.

The episode was taped on November 8th. You can listen to it right away in the audio player above (or on the right side of the player, click “Listen On” to add the Dishcast feed to your favorite podcast app). For two clips of our convo — on African-American lefties against mass immigration, and black voters moving to the GOP over crime — pop over to our YouTube page.

Other topics: David’s upbringing in NYC and Boston; “creating dorky fake newspapers in elementary school”; his mom was a copyeditor and his dad a high-school teacher; the debt that print journalists owed to the sports page; America’s economic golden age of the mid-20th century; how we used to have trust in institutions with more social cohesion; communism “just doesn’t work”; how the union movement was strong; how Eisenhower’s R&D was unprecedented but also had balanced budgets; how JFK was a “massively overrated president”; RFK’s conservatism and his deep popularity with black Americans; LBJ’s view that crime was just poverty; the immigration restrictions until the 1965 act; low crime before the 1960s; the much higher marriage rate before the 1960s, especially among blacks; the stagflation of the 1970s; OPEC after the Yom Kippur War; Milton Friedman; how the government created the computer industry; how the female workforce has been kicking ass; the anti-patriotism of the left; Obama’s love for America; how today’s government doesn’t invest as much in the future; IRA and CHIPS; the newfound bipartisan interest in unions; Covid relief; crime and disorder after the summer of 2020; effective altruism; the low price of clothing today; how our lower life expectancy is a sign of plenty; and how Millennials are not as far behind their parents as much as we’re told.

Browse the Dishcast archive for another convo you might enjoy (the first 102 episodes are free in their entirety — subscribe to get everything else). Coming up: Carole Hooven returns to talk about her tribulations at Harvard, McKay Coppins discusses Romney and the GOP, my old friend Joe Klein and I do a 2023 review, Jennifer Burns on her new biography of Milton Friedman, and Alexandra Hudson on civility. Please send any guest recs, dissent and other comments to dish@andrewsullivan.com.

On last week’s episode with Cat Bohannon on women and evolution, a listener writes:

Thanks for the excellent conversation. I fully agree with you about the word “queer.” When I hear someone say “queer people,” I picture 18-year-olds in Portland and Oakland with chartreuse hair, multiple nose rings, and T-shirts with performative, transgressive messages. I certainly don’t think of Andrew Sullivan.

Me neither. But the thing is: the alphabet people don’t actually regard me as “queer” either. Because I’m white, and not attracted to people with vaginas, I’m not deemed a member of the LGBTQIA+ community. I’m a transphobic, racist oppressor, and always will be. The “Progress Flag” fuses the old rainbow with new colors designed to reflect the abolition of the sex binary and support for BLM. It tells me, and anyone gay or white or non-leftist like me: you are not welcome here. And I might note I have gotten the message. At some point, white gay men will realize that they are for the transqueers what the Jews are for the pomo-left.

Another listener on Cat:

Frankly, I wasn’t too interested in the subject of last week’s podcast, but I had a long drive so I gave it a shot. The very first thing I noticed is how very enjoyable Cat is. She speaks wonderfully. Eventually you addressed her erroneous claim that 20 percent of people are gay, which is obviously absurd.

But you know what? Her response was delightful! She wasn’t too defensive upon being challenged. She realized the significance of the issue. She cheerfully and open-mindedly delved into the topic, and said she’d go back to her source material to see if she made a mistake (which she’s since acknowledged). And that is how it’s supposed to work! Kudos to you both for how that was handled. It brightened my mood.

Yes! Totally non-defensive, and civil throughout. So refreshing.

A crazy coincidence with this listener:

I’m glad your mom is doing so well in her assisted living home. Happy you had a nice visit! My mom will be 94 at the end of the month and she also is thriving in a locked assisted-living home, despite her profound dementia, and is content with music class, chair yoga, and balloon pickleball. Preschool truly is the template for life.

Thank you for the Cat Bohannon interview. I had never heard of her before … but I loved some of her synch up with Ed Yong’s I Contain Multitudes, especially with the breast milk discussion. I’ll check out her book!

My father, Dr. Harmon Bickley, was the American “Father of Plastination” that Cat referenced … super weird. My parents divorced when I was 2, but when I visited him later, I used to find body parts in his lab’s file cabinets. I only saw the “Body Works” exhibit in lower Manhattan after he died. Super strange to see my dad’s picture blown up at the beginning of the exhibit as the “father” of this technology. It was weird from the beginning. Luckily my sisters and I are all really normal and doing fine.

Another listener on Cat:

Interesting conversation, and unlike most, you were more student to her teacher than conversant. One important reality: everybody has a bias that needs to be examined, including Cat’s. I think biology/genes matter more than Cat does, which is my bias, hopefully controlled.

But I’m still haunted by and frightened by The Bell Curve, to put my cards on the table. I highly recommended a recent New Yorker piece about Nvidia, the company at the forefront of AI. What is the ethnicity of Nvidia’s workforce? One-third East Asian, one-third South Asian, and one-third White. Mostly male. (A colleague of mine is doing a sabbatical on “decentering whiteness.” That ship may have already sailed.)

I suspect Cat is less emphatic on gender differences than I am because of her political commitments. And I may be overplaying them for similar reasons, but the jury’s still out.

Yes, the jury is still out. Which is why research should be unfettered. We can be afraid of many things, but we should not be afraid of the truth.

This next listener sends “a note of thanks” for multiple episodes:

I have many friends who subscribe to the Dishcast, but I’m a late adopter — two boys to raise solo, work, no free time, and I’m not much of a podcast person. But one of my friends sent me the David Brooks’ episode, and I was so disappointed when it cut off that I had to pay full-fare for the rest.

I have heard few things more lovely than your shared ruminations on gratitude. I’m a long-time believer in appreciating the small joys: moons, stars, the perfectly colored fall tree against a blue sky, a single flower, my dog (a large joy in a small package). But I happened to listen to the Dishcast during a particularly loathsome and low week, and it was the perfect wondrous thing to remind me to look out for gratitude and find something for which to be grateful. Rarely does an exchange recalibrate so thoroughly.

From there, it was on to Matthew Crawford, and then Douglas Murray from 2022. But I’m going to play David’s episode for my college sons when we make a drive to NJ later this month. So thank you. And my very best for your condo renovation!

The worst is over. But I’ve spent much of the week in bed with my usual bronchial crap. The only way I managed to produce the Dish this week is because Bodenner never taps out, and prednisone is a hell of a drug.

Another listener has a guest rec:

You’ve had Mearsheimer on opposing support for Ukraine because it provokes Putin (as if Putin needed provocation to wage his slow-motion war against Europe and the U.S). You’ve had Judis and Teixeira on, and they seemed to oppose more support for the war because it loses working-class votes. Maybe it’s time you had on someone who can make a fresh case for why supporting Ukraine is not only good policy but a bargain — and also cite Thucydides as an authority and Sparta’s response to Athens’ Sicilian fiasco as a precedent. If you haven’t read the WSJ interview with the classical historian Paul Rahe, you should. I’d love to hear what you’d both have to say as to whether NATO expansion or Russia’s invasion is a truer example of imperial overreach.

Well, we did have Anne Applebaum on as well. And we’re thinking through a new Ukraine pod for the new year. Another rec:

How about having Joseph “Jody” Bottum on the pod? In his book The Age of Anxiety, he sketched an interesting vision of how our discourse was impoverished in certain ways by the collapse of the Protestant mainline since the 1960s and how a kind of zombie Protestantism still informs a lot of progressive politics to this day. In addition, he is one of the most prominent social conservatives I can think of to flip on gay marriage, and it would interesting to hear him reflect on that eight or nine years down the line.

He is also related to Roddy Bottum from Faith No More … c’mon!

He flipped on gay marriage? I didn’t know that. As for Faith No More, the band’s cover of “Easy” is a classic Mental Health Break:

A reader has a book recommendation:

You identified an important spiritual progression in Ayaan’s life, and this also has scholarly backing in James Fowler’s seminal work, The Stages of Faith: The Psychology of Human Development and the Quest for Meaning, where he outlined the hierarchical progression from the lower stages (out for oneself, ethically self-centered) to the highest stages.

The most interesting reveal in Fowler’s stages is that organized religion lives near the bottom, where one follows the church in order to attain a reward or avoid a damnation, but rarely questions the guidance presented as from “on high.” The next higher spiritual stage is actually disillusionment with organized religion, where one challenges the orthodoxy as unjust/unkind and forges a new set of ethics based on a generally humanist perspective.

But higher than that is the mystical stage, where one has been personally touched by an experience/revelation/epiphany, often after reaching a despair of spiritual emptiness. Sometimes this leads back to a kind of religious orthodoxy, sometimes not, but always a humbled and enlightened perspective with a newfound spiritual orientation that emphasizes the spirit of the law rather than the letter. In this case, the law is truly written “in the heart” as both Jesus and Paul advocated.

Not coincidentally, this spiritual evolution parallels the stages that children go through to get to adulthood. So Ayaan has moved from a restricted but structured spiritual childhood in Islam to a disillusioned spiritual adolescence of atheism to a more personally profound and balanced spiritual adulthood in Christianity. If she had returned to Islam instead, it might have been to the more mystical Sufi interpretation.

On that note, I was moved by this wonderful essay in the NYT today. Praise where it is due. It reminds me of my conversation with Christian Wiman and Matt Sitman years ago on what faith is. The New Yorker just ran a profile of Wilman, and he has a new book out.

Thanks as always for the emails: dish@andrewsullivan.com.