Jeffrey Rosen On Virtue And Learning

He has a riveting new book about the Stoic influence on the Founding Fathers.

Jeff is the president and CEO of the National Constitution Center, where he hosts “We the People,” a weekly podcast of constitutional debate. He is also a professor of law at the George Washington University Law School, and a contributing editor at The Atlantic. A former house-mate of mine and friend for 40 years, Jeff began his journalistic career writing some stellar essays on the Supreme Court in the TNR when I was editor. The author of many books, his new one is The Pursuit of Happiness: How Classical Writers on Virtue Inspired the Lives of the Founders and Defined America.

You can listen 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 the transcendence of deep reading in the age of distraction, and the hypocrisy of many Founding Fathers on slavery — pop over to our YouTube page.

Other topics: growing up in NYC with a father who’s a renowned hypnotherapist and a mother who’s a social worker; educated at the Dalton School — “a beacon of liberalism”; reconciling faith with reason; the intellectual tradition in Catholicism; God as reason (logos); Jeff’s deep reading during Covid; Seneca’s essays on time; Cicero’s treatise on old age; Aurelius’ Meditations; Ben Franklin’s 13 virtues; temperance and prudence; Socrates; Plato; Aristotelian balance; Pythagorus; Blazing Saddles; “without virtue happiness cannot be”; Jefferson’s 12 virtues; his rank racism and contradictions over liberty; Sally Hemings; George Wythe freeing his slaves; the Founders building a new society based on ancient wisdom; Cicero at the center of that project; the Bhagavad Gita; the Stoics as Taoist; John Adams as tempestuous and striving for humility; treating his brilliant wife as his equal; making up with his enemies (e.g. Jefferson); Madison and the Federalist Papers; Douglass teaching himself to read; Freud and the substitute of character for personality; delayed gratification; “everything goes to shit in the Sixties”; Gen Z’s pursuit of happiness ending in anxiety; the quiet life of the 18th century vs the “dazzling array of distractions” today; regaining concentration through deep reading; how all the great books of the ancient world are free online; balance, deliberation, and equanimity as keys to good government; the preternatural calm of Obama; the danger of demagogues; Trump as the anti-Christ of liberal democracy and the antithesis of the Founders.

Browse the Dishcast archive for an episode you might enjoy (the first 102 are free in their entirety — subscribe to get everything else). Coming up: Rob Henderson on class and “luxury beliefs,” Christian Wiman on resisting despair as a Christian, George Will on Trump and conservatism, Abigail Shrier on why the cult of therapy harms children, Adam Moss on the artistic process, and Richard Dawkins on religion. Please send any guest recs, dissents, and other pod comments to dish@andrewsullivan.com.

Here’s a listener on last week’s pod with Nate Silver:

To double down on one of Silver’s points: poker is a great unifier. In an America that is increasingly balkanized and dulled by phone addiction, can you name another pastime that brings together, in close physical proximity, old and young, red and blue, every race, class and educational level, new immigrants and WASPs, roughnecks, crypto bros and Charles Murray (as you discussed with him) — all fiercely engaged around a table for hours at a time? I can’t.

The sole exception, as Silver mentions, is women. Few play. Like most female players, he attributes this to male toxicity. It is, in fact, mainly a class issue. I have seen plenty of boorish behavior in poker, but it’s almost totally confined to lower stakes and directed at everyone, not just women. And Karens also play poker. Many of the outrages one reads about on feminist poker Twitter are of the micro-aggression variety. I have never seen a woman being openly disrespected at the table, and my sample size is in the many thousands of hours.

I suspect female players do better than most men. As Silver points out, they can use as a weapon the stereotype of them playing tight and not bluffing. The hot ones become social media stars and snag big sponsorships.

Should more women play? Probably not. IQ differences between the sexes probably matter less here than temperamental differences, like agreeableness. Women account for much more than 1% of poker players, but no women reside on the list of the top 100 all-time tournament money winners. (The Judit Polgar of poker is Vanessa Selbst — a butch lesbian who would be in the top 100 had she not joined a hedge fund.) Whatever sex differences are keeping women out of the top echelons of chess are probably also at work in poker. The blank slatists blame the patriarchy, of course.

If we saw a huge influx of women into poker, inexperienced female players would get slaughtered and lose a ton of money to experienced male players. So is the push to get more women into the game really about feminism, or just virtue signaling? Or, is it about fleecing daughters, wives, and mothers?

Here’s a listener on another theme of the Nate convo — “about young gay people feeling more miserable than we did, even though there are more freedoms”:

Life is better now for gay men because the overt mechanisms of oppression are gone. Currently there is more openness — perceived as a good thing, but which also includes the pressure to be out at school, out at work, out to your family, out to the public, get married (someday), maybe adopt kids, all of it. We had none of that. We had just a few choices mostly concerning survival, which was hard, but simple, uncomplicated, and included not sharing personal information except with your closest confidants and other gay people. These days, gay men feel pressure to share, defend, explain, and promote. That requires a lot of energy, commitment, and vulnerability.

When asked about the depression that young gay men feel and why, Nate Silver references going to nightclubs five times per week, when he first came out. (That was my experience too.) That’s a lot of face-time with others. Social life for most young people now, gay men included, involves social media, technology and dating apps, which means relating to others “second-hand.” That likely contributes to increased alienation and anxiety. They must figure out how to resolve it, just like we did.

A dissent over another episode:

Thanks for your conversation with Isikoff and Klaidman. But I’d like to push back against your pushing back against them about the seriousness of the threat posed by Trump. To be clear, I very much appreciate your desire to be precise and avoid the vague apocalypticism that characterizes much of the “democracy is on the ballot!” rhetoric, and I’m not trying to defend the latter. But there’s such a thing as the pendulum swinging too far in the opposite direction.

For example, you kept asking them, “But was the Georgia stuff REALLY serious?”

Your implicit definition of “really serious” seemed to be successfully preventing the transfer of power in 2020. That seems to me much too narrow and short-term a definition. I see Trump as a battering ram: he’s constantly battering at the castle door of norms and the rule of law. The risk isn’t an immediate breakthrough, but the spread of spider cracks that gradually weaken the door until it breaks.

And spider cracks have indeed been appearing. Some of them were noted by Isikoff and Klaidman, such as the growing (and perfectly understandable) reluctance among decent Americans of varying political stripes to serve as election officers, because who wants to have to go into hiding when Trump summons his mob via Truth Social to threaten death and rape? He’s also shifted the Overton window for permissible discourse in the GOP and has taken over much of its institutional infrastructure — not only at the national level, but also the state level.

What bothers me so much about Trump and his cult is the same thing that ultimately made me start to question wokeness: it’s the cruelty. I winced when you said that the story that he and his minions spread about Ruby Freeman taking drugs was an “LOL” moment — not so LOL for her. What an absolutely horrible ordeal that Trump and his enablers subjected her to.

I think Klaidman had it right: the danger here isn’t a Nazi-style dictatorship, but a more Orbán-style one. Maybe it’s not as bad because power in the US is so much more dispersed, but still plenty grim for anyone who values freedom of thought, conscience, and speech.

I didn’t mean to make light of the hideous treatment of Ruby Freeman and apologize that it came off that way. I take all your good points, and largely agree with them. What I meant by “serious” is an actual, real threat to the democratic system. The clown car of the Trump lackeys in the wake of the 2020 election didn’t quite make the cut. But the broader worry remains and I share it.

A reader adds on Trump:

One of your recent dissenters wrote: “It’s unlikely that any competent, ethical, intelligent person would even want to work in a second Trump administration.” As a graduate of Yale Law School, I cannot tell you how wrong this statement is. I could quickly name off the top of my head dozens of competent and intelligent people from my cohort who would gladly join a second Trump administration — not because they particularly like the man (although some do), but out of sheer ambition and a desire to advance in the rat race. Just look at Hawley and Vance.

A guest rec for the pod:

I write as a fan, with a suggestion for a interviewee: Professor Tricia Rose of Brown University, whose new book, Metaracism: How Systemic Racism Devastates Black Lives—and How We Break Free, is about to be released. You are both serious thinkers, with markedly divergent perspectives on issues of great concern to you both, which I think would make for an informative conversation.

Thanks. Another:

Interesting synchronicity that the same day I read this week’s Dish, I also watched David Baddiel’s short film Jews Don’t Count (and his book is Jews Don’t Count: How Identity Politics Failed One Particular Identity). Worth watching, or reading, if you haven’t already. Baddiel would be a great guest for Dishcast.

A few more recs:

I wonder if you could have a foreign policy expert on the Dish — a Thomas Friedman or Ian Bremmer, or better yet, an expert who is skeptical of the conventional thinking on Ukraine? A recent Dish commenter laid out what has become that line of thought: if Trump wins reelection, he’ll force Ukraine to negotiate a settlement that gives Russia a large slice of its country, it will never get into NATO, and ultimately Russia will swallow Ukraine whole.

I read this all time, and have questions. What’s the alternative? It has always been a fantasy that Ukraine could eject every Russian and indefinitely hold and defend that reclaimed land, regardless of the weapons we give them. We can’t expect Ukraine alone to do what all of NATO was designed for, especially two years into a grinding war of attrition. They simply don’t have enough manpower. Is anyone ready to sent NATO in and start WWIII? I didn’t think so.

If not obliterated in Ukraine, Putin is going to slash through the rest of eastern Europe and threaten NATO? Him and what army? He can’t get out of the Donbas.

And if the stakes are existential, as we are constantly told, why in the world have Biden and other Western leaders not acted like it? Why have they sent Zelensky our military hand-me-downs? Up until this past December, Biden has gotten absolutely 100% of everything he’s asked for Ukraine, and he seems to know that the goal is to save as much of Ukraine as possible while bleeding Russia white — not “winning” in the way that so many say is critical for global stability.

At the end of this I expect a sovereign — albeit smaller — Ukraine welded to the West, while Putin resides over rubble in the east and calls it “victory.” But he will have lost Ukraine as a vassal state, at an enormous price. Biden will have been pivotal in saving Ukraine, but if the establishment is consistent it will blame him for having “lost” Ukraine, based on his low-energy approach over these past two years. Lucky for Biden, Democrats are already creating the narrative that Ukraine had Russia on the ropes until this past winter when the nut jobs in the GOP started to hold up further funding.

China? I don’t think the ultimate status of Ukraine makes one iota of difference in regard to their plans for Taiwan.

To be clear, I am for funding and support for Ukraine, for the purpose of helping it consolidate its defense and put them in the best position for what is inevitably going to be an enormously painful negotiation and concession. The sooner the better for them, because they are losing more people and land every day.

I’d love you to bounce some of this skepticism off of an expert on the Dishcast sometime soon.

You sum up where I am pretty succinctly. But my point in today’s column is precisely that this doesn’t mean holding up military aid now. Au contraire.

A dissent over my skepticism on the Ukraine war:

I find your drift towards neo-isolationism to be baffling. The retreat of the US from world affairs, as proposed by the Trumpian right and woke left, is fantastical in its premises. Both camps suppose that America can make massive concessions to its geopolitical rivals, take its ball, go home, and suffer no long-term consequences. The US has enjoyed unprecedented prosperity and stability since the end of the Second World War because it has used its economic and military resources to maintain a stable world order (essential for economic growth and stability) and credible deterrence.

You’ve flirted with partitioning Ukraine and handing Taiwan over to the PRC. There’s a credible case that the US has overextended itself. So, for argument’s sake, make those concessions if you don’t believe they are vital to the nation’s economic and national security interests. But I would like to hear what you believe would constitute an economic and national security threat.

Would it be worth repudiating our Article 5 commitment to the Baltic states, for instance, should Russia decide that Kaliningrad deserves to be geographically united with the rest of Russia? What if China insists that Japan can no longer remain in the US orbit and hints that it will take drastic measures to ensure that it is the dominant power in the Indo-Pacific? If you want to initiate a recalibration of America’s commitments overseas, fine. But you should be prepared to map out exactly how far you will go and what consequences you’ll accept.

A majority of the American people (and those who sympathize with their instincts, like you) might want to stop being the world’s policeman, and that’s an understandable sentiment. But giving up that responsibility comes with a cost. The last time the US retreated from the world stage in a significant way, it resulted in a very costly world war. Disengaging in the 2020s seems even less viable than it did in the 1920s, given how much more connected we are with the rest of the world economically. Unless you or someone else can articulate a compelling vision for a stable future in a re-calibrated multipolar world, I’m going to remain skeptical.

It seems obvious to me that Japan is not Taiwan. The question is how feasible it is for the US to retain its triumphant position just after World War II indefinitely, given the rise of China and India. I think a little recalibration is needed, especially given American public opinion and loss of faith in foreign policy elites.

This next reader resurfaces the convo I had with Freddie Sayers about Trump:

I just wanted to thank you for summing up so eloquently on your recent UnHerd appearance what so many of us centrists think about Trump. On the one hand, his policies are seemingly actually reasonable, and on the other, he’s a completely intolerable crazy person. This election is a nightmare: vote for an unhinged egomaniac that has good policies but is bad for the republic, or vote for a likable old man whose policies have taken the country in the wrong direction and who likely won’t complete his mandate. It’s a terrible choice for sane people to make.  Your voice is like water in a desert, so keep it up!

A dissent over another part of the Freddie convo:

I have written in the past to you on national security matters, and I want to take the opportunity to respond to your UnHerd episode about a second Trump term. You stated you would be more satisfied with the foreign policy of a second Trump term than a Biden term due to Trump’s isolationist tendencies, which would better manage the current geopolitical crises we are facing.

I think this assessment does not fully account for how Trump’s disturbed psychology impacts his ability to conduct foreign affairs. This problem would be further exacerbated in a second term, as Trump is less constrained by his senior staff, who will largely be sycophants. On three leadership dimensions, Trump’s record indicates he is ill-suited to resolving major foreign policy issues:

1) Dealmaking — Inevitably, all the major conflicts we are facing will need resolution through some kind of deal or settlement. Contrary to his public marketing, Trump was largely an ineffectual dealmaker because his ego and laziness made him more obsessed about being seen as acting tough through bombastic rhetoric than resolving the underlying issues. There were three major instances where this occurred in his administration:

• The first was the renegotiation of NAFTA into the USMCA, which, due to Trump’s anti-trade rhetoric, antagonized two of the US’ major trade partners and resulted primarily in cosmetic updates without addressing underlying US competitiveness issues.

• The second was the Hanoi Summit to negotiate over North Korea’s nuclear status. The summit did not lead to a deal because Trump was too lazy to do the necessary prep work with the North Koreans to gain concessions.

• Lastly, there was the US-China trade deal. Trump liked to act tough on China through tariff imposition, but all the while China ignored the deal’s import requirements and continued with its unfair trade practices. Additionally, because Trump badly wanted this trade deal, he made concessions to China like lifting the ban on the telecommunications company ZTE, which did not serve US interests.

2) Coordination with allies and partners — Given the growing competition with China, the US will need some level of cooperation with allies and partners to preserve its interests. Trump has demonstrated that he is reflexively unilateralist with a zero-sum mentality that causes worse outcomes for the US. He applied tariffs on US allies coupled with public belittling, which hindered cooperating against China. The most egregious example of his unilateralism was the withdrawal from the Iran nuclear deal, which led to Iran getting closer to obtaining a nuclear weapon. If elected, he would likely threaten to withdraw, or outright withdraw, from NATO, undermining US credibility. This would make it more challenging to garner partner military support or provide American access to overseas bases to extend our global strike capacity to respond to threats.

3) Alignment of personal ego to national interests — Trump’s narcissism is well documented, and Trump puts his personal interest above the national interest incessantly. Therefore, he was an easy target for flattery from adversaries to deceive him into thinking their treatment of him reflected their friendliness towards US interests. This was epitomized in 2018 in Helsinki, where Trump publicly sided with Putin and disparaged the US intelligence community over whether Russia interfered in the 2016 election.

Biden has not been perfect, but he is better on all these core metrics of foreign policy leadership than Trump. He can negotiate effectively (AUKUS), he can coordinate with allies to achieve US objectives (getting the Dutch, Koreans, and Japanese to help ban key chip production technology from China), and he is interested in the US national interest and not just his ego. Therefore, if it is a decision about who would better navigate this tense geopolitical landscape, I would trust Biden (even as he faces cognitive decline) over Trump.

Thank you for fostering this community of open dialogue and debate. As a fellow Christian, I have appreciated your recent conversations on faith, and I hope we may both continue to experience God’s grace and peace during this trying season for our country. Also, on a personal level, I hope your new dog is a good fit and can help with the healing process over the loss of Bowie.

I’m grateful for your thoughtful email. I don’t disagree, and was making a broad point about US retrenchment, with which I am more allied with Trump than with Biden. Still wouldn’t dream of voting for Trump — for many of the reasons you cited.

Another reader pushes back on a previous one who wrote the following:

Biden has undoubtedly lost some brain cells over the past four years, but his administration has managed an amazing soft landing for our economy, exceeding all pre-2020 predictions.

The Federal Reserve is not part of the Biden administration. It is, rather, “an agency of the federal government and reports to and is directly accountable to the Congress.” We have all heard countless economists give much credit for the “amazing soft landing” to the Federal Reserve and to the head of the Federal Reserve, Jerome Powell. Your listener went on to say:

I seriously doubt a malignant narcissist who has indicated he will only appoint complete loyalists would be able to accomplish any of those things.

Powell was originally nominated by President Trump.

Of course I vastly prefer Biden to Trump, but let’s stick to the strongest arguments in Biden’s favor.

One more dissent for the week:

I’m a Burkean conservative who loathes performative leftist identity politics and is skeptical of its attendant policy expressions (sex changes for children, DEI, affirmative action, etc.). I’m also quite convinced that Trump is a unique threat to the republic and must be stopped, even if I don’t believe that he has genuine dictatorial potential. Par for the course for your readership so far.

But for heaven’s sake: the Biden doomerism around here is absurdly over the top; daresay reminiscent of the Great Obama/Romney Debate Hysteria of 2012. Your doomerism today seems to have three main vectors, and all of them need serious reality checks:

1. Biden’s first term has been arguably the most successful of the century. That’s a low bar, but this is the president overseeing the healthiest economy in the world (even if presidents don’t deserve that much credit for macroeconomic conditions); the president actually ended the pointless war in Afghanistan; the president has quite skillfully contained a potentially nuclear nightmare in Europe and has so far threaded the needle in an impossible situation in the Middle East; and the president has genuinely resurrected the legislative process and got Washington (somewhat) working again.
2. Of course there have been real disappointments: inflation, the border, and too much cultural deference to the left. Biden is an old-school pol rather than an ideological figure, and no, he’s not doing enough to challenge his left flank and leave a moderate stamp on his party the way a more charismatic politician like Bill Clinton would (and there will probably be disastrous future consequences for the Democratic Party). I can see arguments to place Biden anywhere from +/- one standard deviation from the median president, depending on your taste. But the myopic takes I’m reading on the Dish recently are patently ridiculous; Biden won’t go up on Mount Rushmore, but he’s not the worst president of our lifetimes. Far freaking from it. A vote for him — and not simply against the other guy — will not be a hard vote to cast.
3. While the election is very likely to be close due to our divided society, and Trump could certainly win, Biden is not some guaranteed loser. He should, in fact, be favored to win. Not only is he still the only Democrat who could actually win both his party’s nomination and the general election, his personal political instincts — though derided — have been quite good, as reflected in many elections since the 2020 South Carolina primary through to today. The economic news is plainly turning, and Trump is a truly awful candidate who no longer controls any levers of government to cheat the way he tried to in 2020.
4. Yes, the people who spend time around Biden say he’s slowing down, and his age is a legitimate concern — it’s the biggest wild card over the next nine months, and we are in uncharted waters. But a slurred word here or there, a gaffe from a famously gaffe-prone politician, and “sounding old” are not evidence of cognitive decline. There is, in fact, no actual evidence of cognitive decline. The endlessly-repeated canard that we are watching a senile man erode in real time is obviously belied by point 1 above, and it gives license to every Tom, Dick, and Harry to play neurologist from their sofa (like Bill Frist “examining” Terri Schiavo).

I’m not out to convince you that Biden’s age or record aren’t issues; I’m just begging you to cover them more objectively! Josh Barro is doing the Lord’s work on this, and he needs some help. And as always, thanks for keeping the Dish going all these years!

I’m happy to publish this defense — and we had Josh on the Dishcast last summer to make the case for Biden. And I sure don’t believe anything like “he was the worst president of our lifetimes.” I just don’t think he can command the attention of the country, or has the capacity to reach people or campaign the way a president needs to. Still, I take Nate Silver’s point. Instead of asking Biden to reassure us he’s well enough to campaign and govern effectively for four more years, we need to demand he proves it — and soon. The SOTU will be a moment to test Biden’s capacities; more public events to dispel doubts would help too; a tough interview would be a good idea. Put up or prepare to leave at the convention. Fair?

Another reader responds to my recent piece on the LGBTQIA+ BS:

I’d like to throw in a word of criticism regarding heterosexuals who like to describe themselves as “bi” — the most hopelessly elastic of all these categories. The idea that a greater degree of social tolerance for feelings of same-sex interest requires a whole public project of self-labelling is just self-importance of an embarrassingly immature kind, especially when the label is based on a vanishingly small number of experiences (or even just the passing thought that one might enjoy such an experience if the opportunity ever presented itself).

I’m not under any illusions that we would be better off without labels, or that they don’t have uses, but I do think we could be a little more aware of the vanity involved in rushing to advertise them. The question of what makes a satisfying sexual experience with another person (not to mention the more important question of what makes a satisfying relationship) is a complex matter of particulars, even among people who sit comfortably within one of these obsessively invoked categories, whereas the practice of putting on fashionable labels that don’t really fit is something closer to masturbating in public.

And those people who come out as “queer”? At this point, it could mean anything from straight-woman-with-blue-hair to Robert Mapplethorpe. The pomo left has long wanted to abolish homosexuality. So they’ve conflated it with transness and cultural subversion. It is inherently neither. It is a wiring for same-sex love and attraction. That’s all. And that’s more than enough.

Last but not least:

I thought you might appreciate a new documentary on a history of Pet Shop Boys:

I don’t know if you were contacted as a heads up, but your 2009 interview with Neil Tennant was quoted from a few times. It fit in very well for the documentary.

And a new album is coming soon. Thanks as always for the emails, and send more to dish@andrewsullivan.com.

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