John Gray On The State Of Liberalism

The philosopher returns to the pod as Trump enters his second term.

John Gray is a political philosopher. He retired from academia in 2007 as Professor of European Thought at the London School of Economics, and is now a regular contributor and lead reviewer at the New Statesman. He’s the author of two dozen books, and his latest is The New Leviathans: Thoughts After Liberalism. I’d say he’s one of the most brilliant minds of our time — and my first podcast with him was a huge hit. I asked him to come on this week to get a broader and deeper perspective on where we are now in the world. He didn’t disappoint.

For two clips of our convo — on the ways Trump represents peace, and how heterosexuals have become more like gays — pop over to our YouTube page.

Other topics: this week’s inauguration; the peaceful transfer of power; the panic of the left intelligentsia; the contradictions in the new Trump administration; Bannon vs Musk; Vivek’s quick exit; the techno-futurist oligarchs; Vance as the GOP’s future; tariffs and inflation; the federal debt; McKinley and the Gilded Age; Manifest Destiny; Greenland; isolationism; the neocon project to convert the world; Hobbes and “commodious living”; Malthus and today’s declining birthrates; post-industrial alienation; deaths of despair; Fukuyama’s “End of History”; Latinx; AI and knowledge workers; Plato; Pascal; Dante; CS Lewis’ Abolition of Man; pre-Christian paganism; Puritans and the woke; Žižek; Rod Dreher; Houellebecq; how submission can be liberating; Graham Greene; religion as an anchor; why converts are often so dangerous; Freudian repression; Orwell and goose-stepping; the revolution of consciousness after Christ; Star Wars as neo-Christian; Dune as neo-pagan; Foucault; Oakeshott’s lovers; Montaigne; Judith Shklar; Ross Douthat; the UK’s rape-gangs; Starmer and liberal legalism; the Thomist view of nature; the medieval view of abortion; late-term abortions; and assisted dying.

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: Sebastian Junger on near-death experiences, Jon Rauch on “Christianity’s Broken Bargain with Democracy,” Evan Wolfson on the history of marriage equality, Yoni Appelbaum on how America stopped building things, Nick Denton on the evolution of new media, and Ross Douthat on how everyone should be religious. Please send any guest recs, dissents, and other comments to dish@andrewsullivan.com.

From a fan of last week’s pod:

Thank you so much for your Andrew Neil interview. I can’t remember listening to someone who has such a broad smart take on things today, and on history, who is non-ideological and pragmatic and just smart. Made my day.

From another listener:

There’s an interesting interview between Andrew Neil and Jimmy Savile in 1995. The full interview is embedded in this Daily Mail piece written by Neil, but unfortunately it’s a members-only YouTube video. Neil wrote:

At the time, it was regarded as the toughest interview he’d faced and I suppose in many ways it was. But [The Reckoning] documents over four hours how Savile had got away with his perversions for decade after decade — “in plain sight” as the show puts it — without ever being called properly to account. For my part, the only honest conclusion was that the interview had not been nearly tough enough — and that we had let his many victims down.

Neil was too good a journalist not to know about the allegations against Savile [extraordinarily predatory sex abuse of children and the sick], but given the legal situation in the UK, he could only hint at them obliquely. The media-savvy Savile tries to turn the studio audience against Neil, but eventually Neil triggers a meltdown in Savile by getting him to talk about his experiences down the pits.

The following clip with a banana appears to be the only part of the interview that’s freely available, which is a shame:

On another recent episode — Adam Kirsch on “settler colonialism” — a listener writes:

Thank you for the wonderful programming! I thought your discussion with Kirsch was really interesting and enlightening, and I appreciated the calm and civil tone of the discussion.

It’s worth noting that pre-colonial indigenous American tribes were also constantly warring, enslaving, and pushing the territorial boundaries. These unflattering attributes are not solely European but I guess, sadly, human. We’re jerks.

For example, when Lewis and Clark met Sacagawea, she was a Shoshoni teenager who had been captured at age 12 in a Hidatsa raid and separated from her family and pretty much enslaved. Her Lemhi Shoshone tribe had been pushed out of more favorable land and occupied more marginal territory — not so much “colonized” as expelled. She later, by chance, met her brother Cameahwait in 1805 — when she was part of the Lewis and Clark expedition — in a poignant and emotional reunion. (I loved Stephen Ambrose’s book Undaunted Courage; it tells one of the greatest American stories!) So the disenfranchisement of weaker groups by stronger groups is as old as the hills.

Speaking of old hills, I found this New Yorker article by Elizabeth Kolbert totally fascinating. She makes the point that, any time humans encountered Neanderthals, Neanderthals always lost out. They interbred and lived in proximity but, like the Ice Age megafauna after encountering humans, Neanderthals always disappeared from the scene. Colonization indeed.

George Carlin had some bracing thoughts about how we talk about Native Americans and “natives” in general:

Another fan of the Kirsch pod:

Your discussion of Israelis and Palestinians was a master class. I learned more about the history of the conflict in that hour than I could in a semester of college. Both of you and Kirsch had your points of view but were respectful and so knowledgeable. The best interview ever!

And another:

I appreciated this episode so much, because you asked the kind of questions I have been wanting to ask. Too much discussion of this conflict either memory-holes October 7th or memory-holes the West Bank settlements. However, I do wish you had asked Kirsch about whether those settlements could be rolled back at any time in the future.

This next listener has a grim view of the Jewish state:

After visiting Israel ten years ago, I am less impressed than you are about what Israelis have created there. It’s a crowded country, overly urbanized and developed, which is militarized everywhere you go, with soldiers swaggering about carrying big-ass machine guns. In eastern Jerusalem, I listened to a Palestinian woman screaming as she was being arrested by Israeli police or soldiers, who were sort of laughing as they subdued her. It reminded me of the metaphor of George Orwell where he says in 1984, “If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face — forever.”

In my opinion, Israel is a highly stressed society unable to live at peace with its neighbors. It kind of doesn’t matter how intelligent and energetic you are, how attractive and healthy, how many degrees you have, or how much money you earn. If you are not at rest with yourself and the people you live next to, your life will be difficult and unhappy.

If Israel didn’t have external enemies to fight against, the extreme variety and differences in people and cultures that have immigrated there might cause Israelis to turn on each other — like the recent demonstrations against Netanyahu have shown, and the conflict between secular and religious Jews.

Here’s a dissent:

I’m your biggest fan, but I think you mischaracterized the founding intent of Israel in your conversation with Adam Kirsch. You understand the prelapsarian fantasies and fallacies of the “settler colonial” theorists, who imagine a world in which some of the fundamentals of human nature and history never compel anyone to move from their homeland. But your description of the Israeli nation-building project as yet another utopian vision — as a fundamentally bad idea — is off.

Far from an airy dream, the creation of Israel was a painstaking, desperate necessity. In the words of Haviv Rettig Gur in an excellent conversation with Michael Moynihan:

Israel is the last living Jew in the Eastern Hemisphere … the Jews emptied out of everywhere, and as the world homogenised, few places did it as completely and perfectly as the Arab world, and the Arab world is still in the process of brutally homogenising. And the Jews found one place, one refuge, across three continents … so is the argument that they should have died? … Anti-Zionism that treats the idea of Zionism as if it’s one ideological option among many — Zionism as this kind of luxurious ideological option of safe people — is an entirely Western cartoon.

Actual Zionism is the last living remnants of a destroyed civilisation in the only place where they could survive. And everyone then deciding that they are the problem with the world and have to be destroyed in order for the redemption of the world to happen, everyone in the Muslim context, in the Marxist context, and now in Western academia.

So, like our friend Bill Maher says, is it unjust that a single Palestinian had to be displaced in all of this? Of course it is. But that cycle of injustice finds its origins in a much deeper nature, place, and time than 1948. To lay blame for it on the Jews of Israel, or to suggest that Palestinians suffer merely for the sake of an Arcadian Zionist dream, is to risk something you decry and avoid in every other area: a reductionist view of history.

Here’s a guest rec for a future episode:

I’d like to suggest Nicholas Christakis for the Dishcast. He’s the Sterling Professor of Social and Natural Science at Yale and directs its Human Nature Lab. In his book Blueprint: The Evolutionary Origins of a Good Society, he argues that we focus too much attention on the human’s deeply ingrained tendencies toward aggression, violence, destruction, and bigotry, and not enough on other strongly-wired aspects of human nature: social cooperation, altruism, and capacity for love. How much of the outcomes — good and bad — are wired into the human genome, and how much are determined by environmental conditions and culture? Perennial questions he’s studied and thought a lot about.

Christakis came on the pod three years ago to talk Covid and friendship, and he was a great guest, so maybe he’ll come back at some point. Another rec:

Please have on Jay Bhattacharya to talk about Covid times and censorship he faced from the Biden administration. I’ve been following his substack with Rav Arora, but I have yet to hear a truly great interview with him.

Great idea. Thank you. On the theme of this week’s column, a reader writes:

I’m a long-term Dish subscriber and someone who frequently has found your anti-DEI writings to be dumb. But I don’t write to delve into that fight. Rather, I think this post from Josh Marshall is notable:

The Purported DEI Rollback

One more point to keep an eye on. You’ve likely seen that the White House is doing a series of Executive Orders and letters to employees demanding “DEI” be rooted out of these agencies. News organizations have mostly used this terminology. But whatever you think about DEI, this is deeply and intentionally misleading. This gives the impression that they’re clawing back various #MeToo and post-George Floyd government policies. But they’re actually repealing a host of Executive Orders and departmental policies going all the way back to the Johnson administration. A lot of it is very basic employment non-discrimination rules and contracting non-discrimination rules.

Marshall’s point is important. And I realized that this may be a partial explanation for some of the frequent divides between you and some of your readers (like myself). You may be railing against some modern excesses of the DEI movement, but much of the Republican anti-DEI rhetoric is cover for rolling back civil rights laws and programs dating back to Johnson and the Civil Rights Acts. Without condescension, I understand that the latter is something you find objectionable.

That sort of conflation was echoed by John Harwood this week: “when does [Trump] bring back segregated water fountains?” To which my answer is: since when is enforcement of the Civil Rights Act undermining civil rights? Josh is an old friend and fellow pioneer of online media, but he has become very partisan lately. The LBJ policy that Trump is finally ending was not about anti-discrimination but “affirmative action.” It started the process of racial quotas and hiring for reasons other than merit. I’m thrilled it’s gone.

From another reader:

Among the various post-election topics, one that interests me very much is what I call the Death of the Uniparty. During the election, all of the establishment politicians came out for Harris. You had the Cheneys, Kinzinger, the Never Trumpers, and the Lincoln Project actually supporting her; and many others — Pence, Collins, Romney, Murkowski — said they were not voting for Trump. We were subjected to innumerable lists of former Bush, McCain, Romney, and Trump staffers all saying that they could not back Trump, and in many instances they actually endorsed Harris.

Now that Trump has won, we see the following happening:

• Bernie Sanders out today (Sunday) with an opinion piece on Fox (!) stating the areas where he can work with Trump, including reductions in interest rates on credit cards, prices for prescription drugs, food additives, trade policy, and waste/fraud/abuse, especially in DOD.
• Ro Khanna saying that he’s on board with cutting out waste at DOD — which failed an audit for the seventh year in a row and cannot find over $800 billion of supplies.
• Elizabeth Warren with an opinion piece in the WSJ saying that she is with Trump if he wants to “unrig the economy.”
• AOC asking her some of her constituents why they split their ticket and voted for Trump and her; and they responded that both of them wanted, in their own way, to change the current system, which was perceived as broken:

This illustrates that the divide in our country now is not Dem/GOP, or even liberal/conservative. It’s populist/establishment. Far-left populists have come to the same conclusion as far-right populists: the system is rigged, corrupt, and does not work for the working and middle classes. While their prescriptions for what should take its place may differ, they both agree that much of the present structure and system has to be dismantled. The far left also tends to be more protectionist and isolationist than the establishment, which again fits with Trump’s point of view. McConnell and Schumer are closer to each other in their worldview than either are to Cotton or Sanders, respectively.

There’s going to be a lot of issues coming up where the Democratic opposition will not be unanimous. Look at the recent Laken Riley Act, which passed the House with 46 Dem votes and the Senate with 12 Dem votes — including Fetterman and Gallego as co-sponsors. Dem Senators such as Ossoff, Peters, Smith, and even Shaheen know how the voters shifted in 2024 and are going to be wary of being too “resistant” to everything proposed by Trump.

Seeing high-profile liberal — nay even radical — icons support planks in Trump’s program is quite significant. It will give cover to other liberals to support things they might want to support but would be afraid of the repercussions with their base. They can point to Sanders and Warren and say, “It can’t be that bad if they are voting for it.”

Another has some recommended reading:

I really hope you saw Ross Douthat’s interview with Marc Andreessen. Andreessen explains how he and other techies shifted right, towards Trump, in reaction to what wokeness was doing to their companies, and how the Biden administration bullied them with wokeness. I have noticed on the left that more and more people want to deny that woke is, or ever was, a thing — that it’s all some bogeyman invented by the right and irrelevant in the real world. Andreessen’s story should bury that lie for good (but of course it won’t).

Speaking of top techies, Elon Musk is called out by this reader:

Elon is a weird dude. Like many others, I commend him on the success of his various businesses. But I saw this today on X: Elon is most likely lying about his video-game prowess. It’s both a little sad and somewhat disturbing that he is making these claims:

The discussion under that X thread is interesting. Lots of people are saying they would have been happy to know he was an avid gamer, he didn’t have to be good, let alone the best. Other people are dismissing the claim — so credulous that they won’t even watch a snippet of the video — who then proceed to ask, “What evidence is there for him lying about this?” And then others are saying, so what? Who cares if he is lying. Why does that even matter?

Somehow, though, this is one of the most damaging things for me to learn about Elon. What does it say about a man’s character — someone who has achieved so much wealth, power, and status— that he still feels the need to construct this type of lie?

We mostly know the contours and extent of Trump’s failings and weaknesses at this point. And I think a reasonable person can be on edge about Trump but have some faith in the possibility that he will in fact eventually be gone, having been more bluster than any existential threat. But with Elon, it feels like there are still significant unknown unknowns. Set aside his ties to China for a moment and just ask: if a man with this much power and success is lying about video games, what other unscrupulous decisions might he make?

I find his public statements increasingly ridiculous. He’s an egomaniac. I have a burner account on X and, increasingly, all I get are his inane pronouncements and race fights. I suspect his political life will flame out soon enough.

On the gender front, a reader writes:

I would like to thank you for your “In the ‘Stacks” link to Kier Adrian Grey’s piece about her evolution away from using nonbinary pronouns. Her own account was beautifully honest and, to my mind, authentic.

My daughter will graduate from high school this year. Many of her friends are “theater kids,” and I have watched these friends — all awesome kids — go through every cultural sex/gender trend of the past five years, including polyamory, queerness, nonbinary status, and even renaming themselves Jinx. After all of that, it may not surprise you that 100% of her male theater friends have turned out to be gay men, and 100% of her female friends have turned out to be heterosexual girls who have dropped their “they/them” pronouns and various queer labels.

That’s why Ms. Grey’s piece rings so true. Rather than some conservatives’ assertions that queerness is a result of grooming or peer pressure, it seems more like something of an exploration or even rebellion for many kids. I don’t mean to minimize it. Puberty is rough, and even rougher in the age of MeToo and toxic masculinity. I wouldn’t want to grow up right now! So this feels like a sincere effort to figure themselves out in a new, strange world.

But it also vindicates your warnings for adults who would pressure these kids to make irreversible decisions about their bodies, and for the parents who are afraid to stand up to them. Ms. Grey’s evolution gave her more insight and empathy for others because she had the space to figure things out for herself. We should insist our kids get the same opportunity, no matter what decisions they ultimately make as adults.

I agree but differ with my reader on where the ideas came from. They come from critical theory mad-libs on Tumblr. The difference between this generational experiments in living is that adults in authority gave them all legitimacy, and then pushed kids into irrevocable medical experiments. But yes, in my optimistic moments, I think that adopting “queer” identity or the LGBTQIA+ label is this generation’s version of being a Goth. But being a Goth never caused anyone to destroy their willy.

Here’s another plaudit for “In The ‘Stacks” (which is compiled every week by Chris):

You wrote a factually accurate and completely clear headline: “The House just passed a bill banning males from female sports.” Yours was the first accurate headline I’ve seen on this. A clear and accurate headline has stumped the NYT, LA Times, etc, who continue to write headlines that some sort of anti-trans bill has been passed. The bill has nothing to do with anti-anyone. No one is being banned from sport. If the headlines could be as simple and clear as yours, this thing would tank in no time. Not lost on regular people is that it’s unfair for men to compete against women, and it’s why we have women’s sports (duh).

I’m so embarrassed by my party.

Another reader:

I’m anti-Trump, and I agree with you when you wrote:

When I read stories like this from the Woke Post, I’m just staggered by the dumbness, ignorance, and paranoia so many gays seem to live with. They’re moving up their marriage plans before the Trumpocalypse! And yet, Trump removed the opposition to gay marriage from the GOP platform ….

Yes, it seems to be “dumbness, ignorance, and paranoia,” but it also smacks of self-importance. First of all, there’s the moral superiority of victimhood: I’m a persecuted minority! Secondly, there’s the need to feel inherently transgressive: Society feels threatened by my very existence! This is the Oppression Olympics, and we’re going for the gold.

Plus, of course, there’s more than a bit of TDS mixed in. To add to your list of items showing Trump’s gay friendliness: his mentor was Roy Cohn; Trump wrapped himself in the Pride flag during his 2016 campaign; there’s this 2019 tweet celebrating Pride Month; and there’s this from 2022:

Former President Donald Trump addressed an audience gathered at his Mar-a-Lago club and estate in Palm Beach, Fla., Thursday night for the Log Cabin Republicans’ Spirit of Lincoln gala, the conservative LGBTQ group’s flagship event. “We are fighting for the gay community, and we are fighting and fighting hard,” Trump said.

And just this week:

There’s a lot more examples like that. But reality will not deny us our victimhood!

The nomination of Bessent, as I write in my column this week, is a classic example. The transqueers regard Trump as the devil, and so when he appoints an openly gay man to be Treasury Secretary — the highest office ever occupied by an open homosexual — they simply don’t know what to say or do. So as I show, they simply ignore it. I talked to a pretty well informed gay friend last night and he had no idea that Bessent had been nominated or was even gay. There’s absolutely no mention in the gay press or HRC’s website. If a Democrat had done this, we’d be slogging through dozens of fawning profiles.

One more reader on victimhood:

As an adolescent, four decades ago, I told only one friend that I was gay — and he never spoke to me again. I believe (though cannot be entirely certain) that many other relationships met their end for the same reason. One sibling I was close to summarily told me one day to stay the hell away from him. Our constant companionship ended in the blink of an eye and never resumed (and he is now dead). At the time, I assumed he was going through personal issues, but now I suspect he had connected the various dots indicating my homosexuality.

By the time I was in high school, I was entirely alone. Gay support groups or communities were inconceivable to me. If any existed at that time, I not only remained ignorant of them but, in fact, could not possibly have imagined such things. I now know that Pride parades did take place in those days, but I have no recollection of ever hearing about them.

And, to be clear, it does not feel to me like I’m talking about ancient history. Everything I describe took place in a liberal family living in a blue state just a few decades ago.

That being the case, I am constantly amazed by the swift and astonishingly radical change in our culture’s growing acceptance of homosexuality. The transformation has been so fast that it has often caught me by surprise. The first time I ever saw an episode of Will and Grace, for example, I genuinely feared for the lives of its lead performers. I could not wrap my head around the idea that they would be safe from serious risk of harm after embracing, if not openly promoting, homosexuality in front of a national audience.

And that brings me to your reader’s comments:

Well, clutch my gay pearls! This is America. People get to call you names and more generally believe you deserve hellfire for whatever reason they want. You’re allowed to be similarly insulting towards them, and think as little of them as you’d like. Allowing this is a good thing. It’s what makes freedom in a pluralistic society possible …

When the gay younglings come to us complaining about it, we need to say, ‘Suck it up, fellow faggot; this is what equality looks like!’ (I wouldn’t normally use that language; I’m being rude as part of my point.)

I agree. The societal evolution I describe did not take place because gays decided to obsess over their status as victims. It took place thanks to homosexuals who increasingly managed to live their lives with ever greater amounts of dignity regardless of the overwhelming hostility they faced.

It’s simply an unfortunate but unavoidable fact that a malevolent hatred of homos will always be with us. That sort of thing is just an inescapable aspect of human nature. Not only can it not be stamped out, but any efforts to do so will likely backfire. We cannot mandate genuine tolerance. At best, we can only try to inspire it. We cannot dictate outcomes without the serious risk of turning ourselves into the enemies of an open society … and then we become the very oppressors we once condemned.

The challenging reality is, yes, gays will always need a thick skin and a lot of resilience. The good news, however, is that they now live in a world that accepts them to an extent I never thought possible as a boy. From one generation to the next, the world has changed for the better. But after achieving so much, let’s please be careful not to blow it (so to speak).

I couldn’t have put it better myself.

Thanks as always for the dissents and other emails, and we welcome yours at dish@andrewsullivan.com.

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