Ian Buruma On Spinoza And Free Thought

Inspiration from a 17th century Jewish dissenter.

Ian is a historian, a journalist, and an old friend. He’s currently the Paul Williams Professor of Human Rights and Journalism at Bard College. He served as the editor of The New York Review of Books and as foreign editor of The Spectator, where he still writes. He has written many books, including Theater of Cruelty, The Churchill Complex, and The Collaborators — which we discussed on the Dishcast in 2023. This week we’re covering his latest book, Spinoza: Freedom’s Messiah, and the example of Spinoza’s intellectual integrity in a deeply tribal and emotional time.

For two clips of our convo — on cancel culture in the 17th century, and how Western liberalism is dying today — see our YouTube page.

Other topics: Ian’s Dutch and Jewish roots; the Golden Age of Amsterdam; its central role in finance and trade; when Holland was a republic surrounded by monarchies; the Quakers; Descartes; Hobbes; how sectarianism is the greatest danger to free thought; religious zealots; Cromwell; Voltaire; Locke; the asceticism of Spinoza; his practical skill with glasswork; the religious dissents he published anonymously; his excommunication; his lack of lovers but plentiful friends; how most of his published work was posthumous; his death at 44; the French philosophers of the Enlightenment shaped by Spinoza; how he inspired Marx and Freud; why he admired Jesus; Zionism; universalism; Socrates; Strauss’ Persecution and the Art of Writing; Puritanism through today; trans activists as gnostic; Judith Butler; the right-wing populist surge in Europe; mass migration; Brexit and the Tory fuckup; Trump’s near-alliance with Russia; DOGE; the rising tribalism of today; and thinking clearly as the secret to happiness.

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: Evan Wolfson on the history of marriage equality, Nick Denton on China and AI, Francis Collins on faith and science, Michael Lewis on government service, Douglas Murray on Israel and Gaza, and Mike White of White Lotus fame. Please send any guest recs, dissents, and other comments to dish@andrewsullivan.com.

From a fan of last week’s pod:

Your discussion with Christopher Caldwell was terrific. I didn’t agree with everything he said, but what a relief to hear a measured analysis of the Trump presidency so far.

I’m no fan of Trump, but the strange collective hysteria in response to him is frustrating. Like all presidents, Trump does good things, and he does bad things. But the mere mention of his name and everyone shouts the same list of crimes, over and over. Some of these crimes are real and some imagined, but what’s missing is thoughtful analysis and smart opposition. Take a deep breath, people. As Caldwell said, we’re only six weeks into this.

Yes, but the creepy, dangerous spot-truth cultism remains. From a critic of Caldwell:

He’s an example of how every Trump supporter projects onto Trump what they want him to be and refuse to believe what he has been telling them and actually doing for the past 10 years. It’s the same for the working class as it is for a conservative intellectual like Christopher Caldwell. What they want Trump to be may be different for each supporter, but they all rationalize his behaviors to fit their wishful thinking.

And another:

Your conversation with Caldwell brought to mind the play The Fantasticks, which I assume you saw at sometime during its very long run. The devilish character, El Gallo, takes the heroine on a journey around the world and gives her a magic mask to wear, through which all looks rosy and fine. At various points the mask slips and she sees the reality before her — for example, at first seeing an auto-de-fe as a bonfire and people celebrating, but when the mask slips, she sees people being burned alive. Urged to put the mask on again, all turns rosy and fine.

Here’s another clip of the episode, on the Musk mayhem:

Another listener writes:

I just wanted to briefly call your attention to a trend that is fast becoming an established Newtonian law: that any and all attempts to present a rational, ethically-defensible theory of Trump must be followed promptly — usually within days — by a regrettable Trump incident that unequivocally disproves that theory and embarrasses the poor schmo who proposed it.

Just a few minutes into your chat with Caldwell, I couldn’t help but smile. He clearly spends a fairly large amount of his time and energy working on enlightened theories of Trump that he hopes next time might defy the Law of Trumpian Dynamics, or whatever you want to call it. The Ukrainian portion of your conversation was particularly demonstrative of the futility of this pursuit, being released on the same day that Trump and Vance arranged for a tag-team, Real Housewives-style, shout-down hazing of President Zelensky in front of the White House press corps.

You were of course correct in your assessment of Trump: he’s a bottomlessly immoral narcissist and bully whose worldview is one of a cheap gangster. This is obvious to anyone, but of course it’s awfully unflattering, and Trump needs his defenders. But in the future, just to test the sincerity of your next Trump theorist guest, I wonder if you might ask them right off the bat if they believe Trump is person of any integrity, or if they would hypothetically trust a Donald Trump with anything of personal value to them. I suspect the non-answers would be revealing.

I’d just like to ask them if they believe, as Trump does, that he is the greatest president in history, including George Washington.

One more on the episode:

I wish you had given Caldwell more time to speak, because the conversation could have gone to some really interesting places. I think he understands Trump in a way that a lot of people don’t. I am a person in their 20s who grew up in the Deep South of liberalism (the Bay Area), but who actually voted for Trump in 2024 (“you either die a hero or live long enough to see yourself become the villain”). I agnostically support what Trump is doing, and Caldwell is articulating a nuance about him and his motivations that I think is generally lacking.

Trump is a tribal president, but we are in a tribal time. A lot of chest beating happens now (on both sides), but if you understand this as a political necessity, Trump takes on a different shade. You should check out Marshall Mcluhan if you haven’t read/listened to him in awhile:

While you can hate Trump, you should try to see past his shortcomings — not because they aren’t shortcomings, but because they are shortcomings from a different time. The change driven by screens to the social-cultural environment is the same change that has caused colleges to stop being the bastions of learning and civility.

I also listened to your conversation with Carole Hooven, and something I noticed in her story, and from my personal experience in academia, is how tribal DEI and left-wing orthodoxy are. You are either in the group or out of the group. Saying people are tribal in today’s world is nothing new, but when put in the frame of McLuhan’s global village, this tribalism is seen less as a marker of America’s divisions and more the effect of a completely different technological landscape.

In the global village, the perfect face with the perfect answer (Kennedy, Reagan, Clinton, Obama) starts to stand out as not genuine, because it’s not; it’s too perfect. It’s why Kamala comes off as fake, because the nature of everyone being a publisher, and everyone having a camera in their pocket, means that there is no separation between private life and public life. She has to be extremely fake to be television ready 24/7. Trump does well on social media because he has no sense of obligation to what he says. In a crazy way, this quality is an extremely helpful tool in getting things done when everything you say is written down and retrievable.

I’m not sure he’s “getting things done,” to be honest.

Next up, a reader remarks on the Trump-Zelensky clusterfuck in the Oval Office last week:

Seeing that drama unfold on camera, to see Zelensky’s beleaguered face, the performative anger of Vance, and the sincere anger and contempt of crimson-faced Trump exhibited has left me as just about as depressed about the world as I can recall since Trump’s initial election in 2016.

But I cannot help but express: just what was Zelensky thinking? It was obvious to any observer that Trump believes what he believes about Ukraine (Ukraine is the aggressor, Zelensky is corrupt, etc.) He just believes it. Everyone also knows that rule #1 is: You. Do. Not. Contradict. Trump. You just don’t.

This confrontation was inevitable. It was basically scripted. How did the hundreds of planners and advisors allow this to happen?

Ukraine should have insisted on no press conference. No Oval Office meeting. Zelensky should not have even travelled to DC. Reduce any chance of stuff being on television, and Trump would have turned his attention to other things.

The agreement on minerals in exchange for — we still know not what — should have been signed BEFORE the public engagements. Or Zelensky should have insisted on a meeting on camera with Rubio, not Trump. Instead, we got the ugly scene we all saw because everyone still seems to think (or pretends to think) that Trump is normal and responds to a world of facts.

I get it. Ukraine wants to show they are an independent and strong country. France and the UK got their own Oval Office meetings; so should Ukraine. But why not have Macron and Starmer come WITH Zelensky to the White House? Stand united WITH him. Instead, France and the UK scurried away, basically anticipating the fireworks that would occur on Friday. Cowards.

In order for Ukraine to survive, Zelensky needs to resign. It is profoundly unfair, but Trump despises him — personally and irrevocably. Ukraine cannot hope to receive any additional support in word, dollar, or deed from the US until Zelensky departs the stage. He has already said he’s willing to go if he gets NATO membership. (We know that is a political impossibility.) So Zelensky needs to get on the phone with the EU this very instant and see what can be done. Sign over the mineral rights to the EU and to Canada. Throw Australia and Japan into the mix. Exclude the US. And then depart.

Zelensky deserves so much for his service, but he’s now an impediment to his own country’s freedom. It saddens me deeply to write this, but it’s the truth. Politics ain’t fair. As Thatcher said, “It’s a funny old world.” The comedian in Zelensky will appreciate that.

I find this pretty persuasive. But the problem with Trump is there is no guarantee he would treat any Ukrainian president differently. He despises the country, and is saturated in the online right’s demonization of the place.

Here’s a dissent over last week’s column, “The Other Resistance — From The Right”:

Without taking anything away from the integrity or quality of the conservative writers you named, I nonetheless found the result a bit disingenuous. Yes, as you say, the authors and publications you cite are speaking truth to power. Yes, there’s a resistance from the right. Yes, Hagan Scotten’s letter was a literal high point of my day when I read it.

However, positioning these achievements in a contest with the left reads as petty and snide.

It didn’t take much — all of two or three sentences — but ultimately, you chose to set up a dichotomy between critics on the left and right, and it detracted from your praise. The comparison is asymmetrical. Trump was never a member of the right-leaning establishment; he voted for Democrats and attended elite NYC parties, starred in a TV show, and played bits in Hollywood movies. Unlike Biden — whose floundering 2020 campaign was rescued from within the party by people like Jim Clyburn — Trump rode his escalator like a Trojan Horse into the Republican Party.

So of course, people like David Brooks and Jonah Goldberg have reason to stand up to Trump; he’s antithetical to every principle they’ve ever believed and every word they’ve ever written. Trump was never on their side, and indeed, many of the pundits you listed didn’t vote for the man, so it’s unsurprising to see them eager to offer critiques.

That’s not to say that it wouldn’t have been nice to see more critique from within the left during the Biden administration, but the asymmetries run deeper. Trump’s excesses arrived suddenly and clearly, but those of us who worked in academia in the 2000s saw wokeness arrive more stealthily. Covid no doubt exacerbated every problem in 2020-2022 in ways psychologists will study for some time. And January 6 created a fog over the first months of the Biden administration where, to many, anything seemed normal by comparison. And so on.

Perhaps I’m just making excuses. But then again, despite your piece, it’s also not as though there haven’t been people from the left critiquing Biden and the Democrats’ wokeward turn, often forcefully: Sam Harris, Bill Maher, Caitlin Flanagan, Nellie Bowles, Ruy Teixeira, Noah Smith, Josh Barro, and Conor Friedersdorf, just to start. Your two–time podcast sparring partner Briahna Joy Gray has consistently argued from her own perch on the far left against identity politics (in 2017 chiding Coates, in 2019 arguing to center economics in the campaign, and in 2024 in an otherwise misguided opinion about Israel and Palestine). And while one might argue that Matt Yglesias was too late to address the worst of wokeness, there’s a reason your weekly award is named for Yglesias.

Since you compared satirical publications, it’s worth recalling that I chuckled at The Onion mocking the 2020 Democratic convention for its “successful attainment of 81.4% of diversity and inclusion prerequisites” and nodded grimly at them calling out Biden’s obvious age issues a year before his infamous debate.

Again, perhaps I’m making excuses for some writers I enjoy, or perhaps I’m cherrypicking. But then again, perhaps it’s just unnecessary to bring up the left at all when rightly praising the many conservative commentators criticizing Trump. Can’t qualitative — rather than comparative — descriptions suffice? Can’t we laud Ben Shapiro without taking a shot at Colbert, or admire a smart podcast on the right without having to find a perfect analog on the left? Aren’t we all better off living in a world where sometimes we can just give credit where credit is due without taking a gratuitous shot?

I know it was only two or three sentences where you positioned the left media against the right, but it left a bad taste in this reader’s mouth — like adding “only” two or three tablespoons of anchovy paste to a chocolate cake, ruining an otherwise perfect bite.

Yes, it was basically an aside in the piece. But even an aside is intolerable for some. And let’s just say that the people you cite — Sam Harris, Bill Maher, Caitlin Flanagan, Nellie Bowles, Ruy Teixiera, Noah Smith, Josh Barro, and Conor Friedersdorf — are not figures in the Democratic or liberal-left establishment. Many are loathed by the left. And Barro was a Biden booster for years. My point, and maybe it should not have been distilled down to an aside, is that on core issues — inflation, immigration, wokeness — there was less dissent on the left at the very start than there is now on the right. The one exception I recall was Larry Summers, who rightly warned of inflation.

Another dissent:

Forgive me if I don’t share your belief that the pushback against Trump from many of the so-called conservatives you mention in your column counts as “resistance”. Ever since the initial aftermath of the 2020 election, and especially after January 6, every single speech and column that compared Trump to any of his competitors for the presidency should have begun and ended with this sentence: “Donald Trump tried to overturn a fair election in order to keep himself in power.” To quote Orwell, “We have now sunk to a depth at which restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men.”

Where was Sen. John Kennedy’s concern about the rule of law when he was supporting Trump for president? Same for Chris Rufo, Ben Shapiro, Josh Hawley, and Rod Dreher. Andrew McCarthy wrote that he had “less trepidation” about a Trump presidency than a Harris presidency. Ed Whelan wrote that the question of whether a legal conservative should vote for Trump was a “conundrum”. Bari Weiss wrote shortly before the election that one-third of the Free Press staff were voting for Harris, one-third for Trump, and one-third were undecided or wouldn’t say. That means that only one-third of them were sufficiently concerned about a candidate who had tried to overturn a fair election that they intended to vote for the only person who could stop that candidate from becoming president.

Everything that is happening now could reasonably have been expected from a candidate who had so little regard for the Constitution and the rule of law that he refused to accept the result of a fair election. Sen. Kennedy et al. only value the rule of law when it suits their purposes, which at this time is getting Trump to be more pragmatic about achieving what they want.

You probably get this, but many people don’t, including seemingly everyone who questions Vance on the subject: don’t let anyone get away with claiming that the 2020 election wasn’t fair because of government censorship or unspecified “irregularities”. If an election could be invalidated by what information the government does or does not release, or what the media does or does not report, no election in history would have been valid. Trump doesn’t claim that the election was invalid for those reasons, or at least not only for those reasons. He claims that the election itself — the casting and counting of votes — was fraudulent because of millions of “illegals” voting, fake ballots being counted, cheating by voting machines, etc. That’s what he requires everyone in his administration to profess what is entirely false.

As you know, I agree. I endorsed Harris despite my horror at much of her agenda, because she was not a sociopath who tried to overturn our democracy, and would do so again in a heartbeat.

One more comment from the in-tray:

In your latest column and most of your recent work, your primary focus on the right has been on Trump. This is certainly understandable, as he uses up all of the oxygen in the room, given that he is mentally unfit and “governs” like a bull in a China shop. However, I continue to believe that the main division on the right is not anti-Trump vs. pro-Trump, but the old right (which Trump vanquished in 2015-16) vs. the new right.

There was a reason you stopped supporting the old right, personified by Bush, McCain, Romney, Ryan and the like. The old right had nothing short of contempt for its base and completely ignored our concerns, when it wasn’t actively working against us on issues like immigration, trade, and cultural battles. Its congressional representatives and thought leaders were completely captured by corporate donors, and it viewed endless war as an end in itself.

Its answer to every concern of the multiracial working class that was eager to vote Republican was some embarrassing stew of tax cuts and deregulation, followed by a few remarks about being a churchgoer. And above all else, it was unbelievably intellectually boring —to read any one outlet, such as the Wall Street Journal, was to have read them all.

In contrast, I see the new right not as some sort of cult of personality, but as a ragtag group of political outsiders, recent converts, and independent minds. It’s a diverse coalition of working-class patriots, cultural traditionalists, reactionaries, health-nut moms, tech enthusiasts, disaffected young men — as well as much of the old right coalition. Unlike the old right, the new right is willing to rethink outdated policies and alliances that have led to sclerotic and ineffective government, and it’s finally tuned in to popular culture (there is a reason that Trump’s highest approval rating is among young adults). The new right knows how to reach a broad audience and clearly has a lot more fun doing it, laughing and trolling while the opposition always takes the bate and clutches its pearls in response.

There is no denying that much of what the new right produces is downright stupid and that there are some dark and dangerous elements. But where else could you see a vigorous and lively debate in which the world’s richest man (and arguably the second-most powerful person) would engage with tiny and anonymous social media accounts and begin to somewhat change his mind in real time, as happened recently over the H-1B debate?

There are many reasons I look forward to Trump being out of the picture, none more so than that we can finally have an honest debate about the proper framework of the right and the ways in which the old right failed, without him having to be the sole focal point. And I respect your openness to Vance (the only one on the horizon I see as able to carry the torch), including your recognition that he had no good choice but to align himself with Trump and all the resulting craziness. I’m glad that you haven’t joined some of the other names from the old right you listed in your column, who will no doubt continue their new grift of “conservatives who bash everything about Republicans to progressive audiences.”

Well, maybe my column this week will not be to your liking. But I do respect the shift in the conservative intelligentsia away from brain-dead Reaganism and neoconservatism. I’ve done my best to understand the arguments and air them. On immigration, I’m no longer a Reaganite because the world has changed and American cohesion is threatened by too rapid and too random mass migration. The Weekly Dish is not The Bulwark. I remain a conservative. But I cannot acquiesce to Trump, and the danger he represents. Maybe one day, my take will seem dumb and cowardly. But Trump is a greater threat to liberal democracy and the rule of law today than at any point in his first term. These foundational things matter most.

Thanks as always for the emails, especially the dissents, and send yours to dish@andrewsullivan.com. You can also sound off in Substack Notes. From my feed this week:

When The New Republic ran a cover story on trans rights (long after my time there), Bill Kristol’s Weekly Standard, which used to run a weekly parody page of something in the media, merely reprinted the TNR cover without any change at all — with the mocking title: “Not A Parody”. For Kristol, trans rights were literally laughable.

When Kristol was asked to comment on this, he replied: “We simply designated the New Republic’s cover as that week’s Not a Parody. It speaks for itself, and others are free to comment as they wish.”

This, after a career spent trying to promote and legitimize conversion therapy for gay children and adults.

Just keeping the record straight, as it were.

The record this week:

When I noted this week my reaction to Trump’s address to Congress — “Whatever it is that allows one to watch that speech and analyze it in any serious way is something I just don’t have” — it elicited a ton of comments, such as:

Look, I don’t support Trump, I didn’t vote for Trump, and I don’t like a lot of what he’s doing. But I don’t think I’m his “victim,” and I don’t think you are either. Presidents being narcissistic gaslighting psychopaths is not new. What’s new is the media giving themselves permission not to even pretend to be objective with this particular figure. I truly don’t get it.

Another reader:

STOP TAKING TRUMP LITERALLY. … His standard operating procedure seems to be lobbing a hand grenade of chaos into any and all situations and then opportunistically seizing upon the moment to gain whatever advantage is available. More importantly, his tendency towards pure chaos makes him unpredictable — a good thing for America in relation to its adversaries given that the standard mould in the West is predictable, petty, lesser men trying to emulate Lincoln or Churchill.

Read my response to them and others here. One more note from a reader:

I randomly decided to relisten to this pre-2016 election podcast between Sam Harris & Andrew Sullivan. I highly recommend a listen as I’m sure, especially in the context of the moment, it will blow your mind.

But it was also heartbreaking to hear them spell out their post-Trump-loss hopes for a reckoning, for a correction toward sanity and civility. I’ve seen comments on both of their recent posts accusing them of TDS — the magic wand MAGA waves to shield Trump from any and all criticism. Andrew’s passion here gave me chills. Meanwhile, as Sam correctly says, it’s the Trump cultists who have the real derangement syndrome. People are pretending they don’t see where this is all heading, even cheering it on.

It blows my mind that people actually believe the justifications this administration is using to tear it all down and arrogate power to themselves. Does anyone honestly believe all this chaos, mendacity, and cruelty is about forming a more perfect union? Please.

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